Today we review the oddest concept on last year’s Black List, all to get ready for December’s “Weird Script Showdown!”
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Premise: A young girl creates a robot version of Harry Potter while her father simultaneously is treating Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe for a terminal disease.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 10 votes. The brand new writer, Monisha Dadlani, is repped at Verve and managed at Good Fear.
Writer: Monisha Dadlani
Details: 111 pages
23 years ago a writer named Charlie Kaufman took over Hollywood with a screenplay titled, “Being John Malkovich.” It was about a guy who found a porthole into John Malkovich’s mind. This began the “Charlie Kaufman Era,” an era that included half-a-dozen weird concepts with even weirder executions. Whether you liked or disliked Kaufman, you couldn’t deny that he was unique.
There hasn’t been a whole lot of weird stuff since that era. Occasionally we’ll get films like “The Lobster” and “Sorry to Bother You.” But the thing that made early Charlie Kaufman stand out was that he understood character so well. That and he added just enough familiarity to the premise to make it accessible to larger audiences.
Anybody can write a movie about a guy who walks around in an armadillo suit who’s pursuing his dream of becoming an opera singer. In other words, anybody can come up with a weird nonsensical concept. It takes talent to come up with a strange concept that people can relate to and enjoy.
Such is my desire when announcing “Weird Script Showdown” for the end of the year. Just to remind everyone where we are at the moment—
This Thursday is the deadline for COMEDY SHOWDOWN, where the five best concepts will be featured to read on the site this Friday. (MAKE SURE TO COME BY THE SITE THIS WEEKEND, READ THE FINALISTS, AND VOTE!!!)
The next showdown will be Sci-Fi Showdown. That deadline will be mid-September. More information on that coming.
And then, this December, I want to do something different. I want to do a showdown for weird script ideas. Bring back that spirit of a young Charlie Kaufman.
Which is why I’m reviewing today’s screenplay. This is the kind of concept I’m expecting to get for Weird Script Showdown. And I thought it would be fun to figure out what the challenges are for weird script ideas like this. Let’s take a look.
The year is 2057. 13 year old Myra Gupta is a huge Harry Potter fan. Her best friends, Eva and Riad, are *also* huge Harry Potter fans. But you know what they also are? SECRETLY DATING. That’s right, Eva and Riad announce to Myra that they’re going steady and Myra is devastated because that means the entire dynamic of their friendship has been destroyed.
Across town, a 68 year old Daniel Radcliffe is doing a stage version of one of the Harry Potter books when he has a stroke. He’s rushed to the hospital where his doctor, Dr. Pravit Gupta, Myra’s father, informs him that he has a very rare disease called Kutain’s Disease and he’s only got 3 months to live!
Back in the Gupta household, Pravit doesn’t tell Myra about Daniel, even though he knows she’s a huge Harry Potter fan. But that’s okay because Myra has a new mission after losing her friends. She’s going to build a robot version of her dead mother, who, by the way, also happens to have died from Kutain’s Disease.
After Privat tells Myra that recreating mom is weird, Myra gets a new idea – let’s make the robot Harry Potter! After a week of work, Daniel Radcliffe, as in Old Man Daniel, stops by the house to talk to Privat. Myra comes downstairs with her Harry Potter robot, who meets Daniel Radcliffe! The Harry Potter robot immediately starts downloading all of the Radcliffe information in front of him, making him even more like Harry.
Initially weirded out by the Harry Robot, Daniel starts to like him! And they start hanging out together. As the robot becomes more like Harry every day, he starts concocting spell-laden drinks for Daniel to drink, which begin to cure Daniel! Will Robot Harry Potter be able to save Daniel Radcliffe? Or is Daniel doomed no matter what? Sounds like a question only the House of Gryffindor can answer.
One of the things you’re trying to do with these weird ideas is the same thing you’d do with any idea – create a moment/scene/scenario, early on in your story, that emotionally connects your audience to your hero. Because once the audience is emotionally connected to the main character, we’re more willing to go along for the weird ride.
Early on, Myra learns that her two best friends have become a couple behind her back. While not everyone has experienced this exact scenario, we can all sympathize with someone who, suddenly, feels betrayed and alone. Before this moment, I didn’t care about anything that was happening. But after this scene, I was in.
That writing approach, by the way, will always serve you well. If you’re constantly looking for ways to connect the characters and the audience, readers/viewers are going to get more and more attached to the characters. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter what the plot is. We want to see how each characters’ journey ends.
And make no mistake, this is a weird journey.
It’s 2057. Daniel Radcliffe is doing Harry Potter plays in his late 60s. We’ve got rare diseases we’ve never heard of. We’ve got someone building a robot. We’ve got multiple scenes of Robot Harry Potter and Dying Daniel Radcliffe dancing with each other.
If you look at these elements in a vacuum, you’re thinking they won’t work.
But I cared about Myra. She was an easy character to like. She loses her friends. She’s lost her mom. She’s creating a robot so she’s not lonely. That’s the emotional core of the movie and what we care about.
If I was producing this movie, I feel like I could get the same result with a much less complicated plot. Less moving pieces. But that’s where the “weird script” debate gets interesting.
There’s a component to “weirdness” that doesn’t require logic. When you’re writing weird scripts, you’re following your gut more than your brain. So even though I believe the writer could’ve written an easier-to-follow story with just the Myra/Robot Harry Potter stuff, that choice would mean less weirdness.
It’s an interesting debate. When trying to create something unique, do you ignore all rules and go on pure gut? Or do you create some boundaries that your story has to stay within? Going back to Being John Malkovich, I can see how logic hounds would’ve ruined that script. “Why do we have to have a 7th and a half floor be the way into John Malkovich’s mind? That doesn’t make sense.” Right, it doesn’t. But it certainly makes the script more charming.
The Boy Who Died has a lot going on in it. And I thought it was a bit over-plotted. But I liked the main character so much that it nudged into “worth the read” territory for me. It’s unlike anything I’ve read off the 2020 Black List and that has to account for something.
[ ] Lord Voldermort
[ ] Draco Malfoy
[x] Butterbeer
[ ] Hermoine Granger
[ ] Harry Potter
What I learned: Over-the-top wild ideas can help you go far in this town. We literally just saw it Monday. Michael Waldron made the Black List with his wacky script, “The Worst Guy of All Time And The Girl Who Came To Kill Him,” a spec that landed him assignments for “Loki” and “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.” Wacky crazy ideas indicate someone with a big imagination. And big imaginations are in high demand in an industry where every major franchise is getting wilder and wilder. Go check out the next big Hollywood release – Fast 9 – as a primary example.
