Script sale! Just sold!
Genre: Thriller/Horror
Premise: A young Asian woman becomes concerned when her Asian roommate begins dating a white man and she slowly starts becoming white herself.
About: This script has gotten a lot of heat in the last 24 hours because the trades announced it had been sold. It’s not clear if the actual sale just happened or it happened a while ago and they’re just now reporting on it. I know that happens sometimes. The script has been floating around for a year now which is good news for writers who feel like their script’s been passed up by Hollywood. You’re never passed up! You just have to find that one producer who loves it. So keep hitting people up. Keep pushing them to read your script. It’s like dating. You can have nine bad dates and on the tenth date, you find the love of your life. But does the love of your life have an artificial face?
Writer: Ran Ran Wang
Details: 96 pages
Sonoya Mizuno for Jo?
At the end of the day, screenplays are subjective.
You like some. You dislike others. It’s all part of the game.
But that doesn’t mean you throw up your hands and give up. You can still weight things in your favor so that you’re more likely to end up in the “YES” pile than the “NO” pile. One of the first things you can do is give us a new twist on an old formula. If you do that, you’re ahead of the majority of screenwriters.
And today’s writer does that. This is a serial killer movie. But it’s a serial killer movie with a twist we’ve never seen before. The killer is dating Asian women, slowly turning them into white women, and then murdering them.
Haven’t seen it! And I’m guessing you haven’t either.
The question is, is that a *good* different idea? Or just a different idea? Cause if it’s only different, it’s not going to get you into the YES pile.
20-something Rina, a Korean American lawyer, is out on a date with 20-something Preston, a very white man, who’s also a lawyer (at a different firm). Usually, Rina hates dating app dates. But there’s something intriguing about Preston. She likes this guy.
Not long after the date, we meet Rina’s roommate, Jo, a lesbian who’s secretly in love with Rina. She’s not happy at all to hear that Rina’s date with Preston went well but because she’s such a good friend, she encourages Rina to pursue him.
But then Jo actually meets Preston and he freaks her the hell out. He’s super pale. He’s socially unaware. And he looks psychotic. Sometimes you’ll be talking to him and he just stares at you. Creeeeeeep-y. Jo notices that Preston keeps giving her sexy eyes when Rina isn’t looking.
As the weeks go by, Jo sees less and less of Rina and whenever she does see her, Rina seems paler. As Rina’s relationship progresses, we keep hearing about these blond girls getting murdered by a serial killer. One night Rina starts looking into these dead girls and realizes that one looks exactly like her Asian friend who went missing a year ago. But how can an Asian woman become white and blonde? It doesn’t make sense!
One day when Rina isn’t around, Preston shows up and corners Jo in the kitchen. He then kisses her, biting her lip. Jo gets away and, over the course of the next few days, she becomes super strong. At this point, she knows something crazy is up with Preston and desperately attempts to get Rina away from him. But Rina is now a blond blue-eyed white girl. Which means Jo needs to act fast.
This is a very ambitious screenplay and I’m not sure I was always able to follow along.
I liked a lot of the early stuff. In particular, I liked the subtext behind Jo being in love with Rina but Rina being obsessed with this new guy she met. In screenwriting, you’re constantly looking to build relationships that allow conversations to have subtext.
So when Jo is poo-pooing Rina’s new boyfriend, she’s not literally hating on the boyfriend. She’s got a dog in this fight. She wants Rina. So of course she’s going to hate on the new guy. But she can’t say she loves Rina out loud and therefore has to convey these things through subtext.
I also liked how casual the writing was. Sometimes we writers can obsess over every single word so much so that we end up with these technically correct paragraphs but those paragraphs read like jagged edges. The action description throughout this script read like butter.
My issues with the script had to do with the mythology.
I had a hard time following it. The antagonist, Preston, is fashioned after a vampire. For example, if he bites you, you gain superhuman strength. And there are many allusions to how pale he is and how pale he makes others. So we’re at least partly in vampire land.
But then I don’t know what that has to do with turning Asian women into white women. That whole aspect of the mythology seemed to have different rules. And once you create a mythology that contradicts itself, the reader gets confused and loses confidence in the story.
This is quite common, actually, especially in the early stages of a screenwriting career. We tend to see mythology as this giant candy store where we can pull out any piece of candy whenever we want. But good mythology is the customer who walks into the candy store and only buys the candy that he really needs.
Cause I had a tough time figuring out what the point was here. I know there’s this “toxic masculinity” theme running throughout the script. But there’s also this toxic friendship theme running throughout the script (Rina is terrible to Jo). I suppose, if you wanted to dig deeper, you could even say that this was a story about toxic heterosexuality since Jo is gay and the two people who screw her over are straight.
That’s not how you present your theme.
You don’t give the reader a bunch of choices and say, “Pick one.”
Yes, good movies explore multiple themes but the best movies have a dominant theme – one message they’re trying to get across.
And the problem with a script like this is that it’s clearly a THEME script. It’s created to be deconstructed for its message. So if that message isn’t clear, then you’re not executing the most important part of your presentation. Us moviegoers don’t need a theme when we watch The Fall Guy. But we do when we watch indie movies like this.
Even the title confuses me. “If I Had Your Face.” At first I think that’s coming from Rina’s perspective. She’s eager to have a white woman’s face. But then, later in the script, we get all these shots of mirrors and Jo’s face becomes Preston’s face sometimes and Rina’s face sometimes and the last dead girlfriend’s face sometimes. It just felt like we were throwing spooky stuff up on the screen even if we didn’t understand why.
By the way, this is something newbie writers do all the time in horror. They write trippy stuff and expect the reader to do the work for them. The writer doesn’t know exactly why they’re doing it but they’re HOPING the reader will come up with an explanation. You never want to write like that. You shouldn’t ever expect the reader to do your work. Even though it’s harder, you should always do the work yourself. You should always write things that make sense.
There’s a good lesson to be learned here, even if it’s a confusing one. I believe that Ran Ran is great with character stuff and dialogue. I think she’s weak in horror and mythology. However, this script doesn’t sell without the horror and mythology. That’s how powerful marketable genres are. Even if you’re not great with them, they give you a much better chance at selling your script, even if you didn’t perfectly execute the genre part. And that’s because producers read the script and see the poster and the trailer. Posters and trailers always look better when there’s a marketable genre popping off them.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned:“Running Commentary Description” – Running Commentary Description is when you occasionally use your action lines to commentate on what’s happening. It helps create a more casual read. So, for example, we get this line early on: “Finally, a waiter comes by with two glasses of red wine. A lifeline.” That last part – “A lifeline,” gives the reader a little more information on what that red wine means in the moment. Or later on, when Jo is speaking to a couple of Irene’s work friends and they’re going their separate ways, one of the friends says, “We should all catch up some time.” And the action line that follows is, “They never will.” I kinda like running commentary description but just like anything, if you do it too much, it can get annoying. So be careful out there.
