Genre: Sci-Fi/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) An unlikely group is thrown together by mysterious events that leads them to uncover a government conspiracy.
About: Netflix owns the world! This flashy Black List script (which finished in the top 25) was pitched as Friday meets Get Out and got a Netflix green light out of it. I think a better pitch would be Boys In the Hood meets Dude Where’s My Car. But, of course, if you’re pitching anything in Hollywood, it’s always best to use the most recent breakout hit when possible. If you’ve got a cool action script set around racing, I wouldn’t pitch it as “Ben Hurr meets The Bridge on The River Kwai.” They Cloned Tyrone originally attracted Brian Tyree Henry for the lead, but ended up casting John Boyega. The film will be directed by Creed 2 writer, Juel Taylor. Taylor wrote the script with Tony Rettenmaier.
Writer: Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier
Details: 112 pages
The other day you heard me discussing Ghostbusters. There’s a reason Hollywood is so obsessed with that film. It’s because it’s arguably the best film in history to cross comedy over with supernatural. Comedy and Supernatural and Comedy and Sci-Fi are Hollywood crack. There’s something about those combos that audiences love when they’re done well.
What’s unique about They Cloned Tyrone is that it mixes comedy and sci-fi but it’s also R-rated. The reason this is relevant is that this film never would’ve been made by the old Hollywood. The R rating is too limiting. If it’s going to be a comedy, you want 12 year olds to be able to show up. However, Netflix obliterates that equation. It’s something they don’t even have to think about. Part of the reason is they have a loophole, which is that it’s a lot easier for a 12 year old to watch an R-rated movie on Netflix than it is to see one in the theater.
This is good news for movie lovers. It means we’re going to see more content that, in the past, never would’ve been made. The only question left for today is, is the script actually any good? Let’s find out.
27 year old Tyrone Fontaine (I’m assuming his name is Tyrone although he’s only ever called ‘Fontaine’) lives in The Glen, the kind of neighborhood where you need to be on your toes 24/7. Especially if you’re a drug dealer, which Fontaine is.
When Fontaine learns that his latest deal is short on cash and that cash is in the hands of a squirrelly pimp named Slick Charles, he storms over to Slick Charles’ place to get it. Slick Charles is busy telling his top prostitute, Yo-Yo, that her dreams of achieving a real life are hogwash and she needs to embrace being a hooker.
When Fontaine comes in, Slick Charles starts making all these excuses as to why he doesn’t have the money. And that’s when Fontaine’s Rival, Isaac, arrives and pops lots of caps into him. Fontaine tries to stay alive but dies. Or, at least, he thinks he dies. The next morning, he wakes up in his bed. What the heck is going on!
Fontaine heads back to Slick Charles, who says, oh yeah, you died all right. But if he’s dead, then who’s he? Or I? That’s the question he has to answer so Fontaine grabs Slick Charles and Yo-Yo and they head to Isaac’s trap house, seeing as he’s the one who killed Fontaine. Maybe he has answers.
When they get there, they discover that the house is actually a secret hideout with an underground laboratory. There they discover a white guy with an afro who Slick Charles accidentally kills before they can ask him questions. They also find Fontaine’s dead body!
The group is blown away by all this and they need some food to set their minds straight. So they head to Got Damn Fried Chicken, only to find that another white guy with an afro is serving everyone, and that the chicken is laced with something that’s making them all laugh uncontrollably! What’s going on?
The group will go to the barber shop, the salon, the church, and anywhere else they can find until they discover what the heck is going on here. Or, more specifically, figure out who the hell cloned Tyrone!
There’s a lot to like about this script. It’s got a killer title. It’s got a chaotic energy to it. It takes us to places we don’t usually see. The voice is strong. The dialogue pops off the page.
But They Cloned Tyrone is a tale of two halves.
Through the first half of the script, I struggled to stay invested. I was trying to figure out why and then it hit me. The script has a goal. But there are no stakes attached to that goal. The goal is one of curiosity more than requirement. If they fail to find out why Tyrone was cloned, nothing changes in his life. In fact, he can go back to his drug dealing ways and not be affected.
Now the script does get better in the second half. But by that point, I’d already grown bored.
That’s one of the tough things about writing. You can have strong plot points show up in your script. But if you wait too long, you may have already lost the reader. The general idea is you want to have something every 12-15 pages that ups the stakes and makes the journey feel more important than it did the previous 15 pages. Cause that’s what I was struggling with in the first half. Why do they need to do this? I think Dude Where’s My Car even had stakes attached to finding the car. There was something important in the car they needed if memory serves correctly.
It’s always tough with concepts like this because there’s a tendency to think that because it’s a comedy, you don’t need stakes. But stakes matter in comedies. Look no further than Tag to see how a lack of stakes can make a movie feel utterly pointless (there were zero stakes attached to “tagging” their untaggable friend).
This isn’t the best idea but since drugs and money play a big part in the story, you could’ve created a situation where Tyrone owes a lot of money to someone. And he had that money (or the drugs) on him when he was killed. Therefore, he needs to find his dead body to get the money/drugs back so he can pay off whoever he owes. That way you get your stakes AND your ‘what’s going on here’ mystery.
There’s a scene in the script which could’ve turbo-boosted things if it had done this. Fontaine is at the barbershop and runs into his rival, Isaac. Isaac is pissed and wants to kill him. But he only wants to kill him because it’s Fontaine. Not because there’s any story reason for him to do so. If Fontaine owed him money, now Isaac has actual business with Fontaine. He has a reason to chase him down.
However, if you can stick around past the midpoint, that’s when things get crazy and They Cloned Tyrone kicks into high gear. There’s an old saying that if you’re going to go crazy, there’s no point in going halfway. And these writers FULLY embrace that mantra. (spoiler) The midpoint twist is that there’s this whole underground “Westworld” type lab where white people are cloning black people to keep the Glen a ghetto.
At that point, I was turning the pages solely to find out just how weird things were going to get. You guys know how much I value not knowing what’s going to happen next in a script. In a medium where it’s easy to predict everything the writer’s about to write, it’s rare that I get to experience this level of “what happens next?” So that was appreciated.
However, that feeling of not caring whether Tyrone achieved the goal or not throughout the first 55 pages never left me. One of the hardest things in the world to do is to have a viewer uninterested for half your movie and then come up with some magic trick where they all of a sudden love it. I admired the insanity of They Cloned Tyrone’s second half. But, emotionally, I was just never into it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a description of Fontaine:“Late-20s… ripped like vintage denim.” Here’s why I don’t like “clever” descriptions like this. Because they don’t tell you what you’re looking at. “Denim” does not make me imagine someone who’s ripped and strong. It isn’t wrong to use descriptions like this. I know Shane Black made a career out of it. But I always encourage writers to place clear over clever. Clever gets you a nod or a smile. But clear keeps the writer in your imaginary world. Not to mention, there’s a thin line between “clever” and “too clever by half.” If you cross that line, a nod can become a sigh. A smile can become an eye-roll.
