Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a runner sells his extra New York Marathon entry off for cash, he unwittingly invites a terrorist into his life.
About: This script sold for 750 thousand dollars back in 1995. Three writers wrote it. Kirk De Micco would go on to write The Croods and a lot of other kids content. Stuart J. Zicherman would go on to write the Ben Affleck movie, Elektra. He has since written steadily in television. Most recently, he wrote episodes for The Shrink Next Door and Alaska Daily. Trotiner moved onto producing. His most well-known recent project is Braven.
Writers: Kirk De Micco, Glen Trotiner, and Stuart J. Zicherman
Details: 1995 draft – 132 pages
Peaky Blinders actress Charlie Murphy for Shawn?
One of the things I sit around and spend way too much time thinking about is, did screenwriters work harder back in 1995 or do they work harder now? Cause back in 1995, scripts sold so frequently that there was this belief that you didn’t really have to do much to sell something. So why work hard?
While it’s much harder to sell a script in 2023, I still get the sense that aspiring screenwriters don’t work as hard as they used to. The large majority of the scripts I read today feel like they’re 4-5 drafts from being anywhere near maxing out their potential. I don’t know. What do you guys think?
What intrigued me about this script is that it’s supposed to be a little more sophisticated than your average 90s spec. It’s constructed to make you think more. Let’s see if that’s the case.
26 year old New Yorker, Jamie Mitchell, works as an assistant to Hank Goldberger, the man in charge of the current president’s re-election campaign. Jamie has politics in his blood, as his father was a well-known politician. But he’s got something else in his blood as well – running.
The New York marathon has 100,000 applicants. And it only awards 20,000 entries. Since Jamie, who’s also in law school, has never gotten in, he decides to enter under four different names this year, quadrupling his chances. As it so happens, he gets in twice, once under his name and once under an alias, Stephen Bloom.
Jamie tells his 2 years-long girlfriend, Wendy, that he’s going to make a little cash on that second entry and sells it in the classifieds. He meets up with a beautiful young Irish buyer named Shawn, tells her he’s Stephen Bloom, and then sells his “Stephen Bloom” entry to her.
Jamie can’t stop thinking about Shawn for some reason, so when he runs into her again (literally, they see each other while running), it doesn’t take much for him to get lured back to her place and have wild sex. When Jamie doesn’t go home that night, Wendy dumps him. And then when Jamie goes to check on his best friend, Barry, he finds out he’s been executed in his apartment.
It doesn’t take much for Jamie to realize that Shawn is involved, especially because she tells him she killed Barry. She also informs Jamie that he’s going to help her with a bombing during the marathon as she needs to do it for the IRA. He refuses, running to the Feds, who tell him that they need him to work with Shawn to find out exactly what she has planned. Needless to say, Jamie’s life has turned upside-down, all because he tried to cheat the system. Dishonesty doesn’t pay, kiddos.
This was a really sharp script.
I’m struggling to figure out why it didn’t get made. I suppose the setting might have felt low-stakes. Yeah, you have the president involved. But the story really just revolves around this marathon. So I’m guessing the studios looked at the marathon as not the easiest thing to build a marketing campaign around. This was, of course, well before the whole Boston Marathon bombing.
The script has a really interesting villain in Shawn. This was long before it became fashionable to cast female villains. So the script feels a bit ahead of its time. And she isn’t just a face. She’s legitimately terrifying. Not only does she kill your best friend, execution-style, but she calmly tells you about it the next day. All while sleeping with you the night before to destroy your relationship.
Have mercy on me.
I have to think the IRA connection may have not have been impressive to execs either. I know the IRA is a big deal in Ireland. But it doesn’t translate well to New York. When you’ve got New York, you usually want a villain aligned with a much bigger cause. Also, where’s the connection? What does taking out presidents in the U.S. do for Ireland. They kind of explain this but no matter how they phrased, it still felt small potato famine. Hey, I’m Irish. I can make that joke.
This is why it’s worth spending that extra time to figure this stuff out as a screenwriter. You’ve got a strong villain. But that’s only half the battle. They need a high stakes cause that draws an audience in. One of the reasons I didn’t go see Ant-Man 3 was because the villain’s stakes seemed so low. What did Kane want? Was it to get out of the Micro Realm or whatever? If so, that was not conveyed well in the trailers. So… why is it important that I see this movie?
Contrast this with Thanos. It was made clear a thousand times what this guy was trying to do and it was enormous. So I felt the stakes. I felt I needed to be there.
If there’s one other thing I would’ve pushed for in the screenplay, it would’ve been to work that Jamie-Shawn relationship more. That’s the kind of relationship you want the Feds to come to Jamie about and say “This girl is playing you. We need you to work with her so we know what she’s up to.”
Instead, Shawn shows her cards right away, which means that he already knows she’s bad. She knows he knows she’s bad. So there’s no subtext or dramatic irony in any of their conversations. If Shawn doesn’t know that Jamie is onto her, now you’ve got all these great scenes where Jamie is trying to keep his secret and Shawn might figure out that he’s onto her.
The great thing about doing it that way is you can still do the original thing you wanted to do – making Shawn this cutthroat crazy killer who bullies Jamie into doing what she wants. But you just get to that plot point later in the script. Which gives you the best of both worlds. Jamie trying to work an ignorant Shawn. And then Shawn finding out (on page 75 or something) that Jamie is onto her, and turning into a psychopath.
But even though they didn’t go in that direction, the script still has a lot going for it. The dialogue is a lot better than most of the dialogue written at that time from writers not named Tarantino. And it’s got a really good third act. So this one is definitely worth checking out.
Script link: a day in November
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s something about a big event that’s non-traditional to these types of movies that sets your movie up for a really fun third act. Cause when you think about it, all these movies end in the same place. A shootout in some warehouse or some industrial area. By building this story around a marathon, you get to build your third act around something we don’t usually see in movies. And that’s where you’re going to find those original moments. So look for EVENTS as something to build a concept around. And then you have this beautiful original third act ready to go without having to think about it.
