This is as close as we get to flashy spec sales these days. A writer writes a short story, gets Ryan Reynolds attached, and a bidding war erupts!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A young resident at a psychiatric hospital attempts to diagnose its most dangerous patient.
About: And now for something different. Today we have the wonderful success story of a writer who posted his short story on the subreddit “Nosleep” two years ago and last week, found himself teamed up with “it” Warner Brothers’ horror producer, Roy Lee, and Ryan Reynolds, to turn the tale into a movie. Right now Reynolds is listed only as Producer. But it’s hard to believe he won’t want to play the juicy role of “Joe,” the titular patient driving the story, by the time cameras get rolling. Jasper Dewitt is experiencing that rare “came out of nowhere” moment that every writer dreams of.
Writer: Jasper Dewitt
Details: roughly 60 pages
I absolutely love success stories like this. In today’s Hollywood, the majority of breakout stories come from within. Most of the writers you see credited on studio movies came up through the system. They never had a true “name in bright lights” moment. So it’s fun to see that it’s still possible, even if these breakout moments require some unique twist. Writing a great screenplay will always get you noticed. But being found in some random corner of the internet carries with it that “rags to riches” story the trades love to write about.
Patient’s success also embodies the spirit of what I’ve been pushing for the last couple of years. Which is that you shouldn’t limit yourself to just writing screenplays. And you shouldn’t be trying to get noticed solely through traditional channels. The end game is to get noticed. Therefore, you need to be taking a “whatever means necessary” approach.
Just 25 years ago, it was impossible to get read. Almost literally impossible. Think about if you had a screenplay but no internet. How would you even begin to get people to read your stuff? You’d be lucky if three people read your screenplay in a year. Now we have entire websites dedicated to you being able to promote your work. Take advantage of that. Cause stuff like what happened to Dewitt can happen to you.
“Patient” is written in a first person voice so as to take advantage of the medium where it was published (Reddit). Their subreddit, “Nosleep” has a rule by which every story written there is “true.” Therefore you need to treat it as such. Our hero, Parker, has just started his residency at a psychiatric hospital and all he hears about is the mysterious patient, “Joe.” Joe is legendary due to the fact that everyone who speaks to him either quits, goes insane, or commits suicide. Being your typical ambitious doctor, Parker wants to be the one who cracks him.
It’s by no means an easy goal. There seems to be an intricate web of levers one must navigate in order to get permission to even get inside Joe’s room, much less try and diagnose him. So, at first, Parker goes through Joe’s old files, where we learn that Joe’s been here for over 20 years, since he was six years old, and was committed for being convinced that a spider-like monster lived inside his bedroom walls.
By the time Parker finally convinces the president of the hospital to get a crack at Joe, he’s bursting at the seams. But Joe isn’t anything like Parker expected. He’s skinny and meek and completely lucid. He tells Parker that everything Parker’s heard about him is a lie. That he hasn’t hurt anyone or convinced anyone to hurt themselves. But, rather, his parents are disgustingly rich, and, at the moment, he’s the hospital’s biggest source of income. As long as he’s here, they’re getting rich.
Parker becomes so convinced that Joe is being taken advantage of, that he plans an elaborate escape to free Joe. However, on the night of the escape, he’s swooped up by the orderlies and brought to the president, who informs him that she knew about his escape plan all along. “How?” Parker says. “Joe told me,” she replies. And it’s from here that Parker learns Joe is a lot more complicated than he expected. And maybe he should’ve heeded the advice he got about Joe from the beginning – to stay as far away from this psychopath as possible.
I have mixed feelings about this one.
We have a clear protagonist goal in place: diagnose and save the patient.
But is that goal strong enough to power an entire movie?
That’s the first struggle I had.
The second was padding.
Early on, Parker tells us he’s going insane due to the experience he had with his patient, Joe. Then makes us wait forever before he brings us into Joe’s room. I get it. The writer’s milking that suspense. But I didn’t feel like he’d earned the right to make us wait that long. Okay, you’ve established that the patient is weird. Let’s get to him already.
One of the worst things in storytelling is padding. If it feels like the writer is writing stuff just to pad up the page length, I go insane. And while I understand you need to build up a world before you can exploit it, you only get so much leeway. If I were reading this as a screenplay, I would’ve given up on it during this section.
And I thought about that while it was happening. Why is it, in this particular scenario, that I don’t care enough to get to the good stuff? I realized it was because the main villain, Joe, was becoming more and more obvious the more we learned about him. He made this nurse commit suicide. He assaulted another patient. He scared a guard. WE GET IT! HE’S NOT A GOOD GUY! lol It was all so obvious. Had we been given info about Joe that was actually surprising, I might’ve changed my tune.
This is probably why, once Parker finally talks to Joe, I got onboard. Joe, it turns out, is the opposite of what we’ve been told. I liked that Joe was making sound arguments about being set up, namely that his parents were rich and he was a paycheck for the hospital. All of these rumors about committing suicide or assaulting patients, were lies made in order to keep the gravy train rolling. This set up a legitimately compelling mystery: Which side is telling the truth?
Now Parker has to go back and forth between the two sides to come to a conclusion. It’s during this time that a new variable comes into play – the monster in the walls that supposedly drove Joe here in the first place. I like when stories do this – pose multiple questions – as it gives us more reason to keep reading. Now I’ve got two things I want to figure out.
The story’s featured scene is when Parker visits Joe’s old home so he can inspect the bedroom where the monster supposedly attacked him. I don’t know why but I’m a sucker for the old, “remove the rug and find an anomaly on the floor” development. I fall for it every time. And we get an appropriately kick ass climax to the scene when Parker’s had enough and takes an axe to the walls.
At this point, I was in “worth the read” territory, only to be yanked back to “wasn’t for me” when the author attempts to button up his story with a Sixth Sense level twist. I’ve read the twist several times now and I still don’t understand it. Even after going down and reading some of the comments, it’s confusing.
I’ll say this about good twist endings. They require more rewriting than anything else in storytelling. That’s because they need a series of setups that were put in place throughout the script. And you need to tweak those setups and the ending repeatedly so that when the payoff for those setups finally arrives – our twist – we understand what’s happened immediately. If the audience asks, “Wait, what?” after this moment, the twist didn’t work. And that’s very much how this twist felt. It was a “Wait, what?” twist.
“Patient” is a pretty good story. It’s fun in places. But it seems to be lacking that je ne sais quoi that puts movies like this over the top.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The twist ending is one of the most tempting items on the writing menu. However, think about how many truly great twist endings there have been in cinema history. Can you think of more than five off the top of your head (no, I’m serious – list as many as you can in the comments section – no googling!)? My point is, only write a twist ending if you’re sure it’s effing great. Otherwise, write the ending that best suits your story.
