Genre: True Story/Thriller/Crime
Premise: (from Black List) The incredible true story of the multi-billion dollar Malaysian government corruption scandal which led to the conviction of Prime Minister Najib Razak and almost $5 billion in settlements paid out by Goldman Sachs.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List. I’ll let Deadline give you some insight: “From her kitchen table, Brown revealed the illegal activity that not only went to fund the lavish, Gatsby-like lifestyle of Jho Low, the young, wildly ambitious Malaysian national of Chinese descent who masterminded the plot — and who is still at large — but also the Malaysian prime minister, his wife, their nine-figure cache of jewels, real estate, clothes, and designer handbags, a $1 billion political slush fund, and even the Oscar-nominated Martin Scorsese-directed The Wolf of Wall Street, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort. Along the way, Goldman Sachs – whose most senior executives in the region were found to be complicit – would be forced to pay over $5 billion in settlements to the US and Malaysian authorities.”
Writer: Scott Conroy
Details: 126 pages
Readability: Medium
Money-money-money-monaaay……. MONNNAAAAY.
Hollywood loves themselves a story about money. About excess. Greed. They absolutely LOVE IT. If you can find a true story with even halfway decent characters that exposes some billion dollar scam or grift, WRITE IT. It’s money in the bank. Your bank this time.
This one is a little hard to summarize but I’m going to give it my best shot. There’s this English blogger named Clare Rewcastle-Brown who grew up in Malaysia and now has a blog that nobody reads exposing their government’s corruption.
Clare soon stumbles upon a Malaysian man named Jho Low who is a board member for a Malaysian financial fund called 1MDB. This is a government fund that has indirect ties to the prime minister, Najib Razak. Jho Low really likes to invest in things using this fund. For example, he invests in an oil company in Saudi Arabia. And a movie production house in Hollywood (the one that produced The Wolf of Wall Street).
Jho Low loves to spend money. At one point, we see him blow 3.6 million dollars on a single blackjack hand. Oh, and he spends 42 million dollars on the original Metropolis movie poster, which he frames and puts in the lobby of his production house! Just hanging out. 42 million bucks there for the taking.
Clare starts writing about this guy and, naturally, the Malaysian government gets upset so they start threatening her, putting unflattering pictures of her online, even getting people to follow her around.
Clare eventually gets contacted by a banker who used to work with Jho and has over 30,000 e-mails from him that expose his crazy spending. Clare is too scared to publish them so she goes to the Wall Street Journal instead and they run the story. All in all, Jho Low spent something like 6 billion dollars. This results in mass chaos in Malaysia and Najib Razak is voted out of office at the next election. The end.
Let’s talk about exposition, shall we.
Actually, let’s talk about all three screenwriting villains: Exposition, setup, and backstory.
These three script malcontents are your mortal enemy. Their purpose, while noble, gets in the way of you being able to do what you want to do, which is tell a story.
I just watched this little sleeper film on Netflix called The Clovehitch Killer. It’s a good movie about a teenager in a religious family who suspects that his father may be a serial killer. You should check it out. What stood out to me about that movie was just how little exposition, setup, and backstory it had. It was pretty much straight storytelling. You didn’t have to trek through any mud to get to the beach.
1MDB, much like yesterday’s Foundation, is jam packed with exposition, setup and backstory. If we’re not meeting the fifteenth member of some rare Malaysian bank, we’re meeting the twentieth fellow billionaire buddy of Jho Low.
I’m going to try and make an analogy here so stay with me. Whenever you buy a board game, it comes with a rule book. Or, at least, it used to. I don’t know what they do now. Maybe some hologram lady explains the rules to you. But if you’ve ever played a board game, you know that nobody wants to sit around and read a long rule book in order to play the game. They just want to play. Which is why most board game rule books are short and simple. The creators of these games know that there’s a tipping point whereby if the extensiveness of the rules outweighs the fun of the game, people just won’t play.
As a screenwriter, you want to think about your potential script in the same way. It comes with a rulebook. That rulebook consists of exposition, setup, and backstory. The thicker that rulebook is, the more challenging it will be to write an entertaining story. And if you have a rulebook as thick as 1MDB’s, it’s almost impossible.
1MDB started out strong because it focused on these things that we were familiar with – glitzy Hollywood stars winning Oscars and partying with rich financier producers. But the second we have to start explaining what 1MDB is, the script becomes more of a documentary than a narrative feature.
I mean I still don’t know how Jho Low is connected to the prime minister, which I thought was the whole point. And here’s where the evils of excess exposition rear their ugly head. The answer may very well be in the script. The writer might be able to tell me the exact page number where they explain how Jho Low is connected to the prime minister. But, you see, human readers aren’t computers. We don’t automatically download everything that’s on the page. When a lot of information comes at us, we’re overwhelmed. You might be explaining something clearly to us but we’re still trying to process the last three pages of dense information we read and, therefore, we’re not present enough to understand the latest information you’re sending our way.
This hurts the script in a myriad of ways, one of which is essential for making these types of stories work. The big financial greed stories need a villain. They need someone – or at least some identifiable entity – we’re infuriated by so we can root for them to get caught. Like the Catholic Church in Spotlight. They were so evil in that story, I was infuriated, which made me want them to get caught. I think that person in 1MDB is supposed to be Jho Low but I never once saw him as an evil presence, explicitly because there was too much information to wade through to understand why he was bad.
I think – I *THINK* – that 1MDB was a government fund and, maybe, Jho Low was one of several people tabbed with investing that money to grow the fund for the Malaysian people? And so for every stupid purchase he made, he was deliberately taking money out of Malaysian peoples’ pockets? I *THINK* that was what was going on.
But, again, because there was so much information to wade through, I was never sure exactly how he was hurting the Malaysian people. So I couldn’t be that upset at him. And therefore I wasn’t that keen on him getting caught. And if I don’t care if your bad guy gets caught, you don’t have a movie.
You see, what Scot Conroy doesn’t realize here, is that the real problem isn’t the Malaysian government. It’s exposition. It’s a story that needed such a big rule book that by the time we were done reading it, we didn’t want to play anymore.
And hence, that is today’s lesson. When you’re contemplating whether to write a script or not, ask yourself how big the rule book needs to be in order to write the story. If it’s too big, think twice about writing the script. It’s not that it can’t be done. As I’ve said here before, you can make any story work. But if you’re not an experienced screenwriter with years upon years of practice on how to distill, hide, and eliminate exposition, you’re fighting an uphill battle. I mean David S. Goyer’s been in the business for 20+ years and even HE was having trouble deciding which information should stay and go in yesterday’s Foundation, leading to a clunky, unclear, pilot. You’d be much better off writing a simple story like The Clovehitch Killer. (P.S. It’s really good! Check it out!)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Outrage Narratives. It’s totally legit to write an outrage narrative (the main thrust of the narrative is that you’re so angry, you have to keep reading to see the bad guy go down). We see how effective outrage is by reading the daily news. However, for outrage narratives to work, you must clearly explain why we need to be so outraged at the villain. 1MDB didn’t do a very good job of that, which is why it landed with a whimper.
