Today I review the Number 1 Black List script!
Genre: Drama
Premise: Under the cruel guidance of a mysterious coach, an ambitious high school wrestler struggles to become a state champion while battling a bizarre infection in his ear that both makes him dominant in his sport and threatens his sanity.
About: This is the number 1 script on the 2021 Black List! You can see my reaction to all 60 Black List loglines here. The writer, Daniel Jackson, recently won the 2021 Script Pipeline contest. He went to NYU’s Tisch for film school. And he writes for Thrillist.
Writer: Daniel Jackson
Details: 98 pages
I’m sure you’re all just as excited to get into this as I am so let’s not waste any time! A quick warning. There’s a fairly significant spoiler in the first act which I have to include in the plot summary so if you don’t want to know what happens, go read the script first!
14 year old 106 pound Adam Karr has just joined a new private school where he plans on becoming one of the only freshman wrestlers in history to win the state wrestling tournament. Adam immediately befriends fellow wrestler, and junior, Jason, who shows him the ropes.
Jason makes it clear that the team’s secret weapon is Volkov, a mysterious 70-something assistant coach who used to be in the Russian KGB where he learned all types of fighting styles. But he only coaches juniors and seniors. He’s never even looked at a freshman.
Determined to change that, Adam makes a plea to Volkov to teach him and Volkov agrees to give him a trial private lesson at his house. While the two are sparring, Volkov has a heart attack and dies. Adam runs out of the house, telling no one he was there.
In the following days, Adam starts hearing a voice in his ear (which has been infected from wrestling) and quickly figures out it’s the ghost of Volkov! Volkov’s ghost starts coaching him in his matches, telling him exactly when to move out of the way, or when to go for a tackle. With Volkov’s help, Adam starts destroying his opponents.
But soon Volkov starts coaching him in his love life (“Get rid of your girlfriend”) and social life (“Frame your best friend”) in an attempt to eliminate any distractions so that Adam will have a clear path to the state title. It seems that the more infected Adam’s ear gets, the more negative Volkov gets. Will Adam survive long enough to win state? Or will Volkov’s ear be his downfall?
The number 1 Black List script always brings with it high expectations and those expectations are probably unfair, since it’s hard enough to impress a reader with no expectations. The reality is that, these days, the majority of the writers on the Black List are amateurs. Some of you might push back on that since the writers all have representation. But representation doesn’t mean anything when you haven’t made any money with your writing.
I bring this up because it’s easy to go into these scripts thinking they’re going to redefine the medium. But the reality is that these writers are still figuring out how to be screenwriters. And that’s pretty evident in Cauliflower, an uneven screenplay that bites off more than it can chew (going with the ‘cauliflower’ theme here – roll with me).
There were two things that stood out in the script. (Spoiler) The first was the twist at the end of act one, when Volkov dies. I was so certain that Jackson was going to lean into the Mr. Miagi role with Volkov that I didn’t know what to do with myself when he suddenly died. It reinvigorated my interest in the script, making me excited to go into the second act.
The second choice I liked was inserting Volkov’s soul into Adam’s cauliflower-infected ear and turning it into a demented Obi-Wan Kenobi force ghost. One of the disadvantages writers have these days is that they’re competing against the biggest cinematic juggernaut in history – superhero IP. Every character we create seems tiny in comparison to a superhero trying to save the world.
Well, here, Jackson’s figured out a way to create an indie superhero. Adam’s superpower is his ability to know exactly what to do at exactly the right time. The ear’s voice tells him when to dodge, when to attack, when to pounce. It tells him the answers to his teacher’s history questions. It even tells him the right time to make a move on his girlfriend. It’s his own little spidey-sense.
But there were issues here I couldn’t get past.
The dialogue was a big stumbling block as much of it was on the nose. Here’s an example: “He gets me psyched up. When I listen to him, I feel like I can run through a brick wall.” I suppose you could argue that freshmen in high school don’t have the most sophisticated vocabulary. But you should always look to avoid cliche phrasing like “run through a brick wall.” As a writer, you want to come up with new stuff, not depend on the old stuff.
Another random example: “You’re lucky. You don’t even need to be coached. I watch you out there. It’s like God’s pulling the strings.” This was a line from Jason to Adam. We’ve got another cliche phrase: “It’s like God’s pulling the strings.” More importantly, this is a tell don’t show line. Writers write it when they don’t have confidence that they’ve done the job though the character’s actions. So they write a line of dialogue to drive it home. “You are the most amazing wrestler I’ve ever seen!” If you properly SHOW this, you never need a character to say it.
But things really start to get messy when you delve into Adam’s home life. To be at the top of any sport, you need your parents pushing you. It’s not like you’re voluntarily signing up for wrestling classes at age 10. It’s your parents who have to choose that and then commit you to it. Anybody here who’s been an athlete will tell you – the best kids in their sports always had parents who pushed them into that sport at a young age, made them practice an ungodly amount of hours every week, and usually got them tons of private coaching.
So for Adam’s parents to barely know he was on the wrestling team felt completely false. If he was this good, they would’ve been a part of that.
Then you had the private school angle. For reasons that weren’t made clear, Adam had always been in public school. Except for now, as his parents had just enrolled him in a private school. A private school that cost a lot of money. However, we’re also told that Adam’s father can’t find work. Why would you sign your son up for an expensive private school for the first time when one of you is unemployed? Logically, it made no sense.
We also have an awkward religious subplot. The family had either just become religious, or the parents were already religious and Adam wasn’t for some reason. But now Adam wanted to be religious and asks his parents if he could come to church with them. It wasn’t clear why he wanted to be religious or why he all of a sudden had an urge to go to church. I don’t know. The whole thing felt really loosey-goosey. It wasn’t clear who was religious, who wasn’t, how big of a role religion had played in the family up until now. None of it felt convincing. You can’t do that with religion. It needs to be clear where people stand.
Then, on top of that, you had this Youtuber Adam was obsessed with – Dirk Ironside. Sometimes Dirk Ironiside would appear in Adam’s ear and give him advice. Which was confusing because we’d already built this entire story around Volkov being in his ear. So we now have two ‘magical versions of people’ giving him advice? It felt unnecessarily complicated.
And then when we get to the ending, the main character has gone so insane that we don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. I’m not going to rant about this since I’ve spent way too much time over the years on it already. But my basic issue with it is that it allows you to cheat your way out of any corners you’ve painted yourself into. Amazing writers can sometimes get away with this (they did it in Black Swan, for example). But, like I said, there was so much messiness already that I didn’t trust the writer enough to take me down that path.
The script does end on one hell of a shocking image. And, like I said, I thought the Volkov stuff was interesting. But there were too many half-formulated ideas here. The bar for these scripts is Magazine Dreams. That’s the level of sophistication you’re competing against. In the end, I felt that Cauliflower was too messy.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Use descriptive exaggeration to better convey a visual. You can always depend on the nuts and bolts way of describing something, of course. For example, if you’re describing your hero running, you can say, “He sprints as fast as he can.” And that will do. But if you want to drive the visual home, you’ll have to do better than that. That’s where descriptive exaggeration comes in. You’ll say something in such an exaggerated manner that it conveys a much more powerful visual. Here’s the way Jackson describes Adam running. “Sprinting as hard as possible. Like he’s trying to escape his own body.” When I read that, I FEEL how hard he’s running. Where as, with the more generic, “He sprints as fast as he can,” I don’t feel anything.
