And he attempts to solve the impossible screenwriting quandry of ‘how do you make a screenplay work without any conflict???’
Genre: Christmas Hallmark Movie
Premise: After inheriting a house in Vail, an event planner finds herself planning a giant food fest to save a local restaurant, all while spending a lot of time with the sexy local contractor.
About: What do you need to know? It’s a Hallmark movie starring, of course, Lacey Chalbert! I asked AI how much Lacy Chalbert makes for one of these movies and they said half a mil! By my estimation that makes her a billionaire twice over. Co-writer Delondra Mesa wrote on one of my favorite underappreciated TV shows, Black Summer.
Writers: Delondra Mesa and Duane Poole
Details: A cool 85 minutes
As many of you know, I’ve been asking for Blood & Ink participants to e-mail me with an update on where they are with their scripts. I’m happy to report that most writers are doing well. They’re at least halfway through their first draft. So keep it up and keep writing!
One of those e-mails was from a concept I gave a rare “YES” to, immediately guaranteeing it entry into competition (I think I gave five “YESES” in total). That would be from the writer of, “It’s The Worst Time of the Year.” Here’s that logline if you’ve forgotten: “Two successful, single business women from the big city get trapped in a Hallmark movie nightmare where it’s always fall — but weirdly somehow also always Christmas. They’re forced to open a bakery, enter the pie contest, solve the weekly town murder, and date the impossibly hot plaid-wearing widower — all while trying to find a way to escape before increasingly aggressive townspeople trap them in this hellscape, force them to give up their lives and drink pumpkin spiced lattes….forever.”
I was trading e-mails with the writer when they told me they’d, of course, watched a ton of Hallmark movies for research. And to their surprise, they actually started liking them! But it was this line from our exchange, in particular, that caught my attention: “When you let go and embrace them for what they are, there is something very comforting about a movie with zero real world stakes or conflict.”
If there is one truism I’ve found in screenwriting, it’s that there has to be stakes. If there aren’t stakes, the audience can’t get emotionally invested. Because stakes are what create the “care” part of watching something. Stakes make things matter. If things don’t matter, then who cares what happens?
So, how is it, then, that these stakes-less Hallmark movies are so popular? Obviously, something works about the formula and I wanted to figure out how the one movie formula that didn’t include stakes was still able to keep its audience caring.
Hence, I decided to watch a Hallmark movie. You have to understand how momentous this occasion is. I’ve never watched one before. So, I asked the writer what their favorite Hallmark movie was and they gave me five options. I looked through them, comparing IMDB ratings. Winter in Vail clocked in with the highest score at a 7.0! That’s like a 13.9 if you’re scoring it as a regular movie. I was in. What follows may not only be the answer to great screenwriting. But the answer… to the universe.
Chelsea is a 30-something event planner in Los Angeles who gets passed up for a promotion and thinks it’s a sign that she needs to change careers. On that very same day, she receives a letter informing her that her Uncle passed away and left her a big house in Vail, Colorado.
Chelsea heads out there to feel things out for a few days, figuring she’ll fix the house up and sell it. That’s when she meets Owen, the impossibly hot contractor who seems to be everywhere in town. The two get off to a bumpy start when Owen chastises her for parking in a no parking zone.
Later, when Chelsea starts putting her Uncle’s house back together, she’s forced to hire Owen to help. The two immediately apologize for the way they acted and become fast friends, doing everything together, while Owen fixes up the house.
Owen also happens to be the son of the owner of a German restaurant in town that’s on its last legs. As it just so happens, Chelsea’s Uncle was the star pastry chef there who had a world-class apple strudel. But when he died, the recipe died with him and they haven’t had a strudel since.
When Chelsea later finds her uncle’s secret strudel recipe in an old photo book, she pitches the idea to Owen that they bring the strudel back. But who’s going to make it, Owen asks. We will! she replies.
Chelsea then calls upon her event planning background to put together… Strudelfest, which I’m beyond shocked wasn’t the title of the film. Strudelfest will unite the entire restaurant community to each make their version of a strudel and it will be a big fun event and, hopefully, bring people back to the restaurants and save Owen’s father’s place. Something tells me that, despite the odds being against them, it’s going to work out!
Did somebody say, “Strudel!?”
You know, I couldn’t possibly understand the appeal of these movies without having read the number one script from the Black List yesterday. But I’m really glad I did because it showed me EXACTLY why people love these movies.
Let’s take a quick look at the variables from each of these movies…
Best Seller
-Unlikable female protagonist
-Boring and mostly unlikable male protagonist
-A sad broken marriage.
-The only redeeming feature in the marriage is weird kink-filled sex
-Lots of unhappy people
-Tons of lying
-Infidelity
-Passive-aggressive attacks on your partner
-bitterness
-gossip
-people relishing in others lives being ruined
Winter In Vail
-Ridiculously likable female protagonist
-Incredibly likable male protagonist
-strong sexual chemistry
-Tons of happy people
-Everybody has good intentions
-Everybody helps each other out
-Characters go out and do fun things
-Celebration of family
-An overall happy experience
I mean when you break it down to brass tacks, it’s obvious why people like these Hallmark movies. If you go see Best Seller, you leave that movie feeling miserable about the world. If you see Winter In Vail, you leave feeling hope, happiness, and encouraged that people are, at their core, good. It’s almost scary how obvious it is that these movies do well.
HOWEVER…
I’m not sure I would’ve given the same marks to one of these films that scored a 6.0 on IMDB rather than a 7.0. I believe that these scripts are sneaky hard to write, maybe even more so than regular movies.
Why?
For the exact reason that the writer of It’s The Worst Time of the Year said. The stakes are low and there’s very little conflict. In fact, these movies seem to relish in the avoidance of conflict.
Again, their mission statement appears to be: Let’s make the audience feel good. And if people are double-crossing each other or being mean or getting in fights, that doesn’t leave you feeling good. There isn’t even a villain in this film!
So, where does the drama come from then?
And where does our interest come from when the drama is this light?
Well, the answer is: with good-old fashioned smart screenwriting.
There *are* some stakes to this plot. Owen’s father’s restaurant is on its last legs. It’s probably going to close down. The writers, therefore, make it a top priority to make sure we love Owen’s dad. We get an early scene where Chelsea meets him and he’s the nicest guy in the world. There’s also a slight sadness about him, since he knows that these are likely the last weeks of his restaurant.
Surprisingly, that can be enough to make us care about a story. We like the guy. We don’t want the guy to lose his restaurant. So we’re rooting for him, and everybody else, to save the restaurant!
And, actually, I think that’s the secret sauce to these movies. Everybody is so incredibly likable. They’re either nice, or funny, or helpful, or kind, or encouraging. They have each other’s backs.
This is the exact OPPOSITE of what we saw yesterday, when everyone was so unlikable. And what did I say? I said it is EXTREMELY hard to make a movie work when your main characters are unlikable.
So, the opposite would probably hold true as well, right? It should be EASIER to make a movie work if we *like* the main characters.
It’s funny because I thought that Owen was going to be more of an a-hole. And we were going to go the traditional route of him and Chelsea hating each other but he’s the only contractor in town, so she has no choice but to use him. But that’s not what happened. He was a little jerky in the first scene but from that point on, he’s super nice to her and she’s super nice to him. And it works!
Which leads us to the next secret ingredient on the Hallmark movie menu: Sexual Chemistry.
If you create two characters who we both like and we want to see them get together and then you make us wait to see them get together, that can work in a vacuum! You don’t need a great story around that if that part of the recipe is fire. You really don’t. People are captivated by two people who they want to see get together.
The mistake a lot of writers make is to have the two kiss (or do more) too early. And then most of that sexual tension disappears. They don’t make that mistake in Winter in Vail. They wait and wait and wait, ensuring that we stay until the very end because dammit we want to see these two officially get together!
These scripts really need that part to work because if it’s not working, it’ll shine a light on the lack of conflict in the story.
In the first act, we get a scene of Chelsea’s boss informing her that the big promotion she expected to get has been given to someone else. Her boss isn’t mean about it. But we don’t like her because she seems oblivious to the fact that Chelsea is devastated.
So, later, when she decides to quit, I was expecting a scene where she revels in telling her boss to take this job and shove it. Just to get back at her a little. The writer even sets the scene up for us, showing Chelsea approach her boss and ask to speak to her. But we never see that scene. We cut to afterwards, where she’s cleaning out her desk.
I thought that was a strange choice until later, when I got a better feel for how these Hallmark movies work. They don’t want to show any meanness, any spitefulness. And that’s tough as a writer because you’re leaving conflict-filled home-run scenes on the table. Taking that away from the writer is like taking away half his bat.
Which is why, again, you need to make the sexual chemistry stuff between the two romantic leads perfect. If that works, we’re not demanding a ton of conflict in the rest of the scenes. The conflict is taken care of through the unresolved sexual tension.
I’ll have to see one of the lesser Hallmark movies before I understand where the flaws in this formula are located. But based on this movie alone, I thought it was pretty freaking entertaining. And it was nice to feel happy after a movie for once. Which I’ll be ruining later tonight when I watch Frankenstein. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Protagonist likability solves a ton of your problems as a screenwriter.
