It may have taken an entire calendar year, but we may have just found the best script on the 2022 Black List.
Genre: Thriller/Dark Comedy
Premise: A male stripper in Arizona who’s sleeping with his boss’s wife is propositioned by her to kill her hubby and run away together but things get complicated when they learn about the boss’s improbable money-making venture.
About: Jason Hellerman is an example of why it’s hard out there for screenwriters. He wrote a movie, Shovel Buddies, in 2015, but has struggled to find work since. At this point, he doesn’t even have an agent or manager. But he was still able to get this script onto last year’s Black List.
Writer: Jason Hellerman
Details: 90 pages
Jacob Elordi for Kevin Kreamer?
I forgot which commenter recommended this to me.
But THANK YOU!
Wow, this gem was hidden beneath all these vanilla obvious straightforward Black List screenplays and we didn’t know it! But if we were smart, we could’ve figured it out. Himbo was the only script on the Black List that didn’t have an agent, manager, or producer.
For those who don’t know, agents and managers pump their clients’ scripts into as many hands as possible in the hopes that when voting time comes, the sheer number of people who read it will result in enough votes to make the Black List.
But if you didn’t have someone pimping your script and you STILL got enough votes to make the list??? That’s nearly impossible to do and a sign that you have a REALLY good script. Cause it’s the rare instance of your script getting passed around organically. Which is actually how the original Black List was conceived, before people learned to manipulate it.
This one’s so wild, I’m going to need you to put on your hazmat suits.
We’re in some mid-sized town in Arizona and 20-something dimwitted Kevin Kreamer (stage name) is a male stripper working at Hot Dawgs Strip Club. Hot Dawgs is owned by 50-something Argento Papadakis, who’s one of the few people around town who actually has real money.
One night after Kevin performs, he asks Argento for a ride home, but first Argento has to help his wife, former stripper Lisa, who got a flat tire on the highway. As Kevin helps change the flat, Lisa stares at him like a dog in heat. It’s clear that Argento and Lisa’s marriage is not going well.
Later, when Kevin gets home, none other than Lisa is waiting for him. We learn that the flat tire was a setup so that they could both throw Argento in front of a passing semi and get away with murder. That’s right. Kevin and Lisa are banging. And as soon as they kill Argento, they can run off together with his money and live happily ever after. But Kevin chickened out during the plan. So now they’ll have to do it some other way.
A couple of nights later, after work, Argento and Kevin get wasted, and Argento shows him his big secret. You see, Argento was actually dead broke. Until he stumbled upon a small hidden cave in the Arizona desert. And in that cave? Gold shavings everywhere. You set up a dozen sieves in key places where the water weaves through the cracks, bringing unlimited gold shavings with it, and those sieves are full of gold every time you came back. Argento, who’s been secretly in love with Kevin, offers him all of this if they can be together. And Kevin says yes.
Kevin then heads home to Lisa and tells her it’s over. He doesn’t want to kill Argento anymore. Lisa is furious and starts yelling at him. What neither of them know, however, is that Argento’s been dying to get out of this marriage and only needed proof of Lisa cheating to meet the prenup’s standard of her getting zero in the divorce. So he hired a PI to catch her in the act.
He finally confronts her. But he had no idea Lisa was cheating on him with Kevin. Devastated, he goes home, butthurt, and he tells his PI, “You want to make some real money? Kill them both.” The PI (a crazed woman named Melanie) doesn’t blink. She’s in. Until she overhears something about this cave of gold. Now she, and Lisa, and Kevin, all want what they believe they deserve – a literal money-making cave. Will they get it? Or will they all perish in their greedy pursuit?
This is a small thing but as soon as I saw that this story was set in a small Arizona town, I had a good feeling. Let me explain. When I pick up a script, it is almost always set in New York, Los Angeles, Texas, Paris, London, sometimes Chicago — all the big obvious places.
My belief is that most screenwriters are on cruise-control without realizing it. They’re not trying to be cliche. But they go with the first thing that pops into their head – whether that be a character, a scene, a location. So they’re setting their stories in these locations without even realizing it.
You have to understand that, as a reader, we’re always wanting to be taken to some place new. Cause the new places have things that we haven’t experienced before. For a writer to set their story in Arizona tells me that they’re not like every other writer. So, immediately, I felt good about this script. It turned out, my instincts were right.
The descriptions here were a cut above the average script. Like when we first get inside Kevin’s tiny house, here’s the first description line:
“A front door that has a view of the backdoor.”
Simple. Clever. Descriptive. I rarely see that combo.
This was followed by several fun exchanges. Such as this one…
KEVIN: My mom said money makes you more of who you really are on the inside.
ARGENTO: That’s how I know you’re poor.
And then you had these characters. Every one had something that differentiated them from the characters that I usually come across. Here’s the introduction of Melanie, the PI who Argento hires…
You also have a writer who understands shorthand. He understands that a script needs to move. So, at a certain point, Argento decides he wants to catch his wife in the act of cheating. Now, normally, when you’re writing a plot line such as this, your mind thinks linearly. You think, “Okay, Argento has to hire a PI. He doesn’t know any PIs. So he has to go to some office, interview the guy, tell him what he wants, and then the guy accepts the job and we’re off to the races.”
But that’s boring and logical and there’s too much boring setup involved. So, instead, we show Argento at a diner, ready to meet the PI, and this woman sits down across from him and she’s like, “Okay, let’s rock.” He has no idea who she is. He’d sent a message to an old PI friend he knew from before to come help him out. But it turns out that guy is dead and his daughter, this woman, has taken over the company. As soon as he realizes that, we’re off to the races.
This is what I mean by “shorthand.” Instead of taking time out of your script to do logical boring stuff (go find a PI and tell the PI your whole reason for being there) so that you can get to the fun stuff, you come up with a way to fast-forward through that. He always knows this girl’s family. Her dad worked for him. A thousand times more interesting and we move quicker into the PI plot.
And then, the dialogue was just so good here throughout – a cut above 99% of the dialogue I read. Even some of the dialogue hawks who snipe down any dialogue I post here are going to have to admit this dialogue is better than all the other scripts on the Black List.
Finally, the script has this “lived in” quality. What I mean by that is, the writer has lived with this script for so long that he’s added a million little things so that it all feels connected. It doesn’t feel like one of those scripts where the writer was figuring it out as he went along.
For example, there’s this whole running gag with dumb Kevin trying to keep up with Lisa, who’s really smart. So his bible is Google. He loves googling and learning things. And he’s always telling these things to Lisa and it pisses her off. She always tells him to stop with the Google. Late in the script, when she’s trying to make this grand point, she brings up the infamous story of the guy who sold Victoria’s Secret for 500 grand only to then “put a gun in his mouth after he sold out because he couldn’t deal with missing a chance at a fortune that lasts past this life.”
While she’s been telling the story, Kevin has been pecking at his phone, clearly googling the story, and he turns to her and replies. “It says he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.” And she’s, of course, livid.
That’s a very lived-in response. You don’t figure that moment out the first time through the script. You’re still feeling everything out. That’s the kind of thing where you’re going back through the screenplay numerous times, have read through the same sequence over and over, and then it finally hits you – hey, this is a good place to use that running google joke.
Outside of getting a little sloppy at the end, this was a really good script. It’s definitely going to finish in the top 5 of my 2022 Black List re-ranking. If you can find it (and someone may have it in the comments section) definitely read it!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The power of the “WTF” script element. I already liked this script. But the second this random gold cave entered the equation, I loved it. I have never encountered something like that in a script like this before. Getting a WTF moment into your script that feels believable yet not too random is incredibly challenging. But when you nail it, like Himbo does, it takes your script up to a whole new level.
