Scripts

Blue Lobster
by Scott Teel

Logline:
A reluctant young man learns about love, life, and lobsters from a determined ghost and his daughter.

Synopsis:
Love hurts. That’s Calvin Wright’s philosophy. He’s a journalist for the New York Times – he doesn’t have time for love (or the cooties that go along with it), even if he could reconcile his heart to the fact that love equals pain and unhappiness, so he’s dedicated his life to avoiding love.

Calvin looks for the perfect human interest story instead. Calvin’s ambitious; perhaps a little too ambitious – his editor even has to talk him out of writing about a dead former co-worker’s nudist funeral.

Calvin heads to Maine, where his family is having a reunion. It’s also the time of the annual Lobster Festival. Calvin thinks maybe he can find a story among the local lobster fishermen. When he sees his first uncommon blue lobster, he asks why it’s blue. The answer: “Because no one loves it.”

Then he meets Joy, a feisty, independent lobster fisherwoman who has sworn off men. The only two men she’s ever loved have left her – her father, Darwin, who died, and the father of her 6-year-old daughter Lilly, who left Joy when she got pregnant. When Calvin hears of Joy’s tragic past, and that Lilly is dying of cancer, the greedy writer in him knows he’s found his story.

But Joy is belligerent at each encounter with Calvin. Her philosophy of love is worse than his. Maybe that’s what attracts him to her, because it’s certainly not the heady aroma of fish guts. But he won’t have a ghost of a chance wooing her even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t – until her father’s ghost shows up to prod Calvin on…and make Calvin think he needs a serious CAT scan. Darwin tells Calvin that Joy is just right for him, “... once you can get her to not want to kill you.” When Calvin finally does win Joy’s heart, he panics and flees back to New York. He writes his story and  it breaks what’s left of Joy’s heart. The story is nominated for a New York Writing Guild Award but Calvin can’t find a date to go with him, thanks to his philosophy, though his male tailor does express an unsolicited interest.

Darwin’s ghost pesters Calvin right up to the awards ceremony (“I’m as tired as a one-legged man in an ass-kickin’ contest trying to get you to open your eyes,” he says), where he finally gives up.  But Calvin, seeing the happy couples at his table, doesn’t want to be given up on. When he finds Joy at Lilly’s grave, he must win her over again - this time for good.

© 2005 Scott Teel