Genre: Drama (1 hour pilot)
Premise: A young ex-con, desperate for an honest life, takes a job at a local dealership, unknowingly entering the mob-run underworld of the car business. Based on actual events.
Why You Should Read: This story takes place behind all the headlines that came out a few years back involving Chrysler reporting thousands of ‘fake sales’ in order to inflate sales reports for investors. As an ex con, recently released from federal prison for marijuana trafficking, I took a job at the only place that would hire a felon and still be able to make a decent living. As I soon learned, being a criminal didn’t hurt my chances starting a new life with a career, it actually opened the doors to even bigger money-making opportunities, unfortunately still on the wrong side of the law. This pilot was also given an 8/10 on The BLACKLIST for CHARACTERS, and we all know how important that is on Scriptshadow… Thank you for any consideration!
Writer: Ricky Young
Details: 61 pages
This script has a couple of good things going for it. For starters, it’s written by an ex-con familiar with this side of the world. As a writer, you should always be thinking about how you can market your script once you’re finished with it. Marketing isn’t as important as writing a great script with great characters. But if you don’t have an interesting concept or a clever way to market it, you’re leaving reads on the table. And since this business is a numbers game, you want as many reads as you can get.
Take the other criminal entry from last week’s Amateur Offerings, “Fighting Irish.” Here’s the logline for that one: “Two gypsy fighters from Dublin have lived lives of violence since they were young. When one decides he wants out, what will he do when his father is released from prison and gets entangled in the criminal world of the other?” This is not a bad logline. But there’s nothing that stands out about it. The only element that could be construed as unique is the gypsy aspect, and that’s pushing it.
When you come back to Car God, I’ve got this: “the mob-run underworld of the car business,” and, “as an ex-con released from federal prison…I took a job at the only place that would hire a felon…” A unique attractor (I’ve never heard anything about the mob run car business) AND the author really lived it?? That’s a powerful combination.
And it’s a reminder to you guys that you’ve got to think about this stuff before you put pen to pixel. Imagine yourself in 6 months when your script is done and you have to start telling people about it. Does any part of your pitch (a clever concept, the story behind the script, your own connection to it) sound exciting? Guys – getting people to read your script is one of the hardest things to do in this business. Who wants to read yet another script that, in their experience, is probably going to be terrible? So there’s got to be something in your pitch that moves the needle.
Okay, let’s see if Car God lives up to its pitch.
27 year-old Ricky Young has just finished a stint in prison. He’s eager to get back to his wife, Brooke, and his young son. But, see, getting out of prison doesn’t work like it does in the movies. Ricky first has to find a job. And once he finds a job, his parole officer has to approve a “home pass.” So the tortured Ricky is finally back in the real world, yet he can’t see the only people in the world he cares about.
Ricky applies everywhere (even Taco Bell), but as you’d expect, no one’s eager to hire an ex-con. So Ricky gets a job in job hell – a call center. Meanwhile, across town we meet 63 year-old Carl Montana, a mobbish car dealer who runs his dealership like Mussolini. If you’re a salesman for Carl and you don’t close your deals? Carl is going to make you regret it.
We get a first-hand taste of this when Carl plunges a screwdriver into the neck of a former employee who tried to get out. I guess that lucky fellow won’t be getting his year-end bonus.
Ricky eventually gets fired from the call center, putting his family reunion in jeopardy. And if that’s not bad enough, Ricky’s parole officer is secretly fucking his wife. Yikes.
In the end, Ricky stumbles into Carl’s dealership and Carl gives him a shot to close a deal. If he succeeds, he’s got the job. If not, he’s back out on the streets. Will Ricky pull it off? And even if he does, is he really going to be happy once he finds out what his wife has been up to?
I agree that the character work is strong here (with one exception that I’ll get to in a bit). The biggest accomplishment is how real Ricky feels. And a lot of that comes from the writer being able to draw from real-life experience. I say this all the time but it’s true – when you’ve lived it or you’ve researched the hell out of it, it makes a difference on the page. There’s more detail to every moment, and that detail goes a long way towards suspending our disbelief.
However, I’d be curious to know what the Black List rated Car God in terms of plot. Because that’s the pilot’s big weakness. Here’s my main gripe: We do in 62 pages what we probably could have done in 32.
A pilot is supposed to be exciting and unpredictable. Car God is anything but. By page 20, I realized that everything in the story was pushing towards a “Carl hires Ricky” ending. And for that reason, the script took on this inevitability where it felt like I was in a screenplay elevator, an instrumental version of Sussudio playing in the background, me desperately wondering how much longer it would take before I got to my floor.
One option to fix these “inevitability problems” is to take what was originally your ending and make it your midpoint. Not only does that speed the plot up, but it forces you to get more creative with your storytelling. Now you have to come up with an entire second half. And if you’re not quite sure where that’s going to go, then neither will your reader be. Advantage: you.
Another note. You need to push your scenes more. The big moments here weren’t big enough, clever enough, inspired enough. For example, you set up this whole sinister call center with their sketchy signing mandate and weirdo boss. But then Ricky gets fired for… going to the bathroom?? It was weak sauce. A firing is a big scene. Get more creative. Have fun with it. I don’t know, have him figure out one of his co-workers is stealing money and he tries to do the right thing but ends up getting blamed for it (or something). But going to the bathroom is way too boring for a moment that big.
Ditto when Ricky closes the deal at the dealership. He walks into a room and… gets a guy to sign papers?? The big payoff being that he learned how to make people sign papers from signing them himself when accepting the call center job?
Umm… you don’t need to learn how to sign papers yourself to teach other people how to sign papers. I’m pretty sure paper-signing is self-explanatory. And yes, I know the signer was blind but that was immaterial.
This spoke to something bigger about Ricky, which is that he’s too passive. I’ll get into that more in “What I Learned.” But for right now, we need more variety in the plotting. The story can’t feel inevitable. The big scenes need to be more imaginative. And, finally, Ricky has to have a little more backbone.
Despite this critique, I would DEFINITELY encourage Ricky to keep writing. All of the stuff that I’ve mentioned here can be learned.
:)
Script link: Car God
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Your main character has to be good at something. Ricky pretty much stumbles through this story, riding shotgun, displaying no noticeable skills. That’s fine if that’s his character TO AN EXTENT. But here’s a guy who’s in prison. So I’m guessing he’s been active in some area of his life (selling drugs maybe?). We have to see some of that hustle, that activity, come out somewhere. Because main characters who are along for the ride can’t anchor major TV shows. They’ve got to be good at something and they’ve got to be active. Even the wimpy Walter White was a chemistry god.
