Genre: Comedy/Drama/Thriller?
Premise: (from Black List) Ready for a night of partying, a group of Black and Latino college students must weigh the pros and cons of calling the police when faced with an emergency
About: This script finished in the top 15 of last year’s Black List. It started off as a short film, which helped the writer, K.D. Davila, sell it to Netflix.
Writer: K.D. Davila
Details: 120 pages
Being so busy this week, I find myself even more focused on a script’s page length than usual. If I see 120 pages when I open a script, I am taking a deep breath, then spending the next 120 seconds trying not to yell at my screen.
But let’s say your script is going to be long and there’s nothing you can do about that. Are you screwed? No, you are not. You can still save yourself by making the script EASY TO READ. That means paragraphs that are 3 lines or less. That means sharp concise sentences. It means a commitment to making the eyes move down the page as fast as possible.
But if you violate BOTH of these principles? If your script is 120+ pages AND it’s written in a big slow chunky manner? Prepare for a reader’s wrath. The other day I was going to review Ghost Army, the Ben Affleck project about deception tactics in World War 2. The page count was 120. And the first page? Well, I’ll let you see it for yourselves:
Is there any other script in history that wants to be hated more by readers than this one?
I bring this up because Emergency is 120 pages but when I opened it, I saw that the writing was sparse and clean. So I knew it wasn’t going to be a slog. Well, I knew it wouldn’t be a slog on the *writing* end. As for the *story* side of the equation, let’s find out together.
Our story is set at the fictional Buchanan University, a woke white college with only a few minority students. Two of those minorities are Kunle, a black 21 year old who comes from a family of doctors, and Sean, a black 21 year old who comes from a low-income neighborhood. The two are best friends and roommates.
On their way to an epic night out, Sean and Kunle come home to find an unconscious white girl in their room. Naturally, the two freak out, not only because there’s a potentially dead person in their place but because it does not look good if there’s an incapacitated white girl in two black men’s apartment.
Luckily, the girl wakes up. But she can barely speak. After an argument about whether to call the police or not, the two decide instead to bring the girl to the hospital. They recruit their buddy, Carlos, throw the girl in the car, and off they go.
Halfway there, they come across a frat party and figure the girl’s night must have originated there. Sean has the idea to leave the girl at the party, which Kunle things is the dumbest idea ever. After another argument, they decide to stick to their original plan of getting her to the hospital.
Meanwhile, we cut to drunk girl’s sister, Maddy, who’s looking for Drunky. It’s here where we learn that Maddy’s sister is still in high school! Meaning Sean and Kunle are going to look even worse if they’re caught with this girl.
We follow the two groups around town as Maddy gets closer and closer to locating her sister. When they finally collide, Maddy takes the reins to get her sister to the hospital, with Kunle in tow. Halfway there, the drunk sister goes into cardiac arrest, forcing Kunle to perform CPR. Also, right at that moment, a cop car chirps behind them, forcing the car to a stop. The cops then move in, and we get a big climactic confrontation that may result in someone losing their life. But who will it be???
“Emergency” is a hard to describe script. It’s Weekend at Bernie’s meets Harold and Kumar meets Crash meets… The Hangover, maybe? If that sounds like an impossible combo, that is my thought as well. The tone here is very hard to get a handle on.
The final scene is a good example of this. Here we have this girl dying and this guy giving her CPR, and in order to keep the CPR rhythm, he’s singing to himself, “Staying Alive” (a commonly suggested tune to hum when you’re giving CPR, as it mirrors the compression rhythm). I suppose there’s a way to shoot this where it sounds more tragic than humorous. But to me it just felt goofy.
The script very much has a “Weekend at Bernie’s” vibe to it. They’re dragging this mumbling girl around just like Bernie was dragged around. And yet it intermittently takes on serious subject matter. There will be intense discussions about racism, for example. So the thought in the back of my head the whole time I was reading this was, “What is this movie?” I could never wrap my brain around it.
But the script does have some high points. There’s a nice conflict at the heart of Sean and Kunle’s friendship. Kunle is privileged. Sam is not. That creates tension in their relationship. A good screenplay will do exactly this. The writer will figure out, via backstory, where the problems are in a relationship so that when the shit hits the fan and those characters are stressed, you have conflict ready to go between the two. It doesn’t need to be manufactured on the spot.
And despite my critique of the “Staying Alive” moment, the last scene of the movie is intense. I know that because I was on the edge of my seat saying, “Is somebody about to get killed here??” My guess is that this scene was the focus of the short film that inspired this script. Because it’s clearly the most thought-out scene in the screenplay.
I wouldn’t say everything else in the script was filler. But little else was necessary. The stakes were never high enough for us to care what happened over the first two acts. I kept thinking to myself, “What’s the worst that can happen here? The girl’s sister finds them, Sean and Kunle give the drunk girl back, the end.”
Instead, the sister finds them, keeps her distance, calls the cops, the cops think she’s racist for assuming that her sister hanging out with black guys means they’re kidnapping her. So then it’s back to the sister following them around some more.
A story has to evolve. It can’t keep hitting the same beats the whole way through. Last year’s Oscar winner, Parasite, keeps evolving its story. Every 15 pages something new happens that changes the story (a new family member enters the house, a secret basement is discovered). Driving around in circles is not evolving the story.
“Emergency” is one great scene and a script in search of justifying everything that comes before it. With higher stakes and a tighter grip on its tone, I probably would’ve recommended this one.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the ways I can spot a weak script is if there’s a character who’s getting a lot of screen time that I know nothing about. And the reason I know nothing about them is because the writer hasn’t done the work to figure the character out and understand why they’re in the story. Carlos is one of the main characters here. He gets pulled into this with his roommates, Sean and Kunle. But he barely says anything and he barely does anything of note. If you’re going to give a character more than six scenes, they need to have some depth, some arc. Or else, you probably want to drop the character.
