Genre: TBD
Premise: After being falsely accused of murdering his business partner, a tech titan creates a humanoid version of himself to serve out his sentence to disastrous results.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Matt Fisch
Details: 99 pages
Today I felt like laughing. That’s the great thing about script-reading. Whatever you’re in the mood for, there’s a genre for it. It was a fun Monday. I had a nice dinner. I was ready to laugh. And so it was that I came across this logline on the Black List: “When bio-tech titan Van Danzen is falsely convicted of murdering his business partner, he sends his greatest creation – a spitting-image humanoid robot – to serve a life sentence in his place. However, the humanoid’s militarized programming sends him on a rampage to escape prison and hunt those responsible for his creator’s set-up and imprisonment.”
Does that not sound like a comedy to you? The main character’s name is “Van Danzen.” He’s created a spitting image humanoid robot of himself who he sends to prison. How is that not a comedy? Well, after reading the first twenty pages of Inhuman Nature and not laughing once, I realized that I was actually reading an action script, an action script about a human replica of a billionaire named Van Danzen that was taking itself seriously.
I suppose there was a time, many moons ago, when people would pay for a premise that didn’t make sense. Let us not forget that they made a movie called “Face Off” where people actually bought into the premise that Nicholas Cage and John Travolta had their faces switched. So I guess anything’s possible. But can this bizarre Face-Off meets The Terminator hybrid pull off a similar feat? Grab your humanoid replica and let’s the three of us find out together…
Van Danzen is serving 30 years for killing his business partner. The tech billionaire is escorted into a maximum security prison where he mad-dogs all of the prisoners he passes. But then we cut to a car outside the prison where inside we see… Van Danzen?? Yes, this is the real Van Danzen. The one in the prison is a humanoid replica that Van built to serve his sentence. Meanwhile, Real Van is taking his girlfriend who never talks, Quinn, and sneaking out of the country where he’s going to hide out and live the island life for the next 30 years.
Van’s plan is thrown into disarray, however, when Humanoid Van Danzen snaps and starts killing prison guards! He then marches out of the prison, avoids sniper fire, and goes on a revenge tour to take down the people who put him in prison. Even though it’s not… really… him… who was betrayed? First is the prosecutor, then the judge, and soon it’s an FBI agent, who just so happens to be working with the real Van, who’s currently in Canada (he escaped there by taking an underground tunnel).
The real target of Humanoid Van Danzen, however, is the president of the United States! Yeah. And what we learn is that the president is also a humanoid that Van created. And the president is responsible for killing Van’s partner to set Van up, who, incidentally, was also a humanoid. As was Van’s girlfriend, Quinn. Yup, also a humanoid. Van and the FBI agent must avoid a determined Humanoid Van, then stop him from killing the president of the United States or else… I don’t know. Maybe we all become humanoids.
I’m going to give you a peak behind the curtain as to certain red flags readers spot early that lessen their confidence in a screenplay.
The first is a billionaire protagonist. In a comedy, billionaires are great because you can play around with that extreme to create a lot of jokes. Brewster’s Millions comes to mind. But in any other genre, it’s a lazy device. It basically allows you, the writer, to do anything you want without much effort. Normally, creating the first artificially intelligent human replica would require hundreds of the best scientists and mathematicians and computer experts in the world. It would be a massive undertaking. Instead of having to explain how all that came together, a writer can just say, “Eh, he’s a billionaire so he’d figure it out.”
I know, I know. Iron Man is a billionaire. He’s the most popular character ever. But Iron Man is actually the reason this lazy device has made its way into so many stories. Back when Iron Man was created, that became a trendy story choice. Make your comic book hero really rich. And it worked because it was new and fresh. It’s no longer new or fresh.
Secondly, I saw this line on the first page: “The only car in the lot is a CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL Dodge Charger, decked out in white and black, an emperor penguin on wheels.”
There’s zero reason to include a try-hard visual description of an object every single person on the planet knows. Whenever I see this, I get worried because I know the writer is focusing on the wrong things. Giving a visual description of, say, someone’s apartment makes sense because everybody’s apartment is different. You can tell a lot about a person from how their apartment is decorated. If it’s clean or not. If it’s small or large. If the furniture is cheap or expensive. So if you want to use some fun visual descriptions, save them for moments like this. I know this seems like a small thing to criticize. But in the thousands of scripts that I’ve read, it is my experience that when I see this early on, it’s usually bad news going forward.
Finally, there were lots of exposition-heavy long monologues early on. Monologues are fine. A lot of movies begin with characters explaining things in voice over. Scorsese movies for example. But to spend huge chunk of dialogue after huge chunk of dialogue having reporters explain in excruciating detail that our character is a murderer and lost his court case and what is his life going to be like now that he’s in prison? Seasoned writers don’t do that. They know exposition is the screenwriting devil. They will sell an organ on ebay if it means they can cut a 10 line chunk of expository dialogue down to 6 lines.
All that stuff combined with the fact that this script sounded like a comedy and it wasn’t led me into the next 70 pages skeptical that it was going to be able to turn things around. So it wasn’t surprising when it didn’t. I didn’t even know what the movie was about for another 30 pages. I wasn’t clear who the main character was. You’d think it was Van. But he was so passive and wimpy. It was Humanoid Van who was the active one. He’s out there killing people and, eventually, as we learn, trying to kill the president. But he has zero personality. So we can’t really follow him as the protagonist. This created a sort of “hero limbo” where we were desperately looking for a strong character with a strong goal to follow. That never came.
I know there’s a commenter here who swears that a Black List script has never been written that is worse than an amateur script. He might want to read this script and reevaluate that stance. I’ll take that a step further. If you had handed me this script and Friday’s amateur script and I’d never heard of either, and you told me to read both and bet my life on which one made the Black List, I would’ve said Chris’s Amateur Friday script in a heartbeat. That script had problems but at least it had a voice. It had some vision. This feels like an entry in a UCLA screenwriting classroom contest. I don’t know how it got on the Black List.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware “set the table” dialogue. This is when you want a character to say something for the audience’s sake. So you have another character ask them the perfect question that allows them to do so. For example, if you need the audience to know that the president is bad, a “set the table” scenario might look like this.
John: But why wouldn’t the president listen to us?
Mary: The president was compromised back in Philadelphia when the Chinese operatives injected him with the complacency diode. We can’t trust him anymore.
You can sometimes get away with this if it’s one question and one answer. But if you have scenes where you’re trying to get a lot of information out to the audience and you’re doing this over and over again, it doesn’t sound like a natural conversation at all.
