Genre: Drama (sort of a romantic comedy too)
Premise: After her son dies, a grieving mother decides to look for a mate who will get pregnant with the son’s frozen sperm.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. If you want to see my re-ranking of all the scripts from last year’s Black List, you can check it out here.
Writer: Geoffrey Roth
Details: 122 pages
Juno Temple for Audrey?
I love a good underdog story.
So there’s no one rooting for today’s 72nd ranked Black List script more than me. There’s already been one Black List “worth the read” that got 7 votes (“False Truth”). Can we make it two??
We meet Ben, who’s in his early 30s. Ben informs us, much like Lester Burnham at the beginning of American Beauty, that he’s dead. Ben lived a really full life, though. He was a fun guy with a lot of friends who traveled a lot. The only thing he didn’t achieve before he died was starting a family.
Ben introduces us to his mother, Laurie, who helps out with a foundation of Ben’s, which has capitalized on Ben’s obsessive travel experience by taking all of his videos and turning them into a virtual reality experience with “VR Ben” as the guide. The hope is to sell the company and use the profits to save our dying planet.
When Laurie learns that Ben froze some sperm, she becomes convinced that her new goal in life is to impregnate a young consenting woman with this sperm so that Ben can have a child. So Laurie does the only logical thing one does in these situations – she joins Raya as her dead son.
She starts getting matches left and right, to which she then goes on the dates and tells the women that she’s “Ben,” and that the actual Ben is dead, and, oh yeah, could you please get pregnant with his sperm? Naturally, young hot in-heat females don’t respond well to being told that their date is dead and can you get pregnant.
Coincidentally, a swimming friend of Laurie’s, Aubrey, matches with Ben on Raya, and Laurie uses the opportunity to sell Aubrey on the idea. At first, Aubrey is freaked out, just like everyone else. But after she “meets” Ben in his VR traveling simulation, she actually starts to like him. Against all that one would consider good judgement, Aubrey considers the unthinkable – getting pregnant with Dead Ben’s sperm.
For the record, a specific song cue on page 1, accompanied by a 122 page run-time, is not the best way to endear yourself to a reader.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s discuss the script, which is a bit of an odd duck.
On the surface, we’ve got a semi high concept idea here. A grieving mother starts “dating” young women in the hopes of finding one who will have her dead son’s baby via his previously frozen sperm. Like a much sadder version of Juno.
That’s definitely an inventive concept and I give the writer props for that. Especially because one of the hardest genres to infiltrate with any sort of originality is the romantic comedy. This concept allows for a new spin on that formula.
And it gives us some fun scenes in the process, such as young women matching with Ben on dating apps only for Laurie to show up, tell them the guy they matched with is dead, and that she’s hoping they’ll agree to get impregnated by him posthumously. I mean I’m laughing out loud as I type that. Those will make for a hilarious montage.
But something wasn’t working with the script. Let me see if I can come up with an analogy for why that was. The Way You Remember Me is a brand new house where none of the screws have been tightened yet. It feels too loosey-goosey, and in the process, is hard to buy into.
The loosest of the screws is Ben’s VR subplot. This team of people who loved Ben used all of his travel videos to turn them into a VR experience with Ben being the VR guide.
I understand why the writer did this. It allowed for Aubrey to step into that VR world and sort of be around Ben, almost like she’s dating him. But it’s just not believable on any level.
It’s one of those things we writers notoriously do. We see a problem and we’re so determined to solve it that we don’t hold it up to real-world standards. We use our own internal ‘movie-logic’ instead.
The problem-to-be-solved in “Remember Me” was: “Well, if Aubrey never knew Ben, why would she agree to have his child?” So the writer said, “Well, what if there was this posthumous foundation for Ben that was… ummmm, working on a… VR experience!…. And… ummmmm…. Like, Ben used to be a travel nut and taped all his travel exploits and they were working on turning those into a VR experience and THAT WAY we can have Aubrey “meet” Ben almost like they’re meeting in real life!”
Come on already. It’s such a clearly writer-generated fake situation that it doesn’t pass the suspension of disbelief test.
One of your jobs as a screenwriter is not just to solve problems. It’s to solve them elegantly. It’s to solve them in such a way that they are invisible and the audience is so immersed in them that they never consider the idea that a writer is writing it.
You know who I learned this from? “House of the Dragon’s” Ryan Condal. He used to talk about this all the time back on the Done Deal message boards. Your solutions can’t be so big and outrageous and “movie-logicy” that they break the suspension of disbelief.
Newbie writers are the biggest violators of this because they don’t respect the reader yet. They think the burden is on the audience to go along with whatever they come up with, as opposed to truth, which is that the burden is always on the writer.
Another issue with this script is that it was clearly written by someone who doesn’t read a lot. I know this because if they’d a read a lot of scripts, they would know some of the basic things that readers dislike. Like dual-side dialogue. Giant paragraphs. Big page counts. Unnecessarily over-written openings that go on for too long and, therefore, delay when we get to the actual plot.
One of the reasons I think yesterday’s book was so excellent – and, mind you, it’s a book with 70,000 more words and yet read much faster than today’s script – is that the author was an editor for 20 years. So they’d read so many books.
That’s why The Maid reads so effortlessly, and why I remind aspiring writers at every turn to READ AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. Because I guarantee you, you will accumulate a list of things writers do that annoy you, and, in doing so, ensure that you never make those mistakes yourself.
The Way You Remember Me is like a lot of Black List scripts these days. It’s imperfect. It has some good things. But it doesn’t feel ready in the way that you pour over your work and make it the best it can possibly be before showing it to anyone ready. Which is why I’d retitle it, The Way You Won’t Remember Me.
Script Link: The Way You Remember Me
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Controversial take! This script was super heavy on the music cues. But I’m telling you, music as writing inspiration is HIGHLY DANGEROUS. The beauty of the songs you listen to, and the way they reverberate within you, fools you into thinking that the stuff you’re writing is amazing, when, in reality, it’s just the songs you’re listening to that are amazing. A great scene or a great sequence should be great without a single note of music behind it. This script read like the writer was lost in the power of his music. As a result, the music was doing all the heavy-lifting.
