Carson hacks the Black List to find the best scripts!
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: When a deadbeat son hires his friends to rob his own mother and father in order
to pay an outstanding debt to a local drug dealer, things don’t go as planned, and
family bonds are stretched to their furthest extremes.
About: Justin Varava has had a bit of success as a writer, scoring the occasional TV staffing gig. His most high profile job was writing for Wizards of Waverly Place. This script landed on the most recent Black List with 12 votes.
Writer: Justin Varava
Details: 105 pages
Harris Dickenson for Duane?
With the Black List falling to catastrophically bad levels, it’s become very hard to find good scripts from there.
But I’ve discovered a new approach!
Here’s what I do. I pick two scripts from the list and read the first two pages of each. Then, whichever has the better writing, that’s the one I go with.
The other script in play today was “Trapped,” about a woman who gets trapped in a cave with rising water. The opening of the script is pretty good. We jump right into it. A car is racing through the jungle at night with rain coming down hard. It emerges into an open section and two people are screaming and pointing towards a cave filling up with water.
So, why did I pick this script over that one?
Because this one had the better character moment. It opens with a woman painting herself. The painting is of her smiling. Whereas the real life version of her is the opposite.
Now you may be baffled right now, as you look at that first page and you think, “Wow, that is a wall of text! And right there on the first page! Carson always tells us never to do that so why would he choose this one over the other fast lean script?”
Two reasons. One, the writing here within this “wall” of text is strong. If it was weak then, yes, I would go with the other script. Two, when you read a lot of scripts, you get tired of anything that’s too familiar. And these very lean simplistic concepts all feel familiar to me. If the lean writing had a stronger more unique voice, though, I probably would’ve chosen it.
The hardest thing to do in writing is create interesting characters. Varava has proven in one page that he can create a character I want to know more about. And I was rewarded immediately with a great second scene that I’ll tell you about in a minute.
First, let’s dig into Turpentine’s plot.
Turpentine follows a 20-something burn out in a small town named Duane. Duane owes 8 grand to a bad dude for a long running drug tab, and the bad dude isn’t waiting any longer for his payment.
So Duane recruits his two dumb work buddies, Rodney and Billy, and asks them to rob his father, who has a very rare gun collection. So Rodney and Billy head over to the house one night, with masks, and ask Duane’s father, the very selfish Gene, where the guns are. Gene says he doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
So Billy puts a gun to the head of Helen, Duane’s mom, who, by the way, is extremely unhappy in her marriage due to the fact that Gene won’t even look at her anymore. Billy begins counting to 3. If Gene doesn’t tell him where the guns are, he’ll kill his wife. Gene doesn’t even flinch when Billy counts down. At the end of the count, Billy drops his arm, too afraid to do it. The two then run out. Helen stares at her husband, realizing that he was perfectly okay with them killing her.
Meanwhile Rodney and Billy are so emotionally traumatized from the experience that they demand Duane still pay them for the job. So in addition to Duane owing the criminal boss money, he also owes these two money.
A couple of days later, when Helen goes into town, she spots Rodney, and due to an exposed tattoo, recognizes him from that night. He sees her immediately and tries to run away but she corners him in his car. But Rodney is not ready for what Helen has to say next. She’s not mad at him. She wants him to finish the job and kill her husband.
So while Duane attempts to find other ways to erase his debt, Helen keys in on eliminating the demon she lives with. But let’s just say that Gene isn’t the easiest target and that once you’ve shown your hand to someone, they’re going to be waiting for you the next time.
Let’s talk about the second scene in the script that I teased above.
Cause it’s the scene that solidified that I was going to read something good. It’s a simple dinner scene. Helen cooks chicken fried steak for her and Gene. But as Gene cuts and chews each piece, he’s clearly disappointed with the food.
He finally asks her what she did differently. She says nothing. He’s still suspicious. Slowly eats some more. Looks at her suspiciously. And finally asks the question again. Helen then confesses that she wanted to try something different, so she added a new spice. Gene nods like a cop who’s just caught a murder suspect in a lie and says, very seriously, that his wife should’ve informed him that it was now okay to lie in their marriage. He then goes back to eating in silence.
The reason I liked this scene is because it took a very simple premise — eating dinner — and it used that moment to tell me more about the marriage than the last 50 scripts with marriages combined.
And it wasn’t in this obvious way where they argue about wanting different temperatures on the thermostat. It was this very passive aggressive interrogation into something as simple as: what’s different with my food? It told us that these two have been together long enough that he knows every single little minor change in their routine. It shows that he has disdain for his wife. It shows she walks on eggshells around her husband. All wrapped up in two people eating dinner.
There was another scene a little later that confirmed this writer was the real deal. In it, a woman, Minnie, shows up at an elementary school for a parent-teacher conference with her son’s teacher.
Just as the teacher begins the meeting, the door opens and Duane emerges. Minnie stares at him with rage and says, “What are you doing here?” He says that he was on the e-mail chain that told him about this meeting. Minnie immediately looks to the teacher and says, “Get him off the chain. He doesn’t have custody anymore.”
Duane then proceeds to defend himself to the teacher, explaining that the things that lost him custody of his son were not exactly his fault, which Minnie then disputes, and Duane then defends the dispute.
This is such a clever setup for a scene. Every other writer in existence would’ve had these two come to the parent teacher conference separately but knowingly (Minnie would’ve known Duane was coming). This way is SO MUCH BETTER because it creates conflict from the start. And ALSO it allows the writer to plug in a ton of backstory about Duane and Minnie and their son without it feeling like backstory at all. Cause all of Duane’s backstory is him defending himself.
It takes real thought and skill to write a scene like this. I don’t encounter it often.
Varava makes a lot of great creative choices here. My favorite was when Rodney and Billy broke into the house and demanded Gene’s rare guns. Remember, as a writer, you have a choice about who Billy points the gun at. He could’ve had Billy point the gun at Gene. And I think most writers would’ve done that because it’s Gene who knows where the guns are.
But it’s SOOOOO much more interesting to have him point the gun at Helen because it exposes that Gene doesn’t care about his wife. He doesn’t care if she dies. And you only find that out if Billy points the gun at her. Not only that, but it tells us a lot about Helen as well. Helen knows where the guns are. She could’ve given them up. But she’s so terrified of her husband – he gives her a look that says, ‘don’t even think about it’ – that she chooses to risk death over his ire.
That’s really strong character development there.
Pretty much all the character work here is 5-star. Every character has been well developed. When a character speaks, they have really relatable takes on the human condition. Here’s Duane rationalizing his drug habit that’s left him 8 grand in debt to his work friends: “Well, I been coping. You know? Ever since Minnie threw me out, been trying to get my head straight. My mom was helping me for a bit, giving me some money. Then my dad found out and he cut me off. So, I’d become accustomed to a particular lifestyle, you know? Then, suddenly, through no fault of my own, I was no longer able to afford that lifestyle. And the uncertain feeling of not bein’ able to afford it made me need it even more. Ya know? So it was, like, this real unhealthy cycle.”
My extended family are all small-town folk, and I’ve had conversations that sound exactly like this. Every line feels so authentic. If I had read Trapped, I have no doubt that any of the characters would’ve come even close to the authenticity of these characters.
The only thing holding the script back is its ‘sleepy town’ ball and chain. It’s hard for small stories to elevate up to an impressive level. There’s just something about the tiny scope that limits the height of the ceiling. But boy is this some great character work. That helped it achieve the impossible and move up to an impressive. That rarely happens!
Script link: Turpentine
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Everyday moments have powerful scenes hidden within them. A dinner. Pumping gas. Picking up your kid at school. Doing laundry. Standing in line at the store. Take two characters, a little imagination, and a desire to show the reader who your characters are, and you can use any one of these moments to write an informative entertaining scene.
