How to hack the spec screenwriting game – “The Big U”
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: Through a maddening day of mediation for an office harassment claim she filed,
the clock is ticking on Dana as she questions the price of her silence, sanity, and
the truth.
About: Audrey Ellis Fox is a writer-director who has directed a lot of videos and shorts. This script finished on last year’s Black List with 9 votes.
Writer: Audrey Ellis Fox
Details: 100 pages
Emma Corrin for Dana?
Don’t worry. We’re going to get into what “The Big U” is soon. And no, it’s not what some of your dirty minds are thinking. Get your heads out of the gutter! Especially with today’s subject matter. We have to be respectful. Oh, who am I kidding? When am I ever respectful.
You know, I’m actually surprised to learn that today’s writer is also a director. Normally, writer-directors over-direct on the page. They put in way too much description, as they care more about aiding themselves for the shoot rather than writing an easy-to-read story. Props to Fox for thinking of the reader. No doubt that contributed to how this got on the Black List. Now let’s talk about the plot.
We meet 24 year old Dana as she gets on an elevator. Seconds later, 29 year old Patrick steps on. We can tell, despite there being other people in the elevator, that Dana feels very uncomfortable in Patrick’s presence.
Once Dana gets to her destination floor, she encounters her lawyer, Scott, and we start to get a sense of what’s going on. This is an agreed-upon mediation between Dana and Patrick for something Patrick did to her at work. We don’t know the details yet. But we understand that the goal is to get this mediation done TODAY or it will likely go to court, which neither party wants.
Soon after, an older woman named Colette comes in. She is the mediator. Her job will be to walk back and forth between Dana’s and Patrick’s room and attempt to come to an agreement that both parties are satisfied with. And, almost immediately, there’s tension in the air. That’s because a mystery person is texting our heroine, sending her racy pictures of herself.
The incident in question was sort of a Harvey Weinstein situation. Dana, a software engineer, was drinking with her co-workers on a Vegas road trip, and when the night went late, found herself in an elevator with a friend and Patrick. For lack of a better expression, Patrick pulled his Johnson out and ejaculated on her. The two sides are trying to decide how much that’s worth to Dana.
But Dana doesn’t have the cleanest life. Before she was working as a software engineer, she had an OnlyFans page. Gotta git that money. Not only that, but she has some history with Patrick. They’ve known each other since they were kids. He’s the one who gave her the job. They had several dinners leading up to him giving her the job, all of which she claims were business dinners. But were they?
The first offer from Patrick’s team is a low-ball. Less than six figures. To get them up, Colette says, she’s going to need Dana to convince her how bad this was. The thing is, Dana has a witness to all this – her co-worker – who was in the elevator at the time. But her friend is MIA and doesn’t seem to want to get involved. However, she calls at the final hour, and her testimony is either going to help Dana, or destroy her entire case.
Okay, so let’s get into it.
What’s The Big U?
The Big U is BIG URGENCY.
Big Urgency is not the same as urgency. It’s urgency on steroids, and it’s one of the biggest hacks in spec screenwriting. The objective is to build your story around a really tight timeline.
Want to tell a story about high school? Set it over one day.
Want to tell a story about an Amazon delivery worker? Set it between sun-up and sun-down.
Want to tell a story about a family trip to the beach? Set it over the course of two hours.
The condensing of time creates constraint, which creates tension, which creates conflict. Urgency forces the story to move along quickly, which can make anything entertaining to watch.
I’ll prove to you just how powerful this tool is.
“NDA” is not a movie if it takes place over a week. It’s not even a movie if it takes place over 72 hours. This only works when you condense the timeframe to one day. Think about it. People are more interested when the problem at hand needs to be figured out NOW. Not in a month. Not in a week. NOW!
I expect at least two entries in the Mega-Showdown to be scripts containing The Big U.
And by the way, I’m not saying that The Big U is NECESSARY to write a good script. But I do consider it to be a secret weapon, especially in the highly competitive space of spec script writing. Spec script readers have the shortest attention span of all readers. So they respond well to these scripts.
How was the actual script though??
Funny you ask. Because I think this shows the power of The Big U even more. You don’t see the weaknesses in the script nearly as clearly as you normally would because the urgency is catapulting us through the story.
But I did see some issues. This whole “keeps getting texts” plot development is one I’ve seen frequently lately. I’d say I’ve seen it four times in the last three months in similar scripts I’ve read. That tells me it’s low-hanging fruit – an easy creative choice. Typically, you want to push past the easy creative choices and come up with the ones that nobody would have thought of.
The rules of this mediation were also shakier than a knockoff Cuisinart. It wasn’t clear how things worked. There were no absolute rules or guidelines to be followed. Colette only seemed to leave the room and go see Patrick when the writer felt it was necessary (i.e. she needed to have Dana go off on her own and regroup). This ate into the script’s realism, weakening the suspension of disbelief. I wanted the rules to be more sophisticated. I wanted to be convinced this was really happening.
Finally, I want to mention the ending but it requires me to get into spoilers. So stay away from the below if you want to read the script fresh. After the mediation, which Dana has won for nearly 200k, she follows Patrick down the hallway. When he gets in the elevator, she dips in after him.
She then proceeds to step into his space, so he turns around and backs up. Presumably, she is trying to make him feel just as uncomfortable in the elevator as he made her feel that night. But, also, the writer indicates that there’s a “charge” here, leaving open the possibility that these two were in cahoots all along, bilking the company out of 200k that they would now, presumably, split?
I mean… huh?? This is serious enough subject matter that we should know, definitively, if he did what it was alleged he did. You can’t play both sides of the fence and leave it up to the reader with a script like this. I’m fine if it’s a twist and they were in it together. But that has to be crystal clear as we leave the script. This reveal was way too vague and left me feeling frustrated.
Even with its weaknesses, however, this is a good script to study if you’re an aspiring screenwriter. Shouldn’t be hard to find on the internet but comment below if you want the script and I’m sure someone will send it to you.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Once you come up with your screenplay idea, ask yourself if it is a Big U idea. It may not be. Which is fine. But if it can be turned into a Big U idea, seriously consider it. Average ideas can morph into high concept ideas with this hack. :)
