2019 BLACKLIST - MOVE ON

This screenplay came in at number 1 on the 2019 blacklist. 

It's written by Ken Kobayashi.

It looks like Sony is producing.

Logline: Teddy thinks he’s the only living person left in a world where humanity is frozen in time… until his ex-girlfriend, Leyna shows up at his doorstep. Together, they must go on a journey to find the cause behind the freeze and in the process, confront the issues that plagued their relationship before it’s too late.


This was an interesting script. It does a lot of things right and yet there are a few things it could improve upon. 

THE STORY.... 

This story is largely non-linear. It's not a mash-up like Pulp Fiction, but there is jumping back and forth between timelines. 

The script starts with Teddy proposing to his girlfriend Leyna. She denies him and storms out of the restaurant where Teddy chose to propose. 

Teddy is desperate, on the drive home he tries phoning and messaging Leyna but she refuses to answer or speak with him.

Texting. Driving. 

You guessed it. Teddy crashes. It's not too bad. The tail of his car gets clipped by a van. Neither he nor the other driver is hurt very badly. 

Teddy goes home, hangs out with his buddy Squid who does a great job of consoling him, then not long after at a bar the world around Teddy freezes. 

Everyone is frozen mid-action. A man pouring a beer. The beer is frozen in mid-air, but the beer is still a liquid.

So far so good. We have a lot of passive empathy for Teddy so we care about his story. Being rejected at proposal is a strong passive empathy beat. 

My only note here would be that we could use more ACTIVE empathy for Teddy. In this opening section before the inciting incident (time freezing) we only come to like Teddy because of the bad things that happen to him. Passive empathy only goes so far.

The trick to getting your audience to really love your hero is to inject ACTIVE EMPATHY beats - which are moments where your hero actively goes out of their way to do something good for another character. 

The time-freeze gimmick is a great hook. The only problem with out-there gimmicks is that at some stage you have to explain WHY and HOW the gimmick came to be. If you don't have a good explanation for it, you run the risk of alienating your audience. Throwing them out of the film. 

Does the explanation work here? I'll get to that. For now, all you need to know is that the time-freeze gimmick works. It works for a multiple of reasons. 

UNEXPECTED. 

I did not see this coming. I thought this was going to be a regular relationship drama. I had no idea that there was going to be this sci-fi element injected into the story. 

Being able to surprise your audience is paramount to writing a successful screenplay. If your audience can guess what's going to happen and they're right most of the time, they'll grow bored and tune out quickly. 

Adding this element elevated the story from the murky depths of low concept - to high concept. 

The difference is very important. 

Low concept is where the characters are more important than the concept. 

Most dramas are low concept. When it's just humans interacting with humans with nothing more than their relationships occurring, that's low-concept. 

When you have a gimmick, when you have an element to the story that is unique and unusual, that's when your story becomes HIGH CONCEPT. 

Another way to look at high concept is - it's the hook you use when explaining your story. If you don't have a unique hook, you don't have a high concept story. 

So far so good... 

Directly after freezing the time freeze there is a jump cut to three months later. Teddy has grown a beard and he's settling into living a relatively normal life in this new frozen world. 

This was a good move. A lot of writers would have written Teddy bumbling through ubiquitous WTF? scenes, where he climates to this new weird, frozen world.

These would have been scenes that were highly predictable. And remember, predictability is death to a screenplay. Instead, we find him three months later, everything is still frozen, and finally, Leyna turns up on his doorstep. She is also not frozen. 

Leyna and Teddy set off to discover why this world is frozen. They decide that a trip from Chicago to LA is the best way to do it. 

Along the way, they have plenty of time to discuss their relationship and what happened on the night he proposed. 

Okay, that's the setup. At this stage of the script, my only other major note would be that there is no tangible goal. 

They discovered a giant black wall on the east coast, and on Teddy's google maps there is another black line on the west coast, so their goal becomes, go to the west coast to see if there is also a huge black wall just beyond the coast. 

This is a perfect example of an open-ended goal. Open-ended goals don't work well in films. Audiences are much more engaged when they know WHY and WHAT the hero is trying to achieve. 

Here, also there is a lack of URGENCY or STAKES. 

Firstly the goal is really weak. Go and see if there's a wall. That's not a very engaging goal. And what happens when they get to the wall? It's not established. So we don't know what they're really trying to achieve. A really simple fix could be to put Teddy's parents in LA. Odds are they're frozen. but he has to go and find them to make sure they're okay. This would be a tangible closed-ended goal. It's also a goal that had emotion attached to it. Remember, audiences respond to emotionally motived goals much more than any other kind of goal motivation. 

STAKES

What happens if they don't reach the wall? Well, nothing. They're stuck in this frozen world, which neither of them seem terribly worried about. When there is no threat to your hero's safety, there is no sense of stakes. 

The problem with stories that have no stakes is the audience fails to care about your hero's goal. If it doesn't really matter if your hero achieves their goal your audience won't care, and consequently, they'll tune out. 


URGENCY

There is no ticking clock on their journey. They can take a week to get to LA or they can take 5 years. There is nothing threatening their existence, and there's no need to accomplish their goals in any given time frame.

When there is no clock, when there is no time frame in which your hero has to achieve their goal, it slows the story down immensely. 

When there is a sense of urgency to your hero's journey, your audience becomes much more engaged. 


POINT OF VIEW 

At the midpoint in this story, there is a 180-degree change of Point Of View. 

For the first 50 pages, the entire story is told from Teddy's POV. Then the rest of the story is told from Leyna's POV. 

This was a big throw for me. I had come into the story from Teddy's POV. I had identified with Teddy. I had made a vicarious connection with Teddy, then suddenly I'm asked to make the same connection to Leyna. 

Typically in feature films, it is a kiss of death to switch your POV so hard halfway through the film. 

It is okay to show a few scenes from another character's POV if its necessary for the story to develop. 

Sometimes you need to see what the 'Bad Guy' is up to and there's no way you can do that without leaving your hero for a scene or two. 

But typically 95% of scenes in a feature film should be told from your Hero's POV.

Long-form TV is different. In the longer format, we have more time to come to relate to all the characters and learn to love and hate them for who they are. 

In a feature film you only have 90 minutes to tell your story. When you have multiple POV's you divide your audience's attention, and consequently they don't connect to the story as well. 

Now, in this story, there had to be a POV switch, for reasons I won't discuss as I'd move into spoiler territory. But I will say that it could have been handled better. 

My fix for this would be to not tell the opening half of the film ENTIRELY from Teddy's POV. 

I would have set up Leyna from page one with her own POV. 

In the current draft, the only time we meet Leyna in the first section of the film is through Teddy. If we had opened on a POV neutral scene, say both Teddy and Leyna having dinner together, then jumped over to Teddy's POV with him in the toilet psyching himself up to ask her to propose, then coming back to Leyna's POV and seeing her sitting at the dinner table alone, waiting for Teddy, then we watch from HER POV as Teddy comes back from the toilet and proposes. Then as a POV neutral scene, we have Leyna say she can't do it and leave in tears. 

Then in the following scenes, we jump between Teddy and Leyna - Teddy phoning Leyna, then over with Leyna, she sees Teddy's calls and messages, but she just can't bring herself to answer or talk to him. 

Executing the opening section with a very clearly defined DUAL POV (Teddy and Leyna's) means the switch from Teddy's POV to Leyna's POV will happen more organically at the midpoint. It won't feel like such a shock to the system. 


EXPLAIN THE GIMMICK

The importance of having a good explanation for your gimmick, or hook, or your high concept element is paramount. 

Anyone can create a crazy set of circumstances that will get people's attention. It's really easy to think up something weird and out-there that will get pique people's interest in your story. The real skill, and what separates moderate writers from the best, is having a realistic and plausible explanation for your gimmick/hook.

I won't ruin this story by revealing HOW the world became frozen, but I will say that I wasn't on board with the writer's explanation for it. The reason given felt too perfect. It felt like it was a little bit contrived. It felt like the writer came up with the HOOK and then created the EXPLANATION. 

It is very often better to reverse engineer. Start with a powerful plausible explanation to a gimmick/hook, then work your story around that. 

When you force an explanation of a gimmick/hook to fit your story it will run the risk of coming across as contrived. 


SUMMARY

This script is good. I wouldn't say it's great. Would I put money into this? That would depend on the talent you could get to attach and at what price point. 

This script has ACTOR BAIT written all over it. Its central theme is universal - moving on from a relationship and letting go of a loved one. This will appeal to a very wide audience.

But in its current form, it has too many elements that need addressing. 

If the story were to fix the POV, inject positive empathy, add stakes, urgency and add a closed-ended goal, I could see this script finding an audience. I wouldn't want to see this script made on anything more than $5m.