Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: A female urologist and a retired hooker form an unlikely friendship when they team up to take down a notorious sex trafficker in Miami.
About: Cut and Run finished near the middle of the pack in last year’s Black List. Zoe McCarthy is new on the scene. This is the first script she’s been recognized for. She also has another project in development called Bitches in a Boat.
Writer: Zoe McCarthy
Details: 114 pages – undated
Whenever I read a script, I’m always looking for things I haven’t seen before. Because let’s be honest. We’re all stealing pollen from the same flowers. So the chances that your honey’s any sweeter than mine ain’t that good, ya backyard little bumblebee. But every once in awhile, you do run into something new. And it’s these writers who stand out, since they’re clearly seeing the world in a way we aren’t.
However, I’m not sure I was prepared for today’s level of unique. Starting on close-ups of a man’s “bulbous ball sack” and then, a scene later, a woman’s “errant pubes,” left me wondering if I was reading a screenplay or reliving childhood memories of Fourth of July parties at Uncle Mick’s house. With that said, it guaranteed that what I’d be reading today was unusual, and I was game for that. Pubes and all.
34 year-old Anna Rockport is one of the best urologists in Miami. But her OCD behavior and man-like personality has kept the dudes away in droves. But tonight – tonight is different. Because Anna Rockport’s gonna get laid.
She gets done up in her Friday night best and heads out to some swanky Miami club, the kind where the tables shine due to a combination of cheap hair gel and last night’s errant semen, and corners the hottest guy in the bar, Eddie, letting him know she’s ready to bang-a-lang.
Eddie takes the eventually wasted Anna back to his crib, which has a 150 shades of grey back room that has anything and everything you could imagine for a sexual escapade, including, for some reason, lots of My Little Pony outfits. Anna decides it would be fun to pop one of these on and buck around in circles while singing the My Little Pony theme song.
Unfortunately, the repeated circular motion makes her sick and she pukes all over Eddie’s penis. Naturally, Eddie is furious and kicks her out. But that isn’t the worst thing that happens to Anna. No. Not by a long cum shot. Anna wakes up the next day to find that her escapade was taped and is now trending all over the internet. As if she even needs to go into work to find out she’s fired, Anna realizes that her 12 years of medical school is now worthless.
Wanting to drink away her misery, she meets a local hooker, Angel, in a bar. It just so happens that Angel knows Eddie, and the two team-up to get that bastard back. They sneak into his home just as he’s priming a group of foreign girls he’s sex-trafficking, and while one of them has her mouth around Eddie’s penis, Angel and Anna jump in, causing the girl to inadvertently chomp off Ed’s member.
All hell breaks loose and Angel and Anna are able to sneak out, with Eddie’s severed penis in tow! What follows next is a dangerous game of dick and mouse. Eddie wants to kill them and Anna wants Eddie to admit to the world he’s a sex trafficker.
Of course, Anna’s got the upper handjob since she’s in possession of Eddie’s privates. The two eventually agree to a deal where the pee-pee will be reattached. But as you’ve already stupendously imagined, nothing goes according to plan.
I’m sure a lot of you are thinking what I’m thinking. Which is that this had to be influenced by the infamous Zola Twitter blowout story from last year (which they’re also making a movie of, in case you were wondering). I’m guessing it was, but since that story broke in late October and the Black List was released in the middle of December, that would mean Zoe McCarthy would’ve had to write this in a month, which is pretty impressive.
The thing about that story, though, is that it’s impossible to compete with. It was too fucking crazy. Yet somehow, McCarthy gives Zola a run for her hard-earned money. This woman is so deranged, so unafraid to go anywhere and everywhere, that reading Cut and Run was like watching Thelma and Louise after the two had injected horse roids into their craniums after doing coke all night.
McCarthy embraces the insanity, and like a weekend bender in Vegas, rides it until there’s nothing left to ride. This gives the script a first-draft feel. But I think that works in its favor. You don’t want to clean this up. You want it to be rough around the edges. And this certainly is that.
Still, this isn’t all stream-of-conscious. There is structure to the story. McCarthy uses the basic McGuffin approach that works so well for big tentpole films, and isn’t it hilarious that our McGuffin is a severed penis. So I guess that’d be called a McCockfin?
I was also surprised that she attempted to inject some heart into the story. For example, we find out that the reason Anna wanted to become a urologist is because her father died of testicular cancer and she wanted to make sure other little girls’ daddies didn’t die of the same thing when she grew up.
And there’s this whole subplot with Irina, the 17 year old model-hopeful who had the unfortunate experience of orally severing a man’s penis off, that covers her desperate attempts to find a passport so she can go back to friendly Ukraine. That story is treated with almost as much compassion as it is craziness, which did the impossible, occasionally grounding a sky-high plot that had as much desire to stay on course as Malaysian flight MH370.
Then of course there’s the fluctuating relationship between Anna and Angel. That’s what these two-handers always come down to: How well the writer is able to place that relationship on a roller-coaster so that it stays fresh and unpredictable and hooks the reader into wanting to find out if the two end up together. I’m not going to say that the execution was perfect. But it was certainly solid.
Zoe McCarthy is undeniably talented. Had my sensibilities been more in tune with hers, this might’ve been a life-changing experience. But there are only so many close-ups of ball sacks, penis-puking, and hookers and johns beating each other up that a man can take. If you’re that kind of dirty, this might be for you. If you’re a testicular tale prude like myself, you might find yourself looking away occasionally. Still, you can’t dismiss a voice this brave. It’s a great example of how to get noticed through the power of fearless writing.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Screenwriters, stop mentioning the movie (Thelma and Louise in today’s script) that inspired your movie in your movie! I don’t know why screenwriters do this. It makes your work look less original in the reader’s eyes and it encourages them to draw comparisons. Don’t you know there’s a secret deal every writer and director makes where they don’t mention all the sources they’re copying and we the consumers don’t ask? That way we can pretend everything is original.
