“Prodigy”: From Black List Logline to Movie Premiere

First-person account from co-writer / co-director of the movie Prodigy which got its start with a Go Into The Story contest.

In the nearly 10 years I’ve hosted this blog, I’ve had lots of people get in touch with me about good news in their creative lives. Getting representation. Selling scripts. Setting up TV pilots. Landing a writing assignment. It’s always gratifying when folks take the time to acknowledge what Go Into The Story has meant to them as a source of credible information and inspiration.

But THIS story takes the proverbial cake.

Here is the saga as told by Brian Vidal:

As a longtime follower of Go Into the Story, I’ve spent countless hours reading the thousands of posts on this site. Like many of you, I’ve also participated in several contests over the years. This is the story of how my logline contest entry became my feature film debut as co-writer/director.

Every year, GITS hosts the Black List Word Cloud Logline Challenge — a contest in which readers try to generate interesting/silly/fun loglines using words from the loglines of the films that made the annual Black List. Back in 2013, I decided to give it a go and submitted a few that I thought were pretty good. I was fortunate enough to win one of the prizes for this logline:

A psychiatrist is HIRED to HELP a YOUNG boy LEARN to CONTROL his superhuman abilities after a TRAGIC ACCIDENT.

[Note: The capitalize words are taken directly from the Word Cloud created from the loglines for all of the 2013 Black List scripts.]

I was thrilled to win as I thought it was a strong concept, but I had no intention to further develop it. Instead, I continued to revise another screenplay that I was hoping would generate some attention.

It wasn’t until late in 2014 when I revisited my logline. I had been tossing ideas back and forth with my good friend and longtime collaborator Alex Haughey in hopes that we might find a project to develop. We had worked on several short films together since college, and we both felt like we were ready to take on the challenge of our first feature film. We were struggling to come up with a concept that would grab people’s attention while being low-budget enough that we could produce it ourselves. We went through hundreds of ideas before I remembered the logline for the contest. I pitched it to Alex and he was onboard immediately.

What began as a simple sentence quickly grew into a full outline. A few decisions were made right away due to our budget restrictions. For starters, we knew we had to limit our locations and our cast. We also decided to take a minimalist approach to the superhuman abilities and focus more on the psychologist/patient relationship. Long debates and passionate conversations led us through the development process and then into writing the script. We finished the first draft very quickly and then spent a year rewriting before we felt it was ready to go into production.

[The revised logline: “A psychologist engages a dangerous, young genius in a battle of wits — unaware of the supernatural power the girl possesses, or that her life hangs in the balance.]

We knew casting was going to make or break the movie, so we spent a lot of time trying to find a young boy to play the lead. In late 2015, we brought in a ton of young actors, but we couldn’t find one who could pull off the role in the way we needed for the movie to work. At the end of the process, we came to the realization that opening up the role to young girls would double our pool of potential actors. We put up a casting notice, and the first video submission we got was from 9 year-old Savannah Liles. She was intelligent, menacing, and had the perfect look. Equally important was finding the right actor to portray the psychologist. Richard Neil came in for an audition and blew us away with his first read. We tested Richard and Savannah together, and we knew we had the right duo. We filled out the rest of the cast and were ready to move forward.

Because of our limited budget, Alex and I wore dozens of hats during pre-production and production. In fact, the entire process was so jam-packed that it feels like a bit of a blur. Every waking moment of January 2016 was spent working on pre-production for the film — everything from building the sets to finding the props to figuring out how to do the special effects. Our shoot was 14 days and was honestly a huge challenge. I could go on and on the struggles and obstacles we encountered (such as losing three PAs the first day of shooting or the toilets exploding), but it would take too long. Suffice it to say, we didn’t sleep much.

After taking a much needed vacation, I dove into post-production. I’m an editor by trade, so this part of the process was very comfortable for me. Alex would come in with notes and we would work the cut together. In a way, it reflected a lot of our process for writing. Lots of back and forth and lots of iterations to get things as good as possible. Once we locked the cut, we were able to get some excellent sound work done by a sound designer who had worked with us on a previous short. By July 2016 we had finished the film and were submitting to festivals.

We had a great festival run starting with our world premiere at Cinequest. Having family, friends, and colleagues watch your movie is one thing, but showing the film in front of strangers is entirely different. It’s surreal to have people watch your creation in a real movie theater. The overall response from audiences was great, and we even took home Best Narrative Feature at the Santa Cruz Film Festival.

We were able to leverage our successful festival run into a distribution deal with Gravitas Ventures, one of the largest indie distributors in the world. The film is available starting March 13, 2018 on iTunes, Google Play Store, Amazon, Comcast, DirecTV, and a host of other platforms. It’s exciting to see all of the hard work we put into the project pay off.

So that’s how my logline for a GITS contest became a movie. I couldn’t have done it without Scott and his awesome blog. I hope my story inspires people to continue writing and to look for ways to get their work in front of people. And also to participate in contests!

If you’re interested, you can get a copy of the film here.

Here’s a teaser trailer of the movie:

Go here for a Daily Dead interview with co-writer / co-director Alex Haughey.

Congratulations to Brian and Alex on their movie which just yesterday became available multiple platforms. Check it out!

By the way, this April, I will be doing Year 9 of my A Story Idea Each Day for a Month series. Who knows? Maybe you will find an idea which inspires you to make a movie… just like Brian Vidal did with Prodigy.