Genre: Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) A chemical leak in a local water supply in Central Florida wreaks havoc on the invasive population of pythons, leading a family to the fight of their life to survive.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. It is the writer’s breakthrough script.
Writer: Creston Whittington
Details: 110 pages
Today was an extremely long and difficult work day for me.
And, after it was all done, I had to read a script. And review it. Starting at midnight.
To say I was in the best mindset to read a script would be an untrue statement. But I bring it up because when you’re on the come-up, your script is likely going to be low priority to whoever’s reading it.
Which means it will probably be read under similar circumstances as to how I read this script – at the end of the day when you’d rather call it a night. Which is yet another reason to put everything you’ve got into your screenplays. Because while you can’t control outside factors such as the mood of the person who’s reading your script, you can control how much effort you put into your script.
Let’s see what we’ve got today.
We start out with some daunting local Florida history:
“Every year, the state of Florida sponsors snake hunts in an effort to exterminate the Burmese Python, an invasive specie introduced to the Everglades by the Exotic Pet Trade.
Although the low detectability of these snakes makes population estimates difficult, most researchers propose that at least 30,000 and upwards of 300,000 pythons likely occupy southern Florida and that this population will only continue to grow.”
20-something Sharon Esperanza has just got off of work (at the local aquarium) and realizes that her 12 year-old brother, Bobby, isn’t home. It doesn’t take long for her to realize what he’s up to: The Annual Burmese Python Hunt! That’s right. Here in Florida, once every year, you’re allowed to go out and hunt pythons.
Sharon finds Bobby and yells at him. This is the kind of nonsense that got their dad killed, she tells him. But Bobby tells her how fun hunting pythons is and why can’t she please let him. Sharon is reluctant but she figures if Bobby’s going to be hunting pythons, she might as well tag along to make sure he doesn’t get hurt.
Meanwhile, there’s this giant political backstory going on involving Florida gubernatorial candidate Pam Huntley. It’s discovered that Pam was first eaten by, digested by, then defecated by, a 30 foot long Burmese python. This news coincides with a park ranger being swallowed up by another python. Who’s being hunted here. The pythons or the people???
As the hunt continues, the death continues. But it looks like the pythons are winning! As Sharon’s news reporter mother looks into the cause of the sudden attacks, she finds evidence that the local corrupt politician has been working with a giant Florida pharmaceutical company and that the drugs they’re disposing into the water have turned these pythons into serial killers!
Will Sharon and her brother realize how bad this is in time to get back home and protect themselves from the snakes!? Or is it too late? Have the snakes found their way into each and every home in town!!????
I struggled with this one, guys.
Big time.
I think there were twenty characters introduced before page 10? Do writers realize that readers actually have to remember people? And if you introduce a billion people, there’s no way we’re going to remember them all?
There was also a ton of 5-6 line paragraphs. Look, you can write as many 5-line paragraphs as you want in a script. The reader’s not going to read them, though. You’re not gaming the system by squeezing all that extra information in. People who open scripts expect them to read fast. When the scripts don’t read fast, readers simply adapt their reading style to ‘skim-mode’ so that they do read fast.
On top of all this, this script is titled Reptile Dysfunction. When I open a script titled Reptile Dysfunction, the ratio of work to entertainment should not be 5 to 1. Scripts like this should be the easiest scripts to read in the world.
Yesterday we talked about dead relative backstories. Most movies have them. So it’s a common thing you’re going to be writing a lot. Which means you want to be good at it. You want to understand what works and what doesn’t work and make choices that are right for your screenplay.
In this script, after the opening teaser, we watch old home video footage of two people getting married, having a kid (Sharon), watching the kid grow up, graduate from high school, blah blah blah. And then, somewhere along the way, the dad dies. And we finally get to present day where we are now with Sharon as a young adult.
What that montage did was it created context for our main character, Sharon. We were “there” when her father passed away. The argument FOR this montage, then, is that we feel closer to Sharon than had we not gone through that experience with her. The argument AGAINST this montage is that it takes up valuable script time where we could already be into the story.
It’s no secret around here that people will give up on your script within a single page. Everyone on this site has done it. You have read one of those Amateur Showdown pages and thought, “Nope, not good enough to continue.” A montage like the one in Reptile is not story. It’s not entertainment. It’s not dramatic or suspenseful. All it is is backstory. It’s INFORMATION. When you’re giving people information, as opposed to drama, they lose interest.
Now you may say, “But Carson. What about Pixar’s Up? That started with a montage of two people meeting, falling in love, getting married and one of them dying, and it’s considered one of the greatest scenes ever!” That’s true. But that movie was ABOUT THAT RELATIONSHIP. The whole movie WAS THAT RELATIONSHIP so it made sense to start the movie with the montage of their lives together.
This, meanwhile, is a movie about anacondas attacking a Florida town. It doesn’t need that montage. Yes, I agree that it brings us a LITTLE closer to the main character. But I don’t think it’s worth it when you can just allude to the fact, along the way, that she lost her father.
Screenwriting is so funny. Yesterday was all about a premise that was too simple for its own good. It didn’t have enough meat on the bone. Then you have today’s script which takes a simple premise – snakes invading a town – and approaches it like it’s a Woodward and Bernstein biopic. This is so over-plotted and over-populated, it gets in the way of what the script is meant to do – which is to give the audience a good time.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: When it comes to fun ideas, get out of your own way. Anything that gets in the way of a fun read – long paragraphs, overly complicated plots with lots of jumping around, character counts in excess of 40 people – need to be eliminated. We’re picking up your script with a certain expectation of fun. Just like if someone thinks they’re about to read War and Peace and instead gets The Da Vinci Code, they’re going to be pissed, the same thing is going to happen if your fun-sounding premise reads like a history book.
