Genre: Drama/Crime-Thriller
Premise: In 1980 Los Angeles, the intersecting lives of a group of eccentrics spiral toward chaos when a shocking kidnapping forces them down a dark path with only one way out.
About: Writer-director Elijah Bynum technically broke onto the scene with the A24 dud, Hot Summer Nights. But he followed that up with Magazine Dreams, a brilliant spec about a tortured bodybuilder that turned into Hollywood street dust when star Jonathan Majors’ career imploded. This latest movie of his has attracted a very impressive cast. You’ve got Mikey Madison (Anora) playing Jodie. You’ve got Jessica Chastain playing Sharon. You’ve got Chris Pine playing Jack. And you’ve got Don Cheadle and Josh Brolin in there as well.
Writer: Elijah Bynum
Details: 127 pages
Talk about a writer who got screwed.
Elijah wrote an amazing screenplay in Magazine Dreams. It went on to attach one of the fastest-rising actors in Hollywood history and was slated to be an Oscar contender.
And then the Majors situation happened. This probably isn’t the forum for this discussion. I’m genuinely looking forward to reading this script (I’m writing this before I’ve opened it). But if you want to understand why people are cynical about Hollywood and its awards machinery, this is the perfect example.
Magazine Dreams was tracking toward Best Actor and Best Picture nominations. Then the industry collectively memory-holed it after the Majors allegations. They did the same with The Birth of a Nation after the Nate Parker controversy in 2016.
Here’s what bothers me: If these films were truly the best. If these performances were genuinely transcendent. How can they simply vanish without a trace? I thought the Oscars were about recognizing excellence.
Consider the implications. Magazine Dreams was being positioned as a film people would reference a decade from now. Oscar campaigns were being built. Then… nothing. As if it never existed.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: What other films that we now consider canonical only exist in our cultural memory because a studio decided they were worth the controversy? And conversely, how many genuinely great films have disappeared because someone calculated they weren’t worth the heat?
If we’re supposedly championing “the best,” why do we need the industry’s permission to find it? Why can’t quality speak for itself?
Anyway, it looks like Elijah landed on his feet. This one has a very impressive cast.
It’s 1980. My Darling California introduces us to newswoman Sharon Normandie, who’s married to the Johnny Carson of the time, Jack Normandie. Sharon is a drug addicted mess who hates her husband and her job. Jack, who laces his late night show with lots of religious rhetoric, has driven his wife away by repeatedly cheating on her.
We also meet John Ashley Cotton, a black man who just got out of prison and who used to work on Jack’s show as a janitor. Cotton, always looking to make a buck, blackmails Jack, telling him he’s secretly recorded him having sex with two black women in his office. He wants a payout.
There’s Jodie Taylor, a fresh faced country music star who is a combination of Taylor Swift and Britney Spears. She’s all about purity and waiting for the right one and her music reflects that. But maybe she has some secrets in her past that say otherwise. She has a big performance on Jack’s show.
Then we have dimwitted criminals Roland (older one) and Kent (younger one). They’ve kidnapped a horse (named My Darling California) from Jack. (Man, Jack’s having a bad month). They want half a million dollars to give it back. We eventually learn that Sharon hired them to do this. She’s going to take half the reward so she can leave Jack. And then all of these plot threads and characters weave together for the big finale. And there will be deaths!
I’m admittedly guessing here. But if I had to bet my expensive copy of Final Draft, I would bet that this script was written before Magazine Dreams. Magazine Dreams made the Black List, it got purchased, it got the hottest actor in town attached, and it got made. Elijah then took this out of the drawer, gave it a glow-up, and sent it out.
Why do I think this?
Because it’s very much an early-screenwriter screenplay. These are the kinds of screenplays writers write to prove they’re a good writer. Cause these ensemble stories where you’re cutting back and forth between different plotlines is one of the more common ways to write an “elevated” script.
But what you learn, in retrospect, writing these ensemble pieces, is that it’s hard to keep the engine moving underneath the story. It’s hard enough to keep an engine moving on a single narrative. It becomes three times, four times, five times as hard, doing it here, because you’re constantly taking your foot off the gas when you cut away from a storyline to another one.
Now, if you do it right, that final act has a stronger engine than anything a singular narrative can pull off. Because you’ve set everything up so that, in that act, every time you’re cutting to another storyline, it’s full-throttle hurtling towards its climax.
But that still leaves the first 75% of the screenplay as something the reader has to push through. They have to make more of an effort than usual to follow along. And just hope that you’re a good enough writer to reward them with that big strong 5-storylines-hurtling-forward-at-the-speed-of-light third act.
I bring all this up because the best plan for succeeding as an unknown screenwriter is to write a really compelling single narrative screenplay about a strong character who is pushing towards a big climax. Magazine Dreams was a little slow but its main character helped it achieve that. And scripts like Osculum Inflame. Another great example.
I’M NOT SAYING THEY’RE THE ONLY SCRIPTS THAT WILL LEAD TO SUCCESS. Don’t get your jammies in a bunch. I’m just saying THEY GIVE YOU THE BEST SHOT to succeed when you’re a nobody.
Often, when a screenwriter breaks through using this strategy, they go back to their desk full of old screenplays and pull out that passion project, the one that has a little more “complexity” to it. They’ve got a little buzz so people will read whatever they send out so they send everybody their “I’m a real writer” script.
But here’s my argument. I don’t think these scripts were meant for primetime. They were meant to teach you to become a screenwriter! This type of script teaches screenwriters a valuable lesson – that an ensemble multi-plotline script is really hard to propel forward, especially early on when you’re having to introduce all these characters and their individual storylines. It’s a Setup Carnival but without the fun. Us readers have to muscle through it before the script can gain any sort of plot momentum that hooks us.
So, after writing a script like this, you become much more aware of narrative momentum in screenwriting.
None of this is to say the script isn’t good. I actually found it fairly entertaining. It’s kind of like a softer cozier version of Pulp Fiction. It just didn’t have the teeth that that script had. Pulp Fiction had a good handful of shocking moments. Which meant that any time we waited (such as through the blueberry pancakes dialogue), we were rewarded by something shocking or unexpected that happened in the next scene.
Here, the story is slow. And the rewards are mild. For example, there’s this mystery that Jack has done something horrible in his office that this blackmailer has a videotape of. It turns out he was having sex with two black women. Umm… so what? Maybe that could’ve ended his career in 1980 I guess. But it doesn’t land with the same punch as revealing a gimp, a la Pulp Fiction. I thought, with Jack’s early interactions with children on his show, that his secret sexual exploits were going to be MUCH much worse.
But look, this script is LIGHT YEARS better than yesterday’s script, Behemoth, by Tony Gilroy. This actually shows an understanding of the craft – a writer who knows what he’s doing, even if the creative choices along the way weren’t 10/10.
There’s a great moment in the script where Cotton is telling this long story about working at the late night show and how an actor left some high grade acid in his room and Cotton stole it with the intent of selling it later. But he had to stash it. And after he stashed it, it got lost.
We then cut to Jodie, who’s prepping for her big performance on Jack’s show. And she’s freaking out and the only thing she wants to calm her down – her safe space – is an orange juice. And she keeps asking everybody there for orange juice and they all say they’re going to get it for her but when they look around, they can’t find any orange juice. So they keep lying to her saying that it’s on the way.
We cut back to Cotton, who’s finishing his story. He says how frustrated he is that he lost the acid cause it was worth 5 grand. And the guy he’s talking to asks, “Well where did you stash it?” And he says, “In a bottle of OJ.” And then we cut to Jodie, about to go on stage, and a manager comes up and gives her… a bottle of OJ. And that leads to Jodie taking in 20 doses of acid before going on stage.
The way those two storylines built and then intersected demonstrated a certain poetry that, when this script was working, was great. But there weren’t enough of those moments. There were just enough to keep you invested and that’s it.
Maybe if the script had a character as compelling as Killian Maddox in Magazine Dreams, it could’ve overcome the slower parts of the story. But it didn’t. It had a lot of medium to strong characters. But nobody who truly stood out.
I’m going to say this script is worth reading because there’s plenty of good here. But the format prevents it from ever being able to break out of its screenwriting shell.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Spoiler (for both today’s and yesterday’s script). I read two scripts in two days, both of them about COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS. These scripts could not be more different. And both have a surprise ending where a main character learns that they fathered a child many years ago. I tell you this to remind you that YOUR IDEAS ARE NEVER AS ORIGINAL AS YOU THINK THEY ARE. You may think you’re writing gold. But if the writer down the street who’s finishing their screenplay just as you’re finishing yours, is coming to the exact same conclusion you are, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough, man. That’s why I never trust first choices in writing, especially on endings. You have to dig deeper to find that reveal that’s truly going to surprise people.
