Genre: Thriller
Premise: Over the course of one day, a resilient young woman is terrorized by a self-proclaimed “nice guy” who refuses to take no for an answer after asking her out.
About: This is our April Logline Showdown WINNER! What you see above was the logline used in the competition. If you want to participate in the next Logline Showdown, the deadline is Thursday, May 18th, 10pm Pacific Time. Send your title, genre, and logline to carsonreeves3@gmail.com. The script must be written!
Writer: Patrick Bottaro
Details: 89 pages
I saw some comments where readers were baffled about this logline winning. But I think it’s a really good idea. Let me explain why. The persona of “nice guys” is a fascinating one. The “nice guy” was born out of this idea that if you were just really kind to girl, you could nice your way into her bedroom.
This led to a phenomenon known as “white knighting,” where nice guys would go a step further and “defend” women in public if a perceived “creepy” or “douchey” guy were to hit on her. On the surface, such an action was noble. But what became clear was that the nice guy was not trying to be nice. He was hoping that his niceness would imbue himself to the woman and she would reward him with bedtimes shenanigans.
That’s the appeal of today’s logline. The nice guy is the poster child for irony. He pretends to be one thing, but he’s really the opposite. And those are always great characters – where the external is at odds with the internal.
Now let’s find out if the script is any good!
20-something Grace is setting up a hookup on text with a new guy she’s seeing, Chris, while waiting for her coffee. While she waits, Jon approaches: “JON (mid-30s) creeps up beside her, a little too close. Everything about him is off, the type of person men and women avoid, for different reasons.”
Jon lays it on thick. He tells her she has a beautiful name. That she’s beautiful. That she’s in great shape. Does she want to have a drink with him? Grace rejects him pretty hard but Jon remains persistent, following her outside. She finally has to tell him, as harshly as possible, to get away from her. She’s not interested.
Grace heads to the gym she works at where she confides to her work buddy, Shane, what just happened. Grace heads up to the main desk to get to work and that’s when Jon arrives. He causes some commotion and is able to snatch her phone in the process, before running back out. 20 minutes later and everyone who works at the gym receives nude selfies from Grace’s phone.
Grace wants to go to the cops but the cops need evidence. And they also need a suspect. All they know about this mystery nice guy is that his name is Jon. Grace tries to get security footage of Jon coming in the gym from her boss but the boss is being difficult. Shane tells Grace he’ll get the video. In the meantime, go file a police report.
Grace does that but, afterwards, is attacked by Jon outside, who now has a van. After a brief stint in the hospital where she has to escape Jon once again, she’s able to get to her new bed buddy, Chris’s, house. Chris is a little thrown by Grace showing up unannounced but he’s determined to help her take down this creep. They call the cops but before the cops get there, Jon is able to trick Chris (making him think he’s a cop) and get inside, where he kills Chris and kidnaps Grace.
Back at Jon’s house, Jon puts together the date that he wanted in the first place. With a shock collar on Grace in case she tries anything funny. Shane is able to figure out where Chris lives and shows up, where he barely manages to kill Jon and save Grace’s life. Now that he’s done so, he suggests grabbing a drink with Grace. But Grace tells him, sorry, but we’re just friends. A dark look comes over Shane’s face. The end.
First off, props to Patrick here.
This is a really fast read. I can’t emphasize enough how awesome it is when the writer prioritizes making the reading experience effortless.
And this truly was effortless. Ironically, that ended up hurting the script. But I’ll get to that in a second.
First, I want to say that the trick with these scripts (fast moving thrillers) is that they must read fast but not feel like they were written fast.
This felt like it was written fast. What does that mean? Why would I suspect that? It boils down to how bland the creative choices are. Are the characters all standard and expected? Is the dialogue too basic? Does it lack thoughtfulness? Are things too easy for the heroes and the villains? Are the plot beats easy to see coming? Can I predict, with 80% or higher accuracy, what’s going to happen in the next 20 pages?
Let’s key in on one of those rules.
Are things too easy for the heroes and villains?
Yes. They consistently were. Jon gets through this story with immense ease. He barely has to do anything to get anywhere he wants. At one point, Chris is waiting for the police to show up at his place to pick up Grace. He knows Jon is dangerous. He knows Jon has Grace’s phone. So when the “cops” show up at his building (aka John), and he doesn’t think twice about letting him in — I’m not buying that.
Nor am I buying a woman screaming for help from a crazed man following her to a convenience store owner and all Jon has to say is, “I’m taking my crazy girlfriend back to the mental hospital” to get the store owner to give him Grace. That was consistent with the whole movie. Things happened way too easily.
One of the responsibilities of us screenwriters is making the job difficult. Make the characters EARN everything they get.
I recently watched the thriller, “Missing,” and that’s a great example of making the character earn everything. When her mom goes missing in Columbia during a holiday with her new boyfriend, our teenaged main character has to figure out how to find her. But everyone she calls in Columbia – the hotel, the police – speaks another language. She can’t communicate with them.
The writers then pay off a “task rabbit” setup from earlier in the story. Our heroine sees the link for Task Rabbit again on her computer screen, gets an idea, searches the web for Columbia’s version of Task Rabbit. Even that doesn’t come up with an initial hit. She has to dig deeper (always make things hard on your hero!) and finally finds an equivalent and cycles through a bunch of potentials before she locates a guy who knows English and now she’s got boots on the ground in Columbia to look for things for her.
Side note: The writers of the movie used to read Scriptshadow religiously! They listened!
The point is, you always felt in that movie like the characters had to work for it. The reason you don’t see that in the typical screenplay is because IT’S HARD. It’s one of those things that takes time. It takes trial and error, new ideas forming between drafts. It’s time-consuming. Which is why most writers don’t do it. That’s the first thing that needs to be fixed here.
Now, when it comes to our “nice guy,” Jon, I had issues with his opening scene. Because it wasn’t a nice guy interaction! He comes in and clearly starts hitting on Grace. That’s not “nice guy” behavior. Nice guys would consider hitting on a girl “creepy.” The nice guy would come up and make indirect conversation about her coffee or the weather – safe topics that keep things nice and pleasant. He would then hope that the girl would appreciate him and then start to like him because of that.
The reason this matters is because if this is just a guy who asks a girl out and she says no and he goes psycho, then there’s nothing unique about your idea. You’ve just got a dude stalking a girl. What makes your idea unique IS the “nice guy” part. So you have to get that right.
To Patrick’s credit, I think he’d say the real nice guy was Shane. And Shane definitely does exhibit nice guy behaviors. He wants to help Grace by any means possible just out of the goodness of his heart. Except, of course, that’s not why he’s doing it at all. He’s doing all this with the hopes of getting Grace at the end. It’s the ultimate nice guy move.
And I’ll also give Patrick props for giving us a climax to that storyline which hits us like an Oppenheimer bomb. It was the one moment that truly went against the grain of how that moment is SUPPOSED TO GO in a typical script. To, also, end the script on that moment was a bold move. I just wanted to see more of those bold moves throughout the script. If you could do that as well as make things harder for everyone and make everyone have to work for what they were getting, as well as throw in a monster twist or two, now you’ve got a movie!
A good template is Missing. I swear to you. I was halfway through that movie and I had NO idea where it was going. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Hollywood movie and halfway through didn’t know how it was going to end. And that movie also has that MONSTER twist I was talking about this needing. So you could use that as inspiration.
This feels like a first draft. It needs 5 or 6 more to get it to that mature state where it really cooks.
What’d you guys think?
Script link: Nice Guy
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me (but close to a ‘worth the read’)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the ways to “mature” a script through rewrites is to figure out which of your primary characters are on-the-nose and look for ways to add complexity to them. Jon is very on-the-nose in this script. He literally says, a number times, “I’m just a nice guy.” On-the-nose villains are the most boring characters you can write. So how do we fix this? Well, in the opening scene, after Grace rejects Jon and goes to her car, there’s a van blocking her and the van door opens and there’s a woman helping a child in a wheelchair get out. The scene was meant to keep Grace from getting in her car so that Jon could catch up with her. Why not make it so the girl in the wheelchair IS WITH JON? You would rewrite it so that after she harshly rejects Jon in the coffee shop, she spots him walking back to sit down with the girl in the wheelchair. They’re together. Just as a starting pointing for a character, that’s way more interesting. Psychos who chase women aren’t supposed to be helping push around little girls in wheelchairs. Maybe this is his sister. Maybe it’s his sibling’s daughter and he uses her as part of his “Nice Guy” schtick. I just know that that makes him more complex than just asking a girl out and when she says no he freaks out and decides to chase her for the rest of the day.
