Genre: Drama/Serial Killer (loosely based on true events)
Premise: A struggling single mother must confront dangerous forces – and sins of her past – when her world collides with that of a serial killer. Inspired by the true story of Delaware’s only serial murderer, the Route 40 killer.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. Brand new writer.
Writer: Erin Kathleen
Details: 117 pages
Readability: Medium
Yesterday, we had a main character with a prosthetic leg. Today we have a main character with a severe limp. What is it with writers and legs??? They’re obsessed! Wasn’t it Billy Bob Thorton who said that he wasn’t going to play the Control Room Director in Armageddon until they gave him a gimp foot? People in this business are passionate about legs, I guess.
The year is 1987. We’re in Delaware. A woman named Diane, who used to be a prostitute but who’s finally getting her life back on track, hitchhikes at night. A guy in a van picks her up. When has that ever ended well? He immediately attacks her with a hammer. She’s able to fend him off, burst out the door, and run into the forest. But he chases her and brutally murders her.
Cut to an hour ago where we meet our heroine, 40-something Pam Spinelli. Pam is the manager of a nice restaurant on the Route 40 highway there. Pam is giving some leftovers to Diane out the back door. We get the sense that Pam helps Diane out whenever she can. There might have been a close friendship here once.
Obviously, when they find Diane’s body the next week, Pam’s devastated. That’s the fourth murder along the highway in the past several months. She worries for her 16 year old daughter, Nikki, who works at a donut shop on the highway. Nikki usually gets a ride home but sometimes she has to walk. What if this monster picks her up?
When local cop Miles (he who has the limp), comes around to ask Pam questions about Diane, Pam says she wants to help find the killer. There’s a truck stop down the road where a lot of prostitutes work. They won’t talk to cops but they will talk to her. Miles is reluctant. He’s not supposed to put pedestrians in danger. But this psycho killer is on the loose and the pressure to catch him is high. So he okays it.
At first Pam just talks to hookers to get info. But soon she’s profiling truckers, trying to figure out which one of them is the killer. Things get dicey when she starts riding with them. As Pam tries to work things through with her daughter (so her daughter doesn’t end up like her) and Miles (who she wants but can’t be with since she no longer trusts men) she takes riskier and riskier chances with these truck drivers until she finally finds herself in the company of the killer. Will she survive????
Today I’d like to talk about the balance between character and plot because this balance is something you’re going to be faced with in every movie you write. On the one hand you have character development. That’s characters battling internal demons, characters battling trauma from their pasts, characters battling broken relationships. Whenever you have two characters in a scene and neither of them are trying to forward the plot, they are likely dealing with character related issues.
Conversely, you have plot development and that’s when you’re hitting the reader with new story developments, surprising twists, new information that helps them “solve the case” – anything that pushes your characters closer to the story’s ultimate resolution.
For a point of reference, let’s look at two extreme examples. Raiders of the Lost Ark is, I’d say, the ultimate plot-driven movie. Every scene is shoving the plot forward. Manchester by the Sea may be the best example of a pure character driven movie. I don’t remember any plot beats from that movie at all.
Why am I bringing this all up? Well, it’s because as I read today’s script, I felt like it put the majority of its eggs in the wrong basket, which was the character-development basket. “What’s wrong with character development, Carson? Don’t you tell us all the time that character is everything?”
Yes, character is everything. But, usually, when I say that, I’m talking about creating a really interesting character or a really likable character that we’ll want to follow. Not necessarily writing a ton of character development scenes. For example, Nightcrawler. Gilroy created a really cool character and then mostly left the script in the hands of the plot. He didn’t have fifty scenes of Louis Bloom introspectively trying to overcome himself.
The Women of Route 40 leans HARD into character development and the problem I had with that was when you write in this genre (the serial killer genre), there’s an expectation. People want to see the plot develop in interesting ways and they want those plot beats to come every 10-12 pages. I kept waiting for stuff to happen here and it just didn’t. And even when it did – when someone would be murdered for example – it was covered quickly before pushing on to the next thoughtful character interaction.
And look, I get that the balance between plot and character is going to affect everyone differently. There’s something to be said for taking traditionally plot-fueled narratives and making them character pieces, and vice versa. But you’ve got a really fertile serial killer garden here to grow plot in. So it just seems strange that you only planted a few vegetables.
Here’s what I think happened. The writer wanted to tell an emotional story about the victims of Route 40. And I get that. It’s based on real events so you want to focus on that emotional component and give those victims their due. But I think a time comes with every script where we have to let go of the reason we originally wanted to write it, and we have to embrace what the story needs in order to be entertaining.
We all get wrapped up in that initial reasoning for writing our story. For example, I once wrote a script about the dissolution of the American dream. And I tried to show this through a character doing everything he was supposed to do to make it in America, but it still not working out in the end. And I showed the script to a few people and they were bored. I said, “But don’t you see! This is about America! And how it’s a lie! And he represents the average American!” And one reader just looked at me and said, “Yeah but it was boring.”
Ouch.
But he was right!
I’d gotten so wrapped up in trying to get that emotional point across that I forgot about what the audience needed in order to enjoy the story. That’s all I’m saying here. I don’t know if the script cared enough about keeping the audience engaged. It was more about hitting those character beats that honored the women who died.
For me, at least, that wasn’t enough. You had a unique serial killer. It felt like we could’ve explored him for some bigger plot moments.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a line from the script: “It’s sleeting now, the heavens spitting on her.” While a fun line, this is more of a novel description than a screenplay description. With screenplays, you want to write descriptions that create an image in the reader’s head, not descriptions that will win you an analogy contest. The name of the game is always to paint a picture in the reader’s head. You want them to feel like they’re in the theater looking up at the screen, watching the movie. So come up with descriptions that support that. I’d focus this description more on the violence of the sleet, that it’s “slamming” into her. Something along those lines. Create that image!
