Page 23 of All That Glitters
Tony looked at her. “That’s actually perfect. I’m using that as my logline.”
“I was kidding,” she said, but he was already writing it down.
The boot camp often ended back at Tony’s duplex, which had undergone a dramatic transformation over the past month. The place was still a mess, but now the pizza boxes and empty soda cans shared space with stacks of script pages, character notes taped to the walls, and a whiteboard covered with plot diagrams.
Debbie had claimed the lumpy couch as her reading station, where she would curl up with her bare feet tucked under her, a red pen in one hand and Tony’s latest pages in the other. She’dappointed herself not just his taskmaster, but his first reader, his sounding board, his in-house script doctor.
“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?”
