Genre: Biopic
Premise: (from Black List) Sex, money, and one schoolyard fad that took a nation by storm. Based on the true story of Ty Warner, the enigmatic entrepreneur behind a ‘90s toy craze that sparked madness, murder, and a billion-dollar empire.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. I do not know if the writer, Alexandra Skarsgard, is related to the famous Skarsgard family of actors, but my guess is that she is. Skarsgard is repped by UTA and managed by Kaplan/Perrone. From what I can tell, this is her first big screenplay break.
Writer: Alexandra Skarsgard
Details: 126 pages
Readability: Fast
We’ve been talking all week about the battle between positive material (which tends to make a lot of money) and negative material (which tends to struggle at the box office). A not inaccurate way to characterize Hollywood is it’s a bunch of people trying to become that one artist a year who writes a negative movie that goes on to make a lot of money. That makes them the artist who can do it all.
Well, today, I’m going to give you one of the best templates for achieving this plan: THE TRAGEDY TEMPLATE. The tragedy template requires your movie to star an anti-hero, someone with a series of flaws.
You spend the first two-thirds to three-quarters of your screenplay showing the RISE of this character. The “rise” is important because these movies don’t always have clear goals. Nobody has to save their daughter in a tragedy.
The reason the “rise” works is because everyone likes to watch a character’s rise to prominence, regardless of whether they’re good or bad. There’s something about seeing them get bigger and bigger that’s addictive. Because we know that there’s no drama unless there’s eventually a fall. So there’s a natural desire to get to the fall.
Pro-Tip: All screenwriting effectively is is creating reasons for the reader to keep reading. You do this by injecting a series of “checkpoints” that the reader wants to read to. Certain narratives have those checkpoints built in, such as the tragedy. The reader always wants to get to the “fall.” That means that when you write a tragedy, readers are going to at least want to get to this point in the screenplay.
The fall itself is all about our hero’s main flaw getting the best of them. In a script like this, where someone amasses a lot of money, that flaw is usually greed. Their greed blinds them until they can’t see straight anymore, and it all comes tumbling down. The Wolf of Wall Street is a recent example of this.
The problem with tragedies is that no matter how well they’re written, they always end sadly. It’s built into the formula. Now how many times in your life, when a movie has ended on a down note, have you recommend it? It happens every once in a while if the movie moves you emotionally, such as Titanic. But it’s hard to recommend a movie that you know is going to make people feel down afterwards. So you usually recommend movies with uplifting endings.
That’s why this negative movie thing is so hard. No matter how well your script is written, it’s hard to make a “down” movie go viral.
“Plush” introduces us to real life figure Ty Warner. Ty originally wanted to be an actor, mainly as a way to escape his father, who worked as a salesman for a middling toy company called Dakin. But after realizing that being an actor is actually difficult, he comes back to his old Chicago suburb and reluctantly follows in his father’s footsteps.
But unlike his father, Ty is an amazing salesman. He actually enjoys selling stuffed animals. One day, he comes across a specialty stuffed animal that looks realistic in a way stuffed animals never have before. A lightbulb goes off in Ty’s head. He wants to marry the “realistic” stuffed animal with mass production. He then begins selling these mass produced animals to his Dakin contacts.
When Dakin finds out about this, they fire Ty, and Ty starts his own business, pulling a Jerry Maguire and hiring his old secretary, Carol, from Dakin to build the operation. The company is successful but by no means a phenomenon. That is until something funny happens. It’s the mid-90s when the internet is first coming around. Ty realizes that suburban moms are buying up his discontinued beanie baby units and selling them to the tune of thousands of dollars on the open market.
Ty gets the genius idea to strategically introduce and retire certain beanie babies every month, incentivizing people to buy as many as possible in the hopes of snagging a winning lottery ticket. The strategy is so successful that it turns Ty’s company from a tens of millions of dollars business to a billion dollar business.
Of course, this can’t last forever, and beanie babies are eventually supplanted by Pokemon. As the ship was sinking, Ty hid a lot of his money overseas, which got him into a bunch of tax trouble. Many people thought that he’d be going to prison for several decades. But the judge decided to let him off with 2 years probation. Ty’s public image never recovered after that, but he still runs a successful business to this day.
“Plush” wants to be “Steve Jobs” meets “The Social Network” but it’s not as sophisticated as either of those screenplays. It has the lawsuit framework like Social Network. But its implementation is haphazard. It comes and goes unpredictably. It doesn’t sandwich the narrative in a nice balanced manner.
Nor does it have the clever device at the heart of “Steve Jobs” whereby instead of the lazy cradle-to-grave style most biopics use, Sorkin explored Jobs’s life via Apple’s three biggest public announcements. “Plush” jumps around in time at first before eventually becoming completely linear. It didn’t really feel thought-through to me. Like a building that was built without blueprints.
With that said, two parts of the script worked. The first is Ty. Ty is a strange dude. His mother is schizophrenic and required hospital care for most of her life. That seems to have messed with his perception of reality and at least partly leads to an insane addiction to plastic surgery.
The second is the beanie baby craze moment. It’s interesting seeing how that came about. Nobody had ever done with stuffed animals what Ty did here – creating purposefully discontinued animals in order to create a sales frenzy whereby everybody needed to have all of them. That was fascinating to read about.
There was also this underlying theme of whether Ty was a good person or not. This is a man who kicked his own sister out of his life while making sure his sick mother was always cared for. This man was an asshole to every person he worked with yet he’d help random people he met on the street get major surgery when he found out there were dying. All of this comes together in the final court case scene when the judge is trying to decide what Ty’s sentence should be, and that decision is tied to what kind of person he’s been throughout his life. He has to weigh the good against the bad to make a decision, which makes the stakes very personal.
The big problem that the script can’t overcome, though, is that it’s not as salacious as it wants to be. The logline says there’s murder. There was no murder in this script. The fact that this is a tragedy implies that Ty’s life fell apart. But I just looked online and it appears Ty is still a billionaire and doing just fine.
It seems like the script is taking liberties in assessing how much of a downfall Ty actually had.
All of this left me confused as far as to what to rate the script but I’d say the main character is interesting enough to warrant a ‘worth the read.’
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you don’t have a traditional goal-driven narrative (for example, Fury Road – get to the promised land), choose a narrative that KEEPS YOUR HERO ACTIVE. The nice thing about tragedies is that your hero is typically spending the first 70% of the movie trying to build something. That act of building keeps them active and that’s a huge reason we keep watching even though you don’t have the traditional dramatic setup of saving something or delivering something or avenging something.
What I learned 2: This tip comes from the main character himself! One of the reasons Ty became so successful is that he REALLY FREAKING CARED ABOUT EVERY DETAIL OF THOSE STUFFED ANIMALS. He would stare at them for hours. If the eyes were just a little off, he wouldn’t produce that beanie baby. All artists should be this way. They should be obsessed. If you write John Wick, you have to care about the specific gun he uses. About what his suit measurements are. About how he got his training. The audience doesn’t need to know this stuff. But YOU DO. When you don’t know specifics, you use generalities. Generalities, I shouldn’t have to tell you, lead to GENERIC movies.
