Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.
Genre: Comedy
Premise (from writer): A young man from a strict religious family awakens from a head injury with the personality of a vulgar, slutty party girl.
Why You Should Read (from writer): Tammi was included in Amateur Offerings last year, and while it didn’t get picked, I received a lot of positive feedback and thoughtful comments from those that read it. I recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to make the film myself. In a little over three weeks, I’ve raised almost $20,000. I would love to get feedback on the updated draft from you and the SS community before we (potentially) head into production.
Writer: Vinnie Pagano
Details: 91 pages
The quality of writing this week has been superb. It’s almost unfair to ask Vinnie to follow it. Because my bar, which had been subterranean for weeks, is back up to Olympic-record heights. And as I make that transition from the pro world to the amateur world, I’m posed with a question that never seems to go away: What’s the difference between a pro script and an amateur script? That’s a wide-ranging question with no easy answer but I will tell you the first answer that comes to my mind:
Feeling comfortable within the screenwriting format.
You can tell when someone’s been doing this for awhile. It’s like a veteran gaffer on a movie set. They always know where to stand. They always know where the camera’s going. They always know who’s going to be where and when.
Screenwriting is similar. Once you’ve written a million description paragraphs or introduced a thousand characters, you’re comfortable. And that comfort-level shows on the page.
With newer writers, they always seem to be fighting the format. You can sense when they’re unsure about something. Should I add an extra line here? Should I get out of this scene earlier? Even decisions such as “Should I include “CUT TO” become big deals. And readers sense your trepidation.
One of the purposes of a story is to not feel like a story. It should feel like things are unraveling naturally. With Tammi, I can tell Vinnie is extremely comfortable with the character. He knows her inside-out. I’m not sure he’s got the craft part down yet though. And that’s something I wanna get into.
Enoch is a sweet God-fearing college boy. He’s saving himself for the love of his life, Cloris. And when he goes back home for break, he joins the church play specifically so he can court Cloris, who turns out to be a rude two-faced bitchasaurus.
While at church, a giant cross falls down and knocks Enoch out. When he wakes up, he’s turned into a 19 year-old potty-mouthed super-slut named Tammi. This is baffling to Enoch’s churchgoing parents as well as his doctors. They chalk it up to some rare personality-changing affliction, and unfortunately have no timetable for Enoch’s return.
So “Tammi” goes home, immediately dresses up in drag, and starts painting the town red. She gets her best friend, Dennin (well, Enoch’s best friend anyway), to come out with her, and basically spends every second trying to get as fucked up as possible. Once she’s properly lubricated, she looks for any man who will have sex with her. And if she can’t find them, she insults them. Actually, Tammi insults everyone. That’s kind of her thing.
This leads her to Liam, a church-going man who Enoch saved that day from the cross, and she becomes infatuated with him. She sets her sites on banging him but of course Liam has zero interest in her. In the meantime, Tammi’s parents are semi-trying to find a cure for her. But they’re slowly coming to the realization that Tammi could be sticking around for good.
Let’s get something clear. Your enjoyment of this script is going to come down to one thing and one thing only. Do you think Tammi is funny?
As much as I wanted to love her, she was a bit too crass for me. That’s not to say Vinnie should change her. The great thing about comedy is it’s subjective. And it sounds like a lot of you loved Tammi. But that definitely colored my reaction to the script.
This goes into what I was talking about Wednesday, with the Hangover writers’ new script, Bad Moms. When you’re writing a comedy, it’s important not to ride the entirety of your script’s success on the comedy alone. Build a great story as an insurance policy.
That’s my number one complaint here. There was no story. I didn’t know what Tammi’s objective was other than existing. And when your main character is objective-less, your story usually follows that route as well. Again, with Bad Moms, our main character decided to take on the Queen Bee mom, via a PTA election, and that drove the story to its conclusion.
Vinnie does include a “church play storyline” here, but while that kind of frames the plot, it doesn’t feel important enough. It doesn’t matter for our main character whether the play is a success or a failure, because she’s off doing her own thing. And I often found myself questioning what that thing was.
This is what happens when you have a hero without a goal. If they’re not trying to do something, it becomes the writer’s job to come up with something for them to do. Does that make sense? Because it’s important. If your hero is trying to achieve something, you always know what they need to do next because it’s a step towards achieving that goal. If they have no objective, you have to constantly ask yourself, “What should I do next with her?” Do that enough times and the script starts to feel like it’s spinning its wheels.
Another problem you encounter with a character like Tammi, is running the risk of being one-note. Tammi is a crass one-line machine. And I noticed that on page 70, I was still getting the same jokes as I was getting on page 30. Someone says something, Tammi replies with something rude or sexual.
That can work in a skit, when you’re going for 3 minutes. But this is a feature. I actually looked back to other big-single-personality comedies like Borat to figure out how they pulled that off. And I noticed that while Borat was one-note, they put him in a lot of different situations, so that even though he was the same, the situations around him were unique. And that kept things fresh. In Tammi, we don’t really get that.
All this goes back to what I was saying initially. I’m not sure Vinnie’s entirely comfortable within this format. He knows his main character but he doesn’t know his story. Which is kind of ironic, since just yesterday I was saying character is everything. But yeah, that’s only true if the story is in place. And this one isn’t yet.
That’s not to say there weren’t some good things here. I liked the irony of placing the crass sex-addict in the middle of a church-going community. And there was some real effort made to dig into a few of the characters, such as the parents and Liam.
But the combination of not connecting with Tammi’s humor personally as well as the lack of a strong story kept me from enjoying this the way I hoped I would when I first read that awesome “Why You Should Read.” I wish Vinnie the best regardless. And I hope the on-screen version of this character is so hilarious that none of this nitpicking will matter.
Script link: Tammi
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m not a huge fan of outshining your main character in their opening scene. I know Enoch is supposed to be uptight. But when he’s outshined 100-fold by another character in his first scene, it’s a bit confusing. It’s kind of like, “Wait, we have to now follow the boring person in this scenario?” I know there are extenuating circumstances (the opening character, I believe, is what inspires Tammi) but I might look into attacking this in a different way. When I meet the hero, I want him to be the focus of the scene. Not someone else.
