Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: When the president of the United States heads to the G7 Conference in France, he’ll meet up with the new Prime Minister, who he had a one-night stand with at Oxford twenty years ago.
About: This script finished in the middle of the pack of last year’s Black List. Writer Pat Cunnane was a staff writer on Designated Survivor, which gave him some insight into how to write a president.
Writer: Pat Cunnane
Details: 117 pages
Romantic comedies are HOTTER than a pizza oven in Satan’s basement right now and I’m only expecting them to get hotter.
Since rom-coms relied solely on the star power of their leads, they weren’t able to survive the death of the movie star era. But then a new opportunity arose. The streamer! Streamers didn’t need movie stars to sell their rom-coms. All they needed were two good-looking people and a production that cost less than 15 million bucks. Which is why these little films have found a second life. But what the new generation of rom-coms hasn’t found yet is a good movie. Has there been one memorable rom-com in the last decade? Not to my knowledge. Maybe Affairs of State will be the first one.
Harry Baker Axton is the president of the United States. I’d like to tell you something specific about him but the script doesn’t provide anything in the way of a description of Harry. I guess I’ll just go with “generic presidential figure” in my head. Always a good idea to let the reader do the writing for you (PRO TIP – If you don’t tell us, we’ll make up our own version. And our own version probably won’t be what you had in mind).
Across the pond, we meet Ella Walker who, likewise, comes to us minus a character description. Ella is in the final days of her political race against the current prime minister. It’s a race she wins by the skin of her teeth, shocking the country and the world.
Back in the US, we learn that Axton has a secret. These two actually know each other! Axton was a teacher’s assistant at Oxford when Ella was attending school. The two got drunk one night and engaged in a one-night stand, a one-night stand Ella regretted immediately.
When Axton flies to France for the G7 summit, he reunites with Ella for the first time since that evening. Before we can see what’s going to happen between the two, we’re given the details of an elaborate problem in Yemen that Russia is making worse. This becomes our B-storyline. The Yemen Military Issue. In a romantic comedy.
Ella makes clear to Axton that nobody can find out what happened at Oxford as it would mean the US and Britain could never do a deal again without both countries assuming it was done due to their tryst. Or something like that.
The problem is that Axton really likes Ella. And over the next 48 hours, he keeps sneaking into rooms she’s in and making his case why they should be together. Ella eventually buckles because she sort of likes him. Then the worst possible thing happens. Someone leaks the Oxford affair to the press! This means that one of our esteemed leaders will have to step down from their position. Who will it be? And does this mean our lukewarm non-affair is over for good?
Welcome, my friends, to the world’s most serious romantic comedy!
If you’ve ever wanted a rom-com that centered around the military conflict in Yemen, look no further. I’ve found your script.
Man was this script frustrating.
The whole time I was reading it, I was trying to figure what kind of movie it was. The setup implied a romantic comedy. But the Yemen conflict coated the whole thing in this drab seriousness.
The one thing I know about rom-coms is that there has to be sexual tension between the leads. So I was baffled to find out there was none. Ella straight up hates Axton. There’s never a happy moment between the two. Which was bizarre since, during a couple of moments, she kisses Axton.
All I could think was, “Where is this coming from? You haven’t shown an ounce of interest in this guy for the last 40 pages.”
The script picks up once we get to France because, finally, we have some kind of structure to the movie. They’re going to be stuck working together at the G7 conference for the next 48 hours. That gave us a ticking clock. And because the two of them were always surrounded by their handlers, it gave them very little time to sneak away and be together. That’s always a strong scene set-up, when two people are trying to talk but barely have any time to do so. So this section was readable.
But everything else was straight up disappointing.
I had a major problem with the stakes in the movie, which is Axton’s and Ella’s former hook-up. If the press learns about it, the ability for their two countries to work together is compromised since they’d be making deals for each other and not their people.
Sometimes a set of stakes can work on a technical level yet the audience still doesn’t care. That’s how I’d characterize these stakes. Yeah, sure, their Oxford tryst could “compromise” honest negotiations between the countries. But did I really care about this? Did it worry me? Not in the slightest. If the reader isn’t worried, your stakes are weak, whether they logically work or not.
Stakes is one of those aspects of storytelling you don’t want to lie to yourself about. If you don’t get the stakes right, the audience never feels fear or hope. They never feel fear that anything truly bad is going to happen. And they never feel hope that anything truly good is going to happen. And without fear and hope, the reader is reading from a neutral position the whole time. Nothing in the story can ever affect them in an emotional way.
But there’s a bigger problem here.
The script was never going to work because it’s built on a weak concept.
When you’re setting up a romantic comedy, it works best when there are differences between the main characters. In fact, the more severe the differences, the more interesting the dynamic tends to be. Rom-coms also work best when there’s a power imbalance. This actually works well for any movie team-up. The imbalance is where you get the contrast. The contrast is where you get the conflict. The conflict is where you get the drama. The drama is where you get the entertainment.
Pretty Woman. Notting Hill. Meet the Parents. The Proposal.
Look at the contrast between the characters in all these movies. Look at the power imbalance. It’s severe in all four flicks, right?
Now let’s look at Affairs of State. Two characters. Both leaders of their countries. Both on the same level in pretty much every way. There are very few differences to work with here.
Sure, you get some conflict from the fact that they have to sneak around. But a romantic comedy, if indeed that’s what this is, needs to work at the character level. You need to be able to put your two characters in a room together without anything else going on and they’re interesting together. This script didn’t have that. It was only able to create these momentary pockets of interesting interactions.
I’m frustrated because rom-coms are making this huge comeback and, yet, nobody knows how to write them anymore. I get the feeling this writer has watched five rom-coms his entire life. That’s the only thing that explains why he thought a Yemen subplot would be a good idea.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you’re writing a movie about characters in a specific job – like politics, like business, like the medical field – a common mistake is for your characters to only talk about that world. For example, if you’re writing about doctors, the mistake would be for your doctors to only talk about surgeries, patients, or medical procedures. That’s not real life. In real life, when people get away from work, they talk about anything but work. How their sports team sucks, their favorite hobby, friends, TV shows, their kids, whatever. I found it bizarre that the only thing Axton and Ella talked about this whole script was politics. It just solidified the script as a bland one-note experience.
