Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: Two members of an Upper Peninsula drug enforcement team have their quiet days rocked when a mysterious man who doesn’t speak English races across the border on a snowmobile filled with money and drugs.
About: This script finished on the Black List last year. Ben Bolea has made a short movie as well as a small feature film.
Writer: Ben Bolea
Details: 112 pages
Bring Jennifer Lawrence full circle back re: Winter’s Bone?
Yesterday, in the “What I Learned” section, I talked about a way you can make up for your low-budget movie ending by using setups and payoffs to make the ending feel bigger.
I think about that all the time. As writers, you can technically write anything. You can write a 200 million dollar movie if you want to. But the reality is, you probably need to start small and tell smaller stories. The reason for this is, when you’re an up-and-comer, the studios don’t trust you to write giant movies.
And because you’re writing a smaller movie, you’re starting with one hand tied behind your back, at least in how it relates to competing with the big Hollywood movies.
Therefore, I’m always looking for hacks to make your small movie feel just as big and important as a Marvel movie. Or a Fast and Furious movie. You’ll never compete with their set pieces. But there are ways to trick the reader/viewer into things feeling big even though they’re small.
For example, that movie Boiling Point just dropped on Netflix – it’s a movie about a restaurant kitchen in New York City. The movie takes place all in one night. That URGENCY makes this tiny story feel bigger than it is. So there’s another tip for you: URGENCY can make small movies feel bigger.
Another easy way to make a small movie feel bigger is what today’s script does – it covers drugs. Drugs, guns, murder: All three of those things are cheap to produce. You don’t need a lot of money to shoot a movie that has them. So it’s yet another hack you can use to compete with the big boys.
U.P.S.E.T. takes place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. For those of you who don’t know, Michigan is a state that has this giant vertical shape. Then, above it, is a lake. Above that lake is a SECOND part of Michigan. That’s the Upper Peninsula, which borders Canada.
I like the use of the Upper Peninsula in this movie because I’m always looking for something new and fresh and this area of the country has never been written about before. The title, by the way, stands for a tiny drug force up there. It’s called U.P.S.E.T. and it stands for The Upper Peninsula Substance Enforcement Team.
Heading up this team are 30-somethings Janice and Glenn. But Janice has finally hit the big time and is moving down state to join the DEA. That night, the small force celebrates and Janice makes the mistake of sleeping with Glenn.
The next morning, right before Janice is about to leave, they get a call that there’s a mysterious group of people who are snowmobiling around up north. So Janice and Glenn head up there where they run into a Mexican man speeding across the frozen lake on his snowmobile.
The man, Fausto, crashes and passes out. When Janice and Glenn catch up to him, they find him with a bag containing a million dollars and a ton of fentanyl pills. They take him back to the station but when he wakes up, it doesn’t matter because he can’t speak English.
Janice feels it’s their duty to look into this further and that’s when they find out that this is a major drug operation happening just north of the border and it’s probably – as in DEFINITELY – above their pay grade. But ever the determined cop, Janice heads up to the rich guy’s home that the drugs were supposed to be delivered to to find out more.
From there, the REALLY BAD guys get involved, and now it’s almost certain Janice and Glenn are goners. But if that isn’t bad enough, it turns out Janice’s own boss is involved. Which means they have no help from the outside and no help from the inside. The only way they’re getting out of this is to pull a John Wick and shoot up everyone they see.
I liked the way this script started. Once again, I’m always looking for ANYTHING FRESH in a script. The more freshness you can provide to your script salad, the more eagerly I will chow down. So to start with a cop snowmobile chase was a cool opening! I don’t remember ever seeing a cop car snowmobile going after the bad guys. So I was in.
And when Janice and Glenn slept together, I thought that was a strong choice as well. One of the harder things to do in screenwriting is make the primary character relationships interesting. Most of the writers I encounter take those relationships for granted and barely pay attention to them.
But if you can make that primary relationship interesting in some way, it adds a layer to the story. The more of these layers you can add, the deeper your story plays. The fact that they’ve known each other for years and slept together for the first time last night and now they have to engage in their biggest case ever — that adds subtext to every single conversation they have.
To understand the advantage of that choice, imagine the story without it. Imagine these two as cops who have a normal working relationship. It’s not as interesting. This is why I liked Challengers. Everything we kept learning throughout the movie added more and more layers to the primary relationship (the two players) and that final match.
If you want to know the difference between the okay scripts and the really good ones, it’s the writers who pay attention to details. They really think about that main relationship. They really think about the internal conflict with the protagonist. They really think about how to construct the plot in unexpected and gripping ways.
I realize it’s hard to explain but the short of it is: I can tell when a writer’s put 100% in. I can tell. I can actually tell the EXACT percentage they put in. For instance, I can tell when a writer has given his script 60% of what he’s capable of. These are the scripts I hate reading because I don’t feel like the writer cared enough to put his heart and soul on the page.
Most scripts I read hover between 60-70% effort. I maybe read 4-5 scripts a year where I feel that the writer gave me everything they’ve got. So I’m just warning you, while most readers may not have this nerdy percentage marker in their minds that I have, every reader can tell when a writer isn’t giving their all. You’re not fooling them. Trust me.
I always like to remind writers of that because it’s one of the most controllable variables in screenwriting: effort.
This script I’d put around 80-85%. There’s tons of effort here. But I’m not sure that the story ever did anything exciting. These small-town crime scripts all kinda feel the same. It’s tough to do much new with them. That’s what holding this script back. You read it and you think, “I’ve read this script before.” Not this EXACT script – but ones similar to it.
It was solid. Just never exceptional.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Add at least one layer to the primary relationship in your screenplay so that the scenes between those characters have an extra layer to them. These two slept together. Glenn wants more out of the relationship than Janice does. That ensures all of their conversations have an added layer of subtext!
