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December 3, 2009

Morality and The Next Three Days

This post exists primarily to expound, in spoiler-tastic detail, on a comment I wrote in response to ScriptShadow’s review of Paul Haggis’s latest script, The Next Three Days. For those too lazy to click the link, The Next Three Days focuses primarily on a character hellbent on breaking his wife out of prison in order to reunite his family. Whether or not his wife actually committed the crime — the murder of her boss — remains a mystery throughout the script.

[The spoilers start after the jump, so don’t say I didn’t warn you…]

As Carson rightly observes, the central dramatic question is this: can an ordinary man perform increasingly deplorable actions in the name of something righteous (springing his wife from the clink)? It’s an interesting question, although not an unfamiliar one to anyone who enjoys hardboiled detective fiction. Haggis has the opportunity for a more interesting question along the way: about halfway through the script, the wife (Lara) announces to her husband (John) that she did, in fact, commit the murder. She goes into a scandalous amount of detail, making quite a convincing case. John leaves the hospital in a daze, shocked by what he’s learned…

…and then he goes back to his escape plan unabated, seemingly unaffected by what she’s told him. Rather than allowing this development to lead to more interesting moral questions regarding the utilitarian righteousness of John’s immoral actions (such as, “Is it really a good plan to break your wife out of prison so your son can be raised in a third-world country with no extradition laws by two murderers?”), Haggis uses this more as a cheap plot point to justify John’s later actions: he follows a drug dealer to a stash house, kills all the dealers in the house, and steals their money to finance his family’s, ahem, “retirement plan.”

This is where the script really crosses an odd, uncomfortable line. John stops feeling like a sympathetic, ordinary guy and starts feeling like a sociopath. Although I expected a reversal later in the script, Haggis gives no inkling that maybe Lara lied to John so he wouldn’t feel bad about the failure to get her released legally. Based on textual evidence (rather than the conventions of a mainstream Hollywood movie, which is the only thing that made me assume she’d eventually come up innocent), this stops being a story about two ordinary people and turns into something like Bonnie & Clyde, if that pair had spent most of the movie trying to hide their criminal tendencies from each other. Even that wouldn’t be a bad thing if Haggis embraced the idea that ordinary people harbor dark secrets.

He doesn’t. The script’s breathless pace goes from strength to fault, because Haggis never slows down long enough to acknowledge the dark road he’s taken. He simply barrels ahead full-stop, with a cliché-ridden escape sequence in the third act that leads to an ill-fitting closing scene where the original detectives who worked Lara’s case go back to the scene of the crime and realize she was innocent all along. By the time the script is over, this feels more like a cheesy deus ex machina than the story’s logical conclusion.

Even in the end, Haggis never questions the moral righteousness of a character who’s murdered, stolen, broken somebody out of prison, and fled the country. He merely questions whether or not an “ordinary” person can stomach committing numerous crimes against municipalities and specific people, in the pursuit of a righteous deed. That thematic choice made me very uncomfortable, and it strikes me as the antithesis of Crash’s heavy-handed message.

Posted by Stan at 5:23 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay, Reviews

December 5, 2009

Suspicious Script

Last week, I read a script that made me a tad uncomfortable. It attempted, very ineptly, to capitalize on the recent-but-not-as-recent-as-the-writer-thinks poker craze. I don’t claim to be a cigar-chomping cardsharp, but I know this: a 52-card deck does not contain any “1” cards. That’s more than the writer of this script, who explains that an “Ace is the best card you can get. Then it’s King, Queen, Jack, Ten, Nine, Eight…down to One, usually.” Usually.

Several things got my gears going as I read this script. First: I received it the day before Thanksgiving. Usually, the Murdstone & Grinby Company is shuttered for the whole holiday week (plus the Monday after), so getting a script during an unofficial coverage dead zone concerned me. Also irritated me, because while the extra cash is nice, it’s still the day before Thanksgiving, and I’m fucking lazy.

Second: something about it felt off, in an indefinable way. Sure, it had the same very definable problems from which other scripts suffer (notably one-dimensional characters and a nonsensical third act), but something about the diction didn’t feel right. It felt less like a dramatic work than a loudmouth guy at the end of the bar saying, “Hey, buddy. Yeah, you — you know what’d be a good idea for a movie?” before elucidating a ramshackle stream-of-consciousness narrative that felt more like a working-class fever dream than a piece of writing. I don’t just mean it had a conversational style. The only thing separating it from the guy at the end of the bar was a lot of “No, no — just hear me out” asides. ‘Twas a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Emphasis on the “idiot” part.

I read through the script, then went back over it to craft yet another tedious synopsis and felt repulsed all over again. It felt more like the shit I used to read for The Manager than anything I’ve read for Murdstone, and I’ve read a lot of crap. The fact that it sold and was most likely a go picture (as are the bulk of the scripts I read) alarmed me.

I couldn’t help thinking, though. I know it’s a problem, and I’m working through it with a certified mental health professional. Last time a script really bugged me, I discovered a few months later that it was not, in fact, a go picture; rather, Murdstone wanted to produce it and kept taking meetings with the writer (who also wanted to direct), much to the consternation of Amelia. She found him as annoying as a person as I did as a writer. Once she read the script (which I politely and secretly e-mailed to her), we both agreed we’d hitched our sails on a sinking ship and had either bite down on cyanide capsules or find a rescue boat before they went ahead with this steaming pile. (Semi-amusing postscript: during my crisis regarding this script, Amelia told me for the first time that Murdstone & Grinby paid me for my coverage, then turned around and hired one of their other readers to manufacture a more enthusiastic response instead of crapping all over it.)

So what if this arbitrary script and its arbitrary timing occurred because Murdstone & Grinby had wild hairs up their ass about this poker script? They needed to know before the holiday whether or not this would be the perfect project to set up after their shitty sci-fi project.

Then, my pondering got even weirder. See, Jim (my boss at the company) had given his notice, effective sometime before Christmas. He had no savings or other job prospects, but he’s decided he wants to chillax and focus more on his writing. I’ve heard tale of everyone from assistants to CEOs submitting their own scripts to readers under assumed names — in this case, a script that contained the default Final Draft title page, with none of the information filled out — so they can get honest feedback. Then, they fire the reader if he or she shits all over it.

Amelia had quite a strong opinion about Jim’s writing ability, so I considered the possibility that he had written this script himself (most likely in crayon, with a typist entering it into Final Draft) and submitted it to me because he trusted my cantankerous opinion. In my mind, it made a small amount of sense. If nothing else, it explained the slipshod “first draft by an utter novice” vibe of the piece.

Before writing the notes, I called her for a consult: did she know if they wanted to produce a poker-themed movie, and/or had Jim dropped any hints that he was hard at work on a horrible poker-themed project?

Holy fuck was she pissed. I inadvertently walked into a steaming pile of my own. See, she has a strong opinion about Jim’s writing talent, but apparently in the past few weeks, Jim has developed a strong opinion about hers. She recently finished a script, one of those “pet projects” that she’d spent so much time developing, she’d been hyping it since the day she started at Murdstone. She finally finished it, then polished it into a “Draft 1.5”-type thing, then sent it out to people she trusted — among them, myself and Jim.

I read it, but I had a pretty good idea of what to expect: a typical, problematic first draft with a lot of good ideas buried underneath crap. Jim had never read any of Amelia’s previous work, nor had he listened to her wax on about craft or cinema history or any of the other crap I have. He got nothing but the hype, for five years, and much like Tucker Max fans, he found himself disappointed by the end result.

Hasn’t every writer had at least one experience like this? You meet somebody who’s so articulate, so bright, and so capable, you automatically assume they have the talent to back it up. Then you read something less-than-stellar, and you can’t help it if your respect for them diminishes. I know I’ve had a few of these moments, and it gets easier as you realize how easy it is for smart, knowledgeable people to pump out crap in the early stages. Most people do. When it blindsides you, and maybe especially when someone has spent five years hyping the project, during which time she would have presumably worked all the shitty drafts out of her system, I can understand why Jim would react the way he did.

So how did he react? Well, at work he froze her out completely, ignoring her as much as humanly possible for a week, blocking her from Instant Messenger at home, and apparently not sending her this poker shit. See, part of the reason the “vacation” timing puzzled me is because it’s pretty common for Murdstone to get scripts during time off — but they almost always go to Amelia, whose turnaround is slower than, say, me.

Amelia quickly assuaged my fears about the development possibilities of the script, and especially about the possibility of Jim writing this script (“No way in hell has he ever finished a script!”), but she derailed the conversation by focusing on her fear that she’s being phased out of the company. It may not have anything to do with the reaction of her screenplay, she posited. Murdstone is in trouble, and despite having more seniority than someone like me, she also has less value. Not to me, but to the people at the company, who take her for granted.

I happen to think she’s overreacting, but who knows? With Jim leaving, they’ve brought in a replacement Amelia fears may hate her. Getting squeezed out may have more to do with this than the company’s alleged economic woes. If she gets canned, I lose my inside wo(man), which means I’ll never see it coming if I’m next. The only solution, to quote Roseanne, is to suck up at the speed of light.

This, I can do.

Anticlimactic postscript: I sent the coverage, received no enraged complaints or firings, got more scripts on Monday, got the check yesterday, deposited it today. Good times.

Posted by Stan at 5:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

December 8, 2009

Script Review: The Lovely Bones by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson

[In lieu of actual content, for the next several weeks I will present, at least, one review of an upcoming film each week. These are scripts that I’ve been paid money to read, and many of them contain watermarking, identification numbers, password-protection, and other ways of tracking what company it was sent to; because of this and my desire to keep my job, I will not offer downloads for ANY of the scripts I review here. Don’t bother asking.]

Like Fight Club, The Lovely Bones reads like the kind of thing that would be aces as a novel but might not exactly work on film. Plenty of people argue with me, but I stand by it: the “o btw i r u” “twist” in Fight Club just doesn’t work on film. You can do a lot in cinema with point of view, but I find more often than not that attempts at “unreliable narrator” stories in film turn out more like a cheap betrayal than a legitimate shocking twist. A novel can provide a true first-person narrator experience, allowing the reader to take the journey through the eyes of a single person. If that narrator discovers he has a second personality that he happens to believe is a real person, the reader discovers this right along with them, and it’s a shocking twist. Movies with unreliable narrator twists frequently portray it in exactly the same way: a long-winded explanation accompanied by an unintentionally hilarious montage with people/objects flitting in or out of existence to illustrate the fragile mental state of the character. Fight Club makes it even more hilarious by including eye-rollingly ridiculous moments like Edward Norton beating himself up while confused onlookers watch…and for some reason decide to follow a man who’s clearly out of his mind? Ugh…

Face it: no matter how you tell the story, short of making it a 90-minute POV shot loaded with internal-thought voiceovers, no film can tell a first-person story. At best, it’s third-person limited, but more frequently it’s third-person omniscient. Even with voiceover narration, it’s virtually impossible to sell an unreliable narrator story on film. (The Usual Suspects comes closest by showing its unreliable narrator’s non-insane motivations to weave a bullshit tale.)

The Lovely Bones, thank Christ, does not attempt an unreliable narrator story. Like Fight Club, though, it’s more about the concept than character and story. Don’t get me wrong — it does contain a plethora of interesting, well-drawn characters, which is more than half the battle for a screenplay. But no matter what sort of visual flourishes the writers insert into the script, the concept remains cinematically flawed and subsequently hobbles what could have been a truly great script.

“What, pray tell, is the concept?” you non-book-reading or -trailer-watching heathens might ask. It goes like this: in early-’70s Pennsylvania, 14-year-old Susie Salmon (no, really) is brutally raped and murdered by a hideous neighbor. She goes to a place described as “heaven” in the script, but it seems more like an odd, interstitial netherworld halfway between heaven and earth. Neither limbo nor purgatory, it’s more like a ghost world where the dead can interact with each other in an idealized version of their own world, and if they desire it with enough force, they can “reach” the living through the traditional spiritual methods.

In this way, it resembles a more visually sumptuous Ghost, only with an unsolved murder instead of a crazy Wall Street conspiracy. Unlike Ghost, Susie doesn’t go to much trouble to get anyone in the world of the living to solve the murder. It lacks wacky psychics or Demi Moore with a hideous hairstyle. For most of the script, she just observes the decay of her family and friends over the course of the four or so years after her murder.

It goes like this: Susie has a close bond with her entire family (parents Jack and Abigail, siblings Buckley and Lindsey). All she wants out of life is to become a successful wildlife photographer and to marry (or, at least, share her first kiss with) Ray Singh, the smartest boy in school. Her unassuming yet still sort of creepy neighbor, Mr. Harvey, has other plans. After spotting her at a block party, Harvey (who makes his living creating handmade dollhouses for little girls, which should be enough to get a search warrant any time a neighborhood girl goes missing — damn ACLU!) uses his design and carpentry skills to create what’s described as “the ultimate kid fort” (I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to look it up) in a dirt hole isolated in a cornfield. He lures Susie there, rapes her, kills her, and hides the body in a girl-sized safe. After initially suspecting Ray Singh — on account of his Indian heritage and alleged close relationship with Susie — the police have few real leads. Soon enough, they find the “fort” drenched in blood — so much that, even without a body, the police assume she’s died.

Jack becomes so consumed with finding the killer that he makes plenty of enemies in the town. Suspecting everyone, especially his neighbors, he digs up all manner of closeted skeletons, but the police don’t have the resources or energy to track down all his leads. It’s a moot point, though, since it takes him a few years before he even suspects Mr. Harvey. In the intervening years, Jack’s relationship with Abigail deteriorates, and she leaves to work on a California vineyard. No, really. Ray forms a close bond with Susie’s pseudo-friend, Ruth, over their mutual grief. Everyone but Jack tries to move on with their lives, but reminders of Susie cripple them.

Ironically, Susie watching this unfold (and frequently narrating in voiceover to gloss over the passage of time) with her heaven-friend Holly (a Vietnamese murder victim the same age as Susie) is the least compelling part of the story. Simply telling these characters’ stories would have more than sufficed in a dramatic sense, but the script is more about the concept than what works dramatically. However, the material chronicling the lasting effects of Susie’s death is so good, it doesn’t really matter…

…until the third act, when Susie not only takes action (finally), but her narration goes from an inoffensive explanation of certain details to an incredibly preachy, borderline-annoying screed announcing that Mr. Harvey’s actions were wrong. I guess the audience wouldn’t have known that without a last-minute reminder before he’s forced to face the consequences of his actions.

I know this review skews negative, but about 75% of this script is great. It’s just, like many scripts, the 25% of the script that doesn’t work totally ruins what does. In fact, it’s even more disappointing because what’s good here is so fucking good that the last 10 pages alone becomes a Fight Club-like betrayal of the expectation-building quality that came before it. It all goes back to the problem of the concept: I can easily see the idea of a dead girl narrating the story of her loved ones’ grief and her eventual attempts to bring her killer to justice working well in a novel. As a screenplay, it would simply work better if the script omitted the whole “Susie watches from heaven” sequence, which would both allow the ensemble a little more breathing room and totally eliminate the preachy third act. After her death, Susie’s appearances add surprisingly little to the story. Her voiceover narration does a bit of heavy lifting that could just as easily be parceled out in more inventive ways.

In other words, she’s the script’s primary weakness, but she’s also the embodiment of The Concept. (And, yes, for the sake of argument, I’m willfully ignoring the fact that betraying the concept would deviate from the novel more than those involved in this production would feel comfortable, I imagine.) Without her, it’s just an ultra-depressing movie about grief, loss, and justice. Except it’s not — it’s a solid ensemble drama with some eerie moments, some thrilling moments, and a core story that’s worth telling. It just doesn’t need the ghost of Susie.

Posted by Stan at 10:29 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 10, 2009

Windows: A Fucking Disaster

Does anyone know anything about Windows? Every time I try to learn, it seems that I lose all sense of sanity and logic. It’s an operating system that reminds me of the following dull anecdote from my community theatre days:

A couple of techies attempted to build a doorframe. The end result resembled something out of a German expressionist film. You guys know what a doorframe looks like, right? It’s pretty much a rectangle, all right angles and straightness. This was a sort of indescribable rhomboid disaster that did not, in any way, resemble a frame on which one hangs a door.

The director, stage manager, and master carpenter did the sort of simultaneous double-take generally found in a teen sex-comedy after a super-hot chick walks by in a wet bikini. Only it wasn’t the thrill of arousal they felt. It was the confusion and mild amusement of something that could only be created by someone making minimum wage at a part-time job.

Instead of trying to explain how, exactly, they fucked this up or why they felt they could present this doorframe instead of just pulling the nails out and starting over, the two techies attempted to sell the director on this particular doorframe. Because, you see, the play was a comedy, and comedies are always wacky and full of odd set designs and strange artistic flourishes, right? Right? Right?!! It would’ve been all well and good except for the part where, in order to fit with the doorframe, a custom door with no right angles would have had to be fabricated, which cost money and time and made no fucking sense. Also, it probably wouldn’t have opened or closed properly.

For those not clever enough to comprehend this analogy, Microsoft are the techies, and Windows is that fucking doorframe. Common sense doesn’t apply, and in order to wrangle that operating system into something remotely usable, one has to fabricate an insane door for it.

Here’s what I’ve managed so far: after many long months trying to figure it out, I finally (quite by accident, to my great annoyance) found a way to make Final Draft — that’s right, the screenwriting program — modular. I don’t even know if I’m using the correct vernacular, but here’s one of the basic problems with Windows: the setup programs shit files in the most inconceivable places, and every goddamn program gets so entwined with the fucking registry, you cannot do a simple task like, say, copy an .exe file to a USB drive and use it on a different computer.

For those Windows evangelists (all five of you) scoffing that you can’t do that on a Mac, either, get ready for my rebuttal: YES, YOU FUCKING CAN, YOU GODDAMN RETARDS. Because the shit’s modular. Maybe you couldn’t have in the pre-OSX days, but a new era dawned, oh, eight or nine years ago.

Anyway, I finally found a utility that tracked every goddamn file Final Draft installed and figured out a way to shove them all into a few folders, put them on my thumb drive, and — voilà — a mostly functional, modular version of Final Draft. It has two drawbacks:

1. If you intend to use it on multiple computers, you have to authorize it when you launch and deauthorize it when you stop using that computer.
2. There’s nothing to be done about the goddamn motherfucking fonts.

The first drawback means little to me. This little project consumed me for one reason: I want to fuck off at my shitty day job, because why wouldn’t I? At work, I don’t have the required administrative privileges to install programs, so I had to come up with a workaround. Mission accomplished, and I can leave it authorized until I can leave that dump for greener pastures. (Hopefully January!)

It’s the second drawback that bugs me. See, Final Draft installs a font called Courier Final Draft, obviously a variant on the well-known Courier font. This is fine and awesome; I wouldn’t even mind using Courier itself, but why not use Courier Final Draft, the one designed to use with the program?

What I object to is Courier New, which you’ll be shocked to learn was developed by Microsoft. It doesn’t take some semi-insane, obsessive-compulsive font nerd to realize that Courier New is not only fucking ugly as sin, it also does major hoodoo to the line spacing. As a random for-instance, I just changed the font in a script that just went out. It’s 119 pages with Courier Final Draft; with Courier New, it’s 137 pages, and it’s solely because there’s weird, unnecessary vertical spacing. (Even adjusting Final Draft’s line-spacing options still puts it at 124 pages.)

I wouldn’t call myself a page counter, per se. I don’t follow the script-guru “Moment X must occur on Page Y” philosophy, but certain things should occur within certain basic ranges of time in the story, and I do subscribe to the “1 page = 1 minute” philosophy. So if you have an inaccurate representation there, it throws the whole thing off.

So, for instance, when I spent the past few days plowing through the first draft of one of the many script ideas I took the time to step-outline while trying to figure out how to get Final Draft to work without installing it*, I was hovering around 40 pages before reaching my outline’s predetermined act break point. Yet I didn’t say to myself, “This is kind of a long first act.” Instead, I said, “I don’t feel like I’ve written enough for this to be 40 pages. Something must be wrong with Courier New.”

And boy was it ever. I always knew Courier New looked different (read: ugly), and college taught me that it’s the go-to font for padding term paper page length requirements. (Of course, midway through my college experience, profs wised up and either barred the use of any Courier-based font or went from page requirements to word requirements — foiled again!) Still, I never paid much attention to just how much it fucks with the page count until I got home, changed the font to Courier Final Draft, and found myself back on good old page 32, which felt just about right for what I’d written.

So that’s fucking annoying. On one level, I could say, “This is freeing — without having to pay attention to inaccurate page counts, I can just write without putting any artificial barriers on when things need to happen.” Which is awesome, except for the part where I like artificial barriers. My desire to write screenplays isn’t an accident or act of opportunism: the blank page frightens me. Constraints, artificial or otherwise, make me feel much more comfortable. To me, it seems weird and a little stupid to go to all the trouble to learn new page approximations to get into the Courier New habit. And why the fuck should I have to?

This all goes back to my lack of administrative privileges. If I don’t have those privileges, I can’t install new fonts; if I can’t install new fonts, I can’t install standard Courier, much less Courier Final Draft (were I to hack the planet, I’d go with the one that’s less obviously tied to a non-work-related program).

I tried looking up little workarounds; for instance, one of the ways I get Final Draft to work is by sticking all those .dll files that get shoved into the C:\WINDOWS\system32\ directory into the folder with the Final Draft .exe, which is one of those little Windows tricks I’ve picked up over years of struggling to make it a useful operating system. I had hoped something similar would exist for fonts, but no. The closest I found was some convoluted instructions that are only good for one session.

Today, I stumbled across a small app that allegedly registers fonts in Windows even if a person lacks administrative privileges. I have no idea if it’ll work (I’ll keep you posted).

It still makes me wonder why Windows has to be so fucking stupid about everything. Why can’t it just do shit without having to apply a bunch of crazy hacks and exploits? Oh right, because of all the horribly flawed security issues that make those hacks and exploits a reality. Holy fucking Christ do I hate Microsoft.

Update 12/11/09: I still hate Microsoft, but the “RegisterFonts” utility actually worked…sort of. It does indeed register my off-books fonts, but Final Draft is a little quirky about recognizing them — you have to go into the “Elements” controls, change the font in one of the elements, and click the “apply to all” button in order for it to display in anything but Courier New (I assume this is because it’s the next “authorized” font on the list, but who the fuck knows with Windows).

*For those of you saying, “Gee, Stan, why not just set up an MS Word screenplay template?” I have to respond: the toilet bowl I work for is so goddamn cheap, they won’t pony up for MS Word alone, much less the MS Office suite. Instead, we’re forced to use OpenOffice, a Java-based dungheap that costs nothing except an unfortunate tax on shitty-computer resources. OpenOffice alleges to support MS Office templates, but its support is shoddy at best, yet as far as I can tell it doesn’t have its own native templating system. It’s also surreally counterintuitive when it comes to basic tasks like setting up margins and indentation points, so the whole “set up a template” idea is a bit of a non-starter.

“But, hey,” you say, with a sudden stroke of inspiration, “you could always just write a text file without any tabs and then paste it into Final Draft and set up the correct formatting, right?” First off, get off my back, all right?! Secondly, I fully admit that this is my issue more than that of crappy software, but I just can’t write like that. I can outline until the cows come home, or write awful fiction or boring blog posts or whatever in a blank text file. When it comes to screenplays, I just can’t tolerate anything but Final Draft. I admit I’m spoiled, but I also paid my hard-earned money for it, so blow me. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 4:25 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | “I’m a Living Joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace, Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation

December 14, 2009

Black List Script #1: The Muppet Man by Christopher Weekes

Download PDF: The Muppet Man

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “The life story and tragic early death of Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

An old, disheveled KERMIT THE FROG wakes from a drunken nightmare in a fleabag hotel in “Moo York” — a sort of Toon Town for Muppets. He looks mournfully at an invitation from Miss Piggy’s wedding. In 1990, JIM HENSON (53) wakes looking much the same as this middle-aged Kermit. He takes some aspirin, stares mournfully at a photo of his wife JANE and their fie children, and watches a promo advertising the 20th anniversary of Sesame Street. This turns into a musical sequence intercutting Jim and Kermit singing “Mahna Mahna” as Jim prepares for a recording session and Kermit rushes to Miss Piggy’s church for the wedding.

Jim attends a meeting with a core group of Henson Company employees. His erratic behavior and apparent ill health concerns them all. Jim insists he’ll be fine. While on a private jet heading toward Los Angeles, Jim starts seeing muppets on the plane with him. One of them looks very much like his grandmother, known only as “Dear.” Jim flashes on his childhood. Washington, D.C., 1950. Jim’s engrossed in television, to the consternation of the real DEAR (60s), who warns that he’ll develop “square eyes” from sitting too close, and further warns that the “box sure ain’t gonna help [him] get anywhere in life.” Jim makes a cardboard cutout featuring “square eyes” to amuse his older brother, PAUL JUNIOR, and his mother, BETTY. He wakes father PAUL SENIOR, who starts yelling, and that brings Jim back to the private jet in 1990. They’ve arrived in L.A.

Jim makes an uncomfortable appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show. He’s painfully shy, and as he did in the meeting, he behaves somewhat erratically and, worse than that, can’t quite perform the Kermit voice. Behind the scenes, Henson Company puppeteer KEVIN CLASH starts freaking out. Suddenly, Miss Piggy bounds out from the audience, disorienting Jim, who flashes back to the fall of 1954 — “Teen Jim“‘s freshman year of college. In a puppetry class, he spots a cute older girl, JANE NEBEL (20). He tries to impress her with his skills and humor, but he’s too shy to ask her out. At home, Paul Senior arranges a date for his son, much to Teen Jim’s consternation. This motivates him to finally ask out Teen Jane, but she already has a boyfriend. Disappointed, Teen Jim has his date with JENNY. She’s a little confused by Teen Jim’s puppetry, even after he and Paul Junior demonstrate for her. Teen Jim takes Jenny to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon, more because he knows that’s where Teen Jane and her boyfriend will be than out of any real desire to see the movie. Afterward, Teen Jim flirts with Teen Jane. Jenny feels embarrassed for even going on the date with him, since he’s clearly not interested.

That night, Teen Jim comes home and learns from Paul Junior that somebody from a local TV station saw one of their puppet shows and wants to talk to them about a TV show. Jim and Paul Junior demonstrate for the head programmer, MAX, who shows no emotion whatsoever — then immediately hires them to make their own show. Teen Jim uses this opportunity to impress Teen Jane, by bringing her in as a volunteer puppeteer for his very own TV show. Teen Jane is bewildered by the chaos, but she is, indeed, impressed. A montage, set to “That Old Black Magic,” follows, chronicling both the rise in popularity of Teen Jim’s Sam and Friends show and in Teen Jim’s education of how he can use the medium of television to innovate his puppetry. Within two years, he’s being commissioned to do muppet sketches for The Jimmy Dean Show — but tragedy strikes. Paul Junior is killed in a car accident. Grief-stricken, Teen Jim immediately drives to Teen Jane’s house, explains what happened, and makes a move. Teen Jane tells him he can’t, because she and her boyfriend are now engaged, but Teen Jim declares his love and kisses her.

Back at Arsenio, Kevin insists Jim must see a doctor. He puts Jim into a cab, and Jim tells the cabbie to take him back to his hotel. In 1959, 23-year-old Jim returns to Rome, where he both grieved and studied European puppetry. He immediately seeks out Jane, who’s still working at the TV studio, and asks if she got his many letters. She tells him she called off the engagement. Max welcomes Jim back with open arms, immediately getting him into the world of advertising. Jim and Jane work together on a coffee commercial, but Jim can’t keep his hands off her. Jim pitches the commercial idea to a stone-faced executive — who immediately bursts into laughter and gives Jim money to produce 20 spots. Jim takes Jane to a boardwalk where he awkwardly proposes, but Jane says it’s too soon after her breakup. It’s too late, though — Jim has arranged for fireworks to spell out MARRY ME JANE? Her affirmative response leads to another muppet musical number, featuring Kermit, Miss Piggy, and a bunch of ’50s-style wooden puppets singing “He’ll Make Me Happy” from The Muppets Take Manhattan. This musical number also accompanies a montage as Jim and Jane move up in the world — they get married, lease their own studio in New York, and begin creating more elaborate muppets.

In 1990, Jim has dinner with FRANK OZ, who takes him back to his family. Jim spots Frank’s son playing with some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures and wonders why he and Frank didn’t come up with that. Frank urges Jim to call Jane. Jim refuses. In 1963, a much younger Frank (then 19) is telling Jim the same thing: call Jane. Jim’s distracted by what’s happening with DON SAHLIN (35, his head designer) and JERRY JUHL (25, his head writer). Don pulls a prank on Jim, hiding some creepy monsters in the bathroom. But Jim has already loaded Don’s desk drawers with spring-loaded snakes. Everyone laughs. Jim introduces his Rowlf puppet to The Jimmy Dean Show. Together with his brain trust, they figure out a sketch to do with Jimmy. Jim returns home to Jane — who now has two children — and apologizes for not keeping in better touch. He says he wants to get out, but Jane tells him he just needs to slow down. Jim tells her the more he does now, the sooner he can get them everything they want, and they can be happy. Jane was under the impression that they were happy. Jim drags his brain trust out to make an experimental short film, “Time Piece.” The others are puzzled by it, but soon enough it nets him an Academy Award nomination. He and Jane go out to celebrate. Jane expresses an interest in taking some art courses, but Jim’s too drunk to pay much attention.

In 1990, Jim returns to New York. He picks up his daughter, CHERYL (29), and the two drive down to North Carolina together. She chastises Jim for going on a well-publicized date after he and Jane separated. Jim tells her it didn’t mean anything. He falls asleep, and “Movin’ Right Along” from The Muppet Movie begins to play. Jim dreams that he’s riding with Kermit and Fozzie Bear. Cheryl fears that Jim didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out, but Jim reassures her. In 1968, Jim and his brain trust mournfully watch the news as Dan Rather reports the assassination of Martin Luther King. At home, Jane tells Jim to stop watching the coverage, because it’ll traumatize the kids (who now include Brian and John). Jim attends a lecture in Boston where JOAN COONEY (39) explains that her organization, the Children’s Television Workshop, wants to use the same tools to teach children that are used to sell them toys and breakfast cereal. She illustrates the possibilities by playing a clip of muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show. The audience is unimpressed, but it piques Jim’s interest — and his imagination.

Jim is suddenly brainstorming a plethora of new muppet designs, characters, and settings for Sesame Street. He shows the skeptical brain trust (which now includes Joan) a sketch for Big Bird. Once they design the bird, though, everyone realizes how well this can work. A pseudo-montage follows, as Jim demonstrates characters like Bert & Ernie, Grover, The Count, and Oscar the Grouch (whom they modeled after a grouchy bartender). After showing the setup to his family, Jane rushes out, bursting into tears. Jim follows her outside, baffled. Jane’s concerned because she feels she doesn’t measure up to Jim, and therefore he’ll leave her and the kids, because “[i]t’s the way [her] life works.” Jim reassures her, but she walks away. Some time later, Jane is pregnant again. He’s a little nervous about the upcoming premiere of Sesame Street. This time, it’s Jane’s turn to reassure him. Jim admits that, since Paul Junior died, he’s been “chasing the time [he’s] lost,” but that she’s the most important part of his life. Jim and the Henson Company folks picture-lock their pilot, and within a few weeks it’s the most popular kids’ show on TV, racking up Emmy awards and international syndication packages with ease. As Joan hands Jim a royalty check for over half a million dollars, Kermit creeps up behind him and starts singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” This leads to another musical number, with Kermit accompanying Jim on the long, snowy ride home, where he collapses, exhausted. Across the street, Jim can see kids in several apartments watching Sesame Street, smiling.

It’s 1990 again. Jim and Cheryl arrive at a North Carolina farm owned by Paul Senior and Betty — both still vivacious and gregarious. They have a nice, energetic dinner, but ill Jim sort of puts a damper on it. Later, Paul Senior tells Jim that he and Betty think Jim is depressed. Jim disagrees, but Paul Senior nevertheless urges Jim to call Jane. Jim simply stares out at the sunset, seeing a Landstrider from The Dark Crystal drifting past on the horizon. In 1975, Jim and ALICE TWEEDY operate muppets on Saturday Night Live performing a sketch that gets no laughs. A worried LORNE MICHAELS considers inserting a laugh track. Afterward, Jim and Alice watch with frustration as an even-less-funny Chevy Chase sketch gets more laughs. Jim gripes to his agent, BERNIE BRILLSTEIN, about the SNL experience, saying they should write their own material. Bernie tells him he’s close to closing a deal for a muppet-based primetime show. At home, Jim watches The Sonny & Cher Show with Jane and the kids. The kids beg for a muppet show. Jim and Jane break out Kermit and “Hoggy,” a precursor to Miss Piggy, singing along to “I Got You, Babe” to the kids’ amusement. Jim, the brain trust, and Bernie visit a wealthy British producer, LEW GRADE. Jim fears it’ll be a tough sell, but Lew understands exactly what they want to do and gives them carte blanche — as long as they shoot the show in England.

Not surprisingly, Jane doesn’t take the news well. She doesn’t want the kids to have to split time between New York and England, but she knows she doesn’t exactly have a say in the matter. Some time later, Jim brings young Cheryl and Brian to check out the filming of the first Muppet Show episode. Jim explains to them that it’s a lot like Sam and Friends, and he wishes Jane would be a part of it. Cheryl surprises Jim by observing that Jane frequently talks about how much she hates performing. A few weeks later, Jim and Jane have an awkward dinner at an upscale restaurant. After Jim describes how successful the show is, Jane announces she wants to take the kids back to New York. Jim insists he’ll slow down now that the show’s off the ground, but Jane knows it isn’t true. Jane tells Jim that she did a “silly little painting” and sold it, quite by accident, but Jim wasn’t there to share in this moment of her life. Jim grumbles that he’s been busy lately, but Jane observes that she made this sale six years ago, and has made several subsequent sales — more than enough to earn her own income and support the children. Jim wants to make things right, but it’s too late. Jim watches a Swedish Chef rehearsal, in obvious pain. Frank tries hard to make Jim laugh, but it’s just not happening.

At the Henson farm in 1990, Jim watches an Entertainment Tonight profile that glosses over Henson’s many failures since The Muppet Show: Ghost of Faffner Hall, The Storyteller, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, and Fraggle Rock. Jim stares at the TV mournfully when Betty comes in and tells him to stop watching. Cheryl and Jim retreat to a nearby motel, where Cheryl catches Jim hiding under a blanket, shivering, clearly sicker than he has been. When she leaves him, the disheveled Kermit from the opening sequence arrives. Kermit sympathizes about the collapse of Jim’s marriage, now that Miss Piggy has gone off and married someone else, because he waited too long to tell her how he felt. Jim calls Jane, but when she answers, he waits a beat and hangs up.

Jim and Cheryl return to New York by plane, and Jim spots Kermit drinking in the bar. Cheryl brings Jim home. Jim tries calling Jane again, but again he says nothing and hangs up. Later, Jim lies in bed, looking deathly ill. Kermit shows up again, this time with a box of chocolates. Kermit gives Jim a little tough love, noting that the end is coming, and he’s going to be alone. Jim’s about to pick up the phone — when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Jane. He invites her in, and after some initial awkwardness, they fall back into an easy rapport. It doesn’t last long: he starts coughing uncontrollably, hocking up blood. After yet another refusal to see a doctor, prolonged coughing and Jane’s haranguing finally convinces him to go. It’s too late, though — he has an extremely advanced form of a relatively simple infection (the script doesn’t go into too much detail, but the always accurate Wikipedia reports that it was Streptococcus pyogenes, which is easily treated with penicillin but can become extremely severe if left untreated, like that episode of Sliders where everyone’s dying of strep throat because penicillin hadn’t been invented). The doctor tries to pump him full of antibiotics, but anybody with even a cursory interest in Sesame Street knows the story won’t end well.

But Jim does get the chance to tell Jane he loves her one last time before Kermit takes over, singing “I’m Going Back There Someday” as Jim starts coding. Jane hastily gathers the children, and everyone else catches wind of it. The bulk of the Henson Company (including, obviously, his longtime brain trust) have showed up to pay him a visit — but he’s gone. Days later, a somber crowd gathers for an attempt at an upbeat memorial service. Fighting back tears, Brian reads a loving, letter Jim had written while in the hospital (under the assumption that the kids wouldn’t make it before he died). As Brian reads, it’s clear that this memorial service does not just include humans — hundreds of muppets sit right alongside them. His puppeteers perform various songs as muppets, culminating in a huge group performance of “Just One Person.”

Meanwhile, back in Moo York, Kermit’s still depressed and eating chocolates. Directly to the camera, he says, “You didn’t think we’d end like that, did you?” Kermit storms out of his fleabag hotel along the streets of Moo York, to the mansion where Miss Piggy now resides. She answers the door, and after a long staredown, Kermit tells her he loves her. Miss Piggy immediately goes into the mansion and tells her new husband, Link Hogthrob she no longer loves him. Hogthrob isn’t terribly interested. Together now, Kermit and Miss Piggy duet on “The Rainbow Connection” — joined quickly by Fozzie, Gonzo, and tons of other muppets as Kermit and Piggy marry. Animal tears the church apart, revealing a giant soundstage, then punches a hole in the ceiling, allowing a rainbow to shine down on Kermit and Piggy. Statler and Waldorf gripe about the quality of the ending.

Notes

I feel like I have both the best and worst qualifications to analyze this script: ignorance and apathy. I know exceedingly little about Jim Henson and the muppets, and I don’t really care. Like most, I grew up with them; unlike most, I don’t have fond memories of kneeling inches from the television to watch Sesame Street or The Muppet Show. The best I can muster is an extremely foggy memory of watching Fraggle Rock and Labyrinth with my sister, and a slightly less murky recollection of getting the flu and my grandma checking out Follow That Bird from the public library. I have more specific memories of later projects that had little to no Jim Henson involvement: the Star Wars movies, the first two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, the (better than is generally recognized) sitcom Dinosaurs, and the sci-fi classic Farscape.

On the level that I understand their contributions to entertainment, puppetry, and society as a whole, I respectfully acknowledge the place in history that Henson and his creative team deserve. But I don’t really care. I feel neither the yearning to recapture childhood memories nor the compulsion to seek out or embrace the more adult Henson material. If pressed, I could come up with a laundry list of things I’d like answered in a Jim Henson biopic. Chief among them: why the shift from kids’ shows to the more adult-themed (but still kid-friendly) Muppet Show to the fucking crazy-as-shit Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, which are both nightmare fuel for adults and kids alike?

The Muppet Man makes no real effort to answer this question. True, writer Christopher Weekes occasionally touches on Henson’s vague, ill-defined desire to not allow people to pigeonhole him as a children’s entertainer, but rather than making that the semi-tragic arc of his story (man wants success in one realm, finds it another, uses that power to finally pursue what he originally wanted but fails to succeed), Weekes is content to mention it offhandedly, then distill the entire “adult” phase of Henson’s career with a comically brief Entertainment Tonight profile.

That speaks to the larger problem of the biopic. To make a two- or three-hour movie that encapsulates a person’s entire life is an extreme challenge. I don’t envy the task Weekes took on, but that doesn’t make me like this script any more. It’s shockingly shoddy (shocking only in that 47 allegedly high-powered executives elected this their favorite script uniquely associated with 2009). To put it bluntly: after 138 pages, I feel like I know a lot about what Henson did in his life but virtually nothing about why (or, in some cases, how) he did it.

At the end of the day, it’s a cookie-cutter biopic, relying on every cliché in the playbook as it moves through the beats of Henson’s life (clumsy childhood foreshadowing, the same awkward early romance the future wife, the marital strains frequently found in the “career-obsessed genius” category of biopic, endless musical montages showing the passage of time and increase in success, and so on). The unfortunate fact is that biopics are generally reserved for highly successful, famous people, and when you hit the main beats of successful, famous people’s lives, they all come out pretty much the same. Weekes spends too much time glossing over the details that should make Henson’s story unique. What drove him? How did he assemble his brain trust and learn to rely on them instead of doing everything himself? As mentioned before, did he always have a strong desire to do adult-themed material, or did that somehow come later in life? Or did it even come from him? The script portrays him as exceptionally introverted and easygoing, so did the brain trust pretty much walk all over him and push him into areas he didn’t really want to explore?

The answer to all those questions and many more are: I don’t have a fucking clue.

However, the script has more problems than a simple lack of relevant, interesting details about Henson’s career. The Jim-Jane relationship, which Weekes tries unsuccessfully to use as the lynchpin of the movie, suffers immensely from the “gloss over” approach to biopics. It also suffers because, in order to create the surprise moment that Jim hardly knows a thing about his own wife, Weekes keeps her hidden from the audience. Early on, she seems happy. Shortly after their marriage, she actually states that she’s happy (it’s Jim who isn’t). Several years later, when she has her meltdown upon seeing the elaborate Sesame Street display, Jane has a sort of breakdown that took me completely aback, hurling all these half-crazed statements about people “just leav[ing her], because that’s just the way [her] life works.” Where the fuck did that come from? I have no doubt that this argument actually took place, but nothing we’re ever shown of Jane suggests this sort of fragility or insecurity. In fact, the only other character she interacts with — other than her children — is the guy she got engaged to before she fell for Jim. The guy she broke it off with.

So who the hell is Jane? What’s her story? Understanding her might help make Jim clearer; even if it doesn’t, it’ll at least make her more interesting, and maybe make the breakdown of their marriage a little less cliché-ridden.

The last major problem is the big elephant in the room: the muppet sequences. These sequences did nothing for me but piss me off, for two reasons. First, from the moment we see a disheveled, middle-aged Kermit in Moo York, the sequences felt like nothing but a calculated attempt to bring a combination of nostalgia and “uniqueness” to the script. Like Man on the Moon, The Muppet Man tells a familiar story in a familiar way but periodically tosses moments of subject-appropriate absurdity to create the illusion that it’s not familiar. That’s fucking annoying.

Secondly, it’s a distraction. Remember all that stuff about Weekes glossing over the actual compelling, unique details of Henson’s life? Well, part of the reason he has to gloss over it is because so much time is spent drawing a parallel between the Jim/Jane relationship and the Kermit/Piggy relationship. It’s a parallel that doesn’t even work particularly well. My dim recollection of their characters tells me that Kermit faced Piggy’s aggressive advances with a combination of ignorance and disinterest — this just doesn’t fit with the Jim/Jane dynamic at all. Maybe I’m misremembering the Kermit/Piggy dynamic, but it felt like a poor fit to me.

That’s it for the significant, story-destroying problems. I don’t know enough about Henson to construct my own version of how his biopic should go, which is probably for the best, but I’d start with giving him some basic screenwriting 101 crap like “goals” and/or “obstacles.” For someone so career-driven, he doesn’t seem to have much interest in his own life, and his progress is only impeded by the untimely death of his brother, and then only briefly. He’s pretty much on Easy Street from the moment Sam and Friends hits the airwaves. That may reflect the reality of the situation, but it’s not dramatically compelling.

On to the nitpicky stuff, which I’ll try to keep brief.

Now, I understand that what I’ve read is allegedly a selling draft of the script. I also understand that Hollywood is all about The Concept. However, I hope I’m not beating a long-dead horse by wondering, yet again, why such a sloppily written script has garnered so much goodwill? I mentioned my ignorance of most things Henson, yet even I recognized frustrating inaccuracies*. I suppose some of them would be forgivable if not for the rampant, Australianisms, which, like Britishisms, shatter my suspension of disbelief more quickly than anything else. Recognizing that it’s more about The Concept than the writing — shouldn’t some of it still be about the writing? Am I misguided in my belief that absorbing a person in your story is of equal importance to having a killer concept and/or a killer pitch?

Examples abound of flat-out bad writing that don’t involve this lack of verisimilitude (see also: any one of the musical montages), so this is the irritating icing on the shitty-tasting cake. “Right-o,” “unspoilt,” “Chinese takeaway,” “air con,” “bloody hilarious,” “X is meant to Y” (example: “a sea monster is meant to breath [sic] through gills,” as opposed to “a sea monster breathes through gills”), and those are only a few of them (I didn’t write down all of them and stopped counting on page 67, but trust me — this script is loaded with them). It both surprises and disappointed me that this is acknowledged as the overall favorite; however, it heartens me a little to learn that the Henson Company bought the script with the intention of pretty much burying it (at best, they may incorporate some of its ideas into an existing biopic script).

I suppose I should also comment briefly on the ending, since certain other bloggers have decreed it’s emotionally devastating and that “[i]f you don’t need a towel to clean off your keyboard at the end of this scene, there’s a good chance you don’t have emotions.” Now, I have bawled like a baby at movies, and I have no problem admitting that to anyone other than good-looking women. The last act left me pretty cold, though. Henson’s death was indeed tragic, but I feel no emotional connection to him in my private life, and since Weekes didn’t create an emotional connection to him within this screenplay, I felt nothing during the memorial service and subsequent Moo York sequence. I’m sure I would have felt the proper emotional response in a better script, or if I really felt strongly about Henson and/or his work.

The Bottom Line

Jim Henson is the sort of person who deserves a biopic: an undeniable genius who changed the entertainment landscape permanently, yet someone I assume general audiences don’t know much about. So, in terms of The Concept, I can’t think of a better biopic. In terms of the script itself — holy fuck does it need work. From the story to the characters to the minutiae of its diction, this cannot and should not be made without a page-one rewrite.

Update, later on 12/14/09: Just stumbled across a bile-inducing blog post from the L.A. Times:

They soon found he had written, entirely on spec, a script about one of the most enigmatic and private of contemporary artists without having ever met or even read much about him (there exists no major published biography about Henson).

Instead, Weeks [sic] conjured the story mostly out of his imagination, basing it on a series of photos he’d studied and whatever strands of information he could find on things like Wikipedia. “Even though I was just 10 when he died, Jim Henson had been this Walt Disney-like figure in my life, and I wanted to create a version of him as seen through these kind of rose-colored glasses,” Weekes said Friday from Australia.

The funny/annoying thing is: while I perused Henson’s Wikipedia page for more detailed information about his death, I looked over the beats of his life story and thought, “Holy fuck, did Weekes just copy/paste the Wikipedia entry and add dialogue?” Apparently the answer is “yes.” Still, it infuriates me that he’s being rewarded for what amounts to robbing a bank, then returning the money and receiving a 10% reward instead of a prison sentence. (I’m inferring from the article that Henson Co. bought the script to avoid potential lawsuits for infringing on his widely circulated script — despite the fact that Weekes’s script infringes on their copyrights and trademarks — with any attempt they make themselves. I could be off-base in that assumption, but Lisa Henson doesn’t sound terribly enthusiastic about Weekes’s script, and, well, “Weekes is no longer actively working on his script — he, in fact, has not written a new draft since the original was sold to the Henson Co.” So it is a happy ending!)

*Sesame Street, in this script, debuts in 1970 instead of 1969; just days before his death, Jim sees Frank Oz’s son playing with a Ninja Turtle and doesn’t know what it is, despite the fact that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie — with which he was involved in designing the puppetry — was made in 1989; Cheryl drives Jim to North Carolina, but they fly back with no explanation; I’m sure there are others; and, more often than not, the years indicated in the sluglines fluctuate for no discernible purpose, as if Weekes restructured scenes but forgot to change the years. It makes it difficult to read, when reading, to think years have passed, only to discover in context that it was supposed to be days or weeks after the previous scene. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 5:10 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (4)  | Reviews

December 15, 2009

Black List Script #2: The Social Network by Aaron Sorkin

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “The story of the founders of the social networking website Facebook and how overnight success and wealth changed their lives.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Fall, 2003. At Boston college bar, 19-year-old MARK ZUCKERBERG discusses his strong desire to get into a “final club” (from the context, I gather this is the Harvard equivalent of a fraternity) with his girlfriend, ERICA. The conversation is a bit circular and frequently absurd, but the bottom line is: Mark wants to get into a final club but doesn’t exactly know a way to make himself stand out enough to get into one. The other bottom line is: after Mark arrogantly announces final clubs will help Erica, as well, by allowing him to introduce her to people “she’d never meet otherwise,” Erica dumps him on the spot. Mark tries to recover by condescendingly making light of her school - Boston University, which obviously lacks the prestige and influence of Harvard - which only makes things worse.

Angry, Mark returns to his dorm and continues drinking. While he blogs nasty things about Erica, Mark notices the Kirkland dorm’s facebook and hatches a scheme to get revenge against all womankind. Within a few hours, he hacks into servers for each of the Harvard dorms (because the school doesn’t have a centralized facebook, only one for each dorm), finds digital copies of all the girls’ photos, and cobbles together a website called “FaceMash,” which is similar to Hotornot.com, except (a) it’s only Harvard girls, and (b) students don’t judge the hotness on a 10-point scale, they judge the relative hotness of two women. In order to get it working, Mark enlists the aid of his best friend, business student EDUARDO SAVERIN, who worked up an algorithm for a different application that will work for Mark’s site. Mark hacks together the code and launches the site. Within a few short hours, it becomes so popular on campus that Harvard’s intranet crashes. Eduardo reacts fearfully, but Mark’s both impressed with himself and a little amused.

The action cuts to Mark, a few years later, listening to a lawyer read back Erica’s deposition. It irritates Mark that she told so many lies. Mark sits across a table from Eduardo and his attorneys. Eduardo is suing him for unknown reasons. As Mark clarifies his side of the story and proudly announces that 80% of Harvard’s male population had visited FaceMash within two hours of its launch, we’re back in 2003 and introduced to CAMERON and TYLER WINKLEVOSS, athletic twins involved in Harvard’s rowcrew team. Their friend, DIVYA NARENDRA brings them copies of Harvard’s student paper, which carries a story about Mark’s scandalous FaceMash site. Impressed with Mark’s skills, they decide “this is [their] guy” — but for what? Another future deposition involves Mark against Tyler, Cameron, and Divya - they’re also suing him, for separate currently unknown unknown reasons.

Back in 2003, Mark faces a board of administrators for his FaceMash stunt, but Mark successfully talks his way out of it by observing that, in addition to already apologizing to any groups he may have offended, his stunt revealed many security holes in Harvard’s system, so they should be thanking him. He’s sentenced to six months’ academic probation. Afterward, Eduardo’s sympathetic. He points out that, on the plus side, everyone knows his name. True, but potentially bad: the abuse from female classmates is such that he’s forced to bail on lectures and hide in his dorms. Soon enough, Cameron and Tyler approach Mark. They invite him to the exclusive clubhouse of the Porcellian final club, where they introduce him to Divya. They go over his impressive credentials: in addition to FaceMash, he created a website called CourseMatch that allows users to find out what classes their friends are taking and an MP3 player Microsoft wanted to buy (before Mark released it for free on the Internet). They pitch their site idea, HarvardConnection, a social networking site that differentiates itself from competitors by being Harvard-only. Mark tells him he’s in, but in the future depositions, he denies ever having said that. The lawyers grill Mark on when he came up with “theFacebook” — before or after he learned about HarvardConnection? It was after, right around the time Eduardo announces he’s been “punched” to join the Phoenix final club. Mark pitches an idea that’s eerily similar to HarvardConnection, getting his attention when he describes it as an exclusive club — their own version of a final club, only one where they’re in charge.

In the deposition, Mark explains he approached Eduardo — instead of his suitemates, who are programmers — because he had the money and business sense to help pull it off. They agree to split the profits 70-30. Lawyers ask Eduardo if he had any awareness of HarvardConnection during this time; Eduardo did not. The lawyers begin reading e-mails from Mark to Cameron, Tyler, and/or Divya. All sound enthusiastic and strongly imply he’s working on building the site without much trouble, but soon enough he starts putting the others off. A simultaneous montage shows Mark working his ass off on theFacebook while Eduardo works his ass off to get into the Phoenix club. Just as Mark’s preparing to finally launch the site, his suitemate DUSTIN sheepishly asks Mark if he knows a particular girl and whether or not she’s single. This leads Mark to a final brainstorm — a “relationship status” feature that also allows users to describe what they’re interested in (friendship, romance, etc.). He excitedly tells Eduardo about the idea as he implements the code, and that’s it — they go live. Mark demands a list of Phoenix members’ e-mail addresses to start generating interest in the site. Eduardo’s unsure, but he ultimately gives them up.

The site takes off immediately, and before long, Divya, Cameron, and Tyler catch wind of it. They’re all pissed, especially when they can’t get ahold of Mark or anybody who knows Mark. Divya and Tyler vacillate between wanting to sue Mark or beat the hell out of him, but Cameron calms them down, urging them to let Mark respond to it. Ultimately, they compromise and have the Winklevosses’ father’s in-house counsel draft a cease-and-desist order for Mark. In the deposition, lawyers ask Mark if he knew the Winklevosses were wealthy at the time he started the site. Mark dances around it but eventually admits he did. Back in 2004, Mark (and to a much lesser extent, Eduardo) becomes a big man on campus, garnering attention from attractive women, including JENNY (who will eventually become Eduardo’s girlfriend). In addition to women, nerds and student entrepreneurs want a piece of Mark, but he’s having none of it — he wants the recognition but doesn’t seem to have much interest in cultivating any actual relationships, business or otherwise.

Not long after, Eduardo announces it’s time to monetize the site. Mark doesn’t want to put ads on it, because it’ll lose the “cool” factor. Eduardo notices the C&D from the Winklevosses and freaks out. Mark tells him to relax, arguing that he didn’t steal any of their code and that “a guy who builds a really nice chair doesn’t owe money to everyone who’s ever built a chair.” Eduardo demands to be let in on everything in the future, good or bad. In the deposition, things get heated between Cameron, Tyler, and Divya, in part because billionaire Mark is more interest in running his business from the deposition room than answering lawyers’ questions. He’s sarcastic and condescending, despite the fact that his accusers are sitting across a table from him. In 2004, as things get hot and heavy between Eduardo and Jenny, Mark sees Erica at a bar and approaches her. He offers an insincere apology and brags about theFacebook. Erica’s still pissed about the many insulting blog posts Mark published about her. She sends him away acidly and unintentionally twists the knife by offering him good luck with his “video game.” Immediately, Mark announces to Eduardo that they must expand to additional schools — Columbia, Yale, and most importantly, Stanford. He hires Dustin to help program in exchange for 5% of the business (from Mark’s share) and brings in suitemate CHRIS to work on publicity — starting with planting an article in the Boston University student newspaper.

The deposition breaks for lunch. Mark doesn’t eat, so an associate, MARYLIN, offers Mark some food. He turns her down. She asks if he hates the Winklevosses, but Mark says he knows they’re only suing him because they can’t accept that life can be unfair. Back in 2004, Divya informs Tyler and Cameron that theFacebook is expanding. Their rage renewed, Tyler realizes they can get to him through the school — by stealing their “property,” he violated the rules of Harvard. Cameron and Tyler agree to meet with the president of Harvard.

In Palo Alto, California, currently broke Napster founder SEAN PARKER bangs a Stanford coed, then borrows her laptop to check his e-mail. When he sees theFacebook, his interest is piqued. He decides he needs to meet with Mark Zuckerberg. Back in Cambridge, Cameron and Tyler have their meeting with LARRY SUMMERS, the intimidating president of Harvard. He scoffs at their claims, stating that this is not a Harvard issue and he won’t lift a finger to help them. Over spring break, Mark and Eduardo take a trip to New York to lure prospective advertisers. Mark humiliates Eduardo with his evident disinterest (he wears worse-than-casual apparel — flip-flops, a hoodie, and track pants, and spends most meetings staring at the floor), but Mark comes alive when they meet with Sean Parker at a trendy restaurant. Despite his youth, Sean can work a room and talk up a storm. Mark already views Sean as something of a hero, so he hangs on every word. Eduardo thinks he’s pompous and mostly useless. Taking the social cue, Sean focuses on Mark and largely ignores Eduardo. As he leaves, Sean instructs them to drop the “the” from “theFacebook,” which Eduardo states in a deposition was the only good thing he did for the burgeoning company.

Soon enough, scandal erupts, driving a wedge into Mark and Eduardo’s already raw friendship. After so much time spent trying to convince Mark that Sean’s no good, an issue of Harvard’s student paper reports that Eduardo has been connected with “torturing animals.” (In reality, the Phoenix club forced Eduardo to spend a week caring for a chicken as part of his grueling initiation. Eduardo ignorantly fed the chicken some…chicken from the cafeteria, to the disgust and consternation of animal rights’ activists declaring “forced cannibalism.) Eduardo’s humiliated, and Mark’s lack of sympathy doesn’t help — especially in light of the fact that Mark has secretly used Facebook to cheat on a final exam. As this argument takes place, Dustin monitors the number of subscribers as it rolls over to 150,000. Mark announces his decision to go to Palo Alto for the summer, rent a house, and bring along interns. He asks Eduardo for money, but Eduardo’s angry — he sees this as Mark wanting to get too close to Sean. Mark won’t relent. The next night, he holds a “group interview” for interns — 60 students gathered around a CS classroom in a hacker drinking game. The first ones to jump through Mark’s hacking hoops get the internship slots. As an apology, Eduardo drops by and tells Mark he opened an $18,000 account for Mark’s summer plans. In the deposition, lawyers grill Eduardo on this point — why would someone so against the plans help Mark out? Eduardo wants to be a team player.

Mark, Dustin, and the interns move into a Palo Alto house, only to discover Sean and his girlfriend living across the street. Sean is enthusiastic about Mark’s plans. He shows Mark around Silicon Valley and actively tries to expand the rift between Mark and Eduardo (who is spending the summer at a New York internship). Sean convinces Mark that he hasn’t been thinking big enough — Mark wants to make a million-dollar company, but Sean thinks it can be a billion-dollar company. As a gesture of good faith, Sean makes plans to take Facebook global. In England, Cameron and Tyler take part in an international rowing race, narrowly losing to a Dutch crew. PRINCE ALBERT of Monaco hosts the awards ceremony; despite his royal stature and relative politeness, Tyler is angry and belligerent after the loss. Later, Cameron and Tyler review footage of the race with their father and Divya. Another man, KENWRIGHT, pops along to relate an amusing anecdote about a new website, Facebook, which his Cambridge-attending daughter is using to discuss the race results with her friends at universities all over England, in realtime. Cameron, Tyler, and Divya are appalled. Cameron finally agrees that it’s time to take legal action.

Sean is angry that he can’t get ahold of legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Michael Moritz — the man is flat-out ignoring him, which prevents him from making good on his many promises to Mark. Eduardo arrives at the Palo Alto house and is shocked — it’s a pig sty filled with novelty-sized bongs and half-naked women. He’s pissed that Mark didn’t pick up him at the airport, as promised. Mark apologizes and takes Eduardo away from the chaos so they can catch up. Eduardo gets pissed at Mark’s questions — asking things he should already know the answers to, like when and why Eduardo quit his internship, and that Jenny has become too needy and demanding for him to tolerate. Eduardo is horrified that Mark has let Sean set up meetings with venture capitalists without his knowledge. He returns to New York, angrily. Mark and Sean meet with venture capitalist PETER THIEL, who offers them $500,000 and questions them about Eduardo’s role in the company.

Jenny breaks into Eduardo’s New York sublet. She’s pissed that he didn’t call her the moment he got back, and that he ignored all her calls and text messages while she was gone. A phone call from Mark interrupts the fight. Mark’s pissed because Eduardo froze the bank account. Eduardo says he was trying to get Mark’s attention — and speaking of getting attention, Jenny angrily sets fire to a gift Eduardo brought back with him. Eduardo puts him on speaker phone while he takes care of the fire. Mark tells Eduardo freezing the account was childish, then tells him about the $500,000 investment from Thiel, so Eduardo needs to get back to Silicon Valley ASAP. Eduardo hangs up and dumps Jenny. At Facebook’s new Silicon Valley offices, lawyers walk Eduardo through his contracts. Because of the change in the corporate structure, Eduardo’s ownership stake has risen to 34.4% (instead of 30), which Eduardo helpfully explains will accommodate them on the off-chance they need to dilute the stock for new investors. In the future deposition, Eduardo is livid about having signed these contracts. Why? Because when Mark invited Eduardo back to Silicon Valley under the guise of business meetings, Facebook attorneys inform him that a new capital investment from Michael Moritz has diluted the shit out of the stock — because of the shady contracts Eduardo signed, his ownership stake went from 34.4% to 0.03% overnight.

Eduardo confronts Mark and Sean about this ambush, but Mark points out that Eduardo that he hasn’t been a part of the company for a long time (bear in mind this is the fall of 2004 — at the latest, six months after the site launched), so he deserved to get screwed. Eduardo accuses Mark of planting the “animal cruelty” story in the Harvard paper and announces his intention to sue Mark; more than anything, Eduardo is pissed that Mark would let himself lose his only friend over something as petty as the credit for founding the site. Security escorts Eduardo out of the office, just as the subscriber base hits a million. Sean flirts with an intern (ASHLEIGH), which leads him back to a sorority party, where Sean, Ashleigh, and another couple snort coke and attempt to have a foursome — hindered by Sean’s obsession with talking about himself and his plans for Facebook. He’s so distracting, it takes them too long to realize the cops have busted up the party. They manage to hide the coke — but not the fact that Ashleigh’s only 17. Sean is arrested. Out on bond, he explains the situation to Mark, who makes it clear that Sean’s outlived his usefulness. It’s easily implied that, just as Mark planted the animal cruelty story, he also called the cops on the party. Mark pulls open a box of brand new business cards, which say “I’m CEO…Bitch.”

In the deposition room, Marylin shakes Mark out of his fog. Everyone’s left. He asks her out to dinner, but she turns him down — because his team of lawyers will be pulling an all-nighter to draft a settlement agreement. Mark is disappointed about the settlement. He decides to stick around for a little while longer. He gets onto Facebook, finds Erica Albright’s profile, and adds a friend request. As he waits, staring at the screen, wanting a response, titles explain that the Winklevosses settled for $65 million, while Eduardo settled for an unknown amount and had his “co-founder” status restored on the Facebook masthead. It further explains that Facebook has a user base of 180 million in 60 countries and is valued at $15 billion, making Mark the youngest billionaire in the world.

Notes

Preamble to the actual script notes: I love a lot of what Aaron Sorkin does. He’s a writer with a great many flaws — wild fluctuations in consistency (as evidenced in the four seasons he served on The West Wing, with episodes ranging from superb to shit), an apparent disinterest in long-term story or character continuity (not an issue in a feature script), and, most frustratingly, a penchant for sanctimonious dialogue above all else. When he’s firing on all cylinders, he has done some truly brilliant work (see also: the West Wing episodes “17 People” or “Two Cathedrals,” or pretty much any episode of Sports Night), but when he’s not, it’s amazing how far down he can plunge. Did anyone other than me tune in for the full run of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? What a shit heap that show turned out to be — great pilot, great Christmas episode, all sandwiched by utter, utter dreck, easily the worst writing of his career.

So with two recent creative and commercial failures (the aforementioned Studio 60… and 2007’s Charlie Wilson’s War, which made some money and garnered a deserved Oscar nomination for Philip Seymour Hoffman but sucked some pretty major balls for many of the same reasons Studio 60… did*), I was eager to read this script to see if Sorkin had redeemed himself. Short answer: yes.

Slightly longer answer: whether he made the choice himself or not (I’m too lazy to look up if he wrote this on spec or was hired to write it), Sorkin made a wise decision in writing an apolitical script. Much as I enjoyed significant chunks of The West Wing, his personal politics started to invade every pore (especially after 9/11), which got preachy and annoying. This carried on to Studio 60… and, obviously, Charlie Wilson’s War — but now he’s back, baby, with the politically neutral story of Mark Zuckerberg’s quest for success. Although it’s not a straight-up biopic, reading this script alongside The Muppet Man is a terrific case study. Virtually everything The Muppet Man got wrong (passively nerdy subject, thin supporting characters, endless montages), The Social Network gets right, starting with motivation: Sorkin incorporates a bit of the old Adam Carolla philosophy that when guys stop getting laid, they start designing skyscrapers in showing Zuckerberg’s motivation — his desire for fame and power, under the misguided notion that this will lead to love from one special girl. Erica’s subsequent appearances hammer the point home, but she pops up infrequently enough for it to seem relatively subtle.

More importantly, Sorkin quickly and easily makes every character — from Mark and Eduardo to bit players like Peter Thiel and Marylin — into distinctive, flawed, fully dimensional characters. Much of this occurs through his usual strong dialogue — in fact, typical of a Sorkin script, dialogue drives much of the story and character development, The Social Network zips through surprisingly long scenes (the first scene alone is 9 1/8ths pages, all dialogue) and a mammoth 161 pages on the strength of Sorkin’s banter. Unlike certain other writers of stylized dialogue, Sorkin never hits a false note with these characters. He doesn’t get too cutesy or clever, and each character has a distinctive speaking rhythm and diction. That much is a bit of a surprise — much as I enjoy his previous work, one consistent and deserved criticism is that everybody sounds pretty much the same. Not anymore.

The story itself isn’t quite as strong as the characters or the dialogue. The structure is designed around the collapse of Mark’s friendship with Eduardo — instead of merely telling the tedious story of Facebook’s rise to prominence — which is a great idea implemented reasonably well, but in the end, other story threads (notably the scheming Winklevosses and the rise and fall of Sean) feel oddly superfluous. Fortunately, the characters are interesting enough for this not to frustrate me as much as it could. As is frequently the case in the docudrama/biopic genre, the story just kinda peters out in the third act, but Sorkin does provide some nice moments here and there, including satisfying resolutions to the main beats of the story (the total destruction of Mark’s friendship with Eduardo, and a nice moment taking Mark back to Erica).

As for the nitpicky stuff — I don’t have much of it, and usually the nitpicky stuff doesn’t bother me nearly as much when the rest of the script is solid. Still, Sorkin’s self-proclaimed ignorance about all things technology is evident in the early “Mark Zuckerberg: master hacker” scenes, and the story seems so well-suited to the screenplay treatment that I’ll speculate (with no evidence to back me up) that he took plenty of liberties with the true story. Finally, and perhaps the only nitpick that genuinely annoyed the shit out of me, Sorkin downplays the influence of Friendster and MySpace on Facebook. He has a well-written scene in which it suddenly dawns on Mark that he’s forgotten an important element of the site — relationship status. An important element that was already on MySpace, and you’re nuts if you think a direct competitor would not have paid enough attention to MySpace’s features to realize that. A later, not-quite-so-well-written scene shows Mark coming up with the “idea” for “the Wall” — another concept that, at least in its earliest incarnation, was identical to MySpace’s profile comment board. Little things like this make me wonder if Sorkin got little details wrong among the things I don’t know anything about, like Harvard’s elaborate social structure, but I dunno… It all goes back to the issue of verisimilitude. The Muppet Man bugged me because it felt extremely inauthentic — The Social Network, on the other hand, could very well be wall-to-wall bullshit, but it felt real.

The Bottom Line

Despite my nitpicks and its overall length, The Social Network is a quick, compelling read. With a polish to iron out the kinks, it’s easily ready to go, even though I sort of think the MySpace story is more compelling (especially with its now-tragic ending). Read Julia Angwin’s even-more-gripping book Stealing MySpace and see if you agree.

*I don’t want to leave this without something resembling a full explanation/mini-review, but I don’t want to pull too much focus away from The Social Network, so those of you wanting to know my opinion on Studio 60… and Charlie Wilson’s War, read on; those who could give a fuck, go back up to the review and just accept that these two pieces of work were flawed at best.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — The chemistry-free “will they or won’t they get back together?” relationship between Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson killed this show before it had a chance to start. Easily the weakest subplot in the pilot, investing so goddamn much time on what should be, at best, a romantic subplot did the show no favors. Add to that the frequent West Wing Lite political subplots, wildly unfunny examples of Perry’s allegedly brilliant sketch comedy (the show would have benefited more from not showing the sketches at all than from Sorkin hiring great people like Mark McKinney to help him out), and the same “I’ve changed my mind on who/what this character/storyline is” sloppy writing that plagued The West Wing’s first season all added up to a dismal series.

Charlie Wilson’s War — An interesting story, unfortunately told mostly through Sorkin’s unsubtle, sanctimonious political dialogue. Drawing the obvious parallels to contemporary foreign policy problems would have worked fine if Sorkin could just rein himself in a little bit. Honestly, though, a bigger problem came from the actors (Tom Hanks in hammy Ladykillers mode, Julia Roberts completely phoning it in) and Mike Nichols’s suspiciously lugubrious directing. I don’t want to go too deep with my philosophies about Sorkin’s writing, but it seems to live and die on the strength of his collaborators. When they get it, it can frequently turn out well despite flaws. When they don’t, it turns out like this. Still, bonus points for Philip Seymour Hoffman, the only one in a large cast of people I typically like who understood he was in a screwball satire instead of a pompous docudrama. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 5:12 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 16, 2009

Black List Script #3: The Voices by Michael R. Perry

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “A disturbed man attempts to walk the straight-and-narrow while receiving advice from his ‘talking’ pets.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

A sinister cat, MR. WHISKERS, clashes with the idyllic small town of Veedersburg, Ohio, when he kills a mockingbird just to watch it die, then bats it around with evident pleasure. The cat’s owner, JERRY HICKFANG (29), works in the shipping department of Veedersburg’s economic mainstay, a bathroom fixture factory. He’s approached by DENNIS from the personnel department; after congratulating Jerry on his good work, Dennis informs Jerry that, as the newest employee in the shipping department, he’ll have to spend his off-hours helping to plan a company picnic with members of the factory’s other departments. Jerry is cheerful and enthusiastic about this responsibility, further impressing Dennis. Jerry returns to his home — an apartment above an abandoned bowling alley — and greets his two pets (Mr. Whiskers and BOSCO, a friendly dog) on his way to his bedroom. Inside his bedroom, an offscreen ROOMMATE badgers Jerry about his station in life, ridiculing him and announcing that the factory employees only keep him around for a laugh. Finally, Jerry exits his bedroom to confront the roommate — Mr. Whiskers, who can talk in the same CGI/animatronic way the animals in Babe talked. Mr. Whiskers and Bosco become the devil and angel perched on Jerry’s shoulder: Whiskers is hostile and evil, while Bosco is very pleasant and reassuring.

During the picnic-planning process, Jerry makes some awkward attempts to socialize. Nobody really cares. KATIE, the cute new girl in accounting, is put in charge of the music. She immediately pitches the idea of doing “The Macarena.” Nobody’s terribly enthusiastic, but eventually they agree to allow it. After the group is assigned responsibilities, they break apart. Katie approaches Jerry, who’s in charge of the sound system, to ask if it’ll work with an iPod. Jerry isn’t sure, so he tells her to come by tomorrow to test it out. As requested, she drops by the following day and is surprised and amused to find Jerry rocking out to speed metal. They plug in her iPod, and she turns on “The Macarena.” They joke about possible meanings to the song, and Jerry finds himself smitten. He comes home, walking on air. Bosco’s thrilled at the prospect of Jerry with a girlfriend, but Mr. Whiskers doesn’t share the dog’s boisterous enthusiasm. Jerry ignores the cat.

Jerry visits his court-appointed psychiatrist, the attractive DR. WEST, who’s very supportive about Jerry’s excitement over the company picnic. She asks him about his medication, and Jerry intimates that he hasn’t been taking it with any regularity. West stresses the importance of the meds and asks if he hears voices. Jerry tells her no and complains that the question reminds him of his mother, who claimed to hear the voices of angels calling to her. West explains that this was his mother’s way of coping with her psychiatric issues. Jerry asks her what to do about Katie — he likes her, he wants to be honest with her, but he’s afraid of scaring her off. He decides to only say something if the subject comes up, and West reassures him in that decision.

At the picnic, Katie innocently asks Jerry to dance “The Macarena” — they do, and he’s entranced. He comes home that evening feeling great, muttering the word “macarena” over and over. Bosco’s thrilled that his master is happy, but Mr. Whiskers chides Jerry for not being able to get laid. At work, Jerry walks on air, listening to an off-brand MP3 player with “The Macarena” on an endless loop. He dances and annoys his coworkers. At the end of the day, Jerry comes to visit Katie in accounting (at the picnic, she told him to “come vist [her] some time”). She’s hooched up and ready to go out drinking with her girlfriends. LISA, a slightly sluttier coworker, eagerly invites Jerry along with them. Katie’s unenthusiastic about it, especially when — after a night of drinking — Lisa volunteers Jerry to drive Katie home. On the way home, Jerry invites Katie to the State Fair. She half-heartedly agrees to meet him there. Jerry goes home and excitedly tells Bosco the news. Mr. Whiskers is more interested in Jerry opening a can of cat food for them.

The next day, Jerry drops by the accounting department and runs into Lisa. He has a State Fair pig-racing schedule to drop off for Katie, who isn’t there. Lisa assures Jerry she’ll get it to him, but it takes him awhile to get the hint and actually leave. When he does, Katie emerges, telling Lisa she agreed to meet Jerry at the fair. Lisa reminds Katie it’s karaoke night. Katie says she’ll wait until the office closes and leave him a cancellation VoiceMail. Jerry wanders the fair alone, looking at all the loving couples, dejected. It begins to rain. Still waiting for Katie, Jerry sits in his truck, in the parking lot, until a security guard forces him to leave. Depressed, Jerry drives by the park where the company picnic was held, blasting “The Macarena”; he goes to TGI Friday’s and drinks alone. Meanwhile, Lisa gives Katie a ride back to the factory (where her car is parked) because it’s too rainy to walk. Katie’s car won’t start, and the storm is getting worse. Her cell phone is damaged in the rain, so she can’t call for help. Finally, she flags down a truck — Jerry, who perceives Katie as an angel he was fated to love thanks to the glow of the lightning creating a halo backlight around her. Katie apologizes for ditching him. They agree to have dinner together.

While driving to the diner, Jerry and Katie talk about themselves — Jerry’s a lifelong Veedersburg resident, but Katie only moved there a few years ago. Another lightning strike makes her look angelic, and Jerry’s starting to spin out. He starts asking her about heaven. She explains she grew up in Gary, Indiana, which is closer to hell. The talk of angels and hell reminds Jerry of a nugget of trivia: only four Biblical angels have names. He names three and asks her to name the fourth. Katie doesn’t know the answer, and before Jerry can tell her — he hits a huge buck. Katie screams as his antlers shatter the windshield and Jerry swerves on the rain-slick, winding road. He finally stops and kills the engine — and the buck begins thrashing. Like his pets, the buck talks to Jerry, telling him he wants to die. Jerry respects the buck’s wishes and slits his throat, drenching Katie in blood. Katie is horrified, especially when Jerry gets back in the car and cheerfully launches back into his trivia: Lucifer was the fourth angel.

Katie panics and runs into the woods. Jerry follows her, trying to explain it was an accident. He catches up to her, and after she thrashes, punching and kicking him, he pulls her into a close embrace — then she pulls away, and he realizes he has stabbed her. Aware she’s suffering, Jerry puts her out of her misery. Jerry returns home, pulls off his bloody clothes, and tries to get his bearings. Bosco tries to convince Jerry to go to the cops, which Jerry is ready to agree with until Mr. Whiskers points out the naïveté involved in that plan. Bosco tells Jerry it’s okay because it was an accident, but Mr. Whiskers speculates that Jerry is a born killer. Jerry goes to the police station and asks to speak with a Detective, WEINBACHER, with whom he has some sort of history. Jerry tells Weinbacher he screwed up and needs advice. He leads Weinbacher to his truck — and reveals the buck he hit. Weinbacher suggests Jerry clean it and save the meat before it spoils. Jerry takes the buck back home and carves him up. Mr. Whiskers urges Jerry to do something about Katie’s body before someone finds her.

The next day at work, Dennis panics Jerry by announcing he saw him on Friday. He means at the fair, then immediately asks if Jerry has seen Katie, who didn’t show up to work and won’t answer her phone. Jerry unconvincingly denies any knowledge. This, and another conversation with Mr. Whiskers, convinces Jerry to go to the woods and get Katie’s body. Just as he’s wrapping her body in plastic sheeting, Dr. West calls to remind Jerry of his appointment, which he’s currently missing. Jerry tells her he’ll be right over. Once again, Dr. West reminds Jerry of the importance of taking the medication. His prison release was conditional, so if he’s not doing everything he’s told, he could end up back in the slammer. After the appointment, Jerry returns to his truck, where Katie’s body waits. At home, he carves up her body. Bosco is sympathetic to the emotional difficulty Jerry is having, but Mr. Whiskers is more concerned about Jerry’s pills. He warns Jerry against taking them. As a counterpoint, Katie’s severed head — stored in the refrigerator — demands that Jerry take them. Jerry listens.

By morning, he has reached a transitional point — things are still sunny and optimistic, but Mr. Whiskers and Bosco no longer “talk.” Rather, the bark and meow in a combination of human and animal voices. While at work, the pills really kick in — the color drains out of the image, and the widescreen narrows to a square. The sound gets tinny and distant. Jerry’s dull-eyed and disinterested instead of raring to go. After work, he returns to his apartment, and for the first time we — and Jerry — get an “objective” view of it: it’s a complete sty, and that’s not just because it’s covered in deer and human blood. It’s full of insects, rotting food, etc. The “real” Mr. Whiskers is scrawny and poorly tended; Bosco has out-of-control mange and some sort of disgusting ocular disorder. Katie’s severed head rots in the fridge, gray and disgusting. The next morning, Jerry’s mirror image — still residing in the sparkling, colorful world we previously lived in with Jerry — demands he gets rid of the pills. Jerry flushes them. As the drugs wear off, the image and sound is restored, as is Jerry’s mood.

A group of birdwatchers discover Katie’s blood-soaked purse and a chunk of her intestine. Police are called. That night, Jerry and his pets watch an Animal Planet show emphasizing animal-on-animal murders. Mr. Whiskers encourages Jerry to kill someone else, but Jerry doesn’t want to. Bosco comes to Jerry’s defense, getting into a fight with Mr. Whiskers over whether or not Jerry should continue killing. Jerry gets lost in contemplation. The next morning, while Jerry eats breakfast, Katie’s severed head begs him for a friend. Jerry reluctantly agrees. At work, he cozies up to Lisa and asks her out. They have an after-work drink, where she grumbles about her divorce and brings up her cat. Jerry describes the difficulties of cat ownership, and Lisa agrees. She invites Jerry to her place to meet her cat. Jerry agrees. He drives along a rural, winding road and misses the turn to Lisa’s apartment. He says he has a surprise and takes her to an old, long-abandoned farm — the place where he grew up. He follows Lisa inside, carefully hiding his knife.

Inside his childhood home, Jerry sees himself as a teenager, showing his mother DENISE (40s, intense) and stepfather MACK (30s, brawny and violent) a sock puppet he believes is real. Mack tries to beat the delusion out of him, but teen Jerry won’t relent, so Mack tears the sock into ribbons. He snaps out of the memory, and Lisa sees he’s shaken. She’s sympathetic. They go upstairs, where Jerry flashes on his teen self with Denise once again — she’s in bed and looking worse for wear, terrified that “they” are coming for her, because she told “them” that the angels talk to her and they don’t believe her. Jerry says he believes her, because he hears them, too. Denise begs him for help as police cars arrive. Jerry kills her. In the present, Jerry tells Lisa that his mother died in this room. Lisa opens up, too: she had an abusive father and a methadone-addicted mother. Feeling truly sympathetic, Jerry drops the knife as they leave the room. They go back to Lisa’s apartment and make love — awkwardly yet tenderly.

The next day, both Jerry and Lisa are all smiles. When he gets home the next morning, Bosco’s thrilled to “smell” that Jerry got laid, but Mr. Whiskers is pissed — he left them alone all night without any food. Now that Jerry’s in love — really in love — he’s a little nervous about the things he’s done. Mr. Whiskers advises him to keep ignoring it. At work, Jerry and Lisa make out in the copy room and are interrupted by ALISON, another coworker. Jerry feels awkward, so he leaves. Alison thinks Jerry is cute. Lisa asks Alison to find Jerry’s address in the payroll information so she can surprise him. At home, Jerry intently watches a news report about the alleged “serial killer” who killed Katie. As a reporter interviews Weinbacher, he addresses Jerry directly. Jerry gripes that he doesn’t want to be a serial killer. Katie’s severed head asks to be let out of the refrigerator so they can discuss his problems. Jerry, Bosco, Mr. Whiskers, and Katie’s severed head all discuss Jerry’s killing and why he does bad things. Jerry quickly realizes that pets and severed heads don’t talk, which means they must be figments of his insane mind, so when he blames Mr. Whiskers for encouraging him to kill, he’s really blaming himself.

The doorbell rings, frightening them all. It’s Lisa, with a cake. Jerry quickly goes out on the landing to meet him, inadvertently locking himself out in his frantic effort to keep her from entering the apartment. Jerry thanks her for the cake and tells her he can’t let her in because it’s a mess. He climbs up to the skylight to let himself back inside. But Lisa, who frequently forgets her keys, is an expert lock picker — she gets into the apartment before he does, but Jerry’s fumbling on the roof so preoccupies her that she doesn’t notice the squalid living conditions or severed head (which Jerry covered with a windbreaker). When she finally takes in the scene, she’s horrified. Jerry comes into the apartment, horribly disappointed in himself. He wants to explain, but before he can, she bumps into the windbreaker, revealing Katie’s severed head. Lisa starts screaming, and Mr. Whiskers demands Jerry kill her. Lisa runs out into the woods. She darts down a ravine, but Jerry’s clumsy and falls — right on top of her, seriously injuring her. He strangles her to finish the job, then drags the body to his apartment and dismembers it.

Worried about Lisa after a coworker points her to a newspaper article revealing that Jerry was imprisoned for killing his mother, Alison drives out to the bowling alley, where she finds Lisa’s car. Jerry comes outside to meet her and smoothly talks his way out of it, by implying Lisa’s in his apartment and there in the middle of a lovemaking session. Alison is ready to go when Jerry turns back to his apartment, revealing the knife in his back pocket. She screams and runs into the field behind the bowling alley. Jerry follows, kills her, and dismembers her. Bosco informs Jerry that he no longer thinks Jerry is a good person. Jerry sinks Alison’s car into the river. DANA, Alison’s (male) coworker, comes to the bowling alley looking for her. Jerry’s gone, and he left the door unlocked. Dana takes one look inside, one whiff of the carnage, and vomits immediately.

Jerry gets another call from Dr. West — he’s late for yet another session. Jerry races over, soaking wet and looking disheveled. Jerry tells her Mr. Whiskers made him stop taking the drugs, and that he killed three people and feels terrible about it. West decides to call 911, but Jerry assaults her, smashing the phone and tying her up with packing tape. He drags her to his childhood farmhouse and complains about God — if God didn’t want him to kill, why would He force Jerry to have such a rotten childhood? He agrees to remove West’s gag if she can answer and put him on the “fast-track to mental health.” West says God is so complex, the human mind cannot understand Him or His motivations; in order to help them, He sent Jesus to show what He wanted in a way humans could understand. Jerry cites bowling a perfect game as another example of God showing perfection in a way humans can understand. Jerry asks why he hears voices. West says many people hear voices for many different reasons — he’s not alone, but the key is that he doesn’t have to act on the voices. This is a startling revelation for Jerry.

Dana reports Jerry’s crimes to the police. Jerry brings West back to his apartment, where Bosco greets her enthusiastically and Mr. Whiskers ridiculous her psychotherapy skills. West, who does not see the animals talking, is baffled and terrified. West begs to make a phone call — not to call the police, but so she won’t have to be alone. Jerry honors her request by bringing Katie’s severed head into the room to keep her company. West screams, prompting Katie’s severed head to scream. Mr. Whiskers and Bosco join. Jerry silences them — and notices the police emergency lights flashing outside the window. He grabs his pets and drags them into the bathroom, where he removes an access panel leading down into the bowling alley. Mr. Whiskers flees before Jerry can drop him in, so he and Bosco crawl down into the bowling alley. Meanwhile, West attempts to dial 911 when a SWAT team bursts into the apartment.

Down in the bowling alley, Jerry sees JESUS bowling a perfect game. Jesus tells Jerry he can be forgiven as long as he forgives himself — and others, like his stepfather. Jerry refuses, but Jesus points out that Mack tried the best he could, however imperfectly. If Jerry can’t forgive a man like that, how can he expect his murder victims to forgive him? Mack appears, still a dick, but Jerry finds it in his heart to forgive him. Mr. Whiskers reappears as Mack disappears. Jerry wants to know why Jesus put him through this life, but Jesus simply says it’s part of a bigger picture and that it was not a mistake. The SWAT team descends on the bowling alley.

As they try to enter, the police accidentally set the bowling alley on fire. As toxic smoke cuts off the air supply to Jerry’s brain, he seems to be dying — when suddenly everything turns into an MGM musical. The bowling alley is in mint condition, the smoke has turned into a “tasteful fog,” the SWAT team has turned into Vegas dancers (in dance-friendly variations on SWAT uniforms). Jerry finds Mack, Denise, Lisa, Katie, and Alison looking vibrant and healthy. Jesus appears, too, as do Mr. Whiskers and Bosco. Together, they dance “The Macarena.”

Notes

Remember last year, when I kept ranting about believability? Tons of scripts with great concepts, executed poorly because the writers had no interest in keeping their scripts grounded in believable behavior. The argument is pretty simple: you can offer up the weirdest movie ever made, and I’ll gladly buy into it as long as the characters — weird though they may be — have clear motivations for their weirdness, the weird things they do, and the weird circumstances in which they live. Do not confuse believability with realism. I don’t give a shit about realism. I just want to be able to both understand why characters do what they do, feel what they feel, and believe it. I think, even when movie fans have a hard time articulating why they disliked a movie, it all ultimately goes back to believability.

Lazier writers than me seem to feel like the issues with believability will work themselves out through a combination of acting and directing. While that might be true to some degree, isn’t it still just flat-out bad writing to ignore such things? Especially when you’re trying to sell it — if, as I argue, part of selling a project has as much to do with The Concept as “selling” readers on the story, characters, and universe you’ve created, doesn’t a lack of believability add up to poor salesmanship? Obviously not, considering the shitty scripts topping last year’s Black List were bought and paid for, but I’d still like to believe in a better world. Wouldn’t you?

This brings me to The Voices, a batshit-crazy story that nevertheless delivers pretty much everything I want as a screenwriter and lover of the written word. True, it has its share of problems — primarily, a somewhat repetitive first act and a running gag about “The Macarena” that starts to get a tad eye-rolling before bringing it back for a legitimately hilarious final moment — but it has subtle, well-crafted characters; a thoroughly engaging, frequently hilarious story; and the Jupiter-sized balls to ask tough questions and answer them in irreverent yet insightful ways.

I wasn’t sold on this script at first. Although Perry does a pretty nice job with the slow build of Jerry’s abundant mental problems, the repetitive first act is a little bit too cutesy and coy. Although the writing itself was significantly better right off the bet, I nevertheless found myself girding my loins for another Butter or The Beaver. However, the first act (aside from “The Macarena” joke going stale after approximately the second reference to it) retroactively becomes great in light of what happens afterward. Perry is less interested in The Concept than the complex, difficult character he has created in Jerry. After his murder of Katie and subsequent moral confusion, the script turns into a dark, fascinating portrait of a serial killer (even putting Henry to shame).

The second act complications don’t revolve around the expected (Jerry’s wacky attempts to hide the murder). Rather, Perry depicts Jerry’s struggle to be “good” despite having a severed head in his refrigerator that he thinks has the ability talk to him. With visually arresting detail, he contrasts Jerry’s bubbly-yet-insane personality with the drab, leveled-off medicated Jerry. Equally fascinating is Jerry’s flashback-laden trip to the family farm. I’ll give you that heading out to the family farm might be a sort of cheap plot device in order to further develop Jerry’s character, but it works because (a) Perry sets up Jerry as the sort of dumbass who would come up with the plan to lure someone to a place associated with him and him alone in order to commit a murder, (b) what we’re shown of Jerry’s past is as disturbing as it is fascinating, and (c) it allows Lisa to make an emotional connection with him, further enhancing both of their characters and sending the story down yet another (mostly) unexpected road.

When things really go off the rails in the third act, the story is already humming along so well that it’s easy to ignore Alison and Dana’s lack of development or the weird pseudo-plot hole with Detective Weinbacher. (Seriously: in such a small town, with one well-known semi-psychotic killer who has confessed to his court-appointed shrink to taking his meds inconsistently, he never turns up as a suspect? Why even have Weinbacher in the story? Why not just paint it as an inept county sheriff’s department who couldn’t solve a murder if the killer confessed?) Things get really interesting when Jerry starts debating with Dr. West (and his pets) about the nature of God, why He would sentence Jerry to such a rotten life, and the ultimate question: does a person have to listen to that voice, whether it’s the voice of crippling self-doubt or an extremely moral conscience or pets telling you to kill people? Does ignoring that voice lead to a better life, or does it lead to worse behavior? Perry supposes it depends on the person, and I don’t disagree.

Amid all these questions comes a sequence that’s sure to generate controversy: although it’s evidently a hallucination induced by toxic chemicals and oxygen deprivation, Jesus appears with a bit of tough love that ultimately leads to forgiveness. It’s a gamble, and the full-on absurdity of all the dead players gathering with Jesus and Vegas dancer SWAT officers is a risky ending that, in a weaker script, would have sent me on a rant to end all rants — but here, it works exceptionally well. As Perry has written it, this is the only way to end the story, and it’s remarkably effective (especially in its portrayal of Jesus as a benevolent and forgiving sort — a lot of religious retards seem to forget that part).

So the next time you see me bitching about believability — especially in comedies — just think about The Voices and remind yourself, “This is what Stan’s talking about. He doesn’t just hate everything because he’s a bitter, jealous troll. He’s a bitter, jealous troll because everything’s shit but The Voices, yet all the shit still sells while he toils in obscurity describing memories of beating off.”

The Bottom Line

Here’s all The Voices needs to go from “pretty fucking great” to “insty-classic”: fewer “Macarena” jokes early on (less is more!), either an emphasis or de-emphasis (it’s up to Perry) of Weinbacher, and a production team willing to go ahead with a challenging, intelligent script. No matter how tiny or seemingly insignificant, any attempts to dumb it down or make Jerry “more relatable” (having both Lisa and Katie’s deaths as “mercy killings” is about as “nice” as he should get) will fuck it up. He’s plenty empathetic, despite his insanity, because Perry imbues the character with remarkable depth. Do we really need to “relate” to him in the sense that his killings are justified or he’s a friendly guy who’s fingered for murders he didn’t commit? It concerns me deeply that Hollywood will fuck this up, because this is too good a script to be ruined by focus groups or retarded executives who attempt to justify their existence by giving story notes. I’m usually not that against The Machine, but this is one of those cases where the development process is destined to fuck a script up rather than improving it.

Posted by Stan at 5:13 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 17, 2009

Black List Script #4: Prisoners by Aaron Guzikowski

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Comically Long Logline (provided by The Black List): “After his six-year-old daughter and her friend are kidnapped, a small town carpenter butts heads with a young, brash detective in charge of the investigation. Feeling failed by the law, he captures the man he believes responsible, holding him captive in a desperate attempt to find out what he did with the girls, whom he’s convinced are still alive. But the further he’s forced to go to get the man to confess, the closer he comes to losing his soul.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

KELLER DOVER (37, a well-built carpenter) takes his son, RALPH (15), hunting. Ralph bags his first deer. They drive back home, to a sleepy blue-collar town in Massachusetts. Along the way, they listen to the Bible on cassette and Keller explains the importance of preparation for whatever’s on the horizon. When Ralph talks about buying a used car, Keller gripes about money. Ralph asks why Keller doesn’t fix up Keller’s father’s old apartment house and rent it out. Keller says it’d cost too much to fix. Keller and Ralph arrive at home, where wife GRACE and daughter ANNA (6) wait. They go across the street to the home of their friends/neighbors, the Birches (FRANKLIN, 36 and soft-spoken; NANCY, 32 and tough; and daughters ELIZA, 15, and JOY, 7). The women prepare the deer while the kids go outside, walking around together. Ralph and Eliza flirt, ignoring Joy and Anna. The younger girls see an old, disgusting RV parked in front of an empty house and start playing around it. Ralph and Eliza pull the girls away; nobody notices a shadow lurking inside.

After a nice Thanksgiving meal, Anna asks Grace if she can take Joy back to their house to look for her long lost red whistle. Grace okays it, but only if Ralph and Eliza go with. However, Anna and Joy don’t ask Ralph and Eliza. Before long, Grace realizes she can’t find the girls. Keller goes back to the Dover house, but they’re gone. Both families wander around the neighborhood in search of the girls. They find nothing, but Ralph realizes the RV is now gone. Meanwhile, DETECTIVE LOKI (33) gets an Amber Alert call — the RV was spotted at a nearby rest stop. Loki and other police get to the RV and arrest ALEX JONES (34, disheveled). Loki doesn’t get any answers from Jones, who is spaced-out and seems more like a 10-year-old than an adult. He goes to Jones’s aunt HOLLY’s house, which is where Jones usually parks his RV. He pokes around but finds nothing. Holly offers to sell him her husband’s Trans Am. She explains that her husband disappeared five years ago, after a fight. She takes care of Jones because his parents died in a car accident when he was six. Forensics examines the RV and finds nothing. Keller, Franklin, and their families form search parties to try to find the girls.

Loki drops by to explain to the Dovers where he’s at with the case. Grace is optimistic — legend has it that Loki has solved every case he’s worked — but Keller is frustrated when he finds out they have to let Jones go. Loki promises to keep him in custody, but his captain, O’MALLEY, is having none of it. They have nothing to charge Jones with, so they have to let him go. Loki decides to interview local sex offenders. At St. Ann’s Church, FATHER DUNN — a convicted child molester — lets Loki search the premises. Loki notices a refrigerator has been moved, positioned in front of the door. He pulls it out of the way. Inside the door is a basement with no stairs leading into it. An old corpse with a maze-like pendant hanging around his neck is tied to a chair, surrounded by statues of saints. Loki immediately arrests Dunn, who claims he doesn’t know who the man was. He says the man came to the church years ago, bragging that he’d killed 16 children and intended to kill more. Dunn felt the only solution was to kill the man.

The next morning, Keller is infuriated when he hears on the radio that Jones is being released. He goes to the police station as Jones is being released and confronts him. Under the din of reporters, Jones whispers, “They didn’t cry. Not until I left them.” Keller takes this to O’Malley, but neither he nor Loki exactly believe Keller. Loki says he’ll talk to him, which isn’t good enough for Keller, but it’ll have to do. Jones clams up when Loki talks to him, seeming confused and disoriented. Loki gives Keller the bad news. After being confronted with Grace’s anger and Ralph’s sadness, Keller decides to take matters into his own hands. He follows Jones, who’s walking his dog, and when he hears Jones whispering “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” — the very song the girls had been singing the night they disappeared — Keller threatens Jones at gunpoint. The dog wanders off.

Keller picks up Franklin, who has been instructed to pack a change of clothes. Franklin wants to know why, so Keller shows him: he has Jones chained up in the abandoned apartment house he conveniently owns. Franklin’s horrified, but Keller reminds him that this animal has their daughters, who may still be alive. Meanwhile, Loki discovers the church corpse is still unidentified, and the priest is sticking to his story. He finds a newspaper article dated 1982, describing a boy who went missing — who happened to live at the address of the empty house in front of which the RV was parked. He visits the Milland family, who moved a few years ago, after neighbors kept complaining about the matriarch going after their children. They’re cooperative, but it’s evident that the disappearance of young Eddie has destroyed MRS. MILLAND. Her adult children, KIM (37) and SCOTT (35), show Loki around. Scott explains more about the incidents that drove them to move — it’s all pretty innocent. Mrs. Milland is a drunk who can’t get over her son’s disappearance.

After a night of interrogating Jones, Keller and Franklin are surprised by how disoriented he remains. He won’t say a word. Keller starts beating on him, but it has no effect. As he attends a candlelight vigil, the emotional toll of keeping Jones locked up catches up with Franklin, who behaves strangely. In the crowd, Eliza notices someone leering at the Birches. The following day, Holly’s dog turns up dead, hit by a car. This leads Loki to find out Jones has been missing and was last seen taking the dog for a walk. Loki interviews a department store clerk with a tip. She describes a man similar to the one leering at the vigil and says he keeps buying kids’ clothes, all different sizes, and was recently fondling child-sized mannequins. Meanwhile, Franklin ends up spilling everything to Nancy. They go to the apartment, where Nancy demands to see Jones. She unties him and shows him drawings from Joy. Jones attacks her, begging for help. Keller and Franklin struggle to subdue him.

Keller decides to build a creepy cell he built to house Jones, hidden behind a false wooden wall. Their only connection to him is through a PVC pipe. Keller shows Franklin and Nancy the contraption, and they’re horrified. They try to pry the wood away when Jones grabs at Franklin. Instead, he and Nancy leave. Keller boards him back up. Later that night, a mysterious intruder moves through the Birch house (where Franklin and Nancy are discussing whether or not to call the police on Keller — ultimately, they decide not to). They hear noises and fear Eliza’s missing — but she’s not, and the intruder leaves before anyone really knows he was there. He moves on to the Dovers’ house, where Grace — who’s developed a Xanax-popping habit in the wake of Anna’s disappearance — finds a window hanging open and becomes convinced Anna has come back. Ralph makes her call the police. Loki takes notes. Grace shows him the basement, and Loki’s disturbed by the scope of the emergency provisions. He also notices a half-used bag of lye, at which point he becomes a little disconcerted that Keller isn’t around. Loki begins following Keller, but Keller catches on to him and drives in circles until he reaches a liquor store. He confronts Loki, who demands to know what he’s been up to. Keller makes a convincing case that he’s been drinking and driving around in circles, and it’s too embarrassing to share with Grace, so he’s convinced her that he’s helping with search efforts.

Inspired by his trip to the liquor store, Keller gets bombed and has a dream that Anna found her red whistle — at the bottom of their neighbors’ pool. Keller leaps out of bed and storms to the home of the BREWERS. They’re baffled by him leaping into their semi-frozen pool in the dead of winter. He finds nothing at the bottom. Loki finds an article about Keller’s dad, who committed suicide in the old apartment building. He takes a drive out there and realizes somebody’s inside. He tries to get in, but Keller hears him. Just before Loki can enter and find out what’s really going on, Keller intercepts him on the first floor landing, feigning a hangover. Loki grills him about Alex Jones and the survivalist gear in the basement, but Keller denies everything. Before Loki can get too thorough, he gets a call from the department store clerk — the guy came back, and this time she got plate numbers. Loki tracks them to a man named BOB TAYLOR. Bob wants so much to keep Loki out of the house that he slams the door hard enough to break Loki’s foot. Loki pursues Bob through the house, where there are mazes all over the place. He finds a small room containing 16 steamer trunks. He breaks one of the locks and finds a bunch of bloody kids’ clothes — and snakes. Same deal with all ther other trunks — except the last one, which has a homemade maze book.

Loki calls Keller down to the station. He says that, while Bob confessed and the Birches positively identified some of Joy’s clothes, they didn’t find any bodies. Keller flips out on Loki, accusing him of wasting time stalking Keller instead of finding Anna’s kidnapper. Keller goes home, where he finds Ralph has learned everything from Eliza. Keller insists that Anna is still out there, and he’s going to find her. Bob draws Loki a map to the bodies, but it’s an impenetrable maze. Pissed, Loki starts beating on him. Uniformed officers try to pull him off, and Bob gets one of their guns. Rather than shooting any of them, he kills himself. Nancy tries to convince Keller to end his torment of Jones. She gives him some syringes she uses at her animal clinic to euthanize animals. Alone, Keller contemplates it. Just as he’s about to put Jones out of his misery, Jones whispers that “they’re in the maze.” Keller demands to know what that means, but Jones clams up again.

Keller visits Holly Jones. He claims that he feels bad — partly responsible for Jones “disappearing,” and she invites him in. He subtly lays out clues, testing Holly’s reactions. More importantly, he’s looking for a weakness to get to Jones, and she reveals one: snakes. Before he leaves, Keller notices a newspaper article reporting Bob’s suicide. He’s pissed. Meanwhile, nobody at the police station can figure out the maze — until Loki realizes the pendant on the church corpse was the exact same pattern. Forensics tells Loki all the blood at Bob’s house was from a pig, all the clothes (except those identified by the Dovers and Birches) were brand new, and that more evidence they uncovered suggests Bob was oddly “playacting,” based on a book written by an ex-FBI agent. Forensics also matches up the map to a supposedly unsolvable maze in the agent’s book.

Friction in both the Birch and Dover households lead both Ralph and Eliza to get away from their families for a little while. They run into Loki, creeping around outside the Dover house. He’s found footprints and one of Anna’s socks — evidence of Bob being the “intruder” not-quite-seen earlier. At the apartment house, Keller torments Jones by sliding live snakes he bought at a pet store into the PVC pipe. Terrified, Jones tries to claw his way out and starts saying something. Keller stops his torment and listens, but Jones gives no relevant information and pretty much blanks out.

Meanwhile, inside a mystery room, Joy and Anna are still alive. They’re being drugged and kept by someone seen only in silhouette, forced to solve a variation on the homemade maze book seen in Bob’s home. As the Keeper comes in to check on them, they pretend to be asleep — and they run out past her. They hear the Keeper following them, and as Anna lags behind, Joy realizes she’s disappeared. Undaunted, Joy keeps running until she reaches a busy street, where she’s found. Grace hears the news and yells for Keller and Ralph (neither of whom are home) before storming out of the house, where Keller is arriving. She explains what happened and said Joy is at the hospital. They go down there, and Loki lets them through the police cordon. Grace demands to speak to Joy immediately, but she’s too drugged to be coherent. Keller starts shouting at her, demanding to know where she was being held, when Joy stops her cold by saying, “You were there.” Keller rushes off — to Holly’s house.

Still claiming to feel bad about everything, Keller offers to do any home improvements Holly wants. She invites him into the house — and promptly holds a gun on him. She forces him to drink the same drugged grape-aid she gave to the girls and leads him out to the backyard. As she leads him to the load Trans Am, Holly unspools the entire story: she and her husband kidnapped Alex — he was their first — and they did it not so much to kill as to “declare war on God” — the disappearances shatter the faith of those who are taken as well as everyone their lives touched. They also kidnapped Bob, which she claims to have forgotten about until reading about him in the paper. She complains that she’s had to slow down since her husband’s disappearance. Alex had nothing to do with kidnapping them — he just wanted to give them a ride. Holly forces Keller into the car, has him drive a few feet forward, which reveals a deep, grave-like hole in the ground, filled with children’s skeletons and snakes. She forces Keller into the hole by shooting him in the thigh. Keller sees Anna’s red whistle in the hole with him. Holly covers the hole, then backs the Trans Am over it again.

Ralph and Eliza go to the apartment house. When they find broken syringes and hear noises, Ralph assumes it’s a drug addict and goes in deeper to shoo him away. They find the cell, hear the movement inside, and see a picture of Anna and Joy. They leap to the conclusion that this is where the girls are being kept and immediately dial 911 — but they pull away the wood and discover Jones. Holly watches a news report unraveling Keller’s role in imprisoning Jones, and she’s livid. O’Malley demands that Loki notify Holly of what happened before he makes any effort to find Keller.

As Loki arrives at Holly’s house, Holly readies to finish off Anna while Keller figures out a way out of the hole. Keller rushes into the back entrance of the house and finds Anna — but it’s all a drug-induced hallucination. He’s never left the hole. Loki moves through the house, seeing a photo of Holly’s husband, who wears the same maze pendant as the church corpse. Loki confronts Holly, but not before she injects Anna with Keller’s own syringes. Loki and Holly fire at the same time; he kills her, but ends up with a missing eye. Nevertheless, Loki grabs Anna and drives her frantically to the emergency room. Some time later, Anna — who was saved thanks to Loki’s courage — and Grace greet Loki in his hospital bed. They share a moment of silent connection. Loki looks at a newspaper that announces Eddie Milland (a.k.a. Alex Jones) has finally been reunited with his family — but Keller remains missing. Anna has a new red whistle. Grace dismisses her so she and Loki can talk. She insists she hasn’t heard from Keller. Loki claims he believes her. Grace tells him, whether Keller’s found and sent to prison or not, she believes he’s a good man.

Some time late, a bandaged, cane-carrying Loki surveys the crime scene at Holly’s house. The Trans Am has been gutted but not moved. The lab techs say the frozen ground will slow their progress. The techs leave for the night, but Loki stays behind to look around. In the silence, he eventually hears something coming from the Trans Am, a noise — a whistle. Faintly, but it’s real. Loki rushes in the direction of the Trans Am.

Notes

But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poniard just as she flatted on the top note of the “Bell Song” from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingénue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flatfeet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.
     —Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

As Mr. Chandler argued in his 1944 essay, the chief problem with the popular British whodunits of the day came as a direct result of focusing on the what and the how and not the gut-wrenching why — which, if the authors addressed it at all, usually ended up a half-assed afterthought. He then observes that Dashiell Hammett led a wave of hardboiled pioneers who “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

Granted, murder doesn’t drive the mystery in Prisoners (it’s more of an unfortunate byproduct), but it contains the same sort of structuring that’s predicated entirely on convoluted plotting instead of why people do the things they do. “We’re Satanists who want people to lose faith in God” simply isn’t good enough, even when Guzikowski injects a lot of haughty, ill-fitting religious symbolism into the script. It reminded me a little of Law-Abiding Citizen, which is most certainly not a compliment, in the way it layered the rich sauce of pretension over a fairly schlocky locked-room procedural that would have fared much better had Guzikowski simply embraced the ridiculousness and gone ahead full bore.

Because, at the end of the day, it makes no real effort to define these characters as anything beyond constructs of a dense plot. Every moment in the script feels like a frustrating, arm’s-length calculation designed to further the plot without doing much to make the characters feel like real people doing things for believable reasons. The script is just a series of “seeming” red herrings that add up to a goofy denouement. The corpse at the church and the over-the-top weirdness of Bob seem to be nothing but dead ends, yet Roger Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters (not to mention my Law of Economy of Goofy Procedural Storylines) tell us well in advance that this will all mean something. Somehow, I managed to shake myself loose from the edge of my seat and find myself annoyed that the more I learned about the plot, the less I seemed to know (or care) about the characters involved in the plot.

What could have been a fractured morality tale in the vein of Gone Baby Gone ends up a cheap, pulpy thriller that, ironically, gives pulp detective novels a bad name. As I mentioned, Guzikowski ladles a soupçon of religious symbolism onto this script, but it never quite adds up to more than vaguely creepy moments and bland, ineffectual character traits. So Keller’s fond of listening to the Bible on tape. Is this supposed to imply some sort of moral righteousness that allows him to do vile things to Jones while Franklin cowers? If so, that never comes through as a motivating factor in anything Keller does. It’s really just a conclusion I’m jumping to in order to give it a semblance of meaning. Otherwise, I’d just have to say it’s another plot device — gotta show the Dovers are Christians so audiences don’t assume they’re Satanists, which would negate Holly’s master plan. I don’t want to say that. Please don’t make that be the real explanation. For the love of God…so to speak.

In a script where a detective is given the laughably unsubtle name “Loki” (I’m surprised the captain wasn’t named Odin) and Keller is a carpenter in the world’s laziest homage to Jesus, it’s hard to accept that the proliferation of Christian-themed moments can simply exist to serve the plot. Then again, I can’t exactly figure out how a Norse trickster god figures into this story in any symbolic or literal way, so maybe Keller’s just a carpenter for the plot-based reason that he has to be good at building stuff ‘cause eventually he builds a prison cell. And while I’m bagging on the half-assed attempts at “deep” symbolism, I give Guzikowski some points for not using “chess” as the world’s laziest metaphor for the thrilling game of cat-and-mouse (like the aforementioned Law-Abiding Citizen, among thousands of others). However, I deduct points for choosing a maze motif, which may not be as popular but is equally cheap.

Ignoring the characters and their general lack of humanity for a second, let’s focus on the story. Prisoners has a tight plot in a theoretical way — everything adds up in the end, Guzikowski doesn’t ignore a single loose end, and the script moves from one setpiece to another with relative ease. But when the relative ease comes from the fact that this feels less like a tightly plotted story than a series of loosely connected “cool moments” in a movie, the end result is an empty, frustrating experience — and that, my friends, all comes back to the characters. Without anything to hang our hats on, how can anyone expect us to go along for the ride?

To recap: how does any single character in this script feel about the things that are happening at any given time? Other than, let’s say, “confused and/or angry”? Guzikowski answers that question by largely ignoring anyone other than Keller and Loki, but he also gives these two characters the short shrift. “I have to find my daughter”/”I’m a master detective”/”Get off my plane!” — it’s all so trite, and the lack of any real depth on these two characters in particular (and the menagerie of supporting players in general) takes a moderately interesting concept and flushes it down the toilet. When Holly makes her eye-rolling, Bond-villain confession, what little goodwill anyone has left for this story will drain out completely.

The Bottom Line

In other words, this is the Black List I remembered. At the risk of sounding like a total prick, I don’t see much hope for this creatively without abandoning the cheesy “twisty thriller” elements and grounding everything in something resembling believability. To paraphrase Mr. Chandler, Guzikowski needs to give kidnapping back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons. Otherwise, it’s going to remain like that crappy Poirot story where the guy has already committed a murder and rigs a room so that furniture will crash and a crazy pig-noise toy will imitate the sound of a scream to create the impression that the murder actually occurred when he was not on the premises. That’s not a good thing, guys. Not at all.

Posted by Stan at 5:13 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | Reviews

December 18, 2009

Black List Script #5: Cedar Rapids by Phil Johnston

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Comically Long Logline (provided by The Black List): “After his co-worker dies from auto-erotic asphyxiation, an emotionally stunted insurance salesman from small town Wisconsin takes the man’s place at the division insurance convention in Iowa City, IA, only to find himself coming out of his shell as he bonds with his fellow conventioneers and gradually uncovers a money laundering scheme involving his employer.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Mild-mannered (some might say too mild-mannered) insurance salesman TIM LIPPE (mid-30s) lives in the shadow of friend and coworker ROGER LEMKE — a well-respected family man who is the face of Northlands Insurance, a company serving northern Wisconsin. Tim’s good at his job, but he can’t quite get anyone to recognize that — including his depressed middle-aged fiancée, MILLIE, whom he showers with regular gifts (little trinkets like Beanie Babies) despite her evident lack of interest in the relationship. When Roger turns up dead in some sort of sex game involving autoerotic asphyxiation and lederhosen, Northlands founder BILL KROGSTAD (60s) has only Tim to turn to — because Bill has to attend his daughter’s wedding, he needs a representative to go down to the AMSI convention in Cedar Rapids, win a “Two Diamonds” award (their fourth in as many years) in order to restore the company’s good name. Why? Because Bill wants to retire, and he’d intended to sell Roger the company, but the value has tumbled in light of Roger’s unwholesome death. Winning another Two Diamonds will allow Bill to sell the company for enough to retire on. Tim is a little nervous about this proposition — he’s never been out of the state — but when lays a guilt trip about hiring him at 16 and priming him for a career that hasn’t achieved its full potential, Tim agrees to go.

At 6 a.m. on the day of the trip, Tim goes to Millie’s house to say goodbye and is surprised to find WADE — a more age-appropriate suitor — with her. They claim he’s there because his cable went out and he wants to watch ESPN’s morning program, but it’s evident that they’re having an affair. Millie treats Tim more like a son than a lover, which is appropriate since she was both a middle school teacher and Tim’s deceased mother’s best friend. At the airport, Bill shows up to give Tim a thick guidebook that will help him navigate the convention — who to talk to, who to avoid, what to see, etc. Tim notices one name under “avoid” — Dean Ziegler. Bill says he tried to poach one of Roger’s clients immediately after his death. Bill encourages Tim to stick with the roommate Bill paired him with. On the plane, Tim is incredibly chatty and friendly. It’s his first plane trip. At first, he annoys his seatmate, but by the time they arrive in Cedar Rapids, Tim has made a friend and new client.

After taking in the breathtaking Cedar Rapids skyline, Tim takes a cab to the Holidome. On his way inside, a somewhat skanky young woman, BREE, tries to bum a cigarette from Tim, but he doesn’t smoke and warns her to do the same in order to keep her premiums down. The desk clerk asks Tim for a credit card, but Tim prefers to pay with traveler’s cheques — they’re insured. The desk clerk insists on seeing a credit card, just to verify his legitimacy. Wary, Tim allows it. On the way to his room, Tim brags to Millie about the classy hotel on his cell phone. Tim fumbles with the keycard at his room and is surprised when an African-American man opens the door. This is RONALD WILKES, his nerdy roommate. Tim is initially terrified, but once Ronald introduces himself, he calms down and mistakes Ronald for a hip, cool brother man. Tim marvels at the junior suite, but his happiness is short-lived — budget cuts have forced them to take on a third roommate, DEAN ZIEGLER (mid-40s). He’s foul-mouthed and obnoxious, and neither Tim nor Ronald like him. They excuse themselves to watch the opening remarks of the AMSI president, ORIN HELGESSON (late 60s), who wants to “build a bridge to the 22nd century” through e-commerce.

Tim starts panicking when he learns 15 agencies are competing for the Two Diamonds, including Ronald and “shark” MIKE PYLE, who owns the largest Allstate agency in the upper Midwest. He calls Millie for encouragement, but Wade picks up the phone. He goes to the hotel gym to work out, where a sarcastic conventioner (JOAN) teases him. She’s a little flirty, but she can’t help taking advantage of Tim’s gullibility to amuse herself. In the gym’s showers, Tim runs into Orin, who passes along condolences about Roger and tells Tim somebody has started a petition to rescind their previous Two Diamonds awards, in light of Roger’s sordid personal life. He invites Tim to stop by his suite at any time. Tim goes to a bar where all the conventioners are supposed to meet. Dean calls him over to the bar. He tries to convince Tim that Orin wants to buy his vote for president of AMSI. Ronald shows up, and Dean wonders why the two of them aren’t interested in getting any tail. Just as Tim denies he’d ever get involved with a woman other than Millie, Joan arrives. Everyone starts drinking except Tim (who drinks straight grenadine because of his ignorance), and the drunker Joan gets, the more she flirts with Tim. Nervous, Tim excuses himself, bumping into Bree on his way out.

Tim calls Millie for reassurance — again, she treats him like a child while she relaxes with Wade. Tim practices his big presentation while sitting on the toilet. Dean bursts in, insisting they need to speak in private. Disgusted by the foul stench, Dean says he’ll meet him in the stairwell. When Tim joins Dean on the stairwell, he gets an earful about the petition and Mike Pyle being behind it all. Tim confronts Dean about trying to poach Roger’s client. Dean explains that was a misunderstanding — she called him, just so she could exploit the situation to get a lower rate through Northlands. Surprised by how much sense that makes, Tim hears out Dean’s conspiracy theory that Mike wants to drive the price down as low as possible so he can buy it on the cheap. Further, Dean believes Orin’s in on it, though he doesn’t know why.

The next day, Tim gets an angry call from Bill, who’s on his way to his daughter’s wedding. Orin called Bill to say Tim has been seen with Dean. He threatens to detour to Cedar Rapids, but his wife won’t let him. Instead, Bill simply says Tim cannot let Bill’s company collapse, so he needs to get on the right track. Tim goes out to get some air and finds Joan, smoking. He opens up to her about everything, and she encourages him to break away from Bill. Tim explains the story of how he got involved in insurance: his father was killed in a sawmill accident, and Bill was the one who made sure that Tim and his mother were taken care of. Tim has always seen Bill as a hero, and he sees insurance as a noble calling. She half-jokingly calls him a hero for making selling insurance sound cool. Back at the hotel, Tim runs into Orin, Ronald, and Dean. Dean’s friendly in his brash way, but Tim coldly tells Dean to leave him alone. He goes with Ronald and Joan to Mike Pyle’s seminar. He’s an engaging, vibrant speaker. Halfway through the seminar, he’s called out with an emergency phone call. Dean, doing a horrible and stereotypically offensive Chinese accent, informs Tim that Millie has been killed in an accident. Tim’s pissed when he realizes it’s just Dean.

Tim calls Millie for reassurance, but she’s preoccupied with her dog and practically hangs up with him. Frustrated, Tim decides to sign up for an insurance scavenger hunt — and registers Joan as his partner. He awkwardly tells Joan about this, and she’s surprisingly excited about it. Orin leads the scavenger hunt, telling him they’ll be given a series of clues that lead to additional clues, which will ultimately lead to a physical challenge that will determine the winner. Together, Tim and Joan find the first clue easily, thanks to Tim collecting a lot of Cedar Rapids trivia prior to his trip. The scavenger hunt itself is a tourist trip through Cedar Rapids: the Czech district, a dairy farm, a competitive eating “pork shrine,” etc. They’re the first to reach the meeting place for the physical challenge, “Silo Adventure Park,” featuring several ice-covered silos. Orin presents the physical challenge: whoever’s the first to scale an ice silo wins. Joan and Tim argue about who should do the climbing. Despite his fear of heights, Tim ends up doing it… But the task is so difficult, none of them can get more than a few feet off the ground. After a few hours, Orin calls it, making Tim and Joan the default winners because they reached Silo Adventure Park earliest. They’re presented with a $75 gift card for the Westdale Mall.

On the way to the mall with Joan, Tim discovers 11 missed calls from Millie. He calls her back, and she’s panic-stricken about his eight-hour disappearance. Tim gets annoyed by her treating him like a child. He takes Joan to the Olive Garden, which is painted ironically as a sort of vaguely romantic Italian restaurant. Joan convinces Tim to drink actual alcohol — a cream sherry, which he’s delighted to report does taste like communion wine. Joan asks about his hopes and dreams. After initially saying he’d like to take over for Bill, Tim settles on a desire to have a family. Joan jokingly says he can have her kids. Tim is floored by the fact that she’s married with two kids. She gives a sob-story about her crappy life and proclaims the ASMI convention her “fantasy-land” — for a few days, she can be who she wants to be instead of who she is. Tim is baffled.

They go back to the hotel, where Joan talks Tim into one more nightcap at the bar. One nightcap turns into several, and before long they’re smashed, and so is Dean. Even Ronald stays too long, but when they decide to break into the closed pool area, he says his goodbyes. Joan skinny-dips, and Tim loses control — they start making out while Dean leers, but it’s interrupted by a disgusted Orin, who threatens to call security. They flee. Tim goes back to Joan’s room, laughing, and make love. Afterward, Tim starts out very clingy but quickly falls asleep. The next morning, a seemingly different Joan talks on the phone with her kids and her husband — very serious, focused, and maternal. Tim wakes to find Joan looking at his Two Diamonds proposal. She tells him it’s solid, and he gives most of the credit to Roger. Joan tells Tim that she and Roger were together. Tim’s shocked and a little disgusted — and disappointed that, once again, he’s in the shadow of Roger. Joan tells him that he’s a better person than Roger ever was. Tim admits to being confused, now that he’s come to Cedar Rapids and fallen in love. Joan’s a little alarmed. She reaffirms her “what happens in C.R. Stays in C.R.” mantra and says this can’t go any further.

Tim apologizes to Ronald for his behavior, and while Ronald claims to not care, he’s exceedingly disappointed in Tim. He’s not the only one: Bill calls, livid after hearing from Orin about Tim’s tryst in the pool, which violates the ASMI morality clause and could lose them this year’s Two Diamonds and the previous years’, retroactively. Tim freaks out — everything’s falling apart. Dean has a heart-to-heart with Tim, using an example from his own disturbing life. Bottom line: if this shit is really important to Tim, he’ll step up and find a way to redeem himself. Tim vows to do just that — by begging to stay in the Two Diamond competition. Orin takes Tim up to his suite and explains this is a scam by Mike Pyle — just as Dean said. He tears apart Mike’s petition and talks to Tim about a plan he and Roger worked up to take their companies into the new millennium. Rather than printing ASMI newsletters, they’re saving $4000/year putting them online. Only Orin and Roger have been funneling the money into a secret PayPal account, which he doesn’t know how to use (Roger was the brains of the operation). Orin tells Tim he’ll ensure Northlands gets their Two Diamond rating as long as Tim plays ball with him. Tim agrees to it.

Feeling guilty about his compliance, Tim can’t bear to look at Ronald, Dean, or anyone else at the conference. He escapes to the Applebee’s across the street, where he gets drunk on cream sherrys. Before long, he excuses himself to the bathroom, where he finds Bree screwing a john in one of the toilet stalls. Tim reintroduces himself, offering her a butterscotch. She tells Tim he needs to relax and asks if he has any money. Tim tells her he has $90 and some traveler’s cheques. She asks him for $100 so they can party. He gives it up. Meanwhile, Orin continues to scheme with Mike to broker the sale of Bill’s company. He assures Mike that he’ll only need to keep the clients — not the employees or Northlands office. Orin calls Bill to tell him the deal’s set. Meanwhile, Ronald, Dean, and Joan watch the keynote speech and the lame entertainment (an incongruous Jack Nicholson impersonator). Dean has just learned of Mike Pyle’s evil plan. When he realizes Tim’s nowhere to be found, Dean tries to convince the others to help him look. They’re not interested.

Tim rides with Bree and UNCLE KEN (40s, violent, Applebee’s employee). Bree hands him a meth pipe, which Tim inhales, assuming it’s marijuana. It energizes him in the worst possible ways. They arrive at Ken’s farmhouse, full of bikers and speed freaks, where Tim has a drug-fueled freak out — and he loves it! Meanwhile, a waitress at Applebee’s calls Dean on Tim’s phone, which he left at the restaurant. Dean, Ronald, and Joan go to Applebee’s, where the waitress tells them Tim left with Ken, whom she labels a dope dealer who’s “real different.” She tells them where Ken’s farmhouse is. Meanwhile, in a speedy stupor, Tim opens up to Bree about his sheltered life, how his mother overprotected after his father died. Bree convinces him he’s not living his own life, and he needs to break free. She also offers him anal. Before he can take her up on it or run and hide, Uncle Ken bursts in, looking unhappy.

Dean, Ronald, and Joan arrive at the farmhouse. They wade through the circus of freaks until they find Uncle Ken pounding the shit out of Tim (because he paid for the meth using traceable traveler’s cheques, which Tim protests are 100% insured). Ronald, falling back on his community theatre training and love of The Wire, portrays an effective badass without having to do anything legitimately tough. Ken is afraid enough to let Tim go. They return to the suite, where Tim is bummed out by the details of Mike and Bill’s deal. He’s also a little too drugged out to properly process the information, so Joan maternally puts him to bed. Later that night, Tim is awake again. He gets into Orin’s suite and attacks the man. In the wee hours of the morning, Tim deposits a bound and gagged Orin in the middle of a hog farm. He explains that the Two Diamonds mean something to the people at the convention, so he’ll come back for Orin after a legitimate winner is selected. On his way back to the Holidome, Tim starts cold-calling all of his clients.

Tim arrives back at the hotel just in time to give his presentation — despite the fact that he’s disheveled and covered in mud and hog shit. Just as Bill arrives in Cedar Rapids to seal the deal with Mike, Tim divulges everything — the entire scam — to the audience, then explains that insurance is about love — love for clients and a legitimate desire to help them, rather than selling them down the river to the highest (or lowest) bidder. To that end, Tim has called every one of his clients, informed them of the impending sale, and poached them for his own, independent insurance agency — meaning Mike’s buying a business that’s just lost half its client base. Just as that sinks in, Orin leads police into the banquet hall and has Tim arrested. Before he’s led out, Tim tosses a piece of paper to Dean.

In a holding cell, Tim sells an enormous black man insurance. The police release Tim from jail, and Dean waits for him outside. He explains that Orin was more than willing to drop the charges in exchange for Dean not revealing his scam — the piece of paper was Orin’s PayPal account information. Tim, Dean, Ronald (winner of the Two Diamond award), and Joan ride together to the airport. The three men make plans to meet at a cabin in Canada that belongs to Dean’s cousin. Joan and Tim part ways, vowing to keep in touch.

The following day, back in Brown Valley, Wisconsin, Tim and Millie have an awkward dinner at Old Country Buffet. Tearfully, Millie removes her engagement ring and returns it to Tim. He doesn’t argue. Before either one can say a word, Wade sits down with a plate of food. Tim’s neighbor tells him he’s decided to switch to Tim’s company now that Bill’s selling him out to “some fella down in Milwaukee.” He’d rather do business with a man he can trust than a stranger. Tim is touched. In voiceover, Tim explains that the purpose of insurance is to create a safety net that allows people to take risks and live life to its fullest. It turns out this voiceover is actually a poorly made commercial for Tim Lippe Insurance. At the Canadian cabin, Tim presents the commercial proudly to their friends, who good-naturedly mock him about it.

Notes

As I waded through the first act of Cedar Rapids, I feared I’d entered another Butter. I couldn’t imagine anything worse, so I was tempted to give up and simply abandon the entire Black List coverage project. I stuck with it, though, and I’m glad I did. Although it initially treads on some of the more common small-town stereotypes, Johnston does a wonderful jobs of taking the clichés and twisting them in interesting (if not unexpected) ways. Tim is presented initially as the sort of naïve optimist who would make Frank Capra roll his eyes, but Johnston is smart enough to gradually develop this character into a nuanced, almost tragic figure.

It’s that little thing I keep talking about called “empathy.” As I learned more about Tim, I stopped caring that the script’s a little light on plot. It doesn’t pretend to be a complex corporate thriller, but by the end of the script, the fact that Johnston made me care about Tim, and Tim cared about Bill’s backdoor shenanigans, I found myself caring about the plot by proxy. I wanted Tim to grow a pair and succeed, but the plot could have just as easily been about a put-upon gas station attendant. It’s more important to understand the character’s struggles — even if we can’t exactly to relate to them (as in The Voices) — than it is to have a plot that’s all concept, no substance. Johnston understands that, and it’s heartening to see that some film executives do, as well.

This sense of character permeates every moment of the script. Johnston never violates who these people are in order to mine for laughs — he understands his characters and allows the comedy to develop naturally from their clashing personalities or their naïveté or their sheer prickishness. Sometimes the humor falls flat, but I’d rather not laugh at a joke than get angry at it because, whether it’s funny or not, it doesn’t seem like a thing the character would say or do. Wouldn’t you?

It’s because of this keen awareness of character that the script is not entirely plot-driven. Yes, it has a distinctive three-act structure, but 70-80% of the movie is just characters hanging out, having witty conversations and doing amusing things that seem to drive the plot only tangentially. The story really works because Johnston sells Tim’s arc so well. The plot hinges on his change from good-natured doormat to mostly good-natured assertive superhero, instead of the traditional (and frustrating) sudden 180° turn that occurs in the protagonist when Robert McKee says he should change.

Plus, he gets the little things right — the meth barns, the Czech district, the Westdale Mall. The only thing it’s missing is the stench of the Quaker factory. Even the shit he makes up feels appropriate. That’s verisimilitude, folks. I knew at least one writer in Hollywood had it! Unlike Iowa-set Butter’s seeming confusion about whether or not Iowa City is a large rural town or a suburb, Johnston writes about the Cedar Rapids I know and love. It’s possible that Johnston’s never set foot in the city, but that’s kind of the point: he understands the mindset and customs of the rural Midwest well enough to make even the weird stuff (the Silo Adventure Park) seem so plausible, I had to rack my brain to remember whether or not such a place existed.

The Bottom Line

While neither the funniest nor the cleverest comedy I’ve ever read, Cedar Rapids is one thing a lot of comedies aren’t: enjoyable. Through the combination of Johnston’s smart, witty (but not necessarily gut-busting) humor and strong, nuanced characters, it’s a compelling read that doesn’t need much work. I eagerly await Hollywood removing all the interesting things about the characters in order to strengthen the flagging C story that’s only notable because of those characters.

Posted by Stan at 5:14 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 21, 2009

Black List Script #6: Londongrad by David Scarpa

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “Based on the book by Alan Cowell. The story of the life and subsequent poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, who escaped prosecution in Russia and received political asylum in the United Kingdom.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

In voiceover, SASHA (Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko) explains that someone intentionally poisoned his tea with twice the radioactive dose endured by people standing at the center of the Chernobyl meltdown. A spectrograph view of what happens dramatizes this poisoning. Flash to London, a short time later, as Sasha struggles in a cab on the way to the hospital. His wife, MARINA, attempts to comfort him. In the emergency room, Marina declares Sasha has been poisoned. Per the laws, hey send a police inspector, BRENT HYATT, to file a report on Sasha’s poisoning case. Doctors insist Sasha is suffering from food poisoning, but Sasha knows better. Hyatt asks who poisoned him. Sasha tells him it was the KGB. Hyatt tells him “all that” ended 20 years ago. Sasha disagrees and begins to narrate his story…

…which begins in 1984, in Siberia. Sasha climbs to a rooftop, attempting an assassination — but in the Arctic weather, the metal of the gun sticks to his hand, and his struggles to get free give away his position. Fortunately, it turns out to be an exercise by the KGB. As Sasha explains in voiceover, every young Russian dreamed of joining the KGB. Even as an adult, Sasha would watch old movies dramatizing the glories of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, enraptured. In voiceover, Sasha explains the lifestyle of the late-period USSR: those who had power would take whatever they want; those who didn’t knew better than to complain. Money didn’t matter, so an integral part of their KGB training was learning the American way of doing things — foreign, esoteric concepts like bank cheques and credit references baffled them. A mystery organization of powerful men, the Siloviki (“Men of Force”), were effectively the Illuminati of the USSR: they had their own private subway in Moscow, their own department stores selling American merchandise, and they have the power simply walk into a nice apartment and tell its tenants to leave.

After his training, Sasha is disappointed not to be assigned to the First Directorate — the elite group who were sent to the U.S. to spy. Sasha’s training colonel explains that he’s actually too smart for his own good — he’d end up getting undesired attention. As a result, he’s assigned to the Third Directorate, which does counterintelligence within the Soviet Union. One night, while living it up at a KGB nightclub, Sasha sees his ex-training buddy MISHA has returned from America. He’s drunk and talking up the American lifestyle, trying to convince his comrades of its superiority. Sasha and his new friends humor him until they pull over along the side of a highway and shoot him in the head. Sasha is sort of horrified at first, but he buys into the thinking that Misha had fallen prey to the enemy and deserved this.

In the present, a doctor tries to convince Sasha that all his tests show a case of mild food poisoning. Sasha pulls out hair and asks if that’s a symptom of mild food poisoning. The doctor condescendingly offers that it’s a symptom of middle age. Unnerved, Marina calls a mystery man known only as Boris, looking for help. Frustrated, Sasha returns to his story. He bitterly explains in voiceover that one morning in 1993, they woke up to found they had no country, and while the capitalist West perceived this as a victory, the Soviets found the loss of their empire tragic. Money became worthless, citizens starved, all prisoners — even the ones who should have been imprisoned — were released, and before long hundreds of organized crime syndicates sprouted up. Sasha remains with the KGB in an effort to clean up Russia. He and his friends wander Moscow attempting to defend poor businesses who are forced to pay protection to the various syndicates. One is a ballet studio, forced to pay protection to a corrupt police lieutenant. After talking with the lieutenant, Sasha starts to realize he must have the blessing of someone above him.

He accompanies his friends to a birthday party for one of the ballerinas—future wife Marina, who’s annoyed and embarrassed by the presence of a KGB (now FSB) agent at her party. People start leaving, in fear of the KGB. Sasha dances with Marina and quickly wins her over, despite his abrasive attitude. She complains about the problems of the day, notably her inability to pass a driving test because the examiner expects a bribe that she refuses to give. Sasha accompanies Marina on her next driving test. He holds a gun to the examiner, who immediately agrees to give her a license. Perturbed, Sasha explains that he doesn’t want him to give her one; he wants the examiner to do his job. Marina takes her test and gets her license fairly.

In the present, BORIS BEREZOVSKY arrives with bodyguards, a publicist, and a poison specialist. Sasha is grateful. Boris tells him he will never forget that Sasha saved his life. Back in 1995, Sasha saves Boris’s life. After nearly dying in a car bomb, Boris decides he needs help. In voiceover, Sasha explains that Boris had quickly became an enemy of the old ways. A well-regarded mathematician, Boris embraced capitalism after the fall of the USSR and — after struggling his entire life during the reign of the communist empire — became one of the richest men in the world in five short years. This displeased the Siloviki, who couldn’t adjust to a world where money mattered more than political power. As a result, attempts on his life became rather frequent. After the car bomb, Sasha arrives to help. Boris doesn’t want to help, but Sasha offers that he’ll need a cop eventually.

Not long after this, Boris is holed up in the office of his nightclub while the Moscow police attempt to arrest him. Sasha intervenes, sending the cops away. Boris attempts to pay Sasha to return the favor, but Sasha refuses. Sasha introduces Boris to Marina (to whom he is now married) and their new baby. Boris explains why the capitalist model is failing in Russia and how he strives to make it work. He believes Russia needs great men like Boris himself, but also great men like Sasha — uncorrupted men to oversee the nation’s security forces. Boris asks Sasha what he wants, and Sasha realizes Boris can make it happen: he owns enough media companies to force people to listen. After Boris leaves, Marina doesn’t want Sasha to have anything to do with him. Sasha tells him he can’t quit, so the only thing do is change things.

When the FSB finds out Sasha has befriend Boris, they order him to kill him. Paranoid, Sasha decides the only solution is for someone to speak out. He gathers a large group of ex-KGB agents he believes he can trust and explains what they need to do: go public with what they know about the corruption and atrocities being committed against their countrymen. Sasha has already made the decision to do this, but he leaves the decision to join him up to his friends. Many of these people do join him at a national TV news agency owned by Boris. However, the bulk of them disguise themselves — all except Sasha, who bravely lays out the murdering, drug/weapons trafficking, extorting, torturing, and robbing state officials commit on a daily basis.

After the news report, Boris contacts Russian president BORIS YELTSIN for a face-to-face meeting. Boris wants to encourage Yeltsin to allow Sasha to run the FSB. Yeltsin agrees that they need an uncorrupted man to run things, but he’s found his man — VLADIMIR PUTIN. Yeltsin does allow Sasha to meet with Putin. After an awkward initial meeting, Putin orders the tapping of Sasha’s phone. Shortly thereafter, police burst into Sasha’s apartment, arrest him, and force him to endure a kangaroo court in which a shopkeeper alleges Sasha extorted money from him. Sasha manages to get the witness to recant, which forces the judge to dismiss the case. That doesn’t stop the authorities, though — immediately, still in the courtroom, they arrest Sasha again on a new charge, of extorting a can of sweet peas. Sasha sarcastically confesses and demand that they execute him. He scoffs at them, fully aware that they need to keep him alive because he’s too famous to vanish. In voiceover, Sasha explains how difficult prison is for a member of the FSB — prisoners’ family members were killed, raped, and tortured.

After a few years, Sasha is released. He looks horrible — emaciated and sickly. Sasha explains to her that he used the prison to his advantage, first doing all he could to try to get killed in general population, then starving himself in solitary confinement. They had no choice but to release him, because they couldn’t let him die. Sasha gets his FSB friends to inform on him and leads a straight-arrow life, knowing he’s now untouchable. One night, Marina receives a phone call informing her that either Sasha or their child (Tolik) will be murdered. Marina seeks help with some of Sasha’s ex-colleagues, but she’s told that he’s reckless and she’d be smart to take her child and keep her distance from him.

After witnessing an alleged terrorist attack in Moscow, Sasha explains to Marina what he’s pieced together through various international newspapers — in short, the Russians executed these attacks to justify an invasion of Chechnya that would renew a spirit of patriotism in Russia. Marina doesn’t care. She wants Sasha to play ball in order to save himself or Tolik. Sasha refuses. Instead, he flees to Turkey and sends for her. Marina refuses to leave Russia. Boris comes to plead Sasha’s case, winning Marina over by pointing out that if she doesn’t go to Turkey, Sasha will come back for her, and he’ll undoubtedly be killed.

When they’re finally together, Sasha tries to get political asylum at the American embassy. He’s turned away. Finally, Sasha books a return flight to Moscow, insisting on a layover in London. While in London, Sasha seeks political asylum, and British law requires that he and his family get it. Meanwhile, Boris and several other capitalist oligarchs meet with Putin, who announces he’s taking 50% of their resources. Because he claims everything they own belongs to the state, he feels 50% is a generous offer. Putin wants to know why Boris insists on weakening him with his media outlets reporting negative things about him. Putin quietly freezes all of Boris’s assets to stop him.

In London, Sasha writes a tell-all book laying out everything he witnessed and tying Russia to the alleged Chechen terrorist attacks. Marina pleads with him not to release the book — they’re living a happy, anonymous life in England. If he publishes the book, the FSB will come after him relentlessly. Sasha tells her it’s his job to put this book out. He has help from Boris and an underground syndicate, but to no avail — they publish hundreds of copies, but Putin has them destroyed before anybody can read them. Left with no choice, Sasha is forced to find a real job. As a montage shows his efforts, Sasha explains in voiceover that the Soviet Union forced people to feel a sense of community by cramming them all together, while in the western world, he is finally able to feel alone — and he doesn’t like it.

In the present, Sasha is rushed into a quarantine area, where doctors wear radiation suits to protect from his poison. DR. HENRY, the man Boris brought with him, interviews Marina about Sasha’s potential risk of exposing others. Marina doesn’t believe anyone but her came into serious contact with him. Knowing Marina isn’t long for the world, she visits Sasha in his private room. His hair has completely fallen out, and he’s on a morphine drip. Sasha complains that nobody tells him anything, but he knows from her facial expression that it’s not good news. Marina explains that he was poisoned with Polonium-210. Sasha knows the radioactive substance well — back in the Soviet era, they used to manufacture it in an off-books, unmapped town, where the KGB quickly discovered its mostly untraceable effects as a poison.

Hyatt arrives with other police, trying to figure out the jurisdiction. Ultimately, they decide to pursue it as a murder case — to Marina’s consternation, considering her husband is not (yet) dead — and a secret service agent, ACKERLEY, comes up with a surprisingly plausible theory. The poisoning was far too obvious and sloppy to be FSB. Since the amount of Polonium-210 ingested would have cost $10 million on the black market, they can think of only one person with the money, the connection to Sasha, and the personal grudge against Putin: Boris. Hyatt and the other cops troll the streets of London looking for evidence. They find nothing, so Hyatt is sent back to learn the details of Sasha’s last days.

In the morning, Sasha leaves his apartment after a brief argument with Marina about where he’s going — he has a new job, but she doesn’t like it. Sasha stops at a sushi joint, where a friend there informs him that he’s on a KGB list of targets to kill. (As Sasha narrates the story, it’s intercut with present-day police investigating crime scenes, talking with perps, making sure they aren’t also poisoned, etc.) Sasha goes to Boris’s London offices to wait for a fax, which he’s tasked to deliver at a hotel. LUGOVOI — ex-KGB and Boris’s former security chief — sits among a group of wealthy Russians. Sasha hands off the dossier and shares a drink with Lugovoi — only Sasha doesn’t drink alcohol. He insists on green tea.

Back at home, Marina insists Lugovoi is still one of the Siloviki and is not to be trusted. Sasha is determined to get into Lugovoi’s good graces — he has an opportunity to support his family, and he must take it. The following day is a duplicate of the opening scenes, minus the spectrograph: Lugovoi offers Sasha the poisoned tea, Sasha gladly takes it (although he comments about its bitterness), and they say traditional Russian toasts. After Sasha leaves them, he starts to feel weak and knows instantly that they’ve poisoned him. He stumbles home and forces himself to vomit it up.

In the present, a Scotland Yard delegation goes to Russia to interrogate Lugovoi. His prosecutor, BARSUKOV (it should be noted that Barsukov is the man responsible for imprisoning Sasha earlier in the story, but he didn’t really merit a mention aside from the fact that he reappears here), explains to the police why Sasha’s story makes no sense. Barsukov subtly implies that Sasha may have been a terrorist trying to kill Lugovoi and his men (as evidence, Barsukov points to a man named DMITRY KOVTUN, who is the only one they can find who has suffered at all from the Polonium-210), but Hyatt doesn’t believe it — especially after positively testing Lugovoi’s hotel and Kovtun’s plane for the radioactive fingerprint of Polonium-210.

Sasha, delirious and suffering from dementia, has a moment of startling lucidity. He realizes exactly how the plan worked: Kovtun was sent to London with the poison in a lead vial. He was tasked with merely delivering the package somewhere, but curiosity got the better of him — he opened the vial, and thus was exposed to a small amount of radiation. Sasha insists that both the efficiency of the plan and the inability to factor in human nature are hallmarks of KGB tradecraft. Hyatt brings his evidence to Barsukov, but they will not extradite Lugovoi, Kovtun, or anyone else. Hyatt gripes about this to Boris, who explains that Russians won’t change. They’re more afraid of their own people than the international community; they know someone will take them down, but they don’t know who, so everyone must die.

Sasha dictates his last words to Marina and has a photo taken to show what they’ve done. Shortly thereafter, he dies. In Russia, Putin explains that there is no evidence of foul play in Sasha’s death. Marina prepares to address a phalanx of reporters. Hyatt cautiously tells her that she doesn’t have to. Marina announces that the Soviet way of doing things was to rob everyone of joy, then imprison and/or kill those who were unhappy — but they can’t take her unhappiness away. She will fight to keep it and won’t rest until the world understands why she’s unhappy. She goes out into the crowd.

Notes

I’ve said it before: biopics and docudramas are pains in the ass to write. The reasoning is simple: in many cases, you have to boil down somebody’s life into a short, coherent dramatic story. It’s no surprise that the best of the bunch frequently take extreme liberties with reality. For all the people who balk, “Why don’t they just make it about fictional people if they’re not going to stick to the real story?” — well, I don’t have an answer. I guess it’s just a lurid part of human nature that we’d be more interested in Mozart fondling some tits than some guy named Wolfsbane Nozart.

So far in my ill-conceived run of Black List analyses, I’ve read one bad biopic and one great docudrama. Londongrad falls somewhere between the two.

In a story like this, a writer has the well-nigh impossible task of toeing the line between documenting the facts of the story and delivering a compelling human drama. It seems like it’d be easy — just lay it out like any other screenplay. You already have your elaborate backstory, and you know the events that occur in the story, so it’s just a matter of structuring it effectively, right? Wrong. In a work of fiction, you control everything (until it gets to someone who tells you to change everything). If that elaborate backstory doesn’t work, you can tweak it or just throw it out and start over, reshaping everything until you have a nice story.

You can do those things in a fact-based work if you have no interest in actually basing it on fact. If, however, you want to keep it mostly truthful, everything that should be freeing becomes a constraint, and cobbling together a dramatic story culled from years of research (on the part of The New York Times’ Alan Cowell, whose book is credited as the source for David Scarpa’s screenplay) turns into a daunting, unenviable task.

I’m saying all of this to assuage some guilt for what’s going to happen next: unadulterated bagging on this script. I understand how difficult it must have been to write, and it’s certainly more understated and less obnoxiously manipulative than The Muppet Man. But, as I said about The Muppet Man: just because it’s hard to write doesn’t make the final product any better.

The screenplay falls into possibly three unfortunate traps. One is a byproduct of the genre; the second is just kinda bad writing; and the third may exist only in my mind.

The first: the dreaded “surface-skim” plotting, touching on notable moments in post-Soviet Russia and their effects on Sasha rather than feeling like a natural narrative progression. (Look at movies like the fictional Scarface and fact-based Raging Bull as examples of films that span many years but feel like one cohesive story.) It’s hard for Sasha to emerge as a truly compelling protagonist because the script doesn’t read like the story of a Russian hero — it reads like a series of set-pieces some executive told Scarpa needed to be in the script, whether it makes sense to have them or not.

The second: Sasha’s relentless voiceover narration. Voiceover narration is justifiably considered verboten among newbie screenwriters, although many of them carry it too far and decide any movie that features even a single line of voiceover is a complete disaster. Some writers can use it very effectively (Woody Allen springs to mind, if you ignore the bad narration in the otherwise good Cassandra’s Dream), but it’s pretty common for green writers to use voiceover as a lazy crutch. Rather than finding more interesting ways to tell the story and/or express the characters’ inner thoughts, they can just pop in a quick voiceover to explain everything. It’s a clear violation of the “show, don’t tell” adage.

Sasha’s narration here is 100% lazy, on-the-nose drivel. Ostensibly, it bridges the gaps in time, but the voiceover technique is not used effectively. I’ll give you a key example within this script that distinguishes the difference: early in the script, Sasha narrates, “In 1984, if you were a young Russian, there was no greater dream than to become a member of the KGB. These were the men who single-handedly defeated the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War. These were heroes.” At the exact same time, Scarpa describes a younger Sasha sitting in a movie theatre, watching his childhood KGB heroes in a movie he’s clearly seen enough times to memorize the dialogue. Doesn’t this scene illustrate exactly what’s in the voiceover in a much more compelling way? Doesn’t that, then, render the narration unnecessary? Unfortunately, most of the voiceover cluttering the script is not accompanied by such compelling visuals, but the point is, a better way could be found to express everything that Scarpa lazily leaves to voiceover.

The third problem, the one that may exist only in my mind, might explain the first two problems: with no evidence whatsoever (I didn’t read the book it’s based on and only have a passing familiarity with the source story), I speculate that Scarpa tried way too hard to stick to the facts, and as a result presented a fairly uninteresting docudrama. As I mentioned, the rigid adherence to reality marks the death knell of too many biopics and docudramas. The truth just isn’t that interesting. (And for those of you saying, “What about documentaries?” — are you high? Has any documentary ever been 100% true?)

This, then, becomes the ultimate problem: Scarpa presents the truth, but does he provide us with any information we don’t already know? Everything I know about the USSR, I learned from a combination of Red Dawn, Simpsons jokes, and that Head of the Class two-parter where they go to Moscow. That’s to say, I don’t know much. Despite my ignorance, this script contains few revelations: the Russians had a hard time transitioning to their new society?! The country filled up with corrupt mobsters?! Vladimir Putin is evil?! Scrape me up off the floor. Honestly, the only interesting revelation in any of this is the notion that KGB agents really believed in their society, and really believed they were doing good work. The Western perspective on this is that, at the very least, the people at the top knew they were doing bad things but didn’t care. Did the lower ranks really believe in the cause, or were they brainwashed with propaganda? Heady concepts that the script sort of touches on but never explores with much depth — too much voiceover, too little insight.

The other problem with sticking with the truth is that sometimes it’s just not terribly clever. Scarpa takes his sweet time dramatizing Sasha’s daring escape from Russia, but is there a single moment in that escape that anyone hasn’t seen in other spy movies? The rest of the script is a similar pastiche of moments that could have just as easily come from James Bond or reruns of Mission: Impossible. It’s hard to call the material “unoriginal” if Scarpa has indeed stuck to the facts — but, really, the only thing that distinguishes this script from hundreds of others is the fact that it’s based on a true story.

So what happens when the true story is much less interesting than one that’s made up? Is that when the writers of docudramas start to stretch the truth, in an effort to make the overall product better?

The Bottom Line

I can see only one option for Londongrad: embrace the fake and make shit up. Otherwise, it’s bound to languish as more compelling projects emerge (whether they’re fact-based projects or not). Of course, all of this is predicated on the possibly erroneous thesis that everything in Scarpa’s script is true. If he’s already stretched the truth, then it’s purely a disaster on par with The Muppet Man.

Posted by Stan at 5:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 22, 2009

Black List Script #7: L.A. Rex by Will Beall

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “Based on the author’s book of the same name. A young gangster goes to work in the LAPD as a mole investigating a crime against the head of the Mexican mafia but learns more about justice than he expected from his seasoned partner.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Rolling through the streets of South Central L.A., badass beat cop MIGUEL MARQUEZ (50s) and his rookie partner, RAMOS (20s), observe a bank robbery. They call it in, then move in on the robbers’ van — which is rigged with explosives. A wild action sequence follows. The robbers are clearly armed and well-trained. In the melée, Marquez is severely injured and Ramos is killed. An opening credits montage follows, intercutting the deplorable history of the LAPD with clean-cut 20-something BEN HALLORAN’s progression through the LAPD academy. After the montage, Ben arrives for his first day in the 77th district, where he’s paired up with an unenthusiastic Marquez after LT. VINTNER gives a morning roll-call speech about the increasing racial tensions in the area. Marquez tells Ben he looks soft and asks if he played any sports in high school. Ben says he was on the fencing team. Marquez shows Ben his many guns, including a non-issue .44, and suggests that Ben improve his weaponry. They roll up on TONY T, a wino. Marquez tells Ben to arrest him for public intoxication. Ben tries, but Tony T starts beating on him. It’s quickly evident that this is a setup to initiate Ben. Ben responds to the assault by pounding Tony T in the crotch. Marquez is impressed.

Meanwhile, crooked patrolmen RISLEY and MAPES cruise around MacArthur Park, collecting money from the prostitutes they pimp and drug money from dealers like DEADEYE. Deadeye’s friend and ex-cellmate, WIZARD, got high and killed one of Risley’s hookers — his “cash cow” — which pisses Risley off. In retaliation, Risley breaks Deadeye’s dope-dealing hand. On Crenshaw Boulevard, Ben tries to convince Marquez that he’s a good officer. Marquez refuses to believe it — any skills that Ben may have mean nothing in South Central. Among a bunch of black gangstas, they notice a guy, DEANDRE (20s), hanging back a bit. Marquez explains that he’s the type to inform. Trying to look casual, Deandre steals a car that, it turns out, had already been stolen earlier that day. They chase him. Eventually, he abandons the car and Ben is forced to chase him on foot. Marquez also chases him on foot, and before long they corner him on a pedestrian bridge over a freeway. Left with no alternative, Deandre scales the fence and jumps onto the freeway. Against Marquez’s orders, Ben follows him. Before long, they’re up on rooftops, and Ben tackles Deandre. They crash through a skylight — right into Wizard’s apartment, where his bloated corpses lies slumped over the sink.

After they both vomit from the stench and the workout, Ben cuffs Deandre. Marquez shows up, trailed by their elaborate backup, and chews out Ben for ditching him. Later, homicide detective CHUIN examines the scene with Marquez. They find a ledger that indicates Wizard was the “tax collector” to drug kingpin JOE CARCOSA. Back at the station, Marquez and Chuin pore over the ledger and learn Deadeye has been short for the past several weeks. While the two of them interrogate Deandre (which results in Marquez beating him with a phonebook), the ledger mysteriously goes missing. Marquez finds out Deandre saw combat in Iraq and is an expert in explosives, which makes him realize Deandre was at the bank robbery in which Ramos got killed. Chuin presents Marquez with a theory about what happened to the ledger: Ben took it. Marquez doesn’t believe it.

Marquez takes Ben to a club where Deadeye is known to hang. It’s crawling with gangsters. When they’re threatened by some of Deadeye’s thugs, Ben pulls out his gun and shouts at them in perfect Spanish, surprising Marquez. They get into Deadeye’s office. First, Deadeye denies knowing Wizard; then, he denies skimming off Carcosa’s money; then, he denies that Carcosa would have Wizard killed, because Deadeye would have heard about it. He offers the MS-13 gang as the possible culprits. Meanwhile, Deandre calls his pot-growing pal GET SOME for help with his criminal troubles. Get Some says he’ll handle it.

Marquez and Ben roll into MS-13 territory, Ben speculates that the best way to find Wizard’s killer is to figure out who would benefit from his death. Marquez ignores him. They arrive at an abandoned building where an MS-13 gang member, SOMBRA, holes up. It’s a creepy, filthy, booby-trapped place. Marquez and Ben have to fight their way through a bunch of MS-13 warriors in order to get to Sombra, but after a convoluted action sequence, they both end up on the bed of a flatbed truck. Sombra pursues, getting into the truck cab, and they all end up in the L.A. river. For some reason, Sombra recognizes Ben, but before anyone can make anything of this, Marquez shoots Sombra. Marquez asks why Sombra would be crazy enough to attempt to murder cops. Sombra tells him there’s a “green light” on cops since cops “crossed the line” by killing Wizard. Then he dies. As the site of Sombra’s death is turned into a crime scene, Ben is introduced to BEACHAMP, the head of Internal Affairs. Chuin speculates that Beachamp and Ben are in bed.

BIG BEN KAHN (50s), a charismatic attorney, arrives to bail Deandre out and ask him some questions. When Deandre mentions the bank heist, Big Ben takes pause. Big Ben visits DARIUS (20s), a gangster who also heads a notable hip-hop record label. He asks Darius if he had any involvement with Wizard’s death, but Darius denies it. Nevertheless, Big Ben warns Darius that Carcosa may come after him anyway. Back at the 77th station house, the difficulty of the day has taken its toll on Ben. Marquez gives Ben a Glock .45 that belonged to Ramos and officially welcomes Ben to the district. Ben returns home, where he reveals that he did indeed take the ledger. A gangster thug shows up at Ben’s apartment tells him “he” wants to see Ben.

Darius asks Risley, who has come calling seemingly as a friend or business associate, who was responsible for the Wizard’s death. Risley says the rumor is that it was cops. Darius is uneasy — he doesn’t want to end up in a war with Carcosa. Risley and Big Ben admire a sword Darius owns that allegedly belonged to Nat Turner. Ben shows up at Joe Carcosa’s house, asking about the ledger. Ben says they didn’t find a ledger. Carcosa tells Ben he needs to find the cops who killed Wizard and, most importantly, find the ledger.

The next morning, Marquez, Ben, and Chuin learn that Deandre turned up dead shortly after getting released on bail. After dismissing Ben, Chuin tells Marquez he went through Ben’s personnel file and found it so clean, Ben may not have existed prior to entering the academy. He urges Marquez to get rid of Ben. Marquez doesn’t: if he’s not dirty, Marquez will be hanging him out to dry for no reason; if he is, Marquez would rather have him close than far. Ben runs to the bahtroom and flashes back to a quinceañra at Carcosa’s house. At the party, he and Darius are close friends. Carcosa and Sombra torture a man into signing some papers while Ben watches with some amusement. Later, in private, Big Ben complains that his son — Ben — should not be a part of whatever they have planned. Carcosa insists that he must.

In the present, Marquez and Ben visit the home of C-LOVE, a petty thug who posted bail for Deandre. Marquez grills C-Love until he gives up the name of the person who gave him the money: Get Some. C-Love warns that Marquez will never get near him. Marquez tells C-Love to get his pregnant girlfriend and be ready later that night, so Marquez can put them on a train to Barstow until the heat dies down. Big Ben warns Risley that Carcosa may have a man on the inside. Marquez and Ben surveil Get Some’s crib. They spot an ice cream truck that drives around, only it doesn’t sell ice cream: it’s a mobile gun repair station. Marquez and Ben hold up the driver and force him to go to Get Some’s crib. They use the ice cream truck to ambush Get Some’s security force. After a wild action sequence in which Get Some nearly kills Ben, Marquez finally gets to Get Some. He threatens him, but Get Some is not easily intimidated. Get Some shows Marquez the business card of his attorney — Big Ben.

Ben flashes back to a launch party for Darius’s hip-hop magazine. Big Ben and Ben argue. Darius tells Ben he’s going legit, until he’s attacked on the red carpet. Ben, Darius, and his security force retreat. Later, they show up at the hotel of someone called CERTAIN DEATH, whom Darius blames for the attack and wants to kill. Ben tries to get Darius to listen to reason, but Darius lashes out on Ben. Ben knows where this is headed, so he disappears. The next day — the day of the bank robbery — Carcosa offers Ben a deal: if Ben enters the police academy and informs for him, Carcosa will make Ben Kahn, Jr., disappear.

In the present, Marquez and Ben have arrested Get Some, but Risley and Mapes show up and tell Lt. Vintner that he’s their informant. Marquez tries to beat the hell out of Risley in the middle of the squad room. Marquez and Chuin explain the chain of evidence that led them to Get Some, and while Vintner believes them, he wants to proceed by the books. Marquez balks that there isn’t time for that, but Vintner doesn’t want to hear it. Later, C-Love and his girlfriend, RAYNEECE, are gunned down by men in a passing patrol car. On the way to pick up C-Love, Marquez outright accuses Ben of being IAD. Ben denies it. They discover the shooting — and the crowd that has gathered, all aware that the police did this, none happy about it. Marquez and Ben call for backup. Rayneece is still alive, so she’s rushed to the hospital. Chuin points out that Ben is one of the only people who knew Marquez’s plan for C-Love. At the hospital, Ben is forced to comfort Rayneece’s grieving mother. He reluctantly promises to make her killers pay for their crimes.

When Ben gets back with Marquez, Marquez sees something different about him — after what he’s seen, he’s a real cop now. Ben speculates that Risley killed C-Love. Marquez tells Ben that Risley was the best rookie he ever trained, but he’s gone bad. Marquez didn’t believe it — until he saw Risley at the bank robbery. Marquez says he hesitated when he recognized Risley, but he won’t hesitate again. Ben wonders why they wouldn’t just arrest Risley. Marquez explains that Risley has been involved in so many arrests, if he went down for his crimes, everyone would be turned loose on appeal. The LAPD wouldn’t risk that. Marquez demands to know who Ben is. Ben explains he’s the son of Big Ben Kahn and he was a mole for Carcosa — until yesterday. Marquez tells Ben he needs to decide which side he’s on.

Marquez and Ben pay Get Some another visit. This time, they torture him for information. Eventually, Get Some admits that Risley found out about Wizard’s skimming, threatened to rat him out, so Wizard tried to bribe him with dope — but it wasn’t enough. So Wizard told Risley about the bank where Carcosa launders his money, they put a crew together and hit it. Marquez wonders where Risley could find such a well-trained crew, and Get Some explains that gangsters have been sending soldiers to Iraq to learn tactics for urban warfare. So they intend to pin the robbery on Darius so Carcosa will take him out, allowing Get Some to take control. An LAPD cruiser pulls up outside — it’s Risley, leading a pack of Crip commandos. They go after Marquez, while Ben attempts to follow and defend. After another wild action sequence, Marquez is seriously injured and Ben is attacked from behind.

Ben awakens in a creepy warehouse, filled with gangsters. Risley and Mapes appear just as Marquez regains consciousness. Risley tries to justify his criminal activities by offering that if he didn’t do it, somebody else would — and they wouldn’t have the best interests of the city at heart. Ben tries to fight his way out, and when that fails, he announces he’s working for Joe Carcosa, who sent him to find out who robbed the bank. That gets their attention, but it does little to save him. They hang Ben and Marquez over a pit filled with angry pit bulls and a jaguar. They’re tied together on a pulley, so the heaviest one (Marquez) will be lowered into the pit first, followed (after he’s torn to shreds) by Ben. Marquez is killed in grisly, leering detail. In an effort to save himself, Ben wraps his legs around Marquez’s mangled body as it rises out of the pit. He retrieves Marquez’s secret .44 — which the Crips didn’t find — and starts blasting at Risley and the gangsters as he swings furiously in the hopes that the chain will break and release him. Eventually, it does, and Ben manages to narrowly escape to the trainyards outside. He leaps onto a freight train, waits until the tracks go over the freeway, then dives into a modular home traveling on the back of a flatbed. Risley and Mapes witness this. They scramble for their patrol car and pull the truck over, tasing Ben, arresting him, and claiming he’s on PCP.

Risley and Mapes drag Ben back to Darius’s place. They’re surprised Darius knows him. Darius says they used to be friends, and Big Ben is his lawyer. This surprises Ben, but all the pieces fall into place: Big Ben was the one who told Risley to rob the bank, and he’s the one holding Carcosa’s money. Risley shoots Darius’s security, then Darius. Ben manages to free himself, although he’s still handcuffed, and Ben is quickly cornered. Before he dies, Darius grabs Nat Turner’s sword and runs it through Mapes. Risley pulls another sword off the wall. He and Ben fight; thanks to Ben’s fencing skills, he kills Risley.

At Marquez’s funeral, Lt. Vintner gives a stirring speech about his courage and honor. Ben is surprised when Big Ben shows up. Ben flashes back to the previous night. He goes to Carcosa, tells him he’s out, and hands him Wizard’s ledger. He goes to a car where Chuin and Vintner wait. Ben’s wired: they have Carcosa’s confession on tape. Back in the present, Chuin and a couple of other detectives arrest Big Ben for his role in the bank heist and its aftermath. Despite what’s happening, Big Ben feels some amount of proud redemption that his son is a better person than he is.

Notes

I don’t know what I expected after violating one of my own rules. In doing a mild amount of research on the novel L.A. Rex, I discovered that author (and adapter) Will Beall is, in fact, an LAPD officer working out of the 77th district. After reading that, I can’t honestly say I expected something like The Wire, but I did expect more than what L.A. Rex delivered. It both surprised and disappointed me that an actual officer working out of South Central doesn’t have a more unique take on the cop thriller.

The end result of L.A. Rex is pretty much what you’d get if you jammed The Departed, Heat, and Training Day into a blender and topped it with tiny dollops of every other crime movie made in the past 25 years. I’m not generally one to harp on originality, but this script constitutes little more than a well-written series of genre clichés folded into a convoluted story that doesn’t come close to satisfying. Keeping the list brief, here are the top five: wacky mismatched partners, the rookie paired with the veteran, the screaming lieutenant, the dirty cop who’s convinced of his nobility, and the dirty cop who gains a conscience after What He’s Seen.

I haven’t read the novel, but I have a feeling the problem here is a result of distilling a dense narrative populated by dozens of characters into a script that, although it’s both on the long side (127 pages) and cheating its length (with no rhyme or reason, 90% of conversations in this script are set as two-column dialogue, which makes it very difficult to read but also likely makes the true page count more in the 160-180 page range), is still about half the length of its source material. Novels have their own sets of clichés, but it’s a little easier to get away with movie clichés when you can fill out the characters and the setting to create the illusion of uniqueness.

In a screenplay, it’s harder to cheat that way. Beall’s diction — the words on the page — is great, making this a quick read despite its length, but when you strip away the glitz, you’re left with a steaming pile of moments lifted from many, many better movies. Worse than that, the elements Beall’s novel may have used to make the cliché-ridden situations seem a bit more original — compelling characters with offbeat points of view, for instance — don’t come across in the script at all. It’s too dense for any individual character — including the two leads, Marquez and Ben — to stand out in any way. Hell, I’m shocked to discover Ben’s supposed to be the protagonist. The story is so much about Marquez, and Beall finds himself forced to bury Ben during the first half because of the secrets his character hides, that it becomes somewhat disorienting when we learn Ben is the person we’re supposed to be rooting for. At any rate, Beall introduces each of these characters with flashy, florid descriptions, but beyond that, they’re just the familiar cardboard cutouts filling up a familiar storyline. They don’t have any individual moments to shine, and they never rise above their stereotypical foundations.

In fact, like the similarly convoluted Prisoners, the characters feel more like plot point dispensers than real people. One of the surprising and unique character traits given to any of these people is Ben’s fencing background — but that goes from interesting trait to lame plot device when it becomes necessary for Ben to fence his way to freedom with a sword whose presence is acknowledged so clumsily early on, it could only mean foreshadowing.

To sum up, this script needed more dinosaurs.

The Bottom Line

The only way I can see this script working is if Beall peels back the narrative density that might work in a novel but feels, in this screenplay, like a well-written mess. The story isn’t so mind-blowingly complex that it will elude audience members; rather, the script gets so wrapped up in the story that it loses sight on making the characters into three-dimensional people. The story can remain complex and have the same denouement, but excising about five or six characters will allow the remaining characters more breathing room to develop into natural, interesting characters instead of cardboard clichés.

Posted by Stan at 5:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 23, 2009

Black List Script #8: Desperados by Ellen Rapoport

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “After a woman sends an indignant email to her new beau, who’s gone radio silent postsex, she discovers he’s comatose in a Mexican hospital and races south of the border with her friends in tow to intercept the email before he recovers.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

[Removed by request.]

Notes

Ah, the Idiot Plot. Believe it or not, I haven’t read a script with Idiot Plot elements in a very long time. I’ve read a great many scripts with idiotic plot elements, but it seemed like Hollywood was finally getting away from that old, stupid chestnut: the storyline that only works if every character in the movie is a complete fucking dunderheaded moron.

Honestly, Desperados isn’t a terrible script. It has a genial tone and more than a few smile-worthy moments. Some of the humor reminded me a bit too much of Nancy Pimental’s script The Sweetest Thing. Remember that? The halcyon days of 2001 when Pimental, a South Park writer who rose to mild on-camera prominence as the replacement host of Win Ben Stein’s Money, was poised as a female Farrelly brother, when everyone thought The Sweetest Thing would mark the dawning of a new genre: female-targeted gross-out comedies. Then it bombed, and that was kinda the end of that. Nevertheless, Desperados is filled with similar gross-out gags and, honestly, a few similar story beats. (But it bears more striking resemblances to 1998’s Overnight Delivery and 2000’s Road Trip.)

Despite several amusing moments, the script relies far too much on Three’s Company-esque misunderstandings that, as mentioned, require each character to be an idiot. On Three’s Company, that worked because most of the characters were idiots, and the writers (and actors) used that stupidity for comic effect. That seems to be the norm these days for Idiot Plot movies: make the characters as stupid as the story. It sort of works. (See also: Superbad, one of my favorites of 2007.) Desperados doesn’t do that, though. Desperados gives us a lawyer and a doctor who are portrayed as emotionally retarded, but I don’t think we’re supposed to believe (based on their occupations) that they’re mentally retarded. So when, for instance, Wesley determines Jared must be cheating based primarily on a VoiceMail she doesn’t listen to completely, and knows she doesn’t listen to completely, that makes her an idiot. It’s sort of worse at the end, when Huck draws the mistaken conclusion that Wesley is getting artificially inseminated — because Wesley’s assistant stupidly reenforces that by saying particular things in particular ways that no human would ever use to describe where Wesley is or what she’s doing.

Those are small examples, but the entire plot hinges on one big, steaming pile of Idiot Plot: the sending of the e-mail. In fact, I think this moment in the script shows a pretty clear distinction between regular plotting and Idiot Plotting: Wesley’s increasing neurotic frustration about Jared not calling her is perfectly understandable; her wanting to send an angry e-mail to him four days later is perfectly understandable; even the setup for why she leaves her apartment to talk on her cell phone, and accidentally talking to Jared (whom she’d presumably ignore out of anger if she knew) — perfectly understandable! When she picks up the phone, and it’s Jared, and he has a bizarre yet logical explanation for why he never called, complete with apology, here’s how an idiot would react to that situation: by pantomiming at people who are clearly too stupid to understand, then running into the room screaming at the last possible second. Here’s how a neurotic but intelligent young lawyer might react: “Hold on a sec, Jared. (to Kaylie and Brooke) It’s Jared — he’s okay, do not send the e-mail. I’ll explain when I get off the phone.” Or maybe she doesn’t want to interrupt Jared in his time of need. A neurotic but intelligent young lawyer might, for instance, reenter the apartment after the phone conversation and say, “That was Jared, whose perfectly rational explanation negates any need to send that e-mail.”

Examples abound of more Idiot Plotting: buying up every newspaper in town (what is this, I Love Lucy?), the sex-toy/Ambien misunderstanding, virtually everything involving Nolan and Debbie… It sort of frustrated me because the script has plenty of good ideas for comic set-pieces, but too many of them arrive as a result of moments that just make everyone seem too dumb to have control over their bowels, much less have high-powered careers that require a great deal of education. (And on that note — what the hell is up with Quintano condescendingly insulting UCLA? “State school” or not, it boasts one of the best law schools in the country, and Quintano works at a fucking hotel. In Mexico. Even if he graduated top of his class for Stanford with a major in hotel management, he doesn’t have a lot of room to gloat. Sorry, random tangent — but seriously, what the fuck?)

Worse than the Idiot Plot beats, perhaps, is the conclusion that this script does not need to take place in Mexico. Mexico serves as such a generic backdrop, it could be set in any vacation spot: Hawaii, the Bahamas, Mackinac Island, Orlando, any of our fine national parks. Look, I’ve been to Mexico, and I didn’t stay in any luxury resorts. It’s a place rife with comic possibilities (both racist and not), and it’s decidedly a foreign country. One of the alleged selling points of Desperados is that much of the action involves three American women getting into crazy situations south of the border. But none of it screams, “This could only happen in Mexico.” Not even the bribing of local police. You could easily transpose the action to another vacation resort by only changing the names of locations and maybe three lines of dialogue. Many of the Idiot Plot problems could easily be resolved if the story relied a little more on the natural fish-out-of-water humor that comes from a neurotic, decidedly American woman trying to navigate the unfamiliar customs of a foreign country. Instead, it seems like writer Ellen Rapoport is hedging her bets in case, let’s say, financiers decide they’d rather the script took place on the French Riviera. Setting’s important, and the comic possibilities of this setting is wasted, big-time.

Aside from the excruciating Idiot Plot and the poorly exploited setting, this is standard romantic comedy fare: familiar plot, stock characters, obvious conflicts. It’s not the worst romantic comedy script I’ve read (Fuckbuddies and the alleged anti-rom-com I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell are infinitely worse), but it’s a frustrating read. What does work shows that Rapoport understands comedy and understands relationships. She just relies too much on people who are supposed to be smart acting stupid for no clear reason.

The Bottom Line

I think the key for Desperado’s success lies in really digging into the Mexican setting and deriving natural comedy from that fish-out-of-water concept instead of people acting like idiots and/or trying to catch flights. If it sticks with the Idiot Plot, it’ll end up as yet another forgettable romantic comedy, with or without the “edgy” “gross-out” humor.

Posted by Stan at 5:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)  | Reviews

December 24, 2009

Black List Script #9: The Gunslinger by John Hlavin

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “A tough ex-Texas Ranger has unfinished business with the Mexican gangsters who tortured his brother to death, and when they kidnap his brother’s young son, he comes after them with everything he has got.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Texas Ranger PHIL ELCO (50s) is called to the scene of a murder. The victim: fellow Ranger Danny Hensley, who was tortured by drug dealers (who also kept him alive with medication so they could torture him longer). Phil calls Danny’s brother, Ranger SAM LEE HENSLEY (30s), who is shocked and upset. At the funeral, Sam Lee consoles Danny’s widow, DEBORAH. Sympathetically, Phil gives Sam Lee a tip from the DEA on the down-low: the house where Danny’s body was found is owned by a thug named BILLY FLIP. Strapped with guns, Sam Lee goes to a bar where Flip’s known to drink. He demands to know who killed his brother. Flip is reluctant to tell him until Sam Lee, a crack shot, shoots clean through the bartender’s security baseball bat while looking at him through the reflection flips glasses. Flip tells Sam Lee it was a man named DIEGO DELA, who frequents a whorehouse. Sam Lee pistol whips him for good measure, then heads out to find Diego. Sam Lee waits outside the house until the whores leave, then bursts in, guns blazing. He wants to know who Diego’s boss is, but when Diego refuses to tell him, Sam Lee murders him — along with most of his companions. Phil is rousted out of bed early the next morning by DEA agent STEVE KENNEDY (40s), who explains that one of Diego’s men was an informant who brought the DEA closer than ever to finding out who ran the Tarto drug cartel. Unhelpful, Phil tells Kennedy to prove Sam Lee’s involvement. Kennedy points out that Phil had access to the confidential DEA file that led Sam Lee to Flip, and then to Diego, but not even that convinces Phil to help Kennedy.

Seven years later, Sam Lee is released from prison. His old Ford Bronco waits for him, maintained and tuned by Phil, who now owns a gas and service station in town. After thanking Phil, Sam Lee goes to his isolated ranch house and starts working on repairs and security measures (including motion sensors and a panic room). One night, an attractive Mexican, ESTELLA, shows up on Sam Lee’s doorstep. She claims to be the father of Danny’s illegitimate child, who was kidnapped by a man named Emilio. She begs for help. Sam Lee refuses. He goes to Phil’s garage to see if Phil has an information about Emilio. Phil refuses to help him, fearing Sam Lee’s planning to kill again. Sam Lee explains the bit about Estella fathering Danny’s child, but Phil still won’t help. Sam Lee goes to the motel where Estella is staying and tells her to arrange a time and place to meet Emilio. Sam Lee will get her the $10,000 ransom. On the way to the Mexican bar where they’ve arranged to meet Emilio, Sam Lee meets up with Phil, who has dug up the information on Emilio: he’s known for kidnapping, he’s dangerous, and he always brings backup.

At the bar, EMILIO and his thugs hang around, keeping close watch over the kid, CARLITO. Sam Lee hands off the money, at which time Estella reveals she’s working with Emilio, who claimed he’d pay her half the ransom. Instead, Emilio kills her. They tie up Sam Lee and take him away. He goes quietly. In the basement of a Spanish hacienda, Sam Lee is tortured by FRANCISCO MORELES, the leader of the Tarto cartel. He claims to have protected Sam Lee during his prison sentence because one of the men Sam Lee killed was his nephew, so he wanted the pleasure of killing Sam Lee himself. He also tells a long story about how he got into the trade: he was a Mexican doctor making a low wage and working with inferior equipment. One night, a man came in with abdominal pain but refused to say what he had eaten. Because Moreles couldn’t care for him properly, the man died. When Moreles performed the autopsy, he learned the man had three condoms filled with heroin in his digestive tract. One had burst, but the other two were intact. Moreles took the intact condoms and changed careers. Moreles threatens Sam Lee with a deck of cards: if he cuts the deck and finds an ace of spades, he will kill Sam Lee. If not, he’ll just torture him. Moreles falls back on his medical training to torture without killing. He pulverizes Sam Lee’s shooting hand, detaches one of his corneas, and leaves Sam Lee to await further torture. Later, when somebody comes in to give him more medication, Sam Lee kills the man, takes his gun and all his medical syringes, and flees the seemingly empty hacienda.

He manages to get to Deborah’s house, begging for help (coincidentally, she’s a doctor). She wants to call an ambulance, but he refuses to let her. Sam Lee tells Deborah to call Phil, then passes out. When Phil arrives, Sam Lee has regained consciousness. He tells Sam Lee he knew it was an ambush but let it happen so he could be led to the man responsible for Danny’s death. Phil’s surprised to hear Moreles’s name — by this time, everyone knows who he is. Sam Lee asks for a favor, which Phil arranges: a sham funeral made real with proper paperwork. With everyone convinced he’s dead, Sam Lee can take some time to recuperate. He begs Deborah for help getting to Moreles. She’s reluctant to help — she doesn’t want Sam Lee to end up dead, too — but agrees when Sam Lee tells her about Danny’s kid. She takes Sam Lee out to practice shooting, but he has a hard time with his loss of depth perception and bad hand. When Deborah removes his cast, Sam Lee demands that she cut out the clotting areas that are making his hand swell.

Phil comes over to Deborah’s house. He subtly implies that Sam Lee should leave Deborah out of this. Sam Lee tells Phil it’s not over yet. That night, Sam Lee tries to test the grip of his bad hand. Deborah tells him he doesn’t need to do this — Moreles thinks he’s dead. Sam Lee reminds her about Carlito. Deborah tells Sam Lee she knew Danny was messing around and blames herself for pulling away when she found she couldn’t have kids. Sam Lee has a dream/memory of Danny getting involved in a hostage negotiation involving a child. Sam Lee sneaks into the scene and shoots Danny in the ass in order to get a clear shot at the perpetrator. Afterward, Danny yells at him for not allowing him to negotiate. Sam Lee tells Danny that when he dropped his gun (in order to gain some trust), all bets were off. The next morning, Phil helps Sam Lee rig his shoulder holsters so he can reach both guns even with his bad hand. He warns Phil about various traps he’s set around his ranch house and tells Phil to pick up Deborah and take her to the motel to wait it out. Deborah wakes up and finds a note from Sam Lee, telling her to go with Phil when he comes and giving her his bank account information just in case.

Sam Lee sets up a sniper perch on Moreles’s hacienda. He waits, staking out the place until the right moment. When the time is right, he wedges a stick on his Bronco’s accelerator and aims it at the hacienda. With the men distracted, Sam Lee takes most of them out from his sniper perch. Then, he moves in closer, where he kills the remaining people and gets to Carlito. Sam Lee promises Carlito safety and asks if he wants to come with him. Carlito goes. Sam Lee spreads out a deck of cards, all aces of spades. Moreles and his top men return to the hacienda and find all their men dead and the aces. Moreles tells his men to call any available mercenaries and offer a reward — on Phil and Deborah.

Sam Lee brings Carlito to the ranch house. He prepares for what he knows is coming and shows Carlito the panic room. He tells Carlito to lock himself inside and wait until he hears the password. Phil picks up Deborah and takes her to the motel. He leaves her in the room and goes to the attached diner to get some coffee. Billy Flip works the grill. He sees Phil; Phil sees him and knows what to expect. He returns to the room, where Deborah’s showering, and insists they must leave immediately. Deborah doesn’t understand and won’t give up her shower. It’s a moot point, because it’s too late — Phil only has time to call Sam Lee and warn him before SUVs full of gangsters show up. Sam Lee rushes to the motel. A wild gunfight ensues. Phil manages to hold his own against the many thugs, but it’s not enough — he’s fatally wounded. Sam Lee shows up in time to take out the remaining men, including Billy Flip, whom he kills in cold blood.

Meanwhile, Moreles and his mean have been waiting outside Sam Lee’s ranch house for him to leave. When he does, they go in and find the safe room. Sam Lee drags Deborah back to the ranch house, where he’s set up a sniper perch. Sam Lee’s annoyed to find that Moreles and his men are already there. He tells Deborah to call the sheriff, but Deborah doesn’t have a cell phone. He sends her to go and get the sheriff and bring him back. When she leaves, Sam Lee starts sniping. Moreles tells his men to cut the power. Sam Lee starts firing blind. Moreles knows Sam Lee can’t see anything, or else he won’t be missing. Two of Moreles’s men find the sniper perch. It seems like Sam Lee’s done for — but as they take one of his guns, he comes at them with another, killing them both.

Moreles instructs his men to set a small C4 charge to blow the safe room door. It doesn’t exactly work — the door opens slightly, enough for one man to get a hand through, but Carlito stabs him with a paring knife. Annoyed, Moreles decides to go with a larger charge — if it kills Carlito, so be it. His men set up the charge. Sam Lee moves closer to the house. He manages to kill everyone but Moreles, who grabs the detonator and threatens Sam Lee. Since they’re all in such close quarters, they all die if Moreles detonates the charge. In response, Sam Lee gives Carlito the password. Carlito fiddling with the locks momentarily distracts Moreles, giving Sam Lee the opportunity to shoot Moreles’s detonating thumb. Then, he shoots Moreles in the head. Carlito comes clear of the safe room just as the sheriff’s department surrounds the ranch house. Sam Lee sends Carlito out, telling him to find a woman named Deborah, who will take care of him. Then, still in the house, he detonates the charge, blowing the house sky high.

Carlito is introduced to Deborah. The sheriff is fine with this, seeing as how they’re pseudo-kin. They figure the explosion of the house means Sam Lee is really dead — but he’s not. He watches Deborah and Carlito’s awkward introduction before walking unnoticed into the night.

Notes

Another year, another low-rent No Country for Old Men knockoff.

Like last year’s The Low Dweller, The Gunslinger aspires to be some sort of heady, thought-provoking rumination on violence. Also like The Low Dweller, it’s relentlessly violent but doesn’t provoke much thought on the subject. It knows the notes and not the music, so it features a leaden pace that lacks suspense and a lot of theoretically meaningful conversations that don’t mean much. It’s pretty much a stock revenge action flick that’s desperate to be more. I’m getting a little sick of scripts like that. Remember when friends and family would get killed, and the big hero would go down to the basement, come back with a dufflebag full of guns, and the next hour would be a maniacal yet eminently satisfying killing spree? Why does everything have to be so plodding and pseudo-thoughtful? It’s probably more frustrating because many of these scripts — The Low Dweller and The Gunslinger included — are not thoughtful. They simply plod along, as if the deliberate pace of molasses alone constitutes deeeeeep meaning.

One disadvantage of The Gunslinger is that we only get to know Sam Lee’s brother — the one he’s fighting to avenge, also known as the most important person in this story — through sometimes on-the-nose dialogue and artless flashbacks. None of this works particularly well, feeling more like writer John Hlavin is trying to write himself out of a corner than anything else. It’s too little, too late. It’s easy enough to buy into Sam Lee’s thirst for revenge, but it might have been nicer to get to know these characters before Danny dies. Not just Danny himself, but also Phil and Deborah. We get a few glimmers of what Phil was like before the seven-year jump in time, but what about the others? Were they always so depressing and lifeless? (I say this knowing full well that The Low Dweller actually does use the first act to introduce us to all the notable characters, then kills off the brother and lets us watch the way each character changes as a result of his death. And I didn’t like that, either. Maybe the solution is just a dufflebag full of guns.)

No, no. Get out of the parenthetical, dufflebag full of guns. We need you. I’m not going to sit here and pretend this script had any redeeming qualities. It’s the sort of fucking script where the big villain rattles off James Bond villain speeches the protagonist doesn’t need to know but the audience does, the sort of script where the big villain uses the blood-curdling menace of playing cards in order to threaten the protagonist, and even that truly terrifying display of thin plastic rectangles serves as little more than a moment to lazily call back to during one of Sam Lee’s cheesy action-movie badass moments. How in God’s name did this script get so dull? Why does it refuse to just be a dopey, mindless shoot-‘em-up? It’d be a hell of a lot more fun, and it’s already pretty well dopey and mindless. Just accept it and blow shit up instead of bringing in kids for treacly sentimental moments or focusing on long sequences of people driving around, looking depressed.

Really, the only positive thing I can say about this script is that it shows the Mexico I remember, the one sorely missing from Desperados, but it’s all too brief. This is not the world’s worst script, but it’s yet another example of a script that’s trying to be something it isn’t.

The Bottom Line

Because this bears such eerie similarities to the problems of The Low Dweller, the fix is exactly the same, so I’ll just quote what I wrote then:

There are two obvious but opposite ways to fix it: (1) embrace the fact that it’s an action movie by making it big, dumb, and overblown, or (2) take a step back, look at the way the story unfolds and what happens to the characters, figure out what you’re trying to say with the theme and the subtext, and rewrite it as a heady drama with a few intense, stomach-knotting action sequences. It depends on what [Hlavin] (or whoever produces it) wants the story to be. As it stands, [The Gunslinger] isn’t bad so much as an excruciating example of mediocrity masquerading as something more. Embrace the mediocrity and have fun with it, or work hard to make it great. That’s it.

Posted by Stan at 5:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | Reviews

December 25, 2009

Black List Script #10A: By Way of Helena by Matt Cook

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “A Texas Ranger and his wife move to a frontier town to investigate the disappearance of Mexicans in the area, and soon find themselves caught in the cult of personality that rules the area.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Helena, Texas. 1857. ABRAHAM BRANT (20s), a tall, muscular, hairless man, stands opposite JESSE KINGSTON (30s), with supportive crowds gathered on either side. An ill man, SAUL, introduces the conflict: godly Abraham and godless Jesse are to fight a duel. Muttering scripture, Abraham kills Jesse rather easily. Among the spectators is a small boy, who 30 years later grows up to be DAVID KINGSTON (30s), a Civil War hero and Texas Ranger tasked by the governor to go to the small village of Mount Hermon, because dead Mexicans keep washing up downriver of that town, and one of the latest corpses turned out to be the nephew of an influential Mexican general. The governor warns David about Abraham, who runs the town. David doesn’t remember him from the past, and he doesn’t believe the legends that now float around about him — that he’s a fearless Indian killer who is still right enough with God to heal the sick like Jesus.

David goes home to his Mexican wife, MARISOL (20s), to tell her he’s leaving on the trip. She insists on going with him. They stock a wagon and ride off through hill country and into the desert. Nestled in the Davis Mountains is Mount Hermon, which they arrive at after a brief respite at Fort Davis. A mile outside town, they reach ISAAC riding with a few men. He tells them they need to see the Preacher — Abraham. Isaac leads them through the small, pristine town to the Town Hall, where he introduces them to Abraham. He’s a gregarious, seemingly friendly man who introduces the significantly less friendly Isaac as his son. Abraham offers them a fine cottage for lodgings. He asks them about their religious beliefs — Marisol claims to be spiritual but not religious, while David doesn’t exactly answer the question. Left alone, the couple unpack. David marvels at the sturdy construction of the cabin. Marisol feels uneasy — Abraham sort of creeped her out, acting is if he knew them both and knew they were coming. David tries and fails to comfort her.

The next morning, David rides through town. He comes upon Abraham and Isaac. Isaac prepares to lead a hunting expedition with several men. Abraham shows David around and asks how they ended up in Mount Hermon. David says he and Marisol wanted to get away from it all. Abraham asks how long they’re staying, and when David says only a few days, Abraham asks David to stay longer and offers him the position of town sheriff to secure his stay. David is reluctant, but Abraham, convinces him. Marisol is visited by a gaggle of women from town, who already know David is the sheriff. David examines the stretch of river where the corpses keep washing up. He finds rifle shells nearby. When he returns home, Marisol is still creeped out and feeling ill. She complains about the town and wants to leave. David insists they need to stay a short while longer, until he’s figured out what has happened. If Marisol wants to leave, she can return to Fort Davis. She says she’d never leave him. They make love.

The next day, David is examining his new digs at the jailhouse. He finds a rifle that matches the shells he found by the river. Meanwhile, Marisol gets a surprise visit from Abraham. After some initial awkwardness, Marisol is charmed by Abraham. David stops by Hoot’s brothel. Outside, Isaac makes the stern suggestion that David won’t like it there. David won’t listen to him — unafraid of dickish Isaac, he stands up to him, and Isaac allows him to move past. One of Hoot’s prostitutes, beautiful redhead NAOMI sidles up next to David. She warns him about the town, saying things like “you can’t just leave” and that Abraham both prophesied David and Marisol’s arrival and can hear every word uttered in Mount Hermon. David excuses himself, and outside he runs into Abraham. David talks with him about Isaac. Abraham laughingly agrees when David suggests Isaac needs a serious beating. A shopkeeper gives Abraham some chickens, which Abraham hands to David. When David returns home, Marisol is excited by the food. She’s less excited by how strange she feels. She tells David about Abraham’s visit, which he finds odd because Abraham never mentioned it. He tells her to be careful what she says. Marisol tells him she’d like to go riding tomorrow.

The next morning, Marisol looks sicker, but she insists on riding. Abraham, Isaac, and Naomi arrive. In offering them the opportunity to come to his Sunday service, Abraham is careful to point out that David and Naomi have already met, displeasing Marisol. David thanks them. David and Marisol go riding. Her condition seems to worsen. That night, she starts coughing and vomiting. The following day, at the sheriff’s office, David looks over marked maps of the area when Naomi bursts in, having been beaten by one of her “clients.” David demands to know who did it; Naomi tells him. He goes to Hoot’s, pistol-whips some of the men — despite Hoot’s protestation that Abraham takes care of these things — and drags the assailant back to the jail (all the while yelling at some townspeople to get the doctor). Meanwhile, Marisol wanders the streets, stopping in front of the town hall. Inside, Abraham gives a cult like sermon to most of the town. He sees Marisol, invites her in, and hands her a snake he’s using as a prop. He tells her if the snake bites her and she dies, her salvation is assured. She hands off the snake but does start to get into the sermon.

While the doctor treats Naomi, Isaac storms into the jail, displeased with David’s violence. When Isaac makes an unsavory comment about Marisol, David drags him out to the street and beats the shit out of him. Abraham and others arrive, watching with amusement. David takes Marisol back to the cabin. She’s still ill and behaving strangely, talking about Abraham like he’s a god of some sort. The next morning, David announces to Abraham that he and Marisol are leaving. Although Abraham makes veiled threats in Latin (which David doesn’t understand), he acts sort of pleasant about it. David documents what he’s learning in a journal he keeps. Naomi appears, warning David of danger and asking him to meet her at a creek on Sunday. The doctor visits Marisol. David asks if she can travel, but the doctor says it will kill her. The doctor mutters some scripture suggesting that she will be healed by a savior.

David meets Naomi. She says she’s running away to California and urges David to go with. Naomi tells him that Abraham says he knew David would come, that he knew David’s father, and that David would bring him a wife. David is alarmed by this, but he doesn’t understand it. He gives Naomi his horse and a compass, which he shows her how to use and points the way to California. He tells her to go quickly before the townspeople realize she’s gone. She goes. Disheveled, Marisol wanders into town, looking for Abraham. She collapses. One of the shopkeepers holds on to her. Meanwhile, in Hoot’s, Abraham, Isaac, and a bunch of men surround three newcomers: WILLIAM (50s) and his twin sons, JOHN and GEORGE. Abraham tells them about his time in the Civil War, meeting General Lee. As he describes a quaint scene in which he and his men arrived at the battlefield to help the soldiers, what is actually shown is Abraham and his men pillaging and scalping Union soldiers, to the disgust of General Lee and the other survivors. William and his sons are impressed. David is unimpressed, especially with the strangers’ obsession with killing. His take is that reading about killing has become a substitute for it, and that people who don’t fight in battles wonder what it would feel like to kill. Abraham offers that David seems to have an overburdened conscience; David suggests that Abraham should, as well, but Abraham argues that he’s doing God’s work.

David returns to the cabin to find it in disarray. Marisol holds a knife. She’s cut herself in several places and lies in a pool of blood. David cleans her cuts and bandages them, then announces they’re leaving in the morning. As he prepares the wagons the following morning, he realizes he’s left his journal at the jail. He heads into town to fetch it when he finds Abraham, Isaac, and others leading George, John, and William out of the jail, all holding rifles from the armory. They don’t see him, so he uses that to his advantage, following them deeper into the mountains. Abraham has a group of Mexicans living in what’s effectively a concentration camp. William, George, and John have paid to hunt them for sport. David is horrified, and although he’s a little terrified when Abraham appears to make direct eye contact with him and smile, Abraham never lets on that he’s actually seen David. Once William and his boys have made the kill, Isaac is left to bury the body. Instead, he pretends to shovel until Abraham and the others are out of sight, then dumps the corpse in the river.

Upon returning to the cabin, David finds most of the town is there. Inside, Abraham has tied Marisol to the bed and appears to be exorcising her or…something. David demands to know what’s going on, but Abraham merely says Marisol is no longer his. The crowd beat him and shove him outside. David heads back into town, where he pillages the general store, makes a bunch of molotov cocktails, and hurls them at most of the buildings in town. David goes to Hoot’s, where William and his boys are with Isaac, bragging about the hunt. He shoots and kills George to get their attention. David orders some prostitutes to get everyones guns. David demands to know how much William and John paid to hunt the Mexicans. David orders John to shoot one of Isaac’s men, or else David will kill William. Quivering with fear, John does as he’s asked. Abraham enters the bar. He explains what happened with David’s father in Helena, that he was an awful man and David has turned out better not being raised by him. Abraham is surprised to learn David hasn’t come to town for revenge. David explains his true purpose: that he’s a Texas Ranger investigating Mexicans who have washed up downriver. Abraham condescendingly points out that they bury their victims. David points out that Isaac merely tosses the bodies in the river, surprising Abraham.

Abraham brings David and Isaac outside to a knife duel, mirroring the duel between Abraham and Jesse 30 years ago. David kills Isaac with some difficulty. It takes enough of a toll on him that he falls unconscious. He wakes in the cabin, where Marisol redresses his stitches. She’s cold and distant. David tries to encourage her to remember their love. He dreams of their first meeting, making love, etc. Two days later, Abraham has found his journal and discovered some of David’s romantic poetry. Abraham offers David the opportunity to escape — if he can outlast a group of three hunters who have just arrived from Africa. David is in no condition to do this, but he has no choice. The hunters go after David, but they’re inept. David manages to make out two of the three, and Abraham is so disgusted by the third that he kills him himself. It’s just Abraham and David now. When Abraham runs into a ravine, David manages to unwedge a boulder, which pins Abraham to the ground. Refusing to kill him, David simply secures him to the ground with boulders, hoping nature will take its course. Abraham tries to draw a comparison between Marisol and the men David led in the war, suggesting that David thrives on people needing him to lead and help them. He jams a knife into Abraham’s arm, telling him to kill himself. Abraham tells him that’s a path to Hell, then tells Abraham he will see David again — they are bound to their fates. David returns to the Mexican camp and releases the prisoner, which include a helpless young woman named MARIA, whom David knows needs help.

Six months later, the Texas governor condescendingly explains to the Mexican general that no evidence of the freed Mexicans’ story of a prison exists, so therefore there’s nothing to investigate. The general asks about Abraham Brant; the governor explains that they found him, but he was in no condition to have done what the Mexicans accused. The general asks about David; the governor says he never heard from him, and he’s either dead or missing. The governor refuses the general’s request to send his own men to search for David. Somewhere in the mountains of Colorado, wealthy men arrive in a small town. They come upon Abraham reading David’s journal, leg missing above the knee. Marisol emerges from the house, with a new child. In a Mexican villa, David wakes from a bad dream. He’s now living with Maria, carefree.

Notes

Ugh.

So let’s see… “The Most Dangerous Game” in the Wild West, a religious conflict that makes There Will Be Blood seem subtle, and a repetitive subplot involving a character writer Matt Cook never compels us to care about? That’s By Way of Helena in a nutshell.

What scares you more? A guy who firmly believes in his own God-endowed self-righteous bullshit, or a guy who’s completely full of crap and invokes God as a limp justification for his horrendous actions? If you picked the latter, you might enjoy By Way of Helena. To me and others who aren’t idiots, this becomes the fatal flaw of the script. Part of the problem is that we never really get to know these people or what the fuck, exactly, is going on, but ultimately Abraham Brant seems like a man with too much self-awareness to really believe in his own Godliness. Part of this stems from the scene where he weaves a tale of bullshit about meeting Robert E. Lee when, in reality, he and his followers just pillaged and scalped — if he really believed that every action he takes is justified by the Lord, he’d tell the honest (if alarmingly contorted) truth rather than a complete lie. Because what Abraham tells them isn’t spun or distorted — it’s just horseshit. So if that’s horseshit, doesn’t that make everything else horseshit? This certainly explains his oddly good-humored view of the godless David or his tolerance of a decidedly un-fundie house of ill repute in his town, but it doesn’t make him into the pseudo-mythical walking terror this script is clearly aiming for. He’s just kind of a douchebag.

That’s not to say I’d rather have some sort of Unsolved Mysteries faith healer roaming about. All I want is a guy who really, with all his heart, believes his own hype. That seems to be the great debate with cultists: are these guys great bullshit artists who crassly manipulate people so they can bang a harem of underage girls, or is the reason they’re so convincing because they completely buy into their own full-of-shit beliefs, which compels others to believe? Here’s my cheat sheet, which comes with absolutely no psychological training: if he’s been on TV for 30 years, he doesn’t believe a goddamn word he says; if he leads a group of followers to an isolated compound that will ultimately result in the deaths of every member of the cult, including its leader, chances are he believes he talks to God. Make sense? Thought so.

So if Abraham isn’t a real threat, what does this script hinge on? The “mystery” of who’s dumping Mexicans? The one plus here is that writer Matt Cook gives us the “why” — something he neglects with the two other subplots (David vs. Abraham and Marisol’s descent into…whatever the fuck that is) — and although it’s deplorable, it’s also a storyline familiar to anyone who enjoyed John Leguizamo in The Pest. Or, you know, anyone who’s read “The Most Dangerous Game” or seen the thousands of adaptations and variations (The Pest among them). Now, there’s a reason this story has perpetuated for so long, so I guess I can’t complain about Cook using it here. It’s just that, with so little else to offer, a rehash of a 95-year-old story (that, itself, was probably lifted from somewhere else) isn’t much to hang one’s hat on.

So, then, I guess we’re left with David and Marisol. David, the taciturn “hero” who defies all dramatic sense by not having any clear desires or interests. Yes, he writes love poetry; yes, he was good in the war. But what does he want? He’s assigned the task of investigating the dead Mexicans. He doesn’t have any real desire to do anything but a good job, which is not exactly a riveting character trait. He makes no decision to take any action except what’s required of him, until it reaches a point where any man would be forced to take action. Also not riveting.

To put it in a different context, think about similarly structured western: Unforgiven. Like By Way of Helena, Unforgiven starts with a heaping helping of backstory, followed by the introduction of a taciturn hero who doesn’t explicitly state his motives. The explicitly part is important, because while he never says it allowed, it quickly becomes abundantly clear through conversation and that he wants at least one of three things: the reward money, redemption for his dark past, and/or to protect a woman who may share some similarities with his deceased wife. One of the most interesting parts of the story is seeing Munny reveal more and more of himself until all the cards on the table, allowing us to understand exactly why Munny has decided to take this on (as well as exactly what he’s capable of).

By Way of Helena eventually fleshes out David’s character, but he’s still never ascribed reasons for his behavior. In passing, Abraham suggests that David has a caretaker personality, but not much is made of it, and David’s actions don’t quite match Abraham’s speculation. Aside from that brief moment, no mention whatsoever is made of David’s internal motivations. A little would go along way toward explaining why he doesn’t just get the fuck out of Dodge at the first sign of Marisol’s illness. “Dutiful,” while a practical explanation, just isn’t terribly compelling.

Because of this massive problem with David’s characterization, his issues with Marisol are a flat-out bore. The scenes are repetitive — she shows increasing signs of illness and increasing signs of loyalty toward Abraham, while David non-reacts — but they add no dimension to either character. If Marisol refuses to come into her own, the least she could do is provide a reflection of the things David would never say aloud. Problem is, David would say them aloud — he writes and recites love poetry, for fuck’s sake. An interesting character trait predicated on explicitly stating, in blunt language, one’s feelings, and I still ran through 118 pages without having any idea who this person is or why he acted the way he did throughout the story. Some of his behavior is simple common sense; what isn’t just comes across like bizarre puppet theatre.

The Bottom Line

Let’s see… A pseudo-spiritual battle that is neither spiritual nor much of a battle, a romantic subplot that’s neither romantic nor meaty enough to qualify as plot of any kind, and a cheesy mystery that becomes vital to the cheesier third act? Overall, this year’s Black List scripts have been better than last year’s, because I’m at #10(A) and this is the first one that just completely flatlined, without any redeeming qualities or any suggestions on turning this into a story worth telling. The best choice here is to fly to a safe distance and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

Posted by Stan at 5:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 11, 2009

Surprise Script Review: A Single Man by Tom Ford and David Scearce

Script Download Link: None Available (sorry, kiddies, I’m not risking my neck just to placate you, and I couldn’t find a download anywhere else online) [Although I mostly agree with John August, I am offering this script download because my not-entirely-captive audience has threatened to abandon me if I don’t start “offering downloads like Carson.” It is not for educational purposes. It’s for the purpose of placating people who want to feel good that they know more about an upcoming movie than their plebeian friends and coworkers. If anyone affiliated with this production requests that I remove the link, I won’t lose any sleep over it. Just send an e-mail to the address on the sidebar.]

Note: I would have posted this earlier than the date of its release, but I honestly forgot about this project until I saw a bunch of reviews pop up last night, which doesn’t bode well, right?

Adapted by legendary fashion icon Tom Ford (who, apparently, self-financed the entire project) and David Scearce from the semi-iconic 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel, A Single Man is one of those scripts that lives and dies based solely on the actors selected to play the roles. Ford (who also directed) could have done worse than Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, but still, I feel compelled to examine this phenomenon of “the right actor” saving an otherwise dismal project.

That’s pretty much what A Single Man is: dismal. I haven’t read the novel, and I don’t exactly plan to, but the screenplay is a moody character piece where protagonist George spends most of his time brooding and looking indecisively at his pet handgun. The leaden 88-page script doesn’t have much story to tell: Briton George is a lonely gay literature professor in Southern California, whose beloved Jim died in a car crash a year earlier. Since Jim’s death, we gather, George has spent the bulk of his time drinking, staring mournfully at the Pacific, and having casual sex with grad students. His best friend, Charley (a woman), is a haggard old rummy who has stuck by George because she’s quietly in love with him.

Flashbacks reveal what can’t be told through the power of grim staring: George met Navyman Jim shortly after the end of World War II*, they spent 15 happy years together, and then Jim was killed. Shocking revelations at every turn, right?

In the present, George casually drifts through his (spoiler alert!) last day on Earth. In one of its few effective moments, he goes to Charley’s place, and the drunker she gets, the angrier she gets — blaming George for destroying her life, because she’s spent so many years waiting on him, wishing he’d decide to go straight and hook up with her. Meanwhile, George’s unsubtle lecture on homophobia (buried in analogies to Brave New World) stirs the heart and loins of grad student Kenny, who tries to follow George like a lost puppy. It has no effect, until George runs out of liquor and coincidentally runs into Kenny at the same seaside bar where he met Jim 16 years ago.

Despite drinking and talking with Kenny, George still isn’t terribly interested in or attracted to Kenny. Nevertheless, he accompanies Kenny on a beach stroll, which turns into an awkward skinny-dipping session that grows more awkward when George attempts to drown himself. Kenny pulls George out of the water, takes him back home, and there’s not much left to the story other than George’s death, which I’ll leave a mystery: did he finally commit suicide, or was it…murder?

Actually, one other nice thing happens in the story, although it’s as subtle as it is marginalized: Ford and Scearce draw a nicely depressing parallel between George and Charley and Kenny and his “friend,” Lois, who’s clearly smitten with Kenny in the same way Charley is with George. Look forward to the sequel, A Double Man, chronicling Kenny’s ultra-depressing middle-age in the coke-fueled ’80s, where he undoubtedly falls victim to GRIDS and becomes an early martyr of the burgeoning “not gay cancer” movement. In a The Life of David Gale-style twist ending, Lois will allow Kenny to infect her so she can illustrate the flaws of a prejudiced society.

But I’m getting ahead of myself… Despite its relatively few nice moments — all of which, you’ll note, involve character interaction and not glassy-eyed grief — A Single Man struggles like hell to justify its existence. Like The Lovely Bones, it probably achieves more as a novel than it can accomplish through this adaptation, by virtue of the fact that it’s frequently more interesting to read about a character doing uninteresting things than watching them do uninteresting things. Even if it doesn’t, the subject matter and time of its release justifies its place in history… But does it reflect in any way on contemporary society? Does it have to?

Maybe I’m alone in this thinking, but if a script doesn’t really have anything going for it, shouldn’t it at least have some insightful, thought-provoking thematic elements in play? If its story contains relatively little drama, a mostly impenetrable protagonist whose most interesting character trait is being British, and a metric shit-ton of sad stares, shouldn’t it at least do us the favor of operating at another level, to keep the audience engaged? Keep in mind I tear through Dickens and Thackeray novels like an obsessed maniac, so this isn’t a product of a “Why can’t this be more like Transformers 2?” short attention span mindset: I like the slow build, and I like moody character pieces. But “slow build” implies…an actual build, of some kind. A Single Man doesn’t build. Instead of making a slow, Toyota Prius fuel-efficiency-maximizing acceleration from 0-60, it spends its 88 pages coasting from, let’s say, 15 to a dead stop.

However, I can’t parse this script thematically, either. At best, it’s another example of “Hey, gay men are just like regular people” — they love and grieve and contemplate suicide just like mourning straight people! To that end, this could be a legitimately subtle blow (so to speak) for gay rights, by showing that a gay man’s grief is just as watch-checkingly tedious as a straight person’s (see also: 21 Grams, The Shipping News). However, the non-homophobes who would see a movie like that would respond thusly: “Duh.” It’s not going to change the opinions of those who are somehow unaware that people are people, because as soon as they find out it’s the study of a gay man, their shriveled units will retract and their body will shudder and they’ll either avoid it or protest its existence. Either way, I’m operating under the assumption that this has something to do with the script’s “necessity” to be made, because I can’t come up with anything else based on what I’ve read. Because of its dearth of story, character, and theme, the script felt like a ponderous, three-hour “epic,” despite it being one of the shortest scripts I’ve ever read professionally.

Though I do tend to speculate on whether or not the script will work as a film, I don’t usually comment on reviews of the movies themselves, because the goal is to make a subjective assessment of the script with as much objectivity as possible. This is a different case, though: as I mentioned, I only remembered that I read this script after seeing a bunch of reviews pop up on criticism sites I frequently read — and it sort of surprises me that it’s getting unanimous raves from critics whose opinions I trust. It just goes to show how much directorial style and high-quality performances can mask narrative flaws (or even eliminate them, since I imagine the singled-out-for-likely-justified-praise Firth probably captures a lot about George that may be in the novel but doesn’t appear on the script page, either textually or subtextually).

So it goes from a dull, forgettable script into a well-regarded movie. That, to me, makes it an interesting case study. (Frequently, in my experience, good scripts turn out shitty and shitty scripts turn out shittier, but it’s surprisingly rare for a bad script to blossom into a great movie.) That makes me wish I could offer a download. Alas, it’ll have to wait until I find a copy elsewhere online.

*I’m going to give this script the benefit of the doubt and assume “gay man associated with the Navy” was less of a cliché in the original novel than it is now. [Back]

Posted by Stan at 5:20 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

Black List 2009

Say, these aren’t the best scripts. They’re just the “most liked.” Because why would anyone like the best scripts the most? That’s crazy talk!

As I did last year, I intend to cover the top 10 on this blog over the course of the next two weeks — one a day, starting with The Muppet Man (because I love biopics!), ending with By Way of Helena. This schedule assumes, of course, that these scripts don’t disillusion or enrage me to such a degree that I give up on life altogether.

THE BLACK LIST was compiled from the suggestions of over 300 film executives, each of whom contributed the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2009 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year.

This year, scripts had to be mentioned at least five times to be included on THE BLACK LIST.

All reasonable effort has been made to confirm the information contained herein. THE BLACK LIST apologizes for all misspellings, misattributions, incorrect representation identification, inelegant loglines, and questionable “2009” affiliations.

It has been said many times, but it’s always worth repeating:

THE BLACK LIST is not a “best of” list. It is, at best, a “most liked” list.

I see little reason to list all the scripts mentioned when you can just download the PDF.

Posted by Stan at 2:29 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

December 25, 2009

Black List Script #10B: The Days Before by Chad St. John

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: Since these scripts, bought or not, are currently unproduced and/or in the midst of long, tedious development processes, they may not make it to the screen for up to three years, if ever. You should know that the synopsis contains MASSIVE, EARTH-SHATTERING SPOILERS, even though this screenplay may not resemble the finished film (if any) in any way. Read at your own risk.

Secondary Disclaimer: I refer to what follows as “coverage” by the loosest definition of that term. In keeping with this blog’s tradition, I’ve crammed the notes so full of rancorous rants, it’s 1/10th as concise as actual coverage, almost falling into the category of a review. However, since I’ve included the loglines and a detailed synopsis, it’s close enough to coverage for my purposes. Deal with it.

Logline (provided by The Black List): “A man who possesses a time travel device uses it to go back in time to prevent an alien invasion.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Around 7PM on December 26, 2011, JAMES SMITH and girlfriend RILEY (who records everything on a small camcorder) speed through Washington, D.C., in an old tank of a Bonneville, chased by the police. Smith has a timer on his watch that has about an hour left on it. The Bonneville races toward the White House, using its unwieldy size and weight to smash through barricades. The car ends up flipping, allowing the police to get at Smith and Riley. They demand that the police look in the car’s trunk. Later, an angry Smith is interrogated by COLONEL BODETTE, who wants to know how Smith got an XM-97 prototype, his weapon of choice. Smith explains they’re all over the place where he comes from. Later, Bodette discovers a second James Smith — not a twin; the same person — is sitting in a D.C. jail. The bomb squad opens the trunk. What’s inside remains a mystery, but it’s surprising and impressive enough to get the attention of DEFENSE SECRETARY KRONAU and PRESIDENT MALLOY, who immediately requests the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Space Command, and NASA. Thunderstruck, they all turn to Smith for advice…just as his watch alarm beeps. Smith demands to know where Malloy was 48 hours ago. Malloy is too shaken to respond. Meanwhile, in Riley’s (empty) interrogation room, she hears an eerie sound, like metal scraping. As it grows louder, Malloy is led away without answering Smith. Meanwhile, Smith has been holding a Blackberry that abruptly powers on.

From inside the interrogation room, things outside seem to be going badly. Smith and Riley hear gunshots and screams. The shadow of something disturbing and unseen creeps into Smith’s interrogation room, but he plays dead. Riley climbs up into the ceiling to hide. Smith comes after her. Together, they move through the underground interrogation room, seeing signs of violence but no bodies. Bodette, Kronau, Malloy, and a bunch of Secret Service move through the White House. Smith tells Riley nothing matters but getting to Malloy. He tells her to tell him if she sees “him.” “Him who?” “Him, him,” which doesn’t make sense but terrifies Riley. Malloy and Kronau are the only ones to make it to a safe room, but the blast door has been torn apart and the place is drenched in blood. Smith and Riley find Malloy, who’s dying. Smith demands to know every detail of what was happening with Malloy 48 hours ago. Malloy dies as something huge — ostensibly “him” — arrives, coming after them. They rush outside, trying to get away from the White House. He kills Riley, and as Smith takes back the camcorder, he pushes some buttons on the Blackberry that suddenly wink him out of existence…

…and into 48 hours ago, December 24th. Exhausted, Smith staggers into a nearby bus station and collapses. The next morning, Smith goes to a coffee shop where Riley works. She doesn’t seem to know Smith at all. He apologizes and promises he won’t let her die again. Riley’s baffled. Smith leaves. Meanwhile, Malloy and Kronau attend a funeral for the First Lady and Malloy’s daughter, who died in an unexpected plane crash. Smith steals a taxi and hauls ass to a D.C. street. At a tenement building, he manufactures low-grade napalm and “paints” something on the side of the building. As the Presidential motorcade drifts by, they stop. Written in flames is the President’s top-secret distress code. They arrest Smith, who has come bearing gifts: a blood sample and finger belonging to Malloy, plus alien tissue samples. His camcorder is both tiny and can hold 300 terabytes of data, containing years of footage depicting a horrific alien attack. Bodette’s XM-97 prototype is accounted for, meaning whatever Smith has told them — ostensibly that he’s a time traveler warning of an impending attack — checks out.

Malloy, Kronau, and Bodette interrogate Smith. They want to know what’s going on. Smith explains that aliens will invade Earth for the first time seven years from now, but they have a keen strategy to make humans an unending food source: they gorge on humanity for 24 hours, then jump back in time 48 hours and start over again. When they arrive, Smith uses his own time-traveling Blackberry to travel back and spends 24 hours trying to warn the proper officials before they attack again, and he jumps back again. He can’t travel earlier than 48 hours because his Blackberry is actually an alien device written in an undecipherable language. If the aliens are so secure with their technology, Malloy asks how Smith got his Blackberry. Smith explains that, seven years from now, an old man randomly gave it to him, showed him the five-button sequence to press, then threw himself in front of bus. Smith demands to speak to a scientist, Dr. Constantine Oro, which Malloy approves despite Kronau’s lack of enthusiasm. Looking at the global panic situation, Malloy scrambles military throughout all the major cities. Smith explains to the military how to attempt to fight them. The White House press secretary explains that the country is at its highest alert but tells people not to panic and gives no further details. Riley is pulled out of her coffee shop by Secret Service and taken to the White House. On the ride over, she’s joined by DR. ORO, who’s effectively Brent Spiner’s character in Independence Day.

Smith tries to convince Riley that, in the future, they’re married. She doesn’t buy it. Malloy calls them both into the war room, where Riley sees the horrific footage of alien attacks and suddenly finds herself believing every word Smith says. Kronau asks Smith if he becomes President in the future. Oro examines Smith’s Blackberry, stunned that such a small device could provide the energy required to create a wormhole through time. Smith knows Oro has a particular project, so the convoy heads out to Oro Industries, an abandoned factory in a dumpy part of D.C. In Oro’s basement lab, a huge contraption built around an intricate mirror array waits for them. He built the device for the military, which would have allowed them to send brief warning messages a few minutes back in time if it had been completed (funding was cut before he could see it through). If they had the right amount of energy, the device could theoretically send anything and everything back in time at least 15 years — when he first built the prototype — so Smith offers up his Blackberry, suggesting they use its power source (the alien ships) to send something back in time, to give them more advance warning. Oro doesn’t believe he has nearly enough time. It’s already 3PM, and Smith says the aliens arrive like clockwork at 8PM — on rare occasions, they show up earlier, but it’s almost always eight. Oro is terrified about the ramifications of sending a message to the past, which will change everything. They all realize they don’t have a choice.

Oro and Bodette watch video footage of the invasion. They realize all the ships are synced somehow, so they don’t accidentally crash. Whatever one ship does, the others do — there is no leader, just a big swarm of like-minded vehicles. Oro’s also shocked to discover that these aren’t exactly spaceships — they’re designed to operate in our atmosphere. President Malloy addresses the nation, alarming them with an honest account of what’s to come (which includes video footage). Smith concocts a message to send to the past, which a lab tech converts into binary code. Later, he sees Kronau altering the message somehow. Meanwhile, Oro tears apart Smith’s trusty Blackberry in order to power his own time machine. Riley and Smith share their first real romantic moment, but it’s interrupted when the Blackberry hums to life with a shower of sparks, followed by the groan of metal heard earlier. Smith checks his timer, but there are two hours left. He announces that they’re early.

They have to adjust their schedule, so Oro tries to send the message — and trips a breaker. It’s not the time machine, powered by the ships, but the laptop that has the message in it. Somebody has to reset the breaker — and that somebody is Smith. He races through the lab, resets the breaker, and is pleasantly surprised no aliens have attempted to kill him — until one appears. Smith kills it with his XM-97. He returns to the basement, and they hide, fearing the cacophony they hear outside. Oro sends the message, he thinks, but nothing has changed. Smith orders Oro to put his Blackberry back together. They decide to flee the basement, and not a moment too soon — the “silhouetted dragon” seen earlier (a.k.a., him) arrives. It eyes the mirror array with obvious intelligence. It understands what they’ve done. Smith tries to use the Blackberry to send himself and Riley back in time, but it’s no longer working. As aliens descend on them, Smith realizes Oro put one of the components in upside-down. He flips it, the Blackberry powers on, and he and Riley go back in time, to December 23rd. (Incidentally, they leave Oro behind when he becomes overwhelmed by what’s happening.)

Smith and Riley are already surrounded by soldiers — and Kronau, who is now the President. Malloy is now a vice admiral, Bodette is a general, and Oro…is exactly the same. The world has changed significantly — D.C. is an urban war zone, glutted with military. The Pentagon has expanded exponentially. Hundreds of millions died during riots that followed the initial panic after the message was announced. Military technology has improved to the point that these people are prepared for an attack. They strap Smith into something uncomfortably similar to Farscape’s Aurora Chair, which extracts Smith’s memories and displays them on computer monitors so Kronau and the others can see what they’re up against and strategize. The memory videos are instantly processed by the computer to give vital information about the alien infrastructure. As Riley is dragged to a similar chair, she’s surprised to see a display of Smith’s memories of her — sweet, yet she dies over and over again. Later, Kronau and Malloy plan to send Smith and Riley to the front lines. They need everyone to fight if they stand a chance.

Inside a military chopper, Riley is pissed. Among other things, she’s noticed Smith doesn’t have a wedding ring. Smith makes excuses. He notices Riley nervously fingering something — the laser mirror array. She explains the silhouetted dragon dropped it just before they left. Smith panics and demands they turn the chopper around. They refuse, so Smith and Riley fight back — resulting in the chopper inadvertently spinning out of control. Riley falls out of the helicopter and onto the roof of a building where Oro awaits the end of the world. Smith is also thrown out of the helicopter, landing on another roof, before the chopper crashes. Smith rushes toward Bodette and convinces him that one of the aliens has uncovered their plan, and the only logical thing to do in that scenario is attack sooner, to gain what little surprise element they can. Kronau and Malloy gripe about this hitch in their plans — their strategy was based around a coordinated surprise attack, to catch them off guard. They can’t just change the strategy. Outside, the groaning metal sound starts again. Ships and dragon aliens appear. This time, they’re even more heavily armored than usual — they know what to expect and have prepared for it. The streets of D.C. are instantly filled with carnage. The silhouetted dragon, no longer in silhouette (and revealed as a one-eyed dragon), appears, sniffing around for something. Reports come in that major cities have fallen or are falling.

Riley drags Oro into the building. Smith, injured, meets her in the same building. Smith operates under the assumption that when Kronau confiscated his Blackberry, he destroyed it. Dr. Oro knows he didn’t. Kronau is at Oro’s lab, using the Blackberry to send yet another message back, feeding him more information he can use for political gain. Smith, Riley, and Oro try to sneak through the streets of D.C. They come upon a fire station and steal a truck. Oro flips the siren on, drawing the dragons’ attention. One climbs on the roof. Riley shoots it, and it falls, pulling the roof off with it. As more dragons approach, it looks like they’re done for — when they all suddenly stop. They’re suddenly deferential — because 60-foot dragon queens have descended from something resembling a mothership. Smith, Riley, and Oro get down to the basement lab, but the one-eyed dragon is on to them. Threatening Riley, the one-eyed dragon orders them to “undo” the messages they’ve sent back. Oro sends a message back to himself to disregard all the other messages, which will revert the timeline. Despite complying with his order, the one-eyed dragon still squeezes Riley’s neck and begins shooting blades at the others. General Bodette suddenly appears, worse for wear, and shoots the one-eyed dragon. This knocks him away from Riley but doesn’t kill him — so Riley grabs some live wires and jams them into a puddle of water, which fries the one-eyed dragon’s electronic brain implant.

Smith takes the Blackberry, and they flee. Rather than simply going back another two days to warn the others, Smith and Oro hatch a scheme. Realizing a low voltage overloads their brain implant, they wonder what would happen if they overloaded the computers in one of the ships. Since all the ships operate together, if one goes down, they all go down. Bodette leads them to a blood-spattered lab filled with high-tech equipment, which allows them to analyze the ships. They map the ship and find the location of its control computer. Oro points out that it’s a suicide mission — if they go into a ship 2000 feet in the air, overload the computer, and then jump back in time, there will be no ship, which means they’ll fall to their deaths. They decide to go with it. As Smith, Oro, and Bodette prepare to leave, Riley is angry — she’s finally found him, and now he’s going to kill himself. Smith doesn’t care. He hugs her, secretly duct-taping his Blackberry to her back, which he activates. She shoves him away and disappears through time, pissed when she realizes what is happening.

Smith, Oro, and Bodette hitchhike on floating bodies to get inside the ship. They’re forced to walk through a “scary dark corridor” in order to get to the computer control area. Several times, they’re almost spotted, but they manage to hide long enough. They get the drop on one, which they kill, but not before it kills Bodette. They finally get to the computer, which Oro realizes is protected by a rudimentary containment field — all they need to do is turn it off, and the electrical energy will overload the computer’s circuits. Only — they can’t figure out how to turn off the containment field. Finally, Smith is forced to punch a hole in the floor, which he tosses Bodette’s body through. Bodette’s body, in turn, punches a hole in the containment field, overloading the ship. As energy amasses, threatening to destroy them, another one-eyed dragon appears, ready to kill them. He does kill Oro, but Smith flees. In his attempts to escape, Smith tumbles right out of the ship, followed by the one-eyed dragon. Smith clings to a floating person, a soldier. Smith grabs his pistol, shoots the one-eyed dragon in his one eye, and grabs his Blackberry as he falls. Smith does a swan dive, entering the sequence as he goes, disappearing through time four feet from the ground.

Two days earlier, Riley runs through D.C. to Oro Industries, where she finds Smith in a pool of his own blood. Smith admits she never married him, that he couldn’t even get her to go out with him, but he fell in love with her and forced himself to continually save her, whether she loved him back or not. She cradles Smith as he dies. On Christmas, Riley sits at the café, watching a news report about the First Lady and Malloy’s daughter skipping their helicopter flight, avoiding catastrophic failure. Another report shows Oro getting arrested for charging a Presidential podium and demanding he allocate a grant for SETI. Smith arrives at the café, surprised that this total stranger bailed him out of jail. He asks if he knows her. Riley says, “Not yet.” She asks him to go on a walk with her. Arm in arm, they stroll into a D.C. Christmas portrait. All the while, Riley’s Blackberry lies in a trash can. It powers on.

Notes

In writing, time travel is a bloodsport. If it isn’t played exactly right, it can turn a decent story idea into a complete fucking disaster.

The Days Before isn’t played exactly right.

Let me describe the problem with the time travel logic. It’s pretty convoluted, so bear with me. Okay, so you have the aliens. They have these Blackberry devices that are preprogrammed to travel 48 hours into the past. They eat and pillage for 24 hours, then jump 48 hours in the past. Then, there’s Smith. He travels 48 hours in the past the instant they arrive. So let’s say 12/26 at 8PM is the first-ever time Smith traveled. He goes back to 12/24 at 8PM. The aliens eat and pillage until 12/27 at 8PM, then jump back to 12/25 at 8PM. Smith immediately jumps back, to 12/23 at 8PM. The aliens eat and pillage until 12/26 at 8PM, then jump back to 12/24 at 8PM. Smith immediately jumps back, to 12/22 at 8PM. The aliens eat and pillage until 12/25 at 8PM, then jump back to 12/23 at 8PM. So there’s a pattern, and believe it or not, the pattern pretty much works if you’re going for the “free will” interpretation of time travel. I.e., that time travel is not a predetermined course of action, meaning if you travel back in time and step on a butterfly, it will have dire ramifications on the future; whereas, in the “predetermined” variation on time travel that makes things a lot less messy, you go back and step on a butterfly and it has no effect, because it was always supposed to happen, because you were always there. Did I just blow your mind?

The cracks in the façade start to appear right around the time they decide to send the message 15 years into the past. The aliens travel back 48 hours for every 24 hours of slaughter, which means the men of the past lose 48 hours for every 24 hours they spend planning a counterattack…right? This where things get complicated and started to lose logical traction with me. Because, yes, in a free universe, sending a message to the past saying, “The world will end on December 23, 2011 — here’s how to prepare,” seems like it would make sense. It’s more complicated than that, though. If they have all the information — nobody really ever says what’s in the message, other than Kronau tampering with its content, but it seems strongly hinted that they know enough to be prepared — wouldn’t a smart person draw the conclusion that the end of the world could actually occur anywhere between 7.5 and 15 years from the date the message was received? Because the aliens are barreling at them twice as fast as time is occurring, right? I know a tangent universe is supposed to be an instantaneous change to the timeline, but time isn’t completely fluid, either… Is it?

Whether it is or isn’t, doesn’t the new world fragment everything, creating that universe-destroying paradox Doc Brown warned about in Back to the Future Part II? Because if the entire universe changes, that means Smith changes. It means what will happen seven years in the future changes. If hundreds of millions died in riots, how do we know Smith, the old man, or someone integrally related to the most important moment in the script (Smith receiving the Blackberry) isn’t affected? How do we know the new circumstances of Smith’s military-dictatorship lifestyle won’t change the way he reacts to receiving the Blackberry? Maybe he won’t be the type of person who’s interested in saving the world. This, then, is the problem with the “free will” time travel story: if one moment has permanent ramifications on the universe, those ramifications continue through the present and into the future. Smith and Riley should not be isolated from it, because that just doesn’t make sense. (And yes, it’s a super-cheat to not show any “effect” of the message until Smith and Riley jump again, thus sticking “our” unaffected Smith and Riley into a totally separate tangent universe.)

Even if this, in and of itself, didn’t at least call this plot point into question, here’s something that may: ultimately, the script comes down to overloading the ship fleet’s computers. In the second act, Dr. Oro and Smith decide based on no concrete evidence that they have an “unlimited” power supply — obviously it’s limited by the amount of power the ship needs for propulsion, human-snatching, etc. — to tap into in order to get Oro’s machine working. Oro says that, theoretically, if they can harness the power of the Blackberry, he can send “anything” through time… So why is it that they’re hellbent on sending nothing more than binary code messages? Why not send a person through time, just as Smith himself came back prepared with fingers and tissue samples and video? Not just for the sake of that being a little more dramatically interesting than sending what amounts to a telegram, but for the sake of their own preparedness. They’re relying on a little too much the assumption that they can nab Smith on a particular day, analyze everything he has with him, and magically be able to fight back within 24 hours, despite their plan resting on a coordinated attack among billions.

This concludes the super-nerd dissection portion of the screenplay. On to the normal shit, like story and character…

Strip away the time travel element, and this is just a gorier Independence Day. Not much wrong with that, except for the part where Independence Day already exists and isn’t the terrible movie certain people allege. Maybe this script asks headier questions than ID4 — most of them related to the partially broken time travel concept — but it’s asking the wrong questions. Here’s the #1 question I asked: why are these aliens here? “To eat people” isn’t good enough. What kind of civilization needs to feed so much that they raze a civilization not once, not twice, but in perpetuity until, as far as we know, they get so far back in time that the human race diminishes from billions to a few million? What happens when Earth no longer provides a sustainable level of food? Granted, we never find out why the aliens in Independence Day showed up, but guess what? Those aliens didn’t have a diabolical scheme in place to (a) eat everyone and (b) travel back in time to eat them again. The only thing we learn about The Days Before’s aliens is that they’re apparently feeding enormous queens. Why do they need so much? Is this the preparation for some sort of extended hibernation? Do they need to eat constantly like sharks? Who the fuck knows? St. John doesn’t take the time addressing questions like this.

In fact, he spends a little too much time being coy. That whole “Him, him” style of writing drove me slightly insane, because it smacks of a writer being clever for the sake of cleverness, and frankly, it’s not clever. It’s just coy, which is like an annoying version of clever. Examples of this abound: hiding the aliens the audience knows are aliens, hiding what Malloy initially tells Smith (or even the fact that he tells him anything) from the audience — most of this stuff hinders the story rather than helping it. When it doesn’t hinder the story, it feels more like St. John is being saucy by pointing out things he assumes the audience is thinking about without addressing them with any real substance. Movies are inherently about manipulating audiences, but audiences don’t generally want a movie to manipulate them into feeling frustration. When The Days Before isn’t reveling in the flawed execution of its convoluted time travel mechanics, it’s offering up annoying moments like these.

As an unfortunate result of this tendency toward adorable coyness, the relationship between Smith and Riley is basically one huge macrocosm of why the coyness doesn’t work. The script tries so hard to be edgy and ironic and post-post that it forgets the audience is supposed to get somewhat invested in them. It just backs away from real emotion, opting instead for pithy dialogue that violates one of the central tenets of comedy writing: it’s always funnier when the characters don’t know they’re in a comedy. Smith and Riley both know it, and so does St. John, so he tries so hard to subvert clichés that the relationship isn’t interesting, which makes it hard to care when one of the characters ends up in jeopardy and the other either dashes off to help or preemptively mourns them. Worse than that, St. John doubles back into creepy sincerity with Smith’s disconcerting declaration that Riley wouldn’t give him the time of day and only fell in love with him — multiple times — because he convinced her she would someday marry him. How does that make him, or the relationship, in any way likable? It’s the sort of weird explanation that sheltered men believe makes women melt, when in reality any female with a shred of sanity and/or fewer than three cats would file a restraining order. As opposed to, say, finding the still-alive version of Smith and forcing the relationship to blossom.

Throughout the script, I kept waiting for something unexpected to happen. The first act presents itself as a theoretically inventive script, so why is it that the best it has to offer is a warmed-over Independence Day with a variation on the familiar “time-loop” sci-fi plot and, even better, the “I’ve changed history so we’re all sinister pseudo-Nazis” sci-fi plot? Simply tossing familiar ideas into a blender doesn’t make a story unique. And I wouldn’t care much if it were unique or not if it had something else to sell (like strong characters and/or compelling, if familiar, relationships).

And there are still more crazy sci-fi questions, because I am that much of a nerd:

• If the aliens figured out the ingenious scheme hatched by Smith and Dr. Oro, why wouldn’t they simply travel to an earlier, unexpected point in time and start anew? Why would they, instead, prepare for a battle they’re so uninterested in fighting that the one-eyed dragon sashays up to the humans and says, “Deus ex machina” — whoops, I meant to write, “Undo.”
• Since the ultimate plan is a deus ex machina (on par with Independence Day’s “let’s send them a computer virus,” Signs’ “they’re allergic to water,” and War of the Worlds’ “hey, our microscopic germs are too much for them to handle”) that involves shorting out their power, couldn’t they do the same thing from afar? Remember, the mystical Blackberry draws on their power, and Oro states that they could theoretically send more through time, as long as they had more power — again, this is a concept that is introduced but dropped without any legitimate explanation or dismissal — couldn’t they do something completely insane like try to send a building back through time, drawing so much power that the ships can no longer operate? Better yet, couldn’t they amass as many people as humanly possible to send them all back 15 years to re-prepare, and then give it the ol’ Serling twist (since we’re already mining an ass-ton of sci-fi tropes) that the effort to save humanity really saves humanity (by drawing so much power away from their ships, they all crash)? It’s not art, but it’s off the top of my head and I’d still qualify it as more clever as what actually happens.
• Since when are there outdoor cafés in Washington, D.C., in late December? I’m seriously asking. If D.C. residents, or anyone else living in a cold-weather climate, have seen such a thing and can provide photographic evidence, I’ll gladly shake St. John’s hand. So far, though, this is the most innovative sci-fi concept in the script.
• Once they get the Blackberry back (after Kronau claims to have destroyed it), why don’t they simply jump again — the aliens have already arrived, remember — and warn themselves to make sure to anticipate the “surprise” attack? (The answer is not, “Because the one-eyed dragon told them to ‘undo’ what they did,” because they could just as easily undo the undo. And besides, who in his right mind would receive messages from the fucking future and then just say, “Oh, future me is telling me to disregard the bit about a massive, civilization-destroying alien attack — I guess I should listen”?) The problem doesn’t have a thing to do with the fact that they want to end this once and for all, in case that’s what you were thinking. Nobody in the script mentions the “jumping two days back” thing as an alternative, and nobody ever really acknowledges wanting to overload a ship’s computer to end the invasion permanently rather than just stalling for some more time. It’s simply accepted that this is the only way to go, but even if they wanted to roll ahead with that plan, jumping back to prepare might allow them to pack these nifty things they call “parachutes” so they won’t plunge to their deaths.
• At the very end, Riley is sent back 48 hours. A few minutes later, Smith is sent back 48 hours. They meet, he gives his creepy speech about lying to her and semi-stalking her, then dies. But there’s still another Smith — the one who was in jail — so Riley bails him out and they share a sappy moment. It’s a nice ending, except for the part where there’s another Riley in this timeline. What happened to her?

Look, The Days Before moves like a motherfucker, but it’s another one of those scripts that keeps hurling shiny objects so the audience won’t notice the total lack of substance. What the hell do you do with that? You can either love it because all the distractions make your eyes boggle at its invention (because you’ve apparently never seen a sci-fi movie and, as a result, convince yourself that this script actually is inventive), or you can take a minute to think about what you’re reading and realize it doesn’t add up to anything substantial.

The Bottom Line

Well, you can’t get rid of the time travel without turning this into a remake of Independence Day. The easiest ways to make this script work is to drop the coquettish attempts at cleverness, make Smith’s relationship with Riley more believable and interesting, and (obviously) shore up the holes in the time travel logic. Based on the numerous explanations, St. John seems to think the complexities are airtight, but they’re just not. This project would be a lot better off if audience members didn’t go to some dumpy diner afterward to discuss it and realize it doesn’t make any actual sense. But it has some fun moments and St. John keeps the pace flying, so the fixes are honestly a bit more minor than they seem. They just require a great deal of thought.

Posted by Stan at 7:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)  | Reviews

Black List 2009 – Black Christmas Wrap-Up

To recap:

• The Muppet Man — A dreadful script that manages to dramatize much of Jim Henson’s life without ever providing any insight into what drove him to create.
• The Social Network — A quick, compelling read thanks to Sorkin’s ease with generating conflict and suspense almost entirely through well-written dialogue. The script also wisely focuses on Mark Zuckerberg and the other people involved in the foundation of Facebook more than the story of its founding.
• The Voices — A flat-out great script — funny, insightful, tragic, and brilliant. One of the best scripts I’ve ever read. If it can make it through development unscathed, it’ll be one hell of a movie.
• Prisoners — Too much intricately plotted story, too little anything else.
• Cedar Rapids — A mild-mannered but genuinely funny comedy. As a frequent visitor of Cedar Rapids, it’s nice to see a story set there that doesn’t condescend to what idiots assume “flyover country” responds to.
• Londongrad — One hell of a dull docudrama, telling an interesting story in a remarkably lifeless way.
• L.A. Rex — A convoluted yet hackneyed look at policing in South Central L.A. Full of everything you’d expect and little you wouldn’t (I didn’t see the pit sequence coming, so they have that going for them): gangsters with ties to celebrities, dirty cops, a veteran partnered with a rookie.
• Desperados — A bland but genial comedy that suffers from an overdose of Idiot Plot.
• The Gunslinger — Dull Country for Old Men
• By Way of Helena — An historical drama that manages to combine three of my favorite subjects (religious battles, post-Civil War America, and hunting men for sport) without making any effort to make the subjects compelling
• The Days Before — A sci-fi comedy that gets off on its own cleverness, which is particularly irksome because the script is not as clever as it thinks it is. It’s pretty much just Independence Day with a darker edge and time travel.

It’s not easy to draw any conclusions about why these scripts were as well-received as they are. Some (The Social Network and The Voices) are legitimately great despite the possible marketing problems in the future. Some flat-out sucked (The Muppet Man and By Way of Helena), which makes me question the politics of the whole List, as I did last year. Except, unlike last year’s flawed List, I can’t figure out why anyone would expect something like By Way of Helena to make money. It’s as esoteric as it is bad. At least The Muppet Man, for all its flaws, has a sizable built-in audience.

Other than the ends of the bell curve, the remaining scripts — for all their strengths and weaknesses — are pretty much genre fare, with all the trappings (Idiot Plot, convolution in place of real thrills) that usually make big movies sort of suck. Why film executives would like these scripts makes sense, but it shakes my faith in the development process.

Of course, my trending-positive feelings about the development cycle are no match for my utter confusion about the writing itself. As I’ve said many times, I’m under the (apparently misguided) notion that writers always put their best foot forward — it’s development that saps originality and causes a once-tight script to turn into an unwieldy mess. Because, of course, the writers have to accommodate the input of dozens of people, making them all happy without ever making the audience happy. That’s fine, and I respect that process…

But if what I just spent two weeks reading are selling drafts, as they allegedly are, then I consider it a problem. That’s before the crush of development, the pristine scripts that writers moan and complain about when the final product doesn’t match their original vision. Maybe they had to hastily revise the script in order to get it sold, but that doesn’t say anything positive about the sellers or the buyers. Even so, if you go to a Honda dealership and say, “Hey, do you have that Civic in yellow?” they don’t go to Lowe’s, buy a bucket of house paint, and slap on a coat so they can sell you that particular car. They take the time (and service charges) to painstakingly customize your car, giving you exactly what you want with the highest possible quality. In part, it’s because they want you to buy it for the highest possible price, but the reward is obvious: if you see a Civic with peeling canary-yellow house paint, you don’t just judge the idiot who bought it — you judge the dolts who sold it looking like that. It’s a poor reflection on that particular salesman, or his dealership, or Honda in general.

Maybe it’s a deadline problem. I don’t know. To stick with the Honda/housepaint analogy, even if they were on a deadline, wouldn’t they try their best to hide such a low-grade scam? Brushing on some cheap paint but taping the fuck out of it and maybe spraying it with some kind of sealing polymer to make it slightly less noticeable? In other words: even with finite resources (such as time and money) available, do the best possible work. Given the sold products of some of these scripts (Prisoners, I’m looking at you), if this is the best possible work, no wonder nobody has any respect for screenwriters. Unless they cobbled a rewrite together during a caffeine-fueled all-nighter, to paraphrase Billy Wilder, “This is shit, Mr. Chandler.”

Posted by Stan at 7:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay, Reviews