Number 1 Black List script!
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: Two strangers scramble to find someone to sleep with on the one night of the
year when premarital sex is legal.
About: Travis Braun wrote one of my favorite scripts last year, Dying For You. The guy’s a great writer. So it should come as no surprise that another one of his scripts finished number 1 on the Black List.
Writer: Travis Braun
Details: 98 pages
Pugh for Hannah?
Is this the new rom-com template?
Create a big flashy high-concept way into the genre?
I wouldn’t bet against it. Even though rom-coms have had these little victories over the years, the genre is still nowhere near its former glory. Travis Braun had the idea that, maybe, if you guss it up with a fanciful foundation, it won’t be seen as just another excuse to watch pretty people smile at each other.
Let’s find out if he’s onto something.
In a not-so-slight dig at conservative culture, we now live in a world where, in order to promote family values again, the government has made it illegal to have pre-marital sex. Except for one 12 hour period a year.
Twenty-something pizza-cook, Owen, just got dumped by his girlfriend not only because she doesn’t see a future for them but also because she really really really really wants to have sex with this one guy and since this is the only night to do it, she has to dump Owen NOW.
Cut to Hannah, a personal assistant, who races across town to meet her hot Spanish date for their crazy sex night. They did a Before Sunset thing where they met last year on this day and agreed not to exchange names. Instead, they would meet in this exact spot tonight, a year later. Except Spanish Hottie’s a no-show!
Hannah and Owen both stumble into the night, aware that their only chance to have sex all year just evaporated. You’re probably thinking they’ll bump into each other, right? Correct! They do! And Owen proceeds to throw up all over Hannah’s shoes. It’s what we call, in the business, a “Meet Barf” moment.
They go their own ways. But after Hannah gets arrested for almost having sex with an all-year sex violator guy and Owen falls for a digital honeytrap sending him into Central Park where he’s summarily robbed, the two end up at the police station together.
It’s clear these two are not into each other but when Hannah says she’s starving for some pizza and Owen announces that he’s a pizza chef, there is a slight bit of hope that sex is still on the dough-filled table tonight!
However, just as things are looking up, some too-cool-for-school chick named Nia pulls Hannah off to an exclusive party where she has a chance to not only hook up. But hook up with her celebrity crush! Owen is left alone once again. But only momentarily. He coincidentally ends up at the same party, giving these two one final chance to make sex happen.
I call these ideas “speculative hook” ideas. A world where you can murder one night a year (The Purge). A world where all books are illegal (Fahrenheit 451).
They’re a subset of high concept ideas that focus on creating one shocking societal rule and building a story around it.
I’ve never been the biggest fan of speculative hooks. This type of speculation is so writer-driven, they come off as fake.
But Carson. Aren’t all movie ideas fake? Isn’t Jurassic World fake? Actually, no. That idea makes sense to me. Science has evolved to a point where we can clone animals. So why wouldn’t we be able to clone dinosaurs?
That’s the thing about high-concept ideas. There has to be a line of logic that leads up to their birth. Otherwise, it’s just a writer coming up with an idea and forcing it upon reality.
And yes, I know you can get into the weeds with this stuff. Why do I believe a man can fly around and have super-strength and x-ray vision but not believe the government would limit pre-marital sex to one day a year?
I can’t explain that logically. I can only say that the mythology of Superman, and other superheroes for that matter, is so well-established within our culture that I believe it in the same way that I believe Tom Cruise can cling to the side of a flying airplane.
The result of ideas that don’t immediately meet the ‘suspension of disbelief bar’ is that the reader must climb a steeper hill to get hooked. And other problems in the script become magnified due to the fact that the reader isn’t immediately immersed.
For example, where are the stakes? Why do I care if two adults can’t have sex? What happens to these characters if they don’t succeed? They have to wait a year? Okay. So? There are people in this world, the real one mind you, who haven’t had sex in years. They’re still living their lives.
So, yeah, with every page, I was losing hope.
However…
The script gradually began to win me over with its charm.
Once I realized that, at its heart, it was a romantic comedy, I stopped judging it so harshly. All I care about with romantic comedies is that they meet three criteria. Do I like the guy? Do I like the girl? Do I want to see them end up together?
One Night Only meets all three of those criteria.
A low-key thing that Braun does well is he creates these characters that are fallible. They know they’re imperfect but they still try their best.
I’ll tell you why this is important. I recently watched this show called “Laid.” It’s a high-concept idea as well. This main female character starts to realize that every man she’s slept with is dying. So the show is about her going off and warning all these guys.
In that show, the main character is very dismissive of others, particularly men. She thinks the world of herself, unable to notice any of her flaws. She innately believes she deserves Channing Tatum when she’s more on the level of Jonah Hill. She looks down on most of the guys she runs into. They’re always wrong. She’s always right.
Why would I like that character? Why would I want to root for that character?
Hannah wants the best guy she can get, similar to the protagonist in Laid. But she’s not blind to her own weaknesses. She is fallible and knows it. She realizes that if she had her life together, she wouldn’t be in this position. It makes her a lot more likable so that, when Owen shows interest, I was rooting for her to like him back.
The science of character likability may be the most important component in all of screenwriting. It’s so delicate yet so important. If we don’t like your character, we don’t care about anything else. If you go overboard and make them too likable, they don’t feel like a real person.
It’s a fragile balancing act but it’s worth spending a lot of time on to get right. One of the main questions I would ask anybody who reads your script is, “Did you like my main characters?” Cause if they say “no,” or, just as bad, say, “They were okay,” then you have work to do. Stop worrying about your plot and your twists and your dialogue and get back in there and figure out how to make us love your characters. Cause if we don’t. You’re basically f*&%d.
One Night Only is not as good as Dying for You. That script fired on all cylinders. But it’s still good. And it’s a rare example of somebody in the business writing a funny script. After Hollywood sent the comedy genre to the death camps, all the good comedy writers disappeared. Travis Braun is one of the only few left.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you meet the three romantic comedy criteria I mentioned above, you can activate the “pull-apart” method. That’s what Braun did here. He kept pulling Hannah and Owen apart. They would meet, they would be pulled apart, they would run into each other again, then get pulled apart. When readers see characters they like pulled apart, they stick around until they come together again. This isn’t just true for romantic comedies. You can use it in any genre. One of the reasons The Empire Strikes Back is considered to be such a good film is because we are anxiously waiting until all the characters come back together again. Up until that point, due to their separation, all we feel is anxiety. But, again, this only works if we actually like the characters.
