Genre: Sports/Drama
Premise: In the violent world of underground horse racing, a wannabe female jockey and her trainer brother-in-law become entangled in an illicit relationship full of blood, sweat, and sex that pushes the limits of their bodies and the law.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. It is the final script I wanted to read from last year’s Black List.
Writer: Leigh Janiak
Details: 120 pages
One thing that always perplexes me about The Black List is its pairing phenomenon. There will be a script with an entirely unique subject matter that hasn’t been seen in half-a-decade in Hollywood, only for there to be a SECOND script covering the same subject matter that year.
That’s what we see today. Million dollar spec “Stakehorse” finished number 2 on the Black List last year. The script covered the darker side of horse racing. And now we’ve got a second script from that list that covers the dark side of horse racing. This one appears to go even darker than the first.
So, microwave up some apples and hay and let’s find out if this race is worth betting on.
Ruth and her older sister Diana were brought up by a gritty horse trainer. At 10 years old, they were thrown onto thoroughbreds. When they would inevitably fall, their dad would say, “Get up,” and they’d be expected to race again. Talk about tough love.
Cut to when they’re adults and Ruth is determined to be a jockey, a path that’s dominated by men. How bad is it? Ruth is routinely sexually objectified in the locker room. In one scene, a penis is literally thrown in her face as everyone else chants “suck it.”
Ruth doesn’t care. She just wants to be a jockey and she sees her shot with an 80,000 grand prize Derby race. But she needs a coach so she goes to Hector. Once inside Hector’s place, we see that there’s a quadriplegic woman on a bed. This is Diana. Hector was her coach and is her husband.
If Ruth teams up with Hector, they bypass all the money-shaving aspects of the Derby and get to keep the entire pot. They just need to find a horse for Ruth to ride on. Oh, and I should mention that they also seem to have read 50 Shades of Gray together because, out of nowhere, they start having wild S&M sex between practice sessions. Will it get in the way of her pursuit? We’ll see!
Writing dark material is the drug of choice for many a screenwriter.
Dark material may not keep the lights on at any studios but it *does* give you street cred. It gives the writer street credit, the director street cred, the producers, all the way up to the studio.
Fight Club famously made no money. But it made 20th Century Fox cool for a while. And when you’re the cool studio, other cool filmmakers and actors want to come and make stuff with you. So, while dark material doesn’t directly show up in the bank account, it helps everyone associated with it indirectly.
But here’s the thing about dark material. The darker it is, the harder it is to wrangle. I can make you fall in love with Marty McFly in three minutes. But making you fall in love with Travis Bickle? That takes a whole lot longer.
The reason that matters is because there needs to be a connection between the reader and the script for the script to work. And that connection is most often found between the reader and the main character. Darker characters take a better writer to pull off. That’s because strong writers understand the hole they’re in when they write dark characters and they make adjustments accordingly (in order to balance the darkness out). Whereas weak writers ignorantly believe that you’ll like their dark character no matter what.
I never liked Ruth.
I never understood why I would like her.
She’s cold. She’s bitchy. She’s selfish.
That’s three-strikes-you’re-out.
But if that isn’t enough, she hates animals. If you hate animals – especially the animals that you build your life around – that’s unforgivable. Here’s a line from her…
“Machines can be fixed when they’re broken. I treat these horses like they are — dumb and fickle —”
(There’s venom in her voice)
“I hate them. I hate that I have to depend on these dumb, unreliable animals.”
Why would I even keep reading after that?
Let’s look at the best dark sports movie made in the past 15 years – The Wrestler. The main character in that movie WAS EXTREMELY LIKABLE. He was the nicest sweetest guy. He checks to make sure his opponents are okay after the match. He’s a GOOD DUDE. Ruth is not a good person. I would even go so far as to say she’s hateable.
From there, you have this quadriplegic sister. Why? What’s the point other than to create more melodrama? This script is already dark and sad. Now you’re going to add a quadriplegic sister??
This is why dark material is hard to execute. You’re asking the reader to go with you in spite of all this sad, depressing, angry stuff. It takes someone with a ton of talent to present that in a digestible way. Here it felt like the writer just kept punching us every couple of scenes to make sure we were down as much as possible.
Maybe my bias towards stories with hope is getting in the way of my analysis here. But I still think this was way too dark and sad for no reason.
There was potential for this script to be good, though.
There’s an early scene where Ruth is on her horse, preparing for this underground horse race. To her left is a 13 year old jockey. To her right is a jockey in his underwear. That’s the script I was hoping to read.
Pro Tip: You always want to lean into what’s unique about your concept.
What’s unique here is underground horse racing. Where there are no rules. But there wasn’t nearly enough of that. It was replaced by… S&M sex??????
The counterargument to my analysis is that Harness is unlike any script you’ll read this year. I will give it that. So if you like offbeat stuff, this is definitely that. But the characters never brought me in enough for me to care about that offbeat story.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned:
This script lost me on the first page of our heroine as an adult. Here was that beat…
Bare feet step on a scale.
A YOUNG WOMAN, wearing only cotton underwear. Small, compact. This is RUTH. All grown up.
She looks down at her weight: 116.
Her face betrays no emotion.
Early on, a script is a puzzle to readers. They’re using the pieces that you, the writer, give them in order to figure out who our characters are and what they’re trying to do.
This is the first moment I’m meeting Ruth as an adult. Therefore, I’m looking for the puzzle piece that’s going to help me understand who she is. If a woman looks at her weight on a scale in a moment that’s important enough that she’s checking her weight and her face “betrays no emotion?” Then I am literally learning *nothing* about that person. If she had been angry, I would’ve learned something. If she had been happy, I would’ve learned something. If she had taken out a note card that had her last 5 weights recorded and this one was higher than the others, that would’ve told me something. But this tells me nothing. You cannot tell me nothing about your main character in the first moment that I meet them.
