Today’s script comes out of nowhere to become one of the best screenplays I’ve read all year!
Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: After an awkward young woman moves back into her parents’ house, she gets a strange invitation from a man who claims to sell unicorns.
About: Oh yeah, um, count me in for anything Brie Larson does. I mean, I don’t know about this Captain Marvel stuff she signed up for. I’m not sure I see her as a superhero. But if she’s acting and directing The Unicorn Store, then stab a horn into my side and call me Peanut Butter because I’m there for indie Larson. Brie, of course, acted in my favorite movie from last year, Room. This is going to be her feature directing debut, but it is NOT her directing debut, as she did co-direct a short film called “The Arm” (which I can’t find online – anyone have a link?), which won the special jury short film prize at Sundance, a pretty big deal since they have a couple hundred shorts in that festival. The Unicorn Store was written by Samantha McIntyre, whose biggest writing gig was the short-lived FX show, Married. McIntyre wrote this script all the way back in 2009. But it appears that Brie Larson just now read it, and decided it was the perfect movie to make her directing debut on.
Writer: Samantha McIntyre
Details: 104 pages – July 6, 2009 draft
Continuing a longstanding tradition here on Scriptshadow of reviewing any script that has “unicorn” in the title, we’re going to review The Unicorn Store today. Neeeee-iiighhhhey!
I ain’t gonna let my nose grow here. As I made my way through the first act of Unicorn Store, I was skeptical. It seemed like a strange knock-off of a bunch of early 2000s movies like Lars and the Real Girl, Juno, and Garden State.
But the deeper I ventured into the forest, the more I realized this was its own thing. And by the time I got to the second half, I found myself routinely stopping to think about the story. But what really surprised me was how much the ending moved me. This is truly a script like no other, and I couldn’t help leaving impressed.
The story follows Kit, a 28 year-old woman-child who’s spent the last 6 years of her life adding as many years of college courses as she can. Now, with no more classes left to take, she moves back into her parents’ house, a couple of gung-ho gym-teacher types who wear whistles around their necks.
Kit has no idea what she wants to do with her life so she gets a job at a lame PR firm to kill time while she figures things out. Kit has always been a weirdo. She’s never had a boyfriend, never even been out on a date. I mean, she spends the majority of her time talking to her stuffed bears.
Then Kit gets a special glitter-coated invite to a secret store. Curious, she goes there and meets The Salesman, a goofy guy who’s very serious about one thing: Unicorns. It turns out, according to The Salesman, that they’re getting a new unicorn in and that Kit has been chosen to receive said unicorn should she meet the basic requiements of unicorn ownage.
Thrilled, Kit starts building a stable for her unicorn in her parents’ back yard, but realizes she needs help. She hires a guy with a dorky name (Virgil) on Craig’s List in hopes that he’ll be a nerd and therefore won’t judge her. But Virgil turns out to be a total stud, throwing Kit’s confused never-had-a-man-before’s hormones into overdrive.
Of course, she knows that Virgil would never go for a girl like her, so focuses on friendship instead. Kit decides to tell Virgil that she’s getting a pony to avoid judgment, but it doesn’t take long for Virgil to sense he’s not getting the whole story.
He finally demands to know what’s going on, and Kit believes the best course of action is to show him. So she takes him to the Unicorn Store only for there to not be a Unicorn Store. Just an empty warehouse. Kit must confront the reality that she’s so messed up, she imagined the whole thing, and now she’s going to lose her best friend over it.
But maybe, just maybe, there’s still hope for a unicorn arrival yet.
So let me tell you why I was skeptical of this script, and how it ultimately won me over.
I don’t like character setups that come from an artificial place. If your hero is only the way they are because this is a movie and having those quirks best sets up your story, that character won’t feel like a real person. They’re clearly a construction of the writer.
I didn’t understand why Kit still acted like she was 7 other than it was a cutesy quirky thing to do. What happened to make her this way? That wasn’t explained. And so I felt like I was watching a caricature as opposed to a character.
Compare this to Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” The reason the main character in that show is so mind-numbingly naive is because she’s spent her entire life in a bunker brainwashed by a cult leader. There’s something there to explain how she became so weird.
So Unicorn Store started off on the wrong hoof. The thing is, Kit eventually overcomes this by being so damn relatable. Kit is weird. And she hates that she’s weird. And she just wants to fit in but she doesn’t contain the same social genes that the rest of the world operates on, making her a perennial outsider.
Anybody who’s pursuing this craft or acting or directing or singing, or participating in any artistic endeavor, knows how that feels. You never feel quite connected to the masses. And it’s frustrating and you try all these ways to bridge that gap but you never seem to get there. And that’s when I fell in love with this character, because I knew how she felt.
Then, when you added the unicorn metaphor, it put the script over-the-top. Because it really made you think. And I can give you my interpretation of the unicorn, but what’s great about this script is that my interpretation won’t be yours. That’s when you know a script is doing its job. When it’s able to give everyone their own unique experience.
So the unicorn to me was that we’re all promised this perfect life when we’re young. And then when we become adults, we’re told, “You’re so close! All you have to do now is achieve this one thing and you get your perfect life.” And maybe that thing is a high-paying job, or a husband, or a car, or a house. But each time you get that thing, they tell you, “Oh, you’re almost there. Now you just have to get this one other thing.”
And so you get that thing, and then you’re told, okay, just one more thing. And this cycle keeps repeating itself. And the “unicorn,” it turns out, is the perfect life. It doesn’t actually exist. And we’re so focused on checking these boxes so we can get our unicorn, that we never realize that it isn’t there. The irony being, that if we figure that out, we can live a perfect life. Because we can appreciate all the things we have right in front of us instead of chasing something that doesn’t exist.
And that’s what The Unicorn Store meant to me.
I can’t stress how few scripts actually make me think. So this really left an impression on me. If I was looking for a unicorn script for the summer, I think I just found it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you think you have something special – and I mean something truly different, not another Taken clone – bring that puppy out of the closet every couple of years, dust it off (that means write a new draft), and put it in front of some new eyes. Strong voice-y material usually finds a home in fellow weirdos. But let me stress that it truly needs to be special and not some garden-variety high concept script or melodramatic passion project. Because the flip side of this is a writer holding onto a script that’s never going to go anywhere instead of writing something new, which is what I usually encourage. How do you know if your script is special? It’s usually that script you can’t stop thinking about years after you wrote it. It’s that one that won’t go away. It’s your unicorn screenplay.
