Slump Busters

Creator: Kate Stayman-London
Genre: Comedy
Age rating: Everyone
slump bust•ers (noun, plural) – 1) Fat and/or ugly women with whom baseball players have sex in order to break a hitting slump. 2) A trio of badass ladies who get even by becoming epic slump busters... until one of them falls in love with her mark.
Project collaboration: By Permission
Full synopsis
Discussions (6)
Synopsis: Have you ever heard the term “slump buster”? In real life – this is true – some baseball players, when they get into a hitting slump, have a superstition that the best way to break that slump is to sleep with a woman who's fat, or ugly, or a combination thereof. SLUMP BUSTERS asks the following question: What if one such woman, instead of getting mad, decided to get even by becoming an epic slump buster?

The answer? It'd work out awesome – until said woman fell in love with one of her marks.

Our hero is a lovably dowdy high school statistics teacher named Maddy Jacobs. Maddy lives in Queens, NY, and her two favorite things on earth are numbers and baseball. (Her dog is named Branch Rickey after the Dodgers' general manager who hired Jackie Robinson.) Maddy's also kind of overweight, she's never had a lot of luck with guys, no real boyfriends – largely because she really doesn't believe she's pretty enough to deserve that. But that's going to change over the course of this film, through her relationship with a professional baseball player: Graham Sullivan.

Graham's in his late thirties, not a lot of time left to play baseball, which is all he knows how to do. He's divorced, and he's terrified of the day he's going to wake up and find his career is over and he's all alone. In a lot of ways, he lacks confidence just like Maddy does. But by the end of the movie, he's the guy saving the day, because Maddy has helped him believe that he can.

The movie starts with Maddy learning that her one perfect night (with her hero, baseball player Skip McGee) was actually a sham: Skip slept with her to bust a slump. So Maddy and her two best friends (Caroline and Petra) decide to take revenge on Skip by busting the slumps of baseball players on other teams. Instead of makeovers, they get makeunders -- making themselves crazy ugly. In a Wedding Crashers-style montage, they seduce a parade of terrible baseball players, and it's all well and good until Maddy meets Graham. Turns out, they actually like each other! So Maddy breaks the code of one-night-stands, and she and Graham start dating.

The problem? Graham doesn't think Maddy knows she was supposed to be a slump buster, and Maddy can't let Graham find out he was just one of many marks! Of course, these secrets come to light in high comic fashion, and Maddy and Graham break up. But as the baseball season winds to a close, with the playoffs and Graham's career on the line, they come to discover that they need each other more than they thought. As it turns out, they really did bust each other's slumps -- on AND off the field.

Latest Work

  • Script 2 - Kate's 2nd Draft
    11/23/10
    Main1302307782._sx304_sy171_
    Creative Notes:
    Hey friends -- apparently there are lots of formatting issues in the RTF version, egg on my face! Please download the PDF instead, which is spotless and beautiful. Formatting issues aside, I've spent over a year on this script, and it made round 2 of the Austin Film Festival screenwriting competition, among other contest-y type things.
    PDF
    RTF

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