Genre: Comedy
Premise: Delaney Pitts is a nerdy, teenage virgin who has a secret online life as an erotic fan fiction author. But when a publisher tasks her with writing a book about her (non-existent) high school love life, she’s forced to team up with a top expert in the field: the slutty quarterback of the football team.
About: This script sold after a big bidding war. Emma Stone’s production company, Fruit Tree, is attached and A24 is the buyer. Maya Erskine, who played Mrs. Smith opposite Donald Glover in the Mr. & Mrs. Smith Prime video adaptation of the film, will make her directing debut. The script comes from Morgan Lehmann. This was Lehmann’s second spec sale of 2025. She also sold a female-driven sports comedy project in the vein of Miss Congeniality. Lehmann has also sold a couple of TV pilots. The Harvard grad’s best known credit is writing on numerous episodes for the TV show, Bless This Mess, which ran for two seasons.
Writer: Morgan Lehmann
Details: 99 pages
Abby Ryder-Forsten (Ant-Man & The Wasp) for Delaney?
Not long ago, I was at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market when I got into a conversation with a couple visiting from Ohio. It was one of those easy, drifting exchanges that starts in an ordinary place and expands into something unexpected. The woman was a writer, and they had come to Los Angeles for a book fair where she was appearing as a featured author and doing signings.
Curious, I asked what she wrote, expecting a standard answer, and she immediately said erotica. But not just general erotica. A very specific subgenre of erotica that’s suuuuuper dirty. She was describing this to me with complete ease, giving lurid examples of her work as casually as someone might describe how they cooked their chicken last night. Her boyfriend stood a few feet away, looking a little uncomfortable, as she laid out the details.
What struck me wasn’t the shock value, but how matter-of-fact it all was. Like there was a whole ecosystem of erotic subgenres I had never been aware existed. I knew about Fifty Shades of Grey, of course, but I’d always assumed that that was more of a cultural outlier than anything.
That’s why I chose to read today’s script. It takes that same idea (the existence of a much more specific, niche world of erotic writing) and filters it through a fun lens: a high school girl who has no real life sexual experience. Let’s take a look!
17 year old nerd author Delaney Pitts has a decent sized audience who reads her writing online. Which might surprise you considering that her current story follows Timothee Chalament as Willy Wonka dominating a young tied-up housewife. Yes, Delaney writes about graphic sexual experiences with nerdy pop culture characters.
The irony is that Delaney has zero real-life sexual experience. She hasn’t even kissed a guy! Her only friend is Kira, a super-horny Filipina girl whose parents are insanely religious and don’t let her do anything. As Kira likes to point out, they’re not even cool enough to get bullied. Literally nobody knows they exist.
On the flip side of this you have Ty Reynolds, the high school quarterback and every girl in school’s wet dream (including the teachers). But Ty isn’t even on Delaney’s radar. It’s like the Stapler guy from Office Space wanting to date Margot Robbie. At some point, you gotta be realistic about your options.
But then something interesting happens. Delaney gets a call from a publisher who saw her work online. He says if you can write a whole book of this stuff and it’s good, we’ll give you $50k. There’s only one stipulation. It has to be about the REAL LIFE of a high school girl. It can’t be about Thanos banging Blackpink.
Uh oh.
Delaney doesn’t have any original ideas! Nor would she know where to start. She has zero real life social high school experience. She’s never kissed a guy. Never been to a party. Don’t even get started on how far away she is from sex. But Delaney finds out that Ty got busted for submitting several English essays written by AI. If he doesn’t rewrite those essays and get a good grade on them, he won’t go to college.
So Delaney makes a deal with him. I’ll help you write those essays. You help me learn what high school and socializing and hooking up is really like. Ty agrees and they’re off to the races, with Delaney going to her first party that weekend.
But when the backup QB starts hitting on Delany, Ty gets unexpectedly jealous. And when Ty’s girlfriend, Sabrina, learns of this nerd-chick trying to lure her boyfriend into her weirdo nerd lair, she goes on the offensive, determined to get Delany out of the picture. Which may mean exposing her dirty sex-lit musings to the entire school.
Untitled Erotic Fan Fiction is a solid script. I think my big question, while reading it, was, why did A24 want this? Because this is about as formulaic as a script gets. It’s the same slightly raunchy teen comedy that they’ve been making since Pretty in Pink. I guess I was expecting something a little more avant-garde.
You guys know my feelings about comedies. You have to lean into what’s unique about your premise. Cause that’s the only area where you’re going to find jokes that haven’t been used in other comedies. And, in this case, those are exactly the funniest moments in the script, when we flash to one of Delaney’s weird erotic scenes she’s writing.
The problem was, there wasn’t enough of this! And because of that, Lehmann was instead depending on making teens in a high school setting funny, an arena with millions of other writers competing against you. I mean, how many different ways can you write the scene where your main characters are in a bedroom, talking about homework, with the sexual chemistry boiling underneath?
Again, it’s not that you can’t make that scene good. If the characters are strong and we want them to be together, it’ll work. But it’s still a scene we’ve read a million times before. So, in a way, we’ve already read the scene. We’re just waiting for you to finish it.
My writing strategy is: Look for the avenues that give you an advantage over other scripts. And mining the uniqueness of your concept at every turn is one of the easiest ways to do this. Especially with this premise. The moments I laughed the loudest were always the ridiculous yet alarmingly dirty sexual escapades Delaney would dream up.
I will say this, though. This script is perfectly structured. I’m talking absolutely perfect. It’s 100 pages long. The acts are divided perfectly (Act 1 = Pages 1-25, Act 2 = Pages 26-75, Act 3 = 76 – 100). The inciting incident happens between pages 12-15. We’ve got the midpoint (Delaney’s first party). And the majority of it is invisible. It doesn’t feel like you’re noticing those key script moments when they’re happening.
That’s the moment I’d say that a solid intermediate screenwriter becomes an advanced intermediate screenwriter – when they can structure out their story in a way that’s invisible to the reader.
And just to be clear on why that’s important – because a lot of people think that the 3-act structure and all the sub-beats of that structure are only done to make screenwriting teachers happy. They don’t believe they’re actually useful for telling a story. Not true. This is something I’ll get into Friday, with my new article – the point of good structure is to move the story along. When you nail your structure, your script is always pushing forward. When you don’t, that’s when it feels to the reader like not enough is happening.
Another thing I want to bring up here is the party scene. Cause a very quick way for me to know if I’m dealing with a real writer is to see how they handle a party scene. Not just a high school party scene but any “gathering” scene.
The secret to writing a good party scene is to give the key characters one of two labels. Either they are active or reactive. If they’re active, give them a goal they’re after. If they’re reactive, then you need to have something interesting happen to them (which they can then react to). If a key character doesn’t have one of these two things going on, your party scene will be in trouble.
In the party scene in Untitled Erotic Fan Fiction, Kira loses her phone. Kira has snuck out of her house. Has to sneak back in by 11pm. And we establish that if she goes back to her parents without a phone, her life will be over. So her goal is to find that phone. That’s her directive during the party scene.
Then we have Sabrina, Ty’s girlfriend. Sabrina has noticed Ty becoming distant lately. So she created this party (it’s taking place at her house) with the specific intent of getting her boyfriend obsessed with her again. So that’s Sabrina’s active goal: GET MY MAN BACK.
Then we have Delaney. Delaney doesn’t have a goal really at this party. She’s been forced to come here by Ty so she can experience what a real high school party is like so she can accurately write about it. But that’s not an active goal really. It’s too vague. So, we need to have something happen TO Delaney. In this case, we have Vaughn (the backup QB) notice her and start hitting on her. So Delaney spends the party reacting to that. Does she want to get involved? Does she not want to get involved? That’s her journey at the party.
Finally we have Ty. As we already established, Ty is the target of Sabrina. But Ty is starting to lose interest in his girlfriend. He’s starting to have more fun hanging out with Delaney. So Ty’s journey at this party is to deal with the incessant pressure that is Sabrina trying to get him back. She’s pulling every trick in the book to win him over, which is keeping him from where he really wants to be, which is with Delaney.
Now, all of this might seem obvious to the casual screenwriting eye. “Duh, Carson. You just have them each do something.” Trust me, it’s not that simple, lol. And I can give you about 1000 examples from the 10,000 scripts I’ve read where writers don’t give their party characters a clear directive or a clear action to react to. Actually, I just saw a terrible example of a party scene last night. I had on this awful movie called Palo Alto for 30 minutes (don’t ask why). And there was a party scene where none of the characters had any clear directive or action to react to. They just wandered. And the scene was boring as hell as a result.
All in all, Lehmann has a good understanding of the craft here, which has resulted in a solid script. But when it comes to comedy, you need to step on the gas. And it felt like we were mostly on cruise-control throughout this. More fun scenes surrounding Delaney’s sexual scribblings could’ve easily doubled the laugh count. But I’d still say this is worth the read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A good joke option is to connect two things that don’t go together at all. The juxtaposition of those things is what makes the joke funny. Of course, there’s an art to this. You can’t just say “bears and popsicles” and expect people to laugh cause the two things are different. You have to play with some combinations to find out which ones sound the funniest against each other. But when you land on a good one, it’s gold. In this scene, Ty has read Delaney’s most recent pages and has feedback.
“Fingered Jen” all by itself would not have been funny. The juxtoposition of placing it at a cheap fast food joint is what makes the joke pop.
