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Genre: Drama/Crime-Thriller
Premise (from writer): When her older brother — a notorious NYC graffiti writer — is murdered, a teenaged fine arts student must infiltrate this underground world in order to find her brother’s killer.
Why You Should Read (from writer): The script takes place in NYC during the implementation of Mayor Guiliani’s infamous “broken window” theory. I hurried to get this draft done, as I feel it’s only gaining relevance given the current events. Graffiti’s a tough subject to crack (since most people see graf writers as nothing but vandals), but I tried to make the world as human as possible — through the eyes of a strong young woman. Think Point Break in the world of graffiti, with some freaking GIRL POWER!
Writer: ??
Details: 100 pages
Who says we don’t give high ratings to amateur screenplays on Scriptshadow? As long as you bring the goods, you’re going to get recognized. And Ivy brings the goods. Yet it almost wasn’t to be. Ivy went neck and neck with The Multiverse in last week’s amateur offerings and you guys know I prefer a good sci-fi premise to almost anything else. The Multiverse sounded like it could be the next Inception.
But there’s also something to be said for unique subject matter. When’s the last time you saw a movie about graffiti? Well, I guess there was Exit Through the Gift Shop, but that wasn’t so much a movie as it was a strange movie-docu hybrid. This is a straight up screenplay about the underworld of graffiti artists, seasoned inside a nice little murder-mystery. Let’s take a closer look.
The year is 1995. 18 year-old Ivy goes to a prestigious Michigan private school on an art scholarship. Ivy is extremely talented, but too shy about her work. She’s scared to put it out there for others to see, and it’s starting to take a toll on her education. Her professor tells her that if she doesn’t come out of her shell soon, she may not be here much longer.
Tragedy strikes when Ivy gets word that her older brother back in Brooklyn’s been murdered. When she heads home, we learn a little more about her background – abandoned by both their parents, the siblings leaned on one another to scrape by. It appears that since Ivy’s left, her bro, “Jocky,” has become quite the celebrity on the graffiti scene.
When she asks the cops what happened, they tell her, look, we can’t help you unless you help us. Get in with the graffiti gangs and sniff around, see if you can’t get us some names. It isn’t long before Ivy meets Sev, the 24 year-old reining graffiti king. Word on the street is that Sev killed someone a year ago for stepping on his territory. Could he have done the same to Jocky??
Ivy joins Sev’s gang and shows the kind of promise few graffiti artists do, and her and Sev get real close. The more she gets to know him, in fact, the more she questions whether he could have really killed her brother. But when Sev starts to suspect that Ivy may be working with the authorities, all bets are off, and Ivy may find out first hand what Sev is capable of.
If Ivy were graffiti art, it would definitely be the kind you’d stop and look at. However, the closer you looked, the more you’d see some rushed strokes, some clumsy color patterns. You’d take note of the artist though, and keep an eye out for more of their work.
One of the things I liked about Ivy was its attitude towards art. It reminded me a little bit of Dead Poet’s Society. Characters would routinely trumpet the importance of “letting go” and “breaking the rules.” That’s where all the best graffiti came from.
The problem with this is that Ivy doesn’t break any rules itself. It’s a straightforward setup. Ivy must figure out who killed her brother (goal). She gets in with a dangerous crowd (stakes). Her school is only giving her 30 days leave (urgency). Not that I see anything wrong with this. I love a well-structured screenplay and thought Ivy did a great job of it here. It was just funny that what the characters were saying didn’t match up with what the writer was doing.
But it does bring up an issue we don’t talk about enough. And that’s that, when you do stick to the rules, you have to camouflage them. If it’s too transparent that you’re hitting all the standard story beats, the story itself becomes transparent.
For instance, in an early scene where Ivy goes to her brother’s apartment, the cops knock on the door. They come in, discuss her brother for a minute or two, and then say, “We need you to infiltrate these graffiti gangs. Will you do it?” Now, this scene may need to happen to push the story forward, but that doesn’t mean you can just plop it in there with no finesse.
I mean a) why would they think some uppity private school girl would be able to infiltrate a dark dangerous graiffiti world that she didn’t even know about until today? And b) Where are the formalities involved in creating this operation? Police work has to be documented, it has to be approved. Yet here, apparently, two random cops can just be like, “Go infiltrate a gang,” and that’s that.
We needed more camouflage here. We needed the cops to have seen Ivy’s art to get the idea that she could impersonate a graffiti artist in the first place. We needed more formality than 2 minutes of conversation and “Go do something that could get you killed.” Sometimes, as writers, we’re so blinded by what needs to happen in our story, that we don’t think to ask, “Does this make sense?”
Your story has to be seamless, especially when in it’s in a construct where readers are predicting your beats before you write them. If you write a scene that screams: HERE’S A MAJOR STORY BEAT – you can bet that it will take them out of the story.
There were a couple of other rushed decisions at the end of the script too. A new character (and potential brother murderer), Oz, shows up with only 20 pages to go. Although we’d heard Oz’s name before, it wasn’t in any meaningful capacity. So to then make him a major character in the very last act is jarring.
This seems like it would be an easy fix though. Just make Oz more of a rival to Sev. Maybe Oz tags over some of Sev’s work, or challenges him on subway cars – anything to make him more of a presence earlier in the movie.
And finally (major spoiler), I didn’t like the absentee father coming back to save the day. The father had ONE SCENE previous to this, and all of a sudden he’s Superman, arriving at the last second to save the day. I like the IDEA of the father arcing, but once again, if you don’t put in the legwork earlier in the script (aka more than one scene with dad), it reads false.
But this is also an easy fix. When Ivy comes back to the Bronx, why can’t she have two goals? The primary one is to find her brother’s killer, of course. But the secondary goal (and major subplot of the film) is to reconnect with her father. Or at least find out why he left Ivy and her brother. That should give you a few more scenes between the two, and make the father’s arc more believable.
This may sound like a bunch of criticism, but actually, these problems I’m mentioning aren’t big at all. Most of Amateur Friday scripts need major overhauls. This just needs adjustments. Ivy was not only a fun script, but I could see it playing at Sundance. For that reason, it gets the first amateur “worth the read” of the year!
Script link: Ivy
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Camouflage. Camouflage your story beats, people. Think of it this way. Let’s say you want to hit on a girl. Do you walk up to the girl and say, “I’m hitting on you.” No, you walk up, ask her the time, what she’s doing here, what her name is. Hopefully a good conversation follows, and then you ask her her number. You’re camouflaging your true intention. Same thing with story beats. You can’t have a cop say, “We need you to infiltrate a gang” out of nowhere. You have to build up the situation so that the statement becomes a natural extension of what’s come before.
