Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) An autistic kid tries to do normal college things — making friends, figuring out if girls like him, getting over his mom’s death — while seeing life in his own “musical” way.
About: Today’s script finished on last year’s Black List. Augustus Schiff grew up in Los Angeles, went to the University of Chicago, then came back to LA and, against all the advice he’d received growing up, got into screenwriting. This is his breakthrough script.
Writer: Augustus Schiff
Details: 114 pages
Timothee for Ben?
Man, it turns out all these scripts I’ve been avoiding from the Black List are actually the good ones!
You do understand why I avoided this script for so long though, right? Right at the top, we’ve got autism and mom dying. You play either of those too melodramatically, and we’re done before we even get started.
These are what I call landmine subjects. You step on them and they blow up.
That’s not to say you can’t use them. But you need to treat them a certain way. You can’t take them too seriously. You have to allow the reader to laugh at them (at times). You do that and maybe, just maybe, you can make them work. Which is the exact approach Schiff took.
19 year-old Ben, who’s autistic, spends an entire year watching his mother succumb to cancer and die. Immediately after her death, he enrolls in college at the University of Chicago.
Ben is totally unprepared for the university experience. People at college are so relaxed and fun and social and energetic. Meanwhile, Ben stays in his own little world, under his headphones, listening to music. That is until Carl, his floor mate, invites him over for drinks. There, Ben meets a cool new group of friends including Emma, a super cute girl who seems to like Ben.
On Ben’s first night ever getting totally wasted, he makes out with Emma, which is the talk of the group the next day. This was Ben’s first ever kiss, so naturally he likes Emma. He enlists the help of Carl to make her his girlfriend and Carl is more than happy to oblige.
During this time, Ben develops a separate friendship with his next door neighbor, Rebecca. Rebecca is extremely cold. Feelings are off-limits with her. But there’s something about Ben’s oddness that draws her to him, and the two form a cool friendship built around sharing music.
Even though Ben is hanging out with Emma a lot, it isn’t getting romantic. So Carl re-focuses the mission, eyeing a giant party coming up as the day Ben will make his move. Unfortunately, when the party comes, a lot of things go wrong, and Ben ends up getting too drunk. (Spoiler) When he finally does spot Emma, she’s kissing none other than Carl. Which infuriates Ben, who punches his friend.
The fallout is massive. His entire group of friends kick him to the curb because he’s “a psycho.” As Ben tries to process this betrayal, he comes to terms with the fact that he never properly mourned his mother’s death. Luckily, just when all is lost, Rebecca comes back into his life and picks him up, helping Ben to finally realize that it’s okay to be weird.
The rule with character pieces is that, because there’s no plot, we need two things. We need a main character we really like. And we need at least one unresolved relationship that we are desperate to see resolved.
Today’s main character, Ben, is nearly impossible to dislike. Audiences will root for nearly any character with a disability/condition, whether it be physical, mental, or intellectual. We naturally root for people to succeed who start out in life as underdogs.
But that’s not going to be enough to power an entire character-driven script. Since you don’t have a plot, you need at least one unresolved relationship. This relationship will act as the engine of your story. It will be the only reason we’re turning the pages. We want to see how the relationship gets resolved.
In “Weird,” that relationship comes in the form of Emma. Ben and her drunkenly kiss at a party. Ben likes her. He wants her to be his girlfriend. And, because he’s never had a girlfriend before, he enlists his friend, Carl, to help him, and we’re off to the races. The unresolved relationship here is Ben and Emma, since we’re curious if they’re going to get together or not.
But a little trick you can use in scripts like this is to add a secondary unresolved relationship, which I found to be the strongest creative choice in *weird. Ben also has this side friend in Rebecca and there’s just enough sexual tension there that we’re also wondering what’s going to happen with them.
I always like to point out that in one of the best character pieces ever, Good Will Hunting, there are four main unresolved relationships. There’s Will’s unresolved relationship with his psychiatrist, Sean. There’s the unresolved relationship with girlfriend, Skylar. There’s the unresolved relationship with math professor, Lambeau, and the unresolved friendship with friend, Chuckie.
I encourage writers to add one or two extra unresolved relationships in these scripts just to hedge your bets. Maybe one relationship doesn’t work as well as you want it to. But that’s okay if another one works great.
By the way, I still think that character-focused writers need to consider the plot in so much as if you don’t have any interesting plot developments at all, it’s hard for a story to stay compelling. This is true even if the characters are great. To that end, I loved (spoiler) the plot development of Carl hooking up with Emma. It made things messy and that’s what you want in a script. You want things to get messy because then your character has to figure out a way through that mess. And that’s why we watch movies. To see how they deal with the mess.
There were lots of other things I liked about *weird.
Schiff would do this thing where whenever someone was talking to Ben, they’d say something like, “You’re such a weirdo,” in a half-joking manner. And every time someone would say that word or a similar word, you’d hear this DING. “Off,” “Odd,” “Different,” “Strange,” “Unique.” DING. DING. DING. DING. We’re not really sure why we’re hearing the ding when these words are said. We just know from Ben’s reaction that he doesn’t like them. They seem to be code words that remind him he’s not like other people and that that’s somehow bad.
Then, late in the script, Rebecca says, “You’re weird.” But for the first time in the entire script, we hear a different sound: “Instead of a DING, he hears a lovely little chord progression.” It’s an aural cue to the audience that she didn’t mean it in a bad way like everyone else did. She meant it in an endearing way. And for the first time, Ben realizes that that word can be a good thing. It’s a really poetic and heartfelt moment.
Finally, this script reminded me that certain formats just work. One of those formats is fish-out-of-water. You wouldn’t realize that’s what this is at first glance because the main character isn’t a knife-wielding alligator hunter in New York belting out lines like, “Crikey!” But a fish-out-of-water story is ANY time you place a character in an environment they’re unfamiliar with. So we enjoy watching Ben navigate these foreign scenarios.
We haven’t had many good college movies over the years and I think Schiff found the secret. College is a such a cliched subject that it’s hard to portray it in a fresh way. It turns out all you had to do was change the point-of-view. Have us see college through the eyes of someone other than the average college kid. Excellent stuff.
Screenplay Link: *weird
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s the logline the Black List gave for *Weird – “An autistic kid tries to do normal college things — making friends, figuring out if girls like him, getting over his mom’s death — while seeing life in his own “musical” way.” There are numerous reasons this logline doesn’t work (for those who don’t know, someone other than the writer often writes the Black List loglines, which is why a lot of them are so weak). But the main reason is that, even with a character piece, you should still approach your logline from a plot perspective. The reason being, it makes the story feel more purposeful. At its core, this is a script about a young man who meets, what he believes, is this perfect friend group. So that’s what we want to build the logline around. This is what I would’ve gone with: “After losing his mother to cancer, a young autistic man heads to college where he finds a seemingly perfect group of friends, only to realize that they’re unable to navigate the unique idiosyncrasies of his disorder.” If you wanted to work the title of the script into the logline, you could do this: “After losing his mother to cancer, a young autistic man heads to college where he finds a seemingly perfect group of friends, only to realize that they’re unable to navigate the unique – some might say “weird” – idiosyncrasies of his disorder.”
Logline Consultations are just $25! – Stop trying to get reads with a lame logline! Let me help you craft something way better. E-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com and we’ll get started
