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Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a feuding rap group’s tour bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, three
hip hop superstars find themselves locked in a life-or-death struggle to survive the
night as they are hunted by a group of locals with a hidden agenda.
About: This script made last year’s Black List. The writer, Will Widger, has one credit, a co-writing credit on the 2020 animated movie, “Wish.”
Writer: Will Widger
Details: 104 pages
Is there any better predictor that a bad script is coming than a first page wall of text?
Maybe number 1 on the “bad script coming” list is a large page count (anything above 125). But wall of text on the first page is a close second.
Okay, “bad,” may be a strong adjective to describe “Detour.” Cause it’s not bad. And it has a fairly marketable premise, which is more than I can say for a lot of amateur scripts I read.
But the real problem here is that it’s so unimaginative! This is an outline that a freshman in high school could’ve come up with. Band travels in tour bus. Tour bus breaks down. Band gets stuck in town. People in town attack them. They try to get away.
What good writers do is they take age-old story templates and play around with them. They massage them. They play Twister with them. They move things around. They try new ideas.
A basic example is Twilight. Before Twilight, vampires couldn’t walk around in daylight. That was a new twist on an old trope. And it changed the game. It allowed the vampires to go to high school, where things could happen that hadn’t happened before with vampires.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Detour” follows a 2025 version of The Fugees, Re-Up, with selfish Lil Slip at the helm. Then you have the shy and thankful to be in this group Mayday. And, finally, you have the lone girl, Sanskrit, who resents Lil Slip getting all the attention.
After one of their concerts (and a wild after-party), the trio, along with their security guard, Charlie, and manager, Isaac, jump on their tour bus to head to the next city. At the last second, they learn that their long-time bus driver has been replaced, but don’t think anything of it.
Once in the middle of nowhere, a tire blows out. The next town is several miles away. They figure they’ll hang there until the bus situation is fixed. Lucky for them, an Uber driver, Ally, is driving by. She recognizes the band and offers to drive them into town.
During this time, Lil Slip and Sanskrit bicker over the fact that Lil Slip wants to do a solo album next. He’s promising he’ll come back to the group but she has doubts. Trouble is definitely brewing in paradise.
Once they get to town, they eat at a barbecue diner that’s surprisingly packed for a small town. Several people seem to know them and are big fans. But they’re all acting a little too nice. You don’t have to read through Robert McKee’s “Story” to figure out what comes next.
The town offers for them to stay at the lone AirBnB, which is suspiciously decked out in all new furniture and decorations. And the next thing you know they’ve been kidnapped and beaten up by the town members, who all wear white masks. It’s a little unclear if they’re supposed to be the KKK since I don’t think they’re in full white regalia, so I guess you could consider them the KKK Lite?
Anyway, it’s now a fight for their lives as they have to find a way out of this crazy town! Will they make it? Or will they succumb to these townies who, it turns out, may have a legitimate reason for killing our hip-hop group.
The most disappointing reading experiences I have are the ones where I’m way ahead of the writer. The more pages I’m ahead of them, the more bored I am. I had this template tabbed immediately and was a good 60-70 pages ahead of the writer.
That’s unacceptable if you want to be a professional screenwriter. Put something in there – ANYTHING IN THERE – to throw me off the scent.
Even beyond that, I knew this script was in trouble immediately. The first four pages show a concert where nothing out-of-the-ordinary happens. It’s all setup and exposition. Then an after-party where nothing happens. It’s all setup and exposition. These are the first 4 pages of your script and you’re already boring your reader. That’s unacceptable.
Contrast this with the opening of Superman, which I reviewed on Monday. We meet Superman right after he’s been beaten to an inch of his life. That’s how you start a story off with drama. You’ve created a problem that the reader must continue reading to find out if it’s resolved.
Will Superman be okay?
We must keep reading if we want the answer to that question.
What question has been posed after the first four pages of this script? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Where is the drama? Where is the suspense? The uncertainty? Why isn’t there a carrot being dangled in front of us? ANYTHING to get us to the next page.
It’s unacceptable.
This is why there are levels to this game. Yeah, I didn’t like aspects of the Superman screenplay. But those were PROFESSIONAL PROBLEMS. The problems in this script are AMATEUR PROBLEMS. Not knowing how to use your opening pages to create a dramatic scenario that will make a reader want to keep reading? That’s Screenwriting 101.
To the writer’s credit, he starts to set things up after that that give the story a little bit of suspense. There’s a rift in the band. There’s a crazy fan sneaking around. There’s a brand new driver for the next leg of their trip. That started to pull me in some.
But then we just know everything that’s coming after that. When we get to the diner, we know everybody there is on it. They’re all acting too suspicious not to be. When Sanskrit finds a hidden camera in the AirBnB bathroom, it’s the most unsurprising reveal in the history of screenplays.
I get that some writers are still early on in their journey and they’re still learning. I know that’s always going to be the case.
But if you’ve watched even a medium amount of movies, you should be able to recognize when you’re writing a common plot beat. Every common plot beat you consider, you need to ask yourself, “Should I be doing something less cliche here?” The answer isn’t always yes. Sometimes you want to use cliche because it can help you lure the reader into a false sense of security. It makes them believe they know where the story is going, which better enables you to shock them later.
But if ALL of your plot beats are cliched, then we’re just bored. You need to be more on top of that as a writer.
By the way, all you truly need is one STRONG unexpected plot beat and that can be enough for the whole movie. A great example of this is Companion, one of my favorite movies of the year. When we find out that (spoiler) the girlfriend is a robot, it throws us off-kilter. Even if no other surprises pop up the rest of that movie (there were), we know that they could pop up because the writer has established that something like that can happen.
Being stuck in the middle of nowhere with killers pursuing you will always give your story enough steam to persist. It’ll do the job. But it’s the difference between the middle manager who “gets the job done” every day at work and the aspiring CEO who goes above and beyond to come up with new exciting ways to expand the company. Both employees are doing their jobs but only one is trying to be great. Don’t be the equivalent of the middle-manager writer.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I will give credit where credit is due. If you write at least one thing that I haven’t seen before, you get Scriptshadow respect points. There’s one moment late in the script where Ally, whose face has been caved in and she’s dead, still holds the key to escape – the band needs to get into her phone for information. They try to use her facial recognition to open the phone but it’s not working, so they have to rearrange her face by pushing it back together and holding it up in a way where it looks like a face again. It’s totally gross cause her face has basically been cut in half. But it’s also really funny.
What I learned 2: You know that moment in your script that feels like magic? Maybe it’s a scene. Maybe it’s a moment between your main characters. Maybe it’s this page of dialogue that sings or a really clever moment that worked perfectly? THAT NEEDS TO BE THE FLOOR FOR YOUR SCRIPT, NOT THE CEILING. When you come up with a great moment, like the above “face cut in half phone recognition” moment, that should be one of many many awesome moments in your script. It shouldn’t be the lone one. When you write a moment like that, let it inspire you. Make it the bar for all your other scenes and characters and moments. Cause one strong moment in a script means nothing. You need a lot of them.
