Genre: Detective Noir
Premise: (from Black List) A little person private eye investigates the disappearance of a young actress in 1930s Hollywood, leading him to uncover conspiracies involving THE WIZARD OF OZ and Metro Goldwyn Mayer brass.
About: This script finished fairly high on last year’s Black List. Will Widger is not yet a household name in the screenwriting community, but if you do some digging, you’ll find some bread crumbs he’s left on his way to Oz. He recently co-wrote an animation script called “Wish” for director Cory Edwards (Hoodwinked) with co-writer Patrick Burleigh. He also wrote a script with Patrick in 2011 called “Silverfoxes” about a guy who loses his girlfriend to an older man, so he decides to “Big Momma’s House” himself up as a silver fox to get her back. I get the feeling that Widger and Burleigh co-write a lot of comedy, and Widger wanted to get away (at least temporarily) to write something serious. Kind of like when a lead singer does a solo album so he doesn’t have to go through all that collaboration stuff.
Writer: Will Widger
Details: 121 pages
You have to be a little weary when the first slugline in a script reads “CONTINUOUS.” But as I stated on my Black List breakdown, I liked this premise a lot, and therefore I don’t care if the slugline continues a story that hasn’t started yet. I was trusting my earlier instincts.
With that said, it’s been a tough week. I’m not reading a whole lot of good material. I find myself whispering “Please surprise me please surprise me please surprise me” every time I open a script because I’m tired of reading a logline, reading the genre, then getting EXACTLY what I expected – down to the acts, down to the characters, down to the story beats.
I’m still trying to recover from yesterday’s script, Forbidden Planet, which didn’t include a single plot point, character or storyline that surprised me. This is one of the pivotal things every writer should be thinking about when they write a script! “How am I going to surprise someone whose job it is to read screenplays?” I’m not saying you have to reinvent the wheel. But you need that mindset going into every single scene if you expect your script to get noticed.
The Munchkin did end up surprising me. But not in the ways I expected. More on that in a bit.
40-something Vic Shea (or, let’s just come out and say it, Peter Dinklage, since his casting is the only way this movie gets made) is a little person private investigator. One day, a mother comes in and hires Vic to look for her little person daughter, Claudette, a 15 year-old girl who was cast in The Wizard of Oz as one of the munchkins, but who hasn’t been heard from since.
Vic and his half-assistant half-girlfriend, Doris, reluctantly take the job, expecting to find nothing. But boy are they wrong. Claudette’s landlord, an actress named Anne, tells them that she took Claudette to an MGM party when she first moved into the building.
After some heavy sleuthing, Vic finds out that Claudette was raped at that party, and was pregnant at the time of her disappearance. The prevailing thought is that notorious scumbag and MGM fixer Eddie Mannix did the deed. But upon closer inspection, Eddie never got close to the girl.
As Vic starts digging deeper, Doris starts demanding more from their relationship. And as guys are wont to do, Vic does everything in his power to postpone these discussions. When Doris then dumps him, Vic realizes how much she means to him (this is another thing guys are good at). It becomes clear that he can’t run his life or his business without her.
So Vic must reconcile with Doris in time to figure out what happened to this poor innocent girl. And since the murderer has caught on to their investigation, time is definitely running out.
I was about to give up on this 20 pages in. Something was really off about the tone. In retrospect, now that I know Widger is a comedy guy, it makes sense. The first act felt too light. In addition to some romantic-comedy-like scenes between Vic and Doris, we have Vic in a Chinese doctor’s office begging for herbal treatments to make him taller. It felt a little like Audrey Hepburn’s racially-insensitive apartment manager in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Tone’s a big deal. You don’t want to be too goofy in a script where someone gets raped and murdered and I definitely felt that, for the subject matter, this script wasn’t taking itself seriously enough.
But, once we got into the actual investigation, things started clicking. It’s almost as if Widger came eye to eye with what kind of story he was telling and transformed his approach accordingly. In fact, The Munchkin kicked ass in the second act. I was genuinely interested in finding out who killed Claudette, and I didn’t have the slightest idea who did it. Widger had me right where he wanted me.
Unfortunately, the third act rolled around and a million plot points started coalescing and I have no freaking clue what happened next.
This leads us to the unique challenge of writing an investigation-focused screenplay. How complicated should the investigation be? If the case is too easy to predict, we’re bored. But if it’s too complicated, we get confused, which ultimately leads another kind of boredom. Ideally, you want to write something right down the middle. But how do you know where the middle is?
In that second act, Widger knew exactly where it was. But then, during the last 25 pages, things started getting too complicated. (spoilers) We had already captured the killer, but we still hadn’t figured out who hired Vic in the first place (Claudette’s “mother,” it turned out, was a hired actress). If we’d already found the killer, why did we still care about the fake mother?
I think this goes back to how many elements you’re throwing at your reader – elements being characters, twists, major plot points, objectives, etc. Include too many and it becomes too hard for the reader to remember them all. I don’t know if there’s a perfect number, but my instincts tell me there were too many here. You had Claudette’s landlord, Louis B. Mayer, Eddie Mannix, Claudette, a major casting director, Claudette’s fake mom, Claudette’s real mom, Claudette’s friend, Judy Garland, Judy Garland’s mom (there were a lot of moms here), and Claudette’s magician boyfriend. On top of that we were trying to solve four separate things – a rape, Claudette’s disappearance, Claudette’s boyfriend’s murder, and who hired Vic in the first place. Add some twists on top of that (i.e. the landlord being in cahoots with the casting director) and you can see why following The Munchkin was no easy task.
On top of this, your allotted number of elements will vary depending on how good you are with presenting information. Chinatown is packed with tons of elements. But Robert Towne does an amazing job of conveying information. He explains each element clearly so we’re always in the loop. I’m not sure the same can be said for The Munchkin. Sometimes I was in the loop and other times I wasn’t.
I went back and forth on The Munchkin. It kept me at arm’s length at the beginning, pulled me in for its second act, then it pushed me back out during the climax. The story is a good one and when it’s cooking, it’s cooking. But these screenplays always come down to their endings. The whole reason you’ve invested all this time and mental energy is to be wowed and surprised at the end. I didn’t entirely understand the ending and for that reason, I couldn’t give it a ‘worth the read.’
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s my blueprint for writing an investigation script. Err on the side of complicated with the investigation. Add more elements and twists than you think you have to. You can always dial it back if you need to. Then, when you’re finished, get “clarity” feedback. Have someone read it and specifically ask them to note where they were “confused” about the investigation. After they give you notes, go back and rewrite it. Then go to someone new for your next set of clarity notes. Investigation scripts are “hard burn reads.” The same people can’t read them twice because they already know what comes next. Once you’ve burned a reader, they’re out. Find the next guy, figure out what confuses them, go back and rewrite again. Keep doing this until it’s perfect.
