Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a struggling fashion model in New York City gets chosen by a mysterious Parisian designer to be the face of his first campaign since his disappearance five years prior, she begins to realize she was chosen for a reason and must decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice for beauty and recognition.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 10 votes. The writer, Michael Paisely, is just getting started. He was a Writer PA on The Witcher. And no, I don’t know what that is. STX picked up the script last year.
Writer: Michael Paisley
Details: 111 pages
There’s a theme to this year’s Black List. And that theme is: “I’m still learning.” Which is great. I’m not going to harp on writers learning their craft. We’re all in different stages of the journey so no need to be mean to anyone just because they haven’t figured it all out yet. Well, except for yesterday, of course.
Mia is a young New York model who’s been passed up by every job in the business, all while her model friends are booking Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry. It’s not fair! So when she hears about fashion legend Marceau de Saint-Pierre’s newest fashion show, called “Dollhouse,” she doesn’t bother getting her hopes up.
But then her photographer frenemy, Drew, tells her he’s working on Dollhouse and that he thinks Mia would be perfect for it. Indeed, just two days later, Drew gives her the news that Saint-Pierre wants to see her! So Mia visits him at his lavish mansion where he’s finishing up five years of obsessive work. “Dollhouse,” he tells Mia, is about death.
Now’s the time when I should probably tell you Saint-Pierre went crazy and disappeared five years ago. So, um, yeah. Something tells me this show’s going to be extra in all the wrong ways. Soon, Mia’s informed that three of her model frenemies will be doing the show as well. But it’s clear that Saint-Pierre sees Mia as the star.
Feeling the pressure, Mia wants to look skinny and perfect, and therefore starts doing all those self-destructive things models do. As a result, she starts having bad dreams, many of which involve a bloody model in a dress who equal parts wants to kill her and warn her. Just when she’s about to hurt Mia, though, Mia always wakes up in her bed, wondering if it was a dream… or not.
Things escalate when frenemy photographer Drew gets fired from the job and is later murdered. This is followed by Model Frenemy 1 getting hit by a car, Model Frenemy 2 being stabbed, and Model Frenemy 3 being massacred. Soon, Mia is all there is left. And she looks a fright. She’s done so much damage to her body that clumps of her hair are coming out. Oh, and let’s not forget that Mia always seemed to be the last person to see her murdered friends before they died. Could Mia possibly be the murderer? The “Dollhouse” show may reveal the answer.
If this sounds a lot like a certain movie called Black Swan, that’s because it’s heavily influenced by that film.
I remember reading that script long before the movie came out and it having this rare control of conveying insanity in a sophisticated way. That’s really hard to do and it’s the main weakness I see in all of these “main character going crazy” narratives.
The “going crazy” sub-genre makes it too easy to fall into sloppiness. That’s because you don’t have to explain anything as the writer. If something bizarre happens, you can just have your hero wake up afterwards, posing the question, “Was it real or not?”
For example, early on in this script, one of the mannequins turns out to be a robot that comes off its stand and attacks Mia. Seconds later, she wakes up in her bed and it’s never explained whether she imagined it or not. Nor is there ever another “robot” moment in the script. To me, that’s sloppy. If you’re going to have outrageous things happen, at some point it’s advantageous to give the reader an explanation. Cause when the answer is always “maybe it was a dream,” we feel manipulated.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. Black Swan walked the line perfectly. And I think they pulled it off by not relying too much on the dream thing. They did a few times. But the cool thing about Black Swan was that there were just as many moments that had logical answers to them. It struck that perfect balance. Dollhouse was one continuous series of crazy happenings with zero explanation.
Also, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to gather from Mia killing all of her friends (supposedly). If Mia was on the bottom of the totem pole in the show and she killed them one by one in order to get to the top, that would make sense. But Mia was the star from the get-go. So I didn’t understand how killing several girls below her helped her case. If anything, keep them around so they can see how it felt to be her all those years.
Despite these issues, the script works.
And to explain why, I want to go back to yesterday’s script. Someone in the comments asked me why it was that the Hunters writer was able to get a show on Amazon if he was as bad as I claimed he was. And the answer was, despite not being a good writer, he’s a good concept guy. The script that got him noticed was a big concept idea (the first murder on the moon and the subsequent investigation) and Hunters is a big sexy idea as well.
But it goes one step further. It’s not just coming up with the big concept, it’s coming up with the big concept that writes itself. If you can do that, you don’t have to be the best writer in the world. The CONCEPT IS GOING TO DO A LOT OF THE WORK FOR YOU. So in the case of Hunters, even though most of the scenes are terrible, every once in a while you get a big flashy scene because that’s what the concept dictates – hunting down Nazis.
This is in contrast to, say, “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood” which doesn’t have a concept. This forces Tarantino to come up with cool ideas for scenes all on his own – a much more difficult proposition. But since Tarantino is one of the top 5 screenwriters in the world, he’s good enough to pull it off.
Getting back to Dollhouse, it’s the same thing. This is a big fun concept that writes itself. All you have to do with these “going crazy” movies is give the hero a giant goal they’re after – in Black Swan it was the main role, here it’s the star of the Dollhouse show. And then you show the character slowly losing it along the way in their quest to achieve their objective.
Another thing Dollhouse has going for it is that its two main characters – Mia and Saint-Pierre – are crazy. ACTORS LOVE PLAYING CRAZY. They love it. Love it more than anything. So when you have not one but TWO lead roles leaning into insanity, you know, as a production company, that you’re going to get a lot of great actors interested in this. And once you have the actors, it’s easy to find the money. That’s all this business is. You have to put together the elements that justify the cost of the movie.
But, yeah. This is definitely a writer who’s still learning. We have a Screenwriting 101 mistake in the opening scene, which is putting specific music cues in your script. Not only that, but you assume people know the song and therefore are in the exact same headspace as you when you wrote the scene. Let me take this moment to remind you that there’s three truths to this life – death, taxes, and everybody has different taste in music. Music cues are one of the fastest ways to alienate a reader. And it doesn’t even matter if they aren’t alienated because there’s a 99.9% chance that the production is not going to be able to afford the song anyway!!!
Luckily, this FEELS LIKE A MOVIE to me. That’s important. A lot of scripts read like scripts – they don’t have anything big enough in them to justify being turned into a movie. This is definitely a movie. And that’s why STX picked it up. It wasn’t perfect but it was enough to get it over the finish line.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Crazy characters sell. Narratively, crazy characters are trickier to make work than you think they’ll be. But they are one of the gold stamps when it comes to attracting actors to your material. So if you’ve got a great idea that organically integrates a crazy main character or two, it’s not the worst idea in the world to write that script. See “Joker” for reference.
