Also, Carson offers everyone here a free killer high-concept idea at the end of the review! It’s a good one. And anyone can take it!
Genre: Western
Premise: After staging his death many years ago, an aging gunslinger is forced to reunite with his outlaw daughter during the dying days of the west.
About: Remember, the Black List celebrates one or two Westerns a year. So if you write a good one, it has a shot at getting on the coveted “best of” list. Josh Corbin created a short-lived series on Hulu in 2019 called, “Reprisal,” about a woman who gets revenge on a gang. He’s back with this Black List entry.
Writer: Josh Corbin
Details: 112 pages
Why a Western?
Cause I haven’t read a Western in a while. Geez!
Also, it gives me the opportunity to say something controversial which you’re free to debate in the comments section. Of all the genres I read, Western writers deliver the most consistently. There’s somethign about exploring that time and pace that draws a more sophisticated kind of author.
Let’s see if Weary Ride The Belmonts lives up to that standard.
It’s the New West. Or the end of the Old West. It’s towards the end of the cowboy era is what I’m saying. A 53-year-old dude named Hoagy Belmont is living out in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. He likes his privacy this man. Mainly because he’s done unspeakable things and anyone who’d come to visit him would likely want to sever every limb from his body and leave the rest of him to cook in the sun.
Elsewhere, we meet another Belmont, Ophelia Belmont, Hoagy’s daughter. Due to a series of elaborate backstory details, Ophelia is under the impression that her father is dead. So she’s getting on with her life leading an enormous gang known as the Dead Souls who, when we meet them, are breaking out one of their high profile members from a moving train.
Meanwhile, our aging anti-hero is discovered. Hoagy is shipped to the town of Harperville where he meets Mayor Ingrid, a woman whose husband he happened to kill. Ingrid wants to kill Hoagy more than anything. But why kill one Belmont when you can kill two! So she takes a picture of Hoagy, sticks him in the morning paper, and tells the world, “Hoagy Belmont is still alive! And he’s going to be executed!” This way, Ophelia will see it, come to rescue her dad, and Ingrid gets to rid the world of Belmonts forever.
Ophelia and the Dead Souls, indeed, come charging into Harperville, only to realize that this town is PREPARED. They’ve got some next-level artillery set up for the Dead Souls. But will it be enough? The Dead Souls fight like they’re dead. They just keep coming and, eventually, overwhelm the town. But when Ophelia finally rescues her father, their reunion is not what we expected.
This isn’t your grandpappy’s Western screenplay, that’s for sure. Which is both the script’s biggest strength and primary weakness. It kind of feels like a “Western by way of Tik Tok,” blowing away my earlier theory that Westerns only draw in sophisticated writers.
With that said, that “Tik Tok” brand of writing brings energy. This script is like an atom bomb on top of a nuclear sub wrapped in Tesla batteries. Nobody’s going to accuse this writer of putting them to sleep. Every page is an aggressive affront on your eyeballs.
In addition to bringing the energy, Corbin does a good job of creating characters. That’s one of the best things about Westerns, is that they allow you to go to town with the characters. This is an era where people walked around with guns and settled scores with bullets to the head. That kind of character is going to be more exciting than your average dude.
When we first meet Hoagy, he slams a fork into a guy’s hand, pinning it to the table then takes a shotgun and blows the guy’s head off. When we meet Ophelia, she’s this crazy train-robber who has no issue killing anybody who gets in the way. The guy she rescues on the train is wearing a freaking owl mask. I also liked how evil all of the female characters were. Talk about subverting expectations.
If this script were only about characters, I’d give it a ‘worth the read.’
Unfortunately, the writer gets in his own way with the writing and the plotting.
Corbin writes with such recklessness that too many moments are ruined by his insanely over-the-top style. Here’s an example…
One of Corbin’s slug lines is: “INT. SOME F**KING SALOON SOMEWHERE F**KING ELSE NOW – NIGHT.” I offer that without comment.
I admit that when I first started writing, I used to write lines like this. It feels like you’re bucking tradition and demanding the reader pay attention. But, in reality, it displays a lack of self-belief. If you have to write this hard to keep the reader’s attention, you probably don’t believe in your story enough.
Which is accurate. The story here is muddled. We’re jumping around so much that we’re barely able to keep track of the 25 characters on display. Things do pick up when Ingrid captures Hoagy and we know Ophelia is coming for him. That’s actually the sequence where Corbin’s writing shines the brightest because it matches up with the craziness that’s happening (The Dead Souls storming the town).
But after that, there’s still 40 pages remaining in the script and we’re left to wonder, “Why are we still here? What’s left to figure out?” I guess there are some questions that need answering regarding why Ophelia hates her dad so much and what’s going to happen between them. But that’s the kind of question you want piggybacking on top of a bigger story goal, a story goal you just concluded.
From there, the script devolves into numerous flashbacks that fill in the gaps of our father-daughter backstory. But because the biggest plot beat is already over, I didn’t care. The script reminded me a lot of Across The Spiderverse. There’s so much you have to weed through to get to the point of the movie. But whereas that movie finally found its footing, “Weary” slips and falls down the mountain. It’s a victim of its own overwriting, which I wish the writer would’ve ditched at a certain point so we could focus on the story.
I would say to this writer that if he reins the bombastic writing style in, there’s a story here. But it’s lost inside one of the more aggressive writing voices I’ve ever come across.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
Free High Concept!: So, in the early train set piece in this movie, there is a PRISON PASSENGER CAR, a train car designed specifically to transport prisoners. I don’t know why I never knew that they did this in the Old West, but it’s a brilliant starting point for a movie. Pack that car full of the craziest Old West criminals you can think of, have it crash for some reason, and then unleash those criminals on a nearby city. Is this just “Con Air?” Yes! But it’s been 25 years since that movie. You can officially update the idea. And placing it in the Old West gives it a fresh spin. If this concept appeared in any logline showdown submission, it would be the first logline I would put up. This is a movie. It’s now a free idea. Go out there and write it, as many of you who want to. If enough of you like it, maybe we’ll do one of those contests where everybody writes a script from the same logline.
