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January 1, 2010

Your Money Where My Big Fat Mouth Is

Well, the New Year is upon us, and I’ve decided to finally go ahead with two things I’ve wanted to do for awhile now: a donations page and a script coverage service.

See, the thing is, I’m poor. I have two mostly dead-end jobs, and I paid way too much to go to college. You might think I’m irresponsible, and you’re right. But in my defense, I didn’t take on more student loans to go to law school. (Okay, arguably, that’s a bad decision, because there may be a bigger payday at the end of that road, but who knows? All I’m hearing from that community is that attorneys keep taking bottom-rung administrative jobs because there are too many of them. So I might as well stick with the bottom-rung administrative job I have and not take on more debt. Especially since I’m more interested in the education than practicing law.)

Huh, that turned into a rant. Anyway, I’ve received more e-mails than you’d expect (that’s right, more than zero) from people requesting to “give back,” because apparently I’ve helped them with my half-cocked rants and acerbic wit. I never really thought that was necessary, but then I realized I both like and need money. So if you want to donate, I’ve set it up so you can…

If you don’t like getting nothing for something, I’m also offering some of my writing for sale. It’s all explained here.

As for the coverage service… Well, I’ve received many more requests from people wanting me to read scripts than wanting to hand me money. Honestly, I love reading scripts, and I love helping people (or trying to), but it’s gotten to the point where I just can’t keep doing it for free. So, if you like my reviews or my musings on craft and you’d like me to look at one of your scripts, check out the new coverage service.

Posted by Stan at 1:42 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay, Money Troubles

January 5, 2010

Script Review: Daybreakers by Michael & Peter Spierig

[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.]

Here we are in the world of Daybreakers, in which vampires have become the majority (after some sort of viral pandemic) and the few humans left (5% of the total world population) are hunted for their delicious blood. After establishing this offbeat world and its central conflict — that vampire numbers increase while the “food” supply dwindles — the writers focus on hapless vampire hematologist Ed Dalton. He works for a pharmaceutical magnate, Bromley, who farms humans to provide blood for vampires. Ed, who’s conflicted about using humans, has the moral-balancing task of coming up with a feasible substitute that can sustain vampires without requiring them to kill humans.

One night, Ed comes upon an erratically driving car, which narrowly avoids hitting his sunlight-proofed Escalade. The car’s on the run from the police, because it’s filled with humans (including AUDREY, the de facto love interest). Ed surprises the humans by allowing them to hide in his Escalade while he lies to the police about where they ran off to. Once the police get a safe distance away, the humans leave — but not before Audrey notices Ed’s work ID badge, which identifies him as a hematologist. Ed continues home, where younger brother FRANKIE has returned from military service (in this world, the military simply hunts for human camps). It’s Ed’s birthday — which Ed deems meaningless, considering his immortality — so Frankie surprises him with a premium bottle of 100% human blood. Ed and Frankie argue about the righteousness of killing humans to feed on their blood.

Before the argument can get too heated (though it does get heated enough for Frankie to smash the bottle against the wall), they’re attacked by a “subsider” — a freakish sort of vampire who feeds on other vampires (and/or themselves). This is the sort of world they live in. Frankie and Ed dispatch the subsider. After the police sweep the scene, they discover the subsider was actually a neighbor who disappeared. Ed is incredibly disturbs and feels increased pressure to come up with a substitute. Later that night, Audrey sneaks into Ed’s house, announces that the vampire world is falling apart (citing, among other things, the opening scene — a child vampire committing suicide after deeming an ageless body pointless). Ed tells Audrey he can’t help her, but she gives him a note with a meeting place and time. After Audrey leaves, Frankie hears the commotion and wonders who it was. Ed says it was nobody, but Frankie is quietly suspicious.

The next day, Ed asks Bromley about whether or not a substitute will guarantee the humans’ freedom. He receives an unsatisfactory answer, so Ed decides to meet Audrey — at a wooded creek in midday. He’s introduced to ELVIS, a vampire who reverted back to human form. How? While driving during the day, he got into a car accident that caused him to plunge through the sun-protecting windshield and into the daylight. The combination of the sun hitting him just right and landing in some sewer run-off (which immediately squelched the flames) helped him to survive. Somehow, the sun restarted his heart. Ed is amazed. Audrey, Elvis, and the other humans beg him to help them recreate this “cure” in a lab.

Before Ed can respond one way or the other, the arrival of Frankie and a military unit answers for him. Now on the hunt as an enemy of the state, Ed is forced to flee with the humans. They take him to their hideout, an abandoned winery, where he meets more humans, some of whom are on their way out to pick up humans from a large group they recently came into contact with. In the script’s single least believable moment, a vampire senator shows up at the winery to encourage the humans’ exploits, because he believes a cure for vampirism is better for humanity than any other solution. A senator who cares about humanity? Such imagination!

While Ed performs tests to figure out what caused Elvis’s transformation, Frankie accepts reassignment to a unit headed by Bromley’s personal friend, a general. As a pseudo-loyalty oath, Frankie is sent on an assignment to pursue the convoy of humans moving through the desert (chosen because vampires fear the desert’s lack of cover and delicious human food), which carries Bromley’s daughter, ALISON. As Alison calls the winery to announce they’re under attack, Ed hones in on the cure. He refuses to leave, even though the vampire squadron has the drop on them. He forces Audrey to experiment on him. It basically works like a defibrillator, except the electric shock is a sun-reflecting mirror aimed at his heart. The third jolt gets Ed’s heart beating again — he is human. But Frankie’s nabbed all the humans and returned them to Bromley. Will Ed manage to bring the cure to the masses, or will the blood-loving vampires continue their reign of terror?

Take a wild guess!

Daybreakers is one of those scripts that revels in its own cleverness, going overboard with explanations because the writers want to show us they’ve thought it all through and covered all the bases. They create a vampire-dominated world that sometimes feels real but becomes frequently confusing — because, shock of all shocks, the writers didn’t think of everything. I jotted down a variety of interesting questions this script raises unintentionally (and, as a consequence, has little interested in answering):

• Why doesn’t vampirism have much effect on these people’s lives aside from them (a) requiring a blood food source, (b) not being allowed to go out in daylight, and (c) becoming surprisingly pro-human-murder upon transformation? I know there are a number of schools of thought on vampire lore — ranging from “eh, I’m not much different” to “I am literally a soulless killing machine” — but in this script, what was once humanity seems to take the sudden transformation of the planet in benign stride. This allows for little more than a few jokes (Starbucks mixing coffee with blood, cable news debating the merits of human farming, an ad for a Cadillac Escalade pimped out with the latest sun-blocking technology, etc.) that toe the line between “satirical commentary on America’s pathetic preoccupations” and “no social commentary, just some cheap jokes.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer any real insight into how the planet might react if 95% of the human population found themselves turned into vampires — possibly because it’s set in the not-too-distant future when vampires already run rampant, the script doesn’t concern itself with the immediate reaction so much as the complacency several years after the immediate reaction has been quelled. But is it really acceptable to think people would just settle in and accept their fate? Which ties right into…
• Why hasn’t anyone else attempted a cure? The “solution” is to simply create a viable substitute for blood. Ultimately, Bromley has a clear reason for wanting a substitute instead of a cure (I won’t spoil it, but you can probably predict it if you understand the mind of a stock “glowering capitalist” character), but Bromley can’t be the only game in town… Can he? Nor can Ed be the only one sympathetic to humanity… Can he? Considering the way this script revels in its own details, the script is surprisingly careless about its portrayal of society as a whole. In the minds of the writers, nobody but the people who have dialogue exist. But those people matter to the story — when you’re building a complete world, these details are important. What, exactly, is the infrastructure of the blood farming industry? Which ties right into…
• Why did these idiots let the human decimation get so out of hand? We’re supposed to believe this is a not-too-distant future version of our world, right? A world with thousands of years of agrarian society under its belt? A world that turned livestock farming into a fairly disturbing industry to serve the greater good of mankind? Yet these vampires — whose “night-to-night” lives remain virtually unchanged — don’t understand any of the policies of rationing and forced breeding? They can’t grasp that they have a finite supply of humans, and the only way to make that infinite is to make them last? As in, you don’t have to kill people to “farm” them — you can bleed them in moderation, allow the blood to regenerate, and then bleed them some more. If the vampires were portrayed as more animalistic, I’d be able to accept the notion that they inadvertently turned billions of people before realizing they’d need a food supply. That, at least, would be sort of an intriguing concept for a story. They don’t go into that at all, aside from showing the “subsiders” as the “animal” versions of the vampires.

  The problem traces back to our lack of understanding of the vampire infrastructure. How much blood do they need? How many times do they feed per day? Giving even a passing sense of how much they need to feed versus how much they have to go around would greatly heighten the suspense and Ed’s own desire to come up with a substitute. Just saying “5% of humans remain, which gives us six months before we’re out!” doesn’t help at all — and even if it did give some sort of meaningful picture, it still doesn’t forgive these idiots for letting so many humans die. Unlike oil (the finite substance most analogous to the fight for precious human blood in this script), the blood is renewable ad infinitum if the vampires played it smart. I feel dirty for putting this much thought into how to properly store humans for the purpose of regularly bleeding them, but hey — these are the sorts of thoughts a script like this inspires.

• Why does the vampire subject, on whom Ed tests his blood substitute, scream “Owe!” before dying?
• Do vampire brains continue to develop even though they can’t age? Early scenes show us “child” vampires (ages 8-10) attending high school, to signify the length of time they’ve been vampires. The opening scene shows a young girl dressed in woman’s clothes committing suicide because life as an ageless vampire seems so pointless. This sort of reminded me of the Fasano/Ward draft of Alien 3. It’s flawed narratively but endlessly inventive, and one of its inventions is of an Alien-universe droid whose brain so perfectly mimics a human’s, it becomes “insane” and prone to hallucinations because a droid cannot sleep, yet its brain requires sleep.

  To that end, the human brain develops biologically in tandem with experience. This is why certain experiences (like sex) have profound impacts on the brain if they are experienced before maturation. But if a child vampire’s brain can never “ripen,” how would they live with their increasingly adult experiences? That fascinates the shit out of me, but the script doesn’t take much interest in it.

• Late in the script, a military recruitment poster is defaced with the phrase END TIMES, a phrase I associate with religious types. That made me wonder: what happens to religion in a world where so many are vampires? I mean, when you’re dead but you retain immortality and the power of a dozen men, what do you believe? You certainly can’t embrace the standard values of most religions, because you’re kind of on the wrong end of their moral stick. What happens there? On some level, this ties into the idea that the vampires’ lives just don’t change enough to make this script truly interesting, but I find the idea of vampire theology fascinating. I’m guessing writers before me have come up with something like this. If anybody knows of any examples of vampires worshipping some sort of new (or ancient) religion, I’d love to hear about it.
• Another infrastructure question: within (rough guess) five years of the vampire majority’s existence, car manufacturers have overhauled their designs to accommodate them, the government is tackling vampire rights issues, houses have been designed and constructed to avoid sunlight… I remember reading some article about Minority Report that talked about its infrastructure (particularly the vertical highways that ran right over buildings). Although they speculated that such infrastructure changes/improvements are within our grasp (or will be in the near future), the amount of time and money required for such drastic overhauls made it implausible that any such construction projects would be finished by the time the movie takes place, assuming said projects were approved and budgeted tomorrow.

  Daybreakers reminded me a bit of that. Everything has changed, yes, but it all seems so quick and painless. Set it 20 or 25 years in the future, and I’d probably buy it. Better yet — set it in the present day but in a parallel universe where this vampire “virus” plagued mankind centuries ago, and we’ve progressed to a certain degree, but things are bad. I just can’t accept that, within the span of 10 years (I’m being generous in assuming the “2017” date implies this draft was written in 2007), a vampire plague would transform most of mankind, they would all pick themselves up and dust themselves off and revitalize the planet with vampire-centric improvements on current human technology, and they would find themselves careening toward a world-destroying food shortage. Maybe it’s not so much the time factor as much as the remarkable efficiency of the construction/manufacturing ends of it don’t sync up with the stupidity involved in the food supply.

If you read this far, you might be wondering why I’ve gone off on tangents about what amounts to backstory without addressing the narrative itself or the characters. The short answer: this script gave me nothing else to think about.

The story is becoming a Hollywood nuisance: a generic action script that tosses in horror movie tropes to make it seem a little more inventive. I love horror movies. I love action movies. I’d probably love an action-horror movie if someone ever made a good one. The problem is — nobody’s trying to combine the genre. They just want to make shitty action movies, and they think grafting an obvious horror gimmick onto it will make it seem unique. (Man, I can’t wait to rip into David Hayter’s Wolves, assuming it ever gets made. Spoiler alert: it’s the embodiment of this shitty sort of writing. Holy fuck is it a flaming turd.) So, to that end, there really isn’t much story, or much character. Everything’s just a bunch of gaudy jewelry to disguise how bland and unappealing the action sequences dominating the script are. (And can we declare a moratorium on shitty horror/action scripts using the “viral pandemic” thing as its “ripped from the headlines” explanation for How It Happened? It’s as sloppy and stupid as the many ’50s B-movies that used radiation as the default explanation.)

To put it another way: you know things are bad when one character has to ask another if Audrey is the love interest. They have no chemistry on the page, and no relationship develops. It’s one of those situations where Ed is the male lead, and Audrey is the female character with the most screen time — therefore, she’s the love interest. On the plus side, at least the writers didn’t devote any time to explaining the nonexistent chemistry in the action block or having Ed and Audrey banter about how “real” their relationship is.

But things get worse: throughout the script, the writers toss in boldfaced, underlined, italicized statements like BIG JUMP, SHOCK, or (my personal favorite) BIG SCARE MOMENT. Instead of, you know, actually shocking or scaring us. Really? This passes for writing these days?

Go through the synopsis, or read the script yourself (or see the movie), and tell me if there’s anything — other than the setting — you haven’t seen before, and better. Maybe that’s not such a big deal, because this script seems more interested in its setting than anything else. A script needs more than a unique setting, but the only thing Daybreakers has going for it is the relatively novel universe — and they even fuck that up. What a colossal disappointment.

Posted by Stan at 4:54 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (9)  | Reviews

January 12, 2010

Script Review: The Book of Eli by Gary Whitta and Anthony Peckham

[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.]

The Book of Eli tells a pretty straightforward western story: one taciturn man shows up in a town controlled by a power-hungry madman. Captain Taciturn (hereafter known as Eli) has something the madman wants, and the madman is confounded when Eli won’t give it up immediately. He’s not used to a fight, but a fight is exactly what Eli intends to give him. Does any of this sound familiar?

The amazing thing about The Book of Eli is that it uses genre tropes so damn effectively. It paints a startling, “a few years after The Day After” nightmare world, but aside from that, it’s your standard western plot. More than anything, it shows the importance of developing characters. Audiences are much more willing to go along with a plot they’ve seen before (and what plot haven’t they seen before?) if the characters within that well-worn storyline breathe new life into it.

The script opens with a surprisingly subdued sequence that establish the script’s world, tone, and protagonist more effectively than any script I read in 2008. In a decaying California forest, a disgusting feral cat scavenges for food. It finds a corpse. Eli is tracking the cat, himself scavenging for food (the comparison between the man and the animal is much subtler in the script than in my summary). He’s a careful, practical hunter with a small but varied arsenal (bow and arrow, samurai sword, and shotgun). Based on the condition of his clothes, it’s evident that he’s been a nomad in this world for many years.

After successfully catching the cat, Eli moves out onto a two-lane highway. He comes upon an old corpse, checks it for new boots, and is annoyed when he finds none. Later, he finds a woman whose shopping cart has overturned. She offers Eli a can of pet food to keep him from hurting her, but he has no interest in hurting her. When she asks for help fixing the wheel of her cart, Eli senses an ambush — and when he sniffs the air and smells the post-soap stench of a pack of bandits. They want Eli’s rucksack, but he won’t give it up. He explains this to them calmly, but when they get a bit insistent, he kills them all in a blur of sword strikes and blood. Then, he takes their water and moves on, refusing to take the woman with him.

Eli searches the ruins of an abandoned town until he finds a dead man hanging from a rope in his house (whether he was hanged by others or committing suicide is unclear). Eli takes the man’s shoes and spends the night in the house. He builds a fire, cooks up the cat carcass, and shares a bit with a squatting mouse. He reads from a thick, leather-bound book protected by a big, brass lock (Eli wears the key on a St. Christopher necklace around his neck). He plugs an old iPod into a car battery and plays Mozart’s D-minor piano concerto, and it takes Eli away.

That’s Eli: a man who refuses to give up his desire to return to a world that no longer exists. He arrives in Sacramento looking for help recharging his battery. While waiting, he manages to inadvertently piss off a man working for the town’s big cheese, an asshole slave-driver named Hawthorne (this has since changed to Carnegie, apparently). Hawthorne has his men searching the ruins of the city for one particular book, but the illiterates keep coming back with crappy bestsellers and self-help books. Are Eli and Hawtorne on a collision course for wackiness?

Maybe, but first, Eli gets Hawthorne’s attention by killing nearly everyone in the water bar he owns. Hawthorne recognizes Eli’s intellect and skill with a weapon. He tries to offer Eli employment, and to coax him into saying “yes,” he plies Eli with sex with a 16-year-old bar wench, Solara. Eli turns her down. The next day, Solara shocks Hawthorne by saying grace before a meal — as she saw Eli doing the night before. Solara tells Hawthorne she assumed Eli got it from “his book.” That’s right: for those of you who haven’t already figured it out, “The Book of Eli” is the Bible. It’s only a low-level surprise in the script — not portrayed as a mind-blowing shock like several events that occur in the third act and shall remain unknown.

From the point Hawthorne discovers Eli has a Holy Bible, and Eli discovers Hawthorne wants his Bible, the story moves in a pretty straightforward progression. Hawthorne fights to take the Bible, and Eli fights to keep it. Nothing extraordinary, narratively —

— and yet, the vivid descriptions of setting and action by the writers help to elevate the script. Part of this is because they spend a lot of time describing subtle character moments. Eli and Hawthorne are incredible characters, and much of that comes as a result of these descriptions. This script is a great example of using observable actions to develop characters. More than that, the writers do a great job of establishing not so much a “good vs. evil” conflict as a “tricky gray area” conflict. Eli’s intent on getting his Bible to a library that, as the script goes along, might be a figment of his imagination. He realizes the importance of the book, and he’s willing to kill anyone who wants to stop him or take his book. On the other hand, Hawthorne has dim recollections of the time before Armageddon, and he remembers the power religion once wielded — if he can bring it back, he can control more than just Sacramento. Despite the ease with which the writers could slide into hokey religious clichés, the script isn’t purely about religion: it’s about the value of hope, faith, and the power of the written word (all three foreign concepts in this universe, and one might argue in ours, as well). However, as lead characters go, Solara is a bit weaker than the two men. She’s given similarly compelling actions to reveal who she is, but the writers didn’t do nearly as good a job of selling her Big Decision (whether or not to abandon her Hawthorne-fucking mother to follow Eli, whom she starts to see as a father figure) as they do in selling the motives and behavior of the others. It’s a minor complaint in a great script, however.

The florid writing also gives detail to the third act’s extensive action sequences. Many scripts lack this vividness, and I can never figure out if it’s terrible writing or a result of just writing “placeholder” actions that the director and/or stunt coordinators and/or special effects artists can flesh out. I’m always a bigger fan of writing like this, though. It might step on toes in other aspects of the production, but it allows for immersion that the majority of scripts I read lack. Personally, I always want to be immersed in the story, even if it’s a schlocky romantic comedy. It’s especially important in a script like this, though. The writers are developing a post-Apocalyptic vision from the ground up. The more they describe, the easier it is to see a place that feels real, with a consistent set of rules governing its characters. More than that, when the script descends into an orgy of violence and explosions, my eyes don’t roll quite as hard when the sequences have visceral, suspenseful descriptions. Take this random example plucked from the middle of the script:

Compare that to a “fight sequence” from next week’s review selection, Warrior: The bell rings and White Lightning comes out possessed, rocking Thunder back on his heels with an arsenal of punches and kicks. I guarantee you that sentence will play better than it reads, but that’s kind of the issue for green screenwriters. I’m sure the guys who wrote Warrior didn’t give a fuck about impressing some hotshot reader, but most of you reading this are not in their position. You need to impress the reader or assistant so he or she passes your script along to his or her boss, right? Well, the excerpt from The Book of Eli may not change the way you think about the world, but it’s much more absorbing than Warriors.

More than anything, the attention to detail makes the script feel fresher and more unique than it really is. I don’t mean that to sound insulting — part of the reason I flat-out loved this script is because it manages the a sizable feat. Especially in the third act, the story goes in the expected direction in very unexpected ways. As a random example, Eli pissing off Hawthorne’s toady is a scene that appears in countless westerns. However, it doesn’t generally tend to happen because said toady is insulted by a perceived slight against his mangy pet cat. The bizarre details of this world and the characters in it elevate what could have been a pedestrian script.

(Incidentally, for those of you crybabying that this is just a big knockoff of The Road, you’re wrong: it’s actually a knockoff of Philip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, only with the Bible instead of a creepy astronaut DJ trapped in a satellite orbiting the post-Apocalyptic hellscape. I think the Bible was a better choice.)

So what’s up? I loved the script, and I still love it after giving it a second glance. It stars Denzel Washington and was directed by the not-untalented Hughes brothers. Why did they bury it with a January release? Why did they cut a trailer and TV spots that make it look like a shitty movie that’s already been made five times in the past year? Is Hollywood still afraid of the Bible, or did the Hughes brothers botch it? I’ll find out this weekend — that’s right, this is the rare script I liked enough to actually see the movie in a timely fashion. Even Whip It is languishing in my Netflix queue.

Posted by Stan at 1:54 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | Reviews

January 26, 2010

Commercial Conundrum

[Note: I intended to post this last week but got busy and, per usual, forgot about the existence of this blog. There will be a new script review — of Clive Barker’s Dread — this week.]

This week’s attempt at a script review put me in an awkward position. You see, I haven’t read any of the scripts that are opening. A few weeks ago, I read some bad intelligence telling me Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior will be out this Friday. Turns out, that’s not the case. I guess it’s coming out way the fuck in September, and I really don’t want to be reviewing scripts more than a week or two in advance of their release. So, instead, I’m writing one of the many promised non-review articles that I’ve been too lazy and/or busy to get done.

Something’s been bugging me for the past few months. I got used to writing development notes, which outline a script’s strengths and weaknesses while offering suggestions for ways to improve the script. (That way, Your Boss — who, if you’re lucky, will read maybe one out of every ten scripts he or she forces you to read — will have something reasonably intelligent to say in his next meeting. It’s an elaborate charade, and everyone knows that his or her notes are coming from some borderline-retarded, caffeine-addled reader, yet nobody ever says a word.) On some level, you deal with marketability, but everywhere I’ve worked, they’re surprisingly concerned about making the script as good as possible. In other words, they’ve already convinced themselves that they can sell the product — so now, the challenge is making the product great.

So why do bad movies happen, if everyone’s so concerned about making great product? I’m no expert, but here’s a pretty sound theory: you take 15-20 different people, all with different agendas and different beliefs about what constitutes greatness (some dare to think “artistic merit”; some think “profitability”; others think “myself,” meaning their primary concern is the project making themselves look good; still others think “Well, I have to say something” — they might honestly think this is the greatest script ever written, but in order to justify their jobs, they feel compelled to say something ridiculous like, “Why not set this movie in 18th-century Paris instead of modern North Carolina?”), give them the same script, and you’ll get 50-100 different ideas on how to make the script fit various people’s ideas of greatness. After deluging the writer(s) with these ideas, the writer(s) have the unenviable task of trying to make everyone happy. If they’re great at what they do, this can still result in a good script; more often, it results in a big, sloppy mess.

My realization after reading a few of last year’s Black List scripts made me question this theory, however. Some of the scripts were good, some were flat-out great — but a lot just kinda sucked, which makes me wonder about agendas. I understand that the Black List is all political, so maybe these aren’t really the most favored scripts. Now, since I know work for a distributor/production company, I only read scripts of movies that are nearing completion, so I’m about a year behind the development cycle. But when I look at the Black List from 2008 and even 2007, only one of my favorite scripts (The Book of Eli) made it, and with a relatively low score (though I must qualify, yet again, by saying I did enjoy The Way Back and Whip It, though neither qualifies as a “favorite”). My tastes run pretty mainstream, so it’s not like I’m bitter that the list lacks moody, symbol-heavy French scripts about rape — so does that make me a freakish anomaly, or does that make everyone else an idiot? You know where I stand!

The problem I have isn’t so much with my the holes in my theory about why the development process fails a good script more often than it helps a bad one. It’s more about the differences between reading for a distributor and reading for development. Distributors have their own goals for coverage, chief among them: will this make money? Working for production companies and shady literary managers, I’ve never been asked to consider that question — it’s their job to convince others that the script will make money. So now, I have to adjust my radar. It’s not about better or worse. If the script is locked, the big names are attached, and the budget is set, how much money will it make?

Initially, I tailored my arguments to whether or not I liked the script. It could be the world’s least commercial script, and I would rally around it and insist it could make money with no budget and a no-name cast and make $1 billion in its opening weekend. Conversely, if I hated something, I’d build the synopsis and notes in such a way that it argued against its profit potential, no matter who the stars are or who’s directing. It’s pretty basic, right?

Things have gotten more complex, though. In the past couple of months, I’ve received a number of scripts that I actually like, yet I can’t argue in favor of their commercial possibilities. There’s one broad question I find myself unable to answer: other than me, who’s the audience? Three examples: (1) a romantic comedy, set in England, about an American business student who pays her tuition by starting a business of her own — as a beard for gay men, (2) a story that’s essentially a vignette-driven biopic about an Australian dog that’s apparently famous, and (3) a horror-comedy about a pair of hillbillies who are mistaken for psychotic serial killers by a group of dumbass college students on spring break.

The main problem with all three: they’re not great scripts. I can recognize this fact. They happen to hit certain sweet spots in my sensibilities, but they all have their share of problems. Although it’s actually funny, Script #1 follows its rom-com formula much too rigidly, which means two things: its fair share of Idiot Plot moments, and characters who are more like funny stereotypical constructs than real people. Script #2 is catastrophically unfocused, weakening its structure. Script #3 is a one-joke premise stretched to feature length — granted, it’s a funny joke, but it’d work better as a sketch than a 90-minute movie.

Because these aren’t exceptional scripts, I can’t argue that they’re so fucking good, audiences will embrace them no matter what. But all three share bigger problems: what audience do they want? Does a romantic comedy about a woman pretending to date gay men want to appeal to a straight male? Does a biopic about a legendary Australian dog have any interest in cultivating an American audience? How will a horror-comedy appeal to horror and/or comedy fans when (a) it’s not scary but (b) it’s too gory for comedy fans with zero interest in gore-based comedy (especially when there’s little variety to the humor)?

This leads to obvious thought: I’ve managed to become a sellout hack without even selling a script.

But have I? There’s a weird netherworld in which certain movies exist. Road House is not a good movie, but I love it anyway. It’s entertaining and watchable, but I have no illusions about its quality. Action Jackson, Mr. Mom, Billy Madison, the Doris Day-James Garner comedy where she was stranded on a desert island for years whose title I never remember even though I watch it every time it pops up on Fox Movie Channel (and have consequently seen it about 85 times)… All examples of movies resting in this weird, limbo-like plane of movie existence: they’re likable crap.

How do you argue that to a distributor, though? “It won’t make any money, but man, if it gets on cable, it’ll develop a huge cult following. That cult audience may buy it on DVD or BluRay, but probably not because they play it on Encore 75 times a month.” That’s not what they want to hear. They want to hear about asses in seats and/or DVDs sold, because they don’t make any money through cable deals. So that means I have to torpedo the likable crap in order to make my bosses happy and keep my job.

Is that a good or bad thing? Maybe I’m justifying bullshit, but I feel like it’s the right thing to do, ethically. If something’s not of obvious high quality (like, say, The Book of Eli, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but anyone who reads it will say, “Okay, at least I can see why he liked it”), but I like it anyway, it doesn’t feel right to recommend it. That’d be like recommending a friend for a job when you know he’s kind of a slacker: it’s nice to help out a friend, but that makes you look bad. Some might argue it’d be wrong to not help the slacker friend, but getting him a job he’ll take for granted isn’t help. Explaining to him why you’re not helping him get the job is, at least, food for thought, and real friends get that. Hell, real friends wouldn’t even put you into that awkward situation. Only douchenozzles like Henry Fool would do that.

Justified or not, I still feel bad about it. There’s a place in the world for lovable crap, so movies like that shouldn’t be punished because they’ll never make Avatar money.

Posted by Stan at 2:45 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)  | How Not to Write a Screenplay, Random Musings