A former Black List topping author whose great script only failed to get developed because it, ironically, got blacklisted by Madonna is back with a new take on Macbeth
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) After beloved movie star Tom Adair is found dead, the outpouring of grief and sympathy quickly elevates his best friend Alec Donavan to movie star status. Now Alec must contend with his newfound fame and success–and the fact that he and his agent/girlfriend Karynn Pieper secretly murdered Tom and are haunted by his vengeful ghost.
About: Today’s writer has topped the Black List before with a Madonna biopic that was awesome. She’s back, and this latest script of hers is an adaptation of one of the most popular stories of all time – MacBeth.
Writer: Elyse Hollander
Details: 100 pages
Perfect casting?
For a long time, it has been thought that scripts about the industry don’t work. The failure of HBO’s The Franchise seemed to confirm that pulling off the subject matter was impossible. But then The Studio came along and proved that it could be done!
Has “Turnaround” also cracked the code on stories based on the industry? Let’s find out!
Set in the early 2000s (why? who knows??), 30-something Alec Donovan, an actor, is struggling to make ends meet. He’s resorted to writing his own script. But all the big producers in town tell him that the only way this script will get made is if he has a movie star in the lead role.
It just so happens that Alec has a movie star best friend! Tom Adair. But he and Tom haven’t spoken in forever. Ironically, the two have the same agent, Karynn Piper. And Alec is sleeping with Karynn. But even she tells him it ain’t happening with Tom, who’s on the set of his latest movie, about Caesar.
As it so happens, one of the actors on the movie ODs on some bad coke, and Tom figures he’ll throw his buddy a bone, hiring him onto the movie. Later on, Alec decides to see if Tom will be in his movie so he goes over to his house. That’s when he sees that there’s a young attractive naked dead guy in Tom’s bed. Another OD!
Soon, Karynn is over and the three are deciding what to do with the body. But when Tom starts commanding them around, Alec loses it and pushes his friend down the stairs, killing him. Alec and Karynn decide to stage the house like it was just these two here and jet out.
Cut to a year later and Alec has used the publicity of his friend’s death to become a hot commodity in Tinseltown. He even stars in the sequel to that Caesar movie. Alec has to deal with all the responsibilities of his newfound position, which include being a sellout, something he vehemently detests.
But that’s not nearly as big of a problem as his dead friend deciding to haunt him. “Haunt” is a strong word. I’d say it’s more like trolling. He doesn’t threaten Alec. He just says a lot of things that make him feel bad. Of course, Alec thinks he’s going insane, which interferes with his movie star life. He eventually has a mental breakdown before realizing he must take care of this problem once and for all.
Oof.
Oof oof.
Double oof.
This was not good.
You can always tell, too.
You know immediately if a script isn’t going to work, even if it’s a good writer, like today.
The second I saw that we were randomly setting the movie in the early 2000s I said, “Uh oh.” If stories are set in random near-past time periods for no reason, that’s a good sign that a crappy script is coming.
And then the structure was… nonexistent. Things just happen like they’re being made up on the spot.
This supporting actor dies of an overdose on the set of Tom’s movie and then Alec replaces him. Then that production ends and we cut to another death, when Tom’s boy toy ends up overdosing at his house. Then, not long after that, we get the THIRD death of the first 30 pages, with Tom himself getting murdered.
That’s what we call “all over the place storytelling.”
We cut to one year later because of course we do. Remember yesterday how I told you that extremely tight time frames were screenplay catnip. This shows you what happens when you go the opposite direction. After that one-year jump cut, all the air left the balloon. The story basically starts over with Alec now being a movie star in Tom’s stead.
Then we just… hang out for a bunch of scenes. At a certain point, I checked the page number. It was page 65 and NO PLOT HAD BEGUN YET! There was no engine underneath the pages. The script existed solely to wait for every instance that Tom could haunt Alec. And he didn’t even haunt him that much! Want to know what a script that actually has structure and an engine looks like so you can compare good to bad? Check out any version of A Christmas Carol.
I’d go so far as to say, I don’t think this script did a single thing right. Even the humor wasn’t funny. “Some would say, thirty-five is too old to die young, you know?” Is that a funny line? I know it “presents” as funny. But does it make you laugh?
“Hanging around funny” is not the same as funny. A lot of writers forget that. They think that if they can place some jokes near funny, that will be enough. But funny needs to actually be funny.
The thing is, we’ve got a comp for this on how to do it right. “The Studio.” The Studio is covering the same ground but it’s doing it in a way fresher and funnier way. Note that The Studio does what I was teaching everybody yesterday – using The Big U for all of its episodes.
It also had much clearer characters with clear characteristics, which is imperative to the humor hitting. You have the new studio head who loves artsy movies yet is forced to make brainless big-budget shlock. You have the “That Guy” producer, a talentless douchebag who knows it’s only a matter of time before people figure out he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You have the overly ambitious assistant. And you have the over-the-top marketing girl.
Here in Turnaround, Alec’s character is pretty clear. He’s living in his friend’s shadow. Karynn is clear – she’s the cold-blooded agent. But she’s so cliche that everything she does is boring and obvious. But the real difference in these two character groups is that we don’t like either of the characters in this script. Whereas we like all of The Studio characters.
Here’s one certainty I have learned over 20 years of reading – If you have unlikable leads and no plot engine, there is NO WAY your script will work. It is literally impossible to pull off.
And I think that the pushback to my criticism would be that this is an adaptation of one of the most successful stories of all time in MacBeth. But there’s a slight difference in the time periods that the two versions of the story are released in. And I’m pretty sure that in 1606, Shakespeare didn’t have to compete with an infinite-scrolling app of endless entertainment.
You gotta change with the times, baby. A stronger structure. More urgency. And characters we can actually get behind. This was very close to a “What the hell did I just read.”
The sad thing is that those improvements would probably only make this script average. The DNA here is full of too many cobwebs to turn this into a winner.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It is VERY DIFFICULT to make a big time jump after the first act and have the script work. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But in all the scripts I’ve read that have done it, I’d say 99.9% of them sucked. So, don’t do it unless you absolutely know what you’re doing and you have a good reason to do so as well as a strong game plan for executing it.
