This juicy high-concept show starring Mahershala Ali will be Hulu’s next big buzzy “whodunnit.”
Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Premise: A once successful author does the unthinkable and steals a former student’s book idea after he learns of the student’s death. But after the book becomes a #1 bestseller, someone on social media begins taunting him, telling him he knows what he did.
About: Today’s author, Jean Hanff Korelitz, originally wanted to be a literary novelist, writing “important” and “thoughtful” character-driven stories. Until she realized the reality of her voice as a writer: SHE LOVED PLOT. Thus was born, “The Plot,” a book she said was the perfect writing experience. It shot out of her, uninterrupted, in six months during the pandemic. The sexy concept was quickly picked up by Hulu to turn into a series, which will star Academy Award winner, Mahershala Ali.
Writer: Jean Hanff Korelitz
Details:350 pages
Since we’re talking about the power of concept today – coming up with that big juicy movie idea – I wanted to remind you guys that I do a “Power Pack” logline consultation for 75 bucks. You send me 5 loglines. I give you analysis, rate them on a 1-10 scale (don’t write a script that gets less than a 7!) I rewrite each logline, and I rank them from best to worst. This is great for writers trying to figure out what script to write next.
I also do a la cart logline analysis. It’s $25. Use my expertise of having been pitched over 20,000 loglines to know if your idea is truly worth writing. Just e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com
Okay, on to today’s review. We’re going to talk about a lesser-known sub-genre in the storytelling universe called the “walls are closing in” narrative. Now, the “walls are closing in” narrative has a couple of advantages and one distinct disadvantage.
What it offers is this impending feeling of doom as the truth begins to close in on our hero. You’ll see this in movies where the main character has killed someone and the cops come sniffing around. As the story goes on, we can almost physically feel all avenues of escape shrinking. The walls come from around, above, and below, squeeeeeeezing until they’ve entrapped our protagonist.
It’s a fun narrative because we’re hoping that the protagonist somehow figures out a way to escape.
But there’s a second advantage to these movies that not a lot of writers are aware of. Which is that the main characters are a lot more interesting than your average main character. They’ve obviously done something bad in order to be placed in such a situation. That life-changing mistake creates this internal battle that the character must fight off throughout the story. You know you’ve written good characters when the story stops and we still want to watch those characters. The main reason we’ll want to do this is because they’re going through some major internal struggle, which is exactly what the “walls are closing in” narrative provides.
But that leads us to the downside of these narratives, which is that the characters leading them are passive. Often times, with “walls are closing in” narratives, the main character is waiting around. They’re hoping they don’t get caught. At best, the characters are running around, defensively protecting themselves from being discovered.
As you may know, the best stories are almost always stories where the main character is active. He’s going after something. Let’s see how The Plot addresses this.
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a prodigy. His book, “The Invention of Wonder” was critically acclaimed and became a New York Times best-seller. But it’s been a decade and, two books later, Bonner is seen as an also-ran, one of many famed authors who fell off a cliff.
It’s gotten so bad that Jacob was forced to accept a teaching position at a writer’s summit in a small college called Ripley. Dozens of writers paid to come and learn writing from real authors for a month and then went off and tried to apply their newfound knowledge to their own novels.
While there, Jacob meets the most pompous writer ever, a handsome kid named Evan Parker, who has the gall to tell Jacob that he doesn’t need any writing help. He already knows he’s a great writer. He just needs contacts for when he finishes his book, a book, he claims, that will be one of the best books ever.
Jacob internally laughs this off but then, in a private meeting after class, he asks Evan to tell him about the book and Evan does. Jacob is shocked to learn, as Evan goes through the plot, that it, indeed, will be one of the best books ever written. There’s no hesitation in that analysis. The story, which includes a whopper of a twist, is *that* good.
The summit ends, everyone goes their separate ways, and three years later, out of curiosity, Jacob looks up Evan Parker. He’s confused why he hasn’t seen Evan’s book get published. As it turns out, Evan is dead. He died of an overdose.
It doesn’t take Jacob long to decide what he’s going to do. He’s going to write Evan’s book. And he does. Cut to three years later and Jacob is back on top of the publishing world. But “Crib’s” success dwarfs anything he experienced with The Invention of Wonder. Even Oprah wants to interview him.
Evan even gets a wife out of it! A producer on a Seattle radio show named Anna first falls in love with the book, then with the man who wrote it. And Evan is living every writer’s dream. Until one day, on his website, someone leaves a comment: “You are a thief.” From that point on, Jacob’s dream becomes a nightmare.
Not because anyone is trying to kill him. Because now every minute of Jacob’s life is a minute lived in fear. Will today be the day he’s exposed? At first, the comments come every couple of months. But the mystery person gets on Twitter and starts telling anyone who will listen, that Jacob stole “Crib.”
It gets to the point where the publisher finds out and now they want to know what’s up. Jacob, of course, tells them it’s a lie. But it’s getting bad enough that he can’t just wait around anymore. So Jacob heads back to Ripley College, the area where Evan Parker lived, to see if he can learn anything about who Evan was close with, in the hopes of finding the troll. What he learns is that he already knows the answers to his questions. Because the answers are written in his book.
“The Plot” is a great example of how to come up with a low-key high-concept idea. When you think of high concept, you usually think of something involving dinosaurs, time travel, switching faces. But there’s this whole other range of options below the high-profile versions of high concept that can give you a more affordable great idea.
Some low-key high concept movies that come to mind are Double Jeopardy, Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Groundhog Day, Memento, Limitless, and Yesterday.
A writer who steals a concept from a dead writer only to learn, after his outsized success, that someone knows his secret, is indeed, a juicy setup for a movie (or, these days, a show) that isn’t going to break the bank. Which is why everyone on this site should familiarize themselves with low-key high-concept. Still, to this day, it’s one of the best ways to skip the Hollywood line.
And like I said at the outset, the idea lends itself to a fun “walls closing in” narrative, which I think the writer executes well. That first message Jacob gets (“You are a thief”) reminded me of that famous 90s horror thriller line: “I know what you did last summer.” I was scared for Jacob. Because it’s a unique threat in that there’s nothing you can do about it. At least not yet. All you can do is wait and hope that it somehow goes away, even though you know it won’t.
But what impressed me about The Plot is the thing that I keep telling every writer to do. Find a familiar concept/format/genre/plot and put a spin on it. The Plot is a “whodunnit”….. EXCEPT THERE’S NO MURDER. That’s what makes it unique. Once Jacob decides to do something about this troll, he becomes an investigator. He travels to Evan’s old town to learn about him and, hopefully, figure out who’s sending him these messages.
By the way, that’s how the book handles the “walls are closing in” weakness. It gives its main character a goal of finding out who’s posting these comments. That makes him active. So he’s not standing around the whole show.
Ironically, it isn’t the plot that puts this book on top. It’s the thing that the author claims to be least interested in: character. Because what this story is really about is the struggle of being a fraud. It’s a lot like “Yesterday” in that sense. You have everything you’ve ever wanted. But do you really have it if you ripped off the idea from someone else?
And that’s where The Plot becomes its most interesting, at least for fellow writers. Because it gets into a nuanced discussion about what constitutes “stealing.” Jacob wrote every word of this book. He didn’t use a single line of Evan’s work. So did he really steal? Evan had this plot. And he had this amazing twist. But Jacob wrote it. And that’s what he’s holding onto to keep his sanity. He keeps reminding himself that he wrote everything. But is he just doing that to feel better about what he’s done?
The big weakness in the book is the excerpts from the novel, “Crib,” that Jacob wrote. It’s supposed to be this amazing novel (it basically follows a toxic mother-daughter relationship) but nothing in Crib is as good as anything in the novel we’re reading, “The Plot.”
With that said, “Crib” starts to get juicier towards the end when we realize that the characters in “Crib” were Evan’s mother and sister. Now, if someone tells the world what happened to Evan’s mother and sister, it will clearly expose Jacob as having stolen the story from someone else.
I’m back and forth on whether this should be a series or a movie. Ideally, it would be something between the two. That’s always been the problem with novel adaptations. They’re always too big to be a movie and too small to be a TV show. So if you’re going to make a TV show, you need really good writers who can expand on the detail within the novel to keep the story moving during episodes 3, 4, and 5, where a lot of these bad 1-season TV shows die out.
But I think it’s going to work. Ali is great casting because he looks trustworthy. And I could see him depending on that to gain trust from family, friends, fans. Whereas, internally, he’s the biggest fraud in the world, something you’re typically not expecting with that actor. Remember everyone, one of the best ways to create great character is to make what’s happening inside of them and outside of them as opposite as possible. Success, fame, recognition outside. Shame, fear, feel like a fraud inside. That’s what’s going to make this show work.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is a major spoiler WIL. You’ve been warned. Whoever your “killer” is needs to be treated like every other character throughout the novel/script. Anna, Jacob’s wife, is treated so oddly throughout this story. She’s never around. Whenever she is around, she’s a wallflower. Whenever she talks, she’s very non-specific, vague. Meanwhile, every other character gets a super-detailed life. Anna is treated so differently that we know something is up with her. And, of course, she turns out to be Evan’s sister. She’s the one who’s been threatening him. Whenever you have a twist ending, you want to put yourself in the reader’s shoes and ask, “Who would they think the killer is?” Then make sure, whoever they’d think it is, NOT TO MAKE THAT CHARACTER THE KILLER. Not enough writers realistically evaluate readers when they do this.
What I learned 2: What you want to do instead is let Anna (or whoever your version of Anna is) be the disco ball. She’s the pretty shiny thing we’re all looking at over here so you can shock us at the end with that guy/gal we weren’t expecting at all.
