Genre: Biopic/Sports
Premise: Set in the early 2000s, superstar Ivory Coast soccer player, Didier, joins his flailing home-country team again, but finds that they’re divided by the political civil war brewing within their nation.
About: A fresh and green writer pens one of the top ten Black List scripts.
Writer: Jackson Kellard
Details: 115 pages
This is the highest-ranked screenplay from last year’s Black List that I haven’t reviewed yet, with 24 votes.
But it is also… a biopic.
I’m reminded of a line from my favorite movie whenever I read biopics: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
Should we hold out any hope that the script will be good?
I hold out more hope that the Big Mac I order from McDonald’s later is going to be piping hot.
The one chance this script has is if it constructs an amazing character. An amazing character trumps all. It is the boundless beating heart of every great storytelling experience. Didier? I do not know ye yet. But please, I beg of you. Be great.
It’s 2002 and 27 year old Didier Drogba, an Ivory Coast native, had decided to leave his superstar French team to come back to his hometown and play for the Ivory Coast.
But while his return is celebrated, it is a complicated time in the nation. The north and the south hate each other. And guess what? The Ivory Coast team is made up of players from both the north and the south. Which is probably why they suck so bad.
But Didier’s arrival allows them to start winning games. After several wins in a row, the unthinkable starts to become thinkable: a birth in the World Cup. But, to do so, they’ll need to beat both Ghana and Cameroon, powerhouses in the region.
As those games approach, Didier makes a plea to the country to stop fighting and start uniting. That plea places Didier in the middle of a political firestorm. The current president, Gbagbo, notices and sees that he can use Didier as a pawn.
You see, Gbagbo’s presidency thrives on division. He rules through fear and inspires the north to hate the south. So, when the Ivory Coast gets to the final deciding game with Cameroon to make the World Cup, he tells Didier that he has to lose so that the country remains divided, placing our hero in an impossible situation.
With Scene Showdown coming up, I want to talk about scenes today.
The problem with scene-writing in 2024 dates back to the 1980s, with the introduction of video editing hardware, and then more severely, the 1990s, with the introduction of digital editing software.
Before the invention of these two things, film was being physically cut by an editor. The reason that’s important is because you didn’t have an unlimited number of options when you physically cut into film. You had to think about what you wanted to cut and, because you didn’t have time to make a million cuts, the shots and scenes were longer.
Once video and, especially, digital editing came around, you no longer needed to worry about this. You could make 1000 cuts in a 3 minute piece of video/film within 30 minutes.
What that ended up doing is leading to much shorter shots and scenes. At first, this was a good thing. If you watch some of those 1970s movies, there would be unnecessarily long shots of people getting out of cars and walking up stairs. The audience didn’t need those things so it made sense to cut them out.
But then directors and editors started going too far. It wasn’t just the unnecessary heads and tails of shots that were being cut. It was the whole beginnings of scenes. Or the whole endings of scenes. This led to writers believing they only had to write the middles of scenes. Which is why you get scenes like this…
What is this scene??
It’s just information about a character. There is no conflict. There is no drama. There is no building of tension or releasing of tension. There is no suspense. Where is the craft in this scene?? What are we, the reader, supposed to be entertained by?
I don’t blame the writer for this.
Honestly, I don’t.
I blame the last 30 years of storytelling for making writers believe this is a proper scene to include in a script.
To be fair, I get that you can use scene-fragments to build larger sequences that can have all the things I listed above (tension, conflict, drama, suspense). The problem is when you overdo that. Cause if every scene is just a fragment, I guarantee you you’re going to lose the reader at some point.
Why not write longer scenes that have their own entertainment value, and use those longer scenes to STILL build compelling sequences? Then you get the best of both worlds. We’re entertained DURING the scene and THROUGHOUT the sequence.
But I honestly don’t think writers know how to write scenes anymore. Any scene they write that’s good is by accident. They stumble upon it and realize, “Oh, yeah, this is pretty good. I like this scene.” Instead of planning the script so that nearly every scene reads like that.
And today’s script is where you need that consistent scene-writing ability more than usual. Cause readers are already coming in expecting to be bored. They’re reading some serious biopic about African politics. But you can win them over if you give us entertaining scene after entertaining scene.
This is why I’m doing the Scene Showdown. Not just so you write a full scene with a beginning, middle, and end. So that you realize, “Oh, I should just approach every scene like this.”
Yeah, I get it. Sometimes you have to write a scene fragment to bridge two scenes together. But let that be the exception as opposed to the rule.
All right, so, what about the rest of the script?
I’m not going to lie. I spent the first 75 pages of this script debating whether to jump head first into a volcano. It was just so serrrriuossss. I wanted to be entertained and, instead, I felt like I was doing homework.
But the script picks up in its last 40-45 pages because the stakes are so high. This game they’re playing against Cameroon is not only to get them into the World Cup for the first time ever, but President Gbagbo is threatening to destroy Didier’s life if he wins, because he believes a win will unite the country and, subsequently, eliminate his power.
That’s a great place to put your character – in an unwinnable situation. Cause we truly have no idea what he’s going to do. How rare is that in a sports movie where we don’t know what’s going to happen in the final game? It’s pretty darn rare.
Also, any script can be saved if you get the hero and villain right. If we’re rooting for that hero to succeed and rooting for that villain to go down, that can be enough to do the job. Even if your script is steeped in 50 tons of seriousness, that alone can make us care. I wouldn’t call Didier a perfect hero. But I was rooting for him. I was more rooting against Gbagbo. That guy I definitely wanted to see go down.
So that tipped the scales into a ‘worth the read’ here. But I would still be surprised if anyone who wasn’t an Ivory Coast history buff made it through the whole thing. It’s still a biopic so it’s never going to win over the casual movie fan.
To win over the casual movie fan, you need to be a WANT TO SEE movie, not a SHOULD SEE movie.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Complex socio-political period stories NEED CONTEXT. You can’t just hope to teach the reader everything through exposition. You need a title card at the opening. Tell us what’s happening. Explain this world to us. I spent the first 40 pages only vaguely understanding the conflict between the North and the South. I didn’t even know, at first, that the Ivory Coast team was struggling with North-South division within it. All of that could’ve been easily remedied with a quick title card explaining the basics! How do I know this? Because I am willing to bet my life savings that when this movie comes out, the powers that be will make sure there’s a title card.
