Genre: Drama/Dark Comedy
Premise: A young man attempts to recreate his suicidal sister’s failed high school prom, with the belief that it’s the only way to save her life.
About: This script finished on the low end of the 2014 Black List. The writer, Chai Hecht, hasn’t landed any major assignments yet off of his Black List finish, but has gotten a couple of his short films produced.
Writer: Chai Hecht
Details: 111 pages
So I was talking to a professional reader the other day and the conversation quickly turned to recent script reads and how most scripts fall into two categories.
The first is the Polarizing Category. These are scripts that create a reaction. Now that reaction may be positive OR negative. But at least it’s a reaction.
The second (and much bigger) category is the Safe Category. These are scripts that can also be perceived as good or bad, but the reaction isn’t strong.
Take the script, Lore, which I reviewed last month. I could appreciate the execution. I liked the overall story and understood why a studio would find it marketable. But it was all done in a very blase “Screenplay 101” way and therefore wasn’t polarizing.
On the flip side is “Deeper” by Max Landis. I didn’t like the script. But I have to admit, the thing took chances, it was different. It made me mad at times. And I still remember all the major story beats three months later. That was a polarizing script.
A good analogy is singers. Almost every singer that becomes extremely popular does so because they create a polarizing reaction. The people who have opinions on them have really strong opinions, good or bad. Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Kanye.
The funny thing is, even if you hate one of these artists, you can’t deny that the opinion you have of them is strong. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Kanye West is decent.” It’s either, “He’s a genius!” or “I fucking hate that guy.”
That’s what you’re aiming for when you write. You want people to have strong reactions. And for people to have strong reactions, you need to take chances in your story. You need to let your voice come out. You can’t try and please everybody or write “the technically perfect script.” Part of writing a great screenplay is being brave enough to go to strange places where you don’t know if it’s going to work. And really, that’s true for any artistry.
The reason I picked up In Real Time is because it seemed like it would be a script that, love it or hate it, I’d have a strong reaction to. Let’s see if I was right!
Oscar (or “Osc” as he’s known here) is a 28 year-old piece of shit. Well, maybe “piece of shit” is a strong term. He’s a con artist who pretends to be a door-to-door salesman and, once he gets inside the home, takes whatever looks valuable. Actually, yeah, he is a piece of shit.
Osc hasn’t seen his mother, Lauralie, or sister, Agnus, for a decade. But that changes when he learns that Agnus just tried to commit suicide and is being held in the hospital for two weeks on precautionary measures.
Osc zips back into town and rushes to see his sis, who he loves more than anyone in the world. He realizes that the second Agnus gets out of the hospital, she’s going to complete the deed, and therefore he needs a plan to save her life.
He runs into his old flame, Nicole, the most beautiful girl in town, who still loves him dearly. Nicole is trying to bring awareness to illegal jaywalking by jaywalking back and forth across major streets.
The two investigate what could’ve made Agnus suicidal, and Osc remembers Agnus said the last day she was happy was June 15, 2003, her senior prom.
Osc and Nicole believe that everything went great on that night up until Agnus’s date didn’t kiss her. So Osc plans something spectacular. He’s going to recreate the prom and get her old date to kiss her at the end of the night.
All of this is complicated by Osc’s mom being a nutjob who wants to do things her own way and also by the fact that Osc doesn’t have any money to pull this off. But Osc will stop at nothing to save his sis’s life. Even if there’s no guarantee of success.
I was hoping for In Real Time to be a biting dark comedy in the way that Charlie Kaufman might have treated this. Instead, I got something akin to a John Greene collaboration.
We’ve got a girl who’s going to die (a girl always needs to be dying in a John Greene novel!). We have a quirky romance brewing on the side. We have a strange attractor driving the narrative (the prom recreation).
From a screenwriting standpoint, the foundation is here. GOAL: Recreate Prom. STAKES: His sister’s life. URGENCY: 2 weeks (the second Agnus gets out of the hospital).
That was actually the most clever story point. I admire when a writer can organically insert urgency into his story. “A man must rid his house of a ghost in under 24 hours!” is a typical example of how you can force false urgency onto a story.
Being held at the hospital after a suicide is a real thing. So it felt organic.
But the rest of this script felt like the typical “quirky romance script” every writer writes early on in their career. No judging. I wrote one too. We all do.
The problem with these scripts is that they all scream out, “My early career quirky romance script!” The star isn’t the engaging story. It’s the quirk. And when you make the quirk the priority, it never works. I mean the jaywalking thing is the perfect example. Never in a MILLION YEARS would a real person ever do that.
Then how has John Greene managed to pull off his career? I don’t know. I haven’t seen either of his films. But I did read Nuestadter and Weber’s adaptation of his book, and I can tell you that their focus was not the quirk, but rather the emotion. They didn’t want to gimmick you. They wanted you to fall in love with these characters. And I didn’t see that priority here. This gimmick was definitely the priority.
And that’s important to note. Because when you “gimmick” the reader, you focus on the wrong things, especially in a talky script like this. You’re keen on “cool” or “quirky” dialogue rather than exploring the emotion in the scenes.
The emotion is always what the audience connects with the most. They might not say that. They might even outright tell you they don’t want it. But their favorite movies are almost always movies where they connect with the characters on an emotional level.
And that’s not to say there isn’t an attempt at emotion here, but it’s misguided or something. Osc seems to be battling something within himself but I was never sure what it was. Is he battling the fact that he’s a fuck-up? That he left his family? It’s never clear, so I don’t know what I was supposed to be emotional about!
And the most emotion-potent story thread, that between Osc and his sister, is neutered by the fact that we barely spend any time with his sister! She’s cooped up in this hospital room so we never see her. This puts the bulk of the emotional weight on Nicole, and Nicole just isn’t that interesting (probably because there was so much emphasis put on the quirk – the jaywalking stuff – rather than making her a real person).
So which category does In Real Time get left in? I’m afraid the second one – “Safe.” It does take chances, but those chances never feel organic. They seem forced on the story. Therefore, when the best part of the story arrives, the prom, it’s too little too late. We’re not as invested as we should be. It’s too bad. Cause this concept had potential.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Never let the quirk be the priority. That’s not to say you shouldn’t take chances or go to unique places. But choices shouldn’t be made so you can say, “Look at how unique I can be!” Choices need to first stem naturally from the story for the quirk to work.
