This week features a series from Uncle Jam on the most common scripts he encountered during his time as a Hollywood reader, as well as the lessons we can take away from them.
I doubt any of you are writing scripts about DJs or EDM anymore. Or at least I hope you’re not. But of all the scripts I encountered too many times during my stint as a reader, these ones were the most bizarre and incompetent by several country miles.
Here’s what happened.
The Script
It was the early 2010s. EDM, and the culture surrounding celebrity DJs, was very much in vogue. At its height, two groups of people emerged from the dirt. The first group were the slumbering older generations of various Hollywood businessmen who found out that EDM was a thing after their nieces and nephews told them about Coachella. The second were club owners and night life promoters who thought, “EDM big, me make money” while presumably snorting coke out of a sex worker’s rectum. In the former case, this person has enough contacts to get a script read. In the latter case, it’s someone with enough money.
Whichever it is, they need a script first. Neither of these people are writers themselves, so they either hire some suicidally depressed screenwriting major who will work on anything to get a foot in the door or they’ll hire a family member who has literally never written a script before. Either way, the end product was always some hilarious mess. Or it would’ve been hilarious if I wasn’t the one who had to read them.
Like Grand Prix scripts, there isn’t really a formula here. But there were commonalities. From a broader standpoint, all of these scripts were essentially “American dream” stories. “I’m a poor boy from the middle of nowhere. I hopped on a bus and I’m here and I want to be the best DJ ever.” You watch him work a shitty job and meet a girl and rise and fall and learn a lesson so on and so forth. In a way, they’re not that far off from sports scripts.
But you know what else these scripts have in common? Dumbness.
Let’s start with a petty academic point. EDM artists and DJs are not the same thing. EDM artists are musicians who compose electronic music. DJs use a knowledge of existing music to cater a specific experience to a specific crowd, be it a rowdy dance floor at a wedding or a more relaxed atmosphere at a gallery opening.
To you and me, this may seem obvious. However, I bring it up for two reasons. First, to demonstrate that these writers fucked up before they even opened Final Draft because they don’t actually understand what they’re writing about. Second, because they both vaguely look the same? I guess? That’s the only reason I can think of for why I’ve seen so many of these scripts marketed as “EDM musicals” or “electronic operas” when in reality, nine times out of ten, they’re about DJs.
Which leads to another problem that falls under the general category of dumbness. You know the scene in a lot of action movies where the beefcake loads up all his guns before the big act three shootout? A lot of these scripts have a scene just like that, only instead of machine guns, knives, and grenades, it’s a dude sitting at a laptop picking songs from his library. Sometimes, we’ll even get some voiceover from our DJ explaining their decision. “Okay, there’s going to be older people at this club. Looks like I better pick X SONG THERE’S NO FUCKING WAY THE PRODUCERS COULD EVER AFFORD THE RIGHTS TO.”
The Danger Zone
The problem, it seems to me, is how to make an actual movie out of something like DJ’ing or composing EDM. How do you make these professions interesting to watch on screen? The answer to this problem seems to be to contrive ideas that seem vaguely movie like and try to fool the audience into thinking you’re seeing something more substantial. Movies about life upon the stage generally have grand finales, right? So what’s the EDM/DJ version of that?
A DJ orchestra. An orchestra of DJs. DJs. In their booths. Arranged like an orchestra. All performing one song at the same time. I have read this idea in multiple scripts. DJ orchestras. DJ. Orchestras. Take a moment and think about that. Stare at the ceiling in awe as the flood of reasons why this idea makes zero sense consumes your thoughts. “Do they all share the same speaker system?” “How do they play in sync?” “How do you get that many DJ booths on one stage?” Don’t just focus on one of these thoughts. That’s impossible. Just let the stupidity take you.
Respect Your Audience
All that said, let’s assume for a second that you want to make an EDM movie. Can a movie about EDM or DJs be interesting? Sure. Or at least I hope so, if only because I’ve personally reached my limit on rockstar biopics. Should you write an EDM or DJ movie? Only if you can find a way to make it a movie. Not something merely resembling one that you’re writing for cynical reasons.
It’s easy to laugh at the dumb scripts for being dumb. But in all honesty, the EDM/DJ scripts that I read irked me so much because all of them, and I mean all of them, think you’re stupid. They all had the feeling of “Hey, let’s get all these EDM fans to pay to see this dumb fucking movie.” Now, there’s no shame in writing for money, and we all must find our own ways of coming to terms with the fact that art can’t exist without commerce. However, great writers can take a nakedly commercial trend or IP and still tell an effective story. Cavemen writers who only see the money often find their scripts in the trash pile.
The commerce of this industry can’t exist without the art either. Lazy writers who don’t understand this are doomed to hackery and failure.