Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: After Amanda is seemingly ghosted by the man of her dreams, she’s delighted to discover he’s actually been kidnapped — and takes it upon herself to be his rescuer, going on an adventure of epic proportions along the way.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer has a small indie credit from 2014 but it’s safe to say that this is his true breakthrough in the business.
Writer: Dan Schoffer
Details: 104 pages
Is Anna Kendrick the only actress who can make this character likable?
In a recent newsletter I shared a comedy idea with you called “Friend-Zoned” about a beautiful woman notorious for friend-zoning all the men in her orbit, who then falls for a studly new guy at work, only to get friend-zoned for the first time in her life.
I thought it was a funny idea and I liked the potential internal journey of the main character. It’s fun to watch someone high and mighty get their comeuppance. The only thing I was worried about was, would anybody actually like someone who spends all of her interactions with men emotionlessly crushing their dreams?
This script proved to me that my worries were justified.
26 year old first year lawyer Amanda Tinsely has gone out on 87 Tinder dates this year alone. In every single instance, she has ghosted the guy after the first date. Amanda sees this as a good thing. If she were to actually call the guy and reject him, he would have to feel the sting of her disinterest. In all these cases, it’s easier if they just keep texting without a response and eventually figure it out on their own.
Then one day Amanda’s walking around and she hears a guy whistle at her. Morphing into Captain Marvel mode, she immediately scolds the man. That is until she realizes he was whistling to retrieve his dog, Paw McCartney. Feeling dumb and also realizing just how hot this guy (Julian) is, Amanda does a 180, goes home with him, and they bang.
Amanda is soooooo very happy that she’s finally found a guy that she likes, but the next day at work she realizes that he still hasn’t texted her. So she texts him. But he doesn’t text back. Not later that night. Not the next day. Not all week! Amanda is devastated because SHE’S JUST BEEN GHOSTED.
Of course, Amanda can’t leave it at that. Their connection is too strong! So she does what any rational person would do, finds out where Julian lives and goes to his house. As she’s about to ring the doorbell, the neighbor informs her that Julian has been missing all week. Amanda is ecstatic! This means Julian didn’t ghost her.
Amanda uses her law firm connections to get access to a private investigator, Dean, only to find out that Dean is one of the 87 guys she went on a date with and ghosted! Dean agrees to see her again basically to tell her that she’s a bad person, but reluctantly gets hired by Amanda to find Julian.
Dean eventually locates Julian in Panama, of all places, potentially kidnapped by a powerful business woman who is trying to take over the country’s internet. Dean and Amanda then fly down to Panama, find the compound where Julian is being kept, and try to infiltrate it via one of his body guards. Using the only talent she has – getting matched on Tinder – Amanda is able to match with the businesswoman’s bodyguard, giving the two a direct opening to rescue Julian! But what happens when Dean starts to actually like Amanda? Will he convince her to leave Julian there?
Ghosted highlights one of the trickiest aspects of writing comedies.
Comedies are meant to make people laugh.
Comedies also need a well-rounded interesting protagonist to make us care enough about the journey where we can bother to laugh. You can’t laugh if you’re barely paying attention.
Thus is the need to create a main character with a flaw. That flaw is what allows us to feel that they’re a real person with a REAL change that needs to happen in their life.
Unfortunately, by definition, a flaw is negative. And a lot of negative flaws result in unlikable characters.
The challenge with comedy scripts is to make the main character’s flaw deep enough that they feel like a real person who needs change, but not so deep that we dislike them.
I don’t think that Ghosted achieved that goal.
We just don’t like Amanda. She’s acting high and mighty on all her dates. She ghosts everyone. The guy she does fall for is some perfect model whose only positive attribute is his acrobatic sexual prowess.
Why are we supposed to root for this girl again?
I think what this writer is hoping for is the same thing I was hoping for in Friend-Zoned, which is that we’d all enjoy watching a pompous main character get their just desserts. We’d enjoy seeing them suffer at their own game – the same formula that was utilized successfully in Groundhog Day.
Groundhog Day is an interesting example because the main character was *really* unlikable. Like a bona fide a-hole. But the reason why that movie was able to overcome that was that it put its main character through hell. At a certain point things got so bleak that all Phil wanted to do was kill himself.
At that point, how could we not root for him? We felt terrible for the guy.
But “hate me first, love me later” is an untraditional structural choice that’s difficult to pull off, especially in this day and age where people make their minds up faster, and once they do, they mentally check out.
Either way, Ghosted never gives us any reason to change our minds about Amanda. She gets bumped and bruised a bit in Panama. But, for the most part, she has the same attitude of “I’m the prize and everybody else needs to realize that.” Nobody’s going to get behind a character like that.
With that said, there are things that work about the script. The dialogue is very light and fun. The dialogue I enjoyed most was when people would tell Amanda she was an idiot, such as this scene where she’s trying to explain to a cop her connection to Julian…
And there was one really fun set piece where Dean sent Amanda off on a Tinder date with Hector, the bodyguard, with the instructions to drug his drink with a concoction that would force him to tell the truth so they could get answers on where Julian was located. But what Amanda didn’t know was that the drug “strips” she’d be using could be ingested through the skin. So she’d taken them out of their baggie and placed them in her bra. Once on her skin, they dissolved, and so instead of Hector telling the truth, Amanda starts telling it.
But the script fails one final test which is that it doesn’t convincingly show its main characters falling in love. If we’re to root for Amanda and Dean to get together at the end, you have to give us 2-3 genuine scenes in the second act where we see them connecting. If you don’t have those scenes, then the big flashy ending where the girl runs after the guy to tell him she likes him feels empty. Because we never saw any chemistry there to back up those supposed feelings.
Romantic comedies can be deceptively hard because there are all these little things that you have to get right. But I think creating a likable protagonist and giving us convincing moments where we can see our main characters falling for each other are obvious prerequisites. Ghosted needed to nail those two things in order to avoid getting ghosted but didn’t.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Hector Tinder Date Set Piece is a great example of what all of you should be doing with your set pieces. You come up with a plan – in this case, drug Hector so he tells them the truth – and then make something completely unexpected happen instead. Here, Amanda gets drugged instead. This ‘flipping of the plan’ turns this scene into something completely unexpected. You rarely want things going according to plan in screenplays. The majority of the time, you want the plan to fall apart.
What I learned 2: I’m seeing more and more comedy/romantic comedy scripts include exotic locations due to Hollywood wanting bigger flashier comedies that can play outside of the U.S. The adventure aspect of the script gives it a broader appeal than if everything was set in New York.
