The weekend is here. Writer Jay Eden would love if you busted out your old record player and took a trip into the past. Vinyl lovers unite for… WHITE LABEL!
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Genre: Dark Rom-Com
Premise: (from writer) When a young vinyl music store owner loses everything — love, friendship and vinyl records — he struggles to rebuild his life, hindered by pimp-like friends, a beautiful agent provocateur and an ex-girlfriend who refuses to let their relationship die until she finds a suitable successor. In the vein of HIGH FIDELITY and 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.
About: (from writer) WHITE LABEL landed me a Blacklist manager for three days when I sent it out last year. We had a weekend love-in, swapped lots of emails, planned a campaign to attach a director and talent — then she emailed back the following Monday and said she was simply too busy to take on another client. The script (under a different name) got a professional rating on SPEC SCOUT, and was ranked on the TOP 10 list of the best scripts of 2012 by a Scriptshadow reader (someone I have never met, honestly!).
Writer: Jay Eden
Details: 113 pages
One of the cooler things you can do in LA is head up to Sunset and Vine and visit Amoeba Records. It’s this huge sprawling store with about a billion records. It’s kind of amazing to think about. Vinyl died off a long time ago. In fact, it’s died many deaths. First by cassette, then CD, and now digital. Many people who swore by the vinyl listening experience watched helplessly as their flagship sound experience was ripped away from them.
So to think that there’s this entire store that still sells these things. And not just that – they’re ALWAYS packed. It’s baffling. With that being said, I have to admit I’ve never been a music geek. I mean don’t get me wrong. I’ve bought a hell of a lot of songs on Itunes. But I’m not someone who can tell you what venue Led Zeppelin first played in. Or what studio Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” was recorded in. It’s just not my thing.
Music is something for me to experience and enjoy, not dissect. And really, I wouldn’t have it any other way. One of the downsides of being in the movie business (and I use that term loosely, don’t worry), is that in order to survive, you have to dissect, you have to watch things over and over again to understand why they do or don’t work so you can talk about them intelligently, as well as apply that knowledge to your work. I’m not going to lie, that takes some of the fun out of it. It’s hard for me to just sit down and enjoy a film these days. I’m too busy thinking about all the shit that’s gone into it.
With music, I don’t have to worry about that. It’s why I can enjoy “Satisfaction” and “Gangnam Style” in equal measure. I don’t have to bring any of that judgmental snarkiness over from the film world. Which leads us to White Label. This is a script written by a music geek for music geeks. And for that reason, while I appreciated it, it never truly resonated with me. It sort of drifted around me. I enjoyed some moments, but was never totally enthralled.
White Label puts us back in the decade of big hair and male mid-riff shirts (the 80s) and follows a guy named Matt. Matt is the owner of a store named Urinal Vinyl, a record shop famous for its giant urinal in the middle of the floor, where those desperate for rock schoolage can sacrifice their old shitty records and be given the truly best rock in return. In other words, it’s a gimmick that separates UV from every other record store in town.
But the fun and games of the 70s and early 80s are coming to an end. That’s because a new medium is hitting the streets, the compact disc. And they’re making their way into every record store in California. Every record store except for one. Urinal Vinyl. That’s because Matt refuses to bend to the constraints of capitalist America.
Cut to our romantic foil, the royally fucked up but unimaginably beautiful Charlie, one of those women who could find trouble in a church. Charlie works for one of these compact disc companies and realizes if she could infiltrate Matt’s little store, she could find out what they’re up against. So that’s exactly what she does, hoping to rope Matt in and get all the information she needs and use it against him. But it’s not that easy. Matt is still in love with his dead wife (who he’s able to physically see and talk to by the way) and just getting an uninterrupted moment with him is like trying to get some one on one time with Madonna (80s reference).
There are tons of other people coming in and out of the shop with their own stories as well. There’s Ray, Matt’s best friend, who’s in love with an Argentinian woman he can’t have. There’s Bunker, a 15 year old kid who’s so obsessed with the Goth girl working at the store he comes in every day and stares at her from the corner. There’s Todd, Charlie’s married boss whom she erroneously believes will leave his wife. There’s Phil, who’s married to Matt’s sister. There’s Maddie, who’s trying to rope in Matt as well. Oh, and of course there’s Emma, Matt’s dead wife. Shit, there’s a lot of people here!
Charlie eventually finds a provision in the rental agreement on the building that will close the place down unless Matt finds 30k. All this espionage is getting harder and harder to do, of course, since she’s falling for Matt. And in the end, Matt will have to call on all the famous rockers who once graced one of the greatest record stores in the world to rock out and raise money so they can save the place where they got their first rock education!
I feel really bad about reviewing White Label because there’s more passion and depth in this script than most of amateur scripts I read in a month. You can tell when a writer really loves his subject matter. He gives the words a power you just don’t see when a writer’s writing for the market. I can vouch for that here with Jay. I felt the sweat he laid out on the page. But this just isn’t my thing. So no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get fully into it.
Regardless of that, there’s some really great character development here. Every single character has something going on, from the best friend (who’s obsessed with the coffee shop girl) to Charlie, who has several different people she’s trying to please. I’m a big fan of writers who give every character something to do, something important happening in their lives.
Here’s the irony in that, though. There are too many characters here to begin with. And because Jay is so good with character-building, it actually ends up working against him. Because he’s adding storylines for characters that probably shouldn’t be in the script in the first place. Start with Emma, Matt’s dead wife. I’ve seen the “dead wife who talks to the lead character” half a dozen times before in the last two years alone. We even reviewed a script with this exact hook a few months ago.
Then we had characters like Jake (a late boyfriend for Charlie), Charlie’s sister (who has very little to do with anything), Matt’s semi-gf Maddie, and Bunker’s late girlfriend, Christy Turlington. I didn’t care about the specifics of any of these storylines. All I care about are the main characters’ plights. I want to see THOSE characters interacting with one another, not some late “thrown in” character who I barely know or care about.
To me, White Label’s biggest problem might be that there’s TOO MUCH going on. And some of the more important character storylines get lost in the excessiveness of all the subplots and tangents. This script needed someone to come in there and straighten out all the curls. It needed a “simplification comb,” or, to use a music reference, it needed a simpler beat.
Another thing I’m worried about is how similar this is to High Fidelity. It’s music geeks hanging out in a record store talking about music. Clearly, this was an influence for Jay. But there’s a fine line between influence and “the same thing,” and while there are portions of this story that are its own, there are way too many that feel like excerpts from that film.
Moving forward, here’s what I’d recommend to Jay. Streamline the character count (starting with Emma – represent her with a unique record they used to listen to or something, not a physical talking person) and remember that you don’t have to go into every little detail in every little character storyline. The big storylines should take precedence. Drop stuff like Jake and Christy Turlington. We don’t need them. I’d also bring up the story problem earlier. Right now, it’s introduced at the midpoint and that leaves the first half of the script without a story. Introduce their need to save the store at the end of the first act. Also, make “White Label” a bigger part of the story. It sounds like these “white label” records are worth a lot of money. If they went on a search to find one to save the shop (or he had to, say, decide whether to sell the super-valuable white label record he found with Emma that represents their relationship), that’d be more interesting than the cliché “hold a concert to save the shop” climax. Finally, do everything you can to make this NOT feel like High Fidelity. I’m not even sure how you do that, but the more you separate the two, the more this will feel like your own movie as opposed to a homage to the movie you loved.
This script deserves to be read. Jay has some real talent. The only reason I’m not personally recommending it is because it’s not my thing. But do yourself a favor and check it out so you can form your own opinion, especially if you’re a music geek.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I learned this from a recent TV-related article on Vulture, and it stuck with me. If you’re setting your story in the past, try to set it during a transitional time. Transitional times are usually the most exciting and are well-springs for conflict and drama. In this case, we cover a record store during the CD revolution, which is what creates much of the conflict that drives the plot.
