Genre: Biopic
Premise: The story of how oddball internet reporter Matt Drudge broke the Lewinsky Scandal and nearly took down a presidency, all from a desktop computer in his one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood.
About: Today’s script is the 4th most liked script of 2018. Cody Brotter is a Boston University graduate who’s written for TV, most notably on the show, Comedy Knockout. He also has a podcast, Hollywood Terriers, where he interviews fellow BU graduates in the entertainment industry.
Writer: Cody Brotter
Details: 118 pages
Today we have a totally original screenplay idea that was conceived 100% from someone’s imagination. Just kidding. We have another biopic from the Black List. Writers be working hard on ideas these days. There will come a time – it may be after the Apocalypse with only 20 people left on earth I’m sure – but there will come a time where writers once again attempt to create original stories. Until that time, it’s a biopic world. The rest of us are just living in it.
With that said, if you want to get on Franklin Leonard’s Biopic List, there are two things you can do to improve your chances. One is to find an underdog story. And two is to paint your hero as sympathetically as possible. “Drudge” does both. And once you get past the frustration you feel from having to read another biopic, you realize it does them quite well.
We’re introduced to Matt Drudge through his parents, both staunch liberals who are getting divorced after 15 years. The two are in court for a custody hearing. Except this isn’t your average custody hearing. Instead of the parents fighting FOR custody of their son, they’re fighting to get rid of him. The dad is too busy starting a new family to take him and the mom can’t keep up with Drudge getting in trouble. The judge stares on, flabbergasted. He’s never seen this before.
Cut to a decade later (the early 90s). Twenty-something Matt has moved to Hollywood with no money and managed to beg his way into a Gift Shop job at CBS Studios. When his father flies in for business (not for him), he’s so disgusted by his son’s life, he buys him a computer out of pity. This was right when AOL was sweeping the nation and everyone was talking about getting on this “world wide web” thing.
Little did Matt know, that computer was about to change his life. Through his job, Matt would hear CBS employees gossiping about box office results and who was getting fired, so he started a little newsletter (The Drudge Report), sending this information out to people. It wasn’t long before people began e-mailing HIM to get on the list.
A young conservative named Andrew Breitbart called Matt to meet, and was soon working for him, developing a web page version of the newsletter. The more politically-inclined Breitbart encouraged Matt to include more political news, and that’s where things got interesting. Back then, everyone was still operating by the journalistic rules that had been set up for over a century. You couldn’t just print something. You had to do your “due diligence.” Well, this wasn’t a publication. It was an internet site. So if Drudge got a hot scoop, he could just post it.
A group of young female conservative pundits (pundettes) in D.C. (Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and KellyAnne [soon to be] Conway) recognized they could use this to their advantage. The three were trying to take down Bill Clinton through all of his philandering but the Clinton-loving liberal media were dragging their feet about posting these stories. So they asked Drudge to post them. And he did.
This began a two-front war. The first with the White House and the second with traditional media. You couldn’t just post a story like that, the news networks said. That was… that was… well, you just couldn’t! But Drudge did. And then, when the bombshell story of Monica Lewinsky hit the airwaves and the traditional media still wouldn’t report it (supposedly due to liberal bias), Drudge was all too happy to. And that’s how a little nobody reporter working out of a one bedroom apartment broke one of the biggest news stories in history.
Drudge is a good screenplay mainly because this is a good story. It’s a strange depiction of a person though. I can’t tell if Brotter loves or hates his main character. He starts off painting him with a sympathetic brush. Who’s not going to root for a guy who was abandoned by both of his parents? However, Brotter relentlessly makes fun of his hero’s thinning hair, repeatedly uses the word “creepy” to describe him, and relishes in his lack of friends.
I just don’t understand why you would write a story about somebody you detested. This is why I’m uninterested in seeing Vice. Both Adam McKay and Christian Bale call Dick Cheney the devil. Well if you can’t look at someone objectively, how are you going to portray them accurately?
And yet Drudge works. At least for me it did. Part of that is I went through something similar on a smaller scale. For example, I must’ve received hundreds of e-mails when I started Scriptshadow from people telling me “You can’t do this.” And when I asked them why, the answer was basically, “because it’s always been done this other way.” And I was like, “Well tough cookies. Things are changing.” There will always be resistance to change but, in the end, you can’t change progress.
I do think the script missed some opportunities though. I liked this idea of Drudge’s parents being liberals and Drudge running a conservative website to get back at them. But it’s only casually explored. If Drudge wasn’t actually conservative, but doing this solely to stick it to his father, that would’ve made his character a lot more complex. Maybe with a few more drafts Blotter can explore that angle more.
But by far, the biggest takeaway from this script is the importance of creating sympathy for your hero. You want to do that right away. The cheap way is to have your character give a homeless person a 20 dollar bill (or some do-gooder equivalent of that). Good screenwriters don’t go the cheap route, however. They work harder. Here we create sympathy for Drudge without even meeting him. We see his parents in court trying to pawn him off on each other. Right then, we feel sorry for this guy, and we haven’t even met him yet.
I will continue to rail against biopics. I’m so bored by the genre at this point. But the underdog nature, the high stakes, and the relentless pace of this script made it worth the read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned 1: This was a great character description. You should aim for a character description as specific as this every time out: “Drudge has a twitchy demeanor and horrific posture. He talks with a weird sense of confidence despite a nasally voice and the occasional stutter.” I know exactly who this guy is after that description.
What I learned 2: The most clever thing Brotter did here was identify that there are major controversial players today (Laura Ingraham, KellyAnne Conway, and Ann Coulter, an Andrew Breitbart) who played a big part in a story that happened a long time ago. This makes an older story feel current. So if you’re going to write a biopic about someone in the last 30 years, it will have more punch if some of the players in that story are relevant today. For example, if you’re writing a biopic about Rudy Giuliani centering on 9/11 (oh God, I hope I’m not giving anyone ideas), you know you can include a young Trump in that story.
