Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: (my logline) A female doctor who’s ripped out of the virtual patriarchal world she’s existed in her whole life must team up with a group of rebels who plan to take down the giant evil company that runs this matrix.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. Heather Quinn has a couple of projects in development. But this is really her first official breakthrough script.
Writer: Heather Quinn
Details: 120 pages
Readability: slow
So, I’m going to be honest with you. There were a couple of red flags right off the bat with this one. First was the logline that appeared on the Black List: “A woman abruptly discovers nothing she’s known until now is real, and she must recover the truth in order to save the rest of the country, still trapped inside of the lie.” This isn’t a logline. This is a teaser, and a vague one at that. It doesn’t tell us anything about the story. 99 times out of 100 when I encounter a logline that doesn’t give us any sense of what the story is about, it means the script is in trouble.
Two, the script is 120 pages. Now we’ve had discussions on this site ad nauseam about page count. Some writers will threaten to rip your eyes out if you tell them they have to keep their script under 110 pages. And I respect that point of view. However, one thing is undeniably true about page count. Certain stories warrant a bigger page count. Certain stories do not. A script that takes place over 3 time periods and has a cast of 25 characters is, naturally, going to need more time to be told. Whereas a story about a single character escaping a virtual reality… that shouldn’t require 120 pages to tell.
Of course, as new information in this script arrives, I may change my mind. But that brings us back to the first point, which is that we have zero idea of what this movie is about because the logline is so vague. Hopefully, this is one of those amazingly gifted writers who can make any scenario work. Let’s check it out…
32 year old Lynn Roberts is a doctor. She’s got no friends other than her twin brother, Duke. Speaking of, at Lynn and Duke’s birthday party, we notice that the men all feel very 1955 in their approach to the world. They think it’s bizarre, for example, that a woman could be a doctor.
One night while Lynn is walking from her bedroom to her bathroom, her bathroom disappears. Every time she goes through the door, she’s still in her bedroom. This glitch eventually results in her waking up in a glass container. That’s right, Lynn was inside this movie’s version of the matrix!
Lynn is rescued by a guy named Gray Johnson who tells her that a company called VTI has almost 70% of humanity plugged into their version of the matrix. Out here, in the real world, woman can be doctors without being sneered at!
He brings Lynn back to his secret hideout where Ruth, Lynn’s aunt, explains to her that her grandmother was going to be the first female president of the United States when her car was run off the road and she died. Lynn was in that car!
According to Ruth, Lynn has to reclaim that memory of what happened in the car that night so that they can upload that memory to everyone else in the VTI matrix. Once they all realize what really happened that fateful night, they’ll snap out of their imprisoned minds and wake up. But that’s only if Lynn can access that memory. Will she do it? Only time will tell!
For the first 30 pages of Reality, I thought to myself, “Wow, this writer totally proved me wrong. This’ll teach you to make giant assumptions in the future, Carson.” I was most impressed by the detail-oriented writing, which did a great job painting a picture of both the characters and the world they were in. Really solid stuff.
And then, ever so slightly, the cracks started to show. There started to be a whole bunch of exposition. Which is fine. There was a lot of exposition when Neo exited the Matrix.
The difference is that this exposition didn’t make sense. Apparently, the point of creating this virtual world was to keep women more domesticated. However, it wasn’t clear why anyone wanted to do this or what the end game of such a virtual world was. You also had a woman in charge of this evil program, which confused the message.
We’re told that upwards of 70% of the population are inside the virtual world. If I have this right, that means you’ve created an evil virtual world where women are kept down yet none of the other 30% of the people on the planet are trying to stop it. Do they even know it’s happening? If no, how is it that the rest of the world has no idea what’s happening to 4.5 billion people? Wouldn’t that be hard to cover up? Or are you saying they know and are okay with it? And if they’re okay with it, then why do you need to create a virtual world in the first place? It sounds like you could’ve just done it in the real world.
Not to mention, the financial requirements of placing 4.5 billion people inside of a virtual reality would be in the vicinity of 500 trillion dollars. And that’s a conservative estimate. And what happens to all the infrastructure of the planet when 70% of the population are no longer using it? Wouldn’t that have devastating implications for society?
Some of you may be thinking, “Why does that matter? Who cares how much it costs?” The reason it matters is because suspension of disbelief is critical to buying into any science-fiction story. Even if, as an audience member, you aren’t calculating the exact cost of the enterprise like I am, you’re still thinking, “Something’s off here. This doesn’t feel realistic at all.”
I call this practice working it out on the page exposition. This occurs when you have this giant chasm of mythology to manage and you try to work it all out on the page. You have your characters talking about it and hope you can write yourself into something that makes sense. While this is okay to do in first drafts, you need to refine and focus your mythology so that it’s not just some big garble of information, but rather something that’s logical and can hold up to scrutiny.
At one point Phyllis, the leader of VTI, mentions that she’s worried the United Nations is going to make a stink about the company’s latest actions. Um, why exactly should anyone be worried about a governmental body that’s already allowed 4.5 billion people to be enslaved? I think it’s safe to assume that they aren’t that bothered if they didn’t do anything after the first billion.
We also get this shaky plot goal about changing a memory in Lynn’s past, which will then, if I understand it correctly, change all the other imprisoned peoples’ memories, which will then wake them up. I must’ve read this part ten times and I still don’t understand how it works. You don’t get points just because you include a goal in your screenplay. The goal has to actually make sense. It must be clear. We must believe in it.
The script has a few interesting moments later on when we’re not sure whether our current reality is actually another matrix but these ideas are scattered and never amount to more than a brief, “Oh, that’s cool.”
It’s too bad because it seems like Quinn is using this story to explore several things she’s passionate about, specifically the place of women in society. But it’s buried underneath so much shaky mythology that it’s impossible for any of it to register. Which is why I will say it for the ten millionth time: KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. Stop overcomplicating your stories. Stop trying to do too much. Your story will be lost. Your message will be lost.
Luckily, we have the perfect comp for what “Reality” looks like in a tighter sleeker package: “Don’t Worry Darling.” The reason that script became one of the biggest script sales of the year was because it had ONE CLEAR MESSAGE and it didn’t do anything to distort that message. The script isn’t perfect. But in the battle between patriarchal Matrix movies, it’s much more focused and a lot more entertaining. And it’s because the writers kept things so simple.
Look, “Reality” isn’t a bad script. But the writer is still learning the craft. There’s that ‘searching’ quality to the writing that I see all the time with new writers. They’re trying to work their plot and characters out on the page instead of focusing on what they should be focusing on – entertaining you, the reader.
If you’re an aspiring screenwriter yourself, this is a rare opportunity to see the difference between a sale-able sci-fi script and what most amateur sci-fi scripts look like. Read “Reality” and “Don’t Worry Darling” back to back and you’ll have a better understanding of screenwriting than 90% of the aspiring writers out there.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Use different colored text ORGANICALLY to help your story. The best part of the script is that the first 15 pages are written in blue text. Then, when Lynn gets pulled out of virtual reality, it changes to black text. It had a similar effect to what it was like watching The Wizard of Oz when they went from black and white to color.
