One of the most famous spec sales of all time. Why didn’t it get turned into a movie??
Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: An ultra-masculine airplane mechanic’s wife leaves him for a fruity new age weirdo and must figure out how to get his life back.
About: This is a famous spec sale for a script that never got made. It comes from the spec sale king, Joe Eszterhás. It sold for, I believe, 2.5 million dollars in the late 90s. It was then rewritten by the writing team of Brent Brisco & Mark Fauser, who wrote the monster box office hit, Waking up in Reno, starring Billy Bob Thorton and Patrick Swayze. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a monster hit but there’s a rumor that at least 37 people saw the movie before it went to video.
Writers: Joe Eszterhás, Brent Brisco & Mark Fauser
Details: 122 pages (2001 rewrite)
The Spec King.
He’s a legend this man.
He was also a notoriously angry individual who got in a lot of fights with Hollywood execs. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the main character in this movie, 46 year-old Frank Jessup, is also a hothead.
Frank is an airplane mechanic who loves his Cleveland Indians and who, one day, after heading out to fix an impromptu problem with one of the planes, comes home to find that it’s completely deserted. His wife, the nature-loving Connie, and his teenaged son, the hip-hop obsessed Frankie, have moved out.
Frank storms over to their new apartment to find that not only has Connie left him, but she’s also with some numb nuts named Jeremy. Jeremy is 2001’s version of a hippy. He just wants peace and for everyone to love each other, man. Which makes Frank really confused. Cause he wants to kill this guy. But Jeremy wants to be his friend!
After Frank gets thrown in jail for nearly killing Jeremy, he learns that he needs to take some sensitivity training after it’s discovered that a ton of people at work have complained about racist and sexist comments he’s made. Things really aren’t looking great for our protagonist.
The thing is, Frank is ignorant to everything that’s happening to him. He doesn’t understand what he did wrong. He doesn’t understand why his wife doesn’t like him anymore. He doesn’t understand why his comments at work are controversial. He’s just being his normal fun self.
Only when Frank goes through sensitivity training does he start to realize that maybe he’s crossed the line in a few areas. But even then, he thinks the world is being too damn wimpy. So, will Frank change and convince his family to come back to him? Or is he so far gone that this is who he’s going to be for the rest of his life?
One of the most confusing things that screenwriters had to deal with back in the day was that screenplays which were objectively bad would get sold for loads of money, sometimes north of a million dollars.
And they would see the subsequent movie, which would often be horrible, and they’d say, “Wait a minute here. This film is bad. Why does this sell for a million bucks and I can’t get the worst agent in Hollywood to call me back?”
The answer to this is kind of complex because there are half-a-dozen main reasons that bad scripts get purchased and bad movies get made. But when it comes to the case of Male Pattern Baldness, the answer is obvious. If you have the most successful spec writer of all time going to market with a new script, it’s going to sell for a lot of money regardless of the script’s quality.
You see, in the movie business, you’re trying to acquire commodities that push a project to the finish line – aka, the movie gets made. The more of these commodities you can acquire, the better the chance the movie has of getting made. Joe Eszterhás had gotten multiple scripts to the finish line when he wrote this script. So this is a commodity that’s worth paying a lot of money for. Just having that name on your project gives you a legit chance to get to the finish line.
But is this script really that bad?
No. It’s actually okay. But it’s not good enough to be turned into a movie.
I get the sense that was a personal project for Eszterhás. I looked at his wiki page and saw that he got divorced in 1994. So maybe he started writing this then?
The thing with personal projects is that they can either go really well or really badly. The authenticity and emotion that comes from a personal experience can be quite powerful. But it can just as easily cross into self-therapy, where the story is more about the writer dealing with their demons than writing an entertaining story. And I think that’s what happened here.
I suppose the script is built on a template that works – Your hero loses everything and must look inside themselves, realize what they’ve become, and try to become a better person. Heck, Alan Ball used this template to create a classic in American Beauty, although I’d argue Ball deconstructed the narrative in a more interesting way (Lester Burnham does some questionable things in his pursuit of changing into a “better” person).
But I noticed that about halfway through the script, the story had no more gas. I’m reading a scene where he’s having an argument with his wife and his kid and Jeremy and I realized, “We’ve already had this scene.” In fact, we’d had it a couple of times. That’s typically a bad sign for a screenplay. When you’re repeating scenes. Because it often means you don’t have enough plot for a feature.
The funny thing about this script is that it’s actually quite relevant to today. Frank is the embodiment of toxic masculinity. He lives in his own world. He operates by his own rules. He says what he wants to say. And he doesn’t care if anyone’s offended.
But it’s done in a way where they show real toxicity. He says something racist to a Mexican. He compliments a woman’s breasts at work. He’s openly violent. It’s actual real problems. Not the sanitized stuff you see today where if you ‘like’ a tweet from a Twitter user who once misgendered someone, you’re branded a Nazi, get your bank accounts drained, and are sent to the gulags in Russia.
It’s funny to see how much the line has moved since 2000. And, for that reason, I don’t think the script could be produced. It would require too radical of a rewrite. All the lines that Frank crosses, you’d have to write kinder cuddlier versions of them.
There are still screenwriting lessons to learn here, though. Eszterhás starts out with a head of steam. Read this opening scene and note how something is actually happening as we’re dropped into the story (Frank is on the phone dealing with an escalating work problem while his family tries to get his attention). That’s important to do with character-driven stories. It is imperative that you don’t start off with a boring scene.
And I loved the inciting incident. Normally, the inciting incident in this story would be Connie throwing up her hands and saying, “I can’t take this anymore. I’m leaving you.” It’s much more effective the way Eszterhás writes it, which is that Frank goes to fix the problem at work, comes home six hours later, exhausted, and finds that his entire house is bare. It really highlights the severity of what’s just happened.
And immediately after that, we get the confrontation scene, where Frank charges over to the new apartment and screams at Connie while getting into a fight with Jeremy. That’s a good scene as well. So the script starts out strong. It grabs you.
I also thought Jeremy was a clever character. Usually these characters are jerks. The fact that Jeremy is so nice throws the formula for a curve in a fun way. At one point a lawyer shows up at Frank’s house unannounced and Frank’s like, “Who are you?” He says, I’m your divorce lawyer. I’m the best in the business. Frank says, how do you know about my wife and I getting separated? He says, oh, Jeremy sent me over here.
If you’re wondering what the title means, it refers to a therapist who tells Frank that he has figurative male patten baldness. Which is when you’re too masculine. You have no feelings. You do whatever you want. You’re obsessed with sex. The therapist tells him, I can cure you of this.
Like I said, the script doesn’t have enough going on to warrant anything past the page 60 mark. It’s one of those scripts where the writer starts big out of the gate, but isn’t really sure where the script is going to go. And so every subsequent scene seems to have less punch than the previous one. It goes to show that even the best screenwriters can’t write their way out of a weak concept.
Script link: Male Pattern Baldness
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Character archetypes are meant to be played with. Whenever there’s an archetype in your screenplay, ask yourself if you can play that archetype the opposite of how they’re usually played. Because that will result in a much more interesting character. Jeremy being super supportive of Frank’s attempts to reconcile with his wife was one of the standout aspects of this screenplay because it is the complete opposite of what that archetype usually does.
