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Genre: Heist/Sci-Fi
Premise: Still reeling in the wake of her husband’s death, master thief Viola Crier signs on to a risky, last-minute job set to take place inside a man-made time loop, but as the number of loops increases, the job begins to spiral out of control.
About: Today’s writer and her script finished with 10 votes on the Black List. She is repped by William Morris Endeavor. This is her first screenplay. Or at least the first that’s made any noise.
Writer: Lindsay Michael
Details: 120 pages
How in the world do we follow yesterday?
I’m still thinking about it. Every time I think about what happened, I still can’t believe it. This guy hit someone on stage and then 15 minutes later, everyone gave him a standing ovation. We have to be living in a simulation for that to have happened, right? It defies all logic. There have to be some repercussions. Or are we going to all pretend it never happened, like the Oscar audience?
Anyway, we shall try to move on. And what better way to move on than with a new loop script! I’ve developed one of these myself so I know how tricky they can be. Let’s see how today’s writer handled it.
It’s 2038. A young female thief, Viola, is doing a job in Shanghai with her thief-husband, but he’s killed by the people they steal from. Viola is barely able to get out of Shanghai, with the help of a mysterious man named Okafor. Okafor tells Viola that he wants to hire her for the hardest job she’s ever done – stealing a 53 million dollar diamond. Go put a team together, he says.
She first gets 50 year-old Sybill, who is a master of disguise. She then flies to another country to pick up 19 year old safecracker, Cass. She then grabs explosives expert, Nemo, in Uzbekistan. And finally she gets pilot, Jackie, who’s going to fly everyone out once they steal the diamond.
The target is a place called Sandpiper Resort, in the Namib Desert. The place is a sand ski resort for the rich and famous. Okafor’s brother, a war profiteer named Wangari, took the diamond their dead father left for Okafor and Okafor wants it back. Wangari is in town to vacation at Sandpiper and Okafor knows he’s brought the diamond with him.
Once everyone is together, Okafor reveals their ace in the hole – he’s got a time-looping device. That means they’ll have not one, not two, not three, but four full shots to get the diamond. Anything after that and the time distortion field will destabilize. Nobody is very happy about this unpredictable device but since each individual’s take is 10 million bucks, they get over it fast.
The first run-through, the bomb they use to break into Wangari’s room ends up accidentally blowing a hole in the underground resort and sending a stream of suffocating sand in to snuff everybody out. Once the loop resets, they decide to spend the next shot on a test run. There are too many unknown variables that they need to figure out to pull this off. That leaves them with only two tries left. As you can imagine, the pressure mounts quickly, and the group come to the realization that four tries at the heist of the century might not be enough.
With scripts like this, you have to watch out for information overload and subsequent reader disorientation. Screenwriters are notorious for forgetting just how much information they’re throwing at the reader. To them, this information is common knowledge, so they assume it’s common knowledge to you, as well. This is what gets them into trouble. They’re operating on the assumption that you’re on the same page they are, when, in reality, you’re still ten pages behind them, trying to figure out that thing that happened on page 9.
Sandpiper starts out with a woman standing over a dead body in a morgue, a man whose wedding ring is featured prominently and, therefore, may have been our hero’s husband. Our hero then runs off with a Chinese detective, escaping a team of policemen, only to later get double-crossed by the detective.
At this point, I don’t know who my hero is, why we’re in China, what just happened to her maybe-husband, why she’s playing secret games with a Chinese cop, and what her job is. The next thing you know we’re meeting some random guy named Okafor who helps us escape on a train, then offers us a job to steal a diamond, then minutes later we go on a 4 continent montage to collect a mission impossible team, meeting four team-members who are going to help Viola do the heist.
It’s only after all this is over that we learn her and her husband were a thief-team and they’d been caught, which is why he was killed. In other words, I’m only learning what happened on page 1, on page 40. That’s not acceptable. I know, as writers, we think we’re cleverly withholding information and creating suspense by drip-feeding relevant backstory twenty pages at a time, but you have to be realistic. I’m supposed to keep track of those details while memorizing 4 different people on 4 different continents. That’s unrealistic.
This particular mistake is almost always a beginner one as it takes a while, as a screenwriter, to understand what a reader can and can’t keep up with. That comes through feedback from dozens of people reading your scripts. Which is one of the reasons I encourage new writers to first master simple one-character stories before moving on to Marvel-level 22-parallel storyline screenplays.
This issue continues throughout the script, making relatively straightforward plot points difficult to keep up with. For example, Viola gives up her 10 million dollar share to Jackie. Jackie says why would you do that. Viola says why does it matter? Then, 30 pages later, Viola reveals that Okafor promised her that, if she could steal this diamond for him, he’d use his time loop machine to send her back to save her husband.
Why all the cloak and dagger? Why not just tell us FROM THE BEGINNING that Okafor offers Viola this? I would’ve been way more invested in Viola’s pursuit since I’d know that the stakes were much higher. I just didn’t understand why everything needed to be a secret from the reader. Sure, sometimes you want secrets but not with basic important story elements, like motivation.
I’m not going to knock everything about the script. The loop heist idea is cool. And, strategically speaking, this is the kind of script you want to write if you’re trying to get those Mission Impossible studio jobs. You write in a “big action script” adjacent genre, like sci-fi action. But the hard stuff should be the characters and plotting in a screenplay, not conveying basic stuff like GSU. It just killed any potential enjoyment of the script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned : Never make a script exactly 120 pages. It makes seasoned readers think that you read a screenwriting book that a script couldn’t be over 120 pages and so you nipped and tucked your script relentlessly until you finally got it down to exactly that number. There are definitely things in your script that are not precious enough for you to hold onto that number. If you’re at 120, try to get it down 115. Even 117 is better than 120. 120 has “newbie” written all over it as it reeks of OCD adherence to ancient screenwriting requirements.
