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.”
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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 on December 21, 2009 5:15 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Reviews | Digg It
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