OMG! I Love This Script: Elise H. Greven’s Landscape With Woman

I trawl the Black List website from time to time looking for what might be good or trending. I like to see what’s out there, and find it helpful to imagine I’m a producer or manager—what would catch my eye?

With dozens if not hundreds of projects on their “top lists,” I find it very hard to scan through more than a few at a time. But last week I saw this entry…

Landscape With Woman by Elise H. Greven: When a young painter is offered an opportunity that could change her life, she must navigate a world of high stakes money and power to achieve her dream of becoming a successful working artist.

Okay, I thought, I’m interested in money and power (haha)—let me try this one. It had two “9” evaluations—which is pretty rare, but I’ve been burned before by eccentric Black List ratings.

To all you folks out there in Internet-land…

This is one of the best scripts I have ever read.

I have no connection to the author or the project!

I just completely fell in love with this script. (I’ll tell you why shortly.)

This is one of the few Black List website scripts where the author is repped (rightfully so), so I wrote to her manager just to say how much I love it and would it be helpful if I went all over the Internet saying so?

The manager was delighted and quickly connected me with the writer.

So here we are!

Landscape With Woman is about Ross (short for Roslyn) Tom, a struggling twentysomething painter in New York. She has real talent, but is going nowhere in the competitive art world thanks in part to her characterological inability to play its patronage games (and the fact it’s broken and awful).

Desperate for money, Ross is recruited by a shady art consultant, Amara Chaudhry, in cahoots with Brett Banneker, the trans daughter of a billionaire, to paint a forgery of a specific painting to sell to the billionaire father (for whom it has financial and sentimental value).

So this is sort of a heist movie—but thanks to the Thomas Crown Affair remake (not even the original) people are conditioned to think every art theft movie has a ninja-clad cat burglar slinking down a chimney.

This is not that. There are no burglary scenes, car chases, etc.

It’s really a “con” movie. And like the great con movies, the question of who is really conning who is turned on its head—not once, but twice, and with so much attention to detail, it’s all totally believable and really fascinating. (Clearly the writer did some deep diving into art forgeries, appraisals, legal subtleties, etc.)

But that’s not what I love most about this script!

What I love the most is the humanity. There is a sophisticated, advanced and genuine insight here into the complexities of human beings. The deeper you get into the cons (revealed in nested flashbacks), the more you realize they are turning on the essential truths of what makes human beings tick—the characters’ brokenness and vulnerabilities.

Because that’s what really makes great writing, right? Especially in screenwriting, with so much white space, it’s not really about the words, but the ideas and emotions behind the words. It’s about truthful human behavior and relatable emotion.

And wow, this script is operating at such a high level—and keeps working there right to the end. It has that effortless feeling you only get from high-end (and god willing, very well paid) screenwriters.

And that’s still not the thing I love the most!

What I truly love the most—that makes this script such a unicorn—is that it is about the fundamental human need to make art in search of truth.

I connected so strongly to this, the way it is expressed in Ross’ character and her journey—and I’d be willing to bet that most writers will, too. In fact, I think anybody drawn to showbiz will resonate with it. There’s a reason we put up with all this crap, right?

This script is so good, and so smart, and so entertaining and emotional that I am positive it will get on the annual Black List (the one voted on by executives of the best unproduced scripts they read during the year).

It will get the writer fans and meetings and opportunities for years to come.

And I would give it a solid chance to be made, despite the fact there is no male lead (sadly crucial for financing), car chase, kung fu fight—let alone vampire, serial killer, zombie apocalypse, ancient curse, etc.

This script is going to land with people—the way it landed with me—just based on the depth and truth of the characters.

And for no other reason except that I still have a part of my soul remaining, I thought it would be a mitzvah to try and promote it.

I also thought it would be hilarious because, having no stake in it whatsoever, it would confuse the hell out of people. Like why I am I doing this? BECAUSE IT’S GREAT, YOU SICK BASTARDS.

So I was thrilled to get a chance to talk with Elise.

Elise H. Greven

Lukas: We’re having this conversation because I sort of randomly found your script on the Black List website. And I just loved it from “mildly itchy.” [The protagonist is described on page 1: “She reeks of frustration and looks mildly itchy.” Hahahah.]

Elise: Thank you so much. It’s still like just amazing and surprising to me that you’ve found my work and liked it enough to reach out.

Lukas: But the bad luck is I’m nobody!

Elise: No, I don’t know about that. I looked a little bit into what you’ve done and promoting film music and interviewing all kinds of people. And it looks like we have a shared love of Star Trek.

Lukas: No way.

Elise: Yeah way. I mean, one of my great comforts is watching and re-watching every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Lukas: Oh, that’s crazy…so what is your connection to the art world?

Elise: I studied a little bit of art in my past, I studied art history in college and I did a teeny, teeny amount of painting when I was younger, but essentially the feelings of wanting to make things and the creative yearning, I mined from myself as being a writer and a filmmaker.

So that part is me, it’s my story, but the specifics of art world, painting, sculpting, fine arts in New York, I know that world a bit from friends that I had living in New York. One of my oldest best friends went to Yale and went to their MFA program. And so I got to meet her friends and went to their studios and however many stops out on the J or the L, deep into Brooklyn, the shared studio spaces. And I got to tag along and go to gallery openings and the after-parties.

So that’s how I know that world and spent time with those artists right after they got out of grad school and were trying to make their way and hoping to get galleries. And it has its own system of rules—like you can’t ask a gallery to represent you, you have to wait until they come to you—and there’s a certain set of like awards and prizes they all hope to get and all of the things that are detailed in the script.

But as far as the higher-end sales of like high-ticket luxury art and then into high-worth luxury art forgery, that’s entirely researched. So I watched documentaries and I read articles and it was completely fascinating to me also in the assignment of value, like that was wild to me. And it got sparked because many years ago, I met a guy who worked as some level of sommelier in a restaurant in New York City and he mentioned wine forgeries to me.

And I was like, what now? And he’s like, “Oh yeah, it happens all the time.” It actually comes out of China quite a bit that you’ll have a forged, faked bottle of wine. And at a certain level, there’s like, I don’t know, a couple dozen bottles of a specific, very expensive, very rare bottle of wine and someone pays $50,000 for it.

I was like, “Wait a second, so few people have had it that no one even knows what it’s supposed to taste like?” He’s like, “Yeah, right.” And that blew my mind.

So some lingering idea of—the kind of person who’s able to pay that much money for it is not necessarily even a person who can know [what it is]. The person who’s the expert isn’t the same person as the person who’s able to buy it and consume it.

Lukas: How long have you been working on this?

Elise: I was going to look up the date before we talked, but I want to say maybe two years.

Lukas: Oh, that fast. [This was not a joke; the script is so tight and polished, I thought it must have been longer.]

Elise: That doesn’t feel fast. I started researching in the summer. So watching documentaries, reading articles. Then I spent like three or four months generating ideas and outlining. And the structural stuff was super, super, super hard to crack.

It took me a really long time. I knew I wanted something about forgery and I knew I wanted something where in the middle of the script, we think one kind of con has been going on. And then there’s a layer within a layer where the person who thought they were participating has in fact been set up the whole time, like that kind of reversal.

Lukas: Have you watched Billions?

Elise: I have never watched Billions.

Lukas: Oh, okay [laughs]. Well, then you figured it out independently. It’s a recurring pattern in their show with these billionaires scamming each other. You’ve got one con going on, and then you realize that the people who were apparently the victims were actually playing the perpetrators all along. So who’s really the victims?

And you do the same thing [in Landscape With Woman] where there are these nested flashbacks and you see that the one con was actually just the product of the first con and so forth. It’s very clever and it’s very entertaining. You did it very well.

Elise: Thank you. I mean, to pull it off is a kind of special trick that I admire so much. And I am so delighted when I’m watching someone who does it and does it well, that it was definitely an act of hope and admiration. Like, oh, I would love to be able to pull that off because when it’s done well, like it’s like a beautiful sculpture or a Rubik’s cube or origami or something.

So that was a challenge I set myself and it is super, super hard. It takes a lot of work and nested work and you keep doing it and redoing it.

And somewhere in the middle—I feel like I’m telling tales out of school, but I use the Black List as a personal focus group. So I would buy some evaluations and like throw spaghetti against the wall to see how I was doing.

And I had a first draft that went well and then I sort of took some notes. I was like, cool, I’m so close to pulling this off. And I took some notes and it went terribly.

Like it went way, way worse than a second draft. And somewhere in that process of struggling in the doldrums for like almost a year in rewrites—I was talking to a friend, and it goes back to the point of how do you pull off this puzzle? My friend was like, “You’ve performed the trick so well that no one could possibly see it. And so when it’s revealed, it just kind of makes your reader feel mad that you’ve tricked them.” Not, “Aha, you’ve delighted me by revealing this fun thing.” So it’s right in the line of we’re seeing a magician reveal the magic trick versus “you tricked me in a ‘that’s not fair’ way.”

And so I spent a lot of time thinking about that—that you kind of almost have to build a flaw into the trick to play fair that you could have caught it. You could have caught the scent of it as you go along. So that your audience isn’t just mad that you weren’t playing fair with them.

Lukas: Well, that’s all correct. [we laugh] And was this script something you did on your own? [Obviously Elise wrote it herself, I was curious if she was encouraged by a producer, colleague, etc.]

Elise: Yeah, 100% spec script. My previous work is nothing like this. In fact, I would say my previous scripts are straight drama. The tone is very different. And my “keep the lights on” pay jobs have been adapting true events, a lot of true crime. My previous feature actually had been a biopic.

So this is absolutely an invented, complicated structure and more of a glittery, playful kind of tone. Every part of it was different—even a little kind of say, like “off brand” or off the trail I’d been on.

I just felt this thing inside me that might not be exactly the most easy thing to sell because it’s a little bit not a fish or a fowl—but I was like, this is the thing that I want to write. I feel it inside me. I need to write this. Every idea in it was pressing so hard on me to get out.

Lukas: I really want to just thank you and congratulate you on the humanity of it. And it’s really funny. But there’s so much feeling to it. So yeah, very well done.

Elise: Those two elements, I would say, are parts of myself that are personal and are things that I haven’t mined or brought out in my work before. Because in other times I’ve written from true events or written from previous events. I kind of mined a time in my life that I’ve lived before this—that young, younger, when you feel like your survival as a person depends on being able to express yourself as an artist or if you feel like you’re a creative person, you’re so desperate to be able to express that or have that be seen, or you feel like your existence or your importance—or I think I talked about it in the script that you just want to be seen so badly.

And I know that feeling. I still feel that feeling. And I just connected with the part of myself that I’m so close to and trying to bring that to life. And then I think you had talked about [in emails] feeling a sense of connection with the vulnerability of the characters and their family stories and the wounds or the vulnerabilities that they bring to their flawed actions, what’s driving their flawed actions.

And that definitely comes from my own experience and my own time in talk therapy and my own thinking about my family dynamics and pretty much everyone in my life who’s my partner, my friend circle. When we go to drinks, when we go to dinner, everyone I know has been to some version of talk therapy. So it’s like kind of the coin of the realm of every discussion that happens with people.

And that’s what I spend time with. So in kind of, again, mining my own life, it felt very natural to try to have that be how the characters are described or that their motivations come from those deep family relationships that drive their own flaws or bad behavior, their need to overcome something that is like a pain in them that is unhealed, that they’re trying to heal, that they’ll never be able to heal.

Lukas: It works, it’s great. I’m so impressed and it’s such an enjoyable read. Your voice is very entertaining. Is that hard, the humor? Does that just fall out of your sleeves or do you have to work at some of that stuff?

Elise: I want to say this in a way that is honest and not disingenuous: I’ve only written straight drama and like the straightest of straight drama—like cops investigating things that are terrible, murders. Like, that is mostly what I’ve written. And among friends, I love witty banter and getting through like terrible times in your life. You’re like, “Oh, gotta make a joke out of it because this is absolutely terrible.”

So that is actually how I get through a lot of my life, but I’ve never tried to write that. So this was the first time I’ve ever tried to write in any way that is even a reach towards something comedic, but it felt to me that it met the tone of the genre.

And when I’ve written a couple other scripts, like I wrote a feature biopic about Rachel Carson, you know, the environmentalist—and there’s a love of nature and she was like a very quiet, reserved person. So to me, the tone of that needed a delicacy to it.

And I wrote a pilot about the murder of a journalist in the ’70s and very much in the vein of All the President’s Men. So that felt like it needed kind of a, you know, a vibey ’70s, you know, noir, crimey, cool thing. So I tried to write in that tone.

And if this was like an art heist, kind of, you know, trickery scam thing, it felt like busy banter, Ocean’s 11-y kind of tone is what needed to take us along with it.

So I tried to hit that tone to be appropriate to the story material, but that was the first time trying to do anything like that for me. And it didn’t feel hard to do to write those lines, but I didn’t know if that was going to be successful, what I’d written.

Lukas: Well, the [art] world is so absurd. Are you a Succession fan?

Elise: I’ve never watched Succession.

Lukas: What?

Elise: That’s not true. I’ve watched most of like the pilot episode, and I get so uncomfortable with that kind of humor, a little bit like the kind of Larry David world, like when people are being humiliated in a way where they get more and more uncomfortable, they’re about to be embarrassed, and then they’re getting more and more humiliated. I get so uncomfortable.

I kind of can’t watch. And I believe what everyone says [about Succession’s quality], I just never watched enough to click into the plottiness of it.

Lukas: So what are your favorites? What have you been watching?

Elise: What have I been watching lately? Well, I mean, I think like everyone else, I cried buckets of tears at The Last of Us, like the kind of daddy-daughter thing was really beautiful to me. This is like any Hollywood meeting, someone asks you what you’ve been watching, and you’re like, “I’m gonna say the wrong dumb thing…”

Lukas: I was genuinely curious, but if you don’t—

Elise: Wait, I’m gonna come up with it.

Lukas: Is it that you don’t know, or are you embarrassed to say?

Elise: No, no, no. I mean, to relax, Love Island season seven isn’t gonna watch itself. So there’s that.

Lukas: You said you watched Next Generation reruns? You check it every night at nine?

Elise: Well, sometimes I visit Mexico where my mom is retired and Netflix in Mexico has every season on tap. So that is a delight. You can just turn it on and you go to that safe world where the crew is gonna figure it out and you get to have an adventure, but Picard is gonna make good decisions and scoop up everyone else and keep everyone safe in the end. It’s a beautiful world to be in, yeah. Oh yeah, I love Star Trek.

###

At this point we talked about the business prospects for Landscape With Woman which are, hopefully, quite bright. I had been concerned that because the script was placed on the Black List website, it might have been a kind of “Hail Mary” situation after everybody passed on it.

But, in fact, it was the opposite: it was on the Black List because Elise was using the site for workshopping—meaning virtually nobody inside the industry has seen it yet.

So my dear industry friends (and some enemies), you are in for a great treat! Please enjoy and be good to Elise. (Or else Pizza the Hutt will do a special on YOU!)

Somebody please please please package this and make it for Apple?!?

Professional inquiries: Please contact Markus Goerg at Heroes and Villains, markus@hvemgmt.com.

For now, curious writers can contact me at LukasKendallMV@gmail.com as Elise has authorized me to share the script (until somebody gets too annoying or does something dumb with it).

Many thanks to Elise for her time and more importantly for her wonderful script!