Genre: Comedy
Premise: When Tom Hanks, the nicest guy in Hollywood (and arguably the world), finds his life stolen by a Tom Hanks impersonator, the only way to get it back is to do the one thing he’s never been able to: stop being nice.
About: This script finished with a respectable 12 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writers: Kirill Baru & Eric Zimmerman
Details: 111 pages

One of the co-writers of today’s script is a Scriptshadow fan which always makes my job harder. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like giving negative reviews. I want to prop up everything I read because I know how hard writing is.

One of the main reasons screenwriters give up on their dream is the emotional component. You spend a lot of emotional capital when you write a screenplay. You’re putting a big piece of yourself into a story that takes 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, or longer to tell. It’s hard to spend that amount of energy on something and not be destroyed when people don’t like it.

So I root for every script I read. The only time I truly dump on a screenplay is when I feel that the writer didn’t try. The second I sense creative laziness, I’ll turn on a script faster than it takes Rachel Zeigler to bash the latest movie she’s in.

In “The Great Pretender’s” opening scene, we watch Tom Hanks go to Starbucks, spend half an hour taking pictures with everyone, then, after getting his coffee, head back to his car where he hands the drink to… his assistant. This is Tom Hanks. He’s so nice, HE GETS HIS ASSISTANT coffee.

But one day Tom runs into the wrong person. Tom Hanks! Or, at least, a Tom Hanks impersonator named Gene. Gene asks Tom to come back to his hotel to do a quick viral video and because Tom can’t say no to anyone, he obliges. But not long after he walks inside Gene’s room (and sees the giant piano from “Big”) he wakes up with the top of his head shaved and a snake tattoo on his back. What the heck just happened?

It turns out that Gene is now living in Tom Hanks’ house with his wife. And when the real Tom Hanks tries to come back home, he’s labeled as a crazy stalker. They even prove he’s “Gene” because the perenially incarcerated Gene’s records show he has a snake tattoo on his back.

Tom is forced to go to Gene’s apartment where he meets Gene’s pregnant girlfriend, Connie. After some persuasion, she finally believes he’s the real Tom Hanks and reluctantly decides to help him. Their initial plan is to get Connie into Tom’s house where she will relay to his wife Rita things that only the real Tom Hanks would know. But Rita doesn’t buy it and they’re back to square one.

Things get more complicated when Gene heads to Fiji to film Cast Away 2. Tom and Connie must find a way to the island to finally expose the evil impersonator. But shenanigans keep getting in the way and it looks like Tom Hanks may have to accept being Gene forever.

A decade ago, I was reading an article that covered longtime CBS and Paramount head Sumner Redstone, who competitively challenged an exec to pitch him an idea he hadn’t heard before. “I’ve literally been pitched every movie idea ever. There’s nothing you can pitch me that I haven’t heard.” And he was right. Neither the exec nor anyone else could surprise him with a fresh movie idea.

I feel like I’ve gotten to that place myself. Nobody can pitch me an idea I haven’t heard before. Case in point, I’ve read somewhere around a dozen of today’s idea, where some famous person or political figure is swapped out for an imposter who has to take their place and pretend to be them.

For a while, I thought similar ideas were a problem. But it turns out the opposite is true. It’s the execution that matters. So even though I’ve read versions of this story before, the job of the writer is still the same – execute the best version of this story possible. Did The Great Pretender achieve that?

Well, I believe Baru and Zimmerman gave their best effort.

However, they made a slight miscalculation in that execution and it sent them down the wrong path. Something I continue telling you guys is to mine what’s unique about your script. The less you’re mining the unique components of your script, the more generic your script will be.

This script is built on one major factor: Tom Hanks being too nice.

So, that’s what you want to build your characters and plot around. In order to succeed in this story, Tom Hanks must learn to be mean. The opposite is true for his doppelganger, Gene.  Gene is too mean. So, in order to succeed, he must learn to be nice. If your story beats exploit these two things, you’re going to get lots of laughs.

But the script doesn’t do that. Instead, Tom Hanks has to learn to be… “tough” I guess? For example, Tom and Connie need money to execute their plan. So they go to a drug dealer Connie knows for help. This is one of the major set pieces in the script and it’s not about being nice at all. It’s more that Tom Hanks must act ‘rough around the edges’ so that the dealer believes he’s Gene.  That’s not the same as needing to be mean.

I wanted way more instances of Tom Hanks having to be mean. That’s where your humor’s going to come from: The nicest man in the world having to be an a-hole.

Ditto with Gene. Gene is an asshole. So, to convince others that he’s Tom Hanks, his comedic journey as a character should be that he has to be nice to everyone despite it being so hard for him.

For example, maybe one of the plot lines is that China is starting a new movie studio in Hollywood and they’ve hired Tom Hanks to be the frontman. They know they have a sketchy public image in the U.S., which is why they hire Tom. Cause he’s the nicest guy in the world. The American public trusts him.

So there’s a huge final meeting involved where all the big Chinese players are coming to the U.S. to finalize the deal with Tom. And it’s Gene who has to put on his nice guy act to get the deal done. But, during the sequence, some people are pissing him off. The Chinese CEO is being a dick to him. He’s getting angrier and angrier yet has to continue to be nice. There are many humorous opportunities there.

Instead, we get a Cast Away 2 production storyline. It’s not bad. Gene has to act out a few scenes as Tom Hanks in this silly sequel idea. But it has nothing to do with the theme of the movie! Which is the contrast between being nice and being mean.

That’s the thing about writing comedies.  Oftentimes, you’ll look at the end result and say it’s either “funny” or “not funny.” Which is all that matters when it comes to comedy. However, there are choices you make long before you get to your scenes that will have a big impact on whether they’re funny or not.

Leaning into the unique setup of your concept (Tom Hanks, the nicest guy in the world, is forced to be mean) is one of those choices that, if you don’t do it, you’re not getting the most out of your idea.

One of the most successful comedies ever is Liar Liar, about a lawyer who, in order to win his cases, always lies. He is then forced, for one day, to only tell the truth. Imagine if you wrote that movie and had the major scenes deal with Jim Carrey trying to be more respectful to people.

If you do that, you are not taking advantage of what’s unique about your concept. What’s unique about your concept is that a pathological liar is forced to tell the truth. So, every major comedic scene should put your protagonist in a position where telling the truth makes his situation worse. That’s where the comedy is going to come from.

I don’t want to paint an entirely bad picture here. There were definitely some funny lines. Two of my favorites subscribe to the above-mentioned formula. At one point, Gene gets frustrated and blurts out, “I’m Tom FUCKING Hanks. A NATIONAL GODDAMN TREASURE. You can’t find a remote island on this planet where people don’t know who I am. Remember Covid? Nobody gave a shit about that until I got it.”

And one of the funniest running gags in the film is that Connie isn’t a fan of Tom Hanks’ movies and takes every opportunity to tell him so. TOM: “Connie, have you ever thought about forgiving your Mom?” CONNIE: “Hey, we’re not talking about my Mom. We’re talking about movies and why yours all suck.” Again, this joke stems from not being afraid to be mean. Not being afraid to say what you really think.

We do finally get a legitimate moment like that from Tom, where he’s torturing Gene at the end. But it’s something that should’ve been explored throughout. Not just at the end.

“The Great Pretender” has some shades of “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” in it.  So, if you liked that movie, you might like this. But, personally, I thought we could’ve gotten a lot more laughs out of the premise, specifically by forcing Tom Hanks to be meaner.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Even if I thought this could’ve been executed better, I give props to Baru and Zimmerman for their 4-dimensional thinking. This isn’t just a fun concept. It’s a clever pitch to someone who has repeatedly said in interviews that he’s wanted to play bad guys but that studios won’t let him. This is an inventive way to allow Tom Hanks to play that bad guy (Hanks would play both parts).

A lot of people are going to look at Red One’s box office this weekend and categorize it as a failure.

The film cost 250 million dollars and made only 34 million this weekend.

But whether this movie is a failure or not depends on your perspective. As a movie that needs to make money, yes, it is a failure.

But as a screenplay, this script is beyond a success. That’s because IT GOT MADE. This is something a lot of screenwriters either don’t know or forget. Sure, we all want the glory of that box office hit. But when only 1 of every 10 purchased screenplays/concepts makes it to the big screen, you’ve won the lottery JUST BY GETTING MADE.

So the question to screenwriters shouldn’t be, why did this fail? It should be, why did this succeed? It succeeded because it was a big concept that came at the genre in a fresh way, utilizing an “IP Adjacent” strategy.

Let’s break that down.

The big concept is Santa’s been kidnapped and they hire a real life secret service agent tracker to rescue him. The fresh angle is that they position it like a superhero movie, complete with superheroes Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. And since they don’t have actual IP (Marvel, Star Wars, etc.) they lean into Christmas IP (characters like Santa Claus and Krampus).

I don’t want to undersell the value of the CIA tracker angle. I read a lot of “Santa Claus gets kidnapped” scripts. More than you could ever imagine. But no one’s ever come to me with that tracker angle. It’s almost always some little kid and one of the reindeer who have to rescue Santa. By turning the protagonists into Jason Bourne and Batman, it gave the overused concept a fresh feel.

If I were a producer, I would’ve bought this pitch 10 out of 10 times in the room. It’s not Marvel but what is? Marvel isn’t even Marvel anymore so you need to take chances on projects. This project had way more good going for it than bad so I don’t fault the movie at all.

The only change I might’ve made was to go with more of a comedic actor in the Chris Evans role. Chris Evans and The Rock often play the same role in movies. They’re both big tough guys. You probably needed more contrast there. But, with that said, the two looked to have pretty good chemistry.

Speaking of becoming a screenwriting success, it’s important to remember that, for most writers, success is not a linear journey. It may appear that way to anyone who came into the business between the years of 1998-2008. You get that big sale, you get the follow-up story in the trades, and your career is launched “overnight.”

But, more often than not, your ascension is a series of smaller less visible steps. Look no further than Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. The two were unknown screenwriters when they wrote A Quiet Place. Even after selling it, nobody talked about the film until it became an unexpected hit. Only then did their profiles rise, allowing them to direct their first film in the sci-fi thriller, “65.”

That movie didn’t have enough money to live up to its high concept premise but it established the two as legitimate writer-directors and now they just came out with Heretic, which has a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score and has banked a respectable 20 million dollars in 10 days.

Once again, this all started because they wrote a really good high-concept script in A Quiet Place. What’s the theme today? High concept. Red One is a huge concept. A Quiet Place was a high concept. It’s not that you have to write high concept every time out. But, as you can see, if you want to be the 1 out of 10 purchased projects that actually gets made, high-concept material is often the factor that gets you past the finish line.

The other theme of the day is IP-adjacent subject matter. You don’t have the rights to gigantic IP. So you have to look in the public domain and get creative. Red One may not technically be IP. But it feels like IP. Because who doesn’t know Santa Claus?

Next weekend, we get more IP-adjacent subject matter in Gladiator 2, which is projected to dominate the box office. A big reason for that domination is the Roman Empire. Who hasn’t heard of the Roman Empire? So by setting a movie there, you get the advantages of IP without actually having to foot the bill for IP. These are the things that smart screenwriters think about. Any one of you could write a script about Caesar or Tiberius or Caligula or Constantine tomorrow and wouldn’t have to pay a dime for the rights.

You can still write smaller scripts but, if you do, you have to be a lot more strategic about it. If you want Hollywood people to buy your script, you probably need to write in the horror, thriller, or sci-fi genre, and keep the budget under 5 million (which means a somewhat contained story). If you want to write character-driven material, you have to have a great main character (Nightcrawler, Promising Young Woman, The Whale, Wolf of Wall Street).

But let me be very clear about something: The lower the concept, the more it becomes a writer-director project. I loved Anora. It will probably be my favorite movie of the year. But if it came to me as a script? To buy? I’m not buying it. It’s so character-driven, non-traditional, and execution-dependent that I wouldn’t know what to do with it once I got it. That kind of script needs a writer-director.

Of course, nobody knows anything. All of this can change tomorrow. Someone could sell something that doesn’t fit any Hollywood formula.  Heck, that just happened.  That big 2 million dollar spec that sold bucked every trend in the business by being a character-driven love story.  So you could just go by the strategy of: Write whatever movie you would want to see (the Jordan Peele method of writing).  But if you’ve been in this racket for a long time, I find it silly not to strategize what script you’re going to write next.  Writing a script always takes longer than you think it’s going to take and one of the biggest mistakes writers make is starting a script without thinking about how easy it will be to sell when it’s finished.  In other words, strategize however you want to strategize.  As long as you strategize. :)

What’d you see this week? Anything good?

There is an ebb and a flow to what I obsess over in the screenwriting space. Sometimes I’m obsessed with high concepts. Sometimes I’m obsessed with a great opening page. Sometimes I’m obsessed with second acts.

But as time has passed, there is one obsession that seems to keep coming back to the forefront again and again. Wanna take a guess what it is? While you rack your brain, let me explain WHY I continue to be obsessed with this particular element. It’s because if you are good at this thing, it is one of (if not the) biggest indicator that you are good at writing screenplays.

Wanna know what it is?

Scene writing.

I know, I know. I talk about this all the time. But that’s the point! It’s so important that I keep coming back to it.

The reason it got triggered this time is that I was doing a script consultation while I was in a pretty lousy mood. In script-reading parlance, I was a “tough crowd.” Since my baseline is “tough crowd,” this made me an extremely tough crowd. Despite that, I was pulled into this screenplay immediately. I can’t give you the opening scene for privacy reasons but it amounted to a woman letting a stranger in need of help into her home and the stranger being suspicious. In other words, we know bad things are coming. And if the reader knows bad things are coming, they have no choice but to keep reading.

But if that’s all the scene is, it won’t be enough. You have to build, you have to create conflict, you have to deliver a satisfying resolution, maybe do something unexpected along the way. That’s writing. You’re TELLING A STORY in that scene. Which seems like such an obvious point to make but it should shock you when I tell you I read entire screenplays (a lot of them!) that don’t have a single entertaining scene within them. They’re all scene fragments or exposition or setup for later scenes or a bunch of crap the writer stuffs into the scene to get it out of the way.

Let me make this clear: If you are incapable of consistently writing compelling scenes, you will never advance anywhere as a screenwriter.

In other words, stop focusing on the bigger picture of finishing your scripts if you haven’t even been able to write good scenes yet. How do you know you’ve written a good scene? The reader brings it up! “Oh man. The house invasion where they try and tie Anora up (in the movie, “Anora”). That was a crazy scene!”

Now… does the ability to write a good scene mean the writer will write a good script? Of course not. This is because someone can get lucky. Which I see happen all the time. See, there are these things called “dramatic situations.” These are naturally compelling situations that effortlessly keep a reader’s interest. In the example I used above, a potentially dangerous man alone with a woman in her home… that’s a dramatic situation. Conversely, if those same two people, under the same pretense (he’s a dangerous person), started talking in the middle of Times Square? The scene would lose much of its dramatic punch.

What I’ve learned is that writers can stumble into dramatic situations accidentally. There was never a plan to find the situation. They just got lucky and picked one that was naturally dramatic. Therefore, when you have that writer extrapolate that scene into an entire script, they will rarely, if ever, include a dramatic situation again. And even if they do, it *too* will be an accident.

Once you become a writer who has accumulated enough experience that you have a breadth of dramatic situations to choose from, you will increase the number of dramatically compelling scenes you write, which, in turn, vastly improves the chances that the totality of your script will be good.

Now, does it GUARANTEE it will be good? No. Because writing a series of individually compelling scenes does not equate to telling a story. The challenge with writing full scripts is connecting those scenes together in a story that, like the scenes themselves, builds, then conflicts, then resolves.

The reason that’s so challenging is that a script is long. And there’s a pacing element to all of this. A storyteller needs to know when they’ve been on a road for too long. They must know when to deviate onto a new road – maybe smaller, maybe bigger – that has new things to see, new things to throw at the driver. Learning how to bob and weave and twist and turn to always stay on the road that best maximizes your story takes a lot of trial and error.

Once you become good at scene-writing, you want to become good at SEQUENCE WRITING. That may sound fancy but it isn’t. It’s just the next measurement up from scene-writing. If scene-writing is a teaspoon, sequence writing is a tablespoon (and a script is the entire bowl).

It just means that several scenes will be strung together to create their own story. Let’s say a married couple trying to repair their marriage is having dinner at a restaurant. The act of driving to the restaurant, getting their table, ordering their food, and then eating – that’s technically four scenes. But it’s one sequence that all relates to the same thing (going out for dinner).

Do you need to write four individual dramatically compelling scenes there IN ADDITION TO a dramatically compelling sequence? No, you do not. I would encourage you to try. But I get that sometimes, due to the nature of the script, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe this is a section of the script that needs to move quickly. In that case, staying too long in a couple of these scenes is going to hurt the pacing.

However, let me make something very clear. If you are not including a dramatic situation in each individual scene, you BETTER be creating a dramatic situation with the sequence those scenes reside in. Cause if you’re doing neither, I GUARANTEE you the reader will not make it past that sequence. They WILL stop reading.

The simplest way to create dramatic situations is to introduce a problem to your character, either one that requires a physical solution or a conversational one, try to have them solve it, but put things in the way that make solving the problem uncertain. That’s a key word: UNCERTAIN. If we are uncertain that they will be able to solve the problem, we need to keep reading. But if we’re REASONABLY CERTAIN they’ll figure it out, that scene or sequence loses any trace of drama and we don’t need to keep reading to know what happens.

The best scene in the movie Civil War operates under this formula. A rogue soldier is casually murdering people. He has two of our protagonists with him. The rest of our protagonists have the problem: Their co-workers are about to be assassinated by this dude. They need to convince him not to. Their attempts to persuade him and the uncertainty of his response are what make the scene a dramatic tour de force.

This is NOT the only formula for creating dramatic situations. Just the most used one. In fact, I would love it if you guys shared some of your favorite go-to dramatic situations you pull from when writing your scenes. Together, maybe we can come up with a big enough list that nobody from this site will ever write a boring scene again. :)

If you mention this article, I will give you $100 off a screenplay consultation and $5 off a logline consultation.  E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested!

Unfortunately, I’m traveling this week, which is going to make it hard to post. But I didn’t want to leave you high and dry so I thought I’d quickly share my thoughts on Alfonso Cuarón’s high-production foray into TV, Disclaimer.

Cuarón likes to bounce back (Roma) and forth (Gravity) between low and high budget faire. He is the filmmaker’s filmmaker, the kind of guy you would imagine drags a Panovision camera over to the local coffee shop JUST IN CASE he sees a magical shot he could use in his next movie.

So it was shocking that Cuarón finally made the plunge into television. These film purists haaaaate TV. They think it’s evil. They think it latches onto your inner intestines and slowly nibbles away until there’s nothing left of you but a shell. Cuarón making a TV show is only one director removed from Christopher Nolan doing TV. Considering Nolan would rather fry his eyes inside an industrial sized Mumbai frier before doing TV, that’s a big deal.

Disclaimer is about a very successful journalist, Catherine, who, one day, receives a bunch of photos of her younger self in very sexual positions. Over the course of the story, we learn that, 20 years ago, while she was on holiday with her husband and son, she engaged in a secret intense sexual fling with a young man on the trip.

The next day, due to her negligence, her son ended up on an inflatable boat way out in the water (her husband had to return home early so he wasn’t there). Her lover swam out to save the boy but drowned in the process. Catherine was happy because it meant she could completely bury what happened. There’d be no trace of any relationship.

However, the boy’s parents not only found out what happened, the mother wrote a book about it which the father later published (after the wife’s death). The book focuses on just how awful this woman is. With the book and pictures out there, our dirty debutante must try and clear up the mess before her reputation is ruined forever.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show that wanted to be seen as genius more than this one. Even if we’re only going off the cinematography, this is true. 99.9% of the shots are at magic hour. That may seem trivial but if you’re only shooting at magic hour, that means you are spending a lot of time during the day NOT SHOOTING. Which is expensive. That alone tells you how great Cuarón wanted this to be.

The problem is the same problem with all these “tweeners.” Which is that we’re dealing with a half-movie half-show. It never becomes one or the other. In refusing to do so, we’re never sure what to make of what we’re watching. It really does feel like an odd beast.

But I think the real problem is the characters. There wasn’t one character that worked. Catherine, the lead, was too passive and weak. Stephen, the father of the kid who was killed, was too weird. The guy wore his dead wife’s too-small pink sweater everywhere, like some deranged, but more accessible, version of Buffalo Bill. Catherine’s husband was so spineless you were begging for his scenes to end the second he showed up on screen. Their son was so melodramatic (drug addict, always mad) he didn’t even need to be in the show since we ALWAYS KNEW EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS GOING TO DO.

The only part of the series that kind of worked were the flashbacks to Young Catherine and her lover. Both those actors were strong. They had great chemistry. There was actual tension when they were onscreen. This is the rare instance when I admit that the flashbacks in a story actually helped it. But that’s at least partly due to the fact that everything in the present was so overwrought, making you beg to be anywhere but there.

I can’t believe I made it through the whole series. (spoilers) To be honest, the only reason I kept going was because I heard there was a whopper of a twist. And, to the show’s credit, the twist is pretty shocking. Even more shocking is that we wonder if the final development was the truth… or a lie. But could it make up for 7 episodes so determined to win awards that I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuarón’s crew submitted the series not just for this year’s Emmy’s, but for every Emmy’s through 2034? It couldn’t.

It’s not a bad show. It’s just not as good as it wants to be.  And, sometimes, that’s worse than being a bad show.

What did you think?

We might be looking at 2024’s Best Picture winner

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: An exotic dancer marries the son of one of Russia’s richest men, creating chaos within the family, which is determined to annul the marriage.
About: Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or winning film, Anora, is already his biggest box office hit, taking in 7.5 million dollars so far. To people who only track the box office of movies with 200 million dollar advertising campaigns, that may not seem like much. But Baker’s movies have no money for advertising and are dependent on their quality alone (unlike the Marvel universe) and therefore, 7.5 million dollars WITH MOMENTUM to make a lot more is amazing.
Writer: Sean Baker
Details: 2 hours and 20 minutes

Sean Baker may be my favorite director at the moment.

With his only competition being the Safdies and the Daniels, Baker is number one in the books at bringing ENERGY to indie movies.

Every other indie movie is slow and lethargic. You watch a Sean Baker movie and you feel like you’ve just watched an Avengers movie. They have the same kind of energy. Dare I say, Baker’s Anora has MORE energy than any of the last five Marvel films.

That may be more of a commentary on Marvel than Baker but regardless this guy is a master at making every moment in his movie watchable. I can’t overstate that. This movie was 2 hours and 20 minutes long and there was never a moment in the film where my concentration strayed.

That NEVER happens to me these days. I’m always straying. Because writers (and directors) don’t know how to keep my interest. The better ones can create great scenes every once in a while and keep me engaged in the meantime. But to make EVERY moment compelling?? I don’t experience that anymore except for Baker and maybe the Safdies.

Oh, and by the way!? Baker may be the best casting director in the world. Let me give you a concrete example. The Pitt-Clooney movie Wolfs on Apple contained a very similar character to the character of Ivan in this movie (he’s known as “Kid” in Wolfs and he’s supposed to be this young wild character). The actor who played Kid in that film was below-average to weak. Even annoying at times. He wasn’t exciting nor was he really watchable in any way, which hurt the film because he had a giant part.

But the actor who played Ivan in Anora? I don’t think I’ve seen a young actor this charismatic in two decades. And Baker found him. And don’t even get me started on the actress who played Anora, Mikey Madison. She’s amazing. The guy seems to have an incredible instinct for this stuff.

I wanted to get the directing praise out of the way first because I want to use the rest of the review to talk about the unique screenplay here.

Note: This script’s narrative moves in an unpredictable way so the very nature of reading this synopsis is a spoiler. I suggest you see the movie first, if possible.

Anora is a 23 year old exotic dancer who works in a Jersey strip club. One day, a 21 year old boisterous Russian kid comes in to get a lap dance, chooses Anora, and afterwards, he gets her number. The next day he pays her to come over to his sick crib and have sex.

At first, Anora is all about the money. But it’s clear she’s starting to like Ivan. Ivan proposes hiring Anora for the week and she accepts. They have sex, party, play video games. Then they go on an impromptu Vegas trip and, while there, mostly because he’s wasted and lives in the moment, Ivan proposes to Anora. She says yes and they get married that night!

They go back to Jersey and that’s when Ivan’s handler, Toros, shows up with two thugs, Garnick and Igor. We learn that Ivan’s Russian parents are extremely rich and that there is no f*cking way they’re letting their son marry an American stripper. But the parents are back in Russia. So Toros must get this marriage annulled immediately or he’s in a heap of trouble.

There’s only one problem: Ivan runs away!

He just leaves the house! He even leaves his wife there! Toros has no choice but to call the parents and tell them what happened. Furious, they immediately get on a plane to Jersey. Anora, who’s blindly convinced that things are still going to work out, is now forced to team up with Toros and the thugs to go find her husband before the damn parents arrive.

(Ending spoilers follow) It’s an all-night excursion as Ivan gets plastered and jumps from nightclub to nightclub, party to party, with our pursuers always a step behind. When they finally catch up to Ivan, Anora is expecting him to make things right. But a sobered-up Ivan shrugs his shoulders in defeat and says, sure, let’s get it annulled.

Betrayed, Anora spirals into a mental tailspin. The only person by her side is Igor, the kind-hearted, but dim-witted, thug who, in his own quiet way, has been there through it all. After the annulment is finalized, Igor is the one tasked with bringing her back to her sad Jersey life. But in those final moments together, as she reflects on everything that’s happened, Anora begins to wonder if she’s missed something—or someone—who’s been right in front of her all along.

There are so SO many good things about this script I don’t know where to start. Baker is a low-key great writer.

Let’s start somewhere random – the villain. Because we haven’t talked about villains in a while and this is a great example of how to write a villain with logic. Most writers start off knowing their villains are bad and then spend the rest of the script figuring out WHY they’re bad. Whereas, with Toros, Baker started with WHY Toros was “bad” and then let the villainy aspects of the character emerge from there.

This is how you create characters with truth. You don’t force aspects onto them. You figure out their motivation and let them act in accordance with that motivation. Toros is the villain to Anora and Ivan here. They like each other. They’re married. He wants to destroy that. But Toros has a very good reason for wanting to destroy that. He’s been hired specifically by Ivan’s parents to watch him and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid while in America. So if Ivan does anything remotely stupid, it is Toros who is going to be in trouble. And not regular trouble. Angry Russian oligarch trouble, which is the kind of trouble that could end with you six feet under. So OF COURSE Toros is doing this stuff.

There’s this blink-and-you-miss-it moment late in the screenplay when they go to the Jersey courthouse to get the marriage annulled and learn that they can’t get it annulled here. It must be in Vegas. Toros is stumbling back to the car outside saying, to no one in particular, “I didn’t know this! Everyone can see that right? I was not told that they got married in Vegas. This is not my fault!”

You can see the fear in Toros’s eyes in that moment and understand why he is so adamant about achieving his goal.

Which brings me to another aspect of the screenplay that I loved, which is that every character here has a story. There is no character who is overlooked. For example, any other writer writing these two thugs would’ve seen them as afterthoughts. Baker gives Igor this under-the-radar crush storyline on Anora. And Garnick has this hilarious storyline where he deals with the deteriorating effects of a head injury dished out by Anora early on.

But the coolest thing about this screenplay is that it reboots twice. Rebooting is the act of telling one story but then, at some point, abandoning that story and telling another one. It’s a high-risk high-reward tool and should not be used by the faint-hearted. Because it rarely works.

Usually, people come to a movie to see THAT MOVIE. So, when you, all of a sudden, tell them they’re now going to watch another movie, they feel hoodwinked.

Let me try and explain this. You’ve all seen Pretty Woman, right? Pretty Woman is about a businessman who hires a prostitute to be his girlfriend for the week he’s in town. When we went to see that movie, THAT’S THE MOVIE WE SAW. We didn’t see a movie about a businessman who hired a prostitute to be his girlfriend for the week and then, midway through the movie, he flew back to his hometown and dealt with family issues there. However, if he had, that would’ve been a script reboot.

In Anora, the script starts out as a Pretty Woman update. Ivan hires Anora to be his girlfriend for the week. But he takes it a step further and marries her. The bad guys come in and say you need to get an annulment. We’re thinking this is a 2024 version of Romeo and Juliet. That the movie is going to be about them resisting their evil older overlords and that love will conquer all.

But the script reboots when Ivan runs away. That doesn’t fit any of the criteria of the story we have been promised. They must now go find Ivan. And that becomes the entire middle of the movie. It is a reboot because it is a completely different movie. It’s basically a chase movie now. It certainly isn’t a movie about Ivan and Anora falling in love because Ivan’s barely in the story anymore.

That’s a giant risky move as a screenwriter and it worked.

But what shocked me is that Baker had the balls to reboot the script AGAIN. Technically, once they get the annulment, the movie should be over! Think about it. We’ve achieved the goal. What else is there to do?

Well, Baker has been stealthily setting up this low-key romance (mainly one-way romance) between Igor and Anora. So he creates this final storyline where Igor takes Anora back home. It’s a good 25 minute story that is completely different from everything that’s come before it. Which is why it’s a reboot.

Typically, when you end a storyline (in this case, getting the marriage annulled), all the air goes out of the balloon. So if you try and start a new storyline, you’re asking the reader to stick with you while you blow all that air into a new balloon. And most readers just don’t have the patience for that. Yet here, it works because Baker did such a good job setting it up that we want to see how this relationship is going to be resolved.

There’s a lot more to this movie than what I’ve covered but this should give you an idea of why I love this movie so much and why I think it will probably win Best Picture.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Don’t be afraid to incorporate big-budget screenplay tactics into small-budget indie-type scripts. I loved that Baker created this 15 hour ticking time bomb in the second act. They needed to find Ivan and get the marriage annulled by the time his parents’ plane landed. That urgency helped move that second act along like a bullet train.