Genre: High School/Comedy/Romance
Premise: To revamp her self image, an arrogant but well-meaning high school socialite decides to help a former friend land the guy of her dreams… but in the process, realizes she wants her for herself.
About: This script finished Top 10 on the 2019 Black List. The writer, Sara Monge, wrote for the 2013 show, 101 Ways to Get Rejected.
Writer: Sara Monge
Details: 103 pages
I can appreciate a good high school flick.
Back in the day, the high school comedy was a staple on every studio’s film slate. But let’s be real. Nobody could ever live up to the John Hughes flicks. His films had that magical je ne sais quoi that all high school movies have since been striving to find. Even the vaunted “Easy A,” a script that everyone in Hollywood said was the best high school script they’d read in decades, landed in theaters with a big “meh.”
When a genre is this stale, the only thing you can do to revive it is reinvent it. Anything short of that will get you some polite “attaboys,” but that’s as far as the compliments go. Does “Glendale” reinvent the high school spec? It tries to. And, to some, it may have succeeded. But as much as I was rooting for this script, it never quite took off. Let’s take a look.
Six years ago. Flashback. 12 year old best friends Kate (beautiful and perfect) and Christine (awkward and unconventionally pretty) are playing that 7th grade game you both love and dread – Spin the Bottle. Kate is trying to pump Christine up for a rigged kiss with Ken doll perfect, Devon.
But while they’re getting ready, Christine inadvertently admits to Kate that she masturbates non-stop. This being 7th grade, Kate tells a couple of people, and all of a sudden Christine is the junior high leper. Everyone thinks she’s a perverted weirdo. This Scarlett letter follows her for six years, where we re-meet Christine and Kate, who no longer talk to one another.
Kate has always felt guilty about what she did so she decides to invite Christine to one of her big parties as a way to make amends before they go off into life and never talk again. Incidentally, the next day, when Christine is driving to school, she’s watching the beautiful Devon walk by (yes, the same guy from Spin the Bottle) and accidentally crashes into the side of Kate’s car.
The two are rushed to the school nurse and forced to talk to one another. Kate says she knows Christine likes Devon and she’s willing to help her get him. Christine calls her out, saying she’s only doing this cause she feels guilty, which Kate cops to. But she allows Kate’s help anyway, and soon she’s dressing better, make-upping better, and her IG game is on point. It starts to work. Devon starts liking her pictures! OMG.
However, the more Kate and Christine hang out, the more they rekindle their friendship. The more they rekindle their friendship, the more they realize this might be more than friendship. Yes, that’s right. Kate and Christine are into each other. In fact, THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTO EACH OTHER. Christine is so down but for Kate, she has to think about her image. She isn’t sure that “gay” fits into it. Will Kate break Christine’s heart once again? Or will these two find love in the likeliest of unlikely places?
One thing I have to remind myself is that not everything can be a Carson movie. We can’t only have sci-fi, time travel, and contained thrillers, as much as I would love that to be a reality. You need variety in the movie market or else everything is the same. So, yes, I’d love an occasional great high school movie.
But Glendale is the Jamaican bobsledding team of screenplays. You really want them to do well but they just can’t keep up with the big countries.
For example, one of the differences between high-grade professional screenplays and younger writers is strong plot beats. When you need something to happen in your story, you don’t come up with a lazy way to do it. You think it through and you come up the best plot beat possible.
Christine crashing into Kate while watching Devon walk as a means to get the two talking again felt extremely over-the-top. You couldn’t just… have them start talking again? You don’t need some big silly plot thing to happen. And you may argue, “This is a movie and you do things more dramatically in movies.” That’s true in some cases but you have to choose your battles. With something as simple as talking, you could’ve had them both waiting for a ride outside the front of the school at the same time and that lead to a conversation.
Then there was the love story between Christine and Kate. Sometimes I believed it and sometimes I didn’t.
Love stories are trickier than you think because there are two worlds involved. There is the character world where the two characters are unaware they’re in a movie. This is the world you want to be in as a writer. You want your characters saying and doing things only because they want to say and do them.
Then there’s the writer world where the characters are waiting for the writer to write their next line. Or to give them their next action. This is the world you don’t want to be in. Because when you start making the characters do things, IT READS LIKE SOMEONE IS MAKING THEM DO THINGS.
And that was my issue with their story. Sometimes their interactions felt natural. Other times it was obvious the writer was making things happen. For example, everything here is framed around Kate helping Christine attract Devon. But Christine is gay. She’s not into dudes. So why is she going after this guy? Because it’s a way for the writer to get her and Kate around each other.
I realize that when you’re writing a movie, you must move the plot along. You can’t pretend like it doesn’t exist. But that’s the ultimate goal of a screenwriter, is being able to move your plot invisibly so that it looks like things are happening and not that someone is making them happen. That’s the holy grail.
So when writing a dialogue scene, don’t try to make the characters say what you want them to say. SEE WHAT THEY SAY FIRST. Observe them speaking as an objective party. If they go off-book, let them go-off book. Then you can reel them in when you rewrite the scene. I’ve always found that better than trying to control the scene from the outset. That’s when you get scenes that feel forced.
To be honest, there wasn’t anything bad in this script. It was a light easy read. It was just little things here and there that kept reminding me I was reading a script. Like how the movie is built around, “Are Kate and Christine going to kiss or not?” It was a sweet way to frame the story. But then they finally do and the last 25 pages they’re having hardcore sex. It’s like…okay, so much for the sweetness. It just felt uneven, like it never quite knew what tone it was trying to achieve.
Then again, I’m not the demo for this script! And it’s harder to write these high school scripts than it looks. Taste will vary. Unfortunately, even with some of the good stuff I read, this one wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Look, material like this can get you a Netflix green light. But I still contend that if you want to write the next THEATRICAL high school movie, you need to reinvent the genre. That’s what John Hughes did with The Breakfast Club. Nobody had ever seen a high school movie that took place in one day with a handful of characters, that relied almost completely on dialogue. You have to be that forward-thinking today. Whatever you’re used to seeing in “high school movies,” don’t write that. Come up with something different. It’s actually a genre that’s primed to reinvent because it’s been stale for so long. So if you’ve got that idea, enter it into The Last Great Screenwriting Contest! :)
