Today we discuss one of the most intensely debated topics in screenwriting
Genre: Action-Thriller
Logline: A star quarterback hides a twisted secret—he’s a serial killer carving up victims between games. But when a relentless detective starts connecting the dots, his perfect season—and double life—begin to unravel. American Psycho meets Any Given Sunday.
About: This script finished as the fourth best entry in the Mega-Showdown contest. It was seen as the most daring of the four finalists, which made it polarizing. I always say that if you can’t be the best, then at least be polarizing because polarizing gets people talking. Which is exactly what this script has done.
Writer: Bill Lawrence
Details: 93 pages
Football season is upon us (daaaaaaaa Bears!). So what better way to celebrate than to review a script that debuted here on Scriptshadow!
This is our fourth place finisher, QB1, aka American Psycho in the football world. A few people have been asking if I’m still going to have the Second Chance Showdown for the entries that didn’t make it to the official showdown. The answer is yes. I will have two weekends of them, and those will occur in succession after this coming weekend. So the Showdown fun is not stopping any time soon.
QB1, which is our main character’s name, not just the title of the script, is not your average NFL quarterback. When QB1 watches as his safety blows a coverage, leading to their first week opponent scoring a touchdown and defeating our protagonist’s team, QB1 invites the safety to dinner. AND THEN LATER THAT NIGHT KILLS HIM.
Weak safety problem solved. Not only that, but QB1 starts playing better, and guides us through the process via his aggressive, sarcastic narration. There isn’t a towel boy, waiter, linebacker, or Starbucks customer that is safe from his ongoing opinionated voice-over. But it’s better to be a victim of his narration than his knife, which he next uses to slice up the abusive father of a cancer-stricken young girl who asked for his autograph.
The more he kills, the better QB1 plays. But you can’t kill everyone because then local law enforcement gets involved. And that’s exactly what happens when a young female detective becomes convinced that QB1 is responsible for the disappearance of his safety.
She starts coming around his place, asking all these questions, even demanding to see his basement (where the killing happened). Once QB1 realizes this detective isn’t going away, he uses his celebrity, making a call to the police captain, and insisting that the young detective is obsessed with him, providing made-up evidence, which is convincing enough for the captain to suspend the detective.
This allows QB1 to clear his head and focus on football, and the team storms into the playoffs, where they’re on an inevitable collision with the Super Bowl champs, a team with a coach who dissed QB1 in college, making the game extra important to win.
There are certain movies throughout time that screenwriters have become obsessed with and want to write their versions of. Heathers is one of them. Breakfast Club. And American Psycho. American Psycho may be right there at the top.
Which makes sense. It’s the perfect screenwriting show-off script. You get to write a delicious main character who prattles on about every possible thing he can think of. It’s almost like this cathartic channel by which to spout every annoyance or frustration that has ever popped into your head during the day.
As a result, I encounter these scripts a lot.
What makes them so challenging is that the main character is a killer. And his myriad of thoughts aren’t very nice. This brings the character into one the most highly debatable areas in screenwriting, which is “unlikability.” The character is inherently unlikable. And since he’s leading the audience, that can be unsettling.
How, then, do you make an “American Psycho” work? You have to make the protagonist’s observations a combination of funny and/or honest. “There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine,” Patrick Bateman says.
When I say “honest,” what I mean is that the character says what he’s really thinking, regardless of if it’s offensive. As long as it’s truthful, tons of people will inwardly relate to the observation, drawing them closer to the protagonist.
But here’s the reason unlikability hurts a script. When you get deeper into the story, during times when narratives tend to struggle, when the script engine isn’t as primed and we’re not close enough to the climax to keep us motivated, all we have is our hero to get us through that time. So if we don’t like him, the story can really drag.
And that happened to me here. I was mildly entertained listening to QB1 take us through the story. But once I knew where things were headed, I needed more than mildly amusing. I needed to like and want to root for this person.
To Bill’s credit, he understands this challenge, which is why he makes sure that QB1 kills cancer-stricken girl’s abusive father. And he designs entire scenes around making sure you like our hero. For example, late in the story, he wins 15 million dollars at the craps table and gives it all to the attendant. He tells her to spend the money wisely.
And while, technically, it’s a nice thing to do, I couldn’t help but feel like it was a move by Bill to stave off the exact criticism he knew would be coming. It was as if he said, “You’re going to call my hero unlikable!? Well check this out. I’m going to write a scene where he gives some random poor girl 15 million dollars! Try calling him unlikable now!”
But screenplays don’t work that way. They’re not buttons you can push that automatically change the way the reader feels. Every choice, every development, has to be organically and cleverly woven into the script so that we don’t realize when the writer is trying to make us love their hero in spite of the terrible things he’s doing. Which is hard. But that’s what you sign up for when you write a script like this one. If you’re going to write a 10 out of 10 difficulty script, then get ready for some super advanced level screenwriting challenges.
But look, I applaud Bill for taking a risk here. He’s known for a different kind of movie and this is exactly what you do when you want to break out of that pigeonholed role you’re in. It reminds me a lot of what Michael R. Perry did a decade ago with his script, The Voices. He was frustrated with the types of jobs he was getting and he wrote this weird serial killer script and it became a phenomenon around town and totally changed his career trajectory. All of a sudden, he was getting offered much more interesting projects. I hope the same thing happens for Bill, regardless of me not loving QB1.
Screenplay link: QB1
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Too many writers fall into the trap of creating what I call the “mildly annoying detective”—a bumbling investigator who asks a few questions, follows obvious leads, and poses no real threat to the protagonist. This character serves only as a plot device, checking the box for “law enforcement presence” without generating any genuine tension. The result? Readers remain emotionally detached, confident that the hero will easily outmaneuver this ineffective pursuer. Instead, you want to make your detective relentless. They should operate on a level that makes both protagonist and reader genuinely nervous. They should ask the exact questions that probe the weakest points in carefully constructed alibis, and pursue leads with a methodical precision that feels relentless rather than casual. — The detective in this story was very aggressive for the first 60% of the script. But then Bill let our hero off the hook. The captain suspends the detective, stripping her of her power. She wasn’t nearly as much of a threat anymore. During the end of the script, you want to do the opposite. You want the pressure to ramp up even more! So there was a missed opportunity there.
