Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: When an assassin who works from home discovers that a secret organization is killing all the assassins from *her* secret organization, she must find out who’s in charge and stop them.
About: Amazon just bought this script for low six figures. This is not Kat Wood’s first sale. She sold a couple of scripts to Amy Pascal, one called Envoy and the other, Genus. Born in England, Wood is a former BBC broadcast journalist. David Leitch will be producing “Ruby.” Carson will be retitling the script. It should be titled, “Ruby Tuesday.” Sequels can then be titled, “Ruby Wednesday,” “Ruby Thursday,” etc.
Writer: Kat Wood
Details: 103 pages
Guess what?
The girl-with-a-gun genre is not dead! We’ve got yet another sale in the genre. I’m a little surprised since, of the girl-with-a-gun flicks that have gotten produced so far, none of them have done that well. Heck, Angelina Jolie’s “Salt” did better than all of them and that movie came around long before this trend started. I’m interested in today’s sale because I want to see how this genre is evolving. Because, make no mistake, it’s going to need to evolve if it wants to stick around. Let’s get into it.
Ruby is a Gemstone, an agent for a secret agency. And Ruby is a special type of agent. She works from home. In the opening scene, we watch Ruby assassinate another man — WHO’S CURRENTLY IN INDIA. That’s right, Ruby tracks him and communicates with him via a series of hacks, sending him into the warehouse he owns, which was laced with explosives. Boom!
In her spare time, Ruby does something kind of weird. She stalks her ex-boyfriend, Scott. Now before you judge, you have to understand that Ruby’s handler, Mellor, told her she had to leave her boyfriend because it increased the chances that her identity would be discovered. Ruby then argued for a compromise. She’d still be able to monitor Scott (via phone, webcams and security cameras) so that if anyone came to hurt him, she’d know.
And that’s exactly what happens. Two intruders invade Scott’s place. Ruby immediately races across town to stop them but by the time she gets there, Scott’s been stabbed and the second intruder has escaped. Ruby races Scott to the hospital and then, in a savage move, locates the intruder online and lures him to a building pretending to be his employer. There, she traps him in an elevator, which she’s remotely controlling, and forces him to tell her what the plan was. After she finds out, she slams the elevator into the ground at a hundred miles an hour.
The intel was that somebody named Atlas is going after all the Gemstones. Mellor says he already knew this. But that there is new information. A former Gemstone named Sapphire is selling all the Gemstones out! Ruby will have to find Sapphire and figure out who these Atlas folks are, all while making sure they don’t invade Scott’s hospital and kill him. Can Ruby do it? What do you think?
So, yesterday, I pointed out how Jon Favreau gave us a Western bar showdown scene that was so cliche a six year old could’ve predicted what happened. I said if you’re going to include cliche situations, you need to find a fresh angle. “Ruby” shows us how to do this with its first scene. How many assassination scenes have we seen in movies? 50,000? 100,000? There are only so many ways you can have one person assassinate another. So the average writer is going to do what? Do it the way it’s always been done. I mean, there’s no possible way to create a new assassination scene, right? And even if there was, it would take too long to come up with. Much easier to surrender to the trope. NOPE! Kat Wood’s main character executes her assassination from 8000 miles away. Remotely. That’s how you do something differently, folks. That’s how you catch a reader’s attention.
To achieve this, you must go against traditional screenwriting teachings, which tell you that if there’s going to be an interaction between your hero and someone else, it should happen face to face! You would never want your hero interacting with someone on a phone or a computer. And yet the entire scene in Ruby is constructed around that conceit. This is the thing with fresh ideas. They’re often hidden in the things you’ve been told not to do. That’s why people rarely think of them. They’ve been brainwashed to never consider such ideas. This is also why, every once in a while, you’ll see a really original scene from a beginner. It’s because they’ve never been taught not to do these things. Of course, they don’t know anything else about writing either so despite the occasional original scene, their screenplay is a giant mess.
For about forty pages of Ruby, I had my fist raised in triumph. I liked the remote assassination scene. I loved the elevator torture scene. I was in! This is exactly what I needed out of my agent action movies. Fresh ideas. Fresh set-pieces. However, every ten pages after the elevator scene, Ruby got more and more generic. It was literally as if Wood decided to put away her “originality” magic wand. Because literally everything that happened next was textbook girl-with-a-gun secret agent storytelling. The mysterious secret organization – Atlas. The one-on-one kick-punch-pow fights with the other agents. We even – gasp – have her handler turn on her. Literally the same thing that happens in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE MOVIES.
I don’t get it.
I honestly don’t get it.
And I’m not talking to just Wood here because I see this in every script. It’s like the writer reaches this point after which they stop being creative. They stop caring about making interesting choices. And they just follow the handbook. Whatever the handbook says should happen here, that’s what they’re going to do.
I think I at least kind of know why this happens. The first half of your script is operating under a different set of rules. Things don’t need to be explained anytime soon. This allows for more freedom in the storytelling. You can write in crazy things and, for the most part, not worry about the consequences. But the closer you get to the end, the more everything needs to make sense. This limits the number of creative options you have because if you decide to, say, kill off the main character at the end of the second act, you have to confront questions like, “Well then who’s going to take over the story? And why would we still care?” It’s much easier to toe the company line and do it the way everybody else did it.
I think writers are also scared of coming up with an ending like Tenet. Sure, it’s unpredictable and weird, two things I’m advocating for here. But it doesn’t make sense. What more writers need to get used to is writing a lot of drafts where they play with different endings. It takes longer but you’re more likely to notice just how generic your script is if you’re writing a lot of drafts of it. That’s how they came up with the Delorean in Back to the Future. Remember that, for a lot of drafts, the time machine in that film was a refrigerator. It takes longer but it’s worth it. Cause the last thing you want your reader thinking when they finish your script is, “Wow, those last 50 pages felt exactly like 20 other movies I’ve seen.” You’re better than that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m willing to bet that the reason this script got purchased was because of the first 40 pages. Not the last 60. It should not surprise you, then, that the first 40 pages were when Wood was giving us scenes we hadn’t seen before. I mean, I just read an amateur script EXACTLY LIKE THIS two weeks ago. Literally, the writing is the exact same. The only difference is those first 40 pages of Ruby were more unique. Now imagine if you did that FOR AN ENTIRE SCRIPT. You wouldn’t be getting low six-figure offers from Amazon. You’d be getting low seven-figure offers form Paramount or Sony.
