Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
Premise: (from Black List) A young black girl’s family in 1960s Mississippi decides to harbor two human-looking refugees who have mysteriously fallen from the sky.
About: Today’s screenplay is a double-whammy! It was one of the 2017 Nicholl Screenwriting Competition winners AND it made the Black List, with 12 votes. Sarah Jane Inwards, the writer, studied screenwriting at Northwestern, then moved to LA as soon as she graduated, working as close to the industry as she could (doing everything from reality TV to PA’ing), writing as much as possible in the meantime. This is her breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Sarah Jane Inwards
Details: 116 pages
A lot of writers send comedies and fantasies and thrillers to Nicholl then e-mail me and ask why their scripts never advance. The reason they don’t advance is because the Nicholl doesn’t celebrate marketable screenwriting. They celebrate screenwriting that is thematically driven, that explores the human condition, and that tackles social issues. If you can find an interesting way into one of those stories, your script will not only advance. It will win.
Which is why I’m not surprised at all that Jellyfish Summer was one of the fine winners in last year’s Nicholl contest. The script explores racism in an extremely unique way.
With that said, it’s a bizarre script, the kind of script I’d read and say, “This writer has talent but the script is all over the place. She needs guidance.” And, in the Nicholl’s defense, that’s what they do. They guide their winners after they win. Still, I’m not sure all the parts add up to a whole here. Let’s take a look.
10 year old Maise Ray, older sister Rebecca, older brother, Zeke, and mother, Mama Delilah, are a black family living in Mississippi in 1965. But this isn’t like the 1965 of our history books. In this 1965, people keep falling from the sky. Literally. Families of 3 and 4 plunge to the ground in little space capsules. They are known as the “Fallen.”
Everyone – whites and blacks – hate the Fallen. As soon as they land, they get rounded up and placed in encampments. One day a couple of Fallen kids plunge into the nearby ocean and Mama Delilah rescues them. Because Mama knows that the authorities will place the kids in the camps, she hides them in her house.
However, after Maise accidentally mentions the kids to someone in town, the KKK come, burn the house down, and hang Mama and the older Fallen boy on a nearby tree. If you’re wondering how the KKK got involved, you’re not the only one. Maise, older brother Zeke, and younger Fallen boy, Skinny, set their sights on getting to Mobile, where there’s an “underground railroad” for the Fallen.
Whereas Maise believes that they must help the Fallen at all costs, Zeke is perfectly fine with getting rid of the Fallen. But then Maise meets a Fallen girl who’s a mirror image of herself. They realize that the Fallen people are them, just from a parallel universe. Armed with this new information, they must travel to a nearby town where Martin Luther King is speaking and give him this information before Congress votes to kill all of the Fallen.
Whoa.
There is a lot going on here.
And that’s Jellyfish Summer’s biggest problem. It has something to say. But it’s throwing so much at us that the message gets lost.
I liked the beginning of the script, a clever commentary on racism, which is that every race is capable of it. It wasn’t hitting us over the head with “White people = racist” like most of the scripts tackling racism these days. It makes you think about racism from a different perspective. That was cool.
But the mythology was so wonky, so all over the place, that, over time, I lost track of what the script was about. For example, at first, the Fallen are white people. But then they’re also black people and Mexican people. Which is fine. But it starts muddying the waters on where the racism is supposed to be focused.
From there, you had the KKK. The KKK were against the Fallen. But they were also against black people. Once again, you’re dividing the focus. When groups have multiple targets, we’re not sure what we’re supposed to be taking from their attacks.
Then we find out the Fallen are carbon copies of us from a parallel dimension, so we’re throwing this weird sci-fi element into the mix. Not to mention that, apparently, them being copies of us is the key to stopping racism across the planet. I wasn’t clear why that was the case. Then, of course, you have Maise running into Martin Luther King and him giving her a five page monologue about doing the right thing in life. That’s when I threw up my hands and asked, what’s going on anymore??
I’ll be honest. This felt like a bunch of ideas in search of a story.
But I think the biggest error in Jellyfish Summer was the mythology. In order for any mythology to work, it needs to be simple and clear. There’s no faster way to sink a mythology-dependent screenplay than murky mythology. It’s like the difference between The Matrix, where the mythology was painstakingly laid out so that you understood every single nuance before they moved forward, and a movie like The Cloverfield Paradox, where the mythology was literally, “Anything goes” with no explanation for half the things that happened. Which is why that movie is considered a train wreck.
Now I don’t think Jellyfish Summer is a train wreck. But I wish the writer would’ve stayed with the simplified world she started with. The Fallen were stand-ins for black people in the 60s. And we explored racism through the unique lens of black people being racists towards these beings.
One of the best plot threads in the story is Zeke, who hates the Fallen. Whereas his family wants to save every last one of them, Zeke looks to march with those who want to kill the Fallen. When we see him finally turn and get the warm and fuzzies, that’s what good screenwriting is all about.
But by adding the KKK, a hierarchy of racism, and a really confusing mythology, it muddied the waters to the point where I didn’t know what this script was supposed to be saying.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always err on the side of simple. The fastest way to lose your script is to overcomplicate it. I’d say that’s what happened here.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I heard that there was such a battle over making United States of Fucking Awesome one of the 2014 Nicholl winners, that several Nicholl judges threatened to quit if it was given the top prize. THAT, my friends, is how much the Nicholl hates comedies. And thrillers. And fantasy. And straight sci-fi. The Nicholl is the #1 place for screenwriters who love drama. Who love social issues. Who love exploring the human condition. Who love issues having to do with race and identity. Who love topical issues that are affecting the world. If you have one of those scripts, the Nicholl is your place to go. Otherwise, you probably want to stay away.
