Genre: Thriller
Premise: Told in documentary style with clips from her Youtube channel, a social media influencer mysteriously disappears.
About: This is the second runner up script from The A-List, which is not an actual list but a screenwriting contest set up specifically for entertainment assistants. The scripts are judged by the assistants and, in order to prevent any favoritism, have anonymous title pages. I reviewed the runner up script, The Mermaid, last week.
Writer: Kyle Tague
Details: 91 pages
I love forgetting I’m reading something. It always gives me a high. That’s why I read so much stuff. I’m searching for that next high! You go through a lot of junk to find the pearls. What is a pearl in the screenwriting world? That’s the question everyone wants the answer to, right? The truth is, you don’t know until you see it. From there, it’s easy to backwards analyze why it works. And yet if you follow the exact formula that made that script good, it doesn’t work when you apply it to your own script. It’s almost as if each good script exists inside an impenetrable bubble, a bubble Hollywood’s been trying to pop for 100 years. The only thing they’ve come up with is to make a second bubble and to hire the person who made the bubble in the first place.
I will tell you that one successful element I see in a lot of these breakout scripts is when a writer tells a familiar story in an unfamiliar way. It sort of jolts you. Missing person. Big deal. Oh, wait. I’ve never seen this specific type of missing person in a story told this way before. Okay, now you’ve got me. “Follow Her” is that kind of script. And it had me from ‘hello.’ But that doesn’t mean we stayed together. I’ve seen plenty of scripts start strong and end weak. Would this be another one?
We’re informed on the first page that everything we see will be told in documentary form. We’ll be notified where each piece of footage came from at the start of the scene. So, for example, if this is an uploaded Youtube video, we’ll be told it’s an uploaded Youtube video.
We’re then informed by the documentarian team, Chris and Danielle, that Ali, the subject of the documentary, is missing and presumed dead. We then jump into an explanation of what a social media influencer is, and that Ali was an aspiring actress who tried to expand her marketability by being an influencer.
Cut to a few of Ali’s influencer videos, where we see she’s obviously following the Influencer 101 template. She’s not being herself. She’s being some chippier happier version of Ali. She’s doing grocery hauls and mascara reviews. Boring stuff that isn’t getting her any new followers.
In Skype conversations with her actor boyfriend, Drew (who’s on location shooting a show), Ali laments how difficult it is to gain followers. He tells her to keep at it so she does. One day, Ali receives a stalker video of her which was uploaded to an anonymous linked site. It’s video of her shopping. Ali links the video to her followers and goes on a rant about men and creepiness. It’s raw and unfiltered and it goes viral, getting 3 million views.
Ali is surprised by the success of the clip. Then, a few days later, there’s another one! Except this one feels a little… off. Some internet sleuths figure out the truth. The second video is linked to her boyfriend’s e-mail address, proving Ali and Drew conspired to fake the stalking. Ali and Drew then make an apology video, admitting that she did it for the views. But that the first one was not fake.
Ali’s “Smollet” moment is picked up by right leaning Youtube channels and a Ben Shapiro wannabe, Nicholas, takes Ali to the woodshed as representing everything that’s wrong with the left. They’re all victims. And yet when you get down to it, their victimhood is a lie.
Nicholas’s audience then begins to REALLY stalk Ali, who no longer has the support of the public on her side. In fact, with every new video Ali posts of someone stalking her, the internet makes fun of her, calling her mentally disturbed and desperate for attention.
Then things get really weird, as videos start appearing online of Ali’s stalkers dressing in cloaks and sneaking into her house where they video her sleeping. It’s not too long after that that Ali disappears. The police have no leads to go on. The public accuses Drew. But what our documentarians, the ones who have told us this story, are about to find out, is that Ali’s disappearance may be due to something… otherworldly.
Oh man how I was rooting for this one!
It started off strong. Like I said – we’ve got a familiar story told in an unfamiliar way. And the writer seemed to understand the world he was documenting. Influencers have a very unique and weird life. And I felt Tague did a good job of capturing that. For example, when Ali gets caught for faking the second video, the solution isn’t to come clean. It’s to “come clean for the views.” She’s more than happy to apologize, but only because apology videos get a lot of views.
Likewise, the Right-Leaning Conservative channel stuff felt dead-on. I’ve seen these guys make these videos before, where they chastise influencers like this. Then when they realize that the chastising gets THEM more views, they drum up the chastising and make that public figure their personal punching bag.
Here’s where things started to go south for me, though. Once Nicholas sends all these followers to harass Ali, we venture into some pretty serious stuff. Numerous characters, both online and in person, threaten to rape and kill her. And yet it’s all dealt with in a sort of Happy Death Day tone. It’s supposed to be goofy entertainment. I’m not sure once you aggressively bring rape and death into a script that you can get away with that. I suppose some writers who are extremely sophisticated in how they handle tone can pull it off. But this isn’t that. So it leaves you in this weird viewer purgatory wondering if you’re supposed to be horrified or entertained.
And then it really falls off the rails (spoilers) when we’re asked to accept a late-arriving supernatural element. At first we think these people slipping into Ali’s home are creepy alt-right trolls. But then it’s inferred that they might be demonic.
I’m all for adding supernatural elements WHEN THEY’RE ORGANIC. But when they’re not, it can be a script killer. Especially when you add those elements late in the story. It seemed like the writer wasn’t sure what to do with his ending. So he did a quick rewrite where he inserted a few setups in the last 25 pages in order to infer that Ali’s disappearance was due to supernatural factors.
When you have a strong concept on its own, you don’t need to desperately add a supernatural component to make it even more marketable. This is a good idea without the supernatural. It’s already inventive. It’s already unique. It’s a good murder-mystery. Just keep it that way. There was no reason to throw this other random storyline in at the last second.
I guess I should’ve seen it coming. Whereas the beginning of the script felt sure of itself, you could feel the writer searching for his narrative once he crossed the halfway point. It became more about gimmicky plot developments than staying with what got you there. What got you there was a job we don’t normally hear about in movies (influencer) and a unique way of telling the story (documentary-style). Once you begin descending into the kind of tone they use in Child’s Play, you know your script is toast.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’ve read a half dozen scripts over the last 4-5 months where the concepts were great all on their own but then the writers introduced unneeded horror or supernatural elements. A late supernatural twist can sometimes put a movie over the top (Cloverfield Lane) but it more often sinks the movie, as it breaks the contract you and the reader made when you first presented the idea. Whenever you say, “I’m giving you Movie A,” and then in the end you give them “Movie B,” expect disappointment.
