Genre: Serial Killer/Sci-Fi
Premise: A former music therapist is recruited to use a mysterious machine to dive into the memories of a serial killer on death row.
About: This is the writer’s SECOND time being on The Black List. The first time was with The Traveler.
Writer: Austin Everett
Details: 119 pages
Today, I am shocked.
I read this script, which I did not enjoy (for reasons I’ll get into soon).
And one of my premises was that the writer wasn’t ready to be on the Black List yet. But then I did a little googling and learned that I’d already reviewed a script from this writer. And that I gave the script an impressive!
So now I’m all turned around.
I don’t know how these two scripts came from the same writer. The only thing I can come up with is that, after the success of The Traveler, Everett dug this one out of the deep corners of his hard drive, back when he was still learning how to write.
Because the writing here is not on the same level as that script.
What was my big issue with Earworm?
It comes down to most frequent advice I give writers who send me screenplays. Which is: TOO COMPLEX. MAKE IT SIMPLER.
Today’s script is so much more complex than it needs to be.
Let me go through a list of things we have to keep track of in Earworm.
A psychic
Who’s not really a psychic, but a psychologist
Who’s a certain kind of psychologist that specializes in music therapy
She’s been trying to adopt a girl for three years
She herself was adopted
She had a twin that disappeared when she was young
We have a serial killer
He’s in a psyche ward despite his killing rampage continuing
This killer was also an orphan
This killer’s parents committed a murder suicide
This killer’s foster parents also committed a murder suicide
This killer had a twin.
Nobody knew the twin existed until today
This twin was killed when he was younger
An administrator at the ward has found a new technology that lets you see into someone’s memories
Nobody knows how the technology works
Music sometimes helps the technology work
You can see into a person’s memories when you’re hooked up together
You can also see into a person’s memories when you’re nowhere near each other.
People think you have to be a twin to do the memory invasion.
Sometimes you can switch bodies with the person whose memories you’re looking into
Do I need to go on?
There are, like, 15,000 things going on here.
The script is about a female psychic, Kimball, who’s recruited by this guy, Judd, who works at a psyche ward. That ward is housing a serial killer named Lenny, who’s pled insanity for his case. Judd seeks out Kimball and asks her to come by. He hooks her up to a device where she finds herself inside Lenny’s memory. Specifically, a memory of one of the women he’s killed.
Just out of curiosity, Lenny’s logged thousands upon thousands of hours in life. Why isn’t the random memory Kimball jumps into something more mundane such as Lenny watching TV? Why is it whenever we jump into Lenny’s memory, it’s always one of his most important memories of his life? I’m not even going to try to explain that because I’m still trying to figure out how you hook someone up to a device and they randomly are able to access some serial killer’s memory who’s nowhere near them.
We learn some key details about Kimball and Lenny. Kimball had a twin sister who was taken one night. Lenny had a twin brother who died in a horrible accident. All of this is to imply that the reason Kimball can connect with Lenny on the memory machine that nobody understands is because they’re both twins. Or, I mean, they both have dead twins in their life.
I mean… am I overstating the complexity here?
First off, twin stuff is really hard to get right. If screenwriting were divided into 12 grades, twins would be the thing that everybody in the first grade used. It’s that cheap easy low hanging fruit that seems really juicy when you’re squeezing it in your hand. But all those juices do is make your script wet and soggy.
That’s not to say you can never use it. I have this twin idea that I’ve wanted to do forever. But you have to understand that most people think of twins as a cheap trick. So what you have to do is use that expectation against them. Do something early on with the twins that’s sophisticated that the reader didn’t see coming. This sets the tone for a more sophisticated story. Which you need to live up to for the remaining 70 pages.
The way twins are used here is the worst way you can use them. The twin stuff in Earworm is messy. It’s unclear. There are multiple twins, which is just compounding an already juvenile choice. The mystery memory device only works for twins. Dueling twin mystery backstories.
Random thought. Share your favorite ‘twin’ movie in the comments section.
But the twin stuff isn’t even the main problem here. The main problem is that there’s way too much going on. Just the fact that we start off meeting our protagonist as a psychic. And, then, we learn that they’re a special type of psychic that works with music therapy. And then we learn that they’re not really a psychic but rather a psychologist that lost their license. So this person is three different things within the first ten pages.
How bout we start with being one thing?
I get that, as writers, we want to change things up. But if that means throwing everything and the kitchen sink into a character, that’s worse than being too cliche. When I see something like that early on in a script, I say to myself, “This is too complex.” And what always happens is that ends up being a precursor for what to expect in the rest of the script. And what did we get for the rest of this script? Serial killers, twins, memory infiltrating devices without rules, multiple twin backstory disappearances and accidents, body-switching.
It’s a great big Sloppy Joe.
There aren’t any rules here. When you’re dealing with something as fluid and complicated as memory, you need to establish a set of rules that the audience understands. The Matrix painstakingly laid out every single rule of the Matrix. You can make an argument that it took too long to do so. But the reason they did that was SO YOU COULD ENJOY THE MOVIE. When you don’t convey the rules of the game, you’re going to have people in the back asking, “Wait, what’s a third down exactly?” Of course they’re not going to enjoy it.
The next person who writes a movie about memory needs to put a lot more effort into it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I want to speak to the future screenwriters here who want to write this type of concept. I read a lot of scripts that have to do with going into someone’s memories. Or going into someone else’s head. Before you write one of these scripts, do three full months of research where you learn the science behind the human brain, where you learn about memory, where you learn about the current technology being used to access and study memory. Get a doctorate in those departments. Because one of the things that destroys these scripts is the writer clearly knows so little about the world they’re writing in. When you do the research, you’re able to talk about things and present things in a manner that is believable. Even if these technologies haven’t been invented yet. But if all you’re doing is a few days of googling, the reader will feel that. They’ll sense the lack of authenticity in your story. You need to be an expert on whatever the subject matter is in your script. Period. If your plan is to half-ass the research, I can save you a lot of time. Don’t write the script.
