This genre, once a secret handshake between in-the-know writers and audiences, has been all but forgotten.  Is a sleeper screenwriter ready to revive it?

One of the movies I watched recently for my dialogue book was the romantic comedy, Jerry Maguire. That movie has some of the most iconic lines ever written in it. SHOW ME THE MONNNEYYYYYY! Cameron Crowe had been steadily working up to that moment in time and captured the American zeitgeist with that movie. You think Stranger Things has a cultural impact? Imagine that times 20 with Jerry Maguire.

Romantic comedies have been on my mind lately after reading all these articles about “Bros” tanking at the box office. One of the arguments for why the film failed was that women are the key demo for romantic comedies. So if you give them a romantic comedy without a woman in it, they have no one to relate to. Now you’re dependent on men for your box office. But, oh yeah, men don’t show up for romantic comedies.

Which brings me back to Crowe. Crowe was the guy who figured out the formula for getting men to show up to romantic comedies. He centered his movies around a male main character. He made that character slightly alpha, so as to create an, almost, wish-fulfillment version of a hero for men to root for. And then he didn’t shy away from the love story, which ensured that women got everything they wanted out of the movie as well.

Crowe first birthed this formula in Say Anything. That’s the movie where John Cusack plays Lloyd Dobler, a fast-talking kickboxing instructor who falls in love with a girl who’s way too close to her father. To this day, that film has one of the 25 most iconic images in all of film in it, which is Lloyd holding up the boombox outside Diane’s window playing Peter Gabriel’s, “In Your Eyes.”

But he really turned the formula loose in Jerry Maguire, where we had the overtly alpha sports agent, Jerry Maguire, played by Tom Cruise, try to start his own agency. The movie was the pinnacle of romantic comedies made for men. It had one of the most powerful bromances ever in a movie (with wide receiver and client, Rod Tidwell). It had this wish-fulfillment scenario that all guys love of starting your own business and putting everything on the line to make it work. And, just like Say Anything, it didn’t shy away from the romance.

This was the secret ingredient that no other writer in town seemed to recognize. Some Hollywood writers knew how to write a guy’s movie. Others knew how how to write a girl’s movie. But nobody knew how to mix the two. The key was giving us that “Male” centric storyline but treating the romance with respect, as opposed to making it an afterthought.

There’s one other writer-director who understood the power of this. He just did it in a different genre. That was James Cameron. James Cameron brought the boys on board with his alpha male main characters, some rad special effects and/or cool sci-fi elements, and then he wholly embraced the romance, which ensured that women showed up too. He rode that formula to, at one point, the two most successful movies in history, in Titanic and Avatar.

Getting back to Crowe again, something happened after Jerry Maguire. Elizabethtown had the exact same formula as his previous films. The main character had the cool alpha male job of being a sneaker CEO. Crowe committed to the romance. But something didn’t work. And he tried to do it again with Aloha. Giving us that “cool” military satellite storyline for men, along with the key romance between Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone. But the movie didn’t connect with anybody, men or women. I could write a book about all the mistakes that probably contributed to its failure but the point was, Crowe was now out of the picture with this genre and, except for a couple of exceptions (“Hitch” comes to mind), Hollywood forgot about it.

Until…..…

A young comic/director named Judd Apatow realized that he could tweak the formula. His main change would be to use beta male main characters as opposed to alpha ones. These characters would be dorks, nerds, with not much going on in their life. This would bring in a different kind of male viewer – guys who identified with those groups. But the part of the formula he kept in tact was embracing the romantic components of the story, which was essential to bringing in the female audience.

He also made one other adjustment. He called his movies comedies instead of romantic comedies. It was a branding choice that made men feel more comfortable going to see these films.

Whether by design or not, Apatow had stumbled into the same equation that had made Cameron Crowe a household name. His new tweaking of the formula gave us two instant classics: The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. So it was more than a little bizarre when Apatow abandoned the formula after Knocked Up. Not surprisingly, his movies stopped doing as well. I guess, creatively, he was more interested in drama at the time, which is all well and good. But it left Hollywood’s best kept genre secret without a champion. And that leads us all the way to today. Nobody’s used this formula since.

How could that be?

Hollywood doesn’t just leave money on the table.

There has to be a reason.

Actually, several things happened that contributed to Hollywood forgetting all about this money-printing genre.

First, since 2000, traditional romantic comedies started to do less than stellar numbers at the box office. She’s Out of My League, Friends with Benefits, Leap Year, Just Friends. It was one miss after another. This created the pervasive thought that romantic comedies just didn’t work in the market anymore. A misnomer because it wasn’t that they didn’t work. It was that the movies weren’t as good.

Then Bridesmaids came along and everything changed. It created a movement in Hollywood where leading women were the new leading men. And what better genre to have a leading lady in than the genre that did so well with women in the first place, romantic comedies. It didn’t help that the actress leading all of the big romantic comedies as this time was the devil herself in Katherine Heigel.

Combined with the rise of the Bechedel Test, any remaining male writers who were interested in writing romantic comedies, realized that they weren’t needed here anymore, and moved on to other genres. Throw the birth of streaming into the mix, which seemed to better fit the comedy and romance genres, and this all but pulled romantic comedies off the big screen, which killed the perception of the genre. Now they were seen as “lower tier” movies.

Meanwhile, female writers were mostly writing wish-fulfillment rom-coms that didn’t even attempt to cater to men. This made it so a genre that was already struggling to bring in men had closed the door on them completely.

Another factor is that this industry continues to tell writers, subconsciously or otherwise, don’t write these movies. If you pitched a male-leaning rom-com to the average studio exec right now, they’d look at you cross-eyed. “You want to put a male lead in a romantic comedy?” “You want the female character to be in a supportive role?” “You want her to fall for the man? As opposed to live her best life and not be dependent on a man?” “Are you crazy?”

This is where Hollywood gets it wrong. When it comes down to it, people are going to see what they want to see. Not what Hollywood wants them to want to see. There’s no better example of this than Bros. Hollywood so wanted people to want to see that movie. But there’s the disconnect. You can’t make people want to see something, no matter how good your intentions are. The real world is not a Benchedel Test.

I’m telling you, the male-centric romantic comedy is a goldmine. It’s been proven repeatedly. And it’s there for the taking because very few people know how to write them. Why can’t you be that person? Now, I’m not saying to write one of these movies if you’re not a comedy or romance guy. I’m a big believer that you have to love the genre you’re writing in to write something great. But if this is your genre, don’t be scared off from writing it. Your script is going to feel like a breath of fresh air when people read it since everyone’s been trained to only write these female-led rom-coms right now. It is the perfect time to stand out.

I’m sharing this with you because Hollywood can be really dumb these days and it’s made them forget about what movies people actually want to see. Top Gun proved that in spades. I think the person who writes the next Jerry Maguire is going to prove it as well.

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Genre: Horror/Adventure
Premise: A former Hawaiian warrior turned werewolf is recruited to join a mysterious pack of werewolves.
About: It appears that Aaron Guzikowski really likes wolves. He created the show, Raised by Wolves. And it turns out, during the planned Monsterverse slate of horror movies, he wrote a draft of The Wolfman. Afterwards, Ryan Gosling would come to Universal and pitch his own version of The Wolfman, which had a Christopher Nolan approach to the property whereby he would treat it very realistically. “Nightcrawler” was given as a tonal comp. Yesterday’s writers, Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, would go on to write that draft for Gosling. To be clear, today’s draft was written by Aaron Guizikowski (Prisoners, Raised by Wolves, Papillon).
Writer: Aaron Guizikowski
Details: 120 pages

Wolf Week continues here on Scriptshadow.

Monday, we looked at the classic horror film, An American Werewolf In London. Tuesday, we had that Big Mean Orange-Haired Wolf. And today, we have a reimagining of the classic film, The Wolfman.

So, as those who read my newsletter know (e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com to sign up), our first Monsterverse script, for Van Helsing, turned out to be pretty awesome! And so, can a full moon strike twice in the same month? I thought that was impossible.

Or, wait. A full moon actually stays full for two nights, right? So maybe it can strike twice! Unless the second night of the full moon is only like a 95% full moon. In that case, it’s not a real full moon. And since I don’t know much about werewolf mythology, I don’t know how much of an effect that has on werewolf changism.  Is a 95% werewolf still a werewolf.  Or is just a werewol?

The year is 1826. We’re on Molokai Island, Hawaii (I’m guessing they were targeting The Rock or Jason Mamoa for the role). The prince of this land, Deo Kekoa, is hanging with his homies when a fiery ship sails right up to the beach.

Deo and others try to break through the hull where they hear people screaming. But when they finally succeed, they’re attacked… by a werewolf. Deo is able to kill it but, unfortunately, he’s been bitten. And since his father has seen werewolves before, he knows Deo will turn into one. So he banishes Deo.

We then wake up in 2017 in Iceland, where Deo is now a bodyguard for high-profile clients. Over the years, Deo has learned how to turn into a werewolf on command. Unfortuantely, he still has no control over his true turning, which happens every full moon.

Deo is responsible for guarding a businessman named Edmund Razmus, who works for something called the “Frankenstein” Corporation. He takes Edmund out into the middle of nowhere in order to truly isolate them from threats but it isn’t long before a group of werewolves attack and kill Edmund. Deo does some research on these werewolves and learns that they live in Hamburg, Germany. So off he goes.

Once there, he meets with the alpha of the group, a steely wise businessman named Jacques Delancre, a billionaire shipper. Also, Deo realizes, Delancre is the man who owned the fiery ship that crashed on his shores that day.

At first, Deo wants to kill him. But there’s something magnetic about Delancre that Deo has never experienced before and he soon finds himself curious about this wolf pack. For so long, he’s been alone. It feels good to finally have a family. Delacre teaches Deo to stop resisting his animalistic urges and, instead, embrace them. He wants Deo to be more wolf than man.

The next thing you know Deo is helping Delancre with a heist. The Frankenstein Corp has a lab in the Swiss Alps and they’re doing tests on a former member of the pack. Because Deo has the special ability to turn into a werewolf whenever he wants, Delancre needs him for this rescue mission. Deo agrees, but in the process, worries about if he’s being seduced for, ultimately, nefarious purposes.

Um.

This script is awesome.

I mean, I don’t know what’s going on over at Universal. But they’ve gotten two of the best big-budget scripts I’ve read in a long time and they’re not going to do anything with them. It baffles me.

Cause this was a really cool script.

There were four things that stood out. One, the mythology. It’s really well-researched and constructed. Every werewolf here has a deep backstory as they come from a different time period and different part of the world.  And the stuff about the Wolfpack and who it operated was really cool. Two, the specificity. We start off on a gold-caped Hawaiin prince in the year 1826. I’ve never seen that before in film. When someone can give me that level of detail and uniqueness right away, the script that follows is almost always good.

The originality is strong as well. Going from 19th century Hawaii to 21st century Iceland. It feels like we’re in a totally different world than we’d usually be in with movies like this. 9 out of 10 writers would’ve started this movie in New York.

Finally, the way the story is constructed is really smart. It starts off with this 20 minute teaser. Then we move to a bodyguard story, where our hero has to protect someone. Then we move to a Matrix situation, where our hero joins this cult of werewolves and learns about their pack and powers. And then we’re performing a heist in Switzerland.

It was just really freaking cool!

You know what it felt like in a weird way? Like a werewolf version of James Bond, if that makes sense. And I would’ve never in a million years thought of combining those two worlds for a werewolf film. Yet here we are and Guzikowski hits it out of the park.

You guys know how much I love when I can’t predict what’s going to happen in a script. The problem I always run into when I finally encounter one of these scripts, is that the only reason I can’t predict anything is because the script is so sloppily written and the writer is making things up on the fly. Rarely do I encounter a screenplay where I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen ANNNNND what happens is still smart and calculated. Which is exactly how I would describe this script.

So you’re probably thinking to yourself, if this is so good, why didn’t they make it, Carson? This is where we get into how complicated Hollywood is today. Cause I think almost every genuinely good script has been made in Hollywood. Cream eventually rises to the top.

But we’re in a whole different era these days with all these extra factors in play. Nobody had done the interconnected “Universe” approach on a large scale before Marvel. So this was brand new territory. And the combination of The Mummy doing badly combined with The Invisible Man being a breakout hit changed the course of how Universal approached its monsterverse.

Big-budget was out. Low-budget was in. It’s why we’re going to get a Nightcrawler version of Wolfman. And I’ll be honest, I think a Nightcrawler version of Wolfman could be awesome. It just sucks that this movie is going to be left behind.

With that said, everything is cyclical. There will be a time in Universal’s future where big-budget monster movies make sense again. When that happens, they’re going to want to bring this script, and Van Helsing, back out, and make them. Cause these are really good screenplays. And it’d be a shame if nothing ever came of them.

Screenplay Link: The Wolfman

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

What I learned: A preview of one of my dialogue tips from the book. If you’re going to have people speak in a foreign language, yet present the dialogue in English, it’s imperative that you italicize the dialogue. If not, you’ll create a situation like the opening of today’s script where Deo seems to be speaking in English. And I’m thinking, “How does he know English?” The writer then tells us, in the description, that he’s speaking his local language and a translator is translating it. Problem solved right? No. Because as I continue to read Deo’s dialogue, I’m still seeing it as English and have to adjust, remembering he’s speaking in a different language. It’s an annoying hesitation-correction that occurs every time you read the dialogue. That visual cue of the italics immediately alerts the reader that it’s another language. Problem solved.

Today, instead of writing about scripts from Black List’s pasts, I write about a Black List script… from the fuuuuuuutttttuuurrrrrrrre.

Genre: Biopic
Premise: The story of how independent right-wing media helped Donald Trump win the presidency.
About: Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum have been on a tear lately, landing every writing job in town. The “Orange is the New Black” writers got the Chippendales gig, the Wolfman project, and, most impressively, “Dumb Money,” about the Gamestop stock story.
Writer: Rebecca Angelo & Lauren Schuker Blum
Details: 113 pages

Jake Gyllenhaal for Cernovich?

There is a special kind of excitement that goes into opening a script that you have no information on, not even a logline. The storytelling possibilities are endless.  Who knows where you’re going to end up?  That’s where my head was today.

And then I opened the script.

After a page I mumbled, “Please no.” After two pages I said, a little louder, “Oh God please don’t do this.” After five pages, my head fell into my lap before I raised it to the sky and screamed…

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

But I committed to reading this script so I’m going to review it for you guys.

Our story starts back around 2015 when something called “Gamergate” was going on. I guess a popular online gamer was dumped by his gamer girlfriend and he complained about it online and this got a lot of male gamers angry at the ex and they wrote really mean online comments to her and I guess this was a metaphor, in the media’s eyes, for toxic masculinity.

A lawyer named Mike Cernovich, who lost his license because of a he-said/she-said date rape accusation in college began a legal blog and started writing about Gamergate, which was becoming a rallying cry for men who were looked down upon or something. Cernovich was quickly joined by a conservative gay man named Milo Yiannopoulos who started writing about Gamergate for Breitbart, an independent conservative news outlet.

During Gamergate, Mike and Milo (sounds like it could be a children’s game show) realized the power of conflict in regards to internet attention. Not sure why that would be surprising to anyone but apparently it had never been weaponized before like these two had done it. And they realized they could use that same conflict-based writing to help Donald Trump, whose ideals seemed aligned with Gamergate, to win the presidency.

And so the script is a trip through a bunch of internet conservative personalities – guys like Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec – who join this crusade and use a lot of toxic combative strategies to rile the troops. For example, Milo Yiannopoulos becomes obsessed with making fun of Leslie Jones from the Ghostbusters movie, painting her as the poster child for what’s wrong with political correctness. Blah blah blah. Because of their help, Trump wins the presidency.

Man, I have to say. Dropping this script into the middle of Hollywood must have been like dropping a 50 ton peanut into a cage of rabid elephants.

The reason I was so excited to read this was because I wanted to talk about something we rarely get to talk about on this site. Which is writing samples. The writing sample has become more important than ever due to scripts not selling like they used to.

These days you write a sample, blast it around town, get a lot of fans, get called in for meetings, then pitch for projects at each production house. Nobody represents this power strategy better than Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum. These two have been tearing it up, getting nearly every writing job they interview for.

So I wanted to see what was special about their writing sample that maybe you could learn from so that you could take it and apply it to your own writing samples.

Then I read this script and it turns out its success is only based on them writing about the Trump election. I just don’t think we can learn anything from that.  Except, maybe, that you should title your next script, “I hate Trump.” But it’s more than that.  I was hoping that, in spite of the subject matter, there would still be something to celebrate here.

I look at a script like Promising Young Woman, which covers a lot of the same ground as American Right. It’s about toxic masculinity, sexism, feminism. But it’s actually clever. And it doesn’t paint a black and white picture. The main character is just as flawed as the people she’s going after. So it’s easier for the audience to relate to her. I just re-watched that movie for my dialogue book and holy moly is it good.

Today’s script is just laying out a list of conservative personalities and doing the same tragedy bit with them you see with all these Black List scripts since The Social Network. The Drudge script. The Twitter one. There are several more I can’t remember the titles of.

I don’t know whether to criticize this strategy or celebrate it. Because it obviously worked. To me this genre may be old hat. But Hollywood still seems to lap it up.

I will say this. It does have one major attribute of a typical “writing sample” which is that it’s a hard sell as a movie. Writing samples usually are. As much as everyone likes to talk about politics online, politics don’t make good movies. People go to movies to forget about the politics buzzing in their ears all day. They don’t go to experience more of it.

Which tells me it was a strategic move by the writers from the start. They weren’t trying to make a movie here. They sat down and asked, what kind of script gets passed around Hollywood? Biopics, one. Anything that attacks conservative ideals, two. Combine those ingredients together and you have a nuclear script bomb. So maybe that is something you can learn from.

There are times when writing sample scripts get made but only when the writer goes on to have a couple of big movies in the marketplace. At that point, someone takes a gamble on their writing sample.

Ironically, it rarely ends well. It’s almost better for a writing sample to remain a writing sample because when you make the movie, you often find out there was a reason it was a writing sample. “Passengers” is a great example of this. That script was celebrated as the greatest script never made for eight years. That’s a sweet title to have on your resume. But then the movie gets made, ends up being bad, and now you’re just the writer of that bad movie.

If I can take my aggravated pants off for a just a minute and look at this script objectively, I guess it does a good job of conveying its theme. Which is this idea of weaponizing conflict and divisiveness for personal or political gain. A good writing sample tends to have a strong theme because writing samples are deeper than your typical Hollywood movie.

If they were surface level, like Taken, they’d get made right away. It’s the fact that they require you to think more that prevents producers from making them. Again, most people go to movies to be taken out of their brains. I know some of you hate to hear that but it’s true for mainstream moviegoing. When I watch Black Panther 2 a month from now, I don’t want to be thinking. I want to have fun.

I also give credit to the writers for coming up with this visual highway in their script that stood for the “information superhighway,” aka, the internet. I liked how when our characters would utilize social media and blogs to create divisiveness, that we’d cut to this actual highway and visually see the results – thousands of car pile-ups, for example. And the victims of these online attacks would be climbing out of cars, bloodied, barely alive. That was the one big creative idea they nailed.

Definitely not going to recommend this script, though. I understand why Hollywood likes it, of course. But this was not my jam. I have a crushing fear that it will be the number 1 script on the Black List in two months, and when that happens, it’s basically going to negate the last bit of confidence I have in the list. If you can write something that, this predictably, would be number one on the list, then you’re not celebrating creativity anymore.

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

What I learned: Brown-nose scripts. Brown-nose scripts are when you write about a particular subject or idea because you know the teacher specifically loves that subject or idea. Brown-nose scripts have infiltrated the Black List and, like weeds, are slowly destroying it from within.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A young black man fights for his life after taking a job at a white-owned beauty parlor, whose monstrous owners concocted a wildly popular shampoo that requires a sickening ingredient.
About: We’re going back a year to a high-ranking 2020 Black List script (17 votes) that I never got to. The script was adapted from the writer’s own short film.
Writer: Chaz Hawkins
Details: 103 pages

Ski Mask The Slump God for “O?” 

While reading “The Sauce,” I went back and forth, throughout the script, on whether it was a movie or not.

Yesterday we were talking about “movies” vs “scripts” and, at first glance, this is a movie. You’ve got a character who gets stuck in a dangerous situation and must get out of it. It’s got your concept, it’s got your goal, it’s got your stakes, it’s got your urgency.

However, the script is adapted from a short film. And that’s evident when you read it. Because it spends the first half of its length building up to the “sauce’s” reveal. It does this because it knows that once you reveal the “sauce,” the script becomes about escaping. And it’s hard to build a long escape story around people who are stuck inside, essentially, a warehouse sized room.

But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk about the plot.

22 year old Jason lives in a city called Coolchitown, which may be short for Chi-Town, which may be short for Chicago. Or it may just be a fictional town. It’s unclear. Jason is reeling from two issues. One, his mother recently died. And two, he has extremely low testosterone, to the point where he needs to take steroid pills.

After Jason is fired from his uncle’s barbershop because his uncle can’t pay him anymore, Jason takes a janitor job at the new hair salon across the street called “The Sauce,” which specializes in making straight hair curly. And it’s all because of their secret ingredient, the “sauce.” By the way, many black men in the area have gone missing over the last two months. I think you know where this is headed. Or do you??

The Sauce is run by Priscilla and a group of gorgeous Greek women who are very secretive and who immediately love Jason. And Jason loves the place too! He’s making a lot more money here than he did at that barbershop, that’s for sure. But Jason wants to make more money. So when his best friend, O, and his former crush, Meddy, come up with a plan to steal from The Sauce, Jason is all in.

So they go there late at night, break into the safe, find 100,000 dollars, and think their lives are about to change. Well, they are. Just not the way they think they are. Curiosity gets the best of them and they open the private door that Priscilla said never to open. They’re shocked to find a giant orgy going on between white women and black men. And it doesn’t take much for O and Jason to join in.

Jason then wakes up, still inside this secret room, which appears to have powers that allow it to expand out into this giant “spa.” While O wants to stay here for the rest of his life, Jason wants out. And that’s because Jason’s medical deficiency – his low testosterone – is making him think clearly! He’s got to find a way out of here before Priscilla figures out a way to fix his Low-T problem and, in the process, permanently turn Jason into another “sauce” supplier.

I want to give the writer props here because the whole time we were building up to “what’s going on here?” I thought these Sauce women were killing black men and using their blood in some ritual that allowed them to create this perfect curly shampoo. I definitely didn’t think there were giant orgies going on to extract “their secret sauce” so to speak.

I always give credit to writers who can surprise me.

But let’s go back to my earlier issue of this being a stretched-out narrative. Something that all writers go through – I know I used to agonize over this when I was younger – is “does your concept have the legs to last an entire movie?” And it took me, probably, ten years of being around concepts and seeing them played out in screenplay form before I was inherently able to know if a concept had legs or not. It’s not easy.

But adapting 5-10 minute short films into features is about as hard as it’s going to get for a writer to create a feature length film that doesn’t feel stretched out. Which “The Sauce” is. It takes us all the way until page 55 before the orgy is unveiled. That’s 55 pages you’re stringing the audience along on a single carrot. Most audiences are just not going to be that patient. Especially these days.

And then you run into just as difficult of a problem. Which is, how do the characters escape this room and how do we expand that out another 55 minutes? You really feel that when you’re reading the script. You can sense the writer looking for ways to stretch things out (O takes Jason on a tour of the place?). And screenplays are supposed to read the opposite of that. They’re supposed to read like time is slipping away.

Now, to the writer’s credit, he does some pretty imaginative stuff with the mythology. I thought it was quite creative the way things were tied back to Greece and the Gods and the sirens, and how the workers were also birds, which led to some fun imagery.

But, in the end, if the pacing isn’t satisfactory, the reader or the viewer tune out. And the pacing here, especially throughout the first half of the script, felt like it was being stretched.

I’m not saying this can’t be done. Lights Out is an example of a 3 minute short film that went on to become a feature and make 70 million dollars. I’m just saying this is stuff you need to consider when you’re picking your concept. Or thinking of expanding a short film.

I have a writer-director friend who wrote this fun short movie about a guy whose car gets stolen at a gas-station and his kid is in the backseat. It’s the perfect concept for a short film because this guy has to chase down this car to save his kid. And my friend wants to turn it into a feature. But I don’t see how you do it. Because following a car with your kid in it is great for 7 minutes. But it gets old if you’re doing it for 107 minutes. He still won’t listen to me, lol, but, yeah, we all go through this because when we fall in love with ideas we only see possibilities, not problems.

Anyway, this script is okay but the slow pacing issues born out of a thin idea being stretched to the max kept me from giving it a recommendation.

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

What I learned 1: The sneaky backstory character introduction. I’ve seen writers do this and it’s clever. What you do is you introduce your character not by describing them, but by giving us a little backstory on the character. It’s a cheat code to sneak some backstory in. Here’s how Jason is introduced.

JASON (22), black, a kid that could have made it out the hood but gave up before he saw the greener grass.

What I learned 2 – Don’t make obscure references in your scripts. You’ll be lucky if 5% of the readers catch them. Here’s an example from this script: “Agatha grins slowly, sexually like Herman Cain in one of his 2012 election campaign commercials.” Some people from yesterday didn’t know who William Hung was. William Hung has, maybe, the single most popular talent show audition of all time. And some people don’t know who he is. If people don’t know who William Hung is, they definitely don’t know who someone from a 2012 political ad is. Yet I see writers doing this all the time. You can include references like that IN DIALOGUE, because maybe it’s in that character’s personality to make obscure references. But you can’t do that when you’re talking directly to the reader. Because all you’re going to get is an annoyed eye-roll and the reader thinking, “Who the heck is that?”

Is today’s script killing the Black List?

Genre: Biopic
Premise: The true story of the aftermath of the most infamous audition of all time – William Hung’s “She Bangs” cover on American Idol.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Tricia Lee
Details: 125 pages

Somebody made an interesting comment to me the other day.

They had this cool idea for a script and noted that they were trying to figure out what direction to take it in. They said they were thinking about writing it for the Black List, which meant making it a slow burn, character driven, and more “cerebral.”

Or, he noted, he could “write a script that will actually become a movie.”

This characterization of the Black List struck me. That the writer thought of it as a compilation of scripts that will never become movies.

Because it didn’t used to be that way. The Black List used to gleefully tout how many of its scripts would go on to become films. But is that the case anymore? A lot has been written about how the Black List cares more about social causes these days than what it used to be about, which was compiling a list of the best scripts in Hollywood.

So I decided to do a quick unscientific look at a current Black List compared to an older Black List. I went through the 2019 Black List and counted how many of the scripts went on to become movies. I didn’t use 2020 or 2021 because scripts need time to get produced. But 2019 is still within the time period where the Black List had refocused its mission, leaning into more socially conscious screenplays and writers.

Here’s what I found. In the 2019 Black List, 8 out of 66 scripts became movies. That’s equal to about 8%. In the 2010 Black List, 36 out of 76 scripts became movies. That’s equal to 47%.

Now I know a few of those scripts from the 2010 list took longer than 3 years to get made but it’s clear to me that the Black List used to be a place where, if you made the list, you’d have an almost 1 in 2 shot of getting your movie made. Now it looks like that’s closer to 1 in 8.

What this tells me is that the writers have figured the Black List code out. They know that they can write scripts that have no shot at becoming movies but because the Black List loves those types of scripts, they’ll make the list. And since more scripts are being written to make the Black List as opposed to writing scripts that could be movies, the Black List has become more and more dominated by screenplays that aren’t movies.

Today’s script might be the perfect example of this.

The story is simple. William Hung is 21 years old in 2002, attending Berkley as an engineering student, when, on a whim, he auditions for American Idol, which was still early on in its run and Simon Cowell was fast becoming one of the biggest stars in the world for how mean he could be to aspiring singers.

An American Idol producer recognizes that she’s struck gold as soon as she hears the earnestness behind William Hung’s audition despite being a terrible singer and puts him through to audition on tape in front of the official judges.

It doesn’t go well.

Months later, when the show airs, William Hung is walking around Berkley and everyone starts approaching him, congratulating him on his audition. What quickly becomes apparent is that William is being made fun of, and the only one who doesn’t seem to realize this is William himself.

So when he’s offered a singing contract, he’s more than happy to sign it. His goal is to use this fame to make enough money to buy a house for his parents. Along the way, he’ll deal with fake friends, girls who use him, lots of ridicule, and even a woman who marries him and later takes half the money he earned from all his singing in the divorce. But through it all, William Hung always remains positive.

Let me start off by saying this script isn’t bad. It’s actually pretty heartwarming. The writer explores themes of celebrity and the pressures of being an Asian in America. And there’s something very sweet about William Hung as a character. His priority is spreading a positive message within a worldwide tsunami of negativity. It’s not reaching to say that we need more people like William Hung on this planet. Especially today.

But come on.

This movie is never getting made.

And while I don’t claim to know what’s going on inside the writer’s head, I’d be surprised if she said she wrote this script in the hopes of it becoming a movie. It’s a music biopic, the catnip of all Black List catnips. Just by writing that word – biopic – next to the genre category, the script’s chances of making the list went up 5000%.

You’re probably wondering what that means. “A movie?”

What’s the difference between a script that’s a movie and a script that is only ever going to be a script?

The answer is in the word itself: “Movie.”

“Move.”

A movie script tends to have MOVEMENT. Characters need to go places. They need to do things. And they need to do them NOW. Because if they don’t, something terrible is going to happen.

Several years ago I did a script consultation for a writer. The broad strokes of his story were that a guy comes back to his hometown for a weekend and spends some time with a girl he kinda likes.

This writer’s plan was to sell the script. And I kept telling him, in as many ways as possible, that this wasn’t a movie. Two people hanging out isn’t a movie. There was no hook here to build a marketing campaign around. It was just two people chilling. And nothing even happened between them.

I told him, literally, the only way this becomes a movie is if you’re the director and you find the money and make it yourself. Nobody’s going to buy this because it’s not something anybody can make money off of.

There’s no MOVEMENT. There’s no hook. There’s nothing important going on. Nothing with genuine stakes attached.

Maybe today’s script isn’t the best example because, at least with music biopics, you have famous music. And people will show up to a movie to see all their favorite songs performed from that group. But this isn’t even a real artist. Nobody’s pining to hear William Hung sing a Richard Marx song.

Another growing problem I’m noticing in the industry is that we’re in this weird state of having so much content that it’s easier than ever to convince yourself that your obscure script idea can get made. And to a minor extent, that’s true. There are more openings for content than ever.

But the principles for what sells are still in place. You got to have a concept with a hook, something that entices a mass audience. You gotta have that MOVEMENT I’m talking about – characters with goals that have stakes, and urgency. And freaking CONFLICT. That was another problem with the consultation script. There wasn’t enough conflict between the main character and the girl.

Even TV shows are becoming like this. They’re moving away from strictly character-driven stories to mini-movies. So they need that concept, goal, stakes, urgency, conflict as well.

Look.

There’s an opportunity out there for someone who wants to start chronicling the best scripts in Hollywood again. Cause The Black List clearly isn’t doing that anymore. And even though I thought this script was fine and it was a fast read, it shouldn’t be celebrated as one of the top scripts in town.

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

What I learned: A few weeks ago, I pointed out the opening bully scene in Lord of the Rings as an example of a great way to create sympathy for your main character. Readers immediately like a character who’s being bullied. However, the reason the scene worked was that it found an inventive way to approach the bullying. This little girl lovingly creates a little origami boat and then floats it down the river. And some jerk boys start throwing rocks at it to try and sink it. It wasn’t the on-the-nose bully scene that I usually read in scripts. “Idol,” however, does contain the bully scene you DON’T want to write. William Hung is 10 years old. He’s singing badly. And then we get this line: “Suddenly, a FIST comes rushing toward William’s FACE and makes HARD CONTACT with his right eye. The fist belongs to ANGRY WHITE KID (10).” The “angry white kid” then starts yelling at him that he can’t sing. It’s the epitome of a stereotypical bullying scene, which is why it doesn’t work. Bullying scenes are one of the best ways to create sympathy for your hero. But just like everything else in screenwriting, you have to be creative with it. You can’t give us the on-the-nose, “anybody could think of this” bullying scene.