Genre: Con
Premise: (from Black List) A chain of scam artists goes after one wealthy family with the perfect plan to drain them of their funds. But when love, heartbreak, and jealousy slither their way into the grand scheme, it becomes unclear whether the criminals are conning or the ones being conned.
About: Oddly, this comes from the team whose only other feature credit is the wacky Jonah Hill comedy, The Sitter. It finished top 10 on the 2020 Black List. Apple and A24 snatched the spec script up when it went up for auction. Julianne Moore will play Madeline.
Writers: Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka
Details: 117 pages
This genre has disappeared as of late and I’m trying to figure out why.
It could be as simple as nobody’s written a good con-man script in a couple of decades. I’m trying to remember the last one they released. Was it that Will Smith Amber Heard abomination? The box office results of that one probably didn’t help any subsequent con man movies get made.
I think the issue is that when you write one of these, they can’t just be “movie smart.” It’s one of the few genres where the writer has to be a lot more intelligent than the audience. Because if they aren’t, the cons aren’t clever. And if the cons aren’t clever in a con-man script, then what are we even doing?
Most of the cons in these scripts are “movie-clever.” You know how you’ll watch a movie and there’s a party scene and one of the characters will make a joke and everyone in the scene will laugh but nobody in the audience will laugh? That’s a “movie-joke.” It doesn’t make real people laugh. Same problem with bad con-man scripts. The cons work on the movie characters but the audience wasn’t fooled at all.
I’m hoping this is one of those rare con-man scripts where I’m genuinely outsmarted. Let’s see.
20-something Tom is living a pretty lonely life in Philadelphia when we meet him. It doesn’t help that he owns a bookstore that has no customers. Luckily, that changes when 20-something cutie pie Sandra shows up. Sandra is looking for a book for school and just as Tom is about to ring her up, he does something he never does – he asks her out to dinner.
The two have a great first date, then a great second date, and after a couple of weeks, they’re spending every second together. Tom is on cloud nine! That is until one morning at Sandra’s place when some guy shows up yelling at Sandra. She tells him to leave and explains to Tom that that was her brother. He owes a lot of money to some bad people. How much, Tom asks. 350,000 dollars.
Despite us screaming through the screen at Tom to NOT DO IT, Tom gives her the money (it turns out Tom was secretly rich). And then, magically, the next day, Sandra no longer lives in her apartment. She’s gone.
We then cut back in time to meet… Sandra. But this Sandra is much different than the previous Sandra. She’s a hooker-junkie. Pissed at the lack of money Sandra is making, her pimp makes her approach some lonely guy at the bar. This is Max. Max is in his 30s and can best be described as neutral. After some small talk, Max informs Sandra that he’s going to take her away from this life and help her find a better one.
Cut to our “Neo training sequence” where Max teaches Sandra how to be a lady. He teaches her to sound like she knows about things she doesn’t. And, most importantly, he teaches her to find and play a mark. Pretty soon, Sandra is ready to be a real live con woman.
Then we cut back even further in time to meet… Max. It turns out Max is a screw-up who constantly crawls back home for money. Even his own single mom, Madeline, is embarrassed for him. And this is the worst time for Max to be asking for money since his mom has finally found someone she likes – Richard. Richard is handsome and successful and a genuinely good person. Please, his mother tells Max, don’t screw this up for me.
But what if I told you Max couldn’t screw it up for his mom. That’s because, this isn’t really his mom! It’s his mentor! The person who taught him how to con! And they’re lovers now. Or, at least, Max believers they’re lovers. His fake mom may very well be taking Max for a ride. But that’s okay. Because Max has just found out something very important about Richard. That his son owns a bookstore in Philadelphia. That’s right… Richard’s son is Tom! Duh-duh-duhhhhhhhh!
The dead horse I beat over and over again on this site is: FIND. AN. ANGLE. Find an angle. There are lots of ways to tell a story. You can, of course, use the tried-and-true “straightforward” approach. No gimmicks. No games. A simple linear narrative approach. And that’ll work if the idea is really strong. But sometimes you need a snazzier approach.
That’s what we got today. Telling this story in reverse order while switching the central character each time was genius. Like I said at the beginning of this review, the con-man genre is inherently predictable. So if you tell it in a linear fashion, it’s too easy to guess what’ll happen. The very nature of us changing perspectives and times every 20 pages eliminated our power of prediction. Cause I didn’t even know where the story was headed, much less who was conning who.
But the writers didn’t stop there. They knew that for any screenplay to work, it has to connect with the reader on an emotional level. There are a handful of emotions to choose from. Here, they use anger. The manner in which Sandra took advantage of Tom was so cruel that we wanted to see her go down. So the writer wisely made that the final storyline.
It turns out that Madeline screwed Max over because what she was really interested in was getting Richard’s money when he died (he was in poor health). So the story picks up at the wake, with Tom meeting Madeline as the lawyer informs them that Tom’s father left all of the money to Madeline (in part because Tom proved he wasn’t financially responsible after being conned out of 350 grand). Madeline is elated, of course. But what she doesn’t know is that Tom has spent the last couple of years looking for the woman who conned him. And he’s finally found her. Of course, wherever Sandra is, her connection to Max won’t be far behind. And guess who’s connected to Max? Madeline.
So it isn’t just about the cons here. It’s about the emotional payoff. Do we get to see what we really want to see – which is for these three people who took advantage of Tom to go down. And that, my friends, is how you write a good screenplay.
A side note here is that the dialogue was only slightly better than average. However, I think that’s why it worked. A lot of times in this genre, the writers try to show off their dialogue. Everybody’s got a clever comeback. People are using double-entendres. A lot of the dialogue is dripping with sexual innuendo. That’s fine if that’s the kind of story you’re writing. But these writers wanted this to feel realistic. If you want a story to feel realistic, you can’t over-stylize the dialogue. It’s got to feel authentic.
Which is a good reminder. Everybody talks about how important dialogue is. But if you’re not great at it, there are stories you can tell that don’t require you to be great. So just pick those stories.
My only problem with this script is the ending. I’m not going to go into specifics because it’s super-spoiler territory. But I think the writers bit off more than they could chew. The beauty of the first 90% of this screenplay was how simple it was. Yes, we kept changing times and characters, but once we got into a time-period, it was straightforward. The ending betrays that simplicity, which is unfortunate, because before that, this was a ‘mega-impressive.’ It was, honestly, almost perfect. Hopefully they clean the ending up before they shoot. Either way, this was still a really good script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure we know what’s at stake!! I find out AFTERWARDS that the Richard con was a half billion dollar con?? No no no no no no. That information needs to be clear BEFOREHAND. We, the reader, will be way more invested if we know that kind of money is at stake. Before that, I thought Richard maybe had 5 million dollars or something. I was like, good for you. You can get a three bedroom apartment in midtown. I didn’t realize how big this con actually was.
