Clementine script review with some added insight from the writer!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) Set in real time, a Colombian mother barely escapes a pawn shop shootout and goes on the run from her violent ex-husband, a terrifying mob boss, and a bloodthirsty hitwoman sent to collect an overdue debt, all while trying to keep her diabetic daughter safe.
About: It’s finally here! Boy, I sure do know how to draw out the suspense. Longtime Scriptshadow reader and fave commenter David L. Williams, a man who put his nose to the screenwriting grindstone and worked and worked and worked, completing screenplay after screenplay, finally had it all pay off last year when he made the Black List, earning a highly respectable 12 votes.
Writer: David L. Williams
Details: 91 pages

Alexa Demi from Euphoria would kill this role! No pun intended!

Before we get to the review, which was posted in my newsletter (why aren’t you signed up for my newsletter: carsonreeves1@gmail.com), I wanted to share with you a quick discussion I had with the writer…

Carson: What’s happening with this script currently, David? Who’s going to play the lead role?

David: We have the actress (plus director and financiers). She isn’t well-known but she’s rising and FANTASTIC, and was the director’s first choice. They have it budgeted out to shoot in Miami and Colombia for $10M. The strikes obviously delayed m… everything haha. But they’re still aiming to shoot in or by summer.

Carson: Did you query agents with this script or another one?  Is Clementine how you got repped?

David: So back in 2021 my best friend, Jason Gruich (Cop Cam), and I were both drunk one night and decided to burn cash on evaluations on the Black List *website*. Two days later, Clementine got a 9 out of 10 overall, plus a subsequent 8/10. I kind of hustled that: sent a few queries, told some industry people that I already knew (including reps/execs), and some reps reached out to me via the BL website, my email, and on Twitter (because it was popular on Twitter). I met Mitchell Bendersky at Gramercy Park. Could have gone somewhere bigger, but he’s the most amazing fit that it’s not even funny. He and I are best friends now.

David on left.  Jason Gruich (Cop Cam) on right.

As for agents (Verve), I had a general with a studio exec and he sent that (plus another script he loved that I wrote) to a coordinator there and they flipped. My manager wanted me repped there too, but the exec beat him to it. Lol. Neither of us asked him to. A month later I had a meeting at Verve’s offices and walked out repped.

Carson: So your manager and agent got together and started sending it around to production houses and/or directors?  Is that how the package came together?

David: So I was an Austin Film Fest semi-finalist in 2021 for a pilot and met a finance exec from CAA at a roundtable. I was the only person she reached out to after the fest, but she had initially passed on even reading Clementine and read something else instead (she liked that other concept more). But after I got a 9 on the BL website, she read Clementine and wanted to package it asap. I wasn’t repped with her, she just wanted to take it out. She and my manager took it out the first week of Jan 2022 and that Friday we got an offer for an option. So it actually got picked up BEFORE I officially got agents. My agents came in June, and got me a ton of pitch meetings and more generals. They also rep the company that optioned it. That CAA exec is now an exec at Beck/Woods.

Fun fact. We met our director because he read it off the official annual Black List. He’s Colombian and it really connected with him — he had his reps (ironically CAA) send a really emotional letter to the prod/co. He’s attached to a bunch of cool stuff but we sense that this is like his passion project. And we’re extremely lucky he came to us after we’d already met a bunch of directors.

Carson: You wrote a lot of scripts before Clementine.  Why do you think Clementine was the script that broke you through? What was your mindset when writing Clementine compared to your mindset when you first started writing scripts?

David: Well, the idea hit me like a truck while I was reading a different script, and I started writing immediately, like within an hour. I think there are different ways to hook someone; outside of concept, it can also be presentation and intent. In this case, this isn’t a high concept, but there aren’t a lot of movies that take place real-time and won’t allow you to breathe, and for me and people I’ve met, that was an X-factor.

By the end of that day I had the first act written. The whole script was done in a week. No outline. Haha. What you read is actually the second draft, and it hasn’t changed since 2021. No one has wanted to change anything.

As for what’s different between this and other scripts of mine, while I’m not even sure if it’s my best script, I think it’s the least deniable, if that makes sense. Sometimes in movies like this I think it’s considered great when the protagonist doesn’t have a choice. We love to see what kind of choices characters make, but sometimes it’s more entertaining when the character is faced with “Do this your daughter dies. Period.” I think it has the most clarity and urgency which really does a lot here. I was constantly surprised as the story came to me and I think that comes through.

For example (spoiler) while writing the script, I had no intention of bringing Clementine back after she dies. I was prepared to make it Sicaria’s story. I think that’s what makes it feel so real. While writing it, I literally didn’t think she’d come back.

Carson: Any advice you’d give aspiring writers for getting representation or getting on the Official Black List?

David: When you reach a level where you’re consistently getting little to no notes, and people are flipping for it, send it everywhere that seems legit, as much as humanly possible. And when people inevitably want to meet you, being fun and pleasant go a loooong way. Those are the things that make people wanna be your friend and/or see you succeed: a great script written by a dope person.

Carson: Couldn’t agree more with that answer.  Okay, so what’s next for you?

David: It’s a character-driven sci-fi/drama, vastly different from Clementine, called “Intergalactic.” After Orion’s Belt is destroyed in the night sky, an emotionally unstable teenager attempts to prove to a lonesome astronomer that the event was caused by his ability to move objects in outer space.

Carson: Well I’m rooting for you and I’m sure everyone else here is as well.  Okay, on to the original review from the newsletter!

******************************

I’m not going to pretend like I haven’t been nervous to review this script. David’s such a cool positive guy that I got scared! I didn’t want to rain on his achievement with a bad review should I not enjoy Clementine.

But it’s almost the end of the year and I have to write up my Black List re-ranking post soon which meant I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I had to read Clementine and I had to hope, with all hope, that I loved it. Cause I want David to go far in this business.

We meet 25 year old Clementine as she robs a Pawn Shop with her buddy Disco, and another dude. What we’re going to find out soon is that Clementine owes a nasty guy named Martin 100 grand because she stole from him to get her daughter, Sandy, heart-saving surgery. Sandy is a diabetic and suffers from a lot of health issues as a result.

But the pawn shop robbery goes sideways and Disco and Jake are 86’d. Clementine gets away, but not with the money. It doesn’t take long for Martin to call her and tell her what she already knows. That was her last shot. Now she and her kid are dead meat.

Clementine races home to get Sandy before Martin does and barely beats out Martin’s head assassin, a ruthless scar-faced female killer named Sicaria. Clementine hurries Sandy off to an abandoned warehouse but you knew it wasn’t going to be long before Sicaria found her (big spoilers follow).

Clementine fights Sicaria with everything she’s got but Sicaria is strong and kills Clementine. That’s right. She kills her! Now, we stay with Sicaria, who decides to bring Sandy back to Martin. Afterward, she gets a strange call from her personal cleaner. The cleaner says there’s no female dead body at the warehouse.

Guess who’s coming to dinner, Sicaria. The second time around, Clementine wins. But her daughter is still with Martin. This means Clementine is going to have to go into the belly of the most well-guarded beast in all the city to get Sandy back. Luckily, she’s got the AK-47 Sicaria left behind to help her. Will she succeed? With this script, I can honestly tell you, you’ll never guess.

(Big spoilers follow)

So the scenario I was most afraid of was that the script was going to hover inside of that “not for me” “worth the read” middle ground and I would be put in this position of saying it was “worth the read” even though in my heart it was “wasn’t for me” and you guys would all pick up on it and you would say, “Carson, you’re just giving this a worth the read cause you know David and you wouldn’t give that score if it was a random writer.”

Well here’s some great news: WE DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT THAT.

Cause this script was awesome.

I’m not just saying that. It was really freaking awesome. I’m talking, it will definitely finish in the Top 5 of my Black List Re-Ranking post.

The script is just freaking RELENTLESS.

Something I’m always telling writers is to make things as difficult as possible on your protagonist. Well, David decided that that wasn’t enough. He needed to multiply the words “hard as possible” by a billion.

I can’t remember the last time a script made its hero work so hard. Wow.

I mean, at one point, we kill her! How much harder on your hero does it get??

The opening is a bit overwritten. I didn’t like when David juiced up his prose to sort of break the fourth wall at times. But it was a heart-stopping opening sequence nonetheless. I fucking felt like I was IN THAT PAWN SHOP. Wow. And I’m swearing because it was that intense.

You know what this script made me think of? Remember that script, “Mother,” that went on to star J. Lo on Netflix? There were so many things wrong with that script. This script fixes all of that. This should’ve been the script they picked. Cause Clementine is Mother of the Century with what she has to go through.

A lot of times I’ll give an “impressive” and writers will ask me why this script got an impressive as opposed to other scripts. That answer is easy as pie with “Clementine.” Everything in this script moves like lightning and is as intense as an African safari with no jeeps. But two moments stuck out in particular.

The first is when Clementine is “killed.” I thought she was really dead. And kudos to David for not doing the age-old “psyche out” where she jumps back up at the last second and keeps fighting. No, David commits so hard to the death of the main character that we then follow Sicaria for the next 15 minutes! This made Clementine’s reemergence a gangster twist that blew the doors off my reading Tahoe.
So that was the first one.

The second one was the ending. The ending in this movie is freaking insane! Cause David stuck to that rule of “make things as hard on the hero as possible” and he made sure that, because it was the climax, he made it even harder.

I had no idea what was going to happen. I loved how Clementine grabbed Martin’s son. Because, usually, in any other script, this is a cheap move. But here, it makes total sense. You jacked my kid. I’m jacking yours. You made up these rules. Not me. So it worked perfectly.

But even beyond that, it added an extra variable to the ending where you’re not just asking, “Will Clementine and Sandy get away?” You’re wondering what’s going to happen to this other kid. In any other script, I would’ve known he was safe. But in this script, a woman tried to kill another child. And our main character died for a while! This is exactly where you want your reader. You want them having no idea what you’re going to do and that’s exactly where David had me.

So then, Clementine clears Martin’s home fence with her car, somehow, impossibly, getting past all his guards and him, AND THEN A COP STOPS HER!!! It’s like, “David! You’re killing me, man!” I so wanted her to escape but now this cop stops her. Martin’s son is trying to get out of the car. The cop is threatening to shoot anyone who gets out of the car. Martin’s men are coming from behind. They’re going to catch up to Clementine if she doesn’t find a way out of this cop situation. Then ANOTHER COP comes up and blocks her car….

I mean… dude. David. You win. You – freaking -win. That was some great writing there. This is going to be an awesome movie. I’m so proud of David. GOOD JOB!!!! And now you can read it too. I guarantee you’ll agree with me. :)

Script link: Clementine

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

What I learned: When it comes to backstory/exposition, avoid your hero dishing out their own backstory. Instead, look to have other characters tell your character their backstory. I know that sounds backward, but I’m telling you, it works a million times better. So here, when Clementine first calls Martin to plead for mercy, she starts to talk about her daughter. But, instead of David having her finish, he has Martin give Clementine her own backstory. Clementine (crying): “My… daughter’s—“ Martin: I know your daughter’s sick to hell. I know about the divorce you can’t handle. Your papers. I have your shit memorized.” We get some quick backstory there about Clementine and we don’t realize it at all because it comes from another character. There were tons of other little screenwriting ninja star throws that hit their mark like this. David hasn’t just been reading Scriptshadow. He’s been taking notes!

This juicy high-concept show starring Mahershala Ali will be Hulu’s next big buzzy “whodunnit.”

Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Premise: A once successful author does the unthinkable and steals a former student’s book idea after he learns of the student’s death. But after the book becomes a #1 bestseller, someone on social media begins taunting him, telling him he knows what he did.
About: Today’s author, Jean Hanff Korelitz, originally wanted to be a literary novelist, writing “important” and “thoughtful” character-driven stories. Until she realized the reality of her voice as a writer: SHE LOVED PLOT. Thus was born, “The Plot,” a book she said was the perfect writing experience. It shot out of her, uninterrupted, in six months during the pandemic. The sexy concept was quickly picked up by Hulu to turn into a series, which will star Academy Award winner, Mahershala Ali.
Writer: Jean Hanff Korelitz
Details:350 pages

Since we’re talking about the power of concept today – coming up with that big juicy movie idea – I wanted to remind you guys that I do a “Power Pack” logline consultation for 75 bucks. You send me 5 loglines. I give you analysis, rate them on a 1-10 scale (don’t write a script that gets less than a 7!) I rewrite each logline, and I rank them from best to worst. This is great for writers trying to figure out what script to write next.

I also do a la cart logline analysis. It’s $25. Use my expertise of having been pitched over 20,000 loglines to know if your idea is truly worth writing. Just e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Okay, on to today’s review. We’re going to talk about a lesser-known sub-genre in the storytelling universe called the “walls are closing in” narrative. Now, the “walls are closing in” narrative has a couple of advantages and one distinct disadvantage.

What it offers is this impending feeling of doom as the truth begins to close in on our hero. You’ll see this in movies where the main character has killed someone and the cops come sniffing around. As the story goes on, we can almost physically feel all avenues of escape shrinking. The walls come from around, above, and below, squeeeeeeezing until they’ve entrapped our protagonist.

It’s a fun narrative because we’re hoping that the protagonist somehow figures out a way to escape.

But there’s a second advantage to these movies that not a lot of writers are aware of. Which is that the main characters are a lot more interesting than your average main character. They’ve obviously done something bad in order to be placed in such a situation. That life-changing mistake creates this internal battle that the character must fight off throughout the story.  You know you’ve written good characters when the story stops and we still want to watch those characters.  The main reason we’ll want to do this is because they’re going through some major internal struggle, which is exactly what the “walls are closing in” narrative provides.

But that leads us to the downside of these narratives, which is that the characters leading them are passive. Often times, with “walls are closing in” narratives, the main character is waiting around. They’re hoping they don’t get caught. At best, the characters are running around, defensively protecting themselves from being discovered.

As you may know, the best stories are almost always stories where the main character is active. He’s going after something. Let’s see how The Plot addresses this.

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a prodigy. His book, “The Invention of Wonder” was critically acclaimed and became a New York Times best-seller. But it’s been a decade and, two books later, Bonner is seen as an also-ran, one of many famed authors who fell off a cliff.

It’s gotten so bad that Jacob was forced to accept a teaching position at a writer’s summit in a small college called Ripley. Dozens of writers paid to come and learn writing from real authors for a month and then went off and tried to apply their newfound knowledge to their own novels.

While there, Jacob meets the most pompous writer ever, a handsome kid named Evan Parker, who has the gall to tell Jacob that he doesn’t need any writing help. He already knows he’s a great writer. He just needs contacts for when he finishes his book, a book, he claims, that will be one of the best books ever.

Jacob internally laughs this off but then, in a private meeting after class, he asks Evan to tell him about the book and Evan does. Jacob is shocked to learn, as Evan goes through the plot, that it, indeed, will be one of the best books ever written. There’s no hesitation in that analysis. The story, which includes a whopper of a twist, is *that* good.

The summit ends, everyone goes their separate ways, and three years later, out of curiosity, Jacob looks up Evan Parker. He’s confused why he hasn’t seen Evan’s book get published. As it turns out, Evan is dead. He died of an overdose.

It doesn’t take Jacob long to decide what he’s going to do. He’s going to write Evan’s book. And he does. Cut to three years later and Jacob is back on top of the publishing world. But “Crib’s” success dwarfs anything he experienced with The Invention of Wonder. Even Oprah wants to interview him.

Evan even gets a wife out of it! A producer on a Seattle radio show named Anna first falls in love with the book, then with the man who wrote it. And Evan is living every writer’s dream. Until one day, on his website, someone leaves a comment: “You are a thief.” From that point on, Jacob’s dream becomes a nightmare.

Not because anyone is trying to kill him. Because now every minute of Jacob’s life is a minute lived in fear. Will today be the day he’s exposed? At first, the comments come every couple of months. But the mystery person gets on Twitter and starts telling anyone who will listen, that Jacob stole “Crib.”

It gets to the point where the publisher finds out and now they want to know what’s up. Jacob, of course, tells them it’s a lie. But it’s getting bad enough that he can’t just wait around anymore. So Jacob heads back to Ripley College, the area where Evan Parker lived, to see if he can learn anything about who Evan was close with, in the hopes of finding the troll. What he learns is that he already knows the answers to his questions. Because the answers are written in his book.

“The Plot” is a great example of how to come up with a low-key high-concept idea. When you think of high concept, you usually think of something involving dinosaurs, time travel, switching faces. But there’s this whole other range of options below the high-profile versions of high concept that can give you a more affordable great idea.

Some low-key high concept movies that come to mind are Double Jeopardy, Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Groundhog Day, Memento, Limitless, and Yesterday.

A writer who steals a concept from a dead writer only to learn, after his outsized success, that someone knows his secret, is indeed, a juicy setup for a movie (or, these days, a show) that isn’t going to break the bank. Which is why everyone on this site should familiarize themselves with low-key high-concept. Still, to this day, it’s one of the best ways to skip the Hollywood line.

And like I said at the outset, the idea lends itself to a fun “walls closing in” narrative, which I think the writer executes well. That first message Jacob gets (“You are a thief”) reminded me of that famous 90s horror thriller line: “I know what you did last summer.” I was scared for Jacob. Because it’s a unique threat in that there’s nothing you can do about it. At least not yet. All you can do is wait and hope that it somehow goes away, even though you know it won’t.

But what impressed me about The Plot is the thing that I keep telling every writer to do. Find a familiar concept/format/genre/plot and put a spin on it. The Plot is a “whodunnit”….. EXCEPT THERE’S NO MURDER. That’s what makes it unique. Once Jacob decides to do something about this troll, he becomes an investigator. He travels to Evan’s old town to learn about him and, hopefully, figure out who’s sending him these messages.

By the way, that’s how the book handles the “walls are closing in” weakness. It gives its main character a goal of finding out who’s posting these comments. That makes him active. So he’s not standing around the whole show.

Ironically, it isn’t the plot that puts this book on top. It’s the thing that the author claims to be least interested in: character. Because what this story is really about is the struggle of being a fraud. It’s a lot like “Yesterday” in that sense. You have everything you’ve ever wanted. But do you really have it if you ripped off the idea from someone else?

And that’s where The Plot becomes its most interesting, at least for fellow writers. Because it gets into a nuanced discussion about what constitutes “stealing.” Jacob wrote every word of this book. He didn’t use a single line of Evan’s work. So did he really steal? Evan had this plot. And he had this amazing twist. But Jacob wrote it. And that’s what he’s holding onto to keep his sanity. He keeps reminding himself that he wrote everything. But is he just doing that to feel better about what he’s done?

The big weakness in the book is the excerpts from the novel, “Crib,” that Jacob wrote. It’s supposed to be this amazing novel (it basically follows a toxic mother-daughter relationship) but nothing in Crib is as good as anything in the novel we’re reading, “The Plot.”

With that said, “Crib” starts to get juicier towards the end when we realize that the characters in “Crib” were Evan’s mother and sister. Now, if someone tells the world what happened to Evan’s mother and sister, it will clearly expose Jacob as having stolen the story from someone else.

I’m back and forth on whether this should be a series or a movie. Ideally, it would be something between the two. That’s always been the problem with novel adaptations. They’re always too big to be a movie and too small to be a TV show. So if you’re going to make a TV show, you need really good writers who can expand on the detail within the novel to keep the story moving during episodes 3, 4, and 5, where a lot of these bad 1-season TV shows die out.

But I think it’s going to work. Ali is great casting because he looks trustworthy. And I could see him depending on that to gain trust from family, friends, fans. Whereas, internally, he’s the biggest fraud in the world, something you’re typically not expecting with that actor. Remember everyone, one of the best ways to create great character is to make what’s happening inside of them and outside of them as opposite as possible. Success, fame, recognition outside. Shame, fear, feel like a fraud inside. That’s what’s going to make this show work.

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

What I learned: This is a major spoiler WIL. You’ve been warned. Whoever your “killer” is needs to be treated like every other character throughout the novel/script. Anna, Jacob’s wife, is treated so oddly throughout this story. She’s never around. Whenever she is around, she’s a wallflower. Whenever she talks, she’s very non-specific, vague. Meanwhile, every other character gets a super-detailed life. Anna is treated so differently that we know something is up with her. And, of course, she turns out to be Evan’s sister. She’s the one who’s been threatening him. Whenever you have a twist ending, you want to put yourself in the reader’s shoes and ask, “Who would they think the killer is?” Then make sure, whoever they’d think it is, NOT TO MAKE THAT CHARACTER THE KILLER. Not enough writers realistically evaluate readers when they do this.

What I learned 2: What you want to do instead is let Anna (or whoever your version of Anna is) be the disco ball. She’s the pretty shiny thing we’re all looking at over here so you can shock us at the end with that guy/gal we weren’t expecting at all.

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.

John Wick meets… National Lampoon’s Vacation

Genre: Comedy/Family
Premise: A former top assassin living incognito as a suburban dad must take his unsuspecting family on the run when his past catches up to him.
About: Today’s writer wrote on the TV show, Scream. He’s been a head writer on two other shows. This script not only finished on last year’s Black List, but was also purchased by financing titan, Skydance, the home of such movies as Mission Impossible, Tomorrow War, and Top Gun: Maverick.
Writer: David Coggeshall
Details: 107 pages

Ruffalo for Dan?

I saw on David Coggeshall’s Twitter that when he sent this script to his agents, they dropped him. The script would then go on to sell and make the Black List.

What does this mean, exactly?

Does it mean that, as is often quoted in Hollywood, “nobody knows anything?” Or is there a more complex explanation, some “inside baseball” reason that the common man doesn’t understand?

It’s always interesting to see a script that was rejected then flourish. This happened famously recently with Squid Game. When the Squid Game writer originally pitched that script, executives said it was too dark, that audiences wanted something lighter.

And you know what? They may have been right. Maybe that show wasn’t meant to be made ten years ago.

Now when it comes to The Family Plan, I have no idea the specific reason for why his agents dumped him for it. But I do know this. Unless your agents are specifically comedy agents, you’re going to have a tough time when you send them a comedy script.

Comedy is so divisive. What you think is hilarious I might think is awful, and vice versa. So I can see a non-comedy agent receiving this script, not laughing cause it’s not his type of humor, and saying, “Okay, that’s it. I’m done.”

Another angle to this story is that it’s a family comedy. They say agents just want to make money. That’s true to an extent. But what they *really want* is to be a part of the cool club. They want to represent the hot new “voicy” writer. The Safdie Brothers. Jordan Peele. Whoever the next Diablo Cody is. Representing cool writers is currency in this town.

Agents don’t prance around Nobu talking up their latest family comedy writer. I’m not saying the agents were right to reject this writer. I’m just trying to tell you how the industry thinks, and therefore how this might’ve happened.

And with that, let’s get to the review!

30-something dad-bod Buffalo used-car salesman Dan Mitchell is living a mundane life. He’s got the wife, two children (Nina, 17, and Kyle 14), and a brand new baby. Dan is stuck in the doldrums of suburban hell…….. and he ABSOLUTELY LOVES IT. This is Dan’s dream. Which may sound like a strange dream. But you’re about to find out why.

One day while at the supermarket (carrying his 10-month old son in a baby Bjorn) a tattooed man attacks Dan! Milquetoast Dan all of a sudden turns into Murderer’s Row Dan, and decimates the guy with the precision of Jean-Claude Van Damme in his prime.

Dan, needing to escape the many attempts on his life that are about to begin, rushes home and tells his family it’s time to go on a vacation… to Vegas! His wife, Rachel, is confused. “Um, okay,” she says. “Let’s start planning.” No, NOW, Dan says. He wants to leave IN TWO MINUTES. Everybody jumps in the car, unclear why dad has all of a sudden turned into a psycho, and off they go.

Along the way they stop at Northwestern, as that’s the college Nina wants to go to. That turns out to be a mistake because, while taking the campus tour, Dan is attacked! Dan manages to not only defeat his attackers, but somehow do it without anyone noticing. He grabs his daughter after the tour and says, “Okay, time to get back on the road!”

When they finally get to Vegas, Dan is getting attacked so much that he can no longer keep his secret. So he sits the family down and explains that he used to be an assassin for some really bad people. Not on purpose! He clarifies. He thought he was assassinating dictators. Turns out he was just a killer-for-hire. And now his old boss has finally found him, and wants to clean up his loose end, which includes Dan… and his entire family!

When it comes to comedy, I better laugh in the first couple of pages. And lo and behold, I did get a big laugh early on…

Readers want to know they’re in good hands. They want to know that the writer knows his story, knows the language of screenwriting, knows how to hit a joke or hit a plot beat or set up a character. When I see these sorts of things executed well early on, I know I’m in good hands. After that, I can just relax. Which is what happened here.

The script is at its best in these early scenes. Cause it’s not just Dan fighting off bad guys. He’s having to do so without getting caught. It provides an extra level of difficulty to the fighting that gives the scenes a little extra oomph.

Once we’re on the road for a while, the script loses something and I’m not sure what it was. I think when it comes to any of these big concepts, you want your set pieces to have that clever “this could only happen in this movie” quality to them. Fending off bad guys on a college campus felt too generic to me.

I remember in the original National Lampoon’s Vacation, there was this scene where they visit their “Middle America” cousins and the comedy leaned heavily into the “white trash” and “hick” jokes, which felt organic. All families have those cousins who live in the middle of nowhere and live a totally different lifestyle than you. And there’s comedy to be found in those differences.

I wanted more of that “unique to this concept” type of scenes.

By the way, for those of you who don’t understand what the midpoint shift is, The Family Plan executes a perfect one.

The midpoint shift (which happens at….. the midpoint) changes the movie in some way so that the second half is different from the first half. The first half of The Family Plan, Dan keeps his secret identity to himself. At the midpoint, he tells his family that he’s a former assassin. So the second half of the movie now has a different tenor – he can fight out in the open with his family instead of it being a secret.

I went back and forth on this one. It started out strong. The middle gets a bit repetitive. I would’ve preferred two really memorable set pieces. But, overall, it’s a fun script, and a good representation of what a family comedy should look like.

Script link: The Family Plan

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

What I learned: When the time comes to get an agent, it is VERY important that you are on the same page as them. Because what often happens is, when you have a hot script and agents are fighting to represent you, they just want the shiny new toy. They don’t care if they like the script or not because it’s hot enough that they can use the heat to send it out and hopefully build a package around it. However, the second that script dies and you send them the next script, if they never got your writing in the first place, they’re probably not going to send it out. So, when you’re talking to agents to potentially represent you, pay attention to if they genuinely like your writing. Ask them, “What did you like about the script?” “What did you like about the writing?” Not in a combative way. Just to see if they genuinely like your writing. — I recently had to beg a writer not to sign with an agent. He let me see their e-mail discourse and this woman – a very successful agent by the way – was openly saying she wasn’t a fan of the script but she thought maybe she could send it to some people. If that’s how an agent is starting out their relationship with you, I don’t care how big they are. I promise you you will have issues with them the second you send them your next script.

Genre: Action-Comedy
Premise: After a Hollywood assistant is publicly fired for admitting while on a conference call that he’d love to kill his boss, he finds his boss dead in the office the next morning and goes on the lam to figure out the real culprit, all while being hunted by his boss’s assassin.
About: Lillian Yu graduated from Harvard, wrote for the prestigious Harvard Crimson, and sold her first spec, Singles Day, back in 2018, to New Line. She’s since worked as a staff writer on TV shows, Powerless and Warrior. This latest script of hers finished in the top 5 on last year’s Black List. This script may or may not be written due to Lillian’s direct experiences with Scott Rudin. I have no info on whether that’s the case. All I know is that the second page of the script says, simply, “F*uck you, Scott.”
Writer: Lillian Yu
Details: 100 pages

Parasite actress Park So-Dam for Chelsea?

By this point, you’ve all heard the famous Hollywood saying: “Nobody knows anything.”

More specifically, nobody knows what movie ideas are going to work and what movie ideas are going to fail.

That’s because, although the formula – give them something the same but different – is agreed-upon by everyone, nobody can identify what the percentages of “same” and “different” in that equation are.

This is why you hear so many people say, “That idea is too much like so and so movie.” And for the next idea you’ll hear, “That idea is way too weird.” Nobody can agree on how much of “the same” and how much of “different” is required for a magical winning concept.

Today’s concept puts that quandary to the test. This definitely feels like familiar territory. A couple of mis-matched people are running from someone who’s trying to kill them, carrying, in their possession, a macguffin USB drive, that potentially has the answers they need to achieve their goal.

The “different” part is that, instead of this taking place in Budapest, like a Mission Impossible movie, or even New York City, here in the states, it’s taking place in Hollywood. So that becomes the big question. Is throwing in the Hollywood part enough to make this idea fresh and exciting? Or is it still one of thousands of the exact same types of scripts written in this space?

I suspect the answer will depend on the individual.

Our script follows producing assistant, and 28 year old Ugandan, Teddy Adebayo. Teddy works for a really terrible producer named Frank who throws things at him, makes him kill poor little squirrels because he doesn’t like the sound they make when running on the roof, and routinely laughs at him for being so stupid.

One day, when Teddy is fed up with Frank and not really paying attention to what he’s doing as he patches a bunch of people into a teleconference in the conference room, he confesses to his best friend and fellow assistant, Chelsea Hamamura, that he would kill Frank if he could. Little did he know he was broadcasting on the teleconference when he said this. So Teddy is immediately fired.

That weekend, when Teddy goes in to return his company keys and collect his final paycheck, he finds Frank stabbed to death in his office…. WITH TEDDY’S LETTER OPENER! No sooner does this happen than Chelsea appears, who congratulates Teddy on finally doing the deed. Teddy insists he’s innocent. Only seconds later, a masked man shows up to make sure Frank is dead, forcing Teddy and Chelsea to hide.

While observing the man, Chelsea notices that his gun is cop-issued, which means they can’t go to the cops with this! Teddy will have to prove his innocence some other way. He remembers a “secret” project Frank was working on that may have answers and locates a thumb drive that may have that project’s script on it. They drive off in a James Bond stunt car, with the masked man in pursuit.

Chelsea heads to the SoHo House to confront Paul Rudd, who’s had a two year feud with Frank. While she gives Rudd the business, the masked man appears and starts shooting up the SoHo House. Luckily, KEANU REEVES is there taking a meeting and tackles the guy, allowing Chelsea and Teddy to slip away.

The two eventually end up at Elon Musks’ house (or an Elon stand-in) and then Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s house. It’s a celebrity cameo party. Each celebrity gets them a little closer to their answer. But will it be enough to clear Teddy’s name? Or is he getting screwed one last time by the boss from hell, whose parting gift is sending him to prison for life?

This is the kind of script I was just talking about yesterday as one of the ways spec screenwriters can still get a theatrical release. Write an action-comedy. And to the writer’s credit, this is an action-comedy concept I haven’t quite seen before – an action comedy built around Hollywood. To that end, I guess you can say it checks the “same but different” box.

With that said, something wasn’t working for me. I tried to figure out what it was. The script had plenty of the fun outrageous moments you want from a movie like this. For example, at one point, they go to The Rock’s house for help, which reminded me of the guys in The Hangover going to Mike Tyson’s house.

But then it hit me. The central pairing in this movie isn’t interesting. And it’s not interesting because it’s not easily definable. Last Wednesday I reviewed a buddy comedy called “Drive Away Dykes,” and in that one, the relationship was easily definable. One woman was the most overtly sexual lesbian on the planet. The other was the most conservative lesbian on the planet. They fit together because they were so clearly on two different ends of the spectrum.

There isn’t enough of a difference between these two. For starters, they’re both assistants. So right away, they kind of feel the same. Sure, Chelsea is brave and Teddy isn’t. But these aren’t their defining traits, like the fact that the woman in Drive Away Dyke was a slut and the other was a prude. Here, the fact that one character is brave and one isn’t just seems to be a convenience thrown in there to get some laughs.

The dynamic is off as well.

The script introduces Chelsea first.

Then it introduces Teddy. Yet Teddy, in our first 10 pages, is the hero. He’s the one we’re focusing on. Chelsea is barely mentioned.

But then, as soon as they go on the run, Chelsea takes charge. She’s the one making all the decisions. So it’s apparently her movie, which I guess is why she was introduced first (usually, the character you introduce first is the hero).

But it’s super confusing because all the stakes are attached to Teddy. Not Chelsea. Chelsea’s the comic relief. Except she’s also the hero??

I didn’t know what was going on there.

Also, I want to take a second to vent about something. Because I’m seeing this in more and more scripts.

So, this is how Chelsea is introduced: “We WEAVE THROUGH a threadbare office: an assistant, CHELSEA HAMAMURA (mid-20s, half-Japanese, ASD that manifests as droll), orders office supplies on an Amazon-like e-commerce site named Everest while an INTERN runs from the kitchen with mugs of coffee in hand.”

You may notice that there is very little description of what Chelsea actually looks like. Why does this matter? Well, later, we’re told, rather vaguely, that Teddy is infatuated with Chelsea. And through very minor clues here and there, we learn that she’s really freaking hot. Which is a big reason why Teddy likes her so much.

But for some reason, all writers are terrified to label female characters as attractive now because people on Twitter occasionally highlight these descriptions and say, “Typical male writing. Only focuses on how the girl looks.” And female writers don’t want to perpetuate these dated practices so they don’t tell you either. So now we get these very vague descriptions and the reader is just supposed to figure out on their own if someone is good-looking or not.

While there are situations where a characters’ looks don’t matter, it does matter if you have a love story. A movie about a person who is attracted to a really ugly individual, for example, is a completely different movie than one where they’re attracted to a beautiful individual. I guess this is a long way of saying, don’t listen to all these Twitter losers. Tell us what your character looks like. Don’t be afraid. There are ways to convey a person’s attractiveness tastefully. And you should do so so you don’t leave all your readers confused as hell.

If you decide to keep things vague to win Twitter points, you run the risk of what happened to me in this script. Which was, halfway through, I realized that Chelsea was gorgeous and Teddy was in love with her. That means I missed 40-some pages of potential subtext and sexual chemistry because I didn’t know who was attractive and who was attracted. None of that was explained clearly.

I wish I could say I liked this but it just had too many problems.

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

What I learned: In a Harvard interview back in 2018, Lillian Yu gave two pieces of advice. “First, work as an assistant. Get the lay of the land, and learn the players. See how this weird system works. I can’t tell you the number of seasoned writer-friends who have asked me, a lowly baby writer, for advice on this kind of thing. My only leg up is knowing the industry—who the good agents are, which producers won’t steal your idea, which executive is looking to buy a project about a deaf Tibetan Mastiff, etc. Second piece of advice: work in development. Working as a development exec was basically my grad school in screenwriting. You get to peek behind the curtain and see how everything works from the buyer’s side—what executives look for in a pitch, the note behind the note, meeting etiquette, standard story structure, etc. This was the best investment of my time I could have made, and I actually got paid to do it.”