Screenplay Analysis - The Toe - Hitlist
The Toe, by Mallory Westfall - Hitlist
On the night of her 30th birthday, Elizabeth accidentally comes into possession of a very special item…a severed toe. She soon finds herself obsessing over the toe’s owner and, desperate to shake up her own mundane life, must decide whether or not to give in to the darker impulses the toe has stirred within her.
GENRE
Comedy/Thriller
I've read this screenplay twice. There is a lot to be learned from this script. It does so much right, and yet at the same time, it could do so much better. Let's take a look and see what it does right and how it could improve.
First... the story...
29-year-old Elizabeth lives in a town that isn't specifically mentioned. It's big enough for her to live an anonymous life in, but not so big it's actually an interesting place to be.
Elizabeth lives a hum-drum existence. She works the 9-5 in an office where nothing much happens. It's boring as hell. It's so dull that she lies about her life to her colleagues to try and seem like she leads a much more interesting life than she really does.
The monotony of her existence is broken one evening when she drives behind a truck down a bumpy road. The back door of that truck opens and inside Elizabeth sees a dozen men and women trussed up with bags over their heads, watched over by a menacing man. They look to have been kidnapped. One of the trussed women gets her foot caught in the truck door as it slams closed on the bumpy road and it severs a toe that lands on Elizabeth's windscreen.
Elizabeth is shocked by this and in no hurry to chase down a truck of kidnapped people watched over by men with guns, she stops and collects the toe.
Great setup. So far there is mystery and intrigue. I talk a lot about story engines. There are four key story engines, things that drive the story forward and keep your audience engaged. They are...
GOALS.
STAKES.
URGENCY.
and...
MYSTERY
Of these four, the most powerful story engine is mystery. For some reason, humans are incredibly inquisitive creatures. We HATE not knowing WHY something is. We hate not knowing how something ends. Think about how many times you've started watching something, thought it was terrible, but kept watching just to find out how it finished. Never underestimate the power of mystery.
So far this story has a great mystery element to it. After finding said toe, Elizabeth does her civic duty and reports the kidnapped people to the police. She does, however, forget to mention the toe she found.
Why? At first, I asked this, and the writer explains in the descriptive text that this toe means something to Elizabeth. It is something that gives her life a sense of mystery and excitement.
Now, this is probably the first mistake, or rather should I say, this is the first instance in this script where it could be improved.
Don't rely on explaining character decisions in the descriptive text. Descriptive text should really be limited to describing what can be seen on screen. I must mention here that it is okay to write some small asides and also to describe the mental state of characters for actors to help build their performances from. But in general, you need to make sure that everything in your script can be understood from what the characters do.
The audience learns the story by watching the characters' actions. If an action doesn't seem logical and you need to explain it in the descriptive text so the reader understands, this can backfire on you. Sure, your reader gets it, but will your viewing audience?
There were several instances in this screenplay where the descriptive text overstepped its bounds. Some script doctors advise against writing anything in the descriptive text that can't be seen on the screen, and for a long time, I advocated this. But the more scripts I read, the more I feel that asides in the descriptive text are fine, so long as they add to the reading experience and don't detract from the viewing experience.
Back to the story...
Elizabeth feels empowered with this newfound severed toe in her life. It is her very own special secret. It is something that makes her life interesting. It separates her hum-drum existence from all the other hum-drum lives around her. She no longer feels unimportant. In a very weird kind of way, this toe gives her life meaning.
Emboldened, Elizabeth's personality starts to change. She stops caring about what her fellow office workers think about her, she stops sucking up to her boss, she gets a tattoo.
Yes, a tattoo that leads to her first clue about the owner of the toe.
It's at this point in the story that this script could use a little more improvement.
Great intriguing hook - kidnapped people, a severed toe, but now what? Mystery alone is enough to drive a story, but for a mystery to work your hero needs to ACTIVELY SOLVE the mystery.
A passive hero is really boring, and unfortunately, that is what Elizabeth becomes after finding this toe. I really hoped she would dedicate all her time to finding out who this toe belonged to, but alas she doesn't try very hard at all. She does look over the local internet page of missing people, but other than this web search, she doesn't actively search for where the toe came from. She goes back to her work and we have a series of scenes that don't involve Elizabeth trying to solve the mystery of the severed toe.
Instead, we have a bunch of boring scenes that don't really have any goals.
When your hero doesn't have a goal they are actively pursuing then your story grows boring really quickly. Audiences need to know WHY they're watching. They need to know WHAT the hero is doing and WHY they're doing it.
There are two types of goals. Open-ended goals and closed-ended goals.
Closed-ended goals work best because they have a concrete objective. Your hero must do X to achieve their goal.
Here, at this point of the story, there is no real goal. Sure, Elizabeth is curious about the toe, but she's not really investigating whose it is.
I was hoping that perhaps she would go to a hospital and try to see if anyone presented with a severed toe. She could break into a doctor's office late at night to look through their records to find out about the person with the missing toe. She could get a job as a receptionist at the hospital to search their records, she could take up hacking to try and access their databases. All of these ideas give Elizabeth an ACTIVE closed-ended goal.
But instead, we just have Elizabeth go about her life with this new secret - her severed toe in a ring-box.
The story does start moving again, but it starts moving by CHANCE.
You see, the woman who lost the served toe had a tattoo of a moose on her leg. Elizabeth decides to go and get a tattoo and discovers by chance a picture of that very same moose in the tattoo shop.
This is a good moment to talk about coincidences in film. Coincidences happen in real life all the time. Coincidences are fine in real life, but they come across as weak writing in film (unless you're using them as a comedic device).
Avoid coincidences in your script at all costs.
It's a shame the writer chose to move the story forward with coincidence, as there is a much better alternative. The tattoo of the moose is Elizabeth's only tangible connection to the woman who lost the toe. So it would seem a logical jumping-off point for her to start her investigation.
Have Elizabeth visit every tattoo parlor in town, but she comes up empty-handed. Then, just when she's about to give up she sees someone with a tattoo that is different from the moose but inked in the same distinct style. She asks the person where they got the tattoo done... then fill in the blank from here.
This is a good moment to talk about two writing tips...
NEVER MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR HERO.
This should be obvious, but I see a lot of amateur screenplays that don't put any real obstacles in the way of the hero. Take the scenario I suggested about Elizabeth searching the tattoo parlors for the artist who inked the image of the moose. It would be too easy for Elizabeth to go to a bunch of stores and just happen upon the very same image and consequently the artist who points her toward the woman with the severed toe. Always make your hero's quest difficult. The harder it is for them, the more engaged your audience will be.
DON'T WRITE THE EXPECTED.
If Elizabeth sets out to search tattoo parlors in the hope of finding the artist who inked the lady with the severed toe - and that's what happens, then your audience is going to fall to sleep. There's nothing more boring than watching a film in which the hero sets out to do something and aside from a couple of small hiccups along the way they do exactly what they set out to do.
WRITE THE UNEXPECTED.
Blindside your audience with twists that even you didn't see coming. If you can surprise yourself, your audience is guaranteed to be caught off guard. When your audience can't guess what's going to happen, that's when they really get invested in the story.
It's relevant I write these particular tips at this point in this screenplay's story - as this is exactly what The Toe does.
It goes where you don't expect it too.
At first, I thought it was going to be a simple mystery about Elizabeth searching for the owner of the toe, and perhaps discovering an underground ring of human smugglers or something else equally nefarious - instead what Elizabeth discovers, I did not see coming.
I won't ruin this story by telling any more about its plot out of respect to the writer and producers. But I will say that this story goes somewhere the majority of people wouldn't expect it to. It becomes a very insightful, intelligent and well-crafted story that explores life's grandest question - what is the meaning of life? And, how do we create meaning from our existence?
Before I finish this review let me leave you with another couple of screenwriting tips.
Before this story took its first MAJOR twist - which happens around page 40 - (I'm not counting the inciting incident which is finding the toe) this screenplay could do a few things much better.
EMPATHY
We only really like Elizabeth because we feel sorry for her. This is a form of passive empathy. Now, this kind of empathy works much better than NO empathy, but it's a distant weaker cousin to ACTIVE POSITIVE empathy.
Seeing scene after scene of Elizabeth's sad and lonely life made me feel sorry for her, but it didn't really make me love her. Not enough to commit to going on a journey with her for 90+ minutes.
If I were producing this screenplay, my first note to the writer would be to inject ample doses of ACTIVE POSITIVE empathy in the first 15 pages of the script. But don't leave your empathy beats to the first 15 pages. You need to have active positive empathy beats throughout your screenplay to keep your audience in love with your hero.
GOALESS SCENES
Avoid writing these at all costs. In the first 30 pages of this screenplay, several scenes don't have a scene objective.
A scene objective is a goal your hero is trying to achieve in that scene. It's essentially the reason WHY you're writing that scene. When you have a scene with no clear goal your audience will grow bored of the scene and soon start to check out.
SUMMARY
I read this script twice. The first time I wasn't engaged until the first major twist on page 40, but from then on it really had me and kept me engaged until the end.
The second time I read it I was still bored for the first 30 or so pages but I knew it was going to get much better so I was okay with sitting through the boring first act.
This became an obvious piece of advice to share with you. Don't give your first-time readers any reason to check out from the story early. Keep them engaged by keeping your hero active with clearly defined goals and make sure we love them by injecting active positive empathy beats - these are situations where the hero ACTIVELY does something GOOD for another person/entity, other than themselves. We love altruistic, compassionate characters and will stick with them until the end of their journey.
STORY NOTES
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