Has today’s writer conquered one of Hollywood’s screenwriting chupacabras? Written “the next Goonies?”
Genre: Ghost/Adventure
Premise: A Wisconsin high school girl teams up with her friends to look for a ghost ship she believes is connected to her mother’s disappearance.
About: This script finished with 6 votes on last year’s Black List. So far the writer, Nicole Ramberg, has made a few short films. She is repped by Bellevue. She graduated from Northwestern as well as the NBCUniversal Page Program. She won the 2020 ScreenCraft Action and Adventure category. She is a fellow Chicago suburbian. So I hope this script is good!
Writer: Nicole Ramberg
Details: 120 pages
What separates a top 10 Black List script from a bottom 10 Black List script? Is there any difference between the two? We’re going to try and answer that question in today’s review.
The year is 1993 and 15 year-old Riley Halbeck is living in the American equivalent of hell, aka, Wisconsin (I can say that because I went to college there). Riley and her young sister, Emma, live with their aunt, Annie, because several years ago, their mother disappeared.
Riley, who’s best friends with chatty Ash and sweet Wyatt, has heard rumors that multiple disappearances, not just her mother’s, are tied to the mysterious La Salle Island, which is just off the coast. It is said that near La Salle, people have seen a ghost ship floating around.
Wyatt convinces his pals to head out to that very island on Halloween and, when they get there, they find a girl named Danielle Keller unconscious on the beach. Danielle disappeared eight years ago! And she hasn’t aged a day!
Hoping for a break in her missing mother’s case, Riley encourages Danielle to tell the cops everything she knows. Instead, Danielle says she ran away, ran out of money, and came back. It appears that Danielle would rather lie than have everyone call her a kook. It usually doesn’t go over well when you tell people you were abducted by a ghost ship.
Through the process of deduction, Riley realizes that whoever is manning the ghost ship is looking for a treasure on La Salle Island. If they can find that treasure first, they can lure in the ghost, and, in the process, find Riley’s mom. So the band heads back out to La Salle. But not everything goes as planned.
So, let’s answer that question. What separates the scripts at the top of the Black List from the ones at the bottom? In my experience, top level scripts tend to take more creative chances, tend to be darker, and tend to have more interesting voices. Whereas scripts at the bottom of the pack are often safer, more formulaic, and less likely to offend. They’re sanitized.
There’s some irony to this in that Hollywood likes making more of those bottom level scripts than the top ones. It’s the conundrum all screenwriters face when they put pen to paper. They can impress the young cool assistant crowd or they can impress the people who actually make movies.
But formulaic screenplays have their own set of challenges, namely that it’s incredibly hard to write a sanitized script that’s memorable. The Goonies is a great example of how to achieve that feat. It’s such a fun creative adventure that it doesn’t bother us that it’s so formulaic.
Craigshaven never reaches that level of creativity, unfortunately. The characters are dialed back so as to be ultra safe and impossible to dislike. And while that *seems* like the right thing to do, it’s the fastest way to writing bland characters.
I realize that when you watch Goonies today, there are some parts of it that are offensive. Watching the friends make their fat friend, Chunk, do an embarrassing “fat boy” dance would never make it into a 2023 movie theater. But, at the same time, that lack of fear to offend is what makes the character (and the friendship) more honest and memorable. Kids really did that sort of thing to their friends. And you know what? They still do. Cause kids are kids and they don’t know any better.
So if you erase all of that truth and just have everyone be perfect and inoffensive, I guarantee you, you’ll write boring characters. You would think that each friend in this story has never done a single bad thing in their life. They’re perfect little people. I can’t stress this enough. If your characters have no faults, they are uninteresting.
I’m not saying you have to have a “Chunk dance” in your script to make it good. But you have to figure out the 2023 version of what kids would really do to each other and give us some of that. Because without authenticity, you have an idealized version of the world. But guess what? The world is imperfect.
Another, more obvious, issue with this script is that it doesn’t have a villain! That’s what Goonies was famous for! It’s villains. The scary-looking guy. The mother with her criminal kids. The lack of any villains tells me the writer is scared to do anything hurtful to her characters. What have I told you about this? NEVER PROTECT YOUR CHARACTERS. Do the opposite! Put them through the wringer! Make their lives miserable.
Here’s the thing with screenwriting. When we come up with a script idea, we always have one major thing we want to focus on in the script. If you’re writing “Barbie” for example, maybe you’re obsessed with Barbie Land and really wanting to make that great.
But, in the process of focusing so much on Barbie Land, you may not care enough about the plot. You may not care enough about the message of the film. You may not put a ton of effort into Ken. And if you make that mistake, you don’t create an entire movie. You only create part of a movie. If Greta Gerwig would’ve done that, she would’ve missed out on creating the most iconic character of 2023 – Ken.
In Craigshaven, I see a writer hyper-focused on this boat mystery. By the way, you can always tell when a writer likes one element of their story above all others because whenever that element arrives, the writer spends way more time describing it. You can feel a change in their enthusiasm when it’s around.
But in being so hyper-focused on this ghost ship plotline, everything else falls by the wayside. Not just the characters but the plot. It’s too standard and basic. With screenwriting, you have to do it all. Or you at least have to try. From the concept to the voice to the characters to the storytelling to the dialogue to the relationships to the plot to the structure. You can’t half-ass any of those if you want to write a great script. You can half-ass some of them if you want to write an okay script. But I’m guessing you want more.
I do find something marketable about this concept, the writing is easy to read, and I thought the relationship between Riley and her aunt had a nice arc. It just didn’t push the envelope enough for me. I needed at least one area where it pushed the envelope. It’s hard for me to get on board a script where everything is written so safely.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You need balance in a screenplay. If every character is sweet as candy, your reader’s going to get sick. You need to balance that out with some nasty characters.
