Genre: Drama
Premise: Two struggling lobster fishermen try to hold the crew of a giant container boat for ransom, but when the plan falls apart, one leaves the other to fend for himself.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Josh Woolf, is brand new and does not yet have any credits.
Writer: Josh Woolf
Details: 120 pages
If you put any characters on a boat in the sea and place them in a dangerous situation, there’s a good chance I will want to read that script.
Being on a ship in the middle of the ocean is an inherently dramatic situation. Cause if anything goes wrong, you’re fuuuuuuuuuuu**ed.
But today’s writer takes that premise in a curious direction – his characters leave the boat and go back to shore! Can he still make it work? Let’s find out…
40-something Dennis Kelly is a broke crab fisherman. He didn’t want this job but, due to his fisherman father’s wishes, he took over the business after he died. Dennis works with ex-con Nick Silva. Nobody else will hire Nick because of his past.
Both of them are getting fed up because the shipping business is creating more and more shipping lanes in the ocean, limiting where they can fish, and leaving them with smaller and smaller catches. This leaves Dennis in a ton of debt, which he hides from his wife.
So Dennis comes up with a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone idea: Let’s hold the crew of one of these ship’s ransom. They’re in a unique situation where they have the kind of boat that can get them to these ships. And once they’re on, they can enact their plan. So that’s what they do. They pretend they’re stranded. Once they’re on the ship, they pull out guns, call the company president, and demand 25 million dollars.
But when the president gives pushback, Dennis goes to plan B. There’s a safe onboard. Dennis brings the captain to get that safe while Nick watches the other crew members. But, 20 minutes later, Nick looks out the window to see Dennis heading off in a life boat. Nick charges upstairs, only to find one of the crew members shot and dead.
Nick grabs his own boat and leaves. The two separately get back to shore, to their small Maine town, where they immediately become suspects in what just happened. Dennis hid the safe on his boat but then his boat gets impounded because he hasn’t paid the dock rent in months. As Dennis constructs a plan to retrieve the money, an angry Nick comes back into the picture, determined to make sure he doesn’t take the fall for Dennis’s plan.
Sometimes we write screenplays.
And, sometimes, screenplays write us.
What I mean is, you can have an idea of what your script is going to be. But then when you start to write, it begins wriggling around like a fish. It doesn’t want to go where you want to take it. So you let it take you where it wants to go before, after a while, you’re in an entirely different screenplay from the one you started.
That’s how Sea Dogs read to me.
It reads like a writer who planned to write about two regular guys taking over a giant container ship, but then detours off the ship, back to land, and becomes about the fallout from the botched plan rather than the plan itself.
I could be wrong. Maybe that’s where Woolf always wanted to take the script. But that’s what it FELT LIKE when reading it. Because when you have choices in writing, the route you usually want to take is the one that creates a more compelling situation. There’s no question that staying on this ship and dealing with the deteriorating factors of a botched ransom had a lot more potential than going back home and running away from cops.
There are a million scripts about guys running from cops in small towns. But there are very few where people are trying to rob a giant container ship.
So I think Woolf made the wrong creative choice there. A lot of people are going to read this and feel like it was a bait-and-switch.
But to his credit, he does a pretty good job with the fallout part. At least up until the last 20 pages, when things got too messy. The best thing he did was have Dennis betray Nick. When Nick sees that Dennis is shooting off in the lifeboat, we’re genuinely thinking, “Wait, what’s going to happen now?”
And Woolf keeps us on the edge of our canoe, asking that question, for a good 50 pages. We’re following the two individually and we gradually realize that Dennis set Nick up. He’s hoping he’ll get blamed for the crew member kill and Dennis will be able to slip away Scott-free.
Of course, that’s not what happens. Dennis’s problems get worse as he gets separated from the money he stole and he desperately tries to get it back, all while the cops are closing in.
The script is also a good example of the power of money as a dramatic tool. Running out of money can be cliched if you’re just focusing on overdue bills. But it can be quite intense when it’s all-consuming. That’s what Dennis goes through. He’s 4 months late on every single bill, plus his mortgage. He also loses his boat. He tries to win money back through poker but just loses more. Everywhere he turns, money is being taken away from him.
When you take away enough money from your character, your character becomes desperate. And desperate characters are more reckless. They make riskier choices. They hurt people. Those are all things that make dramatic storytelling better!
Unfortunately, that entertaining reckless behavior is muted due to just how pathetic Dennis is. Actually, both Dennis and Nick are pathetic pathetic people. The way that Dennis has made all these terrible choices in his life and hidden them from others, despite the fact that they could blow back on them (such as his wife) is despicable. So we actually want Dennis to get caught. Hell, I wanted him to die.
I’m still not sure how that story-type works. I grew up with the traditional storytelling axiom of “Make your hero likable so we’ll root for them.” Or, if they’re “bad,” give them some qualities so that we still root for them. Dennis didn’t have a single redeeming quality.
I think there was more of an opportunity here to make Nick a genuinely good guy. Dennis would then screw him over so he’d have to take the blame for what they did. Nick finally toughens up and comes after him. Make it more: Nick vs. Dennis. But, instead, the script mostly forces them to deal with the fallout individually.
I would say the script is worth checking out. But it’s another instance, similar to The Instigators, where it starts off big then tapers off. The script can never quite recover from our frustration over what it could’ve been. Had this stayed on the boat and we beefed up some of the boat worker characters, it could’ve been a really fun screenplay.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: How to open your script with a flashforward — Opening flashforwards are very common in screenplays. I read a lot of them. But most writers write them incorrectly.
What they do is give you a tiny snippet of an exciting situation before quickly ending the scene and cutting to the present. Instead, you want to do what Josh Woolf does here. You want to create an actual SCENE with a beginning middle and end.
Cause think about it. The whole reason you’ve chosen to use this scene from the future is that it’s exciting right? You’re jumping forward in time because, had you started your script at an earlier point, you wouldn’t have had anything exciting to start on.
So the fact that you’re utilizing an exciting situation means YOU SHOULD MILK IT. This scene, which follows the act of picking up two people from a lifeboat and them being dangerous, is exactly 3 pages long, which is the bare minimum of how long a flashforward scene should be. And it’s good! It’s one of the best scenes in the script.
Most of the flashforwards I read, especially in beginner screenplays, last half a page, sometimes a full page. But rarely longer. Sea Dogs’ opening scene is strong in part because the writer takes the time to tell a story within it.
