Genre: Horror/Dark Comedy
Premise: A prolific serial killer struggles to suppress her desire to kill during a weekend-long engagement party hosted by her new fiance’s wealthy, obnoxious family.
About: Our Showdown-winning logline! Rosemary won the contest with 33 and a half votes. That was 35% of the total votes.
Writer: Sam Van Meter
Details: 100 pages
Winner winner In-N-Out Dinner!
“Rosemary” is the winner of the February Logline Showdown.
Congratulations to Sam Van Meter.
Next Logline Showdown is Friday, March 24th.
Send me: Title, Genre, Logline
E-mail: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Rules: Script must be written
Deadline: Thursday, March 23rd, at 10pm Pacific Time
Cost: Free
The big theme of today’s review is execution-dependent concepts. Some concepts are harder to pull off than others. Today is one of those concepts. In general, any time you’re working in the satire or black comedy department, it’s harder to make your screenplay work because tonal consistency is tricky in these genres.
All right, let’s get into…. ROSEMARY!
When we meet 30 year old Rosemary, she’s in the park reading a book, upside-down I may add – the book, not the person (she’s a bit of an odd duck) – when a guy comes up to her and starts chatting her up. We’re keen enough to gather this isn’t the first time she’s done this. Especially after she murders the guy, along with a biker who witnessed the kill. Yup, Rosemary is a serial killer.
Cut to some time later and we meet 33 year old Charlie Page. Charlie is a normal dude. Possibly a bit nerdy. He’s got a fun little description that sums him up: “Charlie is short, slightly scrawny. He moves with an awkwardness that is endearing to some and annoying to others.” You wouldn’t suspect that he’d be able to bag a looker like Rosemary. And yet, as it turns out, he has.
Charlie knows that he’s got a good thing going so he proposes to Rosemary. She’s unsure at first because, unbeknownst to Charlie, she realizes that if she goes down this road, she’ll have to give up reading books upside-down and, oh yeah, serial killing. But after some deliberation, she chooses Charlie.
Once Charlie’s douchebag brother, Zach, finds out about this, he tells the family, and the next thing you know, an engagement party that Charlie does not endorse has been announced. Rosemary is surprised to find that Charlie’s family is mega-rich and lives on a sprawling estate.
Right away, Rosemary doesn’t like anyone. Zach makes fun of his brother non-stop. Robyn, Charlie’s mother, can’t stop putting her son down. Rick, the father, seems like one of those self-important rich people who demand that the world revolve around them. All of these people are stirring up Rosemary’s killer tendencies.
After Rosemary discovers something about herself that changes everything, Charlie learns that his family is involved in some shady business practices and that some equally shady people will be showing up at the party to collect the money they’re owed. After Rosemary can’t hold it in any longer and starts killing people, she meets her match: A guy named Pablo who has killed a lot more people than she has. Will she survive this unforeseen predicament?
The first thing that struck me about this script was how easy it was to read. The first scene is nearly all dialogue, which helps. I always forget how important this is until I read a script like Rosemary! Only then do I look back at the last eight scripts I read and think, “Oh, that’s why those scripts were such chores.”
It’s a smart little trick in screenwriting if you find yourself writing something character-driven. Start your script off with pure dialogue and it creates this illusion that the script is flying by. Not only that, but Sam smartly adds very little description. So your eyes REALLY fly down the page.
Even beyond that, Sam has a very easy-to-read writing style. Sparse. To the point. But still with just enough flare to keep it entertaining. This is how screenwriting is supposed to be!
But while the read was always easy, the content of the read was challenging. The opening scene has Rosemary reading a book in a park. A guy approaches her. They chat. She starts walking with him. She finds out he’s married, kills him, then kills a biker who witnessed the murder.
We’ve talked about this so many times on the site that I’m tempted not to belabor the issue. But your protagonist’s first scene has such an outsized impact on how your reader sees them that if we don’t like their actions enough that we don’t want to root for them, your script is done right there. Seriously. Not a single word you write after that matters.
Rosemary kills a married guy who was hitting on her and then, also, a witness. Is the potential infidelity of a random person merit for murdering them? Of course not. It’s not the classiest move on the guy’s part. But do they deserve death? No. So that’s a strike against Rosemary. But I think I could’ve gone along with that, in a movie logic way, if that was all she did. The fact that she also killed this totally innocent biker dude who was riding by. That’s when I decided I despised this woman.
From that point forward, I just couldn’t get on board with the fun part that I was promised in the logline, which was that Rosemary would try and resist killing the most obnoxious people in the world at her engagement party. Didn’t matter how bad they were. I knew she was worse.
We actually have a great comp for this to see how to do it right. Promising Young Woman had a similar opening to Rosemary and it feels like a spiritual influence. But what was different about the famous Promising Young Woman opening? Well, for one, she doesn’t kill anyone. She actually does something both worse and more palatable. She threatens to destroy their reputation – to force them to live the rest of their life in shame. That to me, at least philosophically, is a far worse punishment. And yet it doesn’t leave us disliking the character.
Also, she had a logical motivation for doing this to people. She was striking fear in the type of guys who raped her friend, which led to that friend’s suicide, in the hopes that they wouldn’t do the same to some other girl. So she has a noble cause. And I know that cause isn’t given in the first scene. But we can tell that she’s doing this for a reason. She’s not doing this cause she’s bored. And, unfortunately, that’s the vibe I got from Rosemary. That she kills people because she’s bored.
Now, there’s a counter-argument to this that I would suspect Sam would make. Which is that Rosemary is a serial killer. She kills people. That’s how psychopaths operate. If you start giving her too much motivation, are we being truthful to her compulsion?
This is why I was musing in the comments section yesterday how execution-dependent these scripts are. It’s because there are all these fractions of tonal directions you can go in, each of which can change the entire feel of your script. We don’t have to bring a biker into this opening scene, for example. That’s a small creative choice that ends up having an outsized influence on how we perceive Rosemary.
But even beyond that, this particular setup where we have to root for a serial killer is always tricky. Cause think about it. You are asking us to ROOT FOR SOMEONE WHO KILLS PEOPLE. The variations of this that are successful have writers who put an inordinate amount of time into figuring how to make that scenario work. Serial killer Dexter kills other serial killers. So it’s easy to root for him.
I’m guessing Sam was inspired by the recent success of “You,” and that’s probably the best tonal comparison for this script. Cause Joel is a cold-hearted killer and I had no problem rooting for him. I have found that, when you write bad people, it can be helpful to give us a running-commentary of what’s going on in their head through voice over narration. It helps us better understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Joel benefits from that for sure.
But if I was Sam’s screenplay lawyer, I would tell this Scriptshadow review guy that Joel and Rosemary are cut from the same cloth. If you’re going to root for him, why can’t you root for her? Which is what makes screenwriting and scripts like this so interesting to discuss. There are no simple answers. Plus, everybody has a different threshold for what they’re willing to accept out of a character.
The script does rebound once it hits the second act due to the fact that we don’t like these family members. So we’re curious if Rosemary’s going to dispose of them. Then it’s a fun game of waiting to see what she’s going to do. And, for the most part, I thought that worked. The climax is also worth getting to. It takes the script in a different direction than I was expecting.
My issue with it, though, was that the badness of these family characters seemed to be set up as too obvious. Zach is so over the top douchey. The mother is so needlessly cruel to her son. The dad embodies everything that is wrong with the 1-percenters. It never felt like these were real people. They felt more like caricatures designed specifically so that we would want to see them die.
Ultimately, it was that combination that didn’t work for me. A main character I didn’t like because she initially kills people who don’t deserve to die. And family victims who were so overtly designed to die that it didn’t feel like she was killing people. She was killing archetypes.
There’s one final example I wanted to highlight that exemplified my problem with the character of Rosemary. When Charlie proposes to her, her first reaction is a daydream. She imagines bashing him over the head and throwing him off a building to his death. This guy, who loves this woman. Who is in his most vulnerable moment, seeing if she’ll share the rest of her life with him, and that’s her first thought?? Why would I want to root for that person?
For “Rosemary” to work, I think Sam needs to find a way to make us care about Rosemary. The good news is, Sam is a very good writer. So I suspect that even if he can’t make this tricky story work, that his future scripts are going to be worth looking out for.
Script Link: Rosemary
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Remember that a comma, or lack of a comma, can make a line read differently. “Charles! How are you handsome?” is the line used in the script. It should be, “Charles! How are you, handsome?” Otherwise, you’re asking Charles how is it that he could possibly be handsome.
GET A PRIVATE SCRIPT CONSULTATION FROM CARSON!: Don’t like the idea of your logline or script being reviewed by the public? Get a private consult with me! I consult on loglines ($25), feature screenplays ($499) and everything in between. If you’re unsure what it is you need, e-mail me. I’ll answer everything you want to know and help you come up with a consultation that works for you. Just this past week I consulted on a synopsis, an outline, a first act, and a writer who sent me five loglines and wanted to know which one he should write as a script! So there’s a lot of flexibility if you need advice. You can set up a consult with me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
