Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: A famed experimental musician finds himself embroiled in the race to solve Earth’s primary existential threat: A deafening sound that never stops, forcing all of humanity to survive in silence.
About: This script finished in the top 15 of last year’s Black List.
Writer: Whit Burnham Brayton
Details: 119 pages
I was really looking forward to this one. I love myself a good sci-fi setup and I’ve never encountered anything quite like this concept before. Sound can be terrifying in the right situation. Whit Brayton seems to have found that situation. Let’s see if the script delivers.
A few years into our future, a sound emanating from within the earth’s atmosphere has taken hold of the planet. It’s so loud and so intense that we’ve been forced to build a society that blocks the sound out as best we can (those who can afford it wear expensive noise-canceling headphones, those who can’t suffer).
Our hero is a 60 year old former maybe-musician (more on that later) named Caden Laforge. After 20 years of being sober, Caden has, for reasons that are unclear, fallen off the wagon. It may be because his wife has been stricken with Alzheimer’s and stays in bed all day. Or it may be because living with the sound has stressed him the heck out.
Caden’s daughter, Vera, works for the president of the United States, Syreeta Chambers, and the next election is right around the corner. Syreeta needs to make progress on the sound within the next few weeks so she can be in a strong position for re-election. Hence, she allows Vera to hire her father, who’s a bit of a sound expert, to see if he has any thoughts.
Caden, who may be the most dreary depressed man in the history of film, notices that they’re fighting the sound instead of absorbing it. He tells Vera and her team to adjust their experiment to be more accepting of the sound, which ends up working!
What they eventually realize is that the sound isn’t some evil thing, but rather a message from the future, which they now must decode! Although it’s never clear, there appears to have been a rift in the space-time continuum 20 years from now which indicates the end of humanity. If they can decode the sound, it may tell them what to do in these next 20 years to prevent the end of times.
I’ve come to realize that the Black List is no longer an indicator of the best scripts but rather a list of writers with potential. And I don’t want that to sound like a bad thing. We need outlets to find writers with potential. But gone are the days when the Black List was a place where you could open up a script and reliably know it would be good.
Loud’s potential has everything to do with its world-building. I loved this intense sound as our antagonist. I loved the way the world has adjusted, such as people using specially constructed noise-canceling headphones. I loved this idea of people interacting with the world but hearing nothing. Not even white noise. How all voices cut through the silence as if being heard through a radio, like helicopter pilots, since that’s the only way people can communicate with each other. I liked how a sound – just a sound – has destroyed all society. All of this was cool.
But nothing else here clicks the way the world-building does. There are some nifty plot beats. Caden has to try and solve the sound so that his daughter’s political party can go into the debates with a convincing plan for defeating the sound. And there’s some kinda cool stuff about the sound being from the future.
But the characters didn’t do enough for me. The main character is an alcoholic for no other reason than to make him feel more dramatic and deep. He’s got a wife suffering from Alzheimer’s for the exact same reason.
By the way, for aspiring writers out there, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s are two of the most cliche character choices you can make. I encounter one of them in every third script I read. So when I see these things, they’re typically a red flag.
That’s not to say they can’t work. But they have to be baked into the story in an organic way. You can’t just put them there as some blanket attempt to make the characters look deeper. If you’re unsure what’s organic and what isn’t, I have a quick test you can use. Erase the characterization (alcoholism, Alzheimer’s) and see if the story changes at all. If it doesn’t change or changes very little, it means you don’t need it.
By comparison, look at The Notebook. Try to take Alzheimer’s out of that film. The movie completely collapses because Alzheimer’s is so tightly woven into the storyline.
But there’s an even bigger problem here which I need to come up with a term for so people can identify and avoid it. It’s the act of writing really serious talking scenes that don’t provide any entertainment value. We get a lot of scenes here of Caden talking with someone else – his housekeeper for instance – that amount to them sharing how depressing their lives are.
To new screenwriters, these scenes feel important and deep. But to a reader, they’re empty and boring. Since the characters aren’t trying to achieve anything in the scene, the story doesn’t advance. And since you only have 50 scenes in a script, every one of them should advance the story. We should feel like we’re a little closer to the objective than we were before the scene started. If you don’t abide by that rule, your script stagnates.
That’s not to say there aren’t scenes here that push the story forward. There are. In fact, the scenes where they’re trying to figure out the origin of the sound are some of the best in the script. But you don’t then get to take five scenes off before you give us another scene that moves the story forward. If anything, the ratio should be reversed. You should give us five scenes in a row where we’re moving the story forward, then maybe one character driven scene.
And there were a lot of issues here that chipped away at my enjoyment of the story. For example, I had no idea what Caden did for a living. I was on page 80 and I was still unsure. I thought he might have been a famous musician or producer. He was obviously rich. But nobody ever said exactly what he did for a living. Which is a pretty important piece of the puzzle considering he’s the one who figures out the Sound.
It wasn’t until I put this review together and I copy and pasted the logline from the Black List, that I saw his official job title – “a famed experimental musician.” I don’t know if there’s a screenwriting rule for this. I just know that I shouldn’t have to go to your logline after reading your script to know what your main character’s job is.
I think the script is attempting to make a statement about the pandemic. At times the “sound” seems to be a stand-in for Covid. But that stuff only works if the script is clicking on all cylinders. I didn’t even know simple things like the protagonist’s profession. So when it comes to something as complex as a metaphor, I can’t give the script the benefit of the doubt.
To top it all off, this is a fun idea yet we didn’t get any fun.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Straight sci-fi and drama do not go well together. The drama sucks all the fun out of the sci-fi concept. We see that with Amazon’s Prime’s Encounter. We see it with Apple’s Swan Song. We see it with Needle in a Timestack. We see it with Reminiscence. Say it with me screenwriters: Sci-Fi and Drama are a recipe for boredom! Science fiction is meant to be played with. It’s a genre that celebrates imagination and playfulness. Have freaking fun with it for goodness sakes.
What I learned 2: It’s hard to make scripts work that possess a very downbeat tone. It’s hard to stay motivated when reading them. It’s hard to drum up enthusiasm for recommending them. I would strongly discourage writers from writing scripts where every paragraph is steeped in a malaise of sadness and negativity.
