Review: THE SUNSHINE BLONDE - REVISION #3

Script review for triggerstreet.com

THE SUNSHINE BLONDE - REVISION #3 - by Marilyn Mallory

When I saw a romantic comedy appear on my assignment list I was pleased, rom-coms are light, fun and breezy affairs. After battling my way through The Sunshine Blonde I feel like the victim of a cruel joke; where was the romance? Where was the comedy?

The Sunshine Blonde is a serious and jaded account of a gold-digging nurse who eventually overcomes her greed to marry another money-grabber who has done likewise. That’s not a rom-com, it’s a redemption drama and should be pitched as such to avoid disappointing and discouraging the audience. A couple of witty moments do not make it a comedy, and the romance is so confused and buried under her victim’s plight that it barely leaves an impact.

I tried to list the elements I liked but could only think of one: Sunshine’s pure white house is a striking visual which could be used to symbolise interesting things about its inhabitant’s psychology (not that I could tie any of those implications to her actions in the script, but the potential was there).

The story doesn’t suffer from any major plot-holes; there are clear desires at play and coherent chains of cause and effect throughout. The writer should be applauded for developing the story thoroughly.

Plot-holes are one thing but plausibility issues are an entirely different matter and The Sunshine Blonde is riddled with plausibility issues: people doing or saying things that I could not ever find believable. Here’s one clear example: Franco’s goon shoots Mack in the shoulder, but Sunshine won’t call an ambulance, instead she waits for April to fly from San Francisco to Passadena by which time Mack is so weak from blood loss they can drag him to the car. Excuse me? How exactly was the sick old man who’d been shot stopping the healthy young woman from calling him an ambulance? We never see this happen, so all we have to go on is Sunshine’s line on the phone when April tells her to call an ambulance: “He won't let me. If you come here, the two of us could overpower him and get him to the hospital.” So apparently, yes, the sick, old man with a gunshot wound was still physically restraining her from using her phone to call an ambulance, yet she could use it to call April. Apparently 1 + 1 = 7. That’s the most extreme example but time and time again people say and do things which just don’t add-up to plausible behavior. My second example would be Ms. Murray randomly deciding to bury a loaded shotgun just below the surface of her flowerbed. Why would anyone ever do that? A dog could dig it up, a child could find it – that’s a horrendously stupid thing to do and it made me wonder if Ms. Murray was meant to be insane. As it turned out, no, she was just planning for that bizarre action sequence where Ross falls on the gun and it shoots Franco’s cane. Even shotguns have trigger guards so how falling on a buried gun could make it leap out the ground and go off, only the writer knows.

Sunshine’s character is loopy! I never managed to get a handle on why she is the way she is at all. Is she meant to be a goody or a baddie? Who knows? She has sympathetic traits – she’s a nurse (a caring profession), she’s been hurt in the past (and refuses to remarry), she can’t deal with death (and goes on vodka/valium rampages), she’s trying to earn money for her daughter’s college fund (which she lost in a share crash). But she also has many unsympathetic traits – she’s greedy, she uses people, she’s manipulative, she only sees others in terms of what they can give her and she recklessly endangers others. Overall she comes off as a woman who should spend several years seeing a shrink. She’s not likeable at all, but she’s not wicked enough to like as an antagonist. Mostly I felt sorry for her; a character with such stunted and arbitrary values needs help.

Mack’s not much better. Towards the end April makes a comment about him perhaps having Alzheimer’s. There’s no perhaps about it, throughout Mack demonstrates all the cogent reasoning of a man well on his way to utter senility.

I won’t continue listing the points I found strange because there are many and I don’t enjoy assassinating scripts, so instead I’ll do my best to offer some advice.

Go back to the concept and abstract it away from any real-life inspiration. Look at it as a script puzzle – what’s the best way to reconfigure the pieces to make a streamlined whole. The core story is a romance – but it’s not the fake romance between Sunshine and Mack, it’s the real romance between Sunshine and Ross. Keep that thread front and center. As a secondary character Mack’s screen-time needs to be dramatically scaled back and his relationship with April should be deemphasized. The story should not be about who inherits Mack’s wealth, it should be about how Sunshine and Ross manage to kick their gold-digging habits and embrace real love. You have to make Sunshine likeable (and that’s the real challenge!) despite her gold-digging ways, the audience needs to get behind her and want her to change for the better. Her daughter is one option for this – show more of her and Rita spending quality time together – people will accept a woman being a bitch to the world if she’s still an angel as a mother. Contrast the Sunshine who bakes cookies in the afternoon then exhorts gifts from her patients in the evening. You need to satisfactorily explain her vodka/valium rampages whenever a patient dies – as it is she just can’t deal with death. I’d spin that, so that whenever a patient dies she’s forced to think about how she used that patient, and now they’re dead she can’t apologize or make amends, so she’s overwhelmed with self-loathing and loses herself in drugs/booze. You can borrow a lot from drug addiction stories – her gold-digging behavior is the habit she’s trying to kick. You need to spin it so that we don’t judge Sunshine by her behavior, we judge her by her efforts to change her behavior.

I’m sorry I couldn’t offer a more appreciative review, but I hope my comments and suggestions can still be of some use for your next rewrite. Good luck.