You’ve got 48 hours to get your loglines in for June Logline Showdown! Details below.
Genre: Drama
Premise: A schlubby, long-suffering late night comedy writer’s simmering anger and jealousy begin to boil over into madness as he suspects that his telegenic A-list boss is trying to replace him.
About: To get you guys excited about this Friday’s Logline Showdown, I’m reviewing May’s runner-up logline, the script I actually thought had the best chance at being really good. But I sensed it wouldn’t win just because it’s such a quiet concept. Yet another reminder to keep the reader in mind when choosing what concept to write. The more read requests you get, the more shots you get get at the winning combo.
Writer: Danny Albie
Details: 104 pages
Once again, this is a reminder that June Logline Showdown is this Friday. Deadline is THURSDAY! So get those loglines in!
When: June 23rd
Deadline: Thursday, June 22nd, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: e-mail all submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
What: include title, genre, and logline
Hader for Andy?
Onto our review!
Andy Letts is a gangly 46 year old divorcee who’s the head writer on an aging late night talk show headed by the beloved Jack Rafferty. Andy’s life amounts to trying to write edgy jokes for Jack, getting turned down, replacing them with safe jokes that Jack wants, and watching as Jack gets all the credit.
Andy doesn’t do much otherwise. He doesn’t date. He masturbates to humiliation porn. He goes to therapy. He’s basically on autopilot. The only other activity he has is following this one girl on Twitter named Becca who occasionally writes funny tweets.
One day, Andy decides it would be a good idea to hire Becca. Especially because his entire writing staff is made up of straight white men. Jack, along with the show’s showrunner, are not happy about this new addition, especially because Becca wants to write more edgy left-leaning political humor. She’s more into “clapter” than “laughter.”
Becca eventually bullies her way into a segment on the show that does really well and that begins her meteoric rise. Within a month she’s the co-head writer on the show. More and more of Andy’s jokes are now being overlooked. It’s only a matter of time before she takes over his job completely.
Then, one night, Andy and Becca decide to get drinks. (Spoilers follow) The drinks go well enough that Andy invites her back to his place. They then get into a heated conversation about diversity that takes an unexpected turn into Becca threatening to falsely accuse Andy of sexual assault. The two get into a brief scuffle that ends with Becca dead.
Andy gets rid of the body, goes back to work, and hopes that everyone will just forget about Becca. And, for the most part, they do. But it turns out Andy’s not finished yet. The Becca escapade gave him a taste for blood, and a taste for finally getting that recognition he so rightly deserves after all these years.
The Head Writer has one of the most charged scenes I’ve read all year. It’s a scene that I’ll never forget.
But, on the whole, the script is a frustrating read for several reasons. So let’s talk about it.
The biggest problem here is that the story doesn’t have an engine underneath it. It’s one of those scripts where life is just happening. I understand that this is a character piece. But even character pieces need that engine pushing the story forward. We have to feel like we’re going somewhere.
After finishing the first act, I still didn’t know what this story was. Andy hires Becca but I didn’t know why. Andy’s problems at work are so vaguely conveyed that I wasn’t sure what the problem was that needed to be fixed.
About 70 pages into the script, Andy explains to someone, “My boss likes my writing but doesn’t like me.” And I thought, “Why didn’t I know that on page 20? Why am I only learning that now?” That’s how vague the first act was. It didn’t do a good job establishing the relationships, what was specifically wrong with those relationships, what was wrong with work, and why Andy needed to solve it by hiring Becca.
When Andy hires Becca, his reasoning seems to be a sprinkling of several things. The other writers don’t work hard enough. They need more representation on staff. Andy wants a younger voice to make Jack look hipper. Andy needs someone to help him with his duties. If you have a bunch of reasons, you don’t have any reasons.
For movies, you need one big reason so the audience is clear on why “the big thing” (in this case, Becca’s hiring) needs to happen.
In “Blackberry,” they need to hire Jim because they don’t have a shark. They have a bunch of geeks who are great at building phones but who don’t have any idea how to run a business.
Once Becca comes in, the script makes another curious choice. Becca insists on making more liberal jokes. Everybody on staff is afraid of this because of the repercussions. Hold on here. Unless this movie is set in an alternate universe, I’m pretty sure that the jokes you can’t tell these days on late-night television are conservative-leaning jokes. So that didn’t ring true at all.
We then go back to our engine-free narrative. Outside of Becca’s popularity rising, it’s not clear where the plot is headed or why we should still be watching. I still don’t entirely understand why Becca was hired. I don’t have a good grip on Andy’s situation with Jack. Jack kind of likes him but kind of doesn’t? It’s confusing. And now we’ve completely taken a left turn by turning the movie into a “late night talk show needs to be more woke” narrative, which comes out of nowhere. It was never established before Andy hired Becca that the show only told conservative jokes.
So all these things led to a very mushy narrative, and a narrative that didn’t have much push behind it. We don’t know where we’re going.
But then we get the Andy and Becca “date” scene.
One of the strategies to really get your reader invested is to write stories and scenes that rile them up. The things that Becca says and does in this scene – I got so angry! To the point where I was not unhappy when she met her demise.
More importantly, after forcing myself through the 60 pages that preceded this scene, only to be on the edge of my seat for six straight pages, I realized: This scene IS THE MOVIE.
But, unfortunately, everything around this scene, starting with page 1 and ending with page 105, needs to mostly be rewritten.
For starters, we need a stronger impetus for hiring Becca. It can’t just be because Andy thinks it maybe sorta might help. Somebody needs to come in and force them to do it. Or they were exposed on CNN for being the last writer’s room of all men. Something like that.
And then everything with Becca’s storyline needs to move faster. We can’t laze around. Create time goals. Maybe we establish that the Emmy nominations are announced a month from now and Becca is determined to get the show nominated. Something where we have a goal and we feel like time is of the essence.
Then, I think the Becca death needs to happen on page 45. Not page 60. You can’t be lazy with plot points in character pieces. It’s too risky cause the slower story is more at risk of getting boring. From there, maybe Andy finds her joke notebook. And so Andy starts using her jokes and he finally starts getting all the credit and acclaim he’s wanted. Meanwhile, the police are closing in on finding who killed Becca. And you can still do this thing where he starts offing other people on the writing team.
You do that, you’ve got a movie. Right now, you’ve got a meditation on what it’s like to be a head writer who nobody respects. That’s fine to explore that. But you need a plot surrounding it.
Script Link: The Head Writer
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re trying too hard to impress the reader, the line is going to feel off. Like this line, “Andy watches Shepherd cut a GIANT PIECE OF ICE CREAM CAKE. It’s so big, feet amputate themselves looking at it.” It took me several reads to realize this was a diabetes joke. It’s just too clever by half. The reader resents writers who are desperate to impress them. Just tell the story. That’s what we like.
