Genre: Action-Comedy (Family?)
Premise: Two former thieves are having a hard enough time with their fussy newborn baby when a mishap draws them back into their old lives, forcing them to recover a priceless jade bangle, escape their boss’s murderous son and, toughest of all, get their baby to sleep through the night.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. The writers, Ted Kaplan and Jenni Hendriks, have written a couple of small novels. This is their first success story in the screenwriting world.
Writers: Ted Kaplan and Jenni Hendriks
Details: 109 pages
Real-life married couple Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively for the leads?
Comedy and Action.
If you can master the combination of these two genres, a huge world opens up to you. Cause this is where all the money is made. This is the powerball winning ticket. Not that thieving nickel slot machine.
Look at all the movies that make the most money. Marvel. Star Wars. Fast and Furious. Even Bond. What do they contain? They contain copious amounts of action, and humor!
In other words, these are great writing sample specs to get into the Marvel, the Lucasfilm, and Universal offices so you can pitch your takes on writing one of those movies.
My concern with today’s spec, however, is that it might be too family-oriented, and therefore get pigeonholed in the “lightweight” category. The lightweight action-comedy writers DO NOT get pulled in by Marvel and Lucasfilm. So let’s see which side of the thin cool line Sleep Factor finds itself on.
Mia and Ryan are the ultimate thieving couple. Because they’re in a relationship, they can read each other minds, as Mia utilizes her tech skills to fly drones around the museums they’re casing, pulling security guards along with them, while Ryan slips in and steals whatever they need to steal.
But those days are about to come to an end because Mia is pregnant. Congratulations, Mia. Cut to a year and a half later and these two are lame-o suburbanites who work at both Home Depot and some boring office job.
The two are not dealt a nice baby hand, as their daughter, Penny, can’t strop crying. The sleepless nights are taking years off the couples’ life. The only solution they’ve found to get their daughter to sleep is to drive her around in their car.
One day, when Ryan is coming home from the grocery store, he sees a car robbery taking place and immediately recognizes his wife as the leader of the team. Ryan chases her down then yells at her. She apologizes and says she’s lost her lust for life. That’s the only reason she started doing these late night robberies. And, after some discussion, Ryan admits he does the same thing.
While this conversation is happening, Mia’s very “hip” crew (“JIN-WOO, Korean-American, intense, probably wearing a social justice tee, LOLA, Black, the brains of the operation, and BEX, non-binary, all attitude”) steals the rare extremely valuable bangle bracelet that Ryan stole from his last job, and drive off.
That bracelet belongs to Ryan and Mia’s longtime handler, Joe, who tells them he’s going to kill them if they don’t bring it to him by morning. So off Ryan and Mia go, their baby in tow, to retrieve the bangle. But when the young hip crew make a side-deal with Joe’s biggest rival – the Estonians! – the stakes go up considerably. Do Ryan and Mia still have what it takes? And can they perform this mission with a baby in tow?? We’re going to find out!
Since this script has a lot of car-chasing in it, let’s talk about lanes.
You, the screenwriter, need to know what lane your script is in. You then need to play by the rules of that lane. So, if you’re in the slasher lane, you probably aren’t going to have any car chases. If you’re in the buddy-cop comedy lane, you’re probably not going to have any steamy sex scenes.
Your lane determines the rules you abide by.
I’m not sure Sleep Solution knows what lane it’s in. At first I thought this was a family action movie in the vein of Adventures in Babysitting. But there’s quite a lot of swearing here. And you can’t swear so much in a family movie. So that told me they’re trying to pull in the regular action demographic.
Except which action fans are going to to pay to see a movie about a couple stealing things while trying to keep their baby asleep? It’s not cool enough. I’m sorry but you can dress it up any which way you want. Parents aren’t cool. nd babies aren’t cool.
That leaves the script with a very narrow audience, as far as I can tell. You’re basically aiming for the “young parents” demo. And I don’t know if those people have time to watch any movies, much less this one.
In addition to this, the movie missed out on its best idea. They establish early on that the baby can’t sleep unless it’s in a car driving at least 45 miles per hour. I loved the motivation for this. The baby was in Mia’s tummy during all her wild car chase burglaries. So it makes sense that it feels the need for speed. But that storyline is abandoned early on. There are plenty of times when our couple stops and discusses things. At one point they even pawn the baby off on a babysitter.
Isn’t the best version of this movie a modern-day family-friendly take on Speed? They can’t let the car stop or else the baby wakes up? Admittedly, that would be a very challenging script to write. But I say go with the best hook you’ve got. There’s no true hook here if the baby can be given over to other characters at certain points in the story.
The script also suffers from a vanilla execution.
I’ve struggled with whether the family-friendly comedy can have anything other than vanilla execution. You can’t get too wild in the PG space. But then I always think of Pixar movies. Those films manage to bring in parents, kids, as well as the 18-35 demo. They achieve this because their films are highly imaginative and put a premium on character development.
There’s very little imagination in Sleep Solution.
In fact, there was only one scene that I felt was worthy of a good spec screenplay. Mia and Ryan capture one of the woke crew members and demand to know where the other crew members are exchanging the stolen bangle bracelet..
The scene happens in the back of their car and Bex, the crew member, won’t budge. He’s not giving up the information. So Mia proceeds to change Penny’s diaper in front of him as a torture device. To a 21 year old kid, this is pure hell. He fights it and fights it as Penny goes into extreme detail about the diaper-changing process until it just gets too disgusting and Bex cracks.
I absolutely love when writers do this. They write a scene THAT COULD ONLY OCCUR IN THEIR MOVIE. You have to remember, people, that readers read the same average to slightly-above-average scenes all the time. We’ve become immune to them. One of the most effective tools you have against this is mining the unique nature of your concept.
If Mia and Ryan had threatened Bex with a gun or a knife, we could’ve seen that in any movie. This was the far better, and funnier, option. But that was it. We never get another scene like it again.
Due to the vanilla execution and lack of imagination in Sleep Solution, I can’t recommend it. It has that professional sheen to it that differentiates it from the average amateur script. But in order to get your script beyond the bottom layer of “professional,” you have to push yourself in the execution stage.
A writer once told me about the way his mentor would critique his screenplays. Whenever he encountered a scene, moment, or set piece that felt average or slight-above-average, he would write down: NGE. That stood for “Not Good Enough.” In other words: YOU NEED TO TRY HARDER.
Script Link: Sleep Solution
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Again, write scenes that can only happen in your movie because they evolve from your specific premise. A classic famous example of this is the birth scene in A Quiet Place. That scene could only be that effective in that specific environment. Sadly, whenever I see writers succeed at this, they only do it once or twice a script, like here. Push yourself more. Try to come up with five of these scenes — six, seven, ten. The more you’re mining your specific premise, the more original your script is going to be!
