Genre: Drama
Premise: Mary, a hair trigger pool hustler, has her hedonistic lifestyle all figured out until
she meets Ray, a fellow pool shark. Will she change her ways and let herself fall in
love? Or just kill him and make a break for it…
About: This script finished with 24 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Ryan Brennan
Details: 114 pages
When you’re tasked with creating characters a day after the reviewer watched the master at creating characters, you’ve got a tough act to follow. Let’s see how today’s writer did.
30-something Mary is an extremely angry person. How angry? Well, she hates men more than anything on the planet. She not only uses them for sex but she steals all the stuff in their homes afterwards. But she doesn’t stop at men. Early on, we watch as she antagonizes a female restaurant customer for no other reason than she can.
Mary is a pool hustler. She walks into a pool hall, pretends to be decent but mostly lucky, luring in potential marks, before betting a bunch of money on the final game and taking them to the cleaners.
It’s not an easy gig that Mary has. She has a deep set hatred for all of her opponents and thinks that everything on earth is disgusting, evil, terrible, or all three. She’s not above shooting any of her opponents who come after her after losing and though no kills have been confirmed, you can bet your bottom dollar that a dude or two has died at Mary’s hand.
This begins to change once she heads to Texas and meets Ray. At first, she sees Ray as a mark. But as one game turns into two, two to four, and four to eight, she senses that maybe she’s not as in control of this situation as she thinks she is. In the end, Ray takes her for a cool 5 grand.
Infuriated, it’s now Mary chases after a man for the first time, which then leads to a night of wild sex. Mary won’t admit it to herself yet but she’s starting to like this guy. She has to admit it the next day though when, at a new bar, jealousy swells up as she watches Ray flirt with a female mark.
For the first time in a long time, Mary dates a dude. This is a foreign concept to her so when she begins to experience full on feelings of love, she freaks out. Now, when you or I freak out because we’re falling in love, we might send too many text messages. Not Mary. Mary asks Ray to participate in a fun game of pretend rape in a bar parking lot. When Ray plays along, pushing when Mary says stop, she pulls out a gun and shoots him three times.
Mary then goes on the run to Vegas, assuming Ray is dead. But Ray survives! And he recruits his pool buddy, Hal, to find Mary and get his revenge. They both head to Vegas and eventually find her. But before Ray can kill her, Mary is so happy to learn that she didn’t kill Ray that she claims she’ll do anything for him. The two (along with Hal) agree to crash the glitziest pool hall in Vegas and burn it down in a single night, hustling as much money as possible. What could go wrong?
A common thing I keep running into with these Black List scripts, especially post-2017, when the cultural climate became more intense, is anger.
And here’s the funny thing. Most writers are already angry. Not all of them. But, generally speaking, writers tend to be a frustrated lot. And they use their stories as an outlet to get that anger out. Which is good if you know how to manage it.
But when you add this additional post-2017 dose of ‘angry’ to an already angry individual, you get scripts like this and Don’t Borrow Trouble. There’s too much anger to come back from. Or, to put it in screenwriting terms, you can’t redeem a character who’s unredeemable.
Mary is an awful person. On top of her hating everyone and being mean to everyone, she attempts to murder the man she loves for no other reason than she’s angry for making her love him. Why would you think we would say, “Man, I really want to hang out with this woman for another hour and see her get better?” No. At that point, I want her to meet her demise.
And while there is a template for telling these types of stories – they’re called tragedies due to the fact that the character dies in the end due to an inability to change – they’re incredibly delicate stories that are hard to pull off.
One of the most famous ones is Taxi Driver and when you look at that story, Travis Bickle was not introduced to us as this hateful angry person. He was more of a lost soul. That’s something people can relate to. Which is why they got on board with him. If Taxi Driver would’ve introduced us to an already mohawked Travis Bickle, the movie would not have worked because we would’ve hated him.
Which is the issue here. We hate this woman so much that nothing you can do in the writing is going to change that.
I actually respected the late story creative choice of Mary shooting Ray because it was so unexpected. It put the story on this new non-formulaic path. And he does take that storyline to its logical conclusion (spoiler) with Ray getting his revenge. But is it really that satisfying to see your protagonist, who you never liked in the first place, die? It all feels a bit… super depressing.
I don’t know if I’m becoming too goodie-two-shoes. Maybe we grow out of all this dark stuff as we grow older and we want lighter fare that makes us happier. But I’m not convinced that’s what’s going on here. I like dark stuff that’s written well. I liked Kinds of Kindness. I liked Strange Darling. I liked Speak No Evil and Furiosa. This just introduced me to a character I hated so much that I could never get past that. This seems to be this ongoing problem with Black List scripts, where the writers are laying on the anger too thick and not considering how it affects the reader.
Because remember, how you introduce a character contributes to 80-90% of how the reader sees them. Here are some early moments with Mary. Here she is talking about men: “99.9% of these walking, talking, fucking, sucking monsters we share the earth with care about one thing and one thing only: themselves.”
And then: Mary, BORED, decides to PUSH HIM OFF and FORCE HIS FACE DOWN between her legs. He takes the cue and GOES DOWN ON HER. After some hair-pulling instruction from Mary, she ORGASMS. He comes up kissing her, but she’s CLEARLY DONE. MARY: “Ugh, that was great. I’m sorry I’m so… tired all of a sudden. But you’re welcome to finish yourself off. G’night.”
And then: Puts her clothes on, and deftly goes through his apartment, STEALING EVERYTHING SHE CAN. Clearly a routine procedure.
And then: As Mary walks to her car, DAVE FOLLOWS HER. MARY (V.O.) “Just don’t forget, boys and girls, shriveled dicks can be real sore losers. So always come prepared.” He looks like he’s going to BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF HER. But as he GRABS HER BY THE SHOULDER, Mary spins around… …GUN IN HAND. FIRES TWO SHOTS: BANG! BANG!
And then after verbally assaulting a woman at a restaurant for no reason: And just as Mary opens her mouth to verbally TEAR THIS WOMAN A NEW ASSHOLE (which she’s fully capable of)… Just then, a SQUAD OF POLICE CARS BLARE BY, SIRENS and all. No doubt headed for the wreckage Mary left behind. TIME TO GO. But Mary certainly won’t let Neighbor have the satisfaction of feeling like she won this interaction… MARY: “EXCUSE ME, WAITRESS? Sorry, I’m gonna go ahead and pay. This woman just will not stop bothering me.”
This was all within the first 7 pages. That pretty much says it all.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re thinking about writing an angry main character, consider instead writing someone who’s broken or lost. You can access some of the same negative emotions that you want to portray your character to have, but broken and lost is much more redeemable. I mean, look through all the movies where an unapologetically angry main character has worked. One of the commenters here will give you about 10, probably. But keep in mind that’s out of half a million movies.
