Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In the not-too-distant future, where a new technology allows an individual to project their psyche into the body of another, thus creating a body-sharing gig economy, a financially-struggling married couple accepts a wealthy man’s proposal to use the wife’s body for a single night, but soon that decision causes their relationship and lives to spiral out of control with fatal consequences.
About: Today’s writer, Mark Townend, has been at this for at least 13 years! I know this because he signed up for the newsletter in 2012. He has one feature credit, a movie he co-wrote with Anthony Bourdain titled, Bone in the Throat, about a young ambitious chef who becomes mixed up with the East End London mob when he witnesses a murder. This script finished with 15 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Mark Townend
Details: 99 pages
Rami Malek for Mike?
We’re going high concept today!
And I don’t want to waste any time getting into it.
So let’s go!
Mike and Jodie are a young struggling married couple drowning in debt. Jodie doesn’t seem to like Mike that much, bristling at even the smallest, most mundane, statements he makes.
One day Jodie’s ex-boyfriend, Sean, who’s become rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, calls Jodie and wants to have dinner. He’s going to bring his girlfriend, Shelby, and encourages Jodie to bring Mike.
After some reminiscing, Sean hits Jodie with a whopper. Despite looking great, he has Stage 4 cancer. He and Shelby have been discussing what he might want to do in his final days and he told her he would love to have one more night with Jodie. Shelby is game for this, with one stipulation.
You see, in this near future that the script takes place in, a new technology has swept the nation – Timeshare – where you can rent people’s bodies. Shelby would “rent” Jodie’s body for the night, allowing Sean to be with “Jodie” one more time, but it wouldn’t be cheating because Shelby would be inside that body. Oh, and Sean would pay them 7 million dollars for this rental.
Jodie feels a little weird about the whole thing but Mike gives her the okay and away we go. The very next day, Jodie spends a night with Sean and comes back home. Immediately, it’s clear that Mike is having second thoughts about the whole thing. He keeps imagining the two having sex. And when he catches Jodie sneaking out to see Sean for dinner, he really freaks out.
So Mike does a Timeshare of his own, jumping into some other man’s body so he can be at the restaurant and listen in on the date. It’s inconclusive what the two discuss but, at this point, Mike is in full-on meltdown mode.
Things descend rapidly from there, with Jodie visiting Sean at his highrise condo. But something happens during their meeting and Jodie *supposedly* shoves Sean out the window, where he plunges 40 stories and dies.
(spoiler) I say *supposedly* because we quickly find out that Mike pulled a timeshare and jumped into Jodie’s body and killed Sean. And now he’s letting Jodie take the fall for the murder! When Jodie realizes this, she puts one last plan together to take Mike down. But she’s going to need Shelby’s help to do it.
Katherine Waterson for Jodie?
The pillar that sets up your story – the very concept your script is based on – must be the strongest pillar of all. If it is weak, if will be unconvincing, and the entire script will far apart.
I didn’t believe this setup at all.
It doesn’t make sense. You have an old girlfriend. You’re dying. You want to have one last date (as well as sex) with her, so you tell your current girlfriend this and she agrees to it. Right there, I no longer believe in the story. I mean, come on. There’s no way Shelby is agreeing to this. The fact that your boyfriend wants to bang the body of his ex would be a non-starter for 99% of the female population.
But even if you go along with that, Sean’s *request* doesn’t make sense either. It’s not like he’s paying 7 million dollars for the body of some gorgeous influencer – Olivia Dunne – who he’s never met before and just wants to have sex with her.
He’s specifically requesting his ex-girlfriend, a person he was (and may still be) in love with. Which means you don’t just want her body. You want HER. You want to spend time with that person again. So getting a Timeshare where you only get her body and not her mind makes no sense.
And those two things create such a shaky setup that anything you build on top of it crumbles.
The next big problem is Mike. I liked Mike’s character description (which I’ll get into in the ‘what I learned’ section) but Mike is an incredibly unrewarding protagonist to follow. He’s dumb. He’s thin-skinned. He’s selfish. We don’t like anything about this guy yet he’s our avatar throughout the story.
Although Jodie has her issues too, she’s much more sympathetic than Mike. So, what happens is, we see this whole story through Mike’s eyes, then when all the secrets are exposed about who was in whose body, we switch over to Jodie as the protagonist for the final act.
I don’t think you can do that. You ask us to watch the movie through one character the whole time, then you say, “Psyche! It’s actually this other person’s story.”
I just watched a movie, Companion, that dealt with this situation much better. Cause it had a similar problem. Due to people not being who they really were, we had to kind of jump around to different characters taking the lead. However, the writer never forgets that we need to see this story through Iris’s eyes. So even though we occasionally jump over to Josh’s POV, we always come back to Iris.
None of this is to say that the script doesn’t have potential. I actually like this idea. I like any idea where you’re playing with different personalities being in the same body. Because it’s high concept, which means the script gets more traction, actors get to play two or more different parts, which means heavier interest from talent, and it opens the door for all sorts of clever plot developments.
But that’s the trick, isn’t it? It’s got to be clever. If you write these types of scripts with a hammer, they get crushed. You have to use a scalpel and a steady hand the whole way through because the audience is expecting the movie to be smart.
For that reason, these types of scripts are the ones that need to be rewritten the most. Cause all of your first ideas (Mike was in Jodie’s body when she killed Sean!) are going to be ideas that the audience predicts. You need to use every draft to throw those first ideas out and go deeper. Go twistier. Go more unexpected!
Companion is a great example of this. It’s a really clever movie where all the reveals come right when they need to. You know this because we never see them coming. Meanwhile, Timeshare was way too clunky in its execution. There was never a plot beat I didn’t predict. And there was never a plot development where I thought, “That was deftly crafted.”
I mean we’re talking this needs 7 to 8 more drafts to fully unlock its potential. You need to go down some dead ends in a few drafts. Figure out what the story is really about in the next couple of drafts. And then bring it all together in the final three drafts. It may be worth that investment, though. This *does* feel like a movie to me. But it’s just not where it needs to be yet.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: On page 5, we get this description of Mike: “Mike likes the world to see him as a nice, enlightened guy. But he’s also frustrated, insecure, and desperately wants to “matter.” And sometimes those things get the better of him.”
I love this description because it doesn’t bury itself in writerly phrases and metaphors that hide who the character is. It just tells you who Mike is in simple clear terms. So many times, I get writers trying to be writers in their character descriptions and, in the process, describe some totally vague person. For example, someone else might write Mike’s description like this….
“Mike, a speeding train of a man with a ten-ton glob of frantic gray matter pulling at his nervous system 24/7 is always trying to be a man’s man when he’s more like a half-inflated basketball…” Like, what does that even mean?
Look, there are some writers who can put together the perfect metaphor to describe their character. But, if you’re not one of those writers, just TELL US WHO YOUR CHARACTER IS IN SIMPLE TERMS. I promise the script will benefit.
