Genre: Drama
Premise: Courted by colleges and sponsors alike, a burnt-out tennis prodigy fights to maintain dominance against her Academy rival as she hurtles toward the existential decision of turning Pro–a choice that will force her to double down on her dream or walk away from the future she’s fought for.
About: This script finished with 6 votes on last year’s Black List. Zachary Joel Johnson was an assistant at Skydance, Scott Free, and Dreamworks Animation.
Writer: Zachary Joel Johnson
Details: 103 pages
Iman Vellani for Faheema?
I’ve been saving this one.
If you’re a new Scriptshadow subscriber, this is where I tell you I used to teach tennis. And, oddly enough, I get at least two tennis scripts a year to review. I’m not sure why the sport is written about so much. It’s inherently boring. I mean how do you tell a story about a sport that nobody in the world understands how to score????
If Player A has Ad-In on match point and the audience doesn’t know what “ad-in” or “match point” means, there’s literally no way to convey the drama. This is something Elad (writer of the other Black List tennis script on the list – Court 17) and I spent hours upon hours discussing while developing that script – how much we should teach the audience. Or if we should just leave it. It was agonizing to discuss and reminded me why I get so frustrated whenever I encounter a tennis screenplay.
The solution is probably to do what Challengers did. That’s the last tennis script I reviewed on the site, the one that stars Zendaya. The script was less about the tennis and more about the dirty love triangle at the center of it.
Believe me. I want this script to be an ace. Because if it is, it means the next 90 minutes is going to fly by. If it isn’t, it means the next 90 minutes is going to feel like the first 10 minutes of The Seeker, which felt like 10 years.
Ya follow that?
Faheema Nassar is an introverted 17 year old tennis prodigy who just won her first professional tournament. However, despite her coach, Bebe, and father, Omar, wanting her to turn pro, Faheema is reluctant. If you turn pro, you can never play college tennis, and Faheema wants to play tennis at Columbia.
So she rejects the prize money and heads back to her tennis academy in Florida to train. There, she’s met with a new face, 19 year old mean girl, Caroline Werber. Werber is only here because Faheema is the best junior talent in the world. By playing alongside her, people will notice Caroline.
Soon after, Prince Rackets shows up and wants to sponsor Faheema. Again, if she does this, she can’t play college tennis. So she’s reluctant to sign. Also, they’re barely giving her any money. Faheema realizes that if she wins the 18s Nationals, that gives you a wild card slot into the U.S. Open. Prince would have to double their offer if she pulls that off. So that becomes her goal.
The problem is, everyone there is obsessed with Faheema and works her to death. She’s getting burnt out. If that isn’t bad enough, Caroline keeps talking her down, telling her she’s worthless, trying to destroy her mental game. And then you have a former Russian Wimbledon champ coming in to train Faheema who’s even more of a c**t than Caroline! If Faheema can somehow survive all this pressure, she can begin her promising career. The question is, does she want to?
Tennis players are actually interesting people.
They tend to be loners at heart. They’re introverted. They’re socially awkward. As a tennis instructor, I can confirm that the kids who the parents brought to my classes were never the cool athletic types. They were always the kids who were a little bit “off,” lol.
I think that’s what Johnson is trying to capture here with Faheema. She’s anxious, socially awkward, introverted. Unfortunately, this combo makes her unlikable. She’s a super downer who never smiles, is never happy, who never likes playing tennis, who doesn’t make an effort to connect with anyone, who doesn’t like any of the people who train her, including her own father.
Why would we root for someone like that?
This is the crux of screenwriting here people. Forget that this is a tennis script. It could be a superhero script, a guy-with-a-gun script, a comedy, a Western, a buddy-cop flick — IF WE DON’T LIKE THE MAIN PERSON WE’RE FOLLOWING, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.
And I think too many writers craft their protagonists without that in mind. To them it’s like a mound of clay that you shape on a whim. If it works it works. If not, it doesn’t. Oh well. Screenwriting starts with making the audience care about the main character and I just don’t see any strategy at all in this script to achieve that.
I’m not even sure what the central conflict is for our main character.
She’s torn between turning pro or playing for Columbia. Why does she want to play for Columbia? Columbia doesn’t even have a good tennis team (which is noted in the script). So why is that so important to you? That question is NEVER answered. It almost seems like Johnson confuses the fact that turning pro means you can’t play in college OR go to college. But that’s not true. You can go back to college after playing on the professional tennis tour. You just can’t play on the tennis team. So what’s really at stake here with this choice of Faheema’s? As far as I can tell, nothing. And it’s supposed to be the central conflict in the script.
This means we have a character we don’t root for in a situation with weak stakes. That’s a bad combo. It’s hard to create something good out of that scenario.
You need to create stakes that hold up in the real world. For example, Faheema decides she’s going to play the Nationals in the hopes of winning in order to double her contract offer from Prince. But what does that really mean? She’ll make 160 thousand dollars instead of 80 thousand.
You have to think about these things from the perspective of the reader. Is the reader really going to say, “Oh man! I was not interested when she was only going to make 80 grand. But now that she’s going to get 160 grand?? I’m all in. I really want her to succeed!!!” Stakes have to feel giant in movies. They can’t be casual. They can’t be ‘sort of big.’
The best aspect of the script was probably the relationship between Faheema and Caroline. Caroline, by the way, had actual stakes attached to her actions. She was 19. She was going to stop getting funded by her parents unless she made the tour. So she needed to win the Nationals to get that wild card or else she’d be forced to quit tennis. THOSE ARE STAKES. Why didn’t we have stakes like that for Faheema?
But anyway, seeing how cruel Caroline was to Faheema provided an ample amount of conflict within the tennis academy. And there’s a nice moment late in the movie where Caroline finally apologizes for being so awful to Faheema. But even that storyline suffered from Caroline being a two-dimensional character for most of the movie (she’s Mean Girl To The Max whenever she walks in the room).
Unfortunately, this script does not give me hope that tennis scripts are now easy to write. Challengers is still my number 1 script. Court 17 is number 2. Everything else is a distant third.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes, how you want to portray your protagonist makes them unlikable. And it’s your job to recognize this and decide if that’s really want you want to do. For example, if you want to create a story around a really depressed person, well, depressed people aren’t likable. So you either need to have a plan to make them likable or you need to scrap your idea entirely. — It can be done by the way. Making a depressing person likable. Sometimes it’s as simple as giving them a sense of humor. Faheema smiled once in this movie. The final line of the script! Just have her crack some jokes. Have her have fun. If your character is down all the time, I PROMISE YOU we will not like them.
