Page 11 of All That Glitters
“Okay, feedback time,” she said. “Good news or bad news first?”
“Definitely the good news.”
“The good news is, the dialog is great. I really love how you’ve given Marcus a distinct voice. He’s cocky, but vulnerable. The same thing goes for Tristan and Andy. They’ve got everything they thought they wanted, but now they’re like, what’s next?”
“What’s the bad news?”
“Your Jessica character is flat.”
Tony shook his head. “No. Didn’t you see when I first introduced her? I gave her big boobs.”
Debbie rolled her eyes. “I saw that. And every girl who reads this will see it. You need to make her feel real. Give her a purpose. What does she want? What are her vulnerabilities? Her goals?”
“So, like a real person?”
“I know this might come as a shocker, but some girls actually are real people.”
Tony thought about it. “What if we had her younger brother pledging the frat? Maybe their parents were neglectful, and she’s had to raise him pretty much herself.”
“And she feels responsible for him,” Debbie said, building on Tony’s idea.
“What if her brother has type 1 diabetes or something?” Tony said. “Maybe she’s studying pre-med because she wants to find a cure.”
Debbie nodded along enthusiastically. “And maybe after he’s pledged, she starts noticing that he no longer needs insulin. Something’s changing in him, and that’s why she starts investigating the frat.”
Tony was now also nodding along enthusiastically, the idea quickly gaining momentum. “And when she finds out they’re vampires, she realizes she’s going to need to kill her boyfriend, Marcus, this guy she’s been dreaming of having a future with, in order to save her brother.”
Debbie beamed. “See. Now, she feels like a real person the audience can care for.”
“Exactly,” Tony said, quickly jotting down these new ideas. “But can we still give her big boobs, right?”
A second later, a stack of script pages nailed him in the head.
One night, they found themselves at Murphy’s Pub, a new dive bar Veronica had recommended. The place had a vintage pool table with felt that had seen better decades. As Tony lined up his shot, he suddenly paused.
“Hold everything,” Tony said and rushed over to the table where his notepad sat beside a pitcher of beer.
“New idea?” Debbie said.
Tony nodded, quickly jotting down the new idea. “Instead of using crossbows to shoot the vampires, what if Jessica uses a potato cannon to shoot stakes at them?”
Debbie did a double-take. “A what?”
“A potato cannon. They use pneumatic pressure to shoot potatoes.”
“Okay...” Debbie said skeptically. “And where does she get one of those?”
Tony thought about it for a moment. “What if she gets some nerds from the science department at her college to make them for her?”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they’re nerds. And the minute she tells them about the vampires, they’re all in. Plus, she’s hot.”
Debbie rolled her eyes, but there was something to this idea. “It definitely ups the humor. Maybe have them competing with each other for her attention while they’re designing these cannons.”
“Exactly.” Tony couldn’t write fast enough to get these ideas down.
A month into the boot camp, Tony’s productivity had increased exponentially. He was actually filling up his notepad way faster than he could transcribe the ideas into screenplay format. And for the first time since starting this latest scheme, there was an end in sight.
Debbie lay on his couch, reading the latest script pages, while Tony typed furiously across the room on his laptop. From time to time, he heard her laugh at something she’d read, and this fueled him to type even faster.
He finally sat back in his chair and stretched. He looked over at Debbie, who was just finishing the last of the pages.
“So, what do you think?” he said. “Genius or disaster?”
She finished the last page and looked up. “This is funny,” she said, sounding more surprised than she’d expected. “I mean, really funny. But it also has heart. I actually felt bad for Jessica when her brother died trying to save her, and killing Marcus becomes a revenge quest for her.”
“So, you like it?” he said.
Debbie shuffled the pages into a neat stack. “I don’t just like it, I love it. This is a movie I would watch, and I don’t even like horror.”
Tony beamed. “I think one more day of Debbie’s boot camp for clueless slackers, and I’ll have it done.”
“Just think,” she said. “You won’t have to worry about me throwing ketchup bottles at you anymore.”
“And I can get my Netflix password back,” he laughed, and so did she. “You know what,” he said, his voice softening. “I’m actually gonna miss this. Hanging out with you every day, it’s been fun.”
“And by ‘fun,’ you mean grueling torture.”
He grinned. “It’s been that too.”
She gave him a smile. “Another Tony-Debbie adventure for the record books.”
“And this one didn’t require us push-starting my dad’s car in the morning.”
They both laughed.
“Seriously, Deb,” he said. “Thanks. It means a lot, your helping me out like this. I’m glad I picked you as my taskmaster.”
Something warm filled Debbie at this simple acknowledgement. It meant more to her than he would ever know. “You know something else,” she said. “This means I won my bet with Jeff.”