Genre: Thriller
Premise: A burgeoning artist is offered a once in a lifetime fellowship, luring her into the
dark side of New York’s elite art world.
About: Cassie Keet has been working in the industry as an actor for a long time. She also writes, directs, and produces a lot of short films. This script finished on last year’s Black List with 15 votes.
Writer: Cassie Keet
Details: 118 pages
I get e-mails fairly often asking about why the Black List scripts aren’t as good as they used to be. My response?
Remember when everyone used to watch American Idol? And then, one day, The Voice came around and nobody watched American Idol anymore? Media experts claimed it was the rotating chairs that caused the change. But that’s not true. What caused the change was that American Idol was bringing in true unknowns, raw singers who had never achieved anything. Whereas The Voice was curating their contestants, many of whom had already had success. The audience loved the better singing of those curated singers.
That’s what happened with The Black List, but in reverse. There were a lot of complaints that the Black List celebrated writers who were already making millions of dollars on their screenplays. Pesky scribes asked, shouldn’t we be celebrating aspiring screenwriters since they’re the ones who need the publicity? And hence, the Black List unofficially became the Up-And-Coming List.
So, this is your fault!
I wanted the best scripts.
With that said, the space between you, the aspiring writer, and the Black List, is as thin as it’s ever been. You can make the list! But you still have to do a few things right. Let’s see what today’s writer did right.
When we meet 20-something New Orleans native, Cecilia, she’s grilling an art critic at an art show about the crassness in which he evaluates art. While Cecilia follows him around with a camera, the critic takes shots at nearly every piece of art at the show. But when they reach the big room, the critic sees that his interview is playing on a big screen and every artist has been watching him.
It’s then that we realize this interview was a piece of art constructed by Cecilia! Naturally, the moment goes viral and, pretty soon, Cecilia is hot sh*t.
Not long after, she’s offered a fellowship by the prestigious Bridger Foundation. For one month, she’ll have an all-expenses paid trip to New York where she will create a piece of art and then show it to all of New York’s elite. Cecilia is ecstatic!
She shows up in New York and quickly meets the married couple responsible for the fellowship, Davis and Isabel Bridger. Right away, she finds the handsome Davis to be a bit handsy. Then again, she’s not exactly putting the kibosh on the touching. Although things get weird a couple of nights later when the two have sex and then Isabel walks in…….. AND JOINS IN!
The next few days, Cecilia starts digging around and learns that there have been 7 fellowships in the past year! That doesn’t sound as prestigious as she thought. When Cecilia goes back over the fine print of the deal she signed, she essentially learns she’s a slave to this couple for the rest of her life, as are all the Fellows. Uh oh.
Cecilia first tries to be polite, begging Davis and Isabel to be let out of the contract. But they give that request a hard no. Which means Cecilia has to get crafty. She will need to use her final art project to both pit the couple against each other and expose them to the world. Will she pull it off? Or is she up against something bigger than she realizes?
Whenever I read a script, I try and imagine the trailer, specifically to see if it could suit up in the jacket of a movie. And I see that here. A young woman gets dropped into the dangerous underbelly of the art world, a place dominated by sociopathic evil rich people, and must fight her way out of it. Throw Anna-Taylor Joy in the lead role and that’s a movie.
If you want to know what screenplay that shouldn’t be a movie looks like in trailer form, go watch this trailer. That’s not a movie. That’s low-stakes mumblecore that will appeal to the writer, their parents, and nobody else. Actually, probably not even the parents. A movie appeals to a mass audience and Fellowship is that.
But it’s also so bland.
With a movie like this, you’re trying to titillate. You’re trying to shock. You’re trying to create this dark world that stirs unease within the reader. And, save for one scene, this doesn’t do that. That scene is when Cecilia is having sex with Davis and then Isabel comes in. Instead of being angry, she joins.
But every other attempt at a dark moment is served up with kid gloves. This is exactly what I was talking about the other day in the newsletter. If you promise a gun-weilding violent film second to none, like the upcoming movie, Havoc, then give us lots of violent gore and awesome gunplay, we’ll be happy.
If you’re promising this dark sexy thriller that will unearth the shocking art underworld, you better give us lots of dark sexy sh*t and some shocking art world revelations. Outside of that one scene, we never hit more than a 5 out of 10 in the sexy or shocking department. The script sits there like a fat cat you’re dangling a string over. It sort of casually plays with the string but mostly looks disinterested.
This is VERY COMMON in intermediate screenwriting, by the way. There are a lot of well-structured professional scripts from intermediates that don’t push the envelope enough. They’re either too bland or too reserved or too predictable. That’s the big challenge with screenwriting. You gotta follow this three act structure, which is inherently predictable, yet still find ways to be unpredictable within it. The writers who learn how to do that are the ones who graduate to advanced level.
Heretic is a great example of that. That writing team (who broke out with A Quiet Place) was always decent. But when they learned to become unpredictable within the screenwriting format is when they wrote their best script yet.
Also, you have to stick the landing with your script. I’m not going to say that Keet’s script flipped upside down once it hit the runway. But it definitely wasn’t as smooth of a landing as it could’ve been. Cecilia has to create this super clever piece of art that takes the Bridgers down yet the piece of art we get is a hodge-podge of a dozen different things that feels like the opposite of clever.
I do think this will become a streaming movie. And that’s a big accomplishment. All aspiring writers would kill for that opportunity. But I couldn’t help but be disappointed by the bland execution here. I wanted more.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your script is set in the present, I would avoid putting the current year anywhere in your script. A lot of people will read your script after this year. So if you put down “2024” like Keet did, and someone reads the script in 2025, it already feels dated. Therefore, option number 1 is to avoid including the year anywhere in your script. But if you have to put it in there, put the next year in. So, if you’re writing a script now, put in “2026.” It gives the script a longer shelf life.
