Sorry for the late post. I was just at Grey Matter and we’re finalizing everything for the Top 5 Scriptshadow 250 Announcement. It’s going to be a big deal. I can’t wait. We’ll be making that announcement here on Monday, May 30th. It’s a tight race too. We had a lot of discussion on who should be the winner and it was freaking close. So mark your calendars folks!
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Premise: When a broke kingdom gets a second chance with a sponsored contest to find the “next Cinderella,” a common girl who competes to help her family must decide if all the drama and a charmless prince are really worth it.
About: A while ago, I was watching Shrek with my toddler niece, and thinking “I would’ve loved a whole movie on the funny fairy tale kingdom stuff.” That thought led to: “imagine if after the Cinderella story, Fairy Godmother became a washed up drunk”…and “imagine if another kingdom tried to find the next Cinderella through a “Bachelor” like competition”…those were just a couple of the “imagines” that resulted in this script, and if it’s something that might appeal to you, I hope you enjoy whatever you have time to read! (as for me: my background began in narrative fiction, and after publishing 3 novels, I started learning all I could about screenplays, as it seemed natural given my love of writing dialogue. A previous script was a top 20 finalist with Script Pipeline in 2014, and with this new one I’m just trying to see if readers find it interesting and fun!)
Writer:Romi Moondi
Details: 103 pages
Every once in awhile I’ll read a comment here that states something like, “If you have this kind of script, don’t put it on Scriptshadow. The community doesn’t like those types of scripts.” Today is the perfect example of that simply not being true. The LAST genres we tend to celebrate around here are comedy and romance, and yet that’s the script that beat out the competition last week. It just goes to show that as long as you’re a good writer with a solid concept and a strong take on that concept, you can write a script that people will notice.
Speaking of good, Cyrielle isn’t doing so good. She’s got a name that sounds like breakfast, she’s on the wrong side of 20 for the Middle Ages, and since it’s the Middle Ages, we’re about 500 years from female empowerment. Which means if you aren’t married by 18, you’re an old maid.
If that isn’t sucky enough, Cyrielle lives in the Enraptured Kingdom, a kingdom so racked by debt that they can barely afford food. That’s not to say King Gastronso isn’t getting his daily share of carbs. In fact, if you judged this kingdom by him alone, you’d think they were doing quite well.
But when King Gastronso is told that a revolt is coming, he teams with celebrity author, Gianni, that of the recent non-fiction bestseller, Cinderella, and a drunken Fairy Godmother, both of whom represent the Enchanted Kingdom.
Gianni’s idea is this. Why not hold a Cinderella Contest, just like his book, to marry off the king’s handsome but arrogant son? With a princess, the spirits of the kingdom will be lifted, which will boost tourism, and the Enraptured Kingdom will be up and running again in no time.
At the announcement ceremony, Cyrielle and her younger siblings sneak in to steal a bunch of food, only to be spotted by the prince, which results, somehow, in Cyrielle being added to the competition. The thing is, nobody believes Cyrielle can win – not even Cyrielle! Yet week after week, in this “Bachelor” like competition (you need to earn a lily to stay another week), the bumbling Cyrielle keeps on keeping on, always barely making the cut. This is ironic since her and the prince appear to have no chemistry whatsoever.
Will Cyrielle win the competition, become the princess, save her family and the kingdom? We’ll find out after this commercial break. I’m Chris Harrison.
I find fairy tales to be the perfect genre to play with. As I like to constantly sear into your eyeballs, every idea has been done before, but not every angle of every idea has been done before. That’s where you earn your mettle as a writer. You find new angles into old ideas.
Since fairy tales have been around for so long, you really have no choice but to find a new angle into them. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to play against the formula. Do what Shrek did. However, because Shrek exists, you need to find an even more disruptive angle, less you look like you’re copying.
Does The Other Princess achieve this?
Sorta.
I liked the reality show stuff. My problem with The Other Princess is more with the nuts and bolts of the story – the motivations of the characters themselves.
For example, I couldn’t figure out why this asshole Prince who despised Cyrielle kept bringing her along. We’re repeatedly told she’s too old. She keeps screwing up in the challenges, looking like a bumbling idiot. And every interaction the Prince has with her goes badly. For the first 70 pages, he appears borderline disgusted with her.
Whenever this sort of thing happens, I’m pulled out of the story because I’m thinking, “This isn’t happening because it’s logical. It’s happening because the writer needs it to happen to move the story forward.” If Cyrielle falls out of the competition, the movie is over.
But that doesn’t mean you can advance her because you need her to be moved forward. There have to be reasons behind it. This is something so many writers get wrong. They have something happen because they want it to happen, not because it would happen.
Yes, there is creative license in storytelling. You do get to do things that people wouldn’t normally do in real life. But it’s a slippery slope. The more severely or frequently you do it, the more you risk the audience calling you out.
Also, while I can forgive the writer for fudging the fringe parts of the story, you can’t fudge anything that’s a part of the story’s engine. This is what’s making the story go. If even one cylinder collapses, everything collapses. And her being chosen to continue is smack dab in the middle of the engine.
Still, I liked certain aspects of the script. As long as we’re talking about finding new angles, don’t just do it for the story, do it for the characters as well. Ask, “What has this character always been, and how can I change that?” I’ve never seen a bumbling drunk fairy godmother with no powers before, and that incarnation of the character was hilarious. Probably the best part of the script.
I also liked how Gianni was secretly listening to every conversation in the competition (like cameras in a reality TV show), writing it down, sending it back to the Enchanted Kingdom, where it was then copied onto numerous scrolls and sent out to everybody in the land, effectively creating the world’s first reality show. That was clever.
However, this should serve as a warning that scripts aren’t just about ideas. Ideas like the above are the fun part. We all love writing them. But once you have that down, you need to make sure the structure is sound, the character arcs are sound, the character motivations are sound. That’s the hard stuff, the boring stuff, but the stuff that brings it all together, that makes your story seamless.
I thought The Other Princess was a solid Amateur Friday entry. It just needs a bit more craft and technique to tidy up those edges. I hope Romi works on it because I think it has potential.
Screenplay Link: The Other Princess
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Creativity is just one part of screenwriting. You can come up with a great character, a clever scene, or a hilarious joke, but if the craft side isn’t there, your script isn’t going to pop. So just keep working on the craft (structure, GSU, suspense, plotting, pacing). And the reverse is true as well. There are a lot of great craft screenwriters out there who aren’t being creative enough, who aren’t pushing the limits of their imagination or trying unique things. So it goes both ways. You have to be proficient at both.
