How to prepare for a Screen Draft

I love making an appearance on Screen Drafts.

It’s easily the podcast where I’ve appeared as a guest the most number of times. I think I’m up to 16 drafts now, and then four appearances where I’ve been a guest Co-Commissioner. If you’ve never heard the show, let me explain. The premise is simple. Clay Keller and Ryan Marker are the Co-Commissioners, and every week, they bring on two or three guests who competitively collaborate to make a list about something involving movies. The drafts I’ve participated in include Godzilla, James Bond, Steven Spielberg, Vietnam War movies, the films of 1994, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and, most recently ‘70s Comedy.

It is a discussion show, but it’s also a game, and there are times I feel like I’ve played the game part of it well and times when I don’t think I played it well at all. My first time participating was to draft John Carpenter movies, back in October of 2019. I co-drafted the list with Joe Lynch, who was also playing for the very first time. For a regular draft, you make a list of seven films, and Joe and I both wanted to make sure we got some of our favorites on the list. In doing so, we managed to leave some giant titles off the list, including one that still haunts me. Our final list looked like this:

1. Big Trouble in Little China
2. Assault on Precinct 13
3. Christine
4. The Fog
5. Halloween
6. They Live
7. Prince of Darkness

So, yeah, I know. Where the fuck is The Thing?! I have been asked some variation of that question about a bazillion times, and so has Joe. And we both adore that film. It certainly wasn’t intentional. If I were making this list right now, it would look different. In fact, on Letterboxd, you can see my personal ranking of John’s movies, and I included both of our episodes of Masters of Horror in my list. (https://letterboxd.com/drewmcweeny/list/all-the-carpenters/) The whole point of the show is, as they say on every episode, “competitive collaboration,” and that means you are trying to get your favorites on the list over your opponent’s favorites, but it also means you both co-sign the finished list and own the results.

I’ve gotten my heart broken by other people’s gameplay at times. I thought there was genuine disrespect paid to The Last Temptation of Christ in the Martin Scorsese Super Draft (a Super Draft is where you do an entire filmography) and even more disrespect paid to Tucker: The Man & His Dream on the Coppola Super Draft, but I’m sure there are people think I’m a giant asshole because of the way I vetoed The Last Action Hero entirely off of the Planet Hollywood Mega Draft. The gameplay on that draft, which was supposed to be the top 20 films featuring Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis, was positively brutal, and I had the best time playing with Wynter Mitchell, Marc Bernardin, and Jordan Crucchiola that night. In general, I have loved getting to know the other drafters and learning how they might or might not play in a draft. That’s part of the game, and Clay and Ryan do a great job of curating this big ongoing movie party they throw.

Recently, I was asked to take part in, as I said, a mini-Mega draft (13 titles) for the incredibly broad topic of ‘70s Comedy (https://screendrafts.libsyn.com/70s-comedy-mini-mega-draft-with-bryan-cogman-oriana-nudo-drew-mcweeny-and-frank-berman), and this was positively the hardest draft I’ve ever done. I drafted with Oriana Nudo and Bryan Cogman, and I like our final list quite a bit. Bryan is, at this point, an old friend, and I love every conversation we’ve had on this show and in real life. If you’d like to hear him on The Hip Pocket, you can in this season two episode (https://www.drewmcweeny.com/the-hip-pocket-204-bryan-cogman/). Oriana, on the other hand, is someone I’ve listened to on the show, but we’ve never drafted against each other before. I was looking forward to it because I think she makes really interesting choices.