Jiminy Crickets! We’ve got our first [x] impressive of the year!
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: In a small town, a high school math teacher on the verge of having his first child with his wife, must manage a rapidly unraveling sexual relationship with a student.
About: Today’s script finished with only 7 votes on last year’s Black List. Proof yet again, Mr. Leonard needs to reevaluate his scoring system. Or else he’s going to have to start paying me to do these end-of-the-year re-rankings where I tell everyone how the scripts ACTUALLY should’ve been ranked. Screenwriter Drake Wootton has no previous writing credits although he did make it on as one of the hundreds of crew members on John Wick 3.
Writer: Drake Wootton
Details: 116 pages (long scripts are getting good scores lately!)
Today, I wanted to read something that pushed boundaries.
I know you’re tired of me saying it but, as someone who reads everything, I’m always searching for that writer willing to go beyond what is expected. He’s not the daily 9:45am LAX to ORD United flight. He’s Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Mr. Carter is just a normal high school math teacher living in a medium-sized town. He’s married to his high school sweetheart, Alyssa, who’s seven months pregnant. The first thing we think about when we see Mr. Carter is that he’s living the typical American life. He seems happy.
But then we note, when he goes to work, that there’s a girl in the back of the class, named Teva, who’s silently crying. And unlike how teachers are supposed to react to such situations, Mr. Carter is highly agitated by this. Once class is over and all the other kids have left, Mr. Carter slams the door and lays into Teva, telling her to “get over it.”
“It” is the brief sexual relationship they had. Logic finally arrived for Mr. Carter when it hit him that, in two months, he’s going to have a kid. The problem is, he’s made a 17 year old girl fall in love with him. She’s confused. She’s sad. All she wants is to be with him.
Meanwhile, back at home, Alyssa hires someone through an app to take care of house chores since she’s becoming less and less mobile. The person who takes the job is Ponce, a normal dude who, coincidentally, also happens to be in Mr. Carter’s class.
What starts off as innocent chores becomes more and more charged as Alyssa begins to have sexual fantasies about Ponce. Although, on paper, Alyssa has had the perfect life, she’s always been a bit of a rebel and is frustrated that that side of her has been curbed. However, unlike her husband, Alyssa seems to have some level of control. She walks up to the line with Ponce but never crosses it. At least not yet.
Teva continues to be a problem for Mr. Carter at school but it gets a lot worse when she finds out she’s pregnant. When she tells Mr. Carter, all he can think about is getting rid of the kid as soon as possible. But Teva isn’t game. She likes the idea of having a child – his child in particular.
Mr. Carter goes nuts trying to talk Teva off that ledge. “You realize,” he says, “That if you have that child, my life is over.” But the more he protests, the more determined she is to have it. Mr. Carter convinces himself that he needs to take this into his own hands. So he ambushes Teva when she’s home alone one night. Except nothing – and I mean nothing – about what happens next goes according to plan.
I’m so happy that when I first saw this logline, I thought, “That sounds like it could be something. The ingredients are there!” And I turned out to be right. This is something. This is really something.
I want to use this opportunity to talk about the many creative choices you are forced to make when writing a screenplay and how important it is to think through those creative choices so that each one gives you the most bang for your back.
The first creative choice Wootton makes is introducing us to a loving Mr. Carter and his pregnant wife, Alyssa. We see the love between these two as they hang out in bed and talk about their child. It’s cute. It’s sweet. We like them.
Then, in the very next scene, we find out Mr. Carter is sleeping with one of his students. The reason this is a smart creative choice is because Wootton could’ve easily started us with the classroom scene. But by first meeting Mr. Carter in this loving moment with his pregnant wife, it makes that second scene hit a lot harder. It changes our perception of Mr. Carter as opposed to immediately shaping it.
The next smart creative choice was to introduce Teva and that relationship AFTER IT HAD ENDED. Wootton could’ve brought us into this relationship at the peak – as it’s going hot and heavy. But by starting it at the end, with one side wanting that end and the other resisting it, it creates a much better launching pad for conflict throughout the story.
If he’s trying to get away and she’s trying to get him back, you’ve got this constant “threat” or “problem” that needs to be resolved, as opposed to the less interesting option of them sneaking around and not thinking all the much about the potential consequences of their actions.
These choices extend to the characters as well. Wootton didn’t need to make Alyssa pregnant. But by doing so, he raises the stakes of the story considerably. A teacher-student relationship that has the potential to destroy a marriage is one thing. A teacher-student relationship that has the potential to destroy a family is much worse.
And when you’re writing these scripts that are entirely character-driven, you need to make creative choices that raise the stakes as much as possible.
The final thing I loved about this script was the nuance. Most of the time when I read these scripts, they’re written with a hammer. Go watch the latest Tyler Perry movie, Mea Culpa, on Netflix, to see what I mean. Every moment is on-the-nose. Every plot development is accompanied by the town herald blowing their trumpet. Here, our writer is working with a 4mm 32 gauge sewing needle.
Alyssa’s relationship with Ponce is a great example of this. That could’ve become its own affair. Instead, it only dances around the potential affair.
But the biggest example of this is the ending. I’m not going to spoil it but Mr. Carter goes to Teva’s house at night with a kitchen knife. He’s planning to kill her. But a few things go wrong and she catches him before he can act. So, before she can figure things out, he quickly hides the knife inside his pants and pretends to be there cause he wants to talk to her.
They sit down and have this sweet moment and then they decide to go upstairs and, he starts seeing that he’s trailing blood everywhere. That really sharp kitchen knife that he stuffed in his pants has cut him. And cut him badly. This begins a final sequence that nobody reading this script could’ve predicted.
That’s what I love!
I love these scripts that seemingly shouldn’t work because they’re just four people in a small town with absolutely nothing new on the concept front. And yet the writer still finds a way to create new unexpected moments at the most important of times.
Most writers would’ve sent Mr. Carter to Tea’s house with a gun. There probably would’ve been a scramble for the gun at some point and it’s just the exact same ending we’ve seen a billion times already. I haven’t seen Mea Culpa. But I’m willing to bet all my tennis rackets that the ending is some variation of that.
The crazy thing about this script is that it’s going to be even better after a couple more drafts. It’s implied that this is a work in progress and I could see that. There’s this Romeo and Juliet play that Wootton clearly didn’t write the full subplot for yet. Both Teva and Ponce are the leads in the play. The way the ending plays out is going to cross-cut with that Romeo and Juliet play beautifully.
This is the closest script I’ve seen to matching the power, the character-exploration, and tone of one of my favorite movies, American Beauty. It has the potential to be that good. Will it be? You need to find the next Sam Mendes and maybe it will. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re going to slowly boil your script, make sure to put your hero in the water right away, even when it’s still cold – “Slow builds” or “slow boils” work a heck of a lot better if we can already see our hero starting to cook from the beginning. This is a slow build type of script. But the reason we stick around during that slow-moving first part is because the writer has placed Mr. Carter in the pot by the second scene. We see that ending things with Teva is not going to go smoothly. It’s going to cause problems down the line. Which gives us a reason to turn the pages. We want to see how she applies pressure and how he will react to it. If you had started with things going well between these two, there’s not as much incentive to turn the pages of this slow-moving character study.
