Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) MEET CUTE, the hottest dating app on the market, brings couples together by giving them their Rom Com moment. When the app’s biggest skeptic, Haley, matches with one of its developers, Russ, their instant connection starts to change her mind.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. Which begs the question. Is there going to be a Black List this year?? There wasn’t a Blood List. It appears that Covid has infiltrated Hollywood’s ability to send out scripts. Does that mean The Last Great Screenplay Contest becomes 2020’s Black List? Lots to figure out in these last few weeks of the year! (edit! My bad. I just learned there was a Blood List. Not sure why nobody told me!)
Writers: Chris and Dan Powers
Details: 109 pages
You may be noticing a trend this week. Easy-to-read genre yesterday. Easy-to-read genre today. Why am I picking easy reads? Maybe because I READ 1000 PAGES OF SCREENPLAYS over the weekend to find my contest semifinalists. These crying eyes needed a break. And they found a couple in the sweet simplicity of slasher horror and romantic comedy. Tons of dialogue. The action paragraphs never extend beyond two lines. It’s sweet screenplay-reading nirvana, I tell you.
Haley is a relationship-phobic producer at a daytime talk show where today’s topic is the new hit dating app, MEET CUTE. Meet Cute’s founder, Keaton, explains that Meet Cute takes all your information, matches you up with the perfect person, and then looks for opportunities when you’re in the same area to send you a push notification to “go to the grocery store” or “take a walk in the park.” You then, hopefully, bump into your significant other in that perfect movie-like way.
We then meet Russ, a coder at Meet Cute, and also a user! On Thanksgiving, Russ gets a notification to “go to the grocery store” and, wouldn’t you know it, he meets none other than Haley there. The two have a canned cranberry-sauce inspired “meet cute” and meet again a few days later at the movies, where they officially enter into the first stage of a relationship.
OR DO THEY!?
Out of nowhere, Haley gets the relationship jitters and pulls out.
OR DOES SHE!?!?
No, because Russ tells her, you can’t do that. We’re a great match.
BUT ARE THEY!?!?!?
No! Because guess what? Russ goes into the Haley’s profile to learn that she was not told to go to the grocery store that night. She was supposed to go to the park! Which means they aren’t really each other’s “meet cute.” Russ decides not to tell Haley this so that their relationship can grow. But then, via circumstances that felt suspiciously like ESP sent from the writers themselves, Haley starts suspecting something is off. She charges to Keaton’s place and demands to know their “meet cute” details. Her suspicions turn out to be correct as Keaton confirms they weren’t supposed to meet each other.
Convinced that there’s no reason to continue this sham of a relationship (because she was told by an app that she didn’t like a guy???), Haley bails. Russ bombards Haley with texts but Haley is having none of it. Will Russ figure out a way to convince our app-influenced rom-com princess to change her mind? Or was their “meet cute” destined to become a “separate ugly?”
Wow.
Where do I begin with this one? Well, the dialogue was pretty good. It wasn’t great. But it was better than the dialogue I read in most amateur romantic comedy scripts. One thing I want to point out with rom-com dialogue is that too many newbie writers write the “falling in love” part of the main couple’s dialogue with a lot of agreeing. “I love this.” “I love it too.” “We were at Pepe’s Pizza last night.” “Oh my god! Did you order the Sicilian crust?” “Yes!” “I love the Sicilian Crust!” “Tell me about it!” Don’t do that. Good dialogue comes from the disagreements. It comes from the no’s. The resistance. The conflict.
Here’s simple exchange between Russ and Haley. RUSS: “My dream is to make a pie that’s half pumpkin and half apple. Like a pizza with split toppings.” HALEY: “That’s disgusting.”
This might seem insignificant. But it’s important to note that a lot of newbie writers would’ve had Haley respond, “Oh my God. That’s genius!”
The bigger point is, the dialogue is solid in this script. And I have a feeling that that’s the reason it made the Black List.
Unfortunately, the rest of the script isn’t up to par. The thing that frustrated me most was loading a huge plotline on top of a very weak plot point. A little past the midpoint, we learn that these two aren’t each other’s “meet cute.” And it’s framed as this devastating development. Haley immediately breaks up with Russ over it.
There are two types of ways you can go in your story. There’s MOVIE LOGIC. And there’s THE TRUTH. You want to use the truth as much as possible. You want to stay away from movie logic as much as possible. Haley breaking up with Russ because they aren’t truly each other’s “meet cute” is one of the most movie logic things I’ve ever read. It is the opposite of what would truthfully happen. Haley doesn’t even believe in dating apps. Why does she all of a sudden think their word is bond?
But the bigger issue is that the writers then build the rest of the script on top of this weak plot development. It’s one thing to introduce a weak plot point. You can spot these in any movie. But you don’t want to make a bad thing worse. Try to isolate the weak plot point because if you use it as a foundation for more story, every additional development is going to feel weaker than the last one. And this was a big enough issue that it affected my enjoyment of the second half of the script.
But I actually have a bigger issue with this script. It doesn’t take advantage of its concept at all. When you have a fun concept inside of a fun genre, the only thing you should be thinking about is exploiting that genre. And, to me, the best way to exploit this concept is obvious. Once we learned that Russ was a coder for the app, he should’ve been using it to meet and have sex with as many girls as possible. He should’ve been the complex main character – the one doing something bad, who finally meets a girl he likes.
Consider what this new plot point would do for the aforementioned problem I brought up. Now, instead of Haley finding out that Russ isn’t her “meet cute,” Haley finds out that he’d been specifically writing code to hook up with as many girls as possible through the app. You see, when an obstacle enters your character’s path, you want that obstacle to be as difficult to overcome as possible. That’s why the reader keeps reading. Because they don’t know if the character can actually succeed. If this happened with Russ, we’d genuinely wonder if these two were ending up together. That’s how difficult that realization would’ve been to overcome.
I don’t know why they didn’t do this because it’s so much better than the script we got but I have a theory. Writers are so paranoid about writing “unlikable” characters that everybody has to be perfect! Even the characters with flaws, like Haley and her commitment phobia, are perky and fun and funny. Nobody has any darkness. Nobody has any complexity. We’re all shiny happy people here.
I’m sorry. But shiny and happy is boring. You gotta inject a little darkness into these happier genres to make them pop.
I don’t know. Maybe that’s just me. But this was way too generic for my taste. A great comp to show how to do it right is Voicemails For Isabelle. That script wasn’t afraid to get a little dirty.
Anyway, this is a no for me guys. Hopefully we’ll find a winner next week!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: People, “let’s” means “let us.” Otherwise, it’s “lets.” I can’t tell you how often I run into this mistake.
