This writer took over the town for a week. What can we learn from her?
Genre: Comedy
Premise: Two parents will do anything they can to help their son get into Yale, his dream college since he was a young child.
About: Sophie Fleur de Bruijn recently sold a romantic comedy spec that is said to be the best rom-com script in forever. I’m trying to get my hands on it (if you have it, please send it to me here: carsonreeves1@gmail.com). In the meantime, this is the script she wrote right before it, which appeared on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Sophie Fleur de Bruijn
Details: 111 pages
Reese for Heather?
The less glamorous but far more common path to success for screenwriters is this: they write a script that’s good enough to get noticed but not quite good enough to sell. That first script puts them on the industry’s radar. Then, when the next script arrives, people are already paying attention. And if that one delivers, everyone wants it.
That’s what’s happened with today’s screenwriter. She wrote today’s script, Early Action, that got her on the Black List. And then last week she went out with a romantic comedy spec that many are saying is the best romantic comedy script in five years. And 40 different companies wanted it. I didn’t even know there were 40 companies who could buy a script but much like a legitimate critique of Backrooms, let’s look past that detail.
Today, I want to take a look at the script that put Sophie on the map and got the industry paying attention. Attention that ultimately helped her sell her next script. By studying what worked, you can apply some of the same principles to your own writing. Let’s jump in, shall we?
Heather and Richard are young parents to Oliver, a kid who only wants one thing in life. To go to Yale for college. The barely middle class couple have secured a house in a really amazing neighborhood because the house had a gruesome murder in it. This has allowed them to get Oliver into the best schools in the country, which will bolster his chances of getting into Yale.
Cut to several years later and Oliver is in his senior year in high school. In an extremely confusing plot point that I still don’t understand, an angry teacher at the school released the GPAs and colleges that all of the kids in the school applied to, which has caused all of the parents to be really really angry.
As best as I can understand, this leads to Heather and Richard learning that five other seniors in the school are also applying to Yale. And apparently Yale only chooses one kid from this school, which means that Oliver’s application has to be better than those five kids. And since that teacher exposed all the students’ applications (I think), Heather and Richard are able to read the other five students’ applications and realize that their son’s application doesn’t measure up to them at all.
So they find Lance Latham, a guy whose only job is to get rich kids into prestige colleges. Lance tells them that there’s very little Oliver can do to beat these other kids. His only shot is writing an essay for the ages. He needs a story that will bowl the Yale admissions team over. So, Lance says to the parents, make sure he has a great story.
Heather and Richard take this to mean they need to create a series of crazy events (deliver a baby from an actor pretending to be in labor in a stuck elevator, have Richard pretend to be choking in a restaurant) that will give Oliver something to write about. But all of the staged events go wrong for one reason or another.
They finally go for the whopper — pay some people to kidnap their own son. This traumatic event will surely lead to the best essay of the six applicants and win Oliver his coveted dream spot at Yale University. Unless something goes wrong, of course.
Okay…
Where should I start?
Let’s start with the setup. If you have to move mountains to set up your story, then your idea is too complex. The amount of events that need to happen here (there’s a strange meltdown at the school as students’ info is leaked, the parents realize Oliver has a tougher road to get into Yale than they thought, they go to the fixer guy who explains to them how applications work and what they’re up against and what the best course of action is which eventually leads to him saying make sure he has a great essay, then they study all of his competitors essays, and then they sneak in and learn that Oliver only has two sentences so far in his essay, and then they start planning a series of faked events so their son has more material to write this essay) — The amount of shit we needed to trudge through just to start the movie was WAY WAY WAY TOO MUCH!
It reminded me of that dreadful screenplay for Will Ferrell’s and Amy Pohler’s movie, The House. I remember that script well because fifteen different things needed to be explained and connected in order to come up with a believable scenario by which the characters would open up a casino in their house. It was awful. And of course the movie was awful too.
Let me give you the setup for the hottest movie in town right now. A guy wishes the girl he’s in love with falls in love with him too and then she becomes obsessed with him. THAT’S IT. THAT’S THE SETUP.
Audiences don’t like to connect 82 dots just to get your movie started. If that’s what it takes to get to the meat of your story, you’ve got way too much going on and you need to seriously simplify it.
Then, after all that work just to set up the story, the faked events the parents come up with DON’T EVEN MAKE SENSE. They give an actress a balloon to put under her shirt and put her in an elevator with their son and have the elevator stopped and the girl pretend to be in labor so that Oliver will deliver a baby. BUT THERE’S NO BABY!!!! What happens when he actually tries to deliver it???? Of course the scene ends with him passing out before that truth can be revealed.
Then our writer creates this scene of the dad choking at a restaurant in the hopes that their son will give him the Heimlich and “save his life.” That’s your plan for writing a great essay on a Yale application??? I once gave my dad the Heimlich at a restaurant??? This movie doesn’t even make sense!!!
The problems with the script don’t stop there. We don’t even spend any time with Oliver! We spend all our time with the parents. Oliver is the one trying to get into school. He’s the reason we’re supposed to be rooting for everything here yet we barely know him. Literally the only thing we know about him is that he wants to get into Yale.
And on top of all this, this is a very weak premise. This movie idea doesn’t fit into any known lane that Hollywood makes movies in. I suppose it’s a comedy but it’s not a comedy lane that has ever been done before. So, why would people go watch this?
So, what’s going on? How is this writer getting so much heat? Well, despite all of this, the writing itself is amusing. It’s even occasionally funny. There’s a scene, for example, where they’re not-so-lightly encouraging their son to change his pronouns to they/them, pretending to have no ulterior motives at all, and a couldn’t-be-bothered Oliver insists he’s fine with his regular pronouns, irking his parents to no end, who continue to push their pronoun agenda all the while pretending they’re okay with whatever he decides. There’s a lot of stuff like that that definitely made me chuckle.
And I think that in spite of being really bad at the mechanics of writing a screenplay, the writing itself is very fluid and effortless and… it’s hard to quantify the last part but the best way to describe it is that I felt good while reading this script. There’s something very positive about the way Sophie writes that I liked.
There was a time on this site when I experimented with two ratings at the end of every script review, one for the script and one for the writer. The problem was that so many of the ratings were the same that I gave that up. But, for this script, I would give a worth the read to the writer and a wasn’t for me for the script.
And maybe what happened with this rom-com she later sold is Sophie just came up with a much simpler idea. The thing about writing screenplays is, each concept leads you down a new path that you haven’t experienced before. And you don’t know what kinds of concepts work best when writing screenplays until you’ve written a bunch of them. And one of the lessons you eventually learn is that simpler concepts work best. So maybe Sophie’s rom-com idea is just really simple. Maybe she learned that lesson after this. Or maybe she just got lucky and stumbled into it. It can happen.
I suppose if you average these two ratings (one for writer, one for script) together, they end up right between a ‘wasn’t for me’ and a ‘worth the read’. So I have to decide which rating to give and I think this writer is good enough that I can bump this up to a ‘worth the read.’ But it’s a very weak ‘worth the read.’
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Good comedy writers use parentheticals strategically. I always tell writers to avoid parentheticals unless they genuinely add something to the line. This is a great example of one that earns its keep:
LUANN (CONT’D)
Thank you. Diane is gonna kick my ass. She teaches kickboxing on weekends.
(with profound importance)
The 9:00AM slot.
Notice that the joke isn’t actually in the words, “The 9:00AM slot.” On the page, that’s just a piece of information. The comedy comes from Luann treating that detail as if it’s the most important revelation imaginable, which comes from the parenthetical.
