Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) When a non-confrontational playwright loses her engagement ring, she must travel through Italy to get it back with a man who was supposed to be just a one-night stand, discussing love and lying along the way.
About: Brooke Baker is fairly new to the screenwriting scene. Although she did write one episode of the TV mini-series, “Pam and Tommy.” This script finished on last year’s Black List with 15 votes.
Writer: Brooke Baker
Details: 104 pages
Kaitlyn Dever for Eleanor?
We’ve got a feminist interpretation of the rom-com genre in the latest Black List entry. Seeing the world though any socially progressive lens is going to give you a huge leg up on your Black List competition. Even if the script isn’t very good.
Eleanor is an English playwright who lives in New York and is vacationing in Rome. Eleanor is engaged to Noah, who she’s known since college. The whole reason she’s in Rome is to research an acting role in an upcoming play.
While there, she stumbles upon a funny handsome tour guide who delivers comedic zingers like, “This is the Fiumi Fountain, or Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi. It was sculpted for Pope Innocent the tenth representing the four continents of papal influence. The cost of it could have fed people on those continents, but what’s hunger when you have the opportunity for an homage.” We may not be smitten by this lumbering joke. But for Eleanor, it’s the best joke she’s ever heard.
The two run into each other later, get a few drinks, and the next thing you know they’re performing a highly inappropriate naked variation of the Macarena. The next morning they concede it was a nice one-night stand and off Eleanor goes to meet a friend in Milan.
But while there, she loses her purse, which contains the engagement ring she wasn’t wearing. After a series of confusing actions that bring us back to Rome, Eleanor reunites with Lucas, who agrees to escort her back to Milan to locate her engagement ring.
That ring becomes an empty McGuffin as it’s only there to allow Lucas and Eleanor to spend more time together and commit more sins against humanity. It turns out, by the way, that Lucas is cheating on someone as well, the girlfriend he hasn’t told Eleanor about.
The two then proceed to look down on others to build up themselves, endearing them to us even more. Eventually, Eleanor figures out that Lucas has a girlfriend, storms off, and is lectured by her lesbian best friend who, for some reason, considers this the optimal moment to scold Eleanor for being straight. If she was gay, she says, her life would be perfect. It inspires Eleanor to dump Noah. But will she still reconnect with Lucas?
Let me start off by saying this is one of the most ideal types of scripts you can write – something with a light easy-to-understand premise, it’s marketable, it has a lot dialogue, and it’s easy to keep up with.
That doesn’t mean it’s the best *movie* to write. But script readers love scripts like this because they require so little investment. The reader can just sit back and enjoy themselves without thinking too much.
To that end, I commend “There You Are.” I read this script at a coffee shop. I tend to be a spaz at coffee shops, looking around at everyone every five seconds. This makes it nearly impossible for me to read scripts there.
But I had zero issues reading this script. So that says something.
However, when a script is really simple and only has a few characters, it is imperative that we like those characters. And I didn’t like Eleanor.
One thing that all writers should watch out for is writing characters who think they’re better than the rest of the world. Eleanor starts the movie out highly judgmental of some guy who hits on her. Then, seconds later, proceeds to fall in love with a man she hasn’t even met despite being engaged. Objectively speaking, which individual is more in the wrong here? The fact that the writer doesn’t realize that it’s Eleanor is odd.
And because this happens right when we meet Eleanor, we formulate a big fat negative opinion about our protagonist. Which means now you’re in the hole with the reader. It doesn’t mean you can’t change their mind. But you’ve added a ton more work for yourself if you plan to get yourself out of that hole.
A great comp for a movie that did this correctly was Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The character of Vicky, just like Eleanor, is engaged and she’s in another country and some attractive man hits on her. But Vicky is aggressively resistant towards him. This gets us on her side. We like that she’s done the right thing.
It’s only through a series of unpredictable events that Vicky is forced to spend time with Juan, where she finds out he’s actually much deeper and more thoughtful than she originally assumed. We watch them start to fall for each other in an organic way. So that when they finally sleep together, it feels natural and not like Vicky was instigating it.
Meanwhile, Eleanor’s over here raising her hand in the middle of the Collesum screaming, “Yaz, queen! Hit me up with that Italian D!” Which we would champion if she wasn’t engaged. But since she is, we’re, like, “What are you doing??” And we don’t like Lucas either. Because he’s cheating on his girlfriend as well.
As the movie goes on and the two begin exhibiting some guilt about what they did, they inch back towards respectability. But, by that time, the hole they dug was too deep. We despised what these two were doing, Eleanor in particular.
Also, there seemed to be these spotlight moments where both the writer and character say things that are completely un-self-aware. Late in the film when Eleanor’s friend points out that, despite everything, Eleanor seems to have enjoyed the experience, Eleanor replies, “God that’s depressing. The best time of my life was hanging out on a train with some a$$hole cheating on his girlfriend.” Wait a minute. Does Eleanor have access to a mirror??
You can make the argument that this movie is exploring reality as opposed to the bubble gum version of relationships and dating. Sometimes, as human beings, we do dumb illogical s—t. Sleep with the wrong people. Hurt those we love. The problem is, the script doesn’t have the requisite touch required to hold up to this more complex view of humanity.
Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s exploration of young love while traveling contains much deeper and more thoughtful conversations, the likes of which support the complex mistakes we make. Everything in There You Are made me think of a Netflix rom-com. And you can’t have brazenly unlikable leads in a Netflix rom-com. That’s not what we’re looking for when we press “play.”
Another story that did all of this way better was the second season of White Lotus. Portia falls for this guy, Jack, and their experience takes on this weird unpredictable journey where it turns out Jack’s life is a lot more complicated than it first seemed. And Portia starts to realize that she’s in over her head.
Meanwhile, “There You Are,” is a wish-fulfillment female fantasy that avoids the consequences of being selfish. The girl still gets the guy, despite both of them making deeply flawed choices they never have to answer for.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your characters ever act like they’re better than others, we won’t like them. There’s this scene where Eleanor and Lucas are out at a bar and they meet some cool Americans and immediately start lying to them about who they are and acting like these other people, who just want to hang out, aren’t worthy of their time or respect. It solidified my dislike not just for them as individuals, but for them as a couple. From that point on, there was no way these two were ever going to climb back out of that unlikable hole.
What I learned 2: Don’t describe your characters with adjectives in your logline that are unconnected to the rest of the logline. Today’s logline starts with: “When a non-confrontational playwright loses her engagement ring…” How does being non-confrontational connect to anything else in this logline? If you had described her as a “commitment-phobe,” now you have a connecting adjective since the movie is about her cheating. But “non-confrontational?” That’s random and, therefore, makes the logline feel amateurish.
