A while back, I wrote an article about surprise box office hits and what we as screenwriters can learn from them. I love trying to figure out why some movies succeed and others fail, and especially how those successes and failures relate to screenwriting, so I thought it would be fun to tackle a new batch of films and see if we couldn’t gleam a few lessons from them. Now I’ll reiterate the obvious. Directing and marketing and star power are huge factors in why movies do well at the box office. But it all starts with the screenplay. Every trailer, every poster, every marketing campaign, every great acting performance – all of those things stem from the screenplay. It’s with that spirit that I bring you my second installment of five surprise hits and what we can learn from them as screenwriters.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Rough Projected Gross: 45-50 mil
Actual Gross: 95 mil
Written by: Aaron Sorkin
What We Can Learn: I’ll give you the first trick to getting your movie to overperform. Cast Jesse Eisenberg. No really. If you remember, he was in one of the films from the last list (Zombieland). But seriously, the success of The Social Network was one of the bigger surprises of 2010. I remember leading up to the film’s release a lot of nervous people close to the project wondering how a dark look at a shiny new Internet tool was going to play to the masses. Who the hell in Omaha Nebraska wants to watch a 20-year-old kid become a billionaire and whine about it? Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. But that’s the thing. That’s the exact reason why people showed up.
Irony.
Don’t believe me? I want you to go to any piece of marketing material you can find for The Social Network. Find me one shot or one video clip of the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, smiling. You can’t can you? That’s because there isn’t one. The Social Network is about a young man who made 50 billion dollars and is unhappy. That doesn’t make sense. Rich people are supposed to have it all. The cars, the houses, the vacations. So when we see the richest 20 something in the world looking miserable, there’s a mystery there that we want answered. And let’s not forget that this is a man who created a network of 500 million “friends,” who’s himself friendless. So we have two high level uses of irony in play here, and in both cases, they’re used to create a compelling dynamic main character. That’s important to remember. You come to The Social Network to see the person, not to be wowed by the plot. The Social Network, as a film, actually has a funky narrative structure. It’s not always easy to follow and it doesn’t reward you in the same way a traditionally structured movie would. But you watch because the main character is so interesting. So before you go out and you write your next screenplay, try to come up with the most intriguing main character you can. Whether you use irony or not is up to you but you better find a way to make him as interesting as possible.
BRIDESMAIDS
Rough Projected Gross: 45-55 million
Actual Gross: 167 million
Writers: Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig
What We Can Learn: Talk about a movie that came out of nowhere. I still remember when Deadline Hollywood was reporting that this thing would make 13 bucks on opening weekend. The argument was that nobody wanted to leave the safety of their homes to watch women burp and fart. They were wrong. Audiences were begging this movie to give them as many noises from as many orifices as possible. The thing is, this film just as easily could have disappeared into one of those orifices. I mean it had no real stars. It didn’t even have a hook. At least with The Hangover, there was a neat concept driving the story. This is just a bunch of bridesmaids, which last time I checked you could find every other hour on E!. So why did it work? I think I know. And it shouldn’t be that shocking. It’s the characters. But unlike The Social Network, where it was more about creating one giant captivating character, the feat in Bridesmaids was how much effort they put into all the characters. Normally, in these types of movies, the main character is pretty well defined. That’s what the screenwriting books drum into your head. Make sure your main character rocks. But most books stop there. When it comes to the secondary characters, they could care less. But what I’ve found is that you can usually separate the wheat from the chaffe by how much effort a writer puts into their secondary characters. That’s where the real work comes in. It’s so easy to just give a secondary character a minor quirk and then move on. It’s hard to sit down and spend just as much time trying to figure them out as you would a protagonist. However, by doing that extra work, your script always shines brighter. That’s what Bridesmaids got right. Every character here was extensively thought through. Kristin Wigg’s character was the unlucky in love girl who always found herself with the wrong man. Maya Rudolph’s character was the stoic steady-as-a-rock best friend. Rose Byrne’s character was the bitter sad stepmom trying to hide behind a false smile. Melissa McCarthy’s character was the crazy happy go lucky overly optimistic even when she has no reason to be character. I read tons of comedies where the drop-off after the main character is so steep, it’s as if the writer just gave up in hopes that some hilarious comedian would be cast and make the role funny. But as you know, there’s nothing uglier than a comedian in a thinly written role trying to do a song and a dance to make up for how undefined the character is. If you don’t believe me, go watch Night At The Roxbury.
THE KING’S SPEECH
Rough Projected Gross: 25-45 million
Actual Gross: 135 million
Writer: David Seidler
What We Can Learn: Raise your hand if you predicted before The King’s Speech came out that the movie would gross over 100 million dollars. Anyone? Anyone? To be honest, I’m surprised that all of these movies did so well. But a stuffy British costume drama rocking the box office was particularly surprising. People say the adult drama is dead, but you wouldn’t know it if you counted the box office receipts from 2010. So then what is it that made this film such a surprise success? Well, I’ve talked about it before. The King’s Speech utilizes two of the most time-tested and well-worn story devices out there. The first is the underdog. Stories always work when they have a good underdog in the lead role. You can sell an underdog story to anybody – doesn’t matter if they’re 7 or 77, especially if it’s true. Seeing and enjoying people overcome adversity is in our moviegoing DNA. The other device is the crazy mentor. I use the word “crazy” loosely, but people are just really familiar with that kind of character and love seeing them operate. But I think The King’s Speech took it one step further and added – yes, there’s that word again – irony. In this case, the situation allowed a nobody to stand up and demand things from the King of England. There’s just something funny and ironic about a peasant ordering around a King. Anyway, the combination of these two well tested tools are what made a stuffy period piece one of the sexier box office hits of the year. Yes I just used the word “sexy” in conjunction with The King’s Speech.
BLACK SWAN
Rough Projected Gross: 20-30 million
Actual Gross: 110 million
Writer: Mark Heyman
What We Can Learn: This is a great movie to study for today’s purposes because every movie Darren Aronofsky had made up until this point had been a box office dud. His biggest film, The Wrestler, made only $26 million. So there was really no reason to believe Black Swan would do any better. In fact, with our subject matter dressed snugly in a leotard, it can be argued that this movie would’ve been lucky to hit the $10 million mark. So then what was the difference? Why did this one succeed when all the others failed? You’re lucky you tuned in into Scriptshadow today because I’m going to tell you. Whereas before, Aronofsky chose stories with broad unclear narratives (Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain, even The Wrestler had a bumpy throughline), Black Swan had one of the cleanest narratives of the year. The main character has the crystal clear goal of maintaining the lead actress role in her play until opening-night. Nipping at her scuffed heels is her evil understudy. How do you get cleaner than “Get to the end of the maze before the villain defeats you.” That doesn’t mean there weren’t complex aspects to the story. We still got some trippy dream sequences and plenty of hallucinations. However, the objective was never in question. The stakes were never in question. We understood every story point clearly. And that’s something Aronofsky didn’t do in the past. So I think this is a great lesson. Remember that when you’re writing independent fare, you’re fighting an uphill appeal battle. It’s in your interest to make elements of your story clean and easy to understand. If you can nudge your narrative closer to a popular genre, like Aronofsky did here by making Black Swan a thriller, you can stay true to your indie roots yet still draw in a big audience. Oh, and it also doesn’t hurt to add a sex scene between your two lead female characters.
INCEPTION
Rough Projected Gross: 90-120 million
Actual Gross: 292 million
Writer: Christopher Nolan
What We Can Learn: I remember reading an article about this last month. In it, a reporter noted that Inception was a box office shock of epic proportions. Warner Bros. had made the movie to keep Christopher Nolan happy between Batman films. They had no idea it would become as big as it did. So the writer of the article was interested in how the success of the film was going to change the moviegoing landscape. What was Hollywood going to do about this? The answer? Nothing. They just watched a sleeper film become a $300 million behemoth and had no idea what to do with it. Now I’ve made my feelings clear about this film. I think it’s really flawed. Regardless of that, I believe the box office for Inception is trying to tell Hollywood something. People want more challenging big budget fare. This may sound contradictory to what I just said about Black Swan. But actually I think the statement is complementary. Independent films need more audience friendly storylines. Big-budget films need more challenging storylines. Hollywood is confused by this because it thinks audiences only want one or the other. I believe audiences are getting sick of the comic book movies and the mash up movies and the movies based on rides and the movies based on toys. They go to these films and feel empty afterwards. At least when you left Inception, you thought about something. You talked about it with your friends. And those are the kinds of conversations that get people back into the theater a second and third time. I think Hollywood is really missing out on the bigger picture here. The thing that the Internet has done is it’s allowed conversations about movies to be had by millions. But Hollywood keeps giving these people movies that aren’t worth talking about. Now I know that Disney VP just came out with a statement proclaiming that story doesn’t matter when you’re making a tentpole flick, and pointed to the terribly written billion-dollar earner Alice In Wonderland as an example. I think there will always be a market for high concept well marketed family fare. But I also think that there’s an appetite from the more serious moviegoers for big budget tentpole films that also make you think. The thing is, those movies aren’t being written. And the truth is there just isn’t a lot of material out there that teaches writers how to successfully write these kinds of movies. You have to balance the challenging aspects of your screenplay with the high concept marketability of a big-budget picture. If you get too esoteric or “out there” than the movie no longer becomes thoughtful. It just becomes confusing. Using our previous director as an example, Aronofsky wanted to make The Fountain for 100 million bucks. There’s a good chance the box office for that film would’ve topped out at $10 million. So really, it’s up to you guys to figure this out. It’s up to you guys to come up with these concepts that balance the two extremes. As always, it begins with the screenwriter. So get the fuck off Scriptshadow and start writing.
Hello everybody. Today is a little nuts so I’m not going to get the article up until later. I’ll try to have it up by 11 AM Pacific time but if I miss that then it will probably be three or four hours later. Hang tight.
Genre: Romantic Dramedy?/Sci-Fi
Premise: As his wedding approaches, a young man gets a visit from an older gentleman claiming to be him from the future. The man tells him that whatever he does, he cannot get married.
About: David Gilbert and George Ratliff worked most recently on the film Joshua, starring Sam Rockwell and Vera Farminga. They seem to be interested in challenging indie fare, as Ratliff’s latest directing effort was about a born again Christian on the run from members of a mega church (that film stars Ed Harris, Pierce Bronson, Greg Kinnear, and Marissa Tomei).
Writer: David Gilbert (story by David Gilbert and George Ratliff)
Details: 114 pages – December 9, 2009 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
Monday we reviewed a script about relationships. Tuesday we reviewed a script about time travel. So it’s only natural that Wednesday we review a script about relationships and time travel! Now before I go on, I should let you know that one of the scripts I’ve always wanted to write was a time travel romantic comedy. I just haven’t been able to find an interesting enough idea. Plus, time travel sucks. I don’t mean that I don’t like time travel. Who doesn’t like time travel? I wouldn’t mind going back in time and rewriting this paragraph. But time travel is tricky because even when you plug up all the holes that time travel plots create, there’s still going to be a dozen or so holes that you missed. Seriously. It doesn’t matter how many you fix. There will always be a dozen more.
Past Imperfect introduces us to Charlie, a cautious individual whose job it is to troll through building sites and make sure there are no historically important artifacts that have been left underneath. You never know what you’re going to find once you start digging. I remember that story from a few years back, where they were working construction in the middle of New York, and found a civil war boat just buried right there in the middle of Manhattan. I wonder at what point those guys realized they were off course (“Captain! We seem to be smack dab in the middle of fifth Avenue! We also stopped moving three days ago! Should we attempt to catch the south wind?”) Anyway, Charlie’s flying home one evening and is lucky enough to be seated next to Prudence, a happy-go-lucky alternative chick who likes to do origami in her spare time.
The two hit it off from takeoff to landing and you can tell that they were meant for each other. Which is a huge problem, because after getting her number, Charlie goes home to meet up with his fiancé. Yes, Charlie has a fiancé, Sadie.
Across town in a zoo, we see an elephant give birth to a 65-year-old man. I’ve personally seen this three times in my life and let me tell you it’s not a pleasant sight. This man, Chuck, is able to secure some clothing and make his way over to the nearest convenience store, where he buys a lottery ticket. He wins the next day and, just like that, is a millionaire. It doesn’t take long for us to figure out that Chuck is actually Charlie from the future and is here on a mission.
That mission is to get Charlie to make two calls. The first is to Prudence and the second is to call off his wedding. You see, Chuck explains to Charlie after finding him, he has spent every day of his married life miserable because he believes he was supposed to end up with Prudence and not Sadie. Sadie is too reserved, too buttoned up, and just not the fun exciting unpredictable person he was meant to be with.
Charlie, of course, thinks this guy is a nut and ignores him. But Chuck starts making calls to these girls as Charlie, determined to make sure Charlie and Prudence get together. Where it gets complicated is that Chuck starts hanging out with Sadie, and actually starts to, gasp, like her. He finds out that Sadie was secretly a standup comedian and she never told him because she was embarrassed. What she doesn’t know is that this is exactly what Chuck believes was missing from the marriage – unpredictability, fun, spontaneity.
In the meantime, Charlie and Prudence, who in the previous timeline never met after that plane ride, are now hanging out left and right, and Charlie is starting to wonder if this old man is right and he was really meant to end up with Prudence. So Charlie is falling for Prudence and Chuck is falling for Sadie, creating one of the weirder quadrangle relationships you’ve ever seen, unless of course you watch Bachelor Pad 2 on Monday nights.
The best way I can describe Past Imperfect is “uneven.” The script has some really nice moments and admirably attempts to explore its premise. But often it gets wrapped up in its own ambition and lost in its own overly quirky atmosphere.
Some of the choices here were just plain odd. For example, this idea that Sadie had a secret crazy fun side that she never showed her husband of 30 years is ridiculous. That implies she’s been living a lie for half her life for no other reason than not to be embarrassed around her husband. It usually works the opposite way. The person you were before the marriage tends to be the fake you. The real you always comes out over time. Plus a standup comedian is way too exaggerated of a choice. I mean if there is a more on the nose option for trying to make a character look outrageous and “fun,” I want to know what it is. For that reason, it comes off as one of those “writerly” choices, a moment where we can clearly feel the writer’s hand manipulating the world above us.
Another thing that bothered me was the introduction of cool elements that were never explored. I talk a lot about characters’ jobs on this site and how important they are to understanding your characters, and here Charlie has one of the more interesting jobs I’ve ever seen in a screenplay. He goes to construction sites, digs into them, and makes sure there are no important ancient artifacts underneath. There’s sort of a magical element to that job in that who knows what he’s going to find?
The problem is, it’s a total misdirect. We keep waiting for it to become a part of the story and it never does. It would seem to me that in combination with the time travel storyline there would be a lot of cool ways to take it. I was sure Charlie would find something on one of his sites that implied a time travel connection to the past as well, inferring that maybe more than one time jump occurred here, and that this ordeal is more complicated than he originally thought. But it turns out just to be a neat job. You know what I have to say about that?
Humph.
Logical issues seeped in as well. The fact that this sixty-something man is able to hot trot his way around and randomly pick up these women 35 years younger than him is a stretch to say the least. I mean I guess he’s rich, but it sure was easy for him to waltz into these young women’s lives and set up dates with them.
Now that’s not to say this was all bad. When I was trying to figure out what I would rate this screenplay, I thought back to a similar script I reviewed a while ago – that Ashton Kutcher Justin Bieber thing: What Would Kenny Do? In that script, the older version of the character also comes back to guide the hero. But the script plays out more like an errand list (the older character just gives him a list of things to do and the younger character follows it). Not once do you feel like the writer is exploring the premise.
At least here there’s something going on. People don’t always do what other people say (creating conflict). The characters encounter unexpected setbacks (changing the story’s course). Complicated situations arise resulting in difficult choices (requiring character development). I like, for example, when Charlie comes back to see Sadie only to find her in bed with Chuck. I think it’s safe to say that being cheated on by your future wife with your future self is exploiting your premise.
I thought Prudence was an interesting character as well. But again, it seemed like opportunities were missed left and right. Prudence makes really eccentric dollhouses. However, Chuck implies that in the future, she becomes a famous architect. Why the writers didn’t connect Charlie’s job of looking at building sites and Prudence’s job of building on building sites, I’m not sure. It just seems like so much story was left on the table here. That’s what frustrated me so much, seeing all these cool storylines they could have explored but just didn’t. Whether they ran out of time or weren’t interested, I don’t know. But man do I wish that they had put more into this.
So I think I’d recommend this one but with heavy reservations. It’s a good premise and a good starting point, but I think it has a long way to go before it reaches the potential of its premise.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read (with reservations)
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you’re writing a time travel script, you’re probably going to need 10 to 15 more drafts than you normally would. That may sound ridiculous, but trust me, if you want your time travel script to be kick-ass, it’s going to take more work than your average screenplay. The reason for this is twofold. First, you’re going to run into way more logic problems when you write time travel movies and you have to make sure you have the time to address all of them. The second is that time travel movies offer a lot of clever story opportunities but it takes lots of time to explore and find those opportunities. By clever, I mean your future wife cheating on you with your future self. If you don’t have those moments, you’re not taking advantage of your time travel premise. That’s why Back To The Future was so great. They took the time to rewrite the shit out of that movie until they found all those clever little connections/moments. Past Imperfect had a few of those moments but not nearly enough. So go ahead and write that time travel film. Just make sure you’re willing to put in the extra time to make it work.
Genre: Sci-Fi Adventure
Premise: The last human on earth, a young girl, is protected by an army of robots against an even bigger army of zombies.
About: Zombies vs. Robots (Inherit the Earth) is yet another graphic novel that has been translated into a screenplay. The geek-tastic set up feels like a kissing cousin to All You Need Is Kill, a graphic novel about a young man forced to take on an alien army over and over again. While both scripts seem to be catered to the tween crowd, both also have soft chewy emotional cores, especially Inherit the Earth. The writer, Petty, has made his name mostly in the videogame world, working on such titles as Batman Begins and Splinter Cell.
Writer: JT Petty (based on the graphic novel by Chris Ryall & Ashley Wood)
Details: 115 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
I don’t know if Inherit the Earth will ever get made. It’s such a bizarre idea I’m not sure your average audience member can wrap their head around it. I mean let’s be honest. It has robots. And zombies. And time travel. This goes beyond Blake Snyder’s double mumbo-jumbo into triple mumbo-jumbo. Does the third mumbo-jumbo cancel out the second mumbo-jumbo? I sure hope so, because if people can accept this, they’re going to find one of the more heartfelt science-fiction movies ever made.
Inherit the Earth is about a crazy scientist named Dr. Satterfield who’s consumed with building a time machine. He’s helped around his lab mostly by robots – I’m presuming this is sometime in the future – most notably his young-looking robot assistant, William.
Satterfield goes a little nuts, insisting that he try his time machine himself, even though it hasn’t been tested properly. Before his assistants can stop him, he leaps through, only to come back 3 seconds later as a raging flesh eating zombie. He starts munching on everyone who subsequently start munching on everyone else, and before you know it, the entire world is one big zombie party.
Cut to seven years later where the last human alive – a young girl named Lucy – is being holed up in the US government’s indestructible Cheyenne Mountain base. Lucy is the last hope for humankind, so the entire mountain is fortified by hundreds if not thousands of military robots.
Now up until this point, keeping the zombies at bay has been easy. As we all know, the only thing slower than a zombie is a Walmart customer. But what these robots don’t know is that the zombies have evolved and there are now “smart” zombies. So when a huge army of zombies strategically breaks through the barrier, the robots are unprepared. Chaos ensues and the biggest robot-zombie massacre ever goes down. When Lucy’s nurse bot is destroyed (the only robot programmed to provide humanlike emotional support for Lucy), that old assistant from Satterfield’s original outbreak, William, is assigned to replace her.
William’s terrified of being thrown into the role as he’s never been programmed to provide emotion. But zombies are everywhere, killing everyone, and there isn’t a lot of time to argue. So he and a really hot gun toting mega-babe robot named Rose escape with Lucy out into the desert.
With the zombies in hot pursuit, and with no more huge mountain barricades to protect her, it’s looking like the end of the human race is near. However, the group gets an idea. The Satterfield of the past will be arriving in the present within a few days. If they can get to his lab and kill him before he has time to get back to the past, they can prevent the zombie outbreak from ever happening and save the world. Since robots are not allowed to kill humans, Lucy will have to be the one to kill Satterfield.
I’ve said this before. If you’re going to give us a sci-fi movie or a fantasy movie or an adventure movie, you better find a way to connect with us on an emotional level as well as give us the action and the trailer moments and the special effects that we crave. Throwing zombies and robots up on screen is going to be fun for about 5 minutes. But if you want us to stay interested for the other hour and 55 minutes, you have to create an unresolved relationship in the movie that we care about and want to see resolved.
That relationship here is the relationship between William and Lucy. What this script does a really good job of, is conveying the loneliness of Lucy’s plight. She’s the last human on earth and she’s just a little girl. She’s surrounded by nuts and bolts and ones and zeros. Nobody knows what it’s really like to be in her position. And that alienation eats at her every day. The robots have actually had to program themselves to provide an artificial version of emotional support in order to mirror the kind of support a child needs.
When the robot responsible for this dies, that task is left to William, who’s just an assistant robot meant for simple duties. What makes it even worse is that Lucy hates him. Whenever she’s upset or confused or sad or lonely, she looks to him for support, and he has nothing to offer her. So in a way, it’s like a typical troubled parent-daughter relationship where two people are just not able to find any common ground.
While all the running from zombies stuff is fun, the real story – the thing that we really want to see resolved – is whether William can finally learn to make an emotional connection with this girl. Likewise, we want Lucy to see how hard William is trying. We want her to see that even though he’s not capable of love, he’ll do anything to save her.
This is what screenwriting is about. It’s not about all of the whizbang special effects gadgetry. Once you map that stuff out – once you have your plot structured – you better have a relationship at the core of your second act that needs deep exploration and that an audience is going to be interested in. The further apart you put the two people in that relationship – Lucy hates William and William is light years away from being emotionally available to Lucy – the more compelling that story is going to be. If you don’t have this, you get Transformers – movies with fake relationships and thin unresolved surface level issues that leave you feeling empty and detached from the two-hour experience minutes after they’re over. Now a studio executive may point out: yeah, but Transformers made $1 billion. Well my reply is: yeah, but you could’ve made 2 billion.
The great thing about Inherit the Earth is that it gets the plot stuff right too. We have a clear goal here: get to and kill Satterfield. We have urgency: Satterfield will arrive in a couple of days so they have to move it. We have more urgency: Thousands of zombies are chasing them (always try to add more urgency!). We have high stakes: literally the fate of the world is at stake. We have unexpected twists and turns: the strange cult that they run into. Everything is in place here for a great story.
What I also liked was that Inherit the Earth didn’t always take the safe route. I think whenever you’re writing a screenplay, it’s your job to explore avenues you’re a little afraid of. You have to take some chances and maybe go into a few places you wouldn’t normally go in. These decisions are the decisions that end up making your screenplay different from every other screenplay out there. So when our characters run into a cult, and we get into the scene where we find out what’s really going on with these people, and what they’re really planning to do with Lucy, it’s horrifying. And it’s not somewhere I expected this screenplay to go. But that’s why I liked the decision so much. It took a chance.
Maybe my only complaint with “Earth” is that the ending gets a little messy and in doing so misses an opportunity to truly pay off the emotional set up between William and Lucy. It’s hard to explain but the final scene is like a category five tornado, and because of all the wind and the noise and the chaos, we’re unable to experience the perfect closure we need between William and Lucy. It’s not a huge deal and I think it only needs some tweaking, but it’s a good reminder that clarity is important every step of the way. You can’t fake your way through anything. You have to make sure that every single word is carefully constructed to convey what you need to convey, especially in the end, when all the threads are finally paying off. However, the reason it didn’t bother me was because the final image was so perfect and so haunting. It totally made up for it.
I just really liked this and I hope the studio takes a chance on it. I have no idea if an American audience would be able to buy into the premise. But if they can, they certainly have the screenplay in place to make it work.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware of predictability and safety when you’re writing. They are your enemies. If your script is always predictable and always safe, then there’s a good chance what you’re writing isn’t very interesting. The Shawshank Redemption has our lead character getting raped repeatedly. Back to the Future has a son who has to make out with his own mom. Even a movie like Up kills off one of the most delightful characters you’ve ever met within the first 10 pages. Here in Inherit the Earth, the whole cult sequence is unsettling and unexpected, a dark place a lot of writers would have been too afraid to tackle. But for me, that’s the sequence that legitimized the story. It showed just how dark and terrible a place the world had become, and that made the need to save it all the stronger. So always check yourself. Make sure you’re not the predictable safe writer.
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: Two best friends, Daphne and Henry, sign up for an online dating service only to find out that they’re each other’s perfect match.
About: Yet another 2010 Black List script, and yet another pair of brand-new writers. “Match” finished on the lower half of the list with 10 votes and was purchased by Mike De Luca productions.
Writers: Morgan Schechter & Eric Pearson
Details: 114 pages – June 22, 2010 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
The gimmick.
These days you can’t write a romantic comedy without a gimmick. Either somebody has to be a friend with benefits. Somebody has to be knocked up. Somebody has to be a 40-year-old virgin. Just writing about a relationship – a.k.a. When Harry Met Sally – isn’t an option anymore. And I guess when you think about it, it wasn’t really an option back then either. When Harry Met Sally may be the one exception to the romantic comedy rule.
However, people have been trying to write the next When Harry Met Sally for 20 years now. So the trick is, how do you write the next When Harry Met Sally but with a gimmick? I think Perfect Match has figured it out. Now calm down. Calm down. I’m not saying Perfect Match measures up to the best romantic comedy of all time, but this is one of the better “friendship” romantic comedies I’ve read.
Perfect Match centers around the friendship of late twentysomethings Daphne and Henry. These roommates are like two peas in a pod. They finish each other’s sentences. They laugh at each other’s jokes. They make fun of each other’s shitty love lives. They’d probably be fine living with each other for the next 50 years if the pressures of society haven’t made Daphne so focused on finding someone to spend the rest of her life with – a task she’s pretty miserable at.
So one day when a commercial comes on for Match.com-like website Charm.com, and she sees that her ex-boyfriend, the one who wrote her sonnets while banging every floozy from Santa Monica to the Jersey Turnpike, is now a spokesman for the site after finding true love through it, Daphne furiously insists that she and Henry try it.
The way that it works is it gives you five “perfect matches.” The two agree that they will go out with all five matches until they find their perfect companion. Henry is reluctant at first but Daphne talks him into it. What follows is a second act filled with them basically going out on all these wacky dates. She goes out with a guy who’s really cheap. He goes out with a gold digger. She goes out with a muscle fitness freak – etc., etc.
On the fourth match, Henry is shocked when he finds a girl he likes, which is bad news for Daphne since she checks the last match and finds out that it’s Henry. Daphne of course realizes that she’s been in love with Henry all this time, but the question is, now that he’s found a girlfriend, is it too late?
Perfect Match falls into that tricky category of the late arriving hook. The late arriving hook is when the thing that makes your concept interesting doesn’t show up until the end of the screenplay. So here you have a movie about two people who are supposedly a perfect match. Yet they don’t figure this out until the third act.
Now on the one hand you can call this dramatic irony in that we’ve been told (just by the title alone) that they’re a perfect match, and now we’re just waiting for them to catch up to us. The tension comes from us wanting them to realize that they’re supposed to be together – sort of like When Harry Met Sally. But the other way to look at it is that an audience could easily get frustrated that it’s taking the entire God damn movie to get to the hook.
I actually wondered if this script would have been better making them the very first match. That way, they could’ve been weirded out, dismissed it as a glitch, and went on with the other four matches. Now, there’s a lot more tension in the scenes because both of them are secretly wondering, “Could the site have been right?” All of their really relaxed hangout sessions would all of a sudden become awkward and filled with subtext. But the script chooses to take a more straightforward lightweight approach and just have fun.
Luckily, the writers are really good with guy-girl dialogue and have tuned in on the relationship. You feel like these two people have lived together and loved each other as friends for a long time (Henry will be the first to yell out that he can hear Audrey using her vibrator). Building a believable friendship isn’t easy but these guys do it.
Too often in these rom-coms the writers are working hard to create those little cutesy “these two really love each other but just don’t know it yet” moments. But there’s none of that here. Their friendship is totally natural and unencumbered by romantic comedy clichés. They just hang out, discuss their romantic tragedies, and move on to the next moment.
As for the stuff that bothered me, I did have an issue with the rhythm of the script, which became too predictable. Once we understood how this was going to work –that they were going to go out with each one of their five dates one at a time – we just sort of knew what to expect. Sure, each date was funny, but because we understood that these two were going to be each other’s final match, it became an exercise in waiting the dates out. There wasn’t enough variety.
I’m not a fan of allowing the reader to get too comfortable in a story because if the reader’s too comfortable then you’re probably losing them. So it would have been nice to have a few twists or turns to throw that rhythm off. Henry meeting a girl he actually liked was a good twist, but it didn’t happen until the end of the screenplay. We needed stuff like that to happen earlier.
Another moment I didn’t love was the ending. I think any writer writing a romantic comedy feels the pressure of having to come up with that big spectacular final mad dash set piece. However, you have to stay consistent with the tone you’ve established. The tone of this story is low key and honest. The rules stay pretty close to the real world. So creating this huge “galloping across the city on a horse” moment felt like the script had turned the channel just before the climax to a Hugh Grant film, which I don’t think it is.
But neither of those things affected my enjoyment of the screenplay too much. In the end, whenever you write a romantic comedy, it’s about creating two compelling people who we want to see together. If you do that, none of the gimmicky stuff surrounding your story matters. It’s just about those two characters. Perfect Match achieves that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There tend to be two types of romantic comedies. There are romantic comedies where the characters meet for the first time. And there are romantic comedies where the characters already know each other. It’s important to know how each of those situations affects the audience. There’s usually (but not always!) more at stake in a relationship if there’s a history there. Think about it. If you meet someone, spend a month or two with then, fall for them, then break up, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to get over that person. But when a long term friendship is on the line, or a marriage is on the line, or a really long relationship is on the line, then it’s not just the love that’s at stake, it’s everything. History creates stakes because both people have more invested in each other. Now there are circumstances where movies do both – such as When Harry Met Sally – where the two characters meet AND establish a long history with one another. But if you’re choosing one or the other, make sure you understand how each type of relationship affects the audience.
