A 2 million dollar spec sale in 2024!
Genre: Drama
Premise: A young woman meets a man and they fall in love quickly. But then they encounter a devastating setback that will change the direction of both of their lives forever.
About: Last week, there was a big bidding war for this script and Amazon/MGM won it for 2 million dollars. It was like the spec script days of old! The writer, Julia Cox, has one feature screenplay credit, for Nyad, the Jodie Foster film about the real-life swimmer who swam from Cuba to Florida. As of today, Sydney Sweeney is being tabbed to play the main character, Maya, although no official deal has been made. Ryan Gosling is producing and I’d be surprised if he didn’t star in some capacity (there are three main male roles).
Writer: Julia Cox
Details: 120 pages
NOBODY. KNOWS. ANYTHING.
The famous words of William Goldman that assessed the competency of the people who run Hollywood.
After you hear the plot and analysis of today’s script, that phrase will be tattooed to your brain.
Because everything I’ve told you to do in order to sell a script… is the opposite of what this writer does.
How can any screenwriter understand anything going forward?
I don’t know.
But I do think there’s a bridge between the high-octane storytelling I preach and how this unconventional spec script sold. So let’s talk about it!
20-something Boston nurse, Maya, meets 20-something Charlie (who specializes in audio synthesis) while buying an end table from him. The sparks fly immediately so Charlie suggests they meet again and Maya doesn’t even try and play it cool. She’s in.
Over the next 20+ pages, the two fall into that kind of love that everyone around them rolls their eyes at. Cause it’s that annoying! But neither Maya nor Charlie care. They are so smitten that they spend every waking second together, oogling and smoogling each other. A couple of years pass and then they get married.
(Spoilers follow)
The year? 2020. The year of Covid.
Charlie gets sick. And sicker. Being an ER nurse, Maya is concerned. She keeps pushing Charlie to go to the hospital, especially because he has asthma. She finally convinces him to go but a couple of hours later, his health deteriorates and he dies. Maya is devastated. She shuts down. There isn’t a life for her without Charlie in it.
Cut to years later and Maya lives in Portugal. She basically eats, drinks, screws dudes, and sleeps. She is on autopilot. Until she meets a sexy Portuguese man named Felix. For the first time, Maya feels positive emotions again. She really likes Felix. And he likes her enough to push her towards a future together.
But emotions scare Maya and she bails, traveling through Europe, getting lost again. The years pass until she’s in her 40s and she finally feels like she can go back to the U.S. It is there where she must face the people she left when Charlie died. And one person, in particular, helps her see through her pain. A person who, in the most unexpected of ways, could be the love of her life.
Does this sound like a 2 million dollar spec sale to you?
I’m guessing not.
Which is why I’m sure your first question is: WHY THE HECK DID THIS SELL FOR 2 MILLION DOLLARS?
Luckily, I think I can answer that question.
You see, there are two types of scripts that sell. The first is a good movie concept. Something like Leave The World Behind. But there is a lesser-known type of script that sells, and that’s the script that does an amazing job of emotionally connecting with the reader.
Which is the category that Love of Your Life falls under.
Because think about it. If you’re crying at the end of a screenplay, that story has succeeded in connecting with you. Which means it has a good chance of connecting with movie audiences as well. Which is the endgame here. All the studios and streamers care about is people watching their stuff. It doesn’t matter how those people get there – concept, emotion – as long as they get there.
The thing is, scripts that connect with readers on an emotional level are significantly more challenging to execute than concept-driven stuff. It takes way more skill to pull one of these off. Which is why it’s so rare. I can’t remember the last time a script blew me away on character and emotion alone.
So, you have to be someone who’s in tune with writing authentic characters who say authentic things. You have to understand what’s too melodramatic, what’s too cliched. If you don’t know exactly where those lines are, then when you write one of these scripts, they turn out like bad Hallmark movies. I can’t emphasize enough how hard these are to execute.
Because look at how many screenplay rules this breaks. It’s 120 pages (too many!). There are lots of 5, 6, 7 line paragraphs (too long!). There’s no clear goal driving the story. You’re working with an elongated time frame, which is always hard to wrangle.
But the hardest thing to get right is the characters. You have to write authentic characters and Julia Cox does a really good job of that. Maya feels real from the very first page.
Another thing that scripts like this need is scope. Because they don’t have a concept, they need to feel big in other ways. This script includes the death of the main love interest on page 45, which is a big moment. And then the character travels the world to forget it. Time then passes. All of these things create scope.
If, however, your main character’s love interest had died and the whole movie takes place in a small town, that’s not enough scope to sell a script for 2 million dollars.
Not only that, but the themes are gigantic and universal here. A big reason why I think this script sold is because it’s arguably about the meaning of life. I know that’s not going to get the kiddies pressing play on Roku but for the adults, they won’t just press play, they’ll toggle the subtitles onto the largest font.
It really comes down to the characters, though. I can’t emphasize enough how weak the characters are in the majority of the scripts I read. They’re either thin, boring, uninspired, or plain. They rarely have personality. They always seem to act inauthentically. In other words, they don’t act like people. They act like writers are writing them.
That’s where Julia Cox excels. I didn’t detect a single inauthentic moment in this script. The characters always acted consistently and realistically. There’s a conversation Maya has with Charlie’s mother late in the script that’s a de facto apology for disappearing after his death. That’s such a tricky scene to write because there are so many temptations to go for the “make the reader cry” line. And those are the lines that always bomb, that always feel like a reach. Cox never gets over her skis in the scene. She just allows the characters to speak to each other. Here’s a small part of that conversation…
(Spoilers)
For the majority of this script, I was going to give it a double worth the read. But the thing that pushed it up to an impressive was the stuff regarding Jason, her best friend. Jason is a huge ally to Maya in her romance with Charlie. So when she reunites with him back in the U.S. and the two decide to push it beyond friendship, I realized that it was actually Jason who was the “love of her life.” Maybe not the love she wanted. But definitely the love she needed. And it got me. Just like I suspect it got everyone else who read the script. Which is why it sold for 2 million dollars.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Resist writing what you WANT the character to say and instead write what that person WOULD say. If you can master this one tip, your dialogue will be better than 90% of the screenplays out there. You can get a lot more dialogue tips like this in my DIALOGUE BOOK!
What I learned 2: Between this and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, we might be hitting a “feels” trend in screenwriting. Scripts about family, love, death, universal themes. Something to keep an eye on!
