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.
Some Context
I am a cis straight white man, and I am here to talk to you about poorly written female characters. The chances of me not sounding like a misogynist asshole at some point in this article are slim to none. However, I’m going to attempt to write about this script anyway because this one has the ugliest implications we need to deconstruct. After all, the vast majority of the scripts were written by men. Shocking, I know.
Bridesmaids came in 2011. Upon its success, a bunch of men who don’t know how to write, let alone write women, smelled blood in the water and saw an opportunity to advance their careers. Add on top of this the still relevant Hangover franchise and as a result, I spent my first year as a reader drowning in these fuckers. I hated every second of it.
The Characters
We establish three friends. Usually, all three are white, but in some cases, there’s a token minority from a culture the usually white writer hasn’t bothered to research. Either way, they all have different hair colors.
The first friend we meet is the hot mess. (The kids still say “hot mess,” right?) She has a lot of sex, she drinks whiskey instead of vodka, and gosh darn it, she just can’t grow up! Something traumatic in her past made her this way, and the other two friends will tiptoe around this event until the end of act two. Also, she usually has a gender neutral name, like Riley, Sam, or Blake. The writer will find this decision very clever.
The second friend is the uptight professional “woman who is obsessed with her career and is not fun at all.” She wears her business suit out, she’s always responding to an email on her phone, and she just doesn’t know how to cut loose like she used to when the three were younger. The hot mess still calls her by a nickname referencing a booze fueled incident from high school or college she’d rather forget. If her name’s Ashley, it will be Smashley.
The third friend is the one who’s about to be married, just got divorced, or just accomplished some major life event, and this event is the reason the three are out celebrating. (It’s usually marriage.) Her personality falls somewhere between the hot mess and the professional and she’s usually the one who stops the other two from tearing each other’s throats out. As the primary character conflict is between the hot mess and the uptight professional, this will be the only trait that defines her in any meaningful way.
The Plot
The trio catch up and discuss the night’s events. The hot mess, realizing this as an opportunity to relive her glory days, has brought drugs. “Out of the question!” responds the uptight professional. Soon afterwards, they find themselves at a club and, sure enough, the hot mess concocts some scenario wherein they take either her or someone else’s drugs.
From here, we roam the city as the shenanigans kick into overdrive. What these shenanigans entail varies depending on the generation of our characters and the writer, as well as their cultural backgrounds and the setting. (Though, almost assuredly, we’re in New York.) However, three things happen each and every time: The professional friend “goes wild” and does something out of character, the friend who’s about to be married will act on her insecurities about commitment and make out with a stranger, and at the end of act two, they’ll get out of a particularly wild event and have an intense argument.
The professional will blame the night’s shenanigans on the hot mess. The hot mess responds by accusing the professional of becoming a boring office drone whose incapable of happiness. The professional friend then calls out the hot mess for not growing up and says something that undermines the fabric of the group. The third friend will try to stop the argument from escalating, but the professional will then make reference to the event that traumatized the hot mess.
The specifics of the event vary. It has to be serious enough to alter her life, but not so big that it can’t be addressed in the confines of a comedy movie. Most writers go with an abortion, unaware that Leslye Headland beat them to the punch in Bachelorette. If it’s not that, it’s usually a dead family member. Whatever it is, once the professional drops this bomb, the group splits up and spends some time apart.
Eventually, after they’ve all done some soul searching, they’ll serendipitously reconvene at their spot. A place we know from a previous scene that has significant meaning to this group. The friends will apologize to each other, they’ll concede that they’re all in need of change, and they’ll rush to the wedding.
The Take-Away
What’s particularly disappointing about this script is that it doesn’t have to be bad. In fact, there were a handful of these scripts that I recommended to my bosses. Almost all of them were written by women who bothered to write their characters with a degree of nuance and humanity.
Unlike Stealth Boxing movies, it’s not the overuse of the formula that’s the problem. It’s the torpor and the ineptitude. Most of the time, laziness in and of itself is so common that you get used to it. But in this case, the laziness feels actively offensive. Readers don’t read your scripts in a vacuum. If you turned in an uninspired script, that’s what I told my boss. If you turned in an uninspired script that’s also offensive, that’s what I told my boss in a much more vitriolic fashion. However, if you gave me something that didn’t make me feel like I was contributing to the sexist attitude of Hollywood, that’s when I’d go to bat for you.