30 Days of Screenplays, Day 27: “(500) Days of Summer”
Why 30 screenplays in 30 days?
Why 30 screenplays in 30 days?
Because whether you are a novice just starting to learn the craft of screenwriting or someone who has been writing for many years, you should be reading scripts.
There is a certain type of knowledge and understanding about screenwriting you can only get from reading scripts, giving you an innate sense of pace, feel, tone, style, how to approach writing scenes, how create flow, and so forth.
So each day this month, I will provide background on and access to a notable movie script.
Today is Day 27 and the featured screenplay is for the 2009 movie (500) Days of Summer. You may read the screenplay here.
Background: Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
Plot summary: An offbeat romantic comedy about a woman who doesn’t believe true love exists, and the young man who falls for her.
Tagline: Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t.
Awards: Nominated for the WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Trivia: According to the DVD commentary, Neustadter estimates that 75% of the film actually happened to him.
This is the chronology of the actual days in the script as it exists:
488: Park Bench, T and S, wedding ring, Narrator
1: Office, T sees S for the first time, intro to T & S as young people (The Graduate / cut hair)
240: Fateful Day, Postscript with T breaking dishes, sister, talks about the arc of relationship
1: Office, S introduced to the company
-5513 / -4779 / -3 / -1: Summer’s special something
3 + 4: Office, T declaring he’s not interested in S, elevator where she likes his music
154: “I love everything about Summer” series of shots
11: T and sister playing Wi where he says S is “special”, warning from sister
22: PacMan center, “It’s off,” she had a “good” weekend, times he tried to reach out to her and she rejected his clues
27 + 28: Office / Karaoke bar: She’s interested in him, but just wants to be friends
29: Copy room, surprise kiss / T’s apartment with Paul
238: Ikea, negative vibe (payoff)
31: Ikea, positive vibe (setup)
32: Greatest Morning Ever!
268: Office, despondent, T in “going to get her back mode”
45: Office, “Knight Rider” payoff
59: Going to movies
87: Record Store, Ringo Star [setup], porn video, shower sex
95: Tom’s Park, 1st time with Summer, architecture talk and draw on her arm
109: S apartment, “I’ve never told anyone that.”
116: PacMan café: T says they don’t need to nail down what they are
118: Soccer I, T asks sister about whether to push S about what they are
366: Party at Summer [setup]
269: “I hate everything about Summer” [payoff]
185: Bar, fight / T & S fight as he presses her on what they have / restless night apart / she shows up / next morning talk about her ex boyfriends
141: Park, “penis”
273–286: Movie montage of T depression
293: “Worst Morning Ever” [payoff], cut from movie
303: Meets with Boss, now to do funeral and grieving cards
167: Montage: Great at job [nice contrast to 303]
306: Seeing Summer everywhere, cut from movie
345: Blind date, FB to where Summer was turning against him, ending up at karaoke bar
360: Train, he and Summer going to the wedding, wedding, dancing
366: Summer party, getting married
402 + 403 + 403 ½: Total depression
404: Quits job
419: Soccer II, starting up with architecture again
240: Fateful day [Payoff]
421–464: Getting his act together montage
488: Tom’s park, T meets with S one last time, he was right, she says, he is a realist now
500: Job interview, meets Autumn
1:
One thing I really noticed: Set-ups and Payoffs. And in the case of the nonlinear approach, Payoffs, then Set-ups.
There’s an interesting comparison to be made to Shakespeare in Love:
- Both Protagonists begin the story living on the surface of life.
- Both have a true creative calling, but are caught up in a state of Disunity including patterns of behavior that keep them from tapping into their Core Essence.
- Both are romantics.
- Both fall rapturously in love with a woman.
- Both lose the woman.
- And in that process, both manage to deconstruct their Old Way of living, tap into their Authentic Self, and emerge in touch with their creativity.
What’s also interesting is if we straightened out (500) Day so the plot laid out in a linear fashion , we see that both movies share another dynamic: Whereas most Deconstruction movements in a story have a negative feel to them insofar as the Protagonist’s Old Ways of being are being bashed about as they stumble their way through the New World [strangers in a strange land], in these two movies, that dynamic is flipped. In the first half of Act Two [the linear version of (500) Days], Tom is wildly in love with Summer, and in Shakespeare Will is wildly in love with Viola. So that feels like a positive thing, even though it is, in fact, deconstructing their Old Ways [patterns of behavior that kept them chained to doing nothing, writer’s block, etc].
The same happens with Reconstruction: Whereas that is normally has a positive feel to it as the P begins to build a ‘new’ persona based on their True Being, if we straightened out (500) Days, we’d see that for both Tom and Will, realizing that they can not be with their lovers, destiny is pulling them apart, this is a negative experience, but a crucial one as it forces them to bust through the final layers of their defense mechanisms, and tap into their Core Essence.
One difference, however: In Shakespeare, his path is clear: Now that he has experienced the heights of rapture and the bitter depths of sorrow, he can now go on to become William Shakespeare: Playwright. However in (500) Days, the ending is, at least for me, inconclusive. We think has gotten his shit together, but then when he meets Autumn, is she really a reward for having tapped into his Core Essence, or is she yet another woman with whom Tom will make the same damn mistakes he did with Summer, view her through his overly romanticized lens of life? After all, the last image is the title: “Day 1.”
Finally, there’s this: While everything may seem to point to Summer being an Attractor character [most associated with the Protagonist’s emotional development], I think it’s interesting to look at Summer as a Trickster. Why?
- One of the defining qualities of a Trickster is they are a shapeshifter: Ally, Enemy, Enemy, Ally. If we track Summer’s relationship with Tom, both at the macro and micro level, we see her shifting all over the place, to the point where even Tom’s perception of her shifts.
- Another defining quality of a Trickster is they test the Protagonist. Again from macro to micro, Summer provides challenges throughout. Her theme song seems to be ‘uncertainty’ insofar as Tom is concerned.
- Another defining quality of a Trickster is they tend to have a mind of their own. Sometimes this can express itself as Ego, sometimes as Id, but they generally in touch with what they want, and they go for it. This is one of the primary reasons why they shift from enemy to ally, back and forth. If their wants and needs align with the Protagonist, they are an ally. If not, they can become an enemy. Summer is clearly much more settled [or at least thinks she is] in her attitudes and desires than Tom who has, as a result of looking at life through highly romanticized lenses, is stuck in a diffuse state of being.
For example on P. 16, Summer explains how she came to move to LA: “Got tired of what I was doing, who I was with. Figured I’d try something new, exciting.” Easy as that. Meanwhile Tom has been working a job he doesn’t really like ignoring his own need for expression [symbolized by architecture] for years.
Perhaps the finest example of Summer as a Trickster is the fact that it is she who — shockingly — falls in love albeit with some other guy. In other words, she did what Tom so desperately wanted her to do… but not with him.
Finally, remember Tom’s best day ever?
They actually shot a version of Tom’s worst day ever, a scene from the original script which ended up on the cutting room floor:
What’s your take on (500) Days of Summer? Stop by comments and post your thoughts.
To see all of the posts in the 30 Days of Screenplays series, go here.
This series and use of screenplays is for educational purposes only!