Psycho meets Alice in Wonderland meets American Psycho. Could there be a stranger more appealing movie combination??
Genre: Murder-Mystery
Premise: Set in 1953, when a young woman is murdered in a small town, everyone suspects the mysterious gardener who lives with his sick mother.
About: We’ve been tackling so many adult scripts lately, it was time to get back to genre. This script finished #2 on last year’s Blood List (Best Horror and Thriller Scripts of the Year).
Writer: Alyssa Jefferson
Details: 98 pages
I often say not to go over 3 lines a paragraph when you’re writing a screenplay. So you may think that when I read a script like The Gardener, which regularly hits up to 8 lines per paragraph, that I’m predisposed to hating it.
But that’s not the case. I’ve always been of the belief that you can break rules. In fact, the rules you break are what help define your voice as a writer. Quentin Tarantino likes to write 10 minute scenes. I wouldn’t advise the average screenwriter go anywhere near that number. But Tarantino knows how to write these scenes and he’s good at it. So it works for him.
Likewise, I don’t mind paragraphs that go over 3 lines as long as your writing’s good, you’re setting a tone, and you’re taking us places we couldn’t normally go inside a pithy 3 line-paragraph. In other words, there’s got to be a method to your madness.
And the best example of this style of writing working is in horror and mystery scripts where the writer is trying to set a dark uncomfortable tone. Less than two pages into Alyssa Jefferson’s screenplay, you know that’s what she’s going for.
She even goes so far as to explain what kind of socks our hero, 30-something Charles Dempsey, is wearing.
Charles, it turns out, is a weird guy. And that’s BEFORE we find out he’s suspected of murder. He lives in the house at the end of town with his sick mother, the two having run a successful gardening/florist business for years now. Except since his mother’s gotten sick, Charles has had to do all the work himself, and it’s starting to stress him out.
One day, on the way to work, he stops in the park to take a rest, only to notice that the body of a dead woman is lying on the grass beside him, a woman with beautiful fresh flowers placed in her hair. Before he can react, Alice Calloway, a local journalist, snaps a photograph of him. Charles runs off to work, disturbed by the whole incident.
It isn’t long before a couple of detectives come by and ask Charles what he was doing at the site of a murder, but he’s adamant he had nothing to do with it. As Charles gets back to his schedule, Alice starts dropping by his shop, and the two develop a friendship.
As more young women start turning up dead around town (all with flowers in their hair), the detectives put more and more heat on Charles. But with Alice continuing to vouch for him, they’re able to keep the detectives at bay. That is, until, the murderer strikes close to home, attacking Alice before disappearing into the night.
Will Charles and Alice be able to figure out and stop the murderer in time? Or will Alice end up, inevitably, like all the other women?
So let’s first discuss this “huge paragraphs” issue. Jefferson is clearly someone who comes from a novel or short-story background. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was her first script. Everything is extremely descriptive, as I pointed out in the opening. And Jefferson does a nice job taking advantage of those descriptions and setting the tone.
But The Gardener’s biggest fault is that the plot doesn’t move fast enough. And the main reason for that is that so much time is dedicated to describing rooms and the way people are standing and what people are doing, that there simply isn’t any time left to add more story beats.
When you come off of a slugline, you’d preferably like to move past the description and into the main action or dialogue exchange by the third paragraph. Good writers can get everything taken care of with one paragraph, meaning they’re into the meat of the scene by paragraph two.
There were a lot of times here where we’d go 5-6 paragraphs of description after the slugline. And even when that was cut down, it was usually because the paragraphs were longer. So we still had to read through the same amount of words to get to the point of why we were here.
So let’s say you have a male character at a fast food restaurant who’s going to hit on a female character. That’s the scene you want to write. You’d set up the restaurant and each character (assuming both characters have already been introduced in previous scenes) in one paragraph, two tops. Then you’d have the male character talk to (or attempt to talk to) the female character (the key action that starts the scene).
Now there are always going to be exceptions to this. And setting the mood for a particularly spooky scene could be one of those exceptions. The problem was, Jefferson did this almost everywhere, and it starts to take a toll on the reader. It’s hard to read through that many words and get so little action that actually plays into the plot. You start to distrust the writing, assuming it won’t provide you with the calories necessary to satiate your appetite.
If you can get past that though, and judge The Gardener as a story, it’s pretty good. It’s one of those scripts where you’re not sure if the main character is crazy or not. So you don’t know if he’s killing these people or if he’s being set up. You’re constantly being ping-ponged between “Of course he’s the killer” and “Oh, there’s no way he’s the killer.” So you’re mainly turning pages to figure that out and, as a writer, it doesn’t matter how you’re getting your reader to turn the pages, as long as they’re turning the pages.
And I think the straw that saved the “worth the read’s” back was the character of Charles himself. The dude was straight up creepy. The way he’d stand in front of the mirror and meticulously comb his hair until every strand was in place. The way a singular altered millisecond of his day could send him into a mental tailspin.
But probably the scariest thing was how calm he stayed in the face of intense pressure. The casual manner in which he’d answer the detective’s questions about the murdered women would make your skin crawl.
A good mystery and a good main character will get you a long way in a screenplay.
And finally, this script has one of the most chilling final images I’ve read in awhile. We’ll just say it’s the kind of image you won’t forget anytime soon, and likely one of the reasons this script has been passed around enough to get voted onto The Blood List.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s an old saying in screenwriting. Come into a scene as late as possible. This doesn’t just mean story wise, but writing-wise as well. In other words, try to get all of your description down in 1-2 paragraphs and then get into the main action of your scene. You will find exceptions to this in your first act though, particularly if you’re introducing a lot of characters. Since most new characters get their own paragraph of description, we could go 3-4 lines deep before the action starts simply because we have new characters to introduce.
