Genre: Slasher/Dark Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) Swept up in the excitement of her wedding day, Dr. Julie Wheeler is oblivious to the killer on her guest list, who is methodically stalking her nearest and dearest, until its too late.
About: This is going to be a little weird because I’m writing this “About” section AFTER I’ve written the review. I do this occasionally because when I look somebody up ahead of a review, I find that their success (or lack of) influences what I write. It’s better when I read the script knowing nothing. That’s when I’m the most honest. So count me both surprised and not surprised when I found out that Jessica Knoll was a successful novelist (her novel, “Luckiest Girl Alive” has almost 4000 ratings on Amazon, which is super hard to achieve). You’ll notice in the things I talk about in the review why her being a novelist makes sense. Anyway, this looks to be Knoll’s first screenplay. Or, at least, the first one she’s sent out to people.
Writer: Jessica Knoll
Details: 108 pages
It’s really hard to find fun premises like today’s on the 2019 Black List. Check out a couple of the loglines I had to wade through to get to this one… “An absent mother attempts to reconnect with her daughter by relaying to her how she helped her own parent through battles with cancer and addiction.” Sounds like a page-turner. “A brother and sister navigate the perils of both man and nature through Central America in their quest to find safety in the United States.” Sometimes I think these loglines are used as cheap alternatives to euthanizing people.
But just like Hamilton, I’m not giving up! I’m not going to miss my shot (to read a great script). And today’s concept sounds fun. So hold my hand (in an appropriate socially-distanced way) and let’s check it out together as script friends…
SCRIPT FRIENDS UNITE!
An upper-class New York wedding is going on for 34-year-old biotech doctor Julie Wheeler and 37-year-old Tom Cunningham. They’ve brought everyone up to the Cunningham Ranch, which, in addition to being Instagram friendly, has been in the Cunningham family for generations.
But we got problems from the start. Such as bridesmaid Becca, who just slept with Tom’s twin brother, womanizer Dylan, is killed by a mysterious axe-murderer in the wine room!
Later, Jason (Becca’s husband), heads out into the woods looking for Becca, since nobody else seems to care that she’s missing. He’s met by the caretaker, Edith. Edith has been on these grounds since the beginning and has known Tom and Dylan since they were kids. Could she be the killer? We’re not sure. But she does warn Jason that Tom and Dylan are known to pull “switcheroos.”
Meanwhile, Julie and Tom get married. Everything seems great, although they find it strange that Jason, a groomsman, decided not to show up. Every couple of scenes, we’re reminded that there’s a dispute at the heart of the Cunningham Ranch deed. It’s supposed to be split between Tom and Dylan. But their mother, who divorced their father, is also getting half of the property.
Amongst all this, Julie is having to deal with her impossible-to-please mother, who thinks Tom isn’t anywhere close to the status of man she deserves. All this leads to the obvious question: Can Julie get out of this weekend alive? As in, literally?
Here’s something I always forget then I see it in a script and I’m reminded of it again. One of the Ten Commandments of screenwriting is don’t have your characters babble on in a scene. Make sure the scene is focused. Establish the point of the scene (what each character wants) then come into the scene as late as possible and get out as soon as possible. This is proper screenwriting etiquette so that your characters don’t talk forever and bore us to death.
However, if you’re good with dialogue, this rule doesn’t apply to you. You want to keep it in the back of your mind, of course. But if you can write lively, clever, fun, NATURAL interactions between characters, the reader doesn’t notice that the scene is long. We don’t care about that rule because we’re wrapped up in the interaction.
You can see this on page 6 in a scene where Julie is getting ready for the wedding. There’s a lot of chit-chat, backstory mentioning, even significant exposition – things that typically kill dialogue. But Knoll writes dialogue so effortlessly, we’re too busy enjoying ourselves to notice it.
So how do you know if you write good dialogue and can ignore this rule? You have to be told by at least three people who have read your work, unprompted, that your dialogue is really good. If no one brings that up on their own, stick to the basics. Clear scene goal. Get in late. Leave early. And yes, you’re cheating if you corner them with a, “So did you like my dialogue?? It was good, right!?”
If Til Death only had a bunch of these dialogue scenes, it would be in good shape. But after that scene, the plotting takes center stage. It’s all about herding characters to certain areas (it’s time for pictures!), getting a character alone so he’s exposed the potential killer. And lots of setup about the twins, the ranch deed, and complicated high society money problems.
Once the script got bogged down in that, it wasn’t nearly as entertaining. I liked it better when it was funny. The opening was funny. Julie talking to her friends in that scene was funny. But most of that goes out the window when it’s time to set plot points up.
And this is something a lot of new writers struggle to figure out. If you have a plot-heavy story, you don’t want to let the plot become a burden on the script. It can’t be this never-ending wall of information because then you lose the fun. And, literally, that’s what we get here. We get walls of text everywhere. 14-line paragraphs aren’t uncommon. This in a medium where you should be nervous writing a 4-line paragraph.
It seems to me like Knoll is a talented writer who’s new to screenwriting. Some of these mistakes are Screenwriting 101 stuff. And now that I’m thinking about it, that 10-page dialogue scene I praised may not have been a deliberate choice, but rather the writer not knowing that 10-page dialogue scenes aren’t common in screenwriting.
I’m going to talk about another ‘what I learned’ in a second but my preemptive ‘what I learned’ is to not overburden your script with direction. If there’s a lot of describing what’s going on and where we are and you’re mixing that in with lots of exposition-focused dialogue, that’s like forcing a soccer player to go out on the field holding a 30-pound dumbbell. It’s slowing everything down to a crawl and it’s hard to make a story work under those circumstances.
This got close to a ‘worth the read’ because I liked the premise and I liked the way the script started. But it lost its way under a heavy dose of too much plotting.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A lot of good jokes come from establishing a sad or intense situation, the kind of situation that could only warrant serious reactions, and then you throw in a line that’s the opposite of serious. Early in the script, there’s a murder next to a wine rack and a couple of wine bottles fall and break, causing the wine to mix with the blood of the murdered body. It’s a gruesome scene. The caterer and his assistant are horrified by the victim’s death and worried about how to replace the wine (a couple of bottles of ’97 Piedmont) since the wedding is today. He decides on a cheap red wine replacement then says to the assistant, “And find a mop for this. (sniffs the air) And Febreeze or something. (sniffs again) Maybe we dodged a bullet. Smells like the ’97 turned.” You can use this type of humor successfully in any comedy. The more serious the situation, the better the surprise joke will play.
