Tennessee

Drama comedy, 103 pages.

Log Line

When Bret’s girlfriend leaves to teach English in Korea, he quits his job and spends one last weekend with her in Nashville, where they both try to introduce some sense of purpose into their lives.

Summary

Bret and Clara met working soul-sucking jobs at AutoZone in Memphis. Clara quits, goes home to her family in Chattanooga for a few weeks before she heads to South Korea, where she’ll teach English. Though they only recently started dating, her sudden absence hits Daniel harder than he expected, and they both decide to have one last hurrah in Nashville, which neither of them have been to.

Background

This was my first full-length screenplay, and is almost embarrassingly autobiographical. I was 22 when I started writing it, and had been living in Nashville for a few months, where I’d moved after college with my best friend. He and I were both feeling aimless with meaningless degrees in a bad job market, heartbroken from similarly long-term relationships that had unexpectedly imploded.

My first job out of college was working as a copywriter for a home decor company, a job that basically consisted of describing terrible glittery-encrusted things that only a mother could love. It wasn’t great, but I did manage to meet a girl who was in a similar situation. After a year, she moved back to Houston for a bit, then went to Germany to be an au pair. We met up in Memphis, had a nice weekend, and thus this story was born.

I was watching a lot of mumblecore films when I wrote this, and was inspired (like most low-budget filmmakers) by the emphasis on smart dialogue versus expensive set pieces. This script is in the vein of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy in the sense that it has a rather hopeless and inevitable ending seen from a mile away, but still the characters persist.