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Carly J. Hallman’s script explores a small-town woman who goes to violent lengths to escape her surroundings and attend law school.
By Danny Munso
This is a story of how an offhand joke inadvertently led to a burgeoning screenwriting career. Carly J. Hallman had recently applied to a playwriting program in London and after getting waitlisted, she began kidding around with her husband. “I said, ‘What if I found out who the people on the list were ahead of me and just killed them so I could get it,” she laughs. “We both have a very dark sense of humor. It was just a throwaway thing, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea. It was just one of those dumb lightning strike moments.” That simple remark eventually grew to become Wait List, a script that not only appears on the 2021 Black List but does so as the title that garnered the seventh most votes of the 73 on there.
Hallman has spent her adult life as a writer, penning essays and short stories as well as two books — her novel Year of the Goose was published in 2015, with a memoir titled A Farewell to Walmart the following year. After completing those, she wanted to change things up, and a binge watch of the entire series of Mad Men inspired her to try her hand at screenwriting. She got into a masters program at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, where she split time learning how to write both plays and scripts. Because of London’s robust theater scene, she had a lot of playwriting opportunities, getting several productions off the ground at local theaters and the Edinburgh Fringe Fest. But when she got the idea for Wait List in 2018, she started working on it as a screenplay, not a stage production. Despite the concept’s genesis, Hallman didn’t want to set her film in the world of theater. “We’ve seen that before, where the understudy has something against the main actor,” she says. “So I started thinking about who would actually do something like this and why. I settled on law school.”
Wait List follows aspiring law student Kate, who desperately longs to attend her dream school — Columbia — and escape her circumstances of living in a trailer with a junkie father she financially supports in a remote Texas town. She meets a guy named Chad at the gym, and they start dating despite the fact that she can barely stand him. Unbeknownst to him, she begins using his car as a way to track down and murder local girls who got into Columbia before her, in the hopes that she will finally get the call. Before really planning out a lot of the story, Hallman simply started writing down stirrings, and Kate came out. “I just started at the beginning with that first scene, where she’s running on a treadmill at the gym and Chad is trying to get her attention. That was pretty much almost exactly something that happened to me when I was 20. It was this little nugget of truth from my life.” She admits to more than a few similarities between her and Kate, the series of grisly murders aside. Though Hallman lives just outside London, she was born in the small Texas town of Granbury and escaped as soon as she could, first to college in Austin, where she was able to do a study abroad program in Beijing. She loved the city so much she moved back after graduation and ended up meeting her British husband there before they located back to the U.K. “I grew up in a trailer in a small Texas town in the middle of nowhere. You couldn’t walk anywhere. It was oppressively hot. It was not the best place to grow up, but it was good to cultivate imagination and a desire to go elsewhere.” Despite the similarities, Kate began to diverge from Hallman’s own life the further she got into the script. “When I first started writing it, I thought, This person’s me. But as the story went on she took on a life of her own [though] it definitely did come from this place of experience, with her desire to do something bigger. That was the way into the character for me.”
Hallman penned her first draft in 2018, and it was strong enough to gain her representation back in the States. After setting it aside, she revisited the script in 2021 and undertook a major rewrite that resulted in her making the Black List. In the intervening years, she had been told by some who’d read the script that Kate simply wasn’t a likable enough protagonist. “She is very unlikable, for lack of a better term. A lot of people told me they understand what she does but they don’t necessarily like her. Other people told me they root for her but they don’t like her. I feel like that’s a very fine line and hard to pull that off.” Her rewrite focused heavily on the first act of the script and setting up Kate’s character a little better, including the fact that her mother had recently passed away from cancer. Her ashes are in an urn in the family trailer and hang heavily over Kate’s relationship with her father. “I don’t know if I was entirely successful, but that challenge interests me. I wanted to make her mother’s death more of a thing in her life and in the interactions with her dad. I really focused on the ghost of her mother that was there. I was trying to lay a good foundation in the first act so that people would be along for the ride a little more in the rest of the script. In a weird way, I was trying to make her more relatable.”
Hallman’s writing does just that. Though we as readers will find fault with Kate’s decision making, Hallman brilliantly sets up why Kate would be pushed to such an act in the script’s first 30 pages. It’s just not her fraught relationship she with her dad or dire financial circumstances or the tense ways we see her interact with Chad and Leo, her dick of a boss at Subway. Through her writing, Hallman also gives the reader a sense that Kate is just a little off, culminating in the first murder Kate commits. It’s a scene that took the writer a while to get right. “I had to really rethink it,” she says. “In the first draft, it tripped people up and felt really sudden. That’s a moment where you can lose people when they’re reading it, so I really wanted to get that right. I had to rewrite it multiple times.” She discovered the problem was less about the scene itself and more about what leads up to it. As she readies herself to murder this girl named Robyn, Kate launches into a feminist monologue. This is a callback to an earlier scene where on a break at work she is watching a poet perform something similar on her phone. It’s the latest signal to the reader that not all is right with Kate. “I wanted to reference back to that. What I learned is that no scene stands on its own. No scene is an island. Sometimes if you can’t figure out your way into a scene, you might need to figure out something that happens earlier and then you can bring a piece of that into the scene that’s causing you problems. It might just mean you’re missing something earlier in the script.”
Since Hallman is new to screenwriting, she admits she hasn’t settled on a definitive process just yet. For Wait List, after she penned that initial gym scene with Kate and Chad, she worked on a bare bones outline and then alternated between the script and filling out the outline as she progressed. For a new spec she is writing, she is using sticky notes to list out the beats. “Something I’ve landed on that works for me is I like to take things act by act or section by section,” says the writer. “I feel like even though I come from a longer-fiction background, I still find a 100-page screenplay to be really daunting. But a first act or 25 pages — that feels doable to me. So breaking it down into smaller chunks is something that helps me not feel as overwhelmed.”
After the Wait List script was sent out by her reps at Empirical Evidence in 2021, Hallman estimates she’s taken between 60 and 70 meetings with various companies, both about this film’s future and to discuss other projects. Being so far removed from Hollywood isn’t really a factor, since the industry has gotten used to pandemic-prompted Zoom meetings, and Hallman’s story can serve as proof for individuals who live outside of L.A. and New York that they can have a presence in the industry without having to change zip codes. She is convinced the writing is all that matters, though despite making the Black List and being on the brink of a full-fledged career, she’s not celebrating her arrival just yet. “Everything moves very slowly in this industry,” she says. “I don’t really feel like I’ve made it. I don’t know if anyone ever does. I keep telling myself it’s only the beginning.”
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