Genre: Comedy
Premise: Two teenage feminists struggle to create the perfect boyfriend, only to watch their experiment deteriorate as he succumbs to the ultimate perpetrator of casual high school misogyny: the football team.
About: Screenwriter Julie Mandel Folly is building a nice resume. She wrote on the underrated half-hour comedy, “Welcome to Flatch,” which I enjoyed (the actress who plays the main character is hilarious). She also wrote on the well-received HBO show, Minx. Here, she’s teamed up with Hannah Murphy, who she worked with on the short comedy-horror film, The Spookening. Their script made the 2022 Black List with 7 votes.
Writers: Julie Mandel Folly & Hannah Murphy
Details: 100 pages
Peyton List for Lizzie?
As I come to terms with the unfortunate reality that we are nearly at the time change and that it’s going to start getting dark at 1pm and that LA gas is now at 15 dollars a gallon, I turn to screenplays to lift me out of my mini-depression. Please, oh screenplay Gods, provide me with a great screenplay to read.
It’ll be up to a couple of TV writers to catapult me out of my funk.
What I always worry about with TV writers writing features is the “solidness” of their writing. Everything in feature writing needs to be harder and clearer. The characters need clearly defined flaws. Act turns must be solid. Goals must be as clear as the Maui ocean. Cause unlike TV shows, features have ENDINGS.
Whereas, in the TV world, you’re constantly existing in this “soft” shapeless environment where there are no endings in sight. So you can drift in TV shows and not be so defined all the time.
Will today’s writers circumvent that trap? Admiral Ackbar, what do you say?
Caroline and Lizzie are 17 year olds who aren’t really nerds but they’re nowhere near the top of the high school pecking order. Lizzie is obsessed with losing her virginity to a hot boy she’ll never get and Caroline is gifted with smarts, so much so that she’s aiming to go to MIT.
After the two traverse over to the latest high school party and Lizzie fails, once again, to land her crush, Caroline pitches her an idea. What if she could bring a hot dead guy back to life? By doing so, not only will Lizzie finally lose her virginity (which would allow her to focus on more important things) but she’ll have a hot boyfriend to boot!
They dig up a recently dead hot guy, shock him back to life, and name him Leo Seacrest before informing him that he’ll be dating Lizzie. He gives no resistance to the idea whatsoever and, just like that, Lizzie loses her virginity. As a bonus, everyone in high school is enamored with Lizzie’s new boy toy.
But then Lizzie realizes that hanging out with the zombie version of Ken isn’t that interesting and breaks up with him. Caroline later comes to Leo to see if he’s okay, only to realize that she kind of likes him. And he likes her. Unexpectedly, the two become an item. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all!
Except then Leo starts hanging out with the dudest bros in dude-bro-land, Goose and Richie, both on the dreaded football team and DEFINITELY not feminists. Goose and Richie are shocked when they find out Leo hasn’t banged Caroline yet and construct a plan to get her drunk at the next party so that sexy times can happen.
When Caroline realizes that Leo is now a dude-bro and potential date-rapist, she regrets bringing him to life and proposes that they send him back six feet under. Lizzie wonders if that’d be murder, something the two cannot come to a consensus on, but they decide to do it anyway. So it’s goodbye, Leo. Unless he can somehow some way, be pulled out of his dude-bro tailspin.
Remember that time when I said TV writers have to be clear and defined.
Like, at the beginning of this review.
Yeah, well, our writers weren’t listening.
You see it right away in regards to motivation.
In any script, the reasons your characters are doing things needs to be as strong as possible. The weaker their motivation is, the less we’ll care.
Take a simple story. A cat is stuck in a tree.
In our first scenario, our hero is the cat’s owner. This has been his cat for fifteen years. Our owner loves this cat more than life itself. In our second scenario, this is not our hero’s cat. In fact, it’s the neighbor’s highly mean, highly annoying cat that hisses at our hero every morning.
Which scenario has the stronger motivation for our hero?
I don’t even need to write it, it’s so obvious.
That’s why motivation matters. So if you get motivation wrong, the reader detaches. They don’t care as much. I don’t care if the hero saves the mean cat who always hisses at him.
In Life of the Party, Lizzie’s motivation is to get laid. But it’s not clear how this is going to improve her life. She never makes it clear why getting laid is such a priority. We’re just supposed to accept that she wants it really bad. Caroline’s motivation is even murkier. She wants to get into MIT. If she can bring someone back to life, it improves her chances. We know this isn’t a real motivation, though, because she achieves her goal by page 30 (she brings a guy back to life). So her goal is over. What’s left to do? Why is she still so invested in Lizzie and Leo’s relationship? It’s all murky.
Another problem is the characters don’t act consistently. This is a huge one. You can’t make characters do things that they would never do just to move your story forward. Their actions must remain consistent with who they are. Once you betray your character’s reality, that character is dead in the reader’s eyes.
Here, Caroline is pitching bringing Leo back to life and Lizzie losing her viriginity to him as well as getting in a relationship with him. This is an absolutely crazy idea that no one in their right mind would do, of course. Which is exactly how Lizzie reacts. No way. She’s not going to bring someone back to life!
But then, a couple pages later, since the writers need Lizzie on board to make their story work, they have her change her mind and go along with it.
That’s not how screenwriting works. You have to stay consistent with your characters’ actions.
The thing is, there were creative ways around this problem. What they could’ve done is have Lizzie outright refuse: “I’m not digging up a dead guy, bringing him back to life, and having sex with him, Caroline. It’s out of the question!” Lizzie goes her own way and we stay with Caroline. Caroline then goes and does it all herself. She digs up Leo. She brings him back to life. She makes him look amazing. Then she shows up at Lizzie’s house and now Lizzie, who loves hot guys, is only reacting to what’s in front of her (a gorgeous guy). So she changes her mind and says she’s in.
Unfortunately, there were even more screenwriting errors in the script. The way they bring Leo back to life isn’t even believable in the confines of a comedy. They wheel him out of a garage during a storm and hope lightning strikes him (which it does) and then he’s magically alive? I can handle mistakes in scripts. But the one thing I cannot handle is laziness. If I feel like the writer is half-a$$ing it, I am done. I don’t have the time for someone who isn’t giving me their best.
And you’re trying to tell us that Caroline is a genius. How genius does that look? If you’re going to tell us someone is a genius, you gotta show them doing genius things. This is a show-don’t-tell medium. Like when Doc is explaining the time machine to Marty in Back to the Future. It’s really clever how the time machine operates. We believe what we’ve been told about Doc once he explains it to us (that he’s both crazy and a genius).
Unfortunately, this results in a story that’s mostly muck. We’re not really sure what we’re supposed to be doing here. Lizzie breaks up with the boring Leo at the midpoint. That was the entire objective of the story, getting them together. So why am I still turning the pages?
I guess you can make the argument that we’re curious to see what happens to Leo. But Leo is supposed to be the third most important character behind Caroline and Lizzie. So he shouldn’t be the engine for the screenplay. He should be more like the transmission. There’s some charm to Caroline’s pursuit of Leo and some cute moments when Leo turns to the dark side. But 1% of cute and charm isn’t enough to push me through an entire screenplay.
I know some of you get mad when I take a script off the Black List and don’t have anything positive to say about it because it made the Black List. So, obviously, it must be doing something right. Can you tell us what’s right so we can at least use that information to improve our own scripts?
I do like this concept. I think it’s fun. I like that, yet another pair of writers have wisely deconstructed a conceptual trope that used to be associated with guys (The “Weird Science” set up). If you’re a Barbie person, this script explores some similar themes in the way that Leo (aka “Ken”) has a spiritual awakening. So if you liked that film, there might be something for you here.
I just couldn’t get past all the technical errors, like the motivation, character inconsistency, the writers making things too easy for our heroes. And I just thought more could’ve been done with the story. This is a juicy premise. It’s got a lot of potential. I don’t feel like these writers sat down for a month and went through every possible avenue they could’ve taken this idea before picking the best one. It was more like, pick the most obvious direction, write the script in a month, we’re done. At least that’s how it felt to me. I need more than that from a script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You don’t want agreement in screenplays. You want resistance. When they bring Leo back to life and tell him he’ll be Lizzie’s boyfriend, he agrees immediately. How interesting is that? Resistance breeds conflict. Conflict breeds drama. Drama leads to audience entertainment. So a simple fix here would’ve been to have Leo initially refuse to be Lizzie’s boyfriend and they have to convince him. Which, by the way, would’ve been a funny scene. So always lean towards resistance in storytelling. It’s more interesting 99% of the time.
