Who started this
I am asking three writers to send me a finished screenplay and twenty hours a week. It would be indecent to ask for that from behind a landing page. So here is my application, on the same form, with nothing removed.
My name is John Pruzanski. I am a writer and filmmaker in Melbourne. I have produced narrative and documentary film, and worked in publishing, journalism, visual arts, science and technology. A long detour that taught me how the world actually works and very little about how to structure act two.
I have not written much for the screen in the past, even though writing is, I think, the strongest thing I do. It is now the only thing I do.
I am building this room because I have two finished screenplays and almost no evidence about whether either of them is any good.
I have put The Doctrine of Doubt into a great many competitions and done very well in them. I have also come to believe most of those results are close to meaningless … volume businesses where it is not clear a human being reached page thirty. I have run both drafts past every AI available, and every one of them was enthusiastic, which I have stopped treating as information.
The only professional human reader who has assessed it had problems with it. That evaluation is the single most useful thing the script has ever received, and it is also one reader, on one day, with no obligation to explain themselves to me or to stay in the conversation afterwards.
What I want is three readers who finish it, argue with me about it, disagree with each other in front of me, and are still there in week six when I am halfway through fixing it. I could not find that for sale at a price I would trust. So I am proposing we build it.
Which weekly windows could you reliably make, for eight weeks running?
I will fit myself around the other three. From Melbourne, the workable overlap with North America is an early morning here against a late afternoon or evening there, and I am happy to take the early side of it every week. I travel for part of the Season and will be in the northern hemisphere for a month; I have chosen a time that works from both, and I will not be asking anybody to move it.
Logline
The grandchildren of two opposing scientists uncover the legacy of a decades-long battle over lead poisoning: one man's campaign of industrial denial, and the other's attempt to prove the truth before it was buried.
Can I read it?
The first ten pages are here, open to anybody: The Doctrine of Doubt, pages 1–10 →
The complete second draft goes to every writer who applies. I answer every application personally, and I attach it to that reply. I am asking three people for a finished screenplay and twenty hours a week, so it would be indecent to make them decide about me on ten pages while I read all of theirs. You should not have to take my writing on trust any more than I intend to take yours.
What is it about, underneath that?
How corporate denial was invented. The men who worked out that you do not have to win an argument about the science. You only have to keep the argument going. It is a historical story about the machinery that now runs underneath every argument we are still having, especially over climate change.
Contests, coverage, readers, AI. What did you make of the responses?
Competitions: many, with grand placings. I no longer believe those results tell me much. The economics do not support anyone reading carefully, and the feedback, where there was any, could have been written about any screenplay.
Professional evaluation: one, from a Black List reader. They did not like it and did not score it well. It stung, and it is the only genuinely informative response the script has had.
AI: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini have all read both drafts and all been enthusiastic. I have come to understand that this is close to worthless. They reward clean construction and cannot become bored, and boredom is the thing I most need measured.
So my position is: one negative human read, a pile of positive machine reads, and a number of high placings I do not trust. That is not enough evidence to rewrite from, and it is certainly not enough to spend real money on.
What do you already suspect is wrong with it?
It is long at 150 pages, and I suspect that length is a symptom rather than a problem in itself.
I believe I overcomplicated the structure and the narrative, which meant it was more than forty pages before the reader or the audience knew what the story was actually about.
What I want from three readers is to be told whether that is the real fault or only the visible one, and what I have not thought of at all.
What would you want to have achieved by week eight?
A third draft, built on a specific structural pass that I will declare at the end of week two once I have heard the diagnostics, not before. Most likely: rebuilding how the present-day frame carries the historical story, and losing fifteen to twenty pages in the process. If the other three tell me the problem is deeper than that, the honest week-eight deliverable becomes a rebuilt spine and a partial draft, and I would rather have that than a finished draft with the same fault in it.
A note that changed your work.
The Black List evaluation, precisely because I did not want it. Every encouraging response I have had confirmed what I already believed, and confirmation has cost me six months. One reader telling me plainly that it did not work was worth more than all of it, and my only complaint is that I could not ask them a single follow-up question. That gap is the whole reason I want this room to exist.
What I bring as a reader.
I have produced films, which means I have spent years reading scripts for what will and will not survive contact with a schedule and a crew. I read for where the attention goes, where it drifts, and where a scene is doing work the writer thinks it is doing but is not. I am direct. I am not cruel, and I do not confuse the two. I will tell you where I stopped believing it, and I will tell you the page number.
My pledge
The room only works if it is safe enough to be honest in and structured enough to finish something. That is the standard I am holding myself to, and you are entitled to hold me to it from week one.
Three seats
If you would want me reading your script, apply. It takes about fifteen minutes.