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Genre: Thriller
Premise: A young woman long overdue in getting her driver’s license finally takes her road
test, only to find herself receiving direction from a psychotic instructor who wants
her dead.
About: This script finished with 13 votes on the Black List. The writers, who are from Canada, are at the beginning of their careers.
Writers: Kris Bertin & Naben Ruthnum
Details: 90 pages
Sophia Lillis for Kaitlyn?
I will say this about Road Test. When I opened it and saw that it was exactly 90 pages, I said, “Good omen!”
Every story setup has its ideal page count. Contained horror or thriller – 90 pages. Straight Comedy – 100 pages. Adventure film – 110 pages. Historical Drama – 120 pages. And if you are way out of that page count range, it’s a good indication you don’t know what you’re doing.
I saw two people in a car in the logline (contained thriller) and said, “This better be 90 pages.” And it was!
19 year old Kaitlyn is finally taking her driver’s test. It’s a big day because she currently lives with her energy suck of a lame-duck father who holds her down in life. If she can drive, she can get a job. She can move out. She can start living her life!
So, on this morning, her 31 year old pregnant sister, Deb, picks her up and drives her to the DMV. Why is she pregnant? No reason. And it’s never a plot point throughout the rest of the story. A nervous Kaitlyn eventually finds her instructor, Todd, waiting in the testing car and hops in. By the way, the test car has a second steering wheel and pedals for the instructor, so he can take over the drive whenever he wants.
Todd, who wears sunglasses, looks at Kaitlyn like she’s an idiot when she nearly hits two pedestrians pulling out of the parking lot. Todd is tempted to fail her right there but she pleads with him and he says, ‘fine,’ and makes her do what she was most fearing – parallel parking on a hill!
After she barely pulls that off, Todd tells her to pull around a school bus that has its stop sign out. Confused, Kaitlyn refuses. And it’s a good thing she did as kids run across the road at just the moment where she would’ve driven, which means she would’ve killed them! “Good,” Todd says. You have to know when to disobey people. Even driving instructors!
Todd also asks inappropriate questions, like ‘what’s that scar on your arm?’ Hey, instructors aren’t supposed to ask about that! It turns out that when Kaitlyn was 13, she distracted her mom while driving and they got in an accident and mom died. Kaitlyn has felt guilty ever since!
Eventually, Kaitlyn figures out that there’s someone in the trunk. Todd cops up to it, telling Kaitlyn it’s her pregnant sister. So do as he says or she’s dead meat! He then makes her ditch a cop car as well as sit around while he brutally murders an annoying trucker. He makes her pick up a hitchhiker, who he toys with behind her back (will he kill her too???). He also occasionally takes out fingers from the glove compartment and dangles them in front of Kaitlyn and says, “This could be you!”
Finally, Todd explains why he’s doing this. It was his family in another car that Kaitlyn’s mom killed that day. So, this is revenge!
Eventually, she’s able to get away from him and make a run for it and, when he chases her on foot, she circles back and gets into the car, where she finds that Todd, the real driver who was in the trunk, is still alive! The two agree that if they can work together, they may have a chance.
But when they drive to the next house up the road to call for help, they learn… it’s Fake Todd’s compound! Which is also some sort of weird pseudo driving school company. As they go through the house, they find the dead bodies of other women Fake Todd has taken on driving tests. Finally, Fake Todd comes back home, and it’s time for the final battle!
I cannot tell a lie.
My first reaction, after reading this, was to go into my “evisceration” era. I planned to aggressively attack the state of the Black List, calling this a new low for the once esteemed script certifier.
But I’ve done that before. So, instead, I want to look for ways to make today’s script more of a teaching experience.
Every time I give a Black List script a poor review, someone in the comments will defiantly say, “Yeah but then why did it make the Black List!” I think the implication is that the script needs to be praised instead of criticized if it was able to make the most esteemed script list in Hollywood.
I get it. There has to be some criteria for scripts making the list. It’s certainly better than a lot of amateur scripts, right? So shouldn’t I be explaining why it’s good?
Believe me, I would do that IF there was something to praise.
You see, the Black List has pulled their bar down so low that it can be challenging to pick out the differences between Black List and amateur scripts. But I’ll do my best. Let’s start by reminding everyone where we’re at.
When the Black List began, any script was eligible, no matter how successful of a writer you were. This is why those early scripts were great. You were truly getting the best scripts in Hollywood. As the years passed, the list moved away from top-tier writers but still included a lot of strong working writers who weren’t big names yet. So you still got some banger scripts. Nowadays, the list has dropped even those writers from eligibility (unofficially). It’s now mostly writers at the very beginning of their careers.
The way one gets on the list is through votes. To get the most votes, you need the most industry eyeballs on your script. Eyeballs are achieved by your representation sending your script out to people. The wider your reps send it, the more people know about it, which increases the chances that a lot of people vote for it. This means that the super-wide scripts have the best shot at doing well on the Black List.
Here’s the truth no one says out loud, though: The super-wide scripts are not the best scripts in town! If a manager has a great script, he never sends it out wide. He strategically sends it to the people he believes want to make that movie. Therefore, the better scripts in town are actually not entering the voting pool.
What all this means is that the Black List represents the top 75 scripts of the 300 that go wide every year, and those 300 are all scripts that weren’t good enough to have a more targeted approach.
So, yes, you are going to get some really weak writing on the Black List these days. Such as today’s script, which I swear could’ve been written by Chat GPT. If I fed this logline into AI and told it to write me a series of 45 scenes that make up a full script, these 45 scenes would look VERY SIMILAR to what AI would generate.
It’s one of the things I actually like about AI – is that it spits out the most generic version of your movie. So, if you want to write something unique, you can just pour through AI’s version of your script and NOT WRITE ANY OF THE SCENES THAT AI DID. That one approach is going to make your script 100 times better than it would’ve been.
But getting back to this Black List thing – the new floor – what you need to do to make the list – is to be a good enough writer to get representation. Cause, if you do that, your manager will send your script out and you’ll officially be eligible for the Black List.
How do you do that? Come up with a strong concept (send me your logline at carsonreeves1@gmail.com for a $25 evaluation – I’ll tell you if it’s strong enough), show that you understand basic storytelling skills, have at least one really strong character, and then be someone who relentlessly queries managers and agents until enough of them read your script that one signs you.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, is there anything specific I want to say about Road Test?
Not really.
You guys read my synopsis. I’d be surprised if you didn’t know exactly what I’d say.
The failure of today’s script comes down to, as it often does, its premise. Road Test is one of those ideas that’s just big enough to be a spec script but not big enough to be a movie. And when you have one of these scripts, you’re using every page to prove why your story deserves to exist. You’re not telling a story. You’re justifying it. And, when that happens, suspension of disbelief gets broken every other page. We’re constantly questioning things that don’t make as much sense as they should.
I mean, apparently, this serial killer’s entire schtick is to look for people who were in car accidents as children, where their parents killed someone while driving. And then to pretend like he’s the son of the people who were killed, and he’s now getting revenge. And he does this by figuring out when and where these now-grown kids are taking their driving tests, showing up early, killing the instructors, then impersonating them, so he can take them on a wild ride before murdering them.
I get that there’s something called movie logic. But that’s taking it to a whole new level.
I’m probably being too hard on this script but I’m tired of reading screenplays that play out EXACTLY how you expect them to. I mean, at least yesterday, after they showed up in the Zone, all the soldiers died in their tent. That was unexpected. There isn’t one unexpected thing that happens in this entire script. Even the twists are obvious. And that drives me nuts. Writers too often write like they’re competing against five other writers in the world. You’re competing against MILLIONS. So giving the bare minimum execution of your story – the kind of execution that 99 out of 100 other people would’ve come up with – isn’t going to get you anywhere beyond writing an average script.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you want to know what the page count should be for the current script you’re writing, include a mini-logline along with the genre in a comment and I’ll tell you.
