Bag of Chips

Guest Links

• The Guide for Every Screenwriter
• The Successful Screenwriter
• Geoffrey’s IMDb page

References

• “Weird Al” Yankovic
• tanaradoublechocolate on TikTok
• Kettle Chip
• Cracker Jack
• Lay’s Southern Biscuits and Gravy Potato Chips
• Mushroom computer
• Monty Python
• David Cronenberg
• TED Talks
• Kill Bill: Vol. 1
• Solanaceae (Nightshade)
• Swordfish
• All that and a bag of chips!

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Thomas]
I’m curious what an Irish computer driven by potatoes would be.

[Geoffrey]
I’m into it.

[Thomas]
I like the idea of-

[Shep]
Everyone that says they like my pitch, I feel, is teasing me. I feel like I’m being bullied right now.

[Geoffrey]
It’s reverse bullying because you’re cam- “I think you’re doing a great job. You’re really doing good.”

[Shep]
How dare you?

[Geoffrey]
“You hit the assignment perfectly.”

[Emily]
This is what toxic positivity feels like.

[Geoffrey]
“You’re doing, like, so good, though.”

[Emily]
“Yeah.”

[Geoffrey]
“Seriously.”

[Emily]
“It’s amazing.”

[Geoffrey]
“So good. Oh my gawd.”

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary objects and turn them into movies. I’m Thomas J. Brown. And today we have Emily-

[Emily]
Hey, guys.

[Thomas]
F. Paul Shepard-

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
And special guest Geoffrey D. Calhoun.

[Geoffrey]
Thanks for having me.

[Thomas]
Geoffrey is a bestselling author, instructor, fellow podcaster, and most importantly, a screenwriter. He even has IMDb credits for writing. Geoffrey, welcome to the show. Tell us a bit more about yourself and how you got started in screenwriting.

[Geoffrey]
Oh, my God. Well, thanks a lot for having me on. I started screenwriting as a bet close to 20 years ago, which was kind of ironic because I’m dyslexic, but I fell in love with it. Really figured out, hey, you know, I can’t dance, I can’t sing, but damn it, I can write you a screenplay. Ended up doing that for a long time and kind of wrote down my own methodology as a script doctor in The Guide for Every Screenwriter, which became a bestseller and ranked as one of the best screenwriting books of all time.

[Thomas]
Wow.

[Geoffrey]
That kind of worked its way into my podcast, the Successful Screenwriter podcast, where I have a website where people can go and kind of make it their hub for screenwriting.

[Thomas]
Awesome.

[Emily]
That is so cool.

[Thomas]
Well, since you are the guest, you get to choose today’s topic. What are we going to write a movie about?

[Geoffrey]
I want to write a movie about a Bag of Potato Chips.

[Thomas]
All right.

[Shep]
Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. A bag of potato chips? That’s more specific than I was told.

[Geoffrey]
I was thinking salt and vinegar. Is that too far for you?

[Emily]
Just specifically salt and vinegar.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah.

[Shep]
I just had it as a “Bag of chips”.

[Geoffrey]
Well, I guess that makes sense. I’m going with a bag of potato chips. I guess that’s where I’m at.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Geoffrey]
So if it’s a bag of wood chips, you’re in trouble.

[Shep]
Wood chips!

[Emily]
Oh.

[Thomas]
There goes my chocolate chips pitch.

[Shep]
These are all great.

[Emily]
mine are potato chips. I understood the assignment.

[Geoffrey]
Oh, hell yeah. She’s got it.

[Shep]
So mine are computer chips. I’m the only one. I’m the odd person out.

[Geoffrey]
Wait a minute. A bag of computer chips?

[Shep]
Yes!

[Geoffrey]
Can I ask you where you’re buying a bag of computer- Is this the apocalypse? What’s happening right now?

[Shep]
My first thought was, whatever’s the first thing that comes to mind, that’s what I’m going to write the pitch on.

[Geoffrey]
He’s going he’s buying wholesale computer chips by the pound like it’s a bulk food store.

[Shep]
I was thinking of the Weird Al song, “What kind of chip you got in there? A Dorito?” All About the Pentiums.

[Geoffrey]
That’s hilarious.

[Shep]
And that’s where my mind went with computer chips.

[Geoffrey]
I love it. It’s unique. It’s original.

[Shep]
It’s wrong. You could just say it’s wrong.

[Geoffrey]
I’m trying to be supportive, man.

[Emily]
It’s like the lady on TikTok that watches the terrible recipe videos. “Everybody’s so creative.”

[Thomas]
Well, we’ll push forward with it and see where we get. Each episode of Almost Plausible begins with a pitch session where each of us shares the ideas we’ve come up with for a bag of …potato chips. Together, we’ll pick the pitch we like the best and develop it into a story. Geoffrey, tell us the pitches that you came up with for Bag of Chips.

[Geoffrey]
I think I straight up over developed this because I got, like, a title and everything.

[Shep]
Oh, wow.

[Thomas]
That’s fine.

[Emily]
It’s cool.

[Geoffrey]
So here’s my pitch. Deep in the cellar of a food factory, a researcher is trying to cure hunger, world hunger. And while eating his own lunch, he accidentally spills his chemical workplace onto his bag of chips and grants it sentience. But here’s the problem. The bag of chips now has taken its task of feeding the world in the opposite direction, where it has to breed and multiply into more little baby bags of chips. But the only way it can do that is by sucking the salt dry from humanity. I call it The Salting.

[Emily]
I am so sold.

[Thomas]
It should be in an assault joke, right? “The Assaulting”.

[Geoffrey]
Assaulting. That’s good. That’s the sequel, sir. You’re getting ahead of me.

[Thomas]
Oh, okay. All right.

[Geoffrey]
So that’s my overly developed horror comedy pitch.

[Thomas]
Emily, you said you had a potato chip pitch. Let’s hear yours.

[Emily]
I do. Troy is visiting his best friend Darren for their weekly bro lunch. Troy is trying to convince Darren to go to a music festival that coming weekend. But Darren has plans to propose to his girlfriend, and he shows Troy the ring that he just picked up that morning. Troy, being the self-centered manchild that he is, starts ribbing Darren about the impending engagement and swipes the ring, refusing to give it back until Darren agrees to postpone his plans and have one last boys weekend at the music festival. Darren isn’t having it and demands the ring back. Roughhousing ensues. Troy books it out of the break room that they are having lunch in with the ring. Then he promptly trips and falls, sending the ring sailing into an unsealed bag of potato chips below. But the line is moving so fast, they lose track of the right bag and spend the rest of the movie searching for it in various locations the chips are sold, while coming to terms with the changes in their friendship and adult lives. Also, I took out the part of the pitch where we explained Darren and his family own a kettle chip company.

[Geoffrey]
That’s cool.

[Thomas]
I was going to say “So I guess they work at a chip factory, then.” As your pitch kept going, I kept imagining, “Okay, so there’s an open bag of chips. Oh, there’s several open bags of chips? Oh, they’re in a factory. Got it. Okay.”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So it’s like a prize in Cracker Jacks, except it’s a bag of potato chips, and the prize is an engagement ring.

[Emily]
A beautiful engagement ring.

[Thomas]
And some guy’s going to buy chips for his girlfriend, and she’s going to be like, “Yes!” And he’s like, “What?”

[Emily]
Yeah. Imagine they would end up at the festival somehow with the girlfriend, and then there was a vendor who’s selling their potato chips, and then they-

[Thomas]
They’ve given up at that point.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
That would be super cute.

[Thomas]
That’s totally how the movie would go.

[Emily]
Right?

[Geoffrey]
That sounds like a really heartwarming film.

[Thomas]
Well, my pitch is a rom-com where two people meet shopping in the same bodega, and they meet because they both went for the last bag of a particular brand and flavor of potato chip. Their mutual love for the chips is just the beginning of a string of commonalities, which leads to a whirlwind romance, and in short order, they move in together. It turns out that a relationship built on potato chips is as unstable as the chips themselves, however, and the couple breaks up. It takes spending time away from each other to realize that what they had was actually pretty good. And the movie ends with them agreeing to go on another date, but they decided to take things more slowly this time.

[Shep]
What’s the flavor of chips?

[Emily]
Good question.

[Thomas]
Well, we were assigned salt and vinegar earlier, so I guess that’s it.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
Excellent. Excellent.

[Shep]
I mean, that’s not a very rare flavor, though.

[Thomas]
No, it’s not. Maybe it’s one of those ones from another country or one of those limited-edition ones.

[Emily]
The biscuits and gravy Lays.

[Geoffrey]
Oh, my God.

[Thomas]
Yeah, exactly. There you go.

[Geoffrey]
Oh, I can’t even. That would ruin any relationship.

[Emily]
Right?

[Thomas]
That’s why they thought they would be such a good pair. They’re like, “What? Nobody likes these!”

[Geoffrey]
That’s hilarious.

[Thomas]
“Thought I was the only one.” Well, that’s my pitch. Shep, what do you have for us?

[Shep]
Okay, the prompt was a bag of chips. Keep that in mind. The five second pitch is a hacker is set up to take the fall after helping steal a bag of experimental computer chips from a high security tech company.

[Thomas]
Experimental potato chips. Got it.

[Shep]
Experimental chips made from potatoes, grown, vat-grown CPUs.

[Thomas]
There we go. Yes. I just saw a thing about somebody using mushrooms to run computers, so this seems like a natural extension of that.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
I mean, can’t you power a light bulb with a potato?

[Shep]
Self-powering CPUs. Now, Emily, you’re on to something.

[Thomas]
There we go.

[Geoffrey]
That are flavored? He like, licks the chip, puts it into the computer.

[Thomas]
Who needs thermal taste? Just saliva.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Geoffrey]
It’s just like right there. Yes.

[Shep]
Well, you’ve sold me on it.

[Thomas]
Oh, you’re just doing the five second pitch.

[Emily]
That’s it.

[Shep]
Oh, I have lots more.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
I really I wrote a huge thing on this, not realizing that it was supposed to be potato chips, so none of it’s potato. I could read more, but it’s not potato related.

[Geoffrey]
This is the best writers room I’ve ever been in.

[Thomas]
Well, was there a particular pitch that jumped out at anyone?

[Emily]
We know I love horror-comedy.

[Geoffrey]
I mean, Irish lickable computer chips is definitely not something that’s ever been done on the market.

[Shep]
I didn’t realize that they were Irish, but now that you’ve said it…

[Emily]
Makes sense.

[Geoffrey]
In my mind, he woke up screaming in the middle of the night. “Irish potato computer chips.” I kind of want to develop it. I’m interested in it. I thought Thomas’s was cool. I mean, I’m kind of torn here, guys. I’m your guest. So what are we thinking here?

[Shep]
I mean, they’re all good. I think that any of them could be turned into a full story.

[Emily]
Right. We are big on the rom-coms.

[Shep]
We do do a lot of rom-coms, which is one of my favorites.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
All right, we got to pick one.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
I’m fine with any of them.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
They’re all- we could do whatever.

[Emily]
Well, I’m partial to mine because I developed that one, so…

[Geoffrey]
All right, so it looks like we’re going to be developing four of them today. We’re all going to pick our own.

[Shep]
No.

[Thomas]
I’m curious what an Irish computer driven by potatoes would be.

[Geoffrey]
I’m into it.

[Thomas]
I like the idea of-

[Shep]
Everyone that says they like my pitch, I feel, is teasing me. I feel like I’m being bullied right now.

[Geoffrey]
It’s reverse bullying because you’re cam- “I think you’re doing a great job. You’re really doing good.”

[Shep]
How dare you?

[Geoffrey]
“You hit the assignment perfectly.”

[Emily]
This is what toxic positivity feels like.

[Geoffrey]
“You’re doing, like, so good, though.”

[Emily]
“Yeah.”

[Geoffrey]
“Seriously.”

[Emily]
“It’s amazing.”

[Geoffrey]
“So good. Oh my gawd.”

[Shep]
All right, do you want to hear more of my pitch?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
Let’s do it.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
Give us the expanded one.

[Shep]
The slightly expanded one is that there’s a team of tech savvy thieves, and they hire a brilliant hacker to join them in their planned heist of these experimental potato CPUs. But as the team navigates through the obstacles between them and the prize, they realize that these chips are not what they seem.

[Geoffrey]
I love it.

[Thomas]
They’re made of potatoes.

[Shep]
They’re made of potatoes!

[Geoffrey]
I love it.

[Shep]
And the stakes are much higher than they anticipated.

[Thomas]
And we all know what goes well with potatoes? Steak. So steaks and potatoes.

[Geoffrey]
I’m telling you-

[Thomas]
It’s perfect.

[Geoffrey]
Tonally, though, tonally, if you were to write this and shoot this in a farcical manner, it would be absolutely hilarious, and it could come out really well. Like a farcical heist film about computer potato chips. It could be hilarious. Like Monty Python level funny.

[Thomas]
All right. Do we like the computer chips idea, where they’re potato based? Potato starch based. Shep is dying.

[Emily]
I know it’s not possible, but, you know, movies aren’t accurate.

[Thomas]
Look, they’re GMO potatoes, so anything’s possible.

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s what I like the idea of this sustainable product that we’ve come up with.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
All right, I’ll give it to you.

[Thomas]
They run faster, they burn out faster, but they grow back faster. So it’s a quick cycle.

[Emily]
And you don’t have to rely on foreign governments or-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Geoffrey]
You can actually do some world building around this if you want to get, like, Cronenberg crazy with it, where they’re starting to use all kinds of products like that to replace everyday things. You know what I mean?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
So your refrigerator is some kind of a food product, too, instead of just being a big metal box.

[Emily]
So it’s like the Flintstones, but instead of dinosaurs, it’s just vegetation.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah, just food everywhere.

[Thomas]
Different vegetables.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah. In a heavily GMO’d future, things have just gone totally wild.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah, absolutely.

[Thomas]
Vegetables have evolved in ways we couldn’t have possibly expected.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah. You take the food out of the box and then you eat the box.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
You’d be crazy like that where it’s like it’s that sustainable of world. So that could be part of a farcical nature, which would be really interesting.

[Shep]
All right, where do we begin?

[Emily]
You guys take the lead.

[Geoffrey]
Okay, so this is how I develop a screenplay. I start with concept.

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Geoffrey]
Okay. We’re getting into the Guide for Every Screen Writer here because I’m going to shamelessly pitch my stuff.

[Emily]
That’s what you’re here for.

[Geoffrey]
All right, so we start with concept. We’ve nailed the concept here. We have the concept. Right? Then from concept, we go into a theme.

[Thomas]
Great. Okay.

[Geoffrey]
What are we trying to say with this movie? I’m going to change your show from here on out, by the way. Every episode you can be like, “Okay, what’s the theme?”

[Shep]
That’s fine. “Oh, no, he made it better. Oh.”

[Thomas]
Yeah. All right.

[Geoffrey]
“We better not have them back on.” So what are we trying to say with this?

[Thomas]
I mean, it sounds like the theme is sustainability.

[Geoffrey]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Or democratization, like if they’re trying to steal these potato CPUs to get them out so that people can plant them and grow their own and not have to rely on corporations.

[Geoffrey]
Right.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah. That’s good.

[Geoffrey]
So you got sustainability versus capitalism, right?

[Shep]
Yes.

[Geoffrey]
Okay. So now from there, we have our theme. It’s a little bit broad of a theme. We’re going to have to get a little bit tighter with that. But this is how you do it. So you pick your central character, whoever is the star of the film. Here’s the secret. Your central character is actually the living embodiment of your theme. So what you’re trying to say with your theme will be voiced through your character’s actual journey.

[Thomas]
Hang on. I’m going to start taking notes here.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah, it’s okay. We’re in a TED Talk right now, guys.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
I have good news. We’re actually recording this right now. We can listen to it again later.

[Geoffrey]
And if you want more on this, you can go to my courses at TheSuccessfulScreenwriter.com

[Shep]
That’s a good pitch right there. Just slide it right in natural.

[Geoffrey]
I’ve never done it before. The central character is your living embodiment of your theme. So what kind of journey are we going to put a person on where they are going to be struggling with their own sustainability versus capitalism? And I’m already going to cheat because I’m going to send it out there and then let you guys kind of figure it out. But sustainability, right? You think about paying your bills. You go to your day job every day, but you don’t love your day job. But why do you go to your day job? You go to your day job for money to make your bills, right? But you don’t love it. Is that sustainable? Can you live your life that way? That’s a capitalistic way of thinking, but there’s no passion there. So if you have a guy who’s doing the day job every day and say he’s got a mentor and he watches his mentor die young from a heart attack doing the same job, that’s a guy who realizes this capitalistic way of behavior isn’t sustainable. So now he starts venturing on how can I make my money my way and find something that I love to do? And is that start out as a good path of where he’s trying to do a good thing but then ends up in this crew stealing these potato microchips. And there’s his struggle.

[Shep]
See, I thought it was the opposite. Where the main character, the hacker, who I have as a woman, Amanda, is doing the job for money initially.

[Geoffrey]
You can absolutely do that. So you can do an antithesis, essentially, of the theme where she’s doing it for money, but then realizes that that is not sustainable. And then that ties into your theme and that she changes as a character. What’s important with a central character going through a journey of a story is that the central character doesn’t need to become a better person, they just need to change. And they can change for the better or they can change for the worse. As long as it somehow reflects your theme. That’s what’s important. So she could become a complete monster by the end of the movie. If she just starts out as a simple thief and then does the whole, like, Breaking Bad route, you could absolutely do that.

[Thomas]
Let’s take a break here, and when we come back, Geoffrey will continue to school us as we create our story about a bag of potato chips.

[Break]

[Thomas]
We are back. Now, Shep, you created our main character, Amanda. What is the change you envisioned for her over the course of the film?

[Shep]
So I have Amanda being betrayed by the thieves and left holding the bag, so to speak.

[Geoffrey]
Okay.

[Shep]
To take the fall for the theft. But in my original plan, it was a military contractor, and they were military chips, and the government wanted them back. So Amanda has to help, kind of, track down the thieves in order to get the chips back to free herself. But by doing so, she is giving weapons, basically, to the government. So there is a moral dilemma there. Now, this is different.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah.

[Shep]
If it’s grown chips, once they get out into the wild, there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle, and people can just grow their own technology. That seems like there isn’t a moral dilemma there. That would be the best outcome. Although in that case, she’s choosing to do that versus take the payout. So she’s giving the chips out to everyone versus making the money.

[Geoffrey]
She’s Robin Hooding it.

[Shep]
Yes, but that wasn’t her original plan.

[Geoffrey]
Okay. So in story structure, a character in the first third of the movie, the beginning, a character lives their life as is normal. They have a certain amount of tools and techniques they can use. If we break act two up into two halves, the first half of act two is that character trying to solve the problem with the tools that they have and then they inevitably fail by the mid-act-two, which is essentially what we call like a death and rebirth of the character. And this can be a physical, emotional, spiritual, could be a financial. There is some kind of a death and loss of that character, because everything they’ve been trying to do up until this point, they’ve been trying to use the techniques that they used to have. So when they hit this moment of loss, then the second half of act two is this character learning new tools, secrets, trades and knowledge that they can use to defeat the problem. So that would make sense then, if she is this thief and she’s using all these tools and by act two, something happens terrible at the midpoint, she’s been betrayed. Now she has to learn new skills and techniques to solve the problem. Okay, so the next step, you would develop the supporting characters around the central character, a couple of them, because the supporting characters all have their own subplots. Here’s the really sexy thing. Subplots also reflect different aspects of the theme as a thesis or an antithesis of it. So he could have a, she could have a friend who is with them all the way and then betrays them, right? That’s the theme. They could make an enemy a friend, who then helps them throughout it. Helps them change and grow, and also, again, reflects that theme. So you start building up supporting characters. I don’t expect us to do that right now just because we’re on that time crunch, but those are the kind of the building blocks of basic structure and storytelling. And then you can bring in subplots like a heart plot, an antagonist plot, and a supporting character plot, and that can all come together and make the cake.

[Shep]
Okay, so based on what you’ve said, I’m thinking, so we have the main character, Amanda, the hacker, who’s hired by the team of thieves. So we have the charismatic leader of the thieves, Steve.

[Emily]
It’s always Steve.

[Shep]
It’s always Steve.

[Thomas]
Ugh, Steve.

[Geoffrey]
Love it.

[Shep]
But he seems like a good guy at the beginning, and he and Amanda get along really well. But he does betray her or betrays the whole team, whichever would be more effective. And at least Amanda is left behind and ends up in the custody of the feds.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Now, Amanda is on board for tracking Steve down not just to clear her name, but to kind of get revenge on this person that has betrayed her for money. But she can befriend the agent that’s working with her. Like you said, an enemy becoming a friend.

[Geoffrey]
That’s good.

[Shep]
So the agent is kind of an enemy, but they can be friends by the end.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah.

[Shep]
But what does that turn into? Does the agent let Amanda go somehow? Is she going to go off the grid?

[Geoffrey]
That would be part of their arc.

[Emily]
Right.

[Geoffrey]
So that agent would have their own arc, their own subplot. Are they really by the book, by the numbers guy or girl? Doesn’t let ever let anybody go, but by the end realizes that by letting the central character go, it is for the right thing because it is for sustainability, and that will give justice and a new meaning. So it is all part of that subplot. I think that’s very possible. I love the fact that the antagonist is named Steve because I’ve never met a Steve I didn’t like.

[Shep]
Well, we do antagonist Steve’s a lot. Steve is our go to name.

[Geoffrey]
That is absolutely awesome.

[Emily]
So you could also have with the betrayal of Steve and Amanda, and the rest of the team kind of follows Steve, right? Because they’re part of that he’s the leader of the crew, so they’re his crew.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
But they could also end up being sort of jolted and jaded by this betrayal because that’s not what they signed up for either. And so they could come back. Instead of like it being a law enforcement agent, it could just be the other members of the team coming back to help her.

[Shep]
Or she’s trying to track Steve down and is reaching the team members one by one, Kill Bill style, trying to get closer and closer to Steve.

[Geoffrey]
Well, I like that. I would even look at personalizing it even more so that the betrayal of Steve happens in some kind of a death of someone close to her so that it isn’t just about financial loss for her, it’s personal. Maybe she was dragged into this by somebody that needed help and was desperate and tried helping, and then that person ends up being killed. But I would definitely consider personalizing it somehow, or you can go crazy with it. Man, does she have a sick relative that she needs the money for, and she doesn’t get the money and they die, and so now she’s lost everything. And so Steve turns into this monstrous figure in her mind that she has to find and get rid of. So there’s a lot of really, you could take it some dark places. You could take it some more heartfelt places.

[Thomas]
So this betrayal that Steve perpetrates, is that early in the movie, or is that the mid second act turning point?

[Shep]
It’s the mid second act turning point because it’s after the heist.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
Steve gets away with the chips.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So is the heist happening at the beginning of the second act, then?

[Shep]
Yes, the second act is the heist.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
The first act is getting on board with the team and rehearsing the heist.

[Geoffrey]
First part of act two would very least be the heist in progress, because whenever you go from first act to second act, there’s a set change. So you leave Tatooine and you’re in space flying to the Death Star, like that’s act two. So it definitely would be in the heist itself. Well, I think you’ve got something here with this fun heist film that can be done in a pseudo light hearted way. Or it can go dark. I mean, because some of this stuff is getting pretty dark. So it may not be as farcical as at first thought. So it could be dark.

[Emily]
It’ll definitely be one of those movies where you see the previews and you’re like, “Oh, that looks hilarious.” And then you go see, and you’re like, “What the fuck did I just watch?”

[Shep]
Sometimes if you go super dark, it becomes funny again.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
This is true.

[Shep]
So instead of Amanda having, like, a young cousin who needs an operation or they’ll die or they’ll be blind or whatever, it’s Amanda needs money to save an orphanage, but instead it burned down and killed all the nuns and all the orphans because she didn’t have the money to fix the wiring or whatever.

[Geoffrey]
That’s great.

[Shep]
So you have, like, the feds when they’re interrogating her, explaining, “Here’s what happened while you have been in custody.”

[Thomas]
So after she’s betrayed, what does the rest of that second act look like as she’s struggling to adapt and reeling from this betrayal?

[Geoffrey]
I mean, I’m thinking she goes to an ancient wise, totally cliche. She finds an ancient wise man that speaks in riddles.

[Thomas]
Is it a farmer/

[Emily]
Obviously-

[Geoffrey]
More than likely an organic farmer at some farmer’s market.

[Thomas]
Right?

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
An organic Irish farmer.

[Thomas]
Who’s growing non-GMO potatoes.

[Geoffrey]
Yep.

[Shep]
“They’re just potatoes?” Everyone trying to buy them was like, “So what does it do?”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
“You, you eat it.” “Yeah, but what else does it do?”

[Geoffrey]
So, yeah, no, I mean, I would I would say probably goes back to figure out what she needs to do to find these circuits and take her revenge.

[Shep]
Right. She has to find the first person on the team, to move down the list. How does she get out of federal custody? Or does she not? She has the agent-

[Thomas]
Well, she just eats the lock off the door because it’s-

[Shep]
She eats a potato into the shape of a key and then unlocks it.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
We’re killing it.

[Emily]
She manipulates the agent into assisting her. He unwittingly is helping her murder these people, right? Isn’t that what we’re going with? Kill Bill style she’s going through- Because I have a title, by the way.

[Shep]
Oh, what’s the title? Lay it on us.

[Emily]
Night Shade.

[Shep]
Night Shade!

[Thomas]
Is that her hacker name?

[Emily]
Sure.

[Shep]
I mean, you could just have that be her hacker name and don’t draw attention to it.

[Emily]
Don’t explain it.

[Thomas and Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Don’t explain it.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah.

[Shep]
It’s just a thing.

[Emily]
And that’s the name of the movie. Night Shade.

[Thomas]
That’s just like how it was in Swordfish.

[Geoffrey]
Wow, that was a deep cut. So act three would be the big confrontation. She’s killed all the guys and comes after the big dude.

[Thomas]
Is she killing them all, or is she just getting information from them and then moving on to the next one? I guess they would probably warn Steve, potentially. Or have they all been betrayed by Steve?

[Emily]
How are we having them-? Are they also portrayed by Steve so they feel connected to her rather than Steve?

[Thomas]
If in the first half of act two, she’s, like, using her skills, and then she gets betrayed and now has to rely on new skills or doesn’t have the skills that she needs to be able to get the chips back. Maybe what she’s doing is gathering up all the other people who have also been betrayed, and collectively, they will use their skills.

[Geoffrey]
Yeah, because honestly, if I’m writing this, I’m running out of pages because we’ve already spent a lot of page count getting to this point.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Geoffrey]
And then if I have to have her interrogate six guys, we’re looking at like a montage, like a terror montage of different information. But I wouldn’t be able to have her going through guy after guy after guy or girl after whatever to get all the information. So I think compiling everybody together would be better.

[Thomas]
Plus, we’ve already met all of them earlier in the film, so it’s not like we need this backstory for each character. We know what their specialties are.

[Geoffrey]
Right. Yeah, I agree.

[Thomas]
So Steve has the chips, or has he gotten rid of them somewhere? I mean, he’s got to have them, right? We need to get- Does she get them back, I suppose is a question worth answering.

[Shep]
I think that we said that the goal was that they would be distributed to the public in some way. She’s Robin Hooding the chips. They’re not going back to the corporation or the government or whoever.

[Geoffrey]
Honestly, I think she gets the chips and they get distributed in a bag of chips.

[Shep]
They go into a potato chip factory, and they drop them into one of the open bags.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
And then there’s a couple that’s going to get married.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Geoffrey]
There’s this odd couple that meet over one of the bags of chips and fall in love into a toxic relationship as well.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Geoffrey]
So we’re just going to bring it all together.

[Shep]
So to answer your original question, Steve must still have the chips, but there’s got to be, like, a clock on this. He’s about to sell them to some foreign investor or whatever, and they’ll just be at some other corporation overseas, and so they have to retrieve them before that happens. That’s the plan.

[Thomas]
That’s good.

[Geoffrey]
A ticking time clock is great to keep stakes going and keeps the pace going.

[Thomas]
Especially in a heist type of film.

[Shep]
Especially in a heist film where the heist happens in the first half. I was like, “There’s another, what, 45 minutes.”

[Geoffrey]
“How many movies is this?”

[Thomas]
Yeah. So at the end, Amanda is, like, eyeing one of the guys in the crew. You’re like, “Now they’re starting a rom-com.”

[Emily]
Obviously she falls for the fed because it’s enemies to lovers.

[Geoffrey]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Geoffrey]
That’s awesome.

[Thomas]
There you go.

[Emily]
I feel like we got a decent story.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Okay, so let’s go over the story again.

[Emily]
Just do a quick recap.

[Shep]
All right. So, in a world where vegetables have been wildly modified, there is this brilliant hacker, Amanda, and she needs money quick to save that orphanage full of orphans and nuns-

[Thomas]
With the bad wiring.

[Shep]
With the bad wiring.

[Geoffrey]
Very important.

[Shep]
It doesn’t cost much money to hire an electrician, but she needs some. And so she gets hired by this team of thieves and their leader, their charismatic leader, Steve. They plan and practice and rehearse this heist of cutting edge, potato based, lab grown computer chips, and they pull it off. They need her to get into the vault, so she has to be physically in the building. And so they get her to the vault, she hacks it in, and Steve betrays her and leaves her locked in the vault and takes off with the bag of chips, and she’s captured by the feds. And while she’s captured, the orphanage burns down and kills everyone, and she loses everyone she’s ever known and loved.

[Thomas]
You’re right. The darker you go, the funnier it is.

[Shep]
Right? So she befriends the fed and comes up with a plan of tracking down the thieves to get the chips back, and she goes through with the fed, and they capture or they meet up with the team members one by one, who join her in her quest to get the chips back from Steve. And collectively, as a group, it’s another heist. They’re trying to get the chips back from Steve before he sells them to overseas investors. And they do, but the chips don’t go back to the feds. They somehow end up with other people or in the wild or something, and she marries the fed? What was the- I kind of lost.

[Emily]
They end up in a romantic entanglement.

[Thomas]
Sure. Why not?

[Geoffrey]
I would think she totally marries the fed at this point. If we’re going that far with it.

[Shep]
All right. Is that, did I miss anything?

[Geoffrey]
I think you nailed it.

[Emily]
I think you got it all.

[Thomas]
I think we got it all.

[Shep]
That’s a weird one.

[Thomas]
It is. Well, we’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s show about a bag of chips. Was it all that?

[Shep]
(Pained groan)

[Thomas]
Thank you. Or was it just not your bag? Let us know by leaving a comment on our website, reaching out on social media, or sending us an email. Links to all of those can be found at AlmostPlausible.com Geoffrey, you have been a delight to have on our show. If our listeners want to hear more from you, where can they do that?

[Geoffrey]
Oh, they can find me on the Successful Screenwriter podcast, or they can hit me up on my forums on TheSuccessfulScreenrighter.com

[Thomas]
Excellent. Thank you to everyone for listening. And a tremendous thanks to Geoffrey D. Calhoun for joining us and bringing the idea of a Bag of Potato Chips. Emily, Shep, and I are already hard at work on the next episode of Almost Plausible.

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