Today’s script is what would happen if Christopher Nolan wrote a script like Time Crimes. Or Primer.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A man wakes up trapped in a mysterious hotel room. All alone in a mind-bending prison, his only chance for escape is through teamwork… with himself.
About: Michael Shanks and his script finished Top 20 on the most recent Black List. The script seems to be the result of him once getting stuck in a hotel room for 19 hours straight during a layover. Classic screenwriting lesson: Use real life to inspire your ideas!
Writer: Michael Shanks
Details: 102 pages
In many ways, the contained mystery thriller set in a single room is the holy grail of ideas. The mystery along with the contained location provides you with the hook you need to get reads. And the single room means you can shoot it for an insanely low amount of money. I mean what does a hotel room cost these days? 50 bucks a night? Talk about a cheap set.
For that very reason, I read a lot of these scripts, some from really good writers. And they typically suffer the same fate. There’s only so much you can do in one room. Only so much mystery you can unspool, people your character can call on the phone, only so much sinister laughing you can hear from just outside the door. Only so much talking to yourself.
It’s a reminder that one must start strong and never let go. The second you forget that the reader is capable of becoming bored within a matter of seconds, is the second you get lazy and let your guard down. That’s when scripts fall apart. Always respect the reader. Always!
Middle-aged Ben wakes up in a hotel room with a bag over his head and his hands tied behind his back. This means he has to bite through the bag to breathe. Once he does that, he unties himself and tries to figure out what’s happened. He quickly transitions into “get the hell out of here” mode but neither the door or window will oblige. This place is a prison.
Ben passes out and wakes up the next day. After more exploring, he bangs a hole in the side of his hotel room where he sees an adjacent hotel room. This one with ANOTHER BEN INSIDE. And this Ben is going through the exact same motions he was going through yesterday. Hmmm…. When Ben breaks through the wall and tries to team up with Ben-1, he realizes Ben-1 can’t see him. Double hmmm…
The next day, Ben breaks through the wall again to see that Ben-1 has broken through the wall of his own room where he’s now realizing what Ben already realized. That there’s yet another Ben. His Ben-1. But our Ben-2. Getting confused? Oh, we’re just getting started.
Ben eventually realizes that, by himself, there is nothing he can accomplish. But with the help of the other Bens, there are potential opportunities for escape, even though he can’t communicate with the other Bens. For example, on day 1, Ben tried to bash the room door open but wasn’t strong enough. Therefore, on day 2, when Ben-1 is trying to bash the door just like he did yesterday, Ben can help him, using double-the-Ben.
This tactic eventually gets him outside into the hallway, where Ben heads to the hotel lobby. Figuring he’s free, he heads out the front door only to walk into the exact same lobby. And when he tries this again, he walks into a third hotel lobby. It’s starting to look like Ben – like ALL the Bens – are trapped here for good.
That is until Ben notices a trap door all the way up the side of the wall in the lobby. There’s no way to get up there, though. Unless! Unless he uses the help of the other Bens. So Ben stands by the wall and positions himself as if he’s holding someone else up for 30 minutes. The next day, he comes back, where Ben-1 is now positioned like he was a day ago, which means Ben can climb on top of him and create the second rung of a human ladder. The next day he has three Ben-rungs. Then four. Ben figures it will take 15 Bens to get him into that doorway and out of his nightmare forever. That’s assuming, of course, that nothing else unexpected happens in this weirdo hotel fantasyland…
Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel is one of the trippiest scripts I’ve ever read. About midway through, I had to stop, regroup, get my brain centered again, before going back into the story. The rules here are so extensive that brain naps are a requirement.
But I learned something today. Which is that the reader will go with an extensive rule-set if your world is cool. Usually I roll my eyes at too many rules and chastise the writer for being too complicated. But, in the case of Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel, the rules were like this grandiose puzzle that was fun to solve.
There are a lot of genius moments here, such as the human ladder sequence. I always say that your set pieces need to be direct expressions of your unique concept. Or else they’re scenes that can be in any movie.
I can’t think of a set piece in recent memory that’s more a representation of its concept than the Ben human ladder. It’s a glorious extension of this weird idea. Even the details of the idea are fun. We remember that the original Ben stood in that first position for 30 minutes, in order to ensure that all 15 future Bens would have time to stand on top of him. As we’re getting to days 13, 14, and 15, though, we’re realizing that that might not be enough time. So it adds an urgency element to the set piece in a unique way.
I also liked the problems that Shanks came up with. You need to add problems in your screenplay because problems need to be solved. Problems needing to be solved require action. And action moves the plot forward. Shanks’s first problem for Ben is a simple one – starvation. There is no food anywhere in the hotel. So as Ben gets into that third, fourth, and fifth day, he’s starving to death. If he doesn’t find food soon, he’ll be a goner.
He eventually realizes that he can cut flesh off of the other versions of himself and they won’t notice. That’s when I said to myself, “Okay, this writer is a step above most writers who write these movies.” Because that’s just trippy stuff there. In order to survive, you have to eat yourself. That’s not a plot line you usually come across in a screenplay.
The script also does some interesting stuff with dialogue. For example, Ben tries to figure out how he got to this place. So he’s talking out loud about what he does for a living (structural engineer), the mistakes he made that put him in debt, and how that might have led to someone placing him here. It’s a big long monologue. The next day, Ben-1 goes through the same monologue and, as Ben listens to him, he sometimes interjects. So Ben-1 will say, “Mum always insisted, I had to get a degree even though we couldn’t afford it.” And before Ben-1 says the next line, Ben points out, “Maybe she saw it as the best chance to break the chain of bastards you come from…”
I always like when writers find interesting ways to do dialogue and I’m not sure I’ve ever come across this exact type of dialogue exchange. Where you’re having a conversation with your past self despite the fact that only one of you could hear the other. It was stuff like that that set this script apart.
If the script has a weakness, it would be that it gets very heady towards the end. When all of Ben’s plans fail, he has to go back through 30-plus Ben days and look for little clues of how the rules work in an attempt to find the secret to escaping. And I’m not going to lie. I was not always able to follow the logic. But here’s where I say something that I rarely say in these instances: I believe it was my fault that I couldn’t follow along. Not the writer’s. If there’s one thing I know here, it’s that Shanks understands his world. He writes with a level of confidence where you can tell he’s thought everything through, left and right, back and forth, a million different ways, to make sure this all make sense. It’s just one of those Christopher Nolan type scripts where it’s impossible to get everything the first time through. You gotta read it a few times. If that sounds like your jam, you’ll like this a lot.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This script taught me that it may be impossible to write a movie these days that only takes place in one room. Even Shanks realized, at a certain point, that he wasn’t going to be able to keep our attention if this whole movie only took place in a hotel room. I know adding rooms ups the budget considerably, but if you’re these scripts, you’re probably going to have to bring the outside world in at some point.
It’s time to fall in love again… with the Scriptshadow Newsletter. And you better fall hard because there will be no official post today. Luckily, for you, there’s a review of a recent spec sale in the newsletter that’s as high concept as high concepts get. And I go into detail as to why it’s so high concept. I also discuss whether screenwriting is just a big game of luck and, if it is, why not give up? I dig into the buzzy films coming out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, including a film from my favorite new director. I take issue with one of the more bizarre studio released films of the past decade. I also cover a couple new high-profile spec sales. Oh, and a screenwriting tip from my favorite new show, Peacemaker. So there’s something for everyone!
If you didn’t receive the newsletter or would like to sign up, e-mail “NEWSLETTER” to carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I will send it to you TODAY!
I’ve been getting a ton of logline consultations lately and it’s clearly thanks to you guys. A lot of you are referring me to others and I thank you for that (you can get a logline consult for $25 – just e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com). And it’s made me think a lot about concepts lately because I’ve noticed a few things in these consultations.
By the way, the Fabulous First Act Contest is coming soon. It’s going to take over the site in March. I’m going to guide you through writing a first act. And I want you to have the greatest idea you’ve ever written before for the contest. Because, after you’re done, you’re going to submit the first act to me. Which is why today’s post is so important. We need your idea to be awesome if it’s going to have a chance.
A great movie idea is still the best way to get script reads and script purchases. It’s the ultimate hack to the system because if a producer likes your idea enough, they will overlook weaknesses in the script itself. They won’t do that for average ideas. I have seen so many “lesser” writers break into the industry with a great idea while better writers continue to toil in obscurity because they prefer the low-concept route.
But what I’m finding is that it’s much harder to come up with a good idea than it looks. I receive a lot of ideas that are “high-concept adjacent.” They look like a high concept. They smell like a high concept. But they’re missing that “unique factor” that elevates the idea to something special.
For example, I might get pitched a movie about a ghost who petitions God to come back to life for a week. Technically, this is a high concept idea. But it feels too familiar. It’s not very exciting. It doesn’t feel like the writer put a lot of thought into it. Garden variety high concept isn’t going to cut it because it’s highly likely that someone has already come up with a similar idea.
So I wanted to do something different today. While I can’t come up with a great idea for you. I can share with you many of the constants (I call them “high concept multipliers”) I see in high concept ideas. These multipliers do not make great movie ideas on their own. You have to combine them in interesting ways and then harmoniously incorporate characters into the mix.
But, at least this way, you’ll have a list you can go back to whenever you’re struggling to come up with that next script idea. Hopefully this sparks a few huge ideas for those of you wanting to participate in the Fabulous First Act Contest. Because I’m going to be putting a priority on high concept when judging. Okay, here we go.
MONSTERS AND BEASTS – An easy one. Monsters and beasts sell tickets. Godzilla, vampires, dinosaurs, Frankenstein, whatever that thing was in The Ritual. You’re either going to want to find a fresh take on these monsters or give us something entirely new.
AS FAR AWAY FROM THE PRESENT AS POSSIBLE – Come up with an idea that takes place a long long time ago (i.e. during the caveman times) or a long time from now (i.e. a thousand years in the future). The further away you go from the present, the more unique the situation will be. Which is why it will feel high concept.
TIME – This is one of the biggies. You’ve got time distortion (recent spec sale “Time Zone” about special cops who can slow down time to battle terrorist attacks), time loops (Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code), time travel (Back to the Future), telling stories out of order or backwards (500 Days of Summer, Shimmer Lake). This option has the most leeway to get inventive. So it’s a good one to incorporate.
MEMORY – Memory is another big one because it’s such a malleable concept. You can do so much with it. Everything from Christopher Nolan’s 8-minute memory main character in Memento to purposeful memory erasure in Eternal Sunshine. Roshomon is a famous high concept because we experience the same event through several different memories. Even movies like The Notebook, which don’t have any supernatural or sci-fi slant, are able to get that high concept label because the memory component in them is so powerful. That movie jumps between the past and present to explore the devastating affects of Alzheimer’s.
DEATH – Death is the final frontier. Or is it? That’s what’s so great about death (in a movie sense). There’s so much unknown about it that you can go crazy with your ideas. Flatliners famously explored death in a unique way. The Lovely Bones. The Sixth Sense. Meet Joe Black. You can go to town with this one.
ALIENS – The possibilities are endless with aliens. You can explore an alien invasion (Independence Day), an alien visitation (Arrival), the underworld of alien policing (Men in Black), a mysterious alien organism (Alien), an alien killing machine (Predator), humans invading an alien planet (Avatar), an alien signal (The Vast of Night). One of my favorite topics!
GHOSTS – The haunted house movie is probably one of the most reliable formulas in literary history. I just saw a good one recently in The Night House. Dan Akroyd thought up one of the best ghost concepts ever with Ghostbusters. But with any of these high profile subjects, you need to dig a lot deeper than usual to find the fresh idea. Don’t think that you can slap together a ghost concept overnight and it will fly. Go five, six, seven layers deep to find an original ghost take.
ISLANDS – Tons of high concept ideas happen on islands. From Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None to the girl stuck on an island with a monster movie, Beast, to the best TV show of all time, Lost. This one is timeless and it will remain timeless. Throw some characters on an island, build some conflict into their situation (murder, monsters, the supernatural), and it’s often a slam dunk.
POWERS – This should be obvious in 2022. Powers are what make all the money at the box office. But just because you don’t have IP doesn’t mean you can’t write powers into your story. There was a recent spec sale about a group of criminals that steal money from a mansion only to find out it’s the home of a supervillain. Or you could do something as simple as Limitless – a guy finds a pill that makes him super-duper smart.
ROBOTS – I-Robot, The Terminator, Finch, Pacific Rim, Robocop. By the way, one of the tricks you can use is to take an everyday job and combine it with one of these high concept multipliers. For example, you have an exterminator. Well, what if you created an exterminator… who exterminated ghosts (Ghostbusters). You have a cop. What if you had a cop… that was part robot (Robocop).
MURDER – Murder may not seem as high concept as some of these other suggestions. But let me tell you. It’s VERY high concept. It’s one of the most reliable ways to take an idea and spruce it up. Murder gave us all those cool serial killer flicks (Lambs, Seven). But it also gave us cool little scenarios such as Rear Window. There’s so much leeway with what you can do with murder. For example, I recently saw an awesome little movie called The Clovehitch Killer about a kid who starts to suspect his dad is a serial killer. Bonus – this is one of the cheapest high concept options.
DREAMS – This one is dangerous because if you go too fast and loose with dream ideas, they don’t make any sense, like dreams themselves. But there are tons of cool ideas to mine from dreams. I mean, we got Inception out of it. We got The Cell (great idea, bad execution). Vanilla Sky.
MEDICAL AND EXPERIMENTS – Think about medicine and then think in extremes. Sure, someone who’s blind could be the centerpiece of a high concept idea. But you usually want to think bigger for this category. Two kids who have a rare medical condition whereby they can’t be subjected to sunlight (The Others). Or, more recently, we got the medical experiment movie of the decade in Malignant. Maybe you have an idea where the government is secretly carrying out mass experiments on its population without them knowing it. Lots of fun to be had here.
MAGIC – I’m not that into magic but I can’t deny 5 billion dollars worth of cinematic success in Harry Potter. I read a high concept pilot several years ago about a magic world that ran in parallel to our own and then, one day, the two started to overlap. That’s pretty darn high concept. I’m sure you magic lovers can find plenty of cool ideas here. It’s pretty wide open.
IRONY – This is one of the secret ways to create high concept ideas without having to use giant subject matter. A janitor at Harvard who’s a math genius. An 11 year old girl who’s a contract killer (Hanna). An alcoholic who becomes a superhero (Hancock). A couple of years ago, a big idea sold about two ice cream truck owners who entered into a war with one another. Irony should be one of your best friends when it comes to concept creation, and just with writing in general.
SIZE – High concept likes things that are really really big (King Kong) and also really really small (Honey I Shrunk The Kids). Hell, HBO once had a show about a guy with a gigantic male reproductive organ. Really really big and really really small can easily make a stale idea exciting.
A FUN SCENARIO WITH A SET OF STRICT RULES – As a writer, you are God. So come up with fun scenarios and add one or two strict rules that govern the scenario. A lawyer can only tell the truth for one day (Liar Liar). A bus has a bomb on it and it can’t go below 50 mph or the bus blows up (Speed).
WISH-FULFILLMENT – This is one of my favorite ones because it’s the classic “What if…?” question that leads to so many fun ideas. What if a kid wakes up one day in the body of an adult (Big)? What if you could kill your boss and get away with it (Horrible Bosses)? What if you were a musician and became the only person in the world who remembered The Beatles (Yesterday)?
BODY INVASION – This is another popular one. Lots of movies explore what happens when one’s body is not their own. The Exorcist is a classic one. Freaky Friday is another classic – body switching. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Thing. The concept of your body being hijacked is fertile ground for so many cool ideas. I would put this multiplier near the top of the ‘come up with a cool idea’ list. It’s that potent.
VIRTUAL REALITY – I would take this one step further and say, “What is reality?” We got The Matrix out of this. We got The Truman Show, one of the most famous spec scripts of all time. We see virtual reality and ‘what is reality’ being explored in Black Mirror episodes. This is going to be a popular topic for the foreseeable future because technology keeps advancing exponentially, allowing for a steady stream of new ideas.
One final thing when it comes to high concept idea generation. You can use these modules to supersize low-concept ideas. For example, let’s say you want to write a drama about the pain one endures after ending a relationship. So many writers will write these boring predictable on-the-nose explorations of characters trying to get over someone.
Why would you write that when you could take that subject matter and combine it with one of the high concept multipliers I listed above? That way, you still get to explore the story you want to explore. But you also make it entertaining for the reader, not just yourself. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind uses memory and technology to explore a break-up in a compelling way. 500 Days of Summer uses an out-of-order storytelling style to explore a break-up in a compelling way. Yes, it is hard to come up with a great idea. But it’s fairly easy to take a weak idea and make it a lot better by using one of the multipliers above.
Have at it!
Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: In the near future, terminal patients are given the opportunity to go out with a bang with personalized VR “perfect endings.” But when the best Transition Specialist gets far too close to a patient, he finds himself questioning everything in his life.
About: Brian T. Arnold wrote on a web series called “Open House.” This script of his landed on last year’s Black List, with the ninth-most votes. He also won the Tracking Board Launch Pad competition and finished Top 50 in the Nicholl (I believe in both instances with a different script, though I need someone to confirm that).
Writer: Brian T. Arnold
Details: 109 pages
Is today the day it all changes?
Is it finally time for me to recognize that the Sci-Fi & Drama categories mix can produce a good screenplay?
I don’t know, guys. Movies like Swan Song have left such a stain on the sci-fi/drama legacy that it looked like the genre combo would never recover.
Maybe writer Brian T. Arnold has recruited his screenplay acumen from some sort of parallel universe where things that shouldn’t go together suddenly do. A peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich? Gin and milk? Sci-fi and drama?
It’s the near future and 30-something Peter Grimsby, an intensely focused man, is helping an old guy live his dream – take down Hitler during World War 2. The process requires that the man sacrifice himself to do so, and afterwards we learn that we were in a simulation, and that this man is now dead in real life.
Peter, you see, is a “transition specialist.” If you’re dying, the company he works for, Ascension, gives you an opportunity to go out your way. Ascension creates your perfect ending and then, concurrently with the climax, they, poof, inject your real body with poison so you die on the spot.
Lately, Peter’s been struggling. Part of creating these “final endings” is getting to know the people he’s going to murder. So when they die, a little piece of him dies as well. To make matters worse, Peter’s about to meet his biggest challenge yet, Gale, a fast-talking 70-something who hates what Ascension does but realizes it’s the best of a bunch of bad options.
At first, Peter is annoyed by Gale. But once he starts to uncover her rockstar life – she was once a famous photographer who traveled all over the world – he warms up to her. Meanwhile, Peter starts dating the daughter of the man he most recently terminated and, as you can imagine, their relationship is complicated.
As Gale’s perfect ending grows near, Peter begins having an emotional breakdown, which is when we learn that Peter is working on his own perfect ending, tied to a traumatic experience from his childhood. Is this an ending he’s planning on doing soon? Or is it for the far-off future? We’re not sure, leaving us wondering if our hero is going to make it out of his story alive.
Whenever I read a good script, there’s an indication early on that that’s where it’s going. I’ll share with you what that moment was in “In The End.”
The script is tasked with explaining how its rules work. What is the ‘perfect ending’ and what are the logistics to how it works? To answer this question results in exposition which you, the writer, must include. Every writer deals with exposition differently. There are cheap and lazy ways to dole out exposition. And there are thoughtful ways. I can spot a good writer by which option he chooses.
Here, after our World War 2 teaser, Arnold takes us inside a hospice where our hero, Peter, is explaining to a group of dying people how Ascension works. He shows them a little company video, fills in the holes himself, then asks the group if they have any questions. A few of them ask questions and he answers them.
This scene is pure exposition. And yet, any person watching this movie would have no idea that it’s pure exposition because the scenario is organic to the story. Of course to get clients, they have to go places where people are dying and pitch them their business. So we don’t question it.
The lazy way would’ve been for Peter to have a meeting with his boss, and his boss all of a sudden went into an unmotivated exposition monologue: “Do I have to remind you what we do, Peter? We go to old people and we ask them to die with us. You are the creator of their death. You get to choose what it is. I consider that a privilege. And sure, it’s a little barbaric that we shoot poison into them the moment they die in their simulation but…”. I read exposition like this all the time.
Another thing I liked about this scene is that a plot thread emerges from it. Peter receives his next client. That might seem obvious to you. But when you’re staring at a blank page, it’s never obvious. You compartmentalize scenes to do what you want them to do – “Okay, this is going to be the exposition scene where we explain to the audience how the perfect ending works.”
You forget that you can combine things. The fact that one of the patients wants to sign up and he’ll be a part of the plot moving forward means that the scene is not an island. The veins of the following scenes are now laced within it.
I admit that about 40% of the way through the script, I didn’t know where we were going or if I liked wherever that was. Gale took some getting used to. All the other characters felt real whereas Gale felt like something out of an early 2000s indie movie. Here’s a typical line from her: “I almost got a tattoo once that said “No Regrets.” But, I didn’t. Because I knew I’d regret it. And, I have no regrets.”
But the more we got to know her, we realized that that was partly an act to protect herself. Once we started un-peeling her layers, she became more grounded. And that’s when I realized what the script was doing. It was going to make you love this woman so that when Peter had to kill her, it was going to be waterworks. That’s another thing I liked about the script. It sets up an ending we’re sure we’re headed towards before throwing a couple of curve balls at us. It not only doesn’t end up the way we expect it to. It ends better.
I did have a couple of issues with the script. Arnold needed to spend more time on the believability of the “perfect ending” productions. A Hollywood movie takes 1000 people to create. Yet Peter and two assistants are able to put together incredibly complex realistic three-dimensional real-time movies for the clients. It wasn’t as lazy as that Neil Blomkamp movie that just came out (you lay down on a bed and somehow because there’s a wire nearby you’re magically in a simulation). But since that’s the heart of the concept, it needed to be more believable.
I also thought Arnold overcomplicated Peter’s character journey. I never quite understood what was going on with him. Sometimes it was that he got too close to his clients. But then, also, he hadn’t gotten over his traumatic childhood event. And maybe he was considering suicide but maybe not. Also, he was a workaholic and needed to quit and do something he loved to do even though he supposedly loved this job. It was confusing.
Despite that, the bones of the script are so solid and you get so attached to these dying characters, that, emotionally, this is a home run. It really hits you hard at the end so I definitely recommend it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I think what I learned here is that sci-fi dramas don’t work. But drama sci-fis do. What I mean by that is if we expect sci-fi and you give us a bunch of crying and melodramatic scenes, we’re going to be disappointed. But if your story is essentially a drama with sci-fi aspects used minimally to support the drama, that can work. But the marketing needs to be on point. You have to be clear that it’s a drama first. Cause I’m telling you – there’s nothing worse than when you’re excitedly expecting one thing in a script and you get something different. It’s the worst.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: Mickey Rourke loses his mind after he’s forced to take a gig on television’s highest rated show: The Masked Singer.
About: This script finished Top 25 on the most recent Black List. Believe it or not, it’s kind of based on a true story. Mickey Rourke really did appear on The Masked Singer (something I did not know when I originally saw the logline) and randomly took his mask off while being interviewed after his first performance, unintentionally (or intentionally?) disqualifying himself. Maybe Mickey didn’t know the rules?
Writer: Mike Jones & Nicholas Sherman
Details: 94 pages
We’ve had a long and winding journey with comedy scripts on this site. The short of it is that 99.99999% of them don’t do well. Even the ones that are funny don’t have enough laughs in them to justify their existence. I’ve long struggled with whether this is more about me having read too many comedies and therefore being numb to overused jokes or if it’s more the fault of the writers, who aren’t delivering.
Well, this weekend’s mini-binge of Peacemaker reminded me that when you have a group of funny characters and a writer who’s good with dialogue, you’re funny, even to people who have read a million comedy scripts before and know what to expect. In other words, no excuses.
Since this was the funniest premise on this year’s Black List, I felt if any script had a shot at making me laugh, it was this one. Let’s find out if I was right.
Mickey Rourke had one hell of a career in the 80s and early 90s. The script lets us know just how good he had it, giving us all the movies he turned down (Bad Boys, The Big Chill, Caddyshack, Dead Poets Society, Platoon, Tombstone, The Untouchables, Pulp Fiction, Top Gun, 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop, and Silence of the Lambs).
While Rourke had a brief career resurgence with The Wrestler, that was almost a decade ago. With those mortgage payments on that Malibu five bedroom getting harder to pay, Rourke does the unthinkable – he accepts a job on Fox’s weirdo reality game show, The Masked Singer, which has celebrities dress up in bizarre costumes, sing a song, and then a panel of judges tries to figure out who they are.
When Rourke gets to set on his first day, he falls in love with a big purple gremlin costume, insisting on wearing it. Then, during his first performance singing the upbeat Barenaked Ladies song, “One Week,” Rourke has a breakdown and begins crying in his suit. He continues to sing the song though, now as a slow ballad, and America instantly falls in love with him.
Of course, nobody knows that Purple Gremlin is Mickey. So Mickey can’t capitalize on his newfound fame. When he attempts to extort Fox-Disney for some money, they remind him what they did to Armie Hammer when he was difficult. When Mickey keeps pressing the issue, they recast Purple Gremlin with Wanda Sykes!
Furious, Mickey kidnaps the president of Fox TV and, as Purple Gremlin, livestreams a list of requests that, if Fox doesn’t meet, he will blow her up. After Mickey calms down, he decides against blowing her up, but is able to negotiate his way back onto the show for the big finale. He then gives one of the longest monologues in movie history decrying the death of art. (Spoiler alert) He then refuses to take off his mask. The End.
Screenwriting Trigger Warning: This script is heavy on the asides and fourth-wall breaking. If you are not into that sort of stuff, do not read this script. It may put you in a permanent anger coma.
“The Masked Singer” screenplay is almost as absurd as “The Masked Singer” concept. It’s one-part fourth-wall breaking, one part emotional character study, one part absurdist comedy, and one part thoughtful commentary on the state of the industry. I don’t know what to make of it if I’m being honest. On one page, Rourke is threatening to blow someone up in a purple gremlin costume and, on the next page, Rourke is giving a “Leaving Las Vegas” level exploration of debilitating drug addiction.
One of the things you’re always battling as a reader is how the script you expected compares to the script you actually got. This was a funny concept so I was thinking the script was going to lean into Mickey being a diva. Instead, it leans into Mickey being a sad depressed old man. And my question to the writers would be, “Which one is funnier?” I contend that Mickey being a diva is funnier. So I was miffed that that was scrapped in favor of Sad Mickey.
Ultimately, comedy scripts are judged by whether you laugh or not. And I did not. I suppose I giggled a few times, like at the ongoing joke of Mickey being pathetically sad about the fact that he never had kids. But mostly I read this script with a giant confused look on my face. I couldn’t understand exactly what I was reading.
Some people have called this a “parody” script. It’s supposed to get the writers noticed. It was never meant to be a movie. I call b.s. on that. If Mickey’s agents called these guys and said he wanted to do the film, would they say ‘no?’ Of course not. Therefore, it’s a legit script. I bring that up because some writers try to hide behind the parody label so they can have it both ways. If it’s made fun of, it was never supposed to be a real script anyway. And if it gets made, it’s a great story about how a script that wasn’t even real got made.
But ever since Being John Malkovich got produced, these celebrity-focused screenplays are legit scripts and need to be judged as so. While I didn’t dislike this script. I found it too messy. It’s trying to do too many things. Trying to cover too many bases.
And we can’t forget that these scripts have a ceiling. They do well with lower-tier readers, people who haven’t read many scripts, because this is probably the first time they’re encountering this style. But when the scripts move up the ladder to the seasoned readers, there’s a lot of eye-rolling that goes on because they’ve seen this act before. Probably dozens of times.
What’s so frustrating is that this is a really funny idea. An actor who takes himself more seriously than most world leaders is forced to accept the most humiliating job in show business – The Masked Singer. There’s so much comedy to mine from that.
But the focus is more on the fourth-wall breaking description (talking directly to the reader) than the script itself. When you have a good concept, you don’t need that. That’s what good concepts give you. They make it so that you don’t have to depend on gimmicks. You should only bring in gimmicks when the concept is weak.
Take one of my favorite comedy concepts of the last decade, Neighbors – A young couple who have just started a family find out that they’ve moved next to a fraternity house. Imagine writing that script in a big wacky voice where you’re constantly talking to the reader. It would’ve distracted from the story, right? Yet that’s what’s happening here.
The final issue is the script tries too hard. The writing really wants you to love it. I’ve always struggled to figure out where the “try-hard” line is. How does one be big and boisterous with their writing and it not sound try-hard? Well, Peacemaker just did it. So I know it’s possible. But there definitely seems to be a line and, unfortunately, The Masked Singer crossed it.
Based on the overcooked writing and uneven tone, this one wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In a comedy script, you should never try and make the asides funnier than the jokes in the movie itself. Your funniest stuff should be coming through great dialogue or a clever payoff or a hilarious set piece. It shouldn’t come from you sharing an off-screen opinion about whether Nick Cannon should be in your movie after his anti-Jewish comments or if Donald Trump is soulless. Save your best jokes for the actual movie, the stuff that audiences are going to see.
