I tell you how The Beekeeper script sold for a million bucks and share with you some screenwriting lessons from Anatomy of a Fall and Self-Reliance
January is always a funky month in the box office schedule. It used to be a dumping ground for studio movies that tested terribly but, these days, if you have a marketable movie, fun things can happen. Which is why Mean Girls pulled in north of 30 million bucks this weekend.
A lot has been made of the fact that Mean Girls hid that it was a musical in order to get more people to show up. This strategy has always baffled me (they did it with Wonka as well). If you know people don’t want to show up to a musical, why did you make a musical?
Cause neither of these films needed to be musicals. They each would’ve worked as regular movies. I’m guessing in the case of Wonka, it was to get Timothee Chalamet on board. These vain actors are all about proving how versatile they are. So if Chalamet is offered ten common roles and one musical, he’s going to take the musical. Cause that’s the one where he gets to prove the most. So maybe they did it to get him and then began their crusade to convince the rest of the world that they weren’t actually making a musical.
Whatever decisions led to keeping Mean Girls’ dirty little secret, I’m not sure it mattered. Mean Girls is a classic film. It’s still referenced today. So it did well for the same reasons that most franchises do well these days – nostalgia.
The movie I was keeping closer tabs on was The Beekeeper. I reviewed the script last year and loved it. Kurt Wimmer is one of my favorite spec script writers. There are few screenwriters who know how to make readers turn the page better than him.
His process is a strange one, too. He writes 12 screenplays a year – a new one every month. And then he just keeps his ear to the ground on what people are looking for. If an opportunity comes up (his agent calls and says Gerard Butler really wants to make a helicopter film), he goes through his giant script database to see if he’s got a helicopter script.
The way this project came together – and I know this cause Kurt told me – is that Kurt had a previous relationship with Jason Statham and Statham had just gone through a major upheaval with his representation. He fired his agents and managers. He then called Kurt and said, “Do you got anything for me?” And Kurt had just finished The Beekeeper. Statham loved the sound of it and he was in.
I think the reason it’s doing solid business and that audiences are really liking it is that there’s nothing else out there like it. It’s kinda weird. It’s kinda silly. Yet it has this hardcore action component. It really is its own thing. Which is something I tell all writers – you have to give us a script that differentiates itself from all the other scripts out there. You can’t expect to write Type 1 concepts and get people excited.
Will Beekeeper become a franchise? If so, it has to pull off what John Wick did. Not a ton of people saw John Wick when it first hit theaters. It took off once it came to digital. That told Lionsgate that there was a big audience for the film, which is why they gambled on a bigger budget sequel. When that did well, each successive film budget got higher.
Cause, right now, The Beekeeper can’t compete on an action level with John Wick 4 or Fast and Furious. It doesn’t have the budget. To get that budget, it needs to perform like gangbusters on streaming. That’s probably the template for anyone wanting to build a franchise from scratch these days. It’s not like The Matrix anymore, where you become a franchise the first movie out. You have to build that audience.
I watched a couple of movies this past week, each of which provided screenplay lessons. The first was Anatomy of a Fall, which is a big awards contender. It’s a French movie that follows this married writer who lives with her husband and blind 12 year old son out in the middle of nowhere.
One day the husband’s dead body ends up in front of the house and it’s unclear whether he accidentally fell from the third floor, purposely jumped to commit suicide, or if his wife, our protagonist, attacked and pushed him off. The majority of the movie takes place in a courtroom where the prosecution tries to prove that she murdered her husband.
First of all, the movie’s fun to watch if only to see how the French court system works. It’s so bizarre and different from American court. It’s a lot more theatrical. You can’t believe that that’s how they really try people for murder.
But, beyond that, the movie is a failure (spoilers follow) due to the fact that they never tell you if she murdered him or not. If you’re going to build your entire premise around the question of did a woman kill or not kill her husband, then NOT GIVING US THAT ANSWER is cowardly.
You’re a coward because you were afraid to make a creative choice. I say this not just because of this movie. But because I see it all the time in screenwriting. A writer builds their entire story around a question, then doesn’t give the reader the answer. In their minds, they are being artistically courageous. Only hacky mainstream Hollywood movies answer questions, they reason. “Real” movies, movies with “artistic merit,” are vague and ambiguous. They allow the audience to come to their own conclusions.
Bulls#$%.
You can tell yourself that. But what you really are is spineless. You see, if you fashion yourself an “artist,” you can’t give your script a Hollywood ending. So you can’t give us the mainstream answer, which is that she didn’t murder her husband.
However, since there are only two options here – she did or didn’t do it – you know that the jaded readers will find the other avenue just as cliche. In other words, if you say that she did it, the “cool kids” in the audience will roll their eyes and say, “Of course she did. We saw that coming from a mile away.”
So your solution is to not give us any answer. “You figure it out,” you say.
Let me make something clear to you. If you are offloading the work that YOU SHOULD BE DOING and making the reader do it instead, you’re not being an artist. You’re just afraid to make a choice.
Is making a choice going to make some people unhappy? Of course. But it’s your job as a writer to write with conviction. Stand behind your choices. Write towards something you want to say. Don’t make the audience do the work for you. That’s lame. Because I know this writer knows if she killed her husband. They were just afraid to share that truth. That’s unacceptable.
Another movie I watched this weekend was a film on Hulu called Self-Reliance. Jake Johnson writes and stars in the movie. I’m a Johnson fan because he’s from Chicago (where I’m from) and there’s not one person I know who better looks and acts like a Chicagoan than Jake Johnson. Sometimes, when he speaks, I feel like I’m listening to myself.
The movie follows a guy with a boring job whose 15-year girlfriend broke up with him so he moves back in with his mother. Then, one day, he’s approached by some people who tell him he’s been chosen for a game. The game is a dark web game where he’ll be remotely recorded and people will try and kill him. If he can survive for 30 days without getting killed, he wins a million dollars.
He decides to join the game because of a small loophole in the rules which states that he can’t be killed as long as he’s with somebody. So he figures, I’ll just keep someone next to me the whole 30 days. As it turns out, being physically within someone’s presence 24 hours a day isn’t as easy as it seems.
A few people e-mailed me after my Concept Post on Thursday and asked, “Is it possible to write a low-budget Type 2 concept?” And the answer is, “Yes.” To quote the late great Montell Jordan: “This is how you do it.” This story is built around a game where you’re trying to avoid assassins for a dark web audience. It doesn’t get any more high concept than that.
Unfortunately, this script is an example of what happens when a newbie writer makes a movie. I know that Johnson has writing credits on a few other films but, from what I understand, those were improvised acting movies where the director gave him a writing credit cause he was making up his dialogue as he went along. Here, he’s actually writing a script.
Where newbies often go astray is that their tone bounces around too much. Here, we have this dark heavy game. But then later, when he teams up with another female player, it turns into a lighthearted romantic comedy. You can’t do that in screenwriting. You gotta pick a lane.
Actually, let me rephrase that. Anything’s possible. As I pointed out earlier, The Beekeeper is equal parts intense and silly. But The Beekeeper was written by a 30 year professional screenwriter who’s literally written 100+ screenplays. You have to go through the trenches to know how to balance tone. If you’re new to this, trying to fit wildly different tones into the same script is the equivalent of riding a roller coaster standing up. Loopdie-loop? More like loopdie-dead.
In this case, had Jake committed to that darker tone, it would’ve taken a 6 out of 10 movie, which is how IMDB currently rates it, to an 8 out of 10. Cause I was into the movie when it was dark and unpredictable. The second it became a rom-com, my interest nose-dived. So it’s not just about matching tone. It’s about sticking to the story you promised the reader you would tell.
Then again, this is that weird movie month where up is down and north is south. So it might be worth checking out if you liked the sound of the premise. I STILL haven’t watched Holdovers. That’s going to be my next one. Oh, and Sisu. A few people have told me that one was good.
Two quick reminders before I go.
CHOOSE THE CONCEPT FOR THE SCRIPT YOU’RE GOING TO WRITE BEFORE THURSDAY. We’re going to start the outlining process.
Also, this is another reminder that January Logline Showdown is January 25th. So get those loglines to me before then!
