Genre: Murder-Mystery
Premise: When a sex-obsessed single woman visits her estranged married twin in Italy, she’s asked to impersonate her, leading to a string of unfortunate events.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List. It’s based on a book by first-time author and Londoner Chloe Esposito, who received her BA and MA in English from Oxford University. Screenwriter Jade Halley Bartlett adapted the book. This is her breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Jade Halley Bartlett (based on the novel by Chloe Esposito)
Details: 140 pages!!!
I noticed a few comments about how this site used to be so upbeat! So inspiring! Yet now you come here and every single script gets a “wasn’t for me” rating. What kind of inspiration is that, Carson?!
Here’s the funny part. Whenever I like a script, everybody else trashes it. I get the feeling that if the commenters were reviewing scripts, they’d all get “what the hell did I just reads.” Therefore, it it wasn’t for me, we’d have no positive reviews at all!
All jokes aside, there’s probably something wrong with your analysis skills if all you do is hate everything or all you do is love everything. If you hate everything you watch, you probably shouldn’t be in this business. Right? What’s the point? Are you trying to depress yourself to death? And if you love everything, you don’t have the critical gene necessary to identify problems in your own screenplays.
I’m definitely closer to the former than the latter. And I have to remind myself to loosen up sometimes. Entertainment doesn’t work if you’re not open to the possibility of being entertained. So I’m glad this script came along when it did. It’s messy. It’s weird. It’s over-the-top. But you can’t deny that it’s entertaining.
27 year old Tinder-obsessed Alvina Knightly has two best friends – a poster of a shirtless Channing Tatum and a giant dildo named Mr. Dick. After getting fired for watching porn at work and kicked out of her flat because she’s a nuisance to the flat’s safety, Alvina gets a call from twin her sister, Beth. In a series of asides to the audience, Alvina explain that she hates her sister and her rich perfect life more than anything.
And usually, that feeling is mutual. But today Beth is insistent that Alvina come visit her and her husband in Italy. Alvina’s got nothing else to do, so she arrives in their beautiful countryside home, where she’s reunited with Beth’s hot husband, Ambrogio, who she, oh yeah, happened to have sex with once (Ambrogio swore to Beth he thought Alvina was her).
Anyway, once Alvina’s settled, Beth asks her to pretend to be her for a day while she goes off and takes care of some mystery business. Alvina reluctantly agrees, and then that night Beth comes home, drunk, berates her sister, leading to a tussle, and Beth falls, hits her head, and falls into a pool. Alvina decides, in that moment, not to save her. So Beth dies.
When Ambrogio appears, he assumes Alvina is Beth, and says something shocking. “You weren’t supposed to murder her here!” Realizing she was summoned here to be killed, Beth gets revenge by killing Ambrogio the next day, only to learn that he was involved in a 20 million dollar painting heist. Alvina must now make the difficult decision to nope the hell out of Italy, or embrace the life of her gangster sister and get dat money.
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first. This script is too long. This plot is too messy. And a lot of the plot points read like a Spanish soap opera.
However, the reason you’re still entertained is that the voice of the writer is bananas. Remember, guys and gals. Voice is the x-factor. Voice can take a seemingly boring premise and make it fun. Voice can take a seemingly cliche premise and make it shine. Voice is the screenplay hack that supersedes the rules.
Because if I’m enjoying myself, I don’t care if Character C didn’t have a proper arc or not.
One of the most effective ways of displaying voice is to focus on the bad as opposed to the good. There’s something real about the messiness of life. For example, when Alvie wakes up at the opening of the script, she swings her feet to the floor where they land on an open pizza box. She then lifts her foot up, which now has a pizza slice attached to it, and eats it.
You can’t write that scene in studio movies like Rampage. Every scene has to be carefully considered so that the characters are coming off the right way. This character needs to be perceived as good. This one as greedy. This one as the “funny friend.” And if you deviate from that by writing a weird scene, the studio makes sure that scene is axed. Mad Bad and Dangerous, for better or worse, is one long string of stepping on open pizza boxes.
Not to mention the main character is so savage that even if you hate her, you always want to know what she’s going to say next. Here’s a conversation with Alvie’s roommate, Gary, who’s had it with her. “Did you put that hole in the ceiling? I don’t actually care. We’d like you to move out. Tomorrow. So…good luck in your- (he gestures to Mr. Dick) -endeavors.” “Did you say tomorrow?” “It’s not personal. No, it is.” “You’re hideous and you smell like white wine vomit.” “You look like a gang-raped fox.” “Get out of my room, dickcheese. It’s mine for one more night.” “Leave your keys in the kitchen.” “I’ll leave them up your arsehole.”
So if you want to write a script that shows off your voice, the best way to do it is to create a hero who’s your evil alter-ego, the one who thinks all those awful things but never says them. Your script is an opportunity to create a character who finally says all that stuff. And while half the people reading that will absolutely hate your hero, the other half will love him.
The only downside to a script like this is that it’s hard to make movies work that are built entirely around negativity. Our main character is evil. Her sister is evil. Her husband is evil. The sexy handyman is sort of nice but still has sex with Beth behind her husband’s back so he’s evil. When everybody has an angle, there’s no one to latch onto and root for. And screenplays can be empty experiences when you go this route. You enjoy everything in the moment. But afterwards you feel empty.
With that said, this writer has talent. She definitely has strong dialogue skills. She takes chances. Every once in awhile the main character will start singing or belting out a haiku. Which is bizarre, but it works in a weird way.
Now she has to work on the basics. How to structure a screenplay. How to focus a narrative. How to edit out stuff that doesn’t matter. This script becomes twice as good with a more streamlined narrative. But hey, these things will come with practice. The voice is strong enough to hold her up in the meantime.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your script is too long, you need to cut it down. Start by cutting scenes that aren’t absolutely necessary. To do this, ask yourself, “If this scene was taken out of the movie, would the movie still make sense?” If the answer to that question is “No,” then keep the scene. If it’s “Yes,” get rid of the scene. For example, when Alvie travels to Italy, we get an entire scene where she’s at the airport and has to go through security. And there’s the old vibrator-that-goes-off-in-the-bag joke which is sort of funny, I guess. But the point is we don’t need it for this movie to make sense. You just cut to Alvie arriving in Italy. This is what movies were built for: cutting out the unimportant stuff. Make sure you’re doing that.
