Genre: Biopic!!!!!
Premise: An overweight sexually confused young boy overcomes massive amounts of adversity to become one of the most famous exercise personalities in history.
About: This script finished top 30 on last year’s Black List. It comes from newcomer Greg Wayne, who hails from Canada. Wayne’s favorite movies are Barry Lyndon, The Remains of The Day, and Amadeus, which pretty much guarantees he’s never read Scriptshadow before. His favorite screenwriter is… well, I’ll let him tell you. “I love Joe Eszterhas. His screenplays have such an effortless flow to them, and are incredibly easy to read. I swear you can finish the BASIC INSTINCT script in like twenty-five minutes.”
Writer: Greg Wayne
Details: 110 pages
This is your quarterly reminder that, as much as I would like to develop a computer virus that seeks out every biopic screenplay on every hard drive in the world and instantly destroys it, biopics remain the most dependable bet to make the Black List. They don’t even need to be good! You can just write about somebody famous, give the script the old college try, and voila, you’re celebrated as the next Aaron Sorkin.
Okay, maybe it’s not *that* easy. But if I had a dime for every average biopic I read from the Black List, I would’ve retired and been in Hawaii by now. The current trend seems to be picking people from the 80s and 90s under one of two categories. One, talented and immensely successful artists (Madonna, Kurt Cobain), two, eccentric and weird celebrities (Richard Simmons, Anna Nicole Smith, Mr. T, Vanilla Ice). I think the reason writers tend to go with the latter is because it’s easier to get the rights to them. And, obviously, you don’t have to worry about getting access to their music.
I’m yet to read a script about an eccentric celebrity that’s blown me away. But I guess there’s a first time for everything. Might today’s review be that first?
10 year old overweight Richard Simmons (real name, “Milton”) is growing up in the single worst place in the United States to be a food addict, New Orleans. You can’t find a breakfast there that’s under 2000 calories. Richard’s tough father tries to get Richard to lose some weight but he just can’t do it. Richard loves food!
At 19, and over 250 pounds, Richard heads to Italy, where he becomes an actor who stars in a bunch of commercials as “the fat guy.” After a particularly humiliating commercial, Richard heads back to New Orleans. In his dream of dreams, he wants to be a performer. He just doesn’t know how. Then one day, a friend takes him to an aerobics class, and he’s in heaven! He’s dancing, yelling, having an out of body experience.
The next day, he tries to get his overweight friend, Maggie, to come to the class. But she’s too afraid of being fat-shamed. That’s when Richard has the revelation of all revelations. There is an entire market of people out there – overweight women, mainly – who are too afraid to go to a gym because of the way they look. So Richard creates an aerobics class specifically for overweight people!
Not long after, he becomes a superstar. Women don’t just like Richard, they don’t just love Richard, they see him as a religious figure, a conduit to God himself. And Richard runs with it. He opens dozens of Richard Simmons aerobics centers across the United States. He starts a TV show. He says yes to EVERYONE who asks him to do something. Pretty soon, it’s Richard Simmons’ world and everyone is living in it.
One of the reasons Richard is so successful is that he actually cares about everyone. When his production team shows Richard the hundreds of fan letters he’s been getting, they ask him if they should throw them away. Throw them away??? Hell no, Richard says. I’m going to write every single one of them back. And he does!
While all this is happening, Richard is massively struggling with his sexuality. He is clearly gay and yet refuses to admit it no matter how many times he’s confronted with it. He is so determined people not know he’s gay, that Richard doesn’t date anyone. As in, ever! He lives a completely asexual lifestyle. This resistance manifests itself in some weird habits, such as Richard keeping a giant dollhouse with tons of headless barbies in it that he often has little tea sessions with. The language during these sessions is… not suitable for children to say the least.
At the height of Richard’s empire, which culminates in him winning an Emmy, he realizes that there is no possible way he can keep up with all of this. There are too many studios, too many shows, too many appearances, too many people to keep in touch with. All that energy he’s been blasting out for the last 30 years finally overwhelms him, and he retreats out of the spotlight. To this day, no one has seen him since 2014.
One of the things I find interesting about biopics is that the writer will often operate on the assumption that the reader already knows where the story is going because they know what has happened in that person’s life. For example, if you write a movie about Jaleel White, the actor who played Urkel, everyone supposedly knows that he ends up on the show Family Matters, where he then becomes a big star.
The problem with approaching your script this way is that you’re using an assumption to power your narrative. You assume that we, the reader, will want to keep reading simply because we’ll want to get to the Family Matters part. Instead of creating a mechanism within the plot itself to power the narrative.
What that might look like is a young Jaleel White is aiming to get into Juilliard Acting School. This would give him a GOAL. Which would create narrative THRUST. We’d feel like we were moving towards something, which would keep us engaged. Maybe he gets into Julliard or maybe not. Once that plotline is over, you would then introduce a new, replacement, goal
St Simmons doesn’t have that, at least initially. It assumes that we’re all in on Richard Simmons becoming an aerobic superstar and we’re just going to keep on turning the pages until we get there. To me, that’s dangerous screenwriting – leaving the job of wanting to turn the page up to the reader. It should be the writer’s job to make you want to turn the pages. And what happens with readers who have no idea who Richard Simmons is? You’re going to lose a lot of them.
Now, once Richard Simmons becomes a superstar, Wayne does start introducing goals. For example, Richard wants to win an Emmy. And then Richard wants to get a bill passed that will make it mandatory that all schools have P.E. The lesson here is that you should have these goals throughout the screenplay. There shouldn’t be a big 30 page chunk anywhere in the script where it isn’t clear what your character wants. That’s when scripts wander.
This is a common mistake in biopics due to what I brought up above. The writer assumes you’ll just want to keep reading because you want to get to that part you know about. Just to be clear, that *will* be enough for some people who are huge fans of the biopic subject. But it won’t be the case for most people.
Despite this hiccup, St. Simmons succeeds just enough to be worth your time. That’s due, in large part, to the character of Richard Simmons, who is just so interesting. He’s actually a great character study for anyone looking to create memorable characters in their own scripts. There are three main areas that make him a standout character. Let’s go over each one.
1) He’s bizarre – Weird/different/unique characters tend to do well in scripts because they’re so memorable. Richard’s obsession with cutoff barbie heads and his excessive aggressive swearing despite being one of the sweetest guys in the world in his public life was enough to keep you intrigued throughout the story.
2) His internal struggle – If possible, you want to add some level of internal struggle to your main character. Characters who have an unresolved issue that’s tearing them up inside tend to be interesting to watch (and read about). Richard’s inability to accept his sexuality makes him quite fascinating to watch.
3) Likability – You’ve never met a person who wants to help more people than Richard Simmons. By the way, this is an important point so I want you to pay attention. You know how we sometimes artificially make our hero more likable by having him help an old man across the street. Readers smell that b.s. If you want to make your character a good person, they need to genuinely be a good person. That’s Richard Simmons. He genuinely wants to help people.
St. Simmons is messy and sometimes untethered, like a lot of biopics. But Richard Simmons is such a unique person that you ultimately get wrapped up in his journey. Not to mention, the dude is kind of inspiring!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes in screenplays, you encounter technical things that you can’t turn to a screenwriting book for because they’re too specific to have been covered anywhere. Wayne encounters one of those problems early on in St. Simmons. The script is about a guy named Richard Simmons. However, some of the script covers him when he was younger, when his name was Milton Simmons. So what do you do? Do you call your main character Milton for half the screenplay and Richard for the rest? Or do you just go with Richard, even if, for all the younger scenes, people are calling him Milton? There’s no easy solution, right? Whenever this happens, the way I like to think about it is I ask, “What would be best for the reader?” They’re the ones who have to engage with your choice. So you want it to run as smoothly as possible for them. I think Wayne made the right choice here. It would’ve been weird to call someone Milton for much of the screenplay if we know him as Richard. So he decided to refer to him as Richard the whole time. Here’s how that looked.
