Genre: Horror
Premise: A young black man fights for his life after taking a job at a white-owned beauty parlor, whose monstrous owners concocted a wildly popular shampoo that requires a sickening ingredient.
About: We’re going back a year to a high-ranking 2020 Black List script (17 votes) that I never got to. The script was adapted from the writer’s own short film.
Writer: Chaz Hawkins
Details: 103 pages
Ski Mask The Slump God for “O?”
While reading “The Sauce,” I went back and forth, throughout the script, on whether it was a movie or not.
Yesterday we were talking about “movies” vs “scripts” and, at first glance, this is a movie. You’ve got a character who gets stuck in a dangerous situation and must get out of it. It’s got your concept, it’s got your goal, it’s got your stakes, it’s got your urgency.
However, the script is adapted from a short film. And that’s evident when you read it. Because it spends the first half of its length building up to the “sauce’s” reveal. It does this because it knows that once you reveal the “sauce,” the script becomes about escaping. And it’s hard to build a long escape story around people who are stuck inside, essentially, a warehouse sized room.
But we’ll get to that. First, let’s talk about the plot.
22 year old Jason lives in a city called Coolchitown, which may be short for Chi-Town, which may be short for Chicago. Or it may just be a fictional town. It’s unclear. Jason is reeling from two issues. One, his mother recently died. And two, he has extremely low testosterone, to the point where he needs to take steroid pills.
After Jason is fired from his uncle’s barbershop because his uncle can’t pay him anymore, Jason takes a janitor job at the new hair salon across the street called “The Sauce,” which specializes in making straight hair curly. And it’s all because of their secret ingredient, the “sauce.” By the way, many black men in the area have gone missing over the last two months. I think you know where this is headed. Or do you??
The Sauce is run by Priscilla and a group of gorgeous Greek women who are very secretive and who immediately love Jason. And Jason loves the place too! He’s making a lot more money here than he did at that barbershop, that’s for sure. But Jason wants to make more money. So when his best friend, O, and his former crush, Meddy, come up with a plan to steal from The Sauce, Jason is all in.
So they go there late at night, break into the safe, find 100,000 dollars, and think their lives are about to change. Well, they are. Just not the way they think they are. Curiosity gets the best of them and they open the private door that Priscilla said never to open. They’re shocked to find a giant orgy going on between white women and black men. And it doesn’t take much for O and Jason to join in.
Jason then wakes up, still inside this secret room, which appears to have powers that allow it to expand out into this giant “spa.” While O wants to stay here for the rest of his life, Jason wants out. And that’s because Jason’s medical deficiency – his low testosterone – is making him think clearly! He’s got to find a way out of here before Priscilla figures out a way to fix his Low-T problem and, in the process, permanently turn Jason into another “sauce” supplier.
I want to give the writer props here because the whole time we were building up to “what’s going on here?” I thought these Sauce women were killing black men and using their blood in some ritual that allowed them to create this perfect curly shampoo. I definitely didn’t think there were giant orgies going on to extract “their secret sauce” so to speak.
I always give credit to writers who can surprise me.
But let’s go back to my earlier issue of this being a stretched-out narrative. Something that all writers go through – I know I used to agonize over this when I was younger – is “does your concept have the legs to last an entire movie?” And it took me, probably, ten years of being around concepts and seeing them played out in screenplay form before I was inherently able to know if a concept had legs or not. It’s not easy.
But adapting 5-10 minute short films into features is about as hard as it’s going to get for a writer to create a feature length film that doesn’t feel stretched out. Which “The Sauce” is. It takes us all the way until page 55 before the orgy is unveiled. That’s 55 pages you’re stringing the audience along on a single carrot. Most audiences are just not going to be that patient. Especially these days.
And then you run into just as difficult of a problem. Which is, how do the characters escape this room and how do we expand that out another 55 minutes? You really feel that when you’re reading the script. You can sense the writer looking for ways to stretch things out (O takes Jason on a tour of the place?). And screenplays are supposed to read the opposite of that. They’re supposed to read like time is slipping away.
Now, to the writer’s credit, he does some pretty imaginative stuff with the mythology. I thought it was quite creative the way things were tied back to Greece and the Gods and the sirens, and how the workers were also birds, which led to some fun imagery.
But, in the end, if the pacing isn’t satisfactory, the reader or the viewer tune out. And the pacing here, especially throughout the first half of the script, felt like it was being stretched.
I’m not saying this can’t be done. Lights Out is an example of a 3 minute short film that went on to become a feature and make 70 million dollars. I’m just saying this is stuff you need to consider when you’re picking your concept. Or thinking of expanding a short film.
I have a writer-director friend who wrote this fun short movie about a guy whose car gets stolen at a gas-station and his kid is in the backseat. It’s the perfect concept for a short film because this guy has to chase down this car to save his kid. And my friend wants to turn it into a feature. But I don’t see how you do it. Because following a car with your kid in it is great for 7 minutes. But it gets old if you’re doing it for 107 minutes. He still won’t listen to me, lol, but, yeah, we all go through this because when we fall in love with ideas we only see possibilities, not problems.
Anyway, this script is okay but the slow pacing issues born out of a thin idea being stretched to the max kept me from giving it a recommendation.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned 1: The sneaky backstory character introduction. I’ve seen writers do this and it’s clever. What you do is you introduce your character not by describing them, but by giving us a little backstory on the character. It’s a cheat code to sneak some backstory in. Here’s how Jason is introduced.
JASON (22), black, a kid that could have made it out the hood but gave up before he saw the greener grass.
What I learned 2 – Don’t make obscure references in your scripts. You’ll be lucky if 5% of the readers catch them. Here’s an example from this script: “Agatha grins slowly, sexually like Herman Cain in one of his 2012 election campaign commercials.” Some people from yesterday didn’t know who William Hung was. William Hung has, maybe, the single most popular talent show audition of all time. And some people don’t know who he is. If people don’t know who William Hung is, they definitely don’t know who someone from a 2012 political ad is. Yet I see writers doing this all the time. You can include references like that IN DIALOGUE, because maybe it’s in that character’s personality to make obscure references. But you can’t do that when you’re talking directly to the reader. Because all you’re going to get is an annoyed eye-roll and the reader thinking, “Who the heck is that?”
