We’ve got a spec script with another wild twist ending!
Genre: Legal Thriller
Premise: When a rich New Yorker is the lead suspect in his wife’s murder, he hires his daughter from a previous marriage, whose wounds from him deserting her have never gone away, as his attorney.
About: This spec sold earlier this year to NETFLIX. Weren’t writers around here just complaining that specs don’t sell? Don’t tell that to Melissa London Hilfers. This is her fifth feature spec sale! Hilfers loves legal thrillers. Not surprising since she is a lawyer. Another “I have no time to write” excuse taken off the table. Yesterday, a doctor with two kids found time to write a novel. And now a lawyer, the profession with the least amount of time in the world, had time to write five scripts. So come on, guys! Let’s see some more output!
Writer: Melissa London Hilfers
Details: 110 pages
Feels like a Natalie Portman role
Today we’re going to talk about how weaving character dynamics into a nuts & bolts legal plot can yield solid returns.
Let’s get to it!
40 year old Cecilia Caufield has just won the biggest case of her life, a 150 million dollar settlement. She goes home and celebrates by having sex with her husband, Ryan. But then we see her leave her husband and go to… another home? To… Peter. Oh wait, Peter is her husband. Ryan is just some lawyer she’s banging. Bad, Cecilia. Bad!
Cecilia’s mother calls and tells her that her father (the two are no longer married) is a murder suspect! His second wife was stabbed and killed on the city streets last night. Cecilia’s father rarely engages with her ever since he moved onto his second family but Cecilia races over to see him anyway and makes sure he’s okay. Not only is he okay, he wants Cecilia to represent him!
An old work buddy of Cecilia’s, Aaron, is the lead prosecutor on the case, and he is POSITIVE William killed his wife. The murder weapon was a jewel-encrusted serrated knife that he gave to his wife for protection a decade ago. Aaron theorizes that William knew she had it on her so he got her onto a dark street, ripped it out, and stabbed her.
Cecilia is diligent in getting all the details of that day from her father, even down to the specifics of he and his wife’s sex that morning. If she’s going to prove her father’s innocence, she needs all the details, no matter how nasty. Cecilia suspects that William’s long-time driver knows more than he’s letting on. As such, she starts to doubt whether her father is really innocent. Regardless, she’s going to fight tooth and nail for him to go free. The question is, what will it cost her?
I had a long think about this one.
Did I like it? Did I not like it?
I’ll start by saying this: The writing was MUCH BETTER than yesterday’s offering. At no point did Melissa London Hilfers describe any character as “handsome” 917,212 times.
But I still had to ask, “Why is this idea movie-worthy?” “How is this storyline any loftier than, say, a The Lincoln Lawyer or Suits episode?”
The answer to this is the reason the script sold. And it’s an important distinction that I want you to pay attention to.
The weakness of a show like The Lincoln Lawyer or Law & Order is that the court cases are more about the nuts and bolts of the case rather than real human emotion. Therefore, you can only ever watch those shows with casual interest.
We know this because whenever a big episode comes around, like a premiere or a finale, it isn’t just some random person who’s on trial for murder. It’s one of the main characters from the show. That’s because they know that, in order to really pull you in, they have to engage you on a deeper emotional level.
That’s what Hilfers does here. This movie is just as much about what’s going on outside the trial as it is inside. It really is the only way you can elevate one of these trial case storylines from what you see on TV. Well, that or some crazy high concept, like the “first ever defense of a ghost” or something.
This script works because Cecilia isn’t just defending her father. She’s getting to spend time with her father again for the first time since she was a child. And there’s this sad irony that the only way she got to do that was for his wife to be killed and for him to be the number 1 suspect.
Which the script needed.
Because the plot itself *is* the exact same stuff you see in a Law & Order episode. There’s the spoiled half-sister who got pissed at her mom when she said she was going to cut her out of the estate. There’s the dead wife’s trainer who claims that she was planning on leaving her husband to be with him. There are not one, but TWO, one-of-a-kind jewel-encrusted knives, either of which could be the murder weapon. And, as is always the case in these stories, nobody seems to be telling the whole truth.
I rarely cared about any of that. I was only mildly curious about who killed the mom. I was more invested in Cecilia’s complex relationship with her father. Particularly, I was wondering if her father was playing her – being charming to get her to do what he needed her to do. But, as soon as this was over, he was going to leave her again.
And then came the twist.
(MAJOR SPOILERS)
This is a good example of the influence a twist can have on a script. Cause I had this as a “wasn’t for me” all the way through. But the twist brought it up to a “worth the read.” The thing you have to remember about a twist ending is not just that it provides the story with a twist. But that it provides the story with a twist RIGHT AS IT ENDS.
That creates a swell of energy within the reader that they then feel the need to expunge. It’s hard to come off a big intense final twist AND NOT WANT TO TALK TO SOMEONE ABOUT IT. So this generates one of the most important things a script requires for success – the reader telling other people about it.
I will often read scripts that I think are good. But they don’t compel me to talk to others about them. They don’t infuse me with a burst of energy that I then must pass on.
The twist, for those of you who are curious, is that Cecilia did it. The reason it works is because there isn’t a single moment in the script that points in that direction so you never consider it. And yet, it’s still paid off.
That’s REALLY HARD TO DO. To not show a single clear setup and yet the payoff is obvious. So let me tell you how the writer did it. She used this infidelity storyline as a fake-out. The whole time, we were thinking that was a subplot meant to explore Cecilia’s marriage. It was so separate from everything else, that we wouldn’t, in a million years, have thought to connect it to the case.
But later, when we see what really happened that night, we see Cecilia and Ryan kissing outside, then him get into an Uber, and who should walk up, but Kimberly. Kimberly is ecstatic that she’s caught her husband’s daughter in this weak moment and delights in telling her that as soon as she gets home, she’s going to call up Cecilia’s husband and tell her that his wife is cheating on him. That’s why Cecilia kills her.
Another thing about the twist is that it makes Cecilia quite the complex character because she does *not* ultimately offer her husband the truth. So, is that good? Are we really happy this girl won? I think we are because Kimberly was an awful person who delighted in taking William away from his wife and daughter. But Cecilia, by no means, gets away scot-free here.
It’s enough to get an endorsement from me. I don’t know what that means going forward in the spec market. Are we about to hit a streak of twist endings? I guess we’ll find out!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to legal scripts, I like the structure used here, where the trial starts at the halfway point. Starting a trial right after the first act means that an entire 75% of your script is going to be a trial. I’m not saying that can’t work but it’s a looooonnnng time to be in trial. Commencing the trial halfway through the script feels like a perfect bifurcation of the structure.
