Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: When a high school girl writes that her father is dead to win a scholarship essay contest, her father likes the idea so much that he decides to fake his death so he can start a new life.
About: This is Amanda Idoko’s second trip to the Black List. In 2017, she wrote a script called “Breaking News in Yuba County,” about a woman who pretends her husband is missing after he collapses of a heart attack in order to soak up in the celebrity status of having a missing loved one. Getting a second script on the Black List combined with studio initiatives to get as many female writers on the payroll as possible, Idoko landed the coveted assignment of writing the Plastic Man movie for Warner Brothers. Plastic Man, as many Hollywood aficionados know, has been in development for over 30 years. The Wachowskis famously wrote a draft of the script in 1995. Come to think of it, I’ve been meaning to review that script. Does anyone have it? If so, send it along.
Writer: Amanda Idoko
Details: 119 pages
Amanda Idoko is really obsessed with fake death scenarios. Or I guess the last one was a real death scenario that had been faked to be a missing person story. Either way, Idoko likes this setup.
The question I have is, why would anyone read these two scripts and think, “We’ve got our Plastic Man writer?” They’re dark comedies. Plastic Man is a goofy comic book movie. Maybe her pitch was that Plastic Man faked his death? “We love it!” If anything, they should be on this girl to write that whole college admissions scandal thing, right?
Frankie is Juno.
I mean, we can write up a big backstory for her but, let’s be honest. From her wise fast-talking persona to having a beta boyfriend who’s too in love with her, Frankie is Juno with a new name. At least Frankie’s not pregnant. Not yet, anyway.
All Frankie cares about is getting out of her stupid small town. And because her parents are losers, her only shot at this is winning the Harvey Scholarship. According to Frankie’s high school counselor, the Harveys love sad depressing stories. The light bulb goes off for Frankie. She’ll say her dad died!
Speaking of her dad, JP, he’s currently trying to divorce her mom, Liv, so he can marry his new girlfriend, Gina. This is yet another reason Juno, I mean Frankie, wants to get as far away from this place as possible. JP is resistant to the idea at first, but then learns about GoFundme pages for funerals, which can fetch up to 20 grand. If he goes along with this being dead thing, he can make a pretty penny and get out of this podunk town with his new beau.
But to pull this off, they’re going to need a body. Lucky for them, there was a mystery hero who recently ran into a burning building to save an old woman then, in going back to save her dog, was killed in the fire. Since he’s burned beyond recognition, it’ll be easy to claim him as JP’s body. Of course, that would make JP the hero, but they’ll figure that mess out later.
Immediately after that part of the con is executed, the old woman who was saved by “JP,” donates 200,000 dollars to his GoFundme funeral page! Liv, who’s always wanted to be a real estate developer, lights up when she sees this. She takes the money and buys her first property behind JP’s back.
Things only get worse from there. After Frankie’s boyfriend confesses to Frankie’s rival, Natasha, who’s going after the same scholarship as Frankie, that this is all a big lie, she breaks up with him. So in order to win her back, he kills Natasha.
As things continue to spin out of control, Frankie notes the irony of the situation. The whole reason she wanted to leave this place was because it was the most boring town on earth. But in one week, she’s had more excitement than most people have in a lifetime. Unfortunately, it’s too late to change course. Frankie made this bed. Now she has to lie in it.
A long time ago – 15 years at least – I had this idea about a UCLA college freshman who had the same name as the school’s big quarterback recruit. When that recruit doesn’t show up, our hero is mistaken for him. Loving the new celebrity status he’s acquired, he tries to keep the con going for as long as possible, despite the fact that he knows nothing about football.
But I could never make the script work because there was no believable scenario under which someone wouldn’t know what the real quarterback looked like. And that was 15 years ago. Can you imagine pitching that idea today? The quarterback would have an entire social media following. He would have dozens of Youtube videos showing off his amazing passes. He’d be a google search away from having 100 pictures of his face.
That’s what I was thinking about when reading this.
In a world this social media prevalent, how does a father in a suburb fake his death? It would be impossible. A 70 year old hermit without a family who’s never used the internet before who lives out in Joshua Tree? Yeah, maybe I can buy him faking his death in 2019. But a family man with an internet history and friends and extended family… I don’t know how that would work unless you moved to a Pacific Island or something.
I think a lot of older writers are in denial about this stuff. They want it to be like the old days where you might not hear from someone for a week and it wasn’t a big deal. But today, the world knows where you are every single minute. Literally. Whether it be from logging onto your phone, posting a picture, tweeting, using your credit card. Even your car is connected to a server somewhere, feeding you GPS coordinates.
In Idoko’s defense, suspension of disbelief is a sliding scale, and that scale gets more forgiving the further into the comedy sub-genres you go. Would two guys delivering a suitcase to a woman halfway across the country really buy a Lamborghini from the money they discover inside of it, as was the case in the movie, Dumb and Dumber? I’m guessing, no. But I never thought about that when I was watching it. I was too busy laughing.
I suppose that’s our answer when it comes to this conundrum. As long as the story is good, we’re not going to obsess over questionable story logic. Indeed, once the story gets going and Idoko is juggling six to seven balls at once, you’re not thinking back to that shaky setup. But the setup has always been sacrosanct to me. That’s where the majority of the exposition and character setup is, all the stuff that can gum up a read. So if you can come out of that without me questioning anything, there’s a good chance I’m going to enjoy the rest of the screenplay.
Dead Dads Club is a story of two halves. The first half is Idoko fighting with everything she’s got to make this setup believable. Then, after she’s done all the hard work and the game can be played, it’s actually quite clever. I loved the mom buying the house with the GoFundme money, completely disregarding the fact that all of it was for the dad, then the old woman’s daughter coming in and demanding the money her mother donated back. You could just see this house of cards crumbling and you wanted to see it fall.
But after it was all over, it didn’t leave enough of an impression on me where I would say to someone, “You gotta read this.” And that’s the true test of whether a script is worth the read on Scriptshadow!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I know this is a weird and hard question to conceptualize, but I want you to try. In this exercise, you need to take yourself out of the equation. Your latest script wasn’t written by you. It was written by someone else. Now if you read that script, would you recommend it to someone else? Be honest. Because this is the crux of whether your script will gain traction in the industry or not – if people read it and want to tell someone else about it. I don’t think enough writers ask themselves this question when they start to write something. They assume it’s going to be good because they conceived of it. But if you can take yourself out of the equation and look at your idea objectively, you may save yourself a lot of time and heartache.
