Calling it early…
Title: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE
Genre: Sci-Fi Comedy
Logline: Two feuding inventors with a lifelong rivalry use their newly created time machines to destroy the other’s past, present, and future, in order to be remembered in history as the father of time travel. TIME AFTER TIME meets GRUMPY OLD MEN
Time of Your Life is one of those ideas that looks like it’s going to be fun to write until you sit down and study the ingredients. Because I sat down to tried to come up with an abbreviated treatment for this script and spent the first 30 minutes staring at the screen with no idea what to do.
Part of the problem is the two protagonists thing. Focusing on two separate protagonists in the same movie is tricky. The easiest script to write is a script with a single protagonist. Cause all you have to do is establish the goal, the stakes, and the urgency for that character and off you go into your story, which will unwind in a straightforward manner.
The second easiest is a two-hander because it works exactly the same way as a single-protagonist narrative, except that you have two characters working towards the goal instead of one. But it will still follow that same basic formula of establishing a goal, attempting to achieve that goal, and running into a lot of obstacles along the way.
An ensemble script (Fast and Furious, Star Wars, Avengers, Toy Story) works by the same rules. The team works as one, essentially making the entire team the protagonist. As long as they all have the same goal (kill Thanos) the narrative will be easy to write.
But Time of Your Life is not that. You have two protagonists which means you have two stories. Which means you have to keep jumping back and forth between the characters as they attempt to pursue their goals (in this case, to take out each other). But because you’re splitting things up, you’re writing two 55-page scripts (each that follows a protagonist with a goal) as opposed to one 110 page script. In my experience, when you try and do that, the script becomes clunky.
So, how do you solve that problem? The most obvious way would be to have one scientist be your hero and the other the villain. We’d then give 65-70% of the screen time to the hero and 30% to the villain. This would allow us to create the GSU aspect of the story with our hero and our villain just keeps getting in the way.
I’m also having a hard time imagining what it is each character does to sabotage the other. I mean how dark do we want to go here? If we want to go full-on, then they’d go back in time to try and prevent the other from ever being born. Possibly even killing them when they’re a kid. It wouldn’t take much research to figure out when, in the 12 years that their rival was a child, a period where they were alone and vulnerable for 30 minutes. So, just go to that time and kill them. Problem solved.
If you want to make this a lighter execution of the concept and take murder off the table, the reader (and audience) is going to ask that question: “Why would that be off the table?” But let’s say it was.
If I were a producer guiding the development of this script, I would be wary of continuing to jump back in time a dozen times. It will get too messy. And it will reinforce the one time travel rule you don’t want floating around in the reader’s head, which is that it doesn’t matter if they succeed or fail because they can always jump back and try again.
Instead, I’d try and focus on one specific leverage point in the Scientist’s life and build the opposing scientist’s goal around that. For example, if Scientist A were to figure out that, back when Scientist B graduated from college, he had an amazing opportunity to join a tech company that would later be the place where he’d discover time travel, and he also learned that Scientist B was in love with a young woman at the time and had to make a decision between her and this company, then Scientist A could go back in time, befriend the girl, and try everything in his power to have her win over Scientist B, so he would never go off to work at the company.
You could then have Scientist A inadvertently start to fall for this girl himself. Then, in the future, you could have Scientist B figure out what Older Scientist A was doing and then go back to let his younger self know what’s going on. Maybe he even recruits the older version of this woman to help him convince his younger self not to end up with her. Now you’ve got five characters in one timeline all operating against one another, which feels more manageable to me than jumping back to the 90s to stop a scientist, then the 80s when that didn’t work, then the 70s when that didn’t work.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Back to the Future, which only goes to one time period, is simple and easy to follow, whereas Back to the Future 2, which goes to four different time periods, is clunky and not as enjoyable. So you need to find a structure like the one I presented above that’s actually manageable.
But I’m willing to stay open-minded. When I look at the AI-generated poster from above, all that stuff *does* look exciting. I would love to have dinosaurs in this story somehow. But can you do it in a way where it’s organic and makes sense? That’s the question. Colin has had this idea for a while but he can’t crack it. Well, Scriptshadow Nation, here’s your chance to crack it for him.
:)
