Today’s script is 500 Days of Summer meets La La Land meets Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets A Christmas Carol
Genre: Romantic Comedy/Dramedy
Premise: After both attending the same wedding solo, David and Sarah embark on a big, bold, beautiful journey with a little help from their 1996 Passat GPS and a little bit of magic for the road trip of their lives.
About: This script finished with 14 votes on last year’s Black List, putting it in the vaunted Top 20. It comes from Seth Reiss, who wrote for the Seth Meyers show. But I’m more interested in his last feature screenplay, which was one of my favorites of last year, The Menu. There is a caveat on that one though, which is that Reiss wrote it with another writer (Will Tracy). On this one, he’s going solo.
Writer: Seth Reiss
Details: 128 pages
Today’s script has 500 Days of Summer like aspirations, mixed with some song and dance numbers, a la La La Land. That sounds to me like something Hollywood would love. But it also sounds to me like it could get stuck in quirksand. Ahh yes, you know what I’m talking about fellow readers – that irritating slushy sand that so many aspiring quirky screenwriters have drowned in. Let’s find out if the quirk reined supreme or the quirk was reined in…
37 year-old New Yorker, David, heads downstate for a wedding, in a 1996 Volkswagen Passat which includes a special GPS feature. At the wedding, David runs into Sarah, also in her 30s, and the two strike up a conversation. Sarah has developed a very tough exterior as a means to protect herself, making it hard for David to figure out if she likes him or not. At the end of the night, she couples up with one of the groomsmen so I guess that answers that.
The next morning, when David is about to drive home, his GPS asks him if he would like to go on a “big bold beautiful journey.” David’s a little creeped out that his GPS is talking to him but sure, why not. The GPS drives David to the nearest Burger King where, low and behold, he sees Sarah! The two enjoy a couple of whoppers and then David asks Sarah if she would like to join him on a big bold beautiful journey. She shrugs and says, sure, why not.
The GPS first brings them to a lighthouse museum that is, in itself, a lighthouse, and as the two watch the sun set at the top of the lighthouse, they realize that they kind of like each other. Next stop is David’s high school, except 20 years ago, during a pivotal moment his senior year. Present David, who’s embodying High School David, plays the lead in the school play. Before their performance, he tells his girlfriend that he loves her. But instead of saying it back, she dumps him for a college freshman. David is devastated.
Next they head to the Chicago Museum of Art, near where Sarah grew up, and one of the museum guards opens up one of the paintings for them to go inside. The painting is set in Paris so the two are now in Paris. Well, the painting version of Paris. After they explore the city, they head to a hospital circa a decade ago, where Sarah finally says goodbye to her mother, who previously died alone. Here, she gets a chance to correct that mistake.
The GPS eventually takes them on a trip to the future, where they are now married and mildly happy together. We then jump back to the present where the trip ends, and both David and Sarah, two souls who heavily guard their hearts, will have to decide whether to continue their journey together in the real world, or leave and never speak again.
It’s a good sign if you can make me laugh on the first page of a script: “We are in a cheap, bland, depressing looking car rental agency on 243rd street in Manhattan. Overhead florescent lights give the place a feeling like, if you took someone’s picture in here, the photograph would look like that person’s been dead for 3 days.” I laughed because those places really do make you look like you’re dead!
With that said, Beautiful Journey didn’t tickle my fancy so much as scratch a few itches. It’s a bold script where the writer makes some unique choices, but those choices are ultimately overrun by its try-hard style. This script wants so badly to be the next great talked about script, and that’s exactly what’s holding it back. If we can tell you’re trying to be talked about, we’re not going to talk about you.
For example, one of David and Sarah’s later stops is at the F.D.C.C.F.W.W.H.D.A.W.T.C.D.A.A.T.D.K. Center. What is that, you may ask? It’s The Formal Dating Complaint Center For Women Who Have Dated And Wish To Complain Directly About And To David Kimmel. It’s a bit too quirk overload for me.
And therein lies the challenge of screenwriting. You’re trying to create these memorable lines and scenes and moments and terminology, and yet it must all be presented invisibly, as if there was never a writer behind it. This is what sank Cameron Crowe’s career. He became obsessed with trying to create these zeitgeist moments and as soon as that became the driving force behind all his screenplays, his movies became unwatchable.
You can’t force this stuff. You have to write what you feel – what is true – and if it captures the world’s imagination, it captures their imagination. But the second you start force-feeding it, the audience can tell, and they’ll rebel against you.
I still liked some things about the script, though. For example, I thought Reiss made a good decision when David and Sarah did not sleep together at the wedding. The second your leads kiss or have sex, you lose one of the most valuable forms of conflict there is in a romantically driven story, which is sexual tension. That sexual tension is GOLD. So hold onto it for as long as you can. If you ever have any doubts about this, compare any sitcom before the lead romantic couple got together and after. Cough cough – Jim and Pam – cough cough. The couple becomes exponentially less interesting after they get together.
The script is also a breeze to read due to all the dialogue. Normally when I see 130 pages, I want to take the world biggest fork and jam it into my eye sockets. But there’s so much dialogue here – not to mention the dialogue chunks are rarely over three lines – that your eyes whip down the page. It’s a secret weapon for rom-coms, since, if the reader’s eyes never have to leave the middle of the page, they’re going to read that script so much faster. Which makes them feel good! You feel like Superman when you down in a script in 45 minutes.
And, to the writer’s credit, this is a different way into a relationship story, which is one of the harder things to do in screenwriting – come up with a delivery method that’s different from what we’ve seen before. You have this GPS person taking these two characters on a journey, which offers up several unique scenarios. And it’s fun wondering where it’s going to take them next. Every destination is a mystery.
Normally, I’d nitpick the fact that the main characters are passive in this experience. But because we’re in a car and we’re always moving towards a new destination, the story doesn’t feel passive. If the movie took place in one location and the characters were acting on someone else’s orders, then yes, I would call out the passiveness. But here, it’s not a problem.
I feel like this script will gain some fans. But, for me, I was too aware of the gears underneath the pages. I could feel the writer trying to be quirky. These types of stories only work when the choices feel invisible and there are very few writers who can pull that off. Charlie Kaufman comes to mind.
Will be curious to see what you guys think of this. Let me know in the comments!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I know writers are terrified of doing stuff that’s “wrong” in screenplays because they fear it will be a “tell” to seasoned readers. While that’s true to an extent, you don’t know what you don’t know. So you can’t avoid all of these mistakes right out of the gate. It takes time to learn them. The good news is, if you write a good script, a few of these mistakes won’t matter. For example, in Beautiful Journey, Reiss writes out “End of Act 1” at the end of the first act, as well as “End of Act 2” at the end of the second act. This is such a beginning screenwriter “tell” because nobody does it. However, as you can see, it didn’t matter. The script still got on the Black List. So just focus on writing a good script. If you succeed at that, readers will overlook these other, less important, mistakes.
