The annual Bitch List, which works to highlight unproduced feature film and television screenplays that pass the Bechdel Test, has just been released.
For those not in the know, the Bechdel Test was created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel and has three criteria: 1) It must feature two (usually named) female characters, who 2) talk to each other 3) about something besides a man. The tool is imperfect: Many female-led films and TV shows surprisingly fail the test (such as “Gravity”), but it’s still a helpful marker for finding projects with multi-dimensional female characters.
This year’s Bitch List selection adds another element. “In addition to showing the industry some of the best scripts available with a female protagonist,” The Tracking Board writes, “it also highlights stories with a diverse cast.”
Many of these writers are looking for representation, but some listed have managers. As the Bitch Pack notes, “None of the big agencies except Gersh represented this year. It’s an interesting trend as ones like ICM are repping people like Tomi Lahren. Simon & Schuster poured money on that Milo guy who trolled Leslie Jones and many others. We must see #ScreenwritersResist (and reps as well), not further promotion of bullies and the oppression of People of Color, LGBTQ and Disabled People via our content.”
See the complete Bitch List below with synopses courtesy of The Tracking Board.
“NoBodies”
by Sereena Shamsi
Format/Genre: Film/Dark Comedy
Logline: A British Indian girl being forced into an arranged marriage is suddenly trapped inside the body of a suicidal Irish DJ, and must fight to get her life back before the clock runs out.
“Werechica”
by Ceda Xiong
Format/Genre: TV/Horror Comedy
Logline: An imbalance in the supernatural energy of Boyle Heights makes everyone nervous except for Lupe Gonzalez (15) who just wants to rock out at her fifteenth birthday. But when puberty strikes, it’s not just periods and boobs she has to worry about; Lupe also has a set of powers that have been secretly shared by all generations of her family. After her crush, Rodrigo, gets evicted by creepy New Yorkers (with some powers of their own), Lupe begins to uncover the mystical underground of East L.A.
“The Salt Flats”
by Shaz Bennett
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: Suspended cop Lucinda “Lucy” Waters, an Indigenous woman, finds a beaten, bloody young girl in the middle of the desolate Bonneville Salt Flat on the border of Nevada/Utah. In the Flats, secretive, closed communities collide. The Salt Flats are home to Daredevil speed racers; Goshute Indians; down on their luck Gamblers; a private military base used to test bombs and chemical weapons; a polygamist offshoot of the Mormon church called the Levitical Brotherhood. Lucy has ties to all these communities and can gain access to all their secrets, because their secrets are hers too. In unraveling what happened to this girl, Lucy is forced to face her past in order to save the lost girl.
Reps: Dave Brown, Echo Lake Entertainment
“Red Road Rastas”
by Amy Banks
Format/Genre: Feature/Comedy
Logline: When Ruby Killed Skunk and her group of Native American “Aunties” find they are no longer revered by their tribe, they set out to reclaim their mojo on an adventure of a lifetime in Jamaica where they find friends, kine bud, and the secret to getting irie.
“Green Carded”
by Kathy Yamamoto
Format/Genre: Feature/Comedy
Logline: When an ambitious millennial running an illegal green card matchmaking ring falls in love with her latest client, she’ll have to choose between her next large paycheck and her newfound love.
*Leads are Armenian, Asian-American and Latina.
“Get Real”
by Thomas Reyes
Format/Genre: TV/Comedy
Logline: Vera Mistri, an ambitious Indian-American journalist, is forced to take a job at a reality TV production company and discovers that her skills producing highbrow broadcast news don’t translate to the pranking, naked dating, Honey Boo Boo world of reality TV.
Reps: Stan Spry at Cartel Management
“One Woman Show”
by Shakina Nayfack & Howard Emanuel
Format/Genre: TV/Comedy
Logline: An unruly cabaret singer attempting to crowd-fund gender reassignment surgery must contend with her boyhood past, a conflicted ex-lover, and a circle of nearly-famous friends all trying to navigate life’s transitions in this “Sex and the City” meets “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”
“Box”
by Adrienne Rush
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: A bi-racial (Black and Caucasian) young woman leaves her dead-end town in Mississippi for the brighter lights of Los Angeles, but soon finds herself homeless and losing all will to gain a foothold in society. A chance encounter leaves her straddling two worlds at once while secretly living out of a storage unit.
Reps: Jessica Jordan, Manager
“JerricaSays”
by Jerrica Long
Format/Genre: TV/Comedy
Logline: After her breakup goes viral, a twenty-something Black Woman uses her investigative skills from dating both sexes to help men and women find out if their partner is cheating, while she attempts to pick up the pieces of her life. Filled with funny, real-life adventures, the show explores the uncharted territory of dating, in a time when Drake lyrics have come to define relationship goals.
“101 Ways to Be a Batter Person”
by Megan Bacharach
Format/Genre: TV/Comedy
Logline: The story centers on a twenty-something woman with sociopathic tendencies who commits to blindly following a list of self-improvement initiatives as a promise to her late mother–the only person she ever cared about and the only person who believed her to be capable of good.
*Open races for all characters
“NASA @ Night”
by Maggie Mae Fish
Format/Genre: TV/Comedy
Logline: Nobody wants to run the Night Shift at NASA. But when Sarah Harris–an unbridled optimist–takes the position, she sets out to turn this dead end job into the launching pad for her dream career, even if everyone at NASA thinks her team is a joke. The team is 50 percent Women of Color.
Reps: Wenzel Entertainment
“Silver Star””
by Katherine Ruppe
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: After the bones of her radical Blackfeet mother are discovered on the reservation where she was raised, intrepid big-city detective Riley Running Wolf reluctantly returns to her rugged Montana home town to work as a deputy for her sheriff father. While fighting tough crimes in the new wild West, she battles the FBI, greedy oil interests, and Blackfeet militants to untangle the conspiracy of her mother’s murder.
Reps: Jeffrey Thal, Ensemble Entertainment
“The Commons”
by Laura E. Davis
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: At a time when disease no longer exists and suicide is compulsory at age 60, an agent for the government’s Sustainability Program must determine if she can facilitate the death of a beloved client after the agent’s world is upturned.
“Kill Me”
by Alix Joyce
Format/Genre: Feature/Drama
Logline: Anne McGregor, a mortician with a bloody past, has given up on love until the day a charismatic conman waltzes into her funeral parlor.
“Prix Fixe””
by Angela Waldrop Gilbert
Format/Genre: TV/Dramedy
Logline: Socially anxious and plain, Marcelle hadn’t planned to ever leave the family maple farm in rural southern Quebec. When finances and her father’s health put the property at risk of being sold, she turns to black market food supplying in order to make ends meet–and then some. “Breaking Bad” with maple syrup.
“Desiccate”
by Brandi Sperry
Format/Genre: Feature/Horror
Logline: When her reclusive sister turns to occult methods in a desperate attempt to save their failing vineyard from a devastating drought, a woman must try to save her family from the mysterious force that begins threatening the lives of all who set foot there.
“The Wild Hunt”
by Vanessa Yardley
Format/Genre: Feature/Drama
Logline: A farm girl and her BFF must defend their sleepy English village when it‘s attacked by a horde of supernatural hunters.
“The Circle”
by CC Campbell
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: Johnny Cash called it The Greatest Story Never Told: Three musicians, two of them pioneering women, embark on an odyssey through a dark, Southern Gothic world grappling to keep marriages, themselves and the music that changed a nation alive. Two of the first professional female musicians charge through a maze of dark figures and mysterious towns, often on motorcycles and brandishing guns, all the time singing for a living and sometimes, for their lives.
“Alma Mater”
by Jenny Deiker
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: When a psychiatrist returns to visit her Alma Mater, a prestigious boarding school in Wales, a student’s violent suicide prompts her to stay and support the staff and students. As her connection with a grieving student begins to blur the lines between reality/fiction, she begins to realize that this may have all happened once before. Think “Pretty Little Liars” meets “Shutter Island.”
Reps: Tom Carter, Artillery Creative / Noah Jones, Gersh
“The Goblin Child”
by Shoshana Rosenbaum
Format/Genre: Feature/Horror
Logline: A woman adjusting to motherhood must confront a terrifying presence in the woods connected to–or summoned by–the lonely little boy next door.
“Wonder Drug”
by Caitlin McCarthy
Format/Genre: Feature
Logline: The true story of the drug DES (diethylstilbestrol), seen as a medical miracle to help women with pregnancy issues and one of the first cash cows for pharmaceutical companies — but which was, in fact, a toxic, carcinogenic drug and one of the biggest medical disasters in history, affecting millions of people worldwide.
Reps: Barry Krost Management
“Casey Can’t”
by Kaitlin Fontana
Format/Genre: TV/Comedy
Logline: When a veteran, old school music critic loses her job, she is forced to take a new one with the sort of magazine she’s always despised: an online blog.
Reps: Brandon Stein, Brillstein Entertainment Partners
“Four”
by Caitlin Schneiderhan
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: A re-imagining of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as four warring crime families.
“Killers”
by Lyn Stephenson-Ivers and Allen Ivers
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: Along the lines of a female drive DEXTER set in the beauty industry, KILLERS follows ambitious marketing exec SOPHIE, who finds her job, her sick brother, and her life in jeopardy when a manipulative psychopath uncovers her secret life as a serial killer.
“The Letters”
by Dani Bailes
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: After discovering her mother’s extensive correspondence with a notorious serial killer, Violet Bryce finds herself entangled in family secrets when a similar murder occurs in her own backyard.
Reps: Zadoc Angell & Chelsea Benson, Echo Lake Entertainment
“High School Hellions”
by Nate Myers
Format/Genre: Feature/Action Comedy
Logline: At a boarding school for genius, juvenile delinquents, a student creates a new drug called Bliss. But when it goes horribly awry, our leading lady and her two best friends have to fight their way to freedom.
“Looped”
by Gabriel Klein
Format/Genre: TV/Animated Comedy
Logline: Jane and her teenage son break into an old R&D lab at the tech company she co-founded with her estranged childhood friends to finish their time machine. Once completed the time machine’s existence causes a paradox wherein all six of the diverse friends who worked on the invention are trapped in a continuous loop predestined to be a part of world history. Now they flash through time interacting with famous figures and guiding their paths, while flashbacks illustrate their own past together and the friendships worth reuniting.
“Legacy”
by Alex Freedman
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: Following the suicide of her father, an attorney is forced to return to her distant brother and family law firm in New York.
“Humane”
by Mike Sorce & Matthew Kic
Format/Genre: TV/Drama
Logline: Buried secrets come to light after a tragic car accident disrupts the lives of several employees of a small town animal kill shelter. Six Feet Under meets “The Affair.”
“Transplant”
by Joe Brukner
Format/Genre: TV/Comedy
Logline: When the stubborn and self-reliant April Johnson is diagnosed with acute kidney failure, she returns home to South Dakota to con her estranged family into giving her a kidney.
