Premise: When valuable paintings surface some 20 years after his involvement in one of the largest art heists ever, ex-Boston PD detective Wayne Merner is thrown back into the case that claimed the life of his partner.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted.
Writer: Randy Steinberg
Details: 109 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
I’m always intrigued by art heist movies. The tone feels so much more…dignified, I guess I would say, when compared to straight heist movies. Stealing money is boring (unless it's Die Hard of course :). It takes someone with a particular kind of taste, with a particular set of skills, to steal a famous painting. I love The Thomas Crown Affair
, and I’m always looking for the next one.
Randy, the writer here, is at that stage that a lot of writers are, where they’ve written a few scripts and are starting to find success in getting people to read their material. Yet still nothing’s happened. Let’s see if we can identify where he can improve his script, Eye Of The Beholder, to make this process a little easier for him.
We start in South Boston at the Harden Museum. It’s March 17, 1990. A couple of security guards are making their nightly rounds when two men in Mona Lisa masks charge in and steal four paintings worth millions of dollars.
Wayne Merner, a ruggedly handsome cop, believes he’ll be working alone on this case, but is shocked to find out that he’ll be joined by FBI agent Chris Hill, a sexy girl who’s not afraid to mix it up and put her life on the line to get the case solved. This is a huge problem in Wayne’s eyes, as he doesn’t trust the FBI, due to a crappy experience with them in the past.
The duo starts with the Mona Lisa masks, scouring every costume store in town to find out who sells them. Eventually they’re led to a turtle-neck wearing sleazeball named Hoffman. Hill poses as an interested buyer and they set up a potential exchange. Things go wrong though when Hill realizes the paintings are fakes and these aren’t the real thieves. But by then it’s too late, and chaos ensues, ending up in Hill being shot and killed!
70 pages into the script, we jump forward 20 years to the present day, where Merner, who’s lived a full life and raised a family, is now on the verge of retirement. Merner is still consumed by the heist never being solved, and decides to re-open the case himself. The cops actually end up finding the paintings, but that’s not enough for Merner. He has to find out who took them. He eventually learns that the case isn’t as complicated as he thought it was, and that the thieves may have been right under his nose the whole time.
To put it bluntly, Eye of the Beholder is definitely not ready for primetime.
The biggest problem here is that the promise of the idea isn’t realized on any level. This story has major tunnel vision. It can only see the finish line and nothing else. There are no subplots here. There are no attempts to get to know the characters outside of their immediate goal. Relationships aren’t explored on any level. We’re just barreling towards one singular goal – Get the paintings back. And as a result, there’s nothing for the reader to get emotionally invested in.
For example, let’s say you and I were standing at the bottom of New York City and I said to you, “I need you to go grab a book for me I left in Midtown.” That’s the beginning of a story right there. Now imagine you simply walking 60 blocks, picking up the book, then coming back and giving it to me, with nothing happening in between. Would that be an exciting story to tell?
Of course not.
How but this instead. You start walking and a couple of blocks into your journey, you get a phone call from your girlfriend who says “I just found naked pictures of your ex-girlfriend on your computer. We need to talk now!” Uh-oh. That book is going to have to wait. So you take a detour over to your place but…what the hell…some guy pulls you into an alley and MUGS YOU!
You quickly call the cops, who want a statement, and when you call your girlfriend to tell her what happened, she thinks you’re lying so she says she’s throwing all your shit out the window as you speak. Shit!
You hurry over to your place to save your stuff, but on the way, I call you. Guess what? The person who was supposed to be holding the book had to leave. So now instead of meeting them in Midtown, you have to go to Brooklyn. Brooklyn?? You don’t have time to go to Brooklyn!
This is the beginning of a number of occurrences which make getting that damn book a modern-day nightmare.
The point is, you want to texture your character’s journey with complications, with twists and turns and problems and real life so that the story presents the illusion of occurring in reality. The big problem with Eye of The Beholder is that there’s so little happening outside of the central goal, that it quickly becomes boring.
Another problem here – and I’m sure everyone who read the script spotted it – is that the first act turn doesn’t happen until page 70. Let’s go back to the logline: “When valuable paintings surface some 20 years after his involvement in one of the largest art heists ever, ex-Boston PD detective Wayne Merner is thrown back into the case that claimed the life of his partner. “ To wait til page 70 for the “20 years later” part is insane. Unless you’ve established a pattern of jumping through time throughout your movie (sometimes seen in period pieces) you can’t just do a one-off 20 year forward jump 70 pages into your script. You just can’t do it. It’s never been done before.
And the reason it’s never been done before is because you can’t take us to a false climax on page 70, then ask us to reinvest in an entirely new plot for the final 40 pages. It just doesn’t work. So the first thing I would do over anything in this script is have Merner’s partner die in the first act, preferably by page 15 but no later than page 25, and cut 20 years forward from then, placing the bulk of the plot here in the present as opposed to the past.
Another thing Randy needs to work on are his choices. All of these choices here are way too generic. And I don’t mean “generic” in an insulting way. I mean in the literal sense. The choices are way too basic and familiar. From the characters to the plot to the way scenes play out. They all feel like stuff we’ve seen a thousand times before. If the Mona Lisa masks were really used, I guess that’s okay, but we just saw these types of masks in two very big releases, The Town and Dark Knight, so it looks lazy.
As you may or may not know, I’m not a McKee fan
. But one thing I agree with him on is when he says, good writers don’t go with their first choices on anything. They dig deeper, exploring a fourth, a fifth, or a sixth choice, until they find something that’s not commonly seen or used. That’s one of the big reasons pro scripts are better than amateurs. Amateurs end up writing an amalgam of all the characters and scenes they’ve seen in other movies. Pros dig deeper and try to find things you HAVEN’T seen in other movies. Two of the more basic storytelling essentials, a ticking time bomb and high stakes, are also missing here. It doesn’t matter when he solves the case. And it doesn’t matter IF he solves the case. I mean think about it. What happens if Werner never solves this case? Outside of his curiosity never being satisfied - nothing. Later, when we jump forward 20 years, you can argue against this, saying the stakes are that he avenge his partner’s death. But we barely knew his partner, and we never got the sense that he knew her either (because of the aforementioned never seeing these characters outside of their story goal). So that motivation doesn’t ring true either.
Basically, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done here. But it’s a great learning experience. I see writers make these mistakes over and over again because nobody tells them that they’re problems. These are major problems I’ve listed above that need to be addressed. Once Randy does that, this, along with all of his future scripts, are going to be a lot better.
Script link: Eye Of The Beholder
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I have to commend Steinberg in this respect. He’s writing about a true story, and a fairly interesting one at that. Producers LOVE true stories. So if you can option an article or a real life event in any capacity, do it, as it gives you a little more credibility when querying around.
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