Genre: Family/Fantasy
Premise: An eccentric old clown tries to cheer up a disabled boy by telling the story of his magical adventures on a lifelong quest to win the heart of a beautiful mime.
Why You Should Read: A massive THANK YOU to the commenters of Scriptshadow who read my first draft of this script and offered their valued thoughts and notes on it, and a special shout-out to Carson for his excellent notes and advice. All helped to propel this script to the next level. Booboo The Clown is an original, entertaining, and visually-appealing family-friendly movie. This one has it all. It has a larger than life lead character – a classic underdog – and a novel supporting cast with genuine arcs that actors will queue up to play. It has adventure. It has adversity. It has smiles, laughs and tears. It has scenes you have never seen before. And, most importantly, it has a fucking heart. I have poured my heart into this script and now I’d love to read your thoughts. I send it out as words amidst the wolves. Be ravenous.
Writer: Brian McHale-Boyle
Details: 118 pages
Real talk.
Friday is the final day of the week. Like everybody else, I can’t wait to put aside the computer and enjoy the weekend. For that reason, Amateur Friday reviews often feel like a wall, a final obstacle I must climb in order to get to the promised land. If this is to change, if I’m going to look forward to Amateur Friday as opposed to fear it, I need better scripts. I need stuff where the writer’s trying to blow me away. Not stuff that’s pleasant. The worst thing a screenplay can be is pleasant.
Now I’ve already read BooBoo once. I gave Brian notes on it many moons ago. The fact that he’s still working on it tells me he’s very passionate about the story. Passion can work for you or against you. It can be the fire that stokes a once-in-a-lifetime visionary piece of fiction. Or it can blind you to fact that readers aren’t experiencing the story the way you believe you’re presenting it. Let’s find out how this new draft fared.
Booboo is 70 year old clown who’s still hustling. He’s out there doing the kids birthday party circuit, no hair-smelling involved. It is through one of these parties that he meets Myron, a 9 year old boy in a wheelchair. Myron has a dastardly absentee father as well as a non-judgmental mother who welcomes Booboo into her son’s life with open arms.
As their unlikely friendship begins, Booboo tells the story of how, as a kid, he was an orphan, until he was recruited into a magical clown school on a far away island. There he learned the art of clown and also fell in love with an aspiring mime, Marianne. Marianne is so devoted to the art of miming that she refuses to talk. Ever.
Many years later, after graduating from clown school, Booboo decides to look for Marianne. First he goes to San Francisco, then to Vegas. There, he runs into Ginger, a friend from clown school who’s now a dancer. After saving Ginger from an ugly pimp-like situation, Booboo heads to New York, where he magically runs into Marianne miming in Central Park! He tells her he loves her. She says nothing back cause she’s a mime. And then they enter into a relationship. Unfortunately, Marianne eventually leaves Booboo to be with another former student from their school.
We cut back to present day, where Booboo finally takes Myron to a hospital. It is there where we learn that the reason Booboo is still hustling is that he takes care of Marianne! She’s dying in a hospice care center. He’s spent the last few years paying her medical bills because that jerky guy who stole her from him ditched her. The dedicated Booboo sits there until her dying breath.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read this but I remember enough that I’m surprised how similar it is to the previous draft. I thought that more would’ve changed over the years. I have to give it to Brian, though. He swung for the fences here. This is the clown version of Big Fish meets Forrest Gump. So if you liked those movies, there’s a good chance you’ll like this. But the script is burdened with a deep fatal flaw.
The biggest problem here is that the plot revolves around a love story where we never experience the two characters falling in love. Because Marianne can’t speak, there are no extended interactions between the two. We just talked yesterday about the importance of using dialogue to get inside a character’s head. The ONE scene I used as an example in that article told me more about those two characters than I know about Marianne after an entire script.
And there’s no plot here to alleviate that. Usually, love stories are ancillary to the main plot. Titanic for example. The plot is finding the diamond on a doomed ship. The love story happens along the way. But here, the movie is the love story. And how can we be involved in a love story if a) we never hear one of the characters in that relationship speak, and b) if we don’t know why they love each other. As far as I can tell, Booboo loves Marianne because she’s beautiful. That’s a pretty shallow reason to love someone. And I don’t think there’s any moment in this script where Marianne shows love to Booboo.
The most successful movie that’s ever been made where the plot solely revolves around “Will they get together or not?” is When Harry Met Sally. And one of the reasons we kept watching and kept caring whether they got together or not is because they had these amazing memorable hilarious conversations. They’d go back and forth with each other on the most mundane of topics. Now imagine that movie where Harry talks and Sally never says a thing. We wouldn’t care whether they ended up together because you erased any opportunity to explore chemistry between the two. I’m pretty sure I brought this up in my notes so I’m disappointed that it wasn’t addressed.
Brian may have fallen victim to something all of us writers fall victim to. Which is that we become so in love with an idea that we refuse to budge from it regardless of how damaging it is to our story. In this case, Brian has romanticized the mime stuff (a clown falling in love with a mime has a nice ring to it) to the point where he doesn’t realize how it’s affecting the story. Sure, the big death bed moment where she finally talks is powerful. But is it worth 99% of your love story not working?
This is such a huge issue, I don’t even think it’s worth it to examine the rest of the script. Because without a solution to this problem, nothing else matters. And look, I feel terrible saying this because I know how crazy attached Brian is to this script. But it doesn’t do me or him any good to sugarcoat this issue. That’s how writers go insane – trying to make something work that can’t.
I will say this. Silent characters work better on screen because we can see them. And if you cast the part right and the acting is stellar and the wardrobe is perfect, yeah, we can fall in love simply by seeing Marianne, just like Booboo did. I’ve never watched The Artist (a silent film) but I think that’s a love story, right? And people enjoyed that. But that’s the thing. This isn’t a movie. It’s a spec script. A spec script has to convince through the page, not through the screen. So even if you could make that argument, it doesn’t matter.
This is why I always tell writers to stay away from mute characters in major roles. They are the most unmemorable characters I read by far. I made this case with Duncan Jones “Mute.” I said that script was a disaster for the same reason. We didn’t care about the mute hero because we didn’t know him. So that’s my issue. I don’t know if Brian’s going to listen to me. I hope he does. Because I think he’s a good writer. I think if he moved on to other scripts with this knowledge, he could write something great. But Booboo would need a major rewrite to even SEE if it would work with that note adjustment. And there’s no guarantee it will. So let’s see what else you got. Worst case scenario, you become a huge screenwriting star off another script and you pull Booboo out as you next project.
Screenplay Link: Booboo The Clown
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the primary ingredients in making a love story work is convincing us that the characters are in love. That typically occurs through shared experiences, conversations, memorable events, and a clear connection between the two. And it has to come from BOTH SIDES. Not just one. There wasn’t nearly enough of this in Booboo to convince me that these two were meant for each other.
