Genre: Thriller
Premise: A man wakes up on his wedding day with a text that simply says, “Run,” and what follows is 8 straight hours of people trying to kill him.
About: Another HUGE short story sale. This one sold to Universal. Sam Hargrave (Extraction) will be directing. This is writer Aaron Jayh’s second sale of the year. The other went to Amazon for a project called The Dwelling about a man who discovers that a house is buried in his backyard.
Writer: Aaron Jayh
Details: 45 pages
I know you want me to start right in on these Black List scripts but I want to introduce a revolutionary new practice the rest of the world is aware of you but you, apparently, are not. It’s called PATIENCE. We’ll get to the Black List scripts in the new year. We have a ton going on in these last couple of weeks so I gotta squeeze it all in. Starting with the newest form of spec scripts in Hollywood – short stories!
Our nameless hero, a good guy who runs a non-profit, wakes up on his wedding day with a text that says, “Run.” Our hero ignores it but then gets another text. If you don’t run, you die. The next thing he sees is a giant man breaking into his house. Yeah, our hero thinks, maybe running is a good idea.
He evades the man and grabs an Uber, getting a call from his future wife, Sara, in the meantime. He’s told by the mystery texter to not let on that anything is wrong to Sara. Which would be fine if a car didn’t come out of nowhere and sideswipe his Uber! And now people with guns are getting out and trying to kill him.
Somehow, our hero gets away. He’s guided to a store by the texter where he’ll be able to buy a gun. He’ll need to shoot the man who plans to kill him in five minutes. Huh?? This is not how he planned to spend his wedding day.
Despite numerous attempts by our hero to get the texter to tell him who he is, the texter will not oblige. Just get through the day and get married, the texter says, and we’re all good. That’s the important thing.
Along the way, we learn that the wife-to-be has a father who absolutely HATES our hero. He runs this giant tech corporation and works on top secret projects and needs his daughter to run the company when he retires. But she’s instead wasting her time at our hero’s non-profit, marrying the loser who works there (our hero).
If you’re a savvy reader, you’re starting to put the dots together. This father must have something to do with the attempts on our hero’s life, right? However, when our hero confronts him, the father is convincingly confused. He has no idea what the hero is talking about. Our hero then spends the last three hours trying to figure out what’s going and, more importantly, getting to his wedding alive. Does he get there? And if he does get to the finish line, will he finally find out who was trying to stop him?
Will Poulter for our runner?
The most shocking thing about this sale is that IT ISN’T A SCRIPT EVEN THOUGH IT COULD’VE BEEN. This is, roughly, the same amount of words as a screenplay. This is written in a high-octane, eyes-flying-down-the-page fashion, just like a screenplay. Why, then, did the writer choose to write it as a short story?
Isn’t it obvious? Cause short stories are selling bigger than specs right now. Which doesn’t even make sense if you think about it. It used to be that the short story sold because it was a shorter time investment on the reader’s end. But today’s short story is going to take you just as long to read as a screenplay. So now I think it’s just in the marketplace consciousness that this is where they’re finding material. If you don’t have a buzzy short story as part of your portfolio, now is the time to consider one.
Okay, I’m going to upset some Die Hard fans here but I need to bring this up in order to explain why I struggled with Run For Your Life. Remember Die Hard 3? The one with Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson? I remember going to that movie and being let down. Not in “this was a bad movie” way. More in a, “I wanted a better Die Hard movie” way.
I wouldn’t realize until many years later, when I got into screenwriting, why that movie underwhelmed so much. I learned it was because it made its protagonists passive. Even worse, it made the coolest action hero in the world, John McClane, passive. McClane just went where he was told. That’s not John McClane and that’s not the setup you want for an action movie.
An action movie needs an ACTIVE protagonist. I mean, the words – action, active – are practically the same, right? It wouldn’t be for another several years before the entire puzzle came together. I learned that that Die Hard 3 script wasn’t originally a Die Hard script! It was some other random script called “Simon Says” the studio had already purchased and they just changed all the names to make it a Die Hard movie in order to move into production quicker. It proved to be an early nail in the franchise’s coffin, as the franchise never recovered after that.
Lesson? Don’t make your action hero passive.
Yet that’s exactly what they do here in Run for Your Life. The hero is not making any decisions on his own. Like John McClane, he’s going wherever people tell him to. The story is still entertaining because it’s action packed and it has this mystery component and ticking time bomb. But those things only provide so much cover for the passive protagonist.
This is a long-winded way of me saying I’m not a huge fan of these “follow-my-orders” narratives. They turn your hero into an errand-runner, which, of course, can be overcome with clever writing but, as I always say, writing is hard. Theoretically, any large script issue can be overcome. But it probably won’t be because it’s really freaking hard to write a good story without having to overcome large script issues, much less with them.
That’s not to say Jayh doesn’t give it his best shot. The best thing the script has going for it is its central mystery and I did want to find out who the heck it was who was calling (spoilers follow). I figured it had to be the hero, probably from the future. As soon as we started talking about the father-in-law being this giant CEO tech guy, I figured that made the most sense.
(Major spoiler followed). So there was something really sweet about it being Sara instead. It wasn’t what I was expecting and it wrapped up this backseat theme the story had been promoting all along of: “love conquers all.” This was a woman who was doing everything in her power to save the love of her life and her marriage. It worked!
Maybe too light and airy to become a movie. Echoes of “Ghosted” were ringing in my ears. But it’s still a fun read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The nice thing about writing a short story over a script is that you can get directly inside the hero’s head. This gives us a much better idea of how the hero is feeling and coping during the story, which makes for a different experience. The hardest thing about screenwriting is you can’t do this unless you do voice over, which many find clunky. Your job, as a screenwriter, is to show how your hero is feeling THROUGH ACTION. For example, in a novel, if you wanted to convey that the hero was angry after getting duped by a work friend, you might have him say to himself, “I can’t believe Joe betrayed me.” In a script, you’d show him hurling his phone across the room. In other words, you’d use ACTION to convey what the hero was feeling.
