Is today’s genre really the most efficient way to break into Hollywood as a screenwriter?
Genre: True Story
Premise: On November 1, 2022, FTX was valued at $32 billion. On November 11, 2022, it filed for bankruptcy. This is the incredible true story of the meteoric rise and catastrophic fall of FTX and its enigmatic founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. Jake Disch graduated from Northwestern’s Writing for Screen & Stage program. He was a top-ten finalist in the 2022 Nicholl Fellowship contest. He also had another script on the 2018 Black List called “Gunfight.”
Writer: Jake Disch
Details: 116 pages
If you were a betting man and you somehow found yourself inside a brand new Las Vegas casino called “The Screenwriter’s Casino,” where you could only bet on one thing: What kind of script is most likely to lead the writer to money and success – which type of script would you bet on?
Because I think today’s script represents the best odds at winning that lottery. Hollywood loves true stories, they love stories about tons of money, and they love stories about scandal. Today’s script hits all three of those beats.
Now, you may counter that your odds are better writing a music biopic. But the big difference there is that music biopics require music rights. True stories, like today’s script, don’t require the rights to anything.
So then why do I always review these scripts begrudgingly? If they are a screenwriter’s best shot at breaking into the business, shouldn’t I be promoting them?
I’ll tell you. Because these stories have already been told. I could kind of see the appeal if this was the 1980s and there was no other way to experience the story of something without the movie being made. But these days, if you want to learn about Sam Bankman-Fried, there are 50 Youtube documentaries about him. You don’t NEED to make a movie about him to tell his story.
But let’s find out if the script is able to overcome that.
It’s 2017 and Nishad Singh, a young engineer, meets a guy named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), a young stock trader and obsessive player of the game, League of Legends. They’re both young. They’re both fresh out of the Ivy League. And they’re really into this thing called “EA,” which means every dollar you make from your company, you give it to helping the world. Buying mosquito nets for children in third world countries so they don’t get malaria – that sort of thing.
But Sam is consumed with this idea that they can’t TRULY change the world unless they make a TON of money. As in, a trillion dollars. And he thinks he’s found a way to do it. Basically, Sam wants to buy bitcoins in Japan and sell them in the US for a huge profit. Nobody else has caught onto this opportunity because the bitcoin trading industry is so new.
The plan works so well and they start making so much money that SBF is already thinking bigger. He wants to create an entire platform to trade Bitcoin. So he splits his company in two (to Alameda and FTX) and quickly becomes one of the top two trading platforms in the world for Bitcoin. Things are going well.
They’re going so well, in fact, that Sam buys a mansion in the Bahamas for the team and he and one of the employees, Caroline, start hooking up. Soon, they’re boyfriend-girlfriend. And oh yeah, now everyone wants a part of SBF.
But then the pandemic hits and some highly-specific weird Bitcoin regulatory stuff happens and they’re struggling. SBF makes the difficult choice to use the money in Alameda to save the floundering FTX. Which is illegal (I think) because Alameda is propped up by a Bitcoin stock that SBF decides the value of (I think). So he basically borrows 8 billion dollars that he made up (I think).
Originally, nobody understood Bitcoin trading, making the Bitcoin stock market the Wild West. But now, people are getting hipper to what’s going on and the Feds start moving in. In one shocking day, the company collapses while SBF plays League of Legends, reminiscent of the band playing while the Titanic sinks. To the very end, SBF thinks he can save the company. But he’s about to learn that the game’s over and it’s time to let the adults in the room.
One of the reasons I wanted to read this script was to understand how the heck Sam Bankman-Fried made so much money so fast. Unfortunately, I still don’t know the answer to that.
It’s one of the trickiest components of writing a script like this. How do you convey complex subject matter to the reader? Cause if we don’t understand what’s going on, it’s hard to feel the drama.
The reason Dumb Money worked was because they kept things dumb: Keep buying GameStop stock to bankrupt the big rich bad guys. Then the big rich bad guys rig the system to get their money back. It was beautifully simple.
But here, we get multiple companies under the same umbrella moving money back and forth and, for some reason, that’s not legal, though it’s never clear why it’s not legal, especially when your brainpower is being mortgaged by some new crypto term every two pages.
The thing I tell writers in these scripts is that analogies are your friend. It’s a major tip in my dialogue book. And not just any analogy. It has to be a good one. There’s a point early in this script where the writer uses an analogy to explain what a “blockchain” is and he says it’s like “lines on a notebook.” I’m sorry but that doesn’t help me understand blockchains at all. You need to dig deeper and find the BEST ANALOGY you can come up with. Cause this stuff is not easy to understand.
You can offset this weakness if you have great characters. But you don’t have that here. SBF is an INTERESTING character. But he’s very thin. He plays League of Legends. He wants to grow the company so he can help the world. That’s it. That’s his character. Even his romantic relationship with Caroline is paper-thin. It’s not even clear if he likes her or not.
This is where true stories always frustrate me because you had the opportunity to create an AMAZING character in SBF. Here’s a guy who only cares about helping the world. That’s the only reason he wants to make billions.
Well obviously, then, you want to evolve that character into someone who’s greedy and materialistic. That’s the logical path to expose the hypocrisy of the character and make him more complex. Instead, Sam only dabbles in hypocrisy. He gets a big fancy house in the Bahamas and it’s definitely a splurge. But did I believe he’d gone full capitalist? No, not at all. Cause, in writing, you can’t just give one example. There has to be a repeating pattern.
There’s even this moment late in the script where Nishad says to Sam, “Did you ever even believe in EA?” It’s supposed to be this gigantic character reveal moment. But, in screenwriting, the reader believes with their eyes not their ears. Show don’t tell. You’ve SHOWN us this guy is way more into saving the world than being some greedy corporate type. So of course I believe he always wanted to save the world (for the record, he doesn’t answer Nishad’s question. He, instead, deflects).
I do think Disch made the right choice in regard to who leads the story. It’s hard to make Sam Bankman-Fried a main character when he’s ultimately going to screw so many people over. So Disch, instead, placed Nishad in the protagonist role. Nishad is more sympathetic as he’s constantly questioning Sam’s decision-making throughout the story. It also allowed Disch to include all this commentary on Sam through the eyes of Nishad. Which was smart because Sam was so easy to make fun of. The guy can’t stop playing League of Legends even as his company is crumbling around him. I don’t think you can show that effectively if you’re telling the story through Sam’s eyes.
In the end, with this script, I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to know a lot more about the FTX team. I felt like I knew Sam sort of. I felt like I knew Nishad pretty well. I felt like I knew Caroline a *little bit*. But that was it. I needed more.
There’s this moment late in the script when Caroline screws up, stupidly posting what FTX would settle for as a valuation of the company. It’s the nail in the coffin for the company. And Sam calls her and just rips into her. Tells her she’s stupid. She’s a horrible human being. And that she destroyed everything.
This had the potential to be a giant moment. But because I didn’t even know what Sam felt about Caroline, or what Caroline felt about him (were they in love with each other or just having fun??), it’s only a good moment. Which speaks to how much more powerful this script would’ve been had you written a draft ONLY focusing on improving all the characters and defining their relationships better.
Adults in the Room is not a bad script but it could’ve been so much more.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Get inventive with these screenplays. These scripts can get lost in their technicalities if you’re not careful so it’s important to have fun with them. Disch used this really fun device where we’d be in the past, hanging out with the SBF crew. Then this stuffy old lawyer would appear out of nowhere and say something like, “Wait a minute, what this the heck is a bitcoin?” And then we’d cut to present-day, in the courtroom, and see that the old man is a lawyer. So Disch would physically blend the courtroom scenes into the FTX journey. I found that really clever and enjoyable. He probably could’ve done it even more.
