The Toy Drive
JBLogliner
An entrepreneurial high schooler begins selling sex toys to neighborhood parents to raise money for a car but when his kid sister is diagnosed with cancer, he turns it into a fundraising campaign – with an increasing number of his classmates – to pay for her treatments.
Share
I realize this is a comedy. ?And comedies skewer rational thinking; they ?often require a suspense of disbelief as to the logic of the premise.
But I, for one, am unable to suspend disbelief that parents, adults, would buy sex toys face to face from a kid, from someone who ?knows them, ?be privy to their fetishes and kinks. ?Especially when these days, the same ?parents can browse and procure ?intimate items in privacy (and maybe cheaper) over the Internet. ?Other’s mileage may vary.
fwiw.
Agreed with DPG the basic logic that holds the premise together is weak.
Perhaps he sets up a sex toy web site and it becomes very successful instead of him going around the neighborhood and selling door to door.? Otherwise you could set it in the 80s or 90s and avoid the internet issue, but then the other problem is that sex toys are not expendable products. What I mean is presumably a customer would buy only one sex toy once every few months and so his market would not be big enough to sustain sales for big profits.
Lastly better if his sister getting cancer is used as the inciting incident in the first place, and that motivates him to take action.
I agree with Nir.?For the story to?work in our current time it would have to be on the internet. As Nir said, sex toys are not perishables.?People don’t need to buy them all the time. To get the turnover needed the character would need to sell online to a larger?community. Perhaps he could specialise in a specific kind of sex toy? What if he?makes a special product that no one else has? He is an entrepreneur after all.
Below I’ve broken your logline into the more standard format —
When his kid sister is diagnosed with cancer, an ?entrepreneurial high schooler sells sex toys to neighbourhood parents with the help of his classmates to raise money??for her treatments.
I think a lot of the elements are there. You have the?inciting incident – sister getting cancer. You have a main character – the entrepreneurial high schooler. Perhaps be more specific with this?high schooler??What’s his flaw? Is he a prude? Is he a jock? Why would sales of sex toys be hard for this character? He’s already an entrepreneur. Starting a business isn’t hard for him, so he must have a reasonable amount of confidence in himself.?You also need to communicate how dangerous the cancer is. Is it fatal? Is she going to die tomorrow or wither over the next ten years? The stakes are implied in the cancer but I think you need a ticking clock to get the tension going.? It’s open ended as it is now.
Which gets me thinking…is this for a 90 to 120 min movie? Or a TV series? I’m?picking up echoes of Breaking Bad.