Genre: Action-Comedy
Premise: After a Hollywood assistant is publicly fired for admitting while on a conference call that he’d love to kill his boss, he finds his boss dead in the office the next morning and goes on the lam to figure out the real culprit, all while being hunted by his boss’s assassin.
About: Lillian Yu graduated from Harvard, wrote for the prestigious Harvard Crimson, and sold her first spec, Singles Day, back in 2018, to New Line. She’s since worked as a staff writer on TV shows, Powerless and Warrior. This latest script of hers finished in the top 5 on last year’s Black List. This script may or may not be written due to Lillian’s direct experiences with Scott Rudin. I have no info on whether that’s the case. All I know is that the second page of the script says, simply, “F*uck you, Scott.”
Writer: Lillian Yu
Details: 100 pages
Parasite actress Park So-Dam for Chelsea?
By this point, you’ve all heard the famous Hollywood saying: “Nobody knows anything.”
More specifically, nobody knows what movie ideas are going to work and what movie ideas are going to fail.
That’s because, although the formula – give them something the same but different – is agreed-upon by everyone, nobody can identify what the percentages of “same” and “different” in that equation are.
This is why you hear so many people say, “That idea is too much like so and so movie.” And for the next idea you’ll hear, “That idea is way too weird.” Nobody can agree on how much of “the same” and how much of “different” is required for a magical winning concept.
Today’s concept puts that quandary to the test. This definitely feels like familiar territory. A couple of mis-matched people are running from someone who’s trying to kill them, carrying, in their possession, a macguffin USB drive, that potentially has the answers they need to achieve their goal.
The “different” part is that, instead of this taking place in Budapest, like a Mission Impossible movie, or even New York City, here in the states, it’s taking place in Hollywood. So that becomes the big question. Is throwing in the Hollywood part enough to make this idea fresh and exciting? Or is it still one of thousands of the exact same types of scripts written in this space?
I suspect the answer will depend on the individual.
Our script follows producing assistant, and 28 year old Ugandan, Teddy Adebayo. Teddy works for a really terrible producer named Frank who throws things at him, makes him kill poor little squirrels because he doesn’t like the sound they make when running on the roof, and routinely laughs at him for being so stupid.
One day, when Teddy is fed up with Frank and not really paying attention to what he’s doing as he patches a bunch of people into a teleconference in the conference room, he confesses to his best friend and fellow assistant, Chelsea Hamamura, that he would kill Frank if he could. Little did he know he was broadcasting on the teleconference when he said this. So Teddy is immediately fired.
That weekend, when Teddy goes in to return his company keys and collect his final paycheck, he finds Frank stabbed to death in his office…. WITH TEDDY’S LETTER OPENER! No sooner does this happen than Chelsea appears, who congratulates Teddy on finally doing the deed. Teddy insists he’s innocent. Only seconds later, a masked man shows up to make sure Frank is dead, forcing Teddy and Chelsea to hide.
While observing the man, Chelsea notices that his gun is cop-issued, which means they can’t go to the cops with this! Teddy will have to prove his innocence some other way. He remembers a “secret” project Frank was working on that may have answers and locates a thumb drive that may have that project’s script on it. They drive off in a James Bond stunt car, with the masked man in pursuit.
Chelsea heads to the SoHo House to confront Paul Rudd, who’s had a two year feud with Frank. While she gives Rudd the business, the masked man appears and starts shooting up the SoHo House. Luckily, KEANU REEVES is there taking a meeting and tackles the guy, allowing Chelsea and Teddy to slip away.
The two eventually end up at Elon Musks’ house (or an Elon stand-in) and then Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s house. It’s a celebrity cameo party. Each celebrity gets them a little closer to their answer. But will it be enough to clear Teddy’s name? Or is he getting screwed one last time by the boss from hell, whose parting gift is sending him to prison for life?
This is the kind of script I was just talking about yesterday as one of the ways spec screenwriters can still get a theatrical release. Write an action-comedy. And to the writer’s credit, this is an action-comedy concept I haven’t quite seen before – an action comedy built around Hollywood. To that end, I guess you can say it checks the “same but different” box.
With that said, something wasn’t working for me. I tried to figure out what it was. The script had plenty of the fun outrageous moments you want from a movie like this. For example, at one point, they go to The Rock’s house for help, which reminded me of the guys in The Hangover going to Mike Tyson’s house.
But then it hit me. The central pairing in this movie isn’t interesting. And it’s not interesting because it’s not easily definable. Last Wednesday I reviewed a buddy comedy called “Drive Away Dykes,” and in that one, the relationship was easily definable. One woman was the most overtly sexual lesbian on the planet. The other was the most conservative lesbian on the planet. They fit together because they were so clearly on two different ends of the spectrum.
There isn’t enough of a difference between these two. For starters, they’re both assistants. So right away, they kind of feel the same. Sure, Chelsea is brave and Teddy isn’t. But these aren’t their defining traits, like the fact that the woman in Drive Away Dyke was a slut and the other was a prude. Here, the fact that one character is brave and one isn’t just seems to be a convenience thrown in there to get some laughs.
The dynamic is off as well.
The script introduces Chelsea first.
Then it introduces Teddy. Yet Teddy, in our first 10 pages, is the hero. He’s the one we’re focusing on. Chelsea is barely mentioned.
But then, as soon as they go on the run, Chelsea takes charge. She’s the one making all the decisions. So it’s apparently her movie, which I guess is why she was introduced first (usually, the character you introduce first is the hero).
But it’s super confusing because all the stakes are attached to Teddy. Not Chelsea. Chelsea’s the comic relief. Except she’s also the hero??
I didn’t know what was going on there.
Also, I want to take a second to vent about something. Because I’m seeing this in more and more scripts.
So, this is how Chelsea is introduced: “We WEAVE THROUGH a threadbare office: an assistant, CHELSEA HAMAMURA (mid-20s, half-Japanese, ASD that manifests as droll), orders office supplies on an Amazon-like e-commerce site named Everest while an INTERN runs from the kitchen with mugs of coffee in hand.”
You may notice that there is very little description of what Chelsea actually looks like. Why does this matter? Well, later, we’re told, rather vaguely, that Teddy is infatuated with Chelsea. And through very minor clues here and there, we learn that she’s really freaking hot. Which is a big reason why Teddy likes her so much.
But for some reason, all writers are terrified to label female characters as attractive now because people on Twitter occasionally highlight these descriptions and say, “Typical male writing. Only focuses on how the girl looks.” And female writers don’t want to perpetuate these dated practices so they don’t tell you either. So now we get these very vague descriptions and the reader is just supposed to figure out on their own if someone is good-looking or not.
While there are situations where a characters’ looks don’t matter, it does matter if you have a love story. A movie about a person who is attracted to a really ugly individual, for example, is a completely different movie than one where they’re attracted to a beautiful individual. I guess this is a long way of saying, don’t listen to all these Twitter losers. Tell us what your character looks like. Don’t be afraid. There are ways to convey a person’s attractiveness tastefully. And you should do so so you don’t leave all your readers confused as hell.
If you decide to keep things vague to win Twitter points, you run the risk of what happened to me in this script. Which was, halfway through, I realized that Chelsea was gorgeous and Teddy was in love with her. That means I missed 40-some pages of potential subtext and sexual chemistry because I didn’t know who was attractive and who was attracted. None of that was explained clearly.
I wish I could say I liked this but it just had too many problems.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In a Harvard interview back in 2018, Lillian Yu gave two pieces of advice. “First, work as an assistant. Get the lay of the land, and learn the players. See how this weird system works. I can’t tell you the number of seasoned writer-friends who have asked me, a lowly baby writer, for advice on this kind of thing. My only leg up is knowing the industry—who the good agents are, which producers won’t steal your idea, which executive is looking to buy a project about a deaf Tibetan Mastiff, etc. Second piece of advice: work in development. Working as a development exec was basically my grad school in screenwriting. You get to peek behind the curtain and see how everything works from the buyer’s side—what executives look for in a pitch, the note behind the note, meeting etiquette, standard story structure, etc. This was the best investment of my time I could have made, and I actually got paid to do it.”
