For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our Black List Tales interview with Travis Braun about writing Bad Boy from Backstory Magazine’s issue 51 – now available to read! If you want to read the accompanying script, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Travis Braun on the writing of his unique script told from a dog’s POV that ended up topping the 2023 revered compendium.
By Danny Munso
Travis Braun is an unabashed dog lover, so perhaps it’s fitting that a lot of his career milestones have come as a result of that fact. In 2016, he and his friend Jacob Chase won a $1 million contest from Doritos for the ad “Doritos Dogs,” which aired during the Super Bowl and featured three canines who stack themselves in a trench coat to buy the chips from a grocery store. Braun is currently the creator and executive producer of the Disney Junior series Pupstruction, about a group of pooches who work for a construction company. And while his latest dog project hasn’t been made—yet—it has already garnered him another accolade. Braun’s spec script Bad Boy, which follows a rescue dog named Gary as he slowly discovers that his new and loving owner Cameron may in fact be a serial killer, not only was named to the 2023 Black List but it topped the list as the script with the most votes.
Bad Boy’s origins date back to two years ago, when Braun had the initial idea. “I’ve always been a fan of movies that take big swings and try and do something different,” he says. “That’s why I love going to the movies—to find something different and new. I’ve always loved horror movies like A Quiet Place or Don’t Breathe, and some of those contained thrillers [what’s that mean, ‘contained’ thrillers? They are thrillers], so that’s kind of where the idea came from. What if we did a monster in the house movie but it wasn’t told through the eyes of any humans, it was told through the eyes of this dog who was stuck in there with the monster?” Braun’s first call was, not coincidentally, to Chase, who wrote and directed 2020’s Focus Features horror thriller Come Play. “The first litmus test for most of my ideas is calling him, and especially with this one, because he and I are both huge dog lovers. He’s a tough critic, but when I pitched this he said, ‘Oh, you have to write that.’ That’s when I felt I was onto something.”
It took close to a year before Braun felt the story was coalesced enough for him to write. He keeps ideas for his scripts in the Notes app on his phone and adds elements until he is sure the story is nailed down. “To me, it’s more important that I have the movie in my head as opposed to trying to write a big outline right away or a treatment and get bogged down in so many words,” he says. “My test is always, can I grab a friend and pitch them in five minutes the beginning, middle and end and have them not be bored. Until I can do that, I’m not ready to put words on a page.” The breakthrough came while he and Chase were discussing the story while hanging out with Chase’s dogs. “I landed on the idea: What if this was treated as completely realistic? What if it was one of his dogs that was going through this? [I confined] myself to that box and started this like a real dog would actually behave, which means this isn’t Lassie, this isn’t Homeward Bound, this is not a dog that’s also kind of a superhero. Everyone in that theater should feel when they see this that this is their dog and ask what their dog would do in that situation. Once I landed on that, it felt like there were some walls to this.”
Braun doesn’t have a set writing process, much to his chagrin. “I wish I had one,” he laughs. “I wish someone would just tell me this is how you do a script. Every time I sit down and write I go, Great, remember it worked out last time, so I’m going to do the same thing here. But then it all doesn’t work, and you have to reinvent everything. I think maybe that’s just my shortcomings or it’s just the nature of writing, which is that every story does require its own set of tools. So sometimes it’s doing kind of a beat sheet. Sometimes it’s, Man, I know what this is. I’m just going to start writing it. Sometimes for me, it’s been starting with the third act. For me, it’s what do you think you know most of this movie? What’s the part of it that’s bulletproof, where you can say this is the core of the movie? For me starting in writing, that is helpful because then I have a North Star and if I can get that down, I can start to discover other things.”
The writing of Bad Boy came together more linearly than a lot of his other scripts, mostly due to the fact that his “North Star” with this particular project was the first few pages of the movie. They are the most crucial in the entire script, and because this story is being told from Gary’s POV, Braun not only needs to hook the reader emotionally in a short period of time, but he must do so while logistically hand-holding them as to how this unusual conceit will unfold. “The biggest challenge was conveying to the audience right away that this wasn’t a traditional movie—whose point of view you’re actually with and how we’re going to do that going forward,” Braun says. “It’s not told from a human’s point of view, but it’s also not the Beggin’ Strips commercial where the camera is over the dog’s nose the whole time. The dog has storytelling power and is the center of these scenes, but we’re also showing other camera angles and seeing other bits and pieces, and primarily we’re only privy to things this dog is privy to.” For all the brilliance Braun shows in doing just that in the first few pages, none of it would really work if it wasn’t accompanied by the story’s emotional hook, where we see Gary lose his current family and get stranded on his own before being rescued. “I knew I wanted to get the audience super invested in this dog from the beginning, so having him lose his family in the first few pages and have him be this lost soul looking for an owner was the thing I was really excited to start writing. I wanted to get people to fall in love with this character, because in horror movies the challenge is how to get people invested in your protagonist so that when scary things happen to them, we care.”
Early iterations of the story saw Braun considering that the audience would be able to hear some of Gary’s thoughts. “There was a version where that was on the table,” he says. “It’s a scary thing to jump into a movie and you’re never going to hear your lead character speak or hear their thoughts or any of that. That’s a challenge. How do you make an audience understand the things that are going on in this dog’s head without being able to hear anything? I played around with it, but ultimately it felt more like the comedic version of this movie, and I really wanted to make sure this was a serious, adult thriller horror movie that just happened to have a dog at the center of it.” It’s a testament to Braun’s writing that this never becomes an issue in the script and that he found ways through Gary’s actions to show the reader just what the character is thinking. He estimates he did two major rewrites after the first draft, with additional versions sprinkled in between that reflected smaller changes. One major swap was the addition of Kat, Cameron’s final kidnapping victim who bonds with Gary. In an earlier version, that character took the form of a child before Braun shifted to Kat, a 28-year-old Waffle House waitress who unfortunately gets Cameron’s attention.
That change also allowed Braun to define Cameron’s M.O. more than it was in earlier drafts. Though it’s a small part of the script, we learn Cameron had an abusive relationship with his mother, and that is why his victims all look like she does. “That always shifted a bit, as I had to make sure that backstory really handshakes with the victims and all that really added up in a compelling way. Because we’re with the dog, we’re just getting small pieces of it to put the puzzle together, but it all had to really work on its own so it feels like if you took the dog out of it, that part still needed to feel compelling and interesting.” And it’s a horror film, of course, which means the villain must die. In one of the script’s best scenes, Gary mauls Cameron in an almost feral way to save himself and Kat. On this, Braun holds nothing back. The death is both gruesome and awesome. In writing the scene, he considered what the audience reaction would be should the film ever come to fruition. “I put myself in the audience’s shoes, and seeing the fucked-up things Cameron does throughout the movie, I wanted that catharsis, that moment of the dog taking a stand. And Cameron gets his comeuppance in a really big and visceral way. I always thought most horror movies are best consumed and watched and shared in a group setting in a big theater, and so I wanted this to be a stand up and cheer and clap moment in the theater, because finally that thing you wanted to happen for 80 pages is finally happening.”
In 2021, Braun extended his Disney overall deal to create both animated and live-action content. In addition to Pupstruction, he created the Disney Junior series T.O.T.S., which ran for 75 episodes, and is penning a Disney Channel original movie among his other projects for the studio. To put it mildly, Bad Boy is about as far from a Disney project as it gets. Though he has a fulfilling and successful career writing for younger audiences, he never wanted to pigeonhole himself. “I didn’t ever follow the advice of you have to pick a lane, maybe to my detriment,” he says. “I just get excited about the ideas. My first show at Disney was about a penguin and a flamingo working at a stork delivery service, and I was tickled by the idea the same way I was with Bad Boy. I just follow that passion for the concept, and that’s led me into the kids’ space and into the horror space. It’s just following the love of the concept to whatever genre it goes to. It’s not a strategic move, it’s something I literally can’t shut off or control.”
When the 2023 Black List was announced in December, Braun watched the announcement video and saw Bad Boycome up early. Assuming the scripts were listed in order of the number of votes they received, he was pleased that his script had placed so high, especially since this was his second straight year on the list. (His sci-fi script Dying for Youplaced in 2022.) It wasn’t until he was in the Pupstruction writers’ room that he was made aware via a deluge of texts that Bad Boy had in fact garnered the most votes of any of the finalists that year. “It’s very flattering that people responded to the script the way they did,” he says. “At the end of the day—and this probably goes for every writer—we do this because we want to see these things get made, and for that to give this a little nudge to maybe see the light of day is the real win.” Thankfully, both his Black List scripts are indeed moving in that direction. Dying for You is set up at Lord Miller, while Bad Boy made its way to a financier, with Chase officially signing on to direct. The next steps are casting, packaging and finally getting it made. “There’s still a million ways it could go wrong, and I won’t believe it until I’m sitting in the Burbank AMC when the titles come up. It’s such a weird time in the business, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
If you’d like to subscribe to read the script, feel free to use coupon code: SAVE5 to take $5 off your subscription and get instant access!
All you need to do is click here to subscribe!
There’s plenty more to explore in Backstory Magazine issue 51 you can see our table of contents right here.
Thanks as always for spreading the word and your support!