Today’s script has a Scriptshadow connection!
Genre: Action
Premise: When the illegitimate daughter of a Portland billionaire goes missing, her loved ones turn to Juno and Andi, local homesteaders and members of The Foragers–a grassroots network of experts dedicated to finding the lost and bringing them home.
About: This is the highest rated script on the Black List that I haven’t read yet, with 19 votes. It comes from a writer with a Scriptshadow connection! Read on to find out more!
Writer: Sam Boyer
Details: 105 pages
Thurman for Juno?
Today’s writer’s name may sound familiar to you.
That’s because, once upon a time, in a Scriptshadow competition, his script, “Bait,” did quite well, finishing top 5 in my contest. Here’s that logline: “When Leonardo DiCaprio believes he’s finally found the script that will win him an Oscar, he travels in secret to visit the unknown writer. What he finds instead is a serial killer, who keeps him captive with a group of other A-list victims, all tempted by the same script. Will Leo escape and, more importantly, will he get to make the movie?”
For a while, myself and Grey Matter were developing this project with Sam. But it proved too tricky, as it relied heavily on big movie stars. We started to move down to B-list and C-list stars to make a potential production more realistic, but it lost some of its luster after that. There were also some creative suggestions Grey Matter made that I didn’t agree with. Thus is the challenge of development! Still, it was a fun process.
Sam seems to have spent his interim time doing what every smart writer does – GETTING BETTER. His screenplay, Ojek, won the Nicholl! What’s crazy about that is that he entered the competition twice before his winning year with an unaltered version of the script and didn’t even make it past the first round! (a nice rallying cry for everyone who says script contests are no different from lotteries)
Let’s find out what Sam’s follow-up looks like, shall we?
A young woman named Maria Monica Mora goes missing in Portland. Meanwhile, way out in the woods, we meet Andi and Juno, a middle-aged female couple who seem to prefer living in the boonies and not having a care in the world, other than their next nitpicky argument.
But our perception of them changes when four dudes in tactical military gear bash through their front door and Juno and Andi become trained assassins, grabbing weapons from every corner to take the group down. That’s when Bill Squire enters the room, prompting Andi and Juno to put down their weapons.
Bill is well-known. He’s a billionaire. And his daughter (Maria) has gone missing. Now, there are some extenuating circumstances here. He’s an absentee father. So he hasn’t been a part of her life. But he also doesn’t want her to die. And he’s heard about what Andi and Juno do.
What do they do? They’re part of a highly unique network called the “Foragers.” You know how John Wick goes out there to kill people? Well, Foragers go out to find people. They’re the best at it. And Bill needs the best right now. The last time Maria was seen was 48 hours ago in her home city of Portland.
Juno and Andi head into Portland and start with the “missing person’s handbook.” They find the mom. But, shockingly, the mom says to stop looking for her daughter. Her daughter is dead. Before they’re able to figure out why this mom sucks, they’re attacked! By two assassin types.
These assassins, it turns out, are other Foragers. As they continue their search, they run into more and more of these Foragers. It turns out Bill Squire hired all of them because he really wants to find his daughter and has the money to do so.
But the problem is that there’s some secondary Forager war that’s erupted during this case and Juno and Andi don’t know why it’s happening. So now they don’t just have to find Maria. They have to survive Portland’s version of the Avengers turning on each other.
This has to be one of the most original missing persons scripts I’ve ever read.
I’ll be honest. I’m still downloading the totality of it in my head.
But kudos to Sam for coming up with something original. I don’t even know how to categorize it. It’s like John Wick but with a bunch of weird Portlanders doing John Wick impressions.
I suspect that the draw with this script is making two middle-aged women action stars. Cause we never see that. So that’s the centerpiece of the concept.
But there’s this entire mythology built around these Forager people and they’re all trained assassins that live in the most mundane parts of the US. For example, they run into a Forager from Idaho. All these Foragers seem to live out in the boonies.
It actually made the tone tough to follow. One millimeter to the left and this could easily be a comedy. So I was wondering if Sam was embracing that or just trying something so different that it didn’t matter to him where it landed.
The thing I liked best about this script was that the plot kept evolving. The great thing about a missing persons plot is that it’s one of the most dependable story templates out there. If someone’s missing, most viewers are going to be compelled to stick around and see if they’re found. If the writer’s good and gives you likable protagonists and some insight into the missing person so that we feel connected to them, you can write these stories forever and they’ll work.
The downside of the genre is that there are so many of them. So I like when writers move beyond the straight-forward missing person storyline. And we definitely get that here. Once we learn that Foragers are killing other Foragers, we realize that something much bigger is going on.
In fact, we find the missing girl by page 70. Most missing persons stories don’t want to do that because they’re afraid they won’t have any story left. But if you broaden the story and make it even bigger than one missing person, you can easily build a story that lasts another 40 pages.
Another thing I liked here is the unique location. Location is vastly underrated when it comes to telling stories. A lot of writers go with what’s obvious. If they are telling a story in a city, they’ll usually pick NY, LA, or sometimes Chicago.
But when you pick a place like Portland, which is a very unique city, it allows you to use that city to create a different feel to a common setup. I can’t emphasize this enough. Us readers read the same stories over and over again with only slight differences. Writers overrate their ability to be original. Most of them are telling the same story.
So you want to look for any area where you can be different. Forgaers created two huge differences for a common story template. A network of forest-friendly assassins and a city that never ever gets explored in movies. And believe me, Sam takes full advantage of the weirdness of Portland’s makeup. My brother lives there and every time I go there, I feel like I’m stepping into a different country.
Despite this, the script was just a little too weird for me. I’m not sure I ever totally believed in this bizarre network of people-finders. Their too-cool-for-school personas never matched up with their odd way of life.
Despite this, I’m happy for Sam. I knew he had talent from the second I read one of his scripts. I’m not surprised that he’s killing it now. And look, while this may not have been for me, if you got some cool new weird director – the next Daniels – to direct this, I could totally see it working. It’s just hard to imagine on the page.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Look for a character demographic that isn’t known for doing a certain thing and then have them do that thing. 45-55 year old women are not usually trained killers. By making them trained killers, you immediately set your script apart from all the others out there AND you provide two roles that actors in that demographic will fight to get, since the opportunity is so rare.
