Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: The wife of a megachurch pastor seeks atonement after she and her lover kill an attacker in self-defense, but don’t report it out of fear of exposing their affair.
About: This script finished number 12 on last year’s Black List. Andrew Zilch has been working in Hollywood since the early 2000s, where he was a crew member on Minority Report. He’s since moved onto producing television, where he’s been working steadily. Most recently he produced the show, “Good Mythical Morning with Rhett and Link.”
Writer: Andrew Zilch
Details: 119 pages
I love this setup. It’s simple but effective. Someone or a pair of people or a group of people kill someone and try to cover it up. But, since it’s a movie, the murder doesn’t go away, finding a way to creep back into their lives.
The only issue with the setup is that it doesn’t have the EXTRA. The EXTRA is that extra component that makes your movie bigger than the average bear. For example, let’s say you want to write a TV show about a family. Well that’s a pretty standard setup, isn’t it. There’s no EXTRA. But what if you made the family one of the richest in the world? That would allow you to explore the types of things that you don’t get to see in a typical family drama. “Succession” is currently one of the hottest shows on television. All because of the EXTRA.
Claire and Erik have rented an Air BnB cabin out in the middle of the wilderness so they can do fun adult things all weekend. But while they’re doing fun adult things, a man named Ronnie stumbles in, looking for something to steal. After grabbing Claire’s big diamond ring, he tries to sneak out, but runs into Erik, and that’s when all hell breaks loose. Confusion leads to a fight and Ronnie ends up falling down the stairs cracking his neck.
There’s no humpty-dumpty redemption for poor Ronnie. He’s dead.
Three months later we come to learn that Claire is married. But not to Erik. To Seth, a pastor at New Dawn Church, which is doing so well it’s about to sign a mega-deal with a TV station for broadcasting rights. We also learn that Erik buried Ronnie’s body on the lot and that, so far, nobody knows what happened to him. That changes within the first ten pages as the police announce that Ronnie’s body has been discovered.
In the article announcing the discovery, Claire learns that Ronnie had a daughter, Addie, which makes her feel insanely guilty. So she goes over to visit her under the pretense that she saw the story about Addie’s dad and wanted to see if New Dawn church could help in any way. While there, Claire meets Addie’s deadbeat boyfriend who knocked her up, Kyle, who happens to be an injured bull rider. Kyle and Claire dislike each other immediately.
While Claire’s friendship with Addie grows, Claire’s husband keeps pushing her to help him start a family. For some reason, Claire hasn’t been able to get pregnant (hint hint, she’s trying not to). Also, Erik keeps stopping by whenever Seth isn’t around to plead with Claire to get back together. During one of these talks, Kyle is sneaking around back and overhears them talk about killing Ronnie.
With newfound leverage, Kyle makes his demand. He wants 100k and he won’t tell anyone. Claire says I’ll do you one better. I’ll keep the church safe open tomorrow night and you can take everything that’s in there – over 200k. The only catch is you have to leave Addie alone. Kyle does just that, barely escaping. Claire believes all the drama is finally over. But when Kyle tells Claire that the woman who claims to be her new best friend killed her father, everything falls apart.
Like I said in the opening, you have to have a plan when you’re writing a script based on a concept that could be a five episode subplot in a soap opera. This is a MOVIE we’re talking about here. It’s got to be bigger than real life in some way. It’s gotta have the EXTRA. And the big question with Wayward is, does it have the EXTRA?
Here’s what Zilch did. He didn’t have just any woman cheat on her husband and keep a murder secret. He had the wife of a preacher do it. That elevates things quite a bit since we’re talking about some major irony there. Already, the setup feels juicier than your average “dead body” script.
From there, it’s about acing the two screenwriting mainstays – character and plot. In a high concept screenplay, you don’t have to write the greatest characters ever. Even your plotting can be sloppy because your concept is doing the heavy lifting. But when the concept is average, scripts like this don’t make the Black List unless the character work and plotting are exceptional.
I’ll tell you the exact moment I knew the writer was better than your average writer. It’s when Claire visits Addie and we meet Kyle for the first time. Note that Kyle was the 9th or 10th character introduced in the script. And we quickly learn, in that scene, that Kyle is a bull rider who recently got injured. Which is why he’s doing such a poor job caring for Addie. He’s not making any money.
It was the fact that a character introduced this late in the story had such a specific backstory that I knew I was in good hands. Cause the majority of the scripts I read, the writer doesn’t know anything outside of the immediate world of our hero. They couldn’t tell you what Boyfriend of Secondary Character #3 looks like, much less their job and how it’s affected their lives over the last six months.
I don’t run into a lot of writers who care to go that deep.
And some of you might be saying, “Who cares if this random dude is a bullfighter?” It’s not a pointless backstory. His desperation because he doesn’t have a job is why he wants to exploit this friendship that his girlfriend has with this rich woman. It drives the plot. But had the writer not gotten to know Kyle’s life, he may not have found this storyline. That’s the hidden gift of doing the extra work and finding out what every character’s life is like. New plot ideas pop up all the time when you do that stuff.
I did have a couple of problems with the script, though. And, unfortunately, they were big ones.
I didn’t buy into this idea that some guy was walking through rural Oklahoma, hoping to bump into a house where he could steal something. I mean what’s the steps per likelihood of target in that scenario? 800,000 steps for every one house that may be available to rob?
Normally, this wouldn’t bother me. But as I’ve stated before, the pillars of your plot need to be rock solid. If there is a plot development that is crucial to your story working, that plot development must be pristine. It can’t have anything in it that makes the audience say, “Wait a minute, hold on. He’s doing what?” Cause the second the audience starts asking questions like that, they become aware that they’re watching an artificially constructed story. And because this moment is setting up the entire movie, that means the question is going to linger the entire movie.
It wouldn’t matter if it was a nothing scene ten pages later. But this scene sets up the whole movie!
A similar problem happened later on. Kyle has the upper hand. He can literally tell the cops that Claire and Erik killed a man. So how is it that Claire gets to say, “Here’s the location of our church safe. Go steal the money from it.” Why does the person with the leverage have to perform the dangerous act? Any sane person would say, “Why don’t you get the money out and bring it to me?” And since this was also a major plot point, it hurt the final act.
Which is frustrating because there’s so much good here. All the characters pop. You’ve got this delicious dramatic irony dripping throughout, as Claire is befriending the daughter of the man she killed and pretending like everything is hunky Dorey with her pastor husband. You’ve got the raised stakes of an impending TV deal for the church, which ratchets up the tension with Seth, causing lots of head-butting with him and Claire. You’ve got fun little contrasts such as Seth being a devout Christian and Erik being a hardcore atheist.
I feel if you fixed those two pillar scenes that this script could easily be an “impressive.” But right now, it’s in that “worth the read” category, at least for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Give a little history in the description of the area your story takes place in. Here’s a description of the town in the script: “Once a rough-and-tumble frontier town, Ransom is now an upbeat Tulsa suburb.” Towns can have arcs just like characters. And a simple description of that arc gives the setting life. As opposed to if you just said, “An upbeat Tulsa suburb,” which elicits a much weaker image in the reader’s head.
