Genre: Sports Thriller
Premise: A desperate cyclist and his charismatic new team doctor concoct a dangerous training program in order to win the Tour de France. But as the race progresses and jealous teammates, suspicious authorities, and the racer’s own paranoia close in, they must take increasingly dark measures to protect both his secret and his lead.
About: This script finished in the Top 10 of last year’s Black List. The writer, Haley Bartels, seems to have been destined to get to this point. She received her MFA in Screenwriting from AFI. She got a BA in English from UCLA. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in New York. She studied at Russia’s premiere school for the dramatic arts, the Moscow Art Theater (МХАТ). She made last year’s Blood List. And this script won one of the Nicholl fellowships.
Writer: Haley Bartels
Details: 109 pages
Quoting Macbeth on page 1!
Been a while since I’ve encountered that.
This is just my own personal opinion – this is not a script rule or anything – but I have never, in my life, read a pre-story quote, in a screenplay or a novel, that has enhanced my reading experience. They seem a bit pretentious to me.
Curious to hear what you guys think about pre-script quotes. Share your thoughts in the comments. Actually, wait up! You gotta read my review first.
Taylor Mace lives in Boulder, Colorado and is a professional bike racer. Just not a very good one. He’s 35 years old and in denial about the fact that each year that passes, he’s getting worse. At the moment, he’s barely clinging to the bottom rung of the team he races for, Inverness.
Meanwhile, his best friend on the team, Duncan, is riding better than ever. He has the kind of talent that Taylor could only dream of. Actually, everybody on the team has more talent than Taylor. Taylor is a work horse. And his horse shoes are starting to splinter.
But Taylor is given a second chance when 40-something Andrea Lathe joins the team. Andrea is one of these medical sports doctors who look for ways to improve athletes by checking their blood, their heart, their entire circulatory system.
Andrea puts the team through a series of tests, including an updated version of The Pit of Despair’s death machine in The Princess Bride. No, I’m not kidding. It’s really the same device. The machine’s purpose is to determine each rider’s threshold to pain. You stay in it for as long as you can.
Taylor finishes last in every single test EXCEPT THE MACHINE. Where he crushes everyone else. He makes it an entire two minutes. Nobody else made it more than 15 seconds. His show-stopping result leads to Andrea Lathe becoming obsessed with him. In her experience, the people who win the big tours in racing are the ones who can endure the most pain.
So Lathe makes Taylor her pet project. Which also means that Taylor needs to start taking steroids. Lathe is extremely manipulative and easily able to talk Taylor into doing drugs. And as soon as Taylor does, he begins racing up the ranks within the team. By the time they get to Spain for the big next tour, Taylor is awarded the number 1 spot on the team.
But Lathe doesn’t stop there. She demands that Taylor LITERALLY give her his blood. That blood is then sent off to a secret lab where it’s super-metasticized or something, and comes back where it’s re-injected into him, turning him into a super soldier. Once on the mega-blood, he becomes unstoppable. That is until another racer on the team starts challenging him, a rider who may also be under Lathe’s tutelage.
This is a very good script.
Whenever I come into a sports screenplay, what I’m immediately worried about is cliche. Especially if it’s a racing script. I mean how much more cliche can you get than, “I’m going to win this race.” Let me guess. You’re going to be trailing with 10 seconds to go before your second wind magically kicks in and then you’re able to pass him at the turn and beat him in a photo finish.
Pumping Black is anything but cliche. Remember that movie about wrestling called Foxcatcher with Channing Tatum? This reminds me a lot of that movie. But it’s actually good. The reason it’s good is because the central relationship is really sharp.
You’ve got Taylor, who’s so desperate, at the end of his career, that he’ll do anything to win. And then you have Lathe, who’s one of the better characters you’ll read in a script all year. She’s this manipulative evil sex demon who is not afraid to use her sexual dominance to make these men do what she needs them to do.
One of the early scenes is her needing to check Taylor’s muscles so she tells him to strip. He strips down into his boxers and she says, “No, the boxers too.” Then in one of the most inappropriate scenes you’ll read in 2023, she “inspects” him.
It’s weird but it’s also one of the things that sets the script apart. Whenever Lathe and Taylor are alone, the scene is charged with this intense negative sexual energy brokered by an inappropriate power dynamic.
I liked how Bartels also drip-fed the steroids. At first, it was a just a pill. And you could’ve ended there. Only given our protagonist these pills. But the art of writing screenplays is such that you constantly want to add new things to the story. If it’s just this pill the whole time, we’ll be bored by the pill within 20 pages. So ten pages later, we introduce injections. And then 15 pages later, we introduce the big dog – blood swapping.
And what was so great about the blood-swapping was that now you’re introducing the element of death. It’s explained to us that this mega-blood gets a lot thicker, so much so that riders will set alarms to get up at four in the morning to move around to get their blood flowing so it doesn’t get clogged up in their system and kill them.
I love stuff like this. I love when you add multiple consequences and those additional consequences get bigger each time. At first, it’s just getting kicked off the team. Then, it’s possibly getting caught by the doping federation. Then, it’s death!
As I’ve told you guys before, I often judge the quality of a script on the choices that weren’t made. You could’ve easily made Lathe a nuts and bolts male team member. Just by making Lathe a female, she becomes different. Making in her 40s makes her different. Making her Machiavellian makes her different. Having her use her sexuality to manipulate riders makes her different. This could’ve been a lame character in another writer’s hands. It’s a super memorable character in this writer’s hands.
The only reason the script doesn’t get an Impressive is because of suspension of disbelief issues regarding some of Lathe’s more outlandish behavior. Even though I liked a lot of things about her, I don’t know if I bought that she could just make guys strip completely naked, tie them down, attach them to torture devices without warning, and start torturing them. I mean, did #MeToo get lost on the way to the Tour De France?
Still, the actual writing and style is easy to read. Everything here moves fast. The plot developments, while never shocking, always improvedthe story. For example, bringing this young buck, Malcom, in at the end and having him be a potential foil to Taylor’s glory, and also possibly signifying that he’s the one who’s supposed to win and that Lathe may be using Taylor – that whole evolving storyline was very compelling. There’s this terrifying late development of a bad bag of blood that Taylor injects into himself that may kill him. It’s good stuff.
This is, most definitely, a worthy entry onto the Black List.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Pumping Black shows us the power of an X-Factor character. An “X-factor” character is often someone who doesn’t act predictably. And that makes them very exciting to watch. I mean, one of the key scenes here is when Lathe asks Taylor to consider getting injections as well. Taylor says no. She says fine, sorry for bringing it up. And then, when he turns, she plunges the needle into him anyway. Lathe is the definition of unpredictable. You can’t really use your protagonist as an x-factor character. But you can use secondary characters, like Lathe.
