from the man who brought you Drillbit TaylorWhen I was trying to figure out what script I was going to begin Hunting for Isla Fisher with, I ran through a various set of possible methods: the oldest script, the newest, the shortest, the one I hated the most, the one I hated the least. What I ended up choosing was based on none of these reasons. I’ve recently begun writing a script, The Last days of Sonic Steel, a multi protagonist film based on a washed up band (think The Bay City Rollers) who after a botched performance at an art festival all find out about their impending deaths from a mysterious character (based on No. 44 in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger) and realized I could knock out two birds with one stone: review a script and study the genre.
So I selected Bumped, the infamous Breakfast Club remake.
Oh, how I wanted to like this script. I wanted to love it so much I’d even get discouraged writing my own multi character story. By page twenty, though, I’d lost interest and here’s why: no memorable characters and a poor plot structure.
The premise is simple: five twenty something’s (a washed up musician and his overachieving girlfriend, an obscure online celebrity, a doormat of a girl, and an overachieving guy) get bumped from their flights and stuck in an airport shortly before Thanksgiving.
Let’s go past Breakfast Club as a frame of reference, and also use that other great film Saint Elmo’s Fire to give an idea where Bumped fails. The openings of both these scenes manage to introduce each character with a memorable set up different than all the other characters in the script. In first showing each character already in the airport, the writer fails to let the reader differentiate between the characters early on in the script and as a result, it took me the better part of ten pages to get down who was who. Also, the script sort of paired off the higher class characters against the lower ones which isn’t intrinsically bad, but for God’s sake how many people in their 20’s are making $165,000 annually particularly in this recessed job market?
How about, for once, a commercial script featuring both the poor and the rich in a believable way. If you’re going to accept all these characters end up bonding together, you have to accept that all quickly fall into friendships, which remain throughout the rest of the film. There’s not a thing natural about this. So now we have barely memorable characters bonding through overly on the nose dialogue.
This script feels like one of the cheesier pieces we were subjected to in the Freshman Colloquims in NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program. Bumped is not without it’s charms though. The script’s dialogue has got some strong sequences, and they almost make me wish the opening and first half of the second act were better set up so there could be a larger pay off. This is not a terrible script. And it has all the potential to become a mediocre film, but ten years from now, they’re not going to be studying this in Literature classes or making references about it in Family Guy. Now, in true Isla fashion, I’ll introduce my rating scale for all the scripts on this site with each level named after a various self-reflect Isla film.
Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
X - Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)
The premise is simple: five twenty something’s (a washed up musician and his overachieving girlfriend, an obscure online celebrity, a doormat of a girl, and an overachieving guy) get bumped from their flights and stuck in an airport shortly before Thanksgiving.
Let’s go past Breakfast Club as a frame of reference, and also use that other great film Saint Elmo’s Fire to give an idea where Bumped fails. The openings of both these scenes manage to introduce each character with a memorable set up different than all the other characters in the script. In first showing each character already in the airport, the writer fails to let the reader differentiate between the characters early on in the script and as a result, it took me the better part of ten pages to get down who was who. Also, the script sort of paired off the higher class characters against the lower ones which isn’t intrinsically bad, but for God’s sake how many people in their 20’s are making $165,000 annually particularly in this recessed job market?
How about, for once, a commercial script featuring both the poor and the rich in a believable way. If you’re going to accept all these characters end up bonding together, you have to accept that all quickly fall into friendships, which remain throughout the rest of the film. There’s not a thing natural about this. So now we have barely memorable characters bonding through overly on the nose dialogue.
This script feels like one of the cheesier pieces we were subjected to in the Freshman Colloquims in NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program. Bumped is not without it’s charms though. The script’s dialogue has got some strong sequences, and they almost make me wish the opening and first half of the second act were better set up so there could be a larger pay off. This is not a terrible script. And it has all the potential to become a mediocre film, but ten years from now, they’re not going to be studying this in Literature classes or making references about it in Family Guy. Now, in true Isla fashion, I’ll introduce my rating scale for all the scripts on this site with each level named after a various self-reflect Isla film.
Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
X - Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)
Isla Prospects: I wouldn't want to see her in any of these roles. But this seems like the type of project she'd get sucked into.
If You Forget Everything Else: You can have the best conclusion I’ve ever seen. Lines that tear right at my heart strings. Terrific visuals. But that won’t save you from a false lead in, or set up. Bumped had great dialogue towards the end of the script, but because I didn’t agree with the methods used to reach these scenes I felt like I was reading some other, much better written script.
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