Genre: Thriller
Premise: A fixer who brokers off-the-books exchanges for powerful corporate clients finds himself being hunted after he’s hired to protect a whistleblower and the evidence she’s uncovered.
About: This script finished in the top ten of last year’s Black List. This is the writer’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Details: 108 pages
Just yesterday I was talking about how Sundance movies don’t make money anymore. Well today shows just how much stock Hollywood puts in my opinion. In a most unlikely alliance, Neon and Hulu (??) teamed up to pay the most money for a Sundance film EVER – 18 million bucks – that being for the Andy Samberg time-loop black comedy, Palm Springs. Wondering what the movie is about? Scriptshadow’s got you covered. I reviewed the script last year. Immediate thoughts – the time loop conceit is alive and well. But, also, SOME CATCHY HOOK is better than NO CATCHY HOOK, even if that hook’s a little tired.
On to today’s script, which has a much more subdued hook. Actually, I don’t know if this constitutes a hook. It should lead to some good debate in the comment section (what is a hook?). I would say a hook is any strong unique quality in your concept that begets intrigue. I’d never heard of this unique job before, and I *was* intrigued by it, so I guess that makes it a hook, no?
Karen Grant has found herself in a quandary. She decided to blow the whistle on her company, which develops a synthetic tobacco strain which she knows causes the same types of cancer as regular tobacco. Her 400 million dollar company is about to be purchased by a billion dollar company and let’s just say that if this info gets out, it’s not going to be good for either company.
But Karen gets cold feet when both companies learn of her plan and send people after her. Scary people. Karen is in no man’s land. The bad guys are so powerful they’ll probably find a way to bury the story before it spreads, and afterwards, they’re going to make the rest of her life miserable. But she can’t just give the documents back either. She knows too much. And when gigantic companies encounter problems like this, they tend to dispose of said problem.
So Karen is referred to a guy named Tom, or as he’s known in the business, a “broker.” This is a man whose specific job it is to broker high profile behind-the-scenes deals, such as this one, so that nobody gets in an accidental car crash and that the company in question can be assured that this compromising info never reaches the public. A broker has no allegiance. He’s not here for Karen. He’s here to broker a deal for both sides.
But as you’d expect, the billion dollar company would prefer to do things their way. So their M.O. is to track down these brokers and introduce them to the old concrete feet in the local river routine. Except they’ve never run into a guy like Tom. Tom uses old school technology to communicate – old phones, p.o. boxes. If he needs to have a conversation with his clients, he calls an operator and does what deaf people do, use an old machine to type out his responses and the operator reads them out loud for the other person.
This frustrates the heck out of Karen’s company, who can’t seem to get a beat on this guy. So they eventually decide to do the deal, a deal that will net our broker a cool 40 million bucks. But then something unexpected happens. Tom starts to fall for his client. And that compromises everything.
This one did not start out strong. The problem was voice over.
Here’s the thing with voice over. It’s a great tool. It can be used effectively in a handful of situations. For example – Fight Club. Voice over there is a part of the story’s DNA. It would be weird if that story didn’t have voice over. That’s how well-woven it is into that movie.
The Broker does something you don’t want to do early on in a screenplay, which is to give us voice over that doesn’t clearly connect to the people or the images we’re seeing. We’re watching two people have a conversation at a diner. We meet a couple of other folks also. During this, we hear some random voice from some random guy talking about something vague.
I understand why writers like to do this. There’s something artsy and creative about using voice over with a series of unrelated images. In the rare cases where it’s done well, it creates a sense of mystery that drives the reader to turn the page. But when it’s done badly, which it almost always is, it creates a sense of confusion. I don’t know who ANYBODY IN YOUR STORY IS YET. So when you’re showing me one face and you have some other person talking about something different, it’s frustrating.
And while I did eventually figure it out, there’s no guarantee that the reader will give you that much time. I only did because it was a Black List script, a script that lots of other readers had vouched for, and therefore something I had some assurance would get better. But if you’re a random writer with a random script, I wouldn’t give you the same length of rope. Not because I hate you. But because I’ve read thousands of scripts that started badly and never got better.
So you can get fancy all you want in your opening. But do so knowing that there’s high risk involved.
The good news is, once this story hit its stride, it got good. I liked this broker character. It made sense to me that there are high profile unique situations that occasionally pop up where there isn’t some yellow pages number you can call for help. The only help you could get would be from a specific person who does this specific job, and because of that job, lives in the shadows.
And the writer took that one step further by giving the broker old school technology. It provided the story with an opportunity to create set pieces you don’t traditionally see in movies these days because everyone is using cell phone tracking software and back door sniffers to steal passwords. You can’t do that when the target’s primary communication method is postcards.
I was really digging that aspect of the story. However, the writer takes a calculated risk by adding a love story to the plot. And while I didn’t have a problem with that in theory, it’s not executed very well. First of all, these two can’t communicate face to face. Most of the time when they’re talking to each other, one half of the conversation is coming from the telephone operator, not Tom.
So for Karen to all of a sudden become interested in this guy – she begins asking him personal questions, wanting to get to know him – it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It does open up a fun plot development, though, in that Tom starts getting sloppy because he’s starting to have feelings for her too. But the physical separation aspect of the story becomes too much of a hurdle for that plot development to work.
The script makes some other good choices, though. I’ve read a lot of scripts like this where we only see the story through Karen’s eyes. But The Broker puts us in the room with the bad guys almost as much as the good guys. This allows the writer to create fun dramatically ironic scenes, such as Karen going to the airport and us knowing that the bad guys have already tracked her here. So she doesn’t know she’s being watched but we do. They’re hoping she’ll lead them to Tom. But the climax of the scene is that Tom was playing them the whole time to get them out in the open so he could get a visual on who was following her. You can’t write that scene if you’re only telling the story through Karen’s eyes.
So I’d say The Broker is worth the read. It’s by no means perfect but it’s got enough going on to keep you interested, that’s for sure.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware complicated family dynamics. And if you do have complicated family dynamics, spell them out for us. The reader understands “mother,” “father,” “son,” “daughter.” But things can get confusing when you run into cousin and step-father and step-son and father-in-law and daughter-in-law territory. To the writer, the connection is obvious. But if you don’t spell it out for us, we can easily be confused. I spent half this script trying to figure out who Ray was. At first I thought it was Tom’s brother. But then later we learn they have different moms. So I made an educated guess that their moms were sisters, which would make them cousins. And then Ray has a daughter who Tom has a strong family bond with. What’s the relation when your cousin has a daughter? A cousin-niece? At a certain point, you have to ask if complicated family dynamics are worth it, especially when most of the people reading your script are reading it faster than you’d prefer.
What I learned 2: Why is this a big deal? Have you ever had a reader ask you a question about something in your story that you thought was obvious? Like, “So did John kill Sarah or not?” And you want to point to page 54 where John is being interrogated and he clearly says, in the scene, “I killed Sarah.” Why did your reader miss that? It may be because they were trying to figure out something as stupid as how two characters are related.
