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How Not to Write a Screenplay Archives

June 6, 2010

Collaborative Effort

Here’s the problem: I’m an impatient, impulsive person. Stories come to me in two different ways: in a slow trickle, or a Niagara Falls-like gush. The slow trickle, for me, isn’t even that slow — a number of disparate ideas will enter my brain over the course of a few months, and I’ll realize these pieces form a single, cohesive story. That’s usually how stories and characters come to me, which is handy because I’ll usually be working on something else, so I’ll be jotting down notes for the next project. Maybe that’s just a short attention span working for me instead of against me.

By necessity, I’ll let that story germinate until it’s ready to be written. I hate writing things like that. Hell, I hate writing anything about my creative process because (a) everyone’s process slightly different, so there’s no real advice or insight there, and (b) every time I write something about “letting a story germinate,” I feel like such a pretentious asshole. At any rate, it’s easy to let the slow trickle story rest, because plowing headlong into a story that’s not fully formed is a recipe for disaster. The gusher is totally different — for me, it’s like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. When an idea comes to me that complete, I have to capitalize on it as quickly as possible before my aforementioned short attention span causes me to lose interest and start working on something else.

I guess you could call this “inspiration.” The story drops in my lap, and I crank out a draft in a week or two (as opposed to the story taking a few months to figure out, then taking another month on a first draft), and believe it or not, these first drafts usually turn out as good as a third or fourth draft of the “slow trickle” stories.

Why does any of this matter, and what does it have to do with my impatience? Let’s set the wayback machine for February. Amelia, one of my pals at Murdstone & Grinby, made a dubious claim: “I’m going to write a romantic comedy.” This claim has a number of problems associated with it: (1) although his favorite movie of 2009 was Easy Virtue (I wish I was kidding, especially now that I’ve seen Easy Virtue), Murdstone has never produced anything even close to a romantic comedy; (2) although she’s sorta funny, Amelia has never written a comedy; (3) maybe I shouldn’t say this, even keeping her real identity a secret, but it’s relevant: Amelia has never been in anything resembling a relationship; and (4) as a result of this lack of experience, Amelia has decided to take the robotic, logical approach to love: it’s the result of a combination of chemicals that fade over time, so why bother giving in to it? I’m not kidding — when Assistant Jim announced he was getting married, she scoffed, “The average relationship only lasts four years. Know why? Because love is just a bunch of chemicals that get people to have sex, and those chemicals wear off after four years.” Which is an awesome theory if not for the fact that an “average” includes relationships that last 80 years and relationships that last three months (I’m going to go ahead and assume it doesn’t include three-day weekend sex romps, which aren’t really relationships — there has to be some mild level of commitment before it fails).

After her proclamation, I said, “That’ll be an interesting change of pace.”

“Stan,” she said, “you’ve written romantic comedies. Would you mind if I ran some ideas by you? I have a few rom-com —” God, do I hate that term — “ideas, so I need some help narrowing them down.”

“Sure,” I said, always willing to help out a writer in need.

She pitched me six ideas. Four of the six were rooted in goofy fantasy — and I’m not talking about “this relationship is far-fetched,” I’m talking about gypsy curses as the inciting incident — which I automatically dismissed because, I dunno, that’s as interesting to me as a judge sentencing a couple to stay married for 30 days. The circumstances that force the relationship to exist are needlessly convoluted and impossible to believe. Maybe that’s a nugget of advice: if you can’t think of a non-supernatural explanation for your couple to be together, maybe you shouldn’t be writing a romantic comedy. As a contrary example, The Purple Rose of Cairo, probably my favorite romantic comedy of all time, hinges on a fantastical turn of the plot. The difference there is that Woody Allen has fun with the fantasy element. Most of these romantic comedies use fantasy to start off their story, but then it doesn’t mean anything to the story itself. With the exception of the inciting incident (and usually some lame machinations in the third act, because the writers finally remember that supernatural element from the beginning), the story is played straight. As opposed to, say, a fictional character taking a real-life woman to a fancy restaurant, then trying to pay with a wad of stage money, then trying to flee in a car that he can’t start because “in the movie, it’s always going.” God, I love that movie.

So the two non-fantastical ideas were okay, I thought. One would have followed a character who uses romance novels to woo women, but when he meets a “tough nut to crack,” he’s forced to befriend a famous romance novelist, whose new book features a similar tough nut. (Originally, I hated this idea, but it occurred to me there’s a lot of comedic potential to the idea of showing a woman’s realistic, terrified reaction when presented with a “romance novel” situation in real life.) The one I told her to go with was, I felt, the one she felt the most passionate about, just based on the way she described it. It’s basically a remake of It Happened One Night featuring a Rolling Stone reporter and an American Idol winner. Through convoluted circumstances, they have to get across the country so he can launch his tour. They hate each other, but they fall in love. It’s not art, but it takes a classic storyline and a simple conflict that allows for characters and a relationship to develop. To quote something I read a few days ago on an old Christopher Lockhart post, “Simple done well is better than complex done poorly.”

Things went awry almost immediately. See, Amelia thought maybe we should base the American Idol character on a modernized take on John Lennon. When she tried to hash out the story with me, it suffered from an extreme lack of conflict, because she refused to portray “John” as having any flaws. I have a lot of theories on how romantic comedies should work, and maybe I’m full of shit, but one of the most important ones is that both characters need to have big flaws that the eventual partner can complement. If he’s portrayed as St. John, the journalist looks like a bitch for hating him. I thought maybe some comedy could be mined from an irrational hatred of a comically nice guy, but that’s really hard to pull off when she’s supposed to be the protagonist.

So she hit on another idea: what if it’s about a journalist and a Ringo-inspired character? Amelia thinks Ringo’s a tool, a hanger-on who just follows his bandmate around without contributing anything to his success. Maybe, she thought, in the context of this script, the journalist could get stuck with the dorky “Ringo” character and not “John” himself.

And that’s when the story dropped in my lap. Yes, she came up with the premise, but the moment she said that, everything clicked into place. It’s like when you get lost, then you finally turn down a street you recognize, and you’re not lost anymore. I knew the exact route to take, but… It wasn’t my story. When she, after discussing the story with me for a couple of days, begged me to punch up the dialogue when she finished the draft, I readily agreed. I wanted to collaborate on this story, because I knew how to make it good. Plus, if she let me develop the story with her, I could push her in the right directions. That’s the thing about punching up dialogue: if the story’s not situationally funny, no amount of amusing dialogue can fix that. She’s not a comedy writer, so she doesn’t know how to structure scenes (or even overall stories) in a comedic way.

I know this makes me sound like an arrogant dick. I don’t think I’m the funniest guy alive, but I’ve been writing comedy almost exclusively for over a decade, and I’m not just writing in a vacuum. Not everything works, but in general, I know how to get laughs, and I know how to structure a story in a way that maximizes comedy. People who haven’t developed these skills just can’t pull it off. I know: I’ve read a lot of comedies by people who gleefully announce they’ve never written one before, and it’s always a disaster, even if they’re funny people who enjoy comedy films. It’d be the equivalent of me deciding I can win the Indy 500 because I’m a good driver. I can drive, but I have no specific training in racing. You can’t win on cursory knowledge and enthusiasm, no matter how good your instincts are. This might sound contrary to my usual “all you need to do to write a good script is to watch a lot of great movies and read a couple of good books on the screenwriting craft” advice. I guess it’s a corollary: you can write a good script based mostly on instinct (but let’s not forget the value of reading a couple of screenwriting books), maybe even a great one, but it takes a lot more skill and experience to master a particular genre. And I say that as someone who hasn’t even come close to mastering a genre.

Hey, earlier I had some kind of point. Ah, yes. I was pushing Amelia in a certain direction because she doesn’t know how to structure comedic scenes or a comedic story, so I wanted to minimize the frustration (for both of us) by having to just rewrite everything the way I wanted it. I was trying to play it subtly, nudging her so she felt like she came up with the ideas on her own and I was just there for moral support. Maybe that’s a dick move, but it felt nicer than just saying, “You need to do this, this, and this, and if you don’t, this script will fail.”

After really getting thorough on the story over the course of a weekend, on Sunday afternoon, she gleefully announced she was off to write. A few hours later, she e-mailed me the first seven pages.

Every single page was backstory. I’m not kidding. Yes, we hashed out the backstory of the characters, but it never occurred to me that she’d open the story six months before it actually begins to set everything up. I read them and said, “Okay, I’m not 100% sure we’re on the same page here, so what I’m going to do is write up an outline of everything we talked about, so we both know exactly what story we’re trying to tell. You go through it and argue with me and make changes or add anything you think I missed.” She said, “Okay.”

It took the rest of the evening, but I had a solid nine-page outline. It explained, in detail, why these scenes needed to be structured in this way, how they develop the story and characters, etc. It reminded me a little of John Hughes’s scriptment for Home Alone, where he spelled everything out in blunt terms to accommodate his eight-year-old star. It felt really condescending, but it seemed clear to me that Amelia was going along with the story I was shepherding without exactly understanding why these choices were being made, and all she wanted to do is write a script about John Lennon, full of heart-shaped doodles and variations of “Amelia Lennon” written in the margins. In my conception of the story, “John” is a MacGuffin who drives certain aspects of the plot but really doesn’t figure much as a character.

She took a look at the outline, said, “Wow, this is great,” then set off to work on more pages. We agreed that she’d write the first draft, and I’d polish it into a funny script. On Monday, she told me she’d have the first act done and e-mail it first thing Tuesday morning. I was pleased, because typically Amelia is an extremely slow writer. I thought maybe the fact that she had a solid outline to work with gave her the confidence to work more quickly than usual. Maybe I should have taken it as a sign when she complained that she “can’t write banter” and that she left several of the opening scenes “blank” for me to fill in with banter.* When the pages finally arrived at around 2 p.m. on Tuesday (maybe that’s “first thing in the morning” in her world?), there were…four of them. I may not be an expert on screenwriting, but I do know that first acts are usually longer than four pages.

This was not because she left everything blank for me to write. It’s because she just wrote two or three early scenes, and that was it. A couple of weeks passed where she just stopped working altogether. She talked a little about it after sending me those four pages, but before long she stopped even doing that. Had the project died before a first draft was finished? I didn’t want to be the sort of dick who browbeats people — I figured, if she wasn’t going to write it, I might as well write it myself rather than force her to do everything exactly the way I wanted anyway.

She had a self-imposed deadline looming: Murdstone takes a pile of scripts with him on plane trips. This is the only time he actually reads scripts himself, but he doesn’t take many plane trips. Cannes was approaching, and Amelia wanted a decent completed draft so she could toss it on his pile. This meant we had to have it done before work ramped up in anticipation of Cannes. She only works on a temporary basis, during “busy” times, so she wanted it done by the time she went back. That didn’t happen, but she didn’t seem particularly concerned, even though she announced to Murdstone the day she came back, “Stan and I are working on a romantic comedy.” To my surprise (and hers, as well), this actually excited Murdstone. He’d read Amelia’s previous script and said something fairly generic like, “The writing is strong, but it’s not my cup of tea.” Apparently he meant that, because the idea of her writing in a more commercial genre thrilled him. He was very excited to read it, and assured her he’d read it on the plane.

This meant we had a new deadline: get it done by the time he leaves. Yet, she wasn’t writing.

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m already getting distracted with new ideas. I need to get this down on paper. I won’t even tell her about it — I don’t want to steal her thunder. I’ll wait for her to finish her draft, see how well it matches up with mine, make a few changes, and give mine to her as the ‘polished’ draft.” And I started writing. And had a finished draft four days later. Not fantastic, mind you, but a solid start, and certainly better than the combined total of 11 pages Amelia had sent me. Amelia’s actually lucky the volcano fucked everything up temporarily — I did not have nearly as many scripts to read as I usually do this time of year, which sucked for me financially but was great in the sense that I had free time to work on the script.

The week before the deadline, Amelia finally admitted she hadn’t been working on the script because she was depressed. She didn’t tell me what it was about, but I could take a guess (realizing it’s harder to write a romantic comedy without experiencing romance than it is to write a serial killer thriller without having killed a bunch of people, perhaps?). So I took a gamble: presenting my finished draft would either upset her further, or it’d allow her to breathe a huge sigh of relief — again, not a perfect script, but at least there’s something there to work with. I told her about it, and I’m convinced she lied about her reaction. She said it overwhelmed her and surprised her, but she was relieved. She did sound overwhelmed, but she didn’t sound relieved. She sounded a little pissed that I’d stolen her thunder, which was exactly my fear.

You might be wondering why I did this — why I wrote the draft, why I presented it to her, etc. Much as I’d love to keep rambling about “lightning in a bottle,” I had an ulterior motive. If nothing was riding on this script, I would have just written my draft to get it out of my system and then put it aside. We had a tenuous deadline that could either mean nothing or everything: Murdstone would read it, love it, and want to buy it, or he’d read it, love it, and work his ass off to help us get an agent, and suddenly we’d be stuck as writing partners working on romantic comedies. I could think of worse fates, but I’m guessing Amelia couldn’t. Nevertheless, this is what she wanted: a commercial script that would impress Murdstone enough to stick his neck out for us. I can’t wait for life to happen. I need to make shit happen, and this was an opportunity. If Amelia was going to spend five years writing this script, like she spent five years writing her last script, I was not interested in hitching my wagon to that horse. I’d rather her be a little pissed but realize how much I saved her ass than just not do anything and hope she pulled a script out of her ass before the deadline.

Amelia read the script, said she had to excuse herself from the office several times because it made her laugh so hard, and although she had “a few” notes, she thought it was a solid draft and would spend the rest of the week “editing,” at which point we’d argue it all out and come up with a compromise-based draft to submit to Murdstone. Then, Murdstone announced — surprisingly apologetically — that, because of the volcano, work was mounting, and he’d have to finish it on the plane instead of his usual routine of reading scripts. I did not witness this, but Amelia described him as sounding genuinely upset, which is really surprising if you know him (P.S.: he’s a dick). She runs the office while everyone else is off in France, so he told her to leave a copy on his desk the Friday before he comes back, and he’ll read it. The following day, he told her to schedule a meeting for one week after his return, so we can have a meeting about the script.

“What the hell is going on?” I thought, shocked at how seriously he was taking Amelia. I read her script: it’s good, but it’s not that good.

Because of the delay in the deadline, Amelia naturally delayed her “editing.” I was sort of dreading it. I don’t mind getting notes and then taking them back and incorporating the ones I like but throwing away the ones I don’t. This was different — I’d be expected to incorporate all of her ideas, and although I hadn’t heard any of them, she did tell me one frightening thing: she wanted to trim out the dialogue to keep it under 100 pages. The draft was a solid (maybe a little bloated) 118 pages, but here’s the thing: it’s a screwball comedy. I know that film is a visual medium — and don’t worry, I put in a lot of broad physical schtick and visual puns — but screwball comedies live and die on their dialogue. In a screwball comedy, the characters’ personalities are defined as much through what they say (and how they say it) as what they do. I knew there was material to trim and revise — I’d already been regretting a couple of choices I’d made, and simply cutting them would have freed up at least five pages — but I really couldn’t see us getting it down to 100 pages without turning the characters into what I rather harshly described as “exposition-dispensing robots rather than human beings having conversations.” Half the character and comedy was rooted in the dialogue, so chopping things or rewriting them to rob them of all personality or rhythm would pretty much ruin the script.

And that’s when Amelia launched into the “general” notes. This was just last week. Because there was so much, she decided to separate the “general” notes from the nitpicky notes. About 90% of the general notes were “Add, add, add.” The other 10% were “change.” What the hell was she planning on cutting, if she wanted to take a 118-page script and add at least 10 pages to it?

As a last-ditch effort, I spent Thursday revising the script based on those notes. To be fair, I did like many of her suggestions — but some I hated, and hated them even more when her only defense for them was, “All romantic comedies have [insert irritatingly cliché-based scene].” So I took our conversation on Instant Messenger, streamlined the notes, and ordered them based on priority — stuff that was essential to the script, down to stuff that I both hated and deemed unnecessary. I also trimmed out as much unnecessary dialogue as I could find, and attempted a variation on cheating the margin by rewriting certain lines of dialogue and action to keep them from carrying over to the next line. The end result was a stronger 113-page script. I also wrote a long e-mail defending my decisions to not incorporate some of the ideas. She accused me of being angry about things collapsing with Dentist Chick (short version: she had a boyfriend, but was still more than willing to go out with me — I’ve been down that road many times, so it’s time to break that fucking pattern) rather than simply not liking the goddamn ideas. Man, is that annoying.

I also included a passionate defense of the dialogue, but it didn’t move her. On Friday, after I stalled her for days with (legitimate but solvable) cell phone problems, I’d been backed into a corner. I already regret that decision. If we’d done it earlier, we wouldn’t have come up on the deadline, but look: she has this obsession with doing notes over the phone, which makes zero sense to me in an age of e-mail and IM. We’re writing shit down, so I see no purpose in describing over the phone what needs to be changed or cut, when it could just be written into an IM window and pasted into the script. I’ve tried to convince her of this in the past, but she insists on doing things over the phone. So, because I kept putting it off, we ended up staying up until 4 a.m. working on the changes.

I don’t want to say she tricked me, but initially her dialogue cuts didn’t seem too bad. Better than that, she’d come up with a few additional ideas that I really thought were great. It put me in a better mood, and I was happy to keep working — so happy, I didn’t realize she was slowly stripping the edginess and satire out of the script.

See, I have this thing… Why bother writing a fucking story if you’re not going to say anything more interesting than, “Aww, these two people fell in love”? I thought American Idol was the perfect metaphor to make a rather harsh (and, let’s be honest, fairly unoriginal) statement about pop music. Maybe I’m a dick, but I don’t care if she wanted it to be about American Idol discovering a latter-day John Lennon — I see that show as a shortcut. Ambitious, hard-working musicians don’t need a karaoke contest to find success. (And if you’re thinking it’s hypocritical to go for screenwriting contests while saying American Idol is a waste of space — in the first place, I’m not a big fan of contests, but even if I were, you have to contribute something resembling a personal artistic statement to screenwriting contests. Even if you’re just writing some hackneyed shit to make money, a part of you believes in the story, even if all you believe is “it’s commercial.” What do American Idol contestants contribute, creatively? Other than a hard-luck story that’s largely made up by the producers, they just do bland renditions of other people’s songs, “owning” it by adding a bunch of shitty Mariah Carey vocal runs. Is it any surprise that they’re beloved when doing karaoke but fall flat on their asses when singing awful songs written by even worse record producers?) Wow, I hope you enjoyed that mini-rant, because I just lost my train of thought. Yeah, so the script ultimately turns into an indictment of big media conglomerates owning both news and entertainment outlets. The line blurs, so the main character (who is shown as passionate about music and disdainful of the American Idol/pop music assembly line) thinks she’s going to submit this tough exposé about what a sham it all is, when she learns her magazine is owned by the same media conglomerate that owns our American Idol surrogate. She has a choice: resign, or keep going with an article that humiliates the man she’s fallen in love with. Guess which one she chooses?

More than anything else, her character arc hinges on that scene. To some extent, so does the plot. It’s the moment where this hard-nosed career woman realizes everything she’s been working for is a lie, and the choice she makes shows how far she’s come. Her job no longer matters to her — he matters. Yes, it’s trite. Yes, it’s pat. But to quote Amelia, “All romantic comedies are trite and pat.” At least there’s some grim corporate satire, which I have decided is commercially viable in our current state of economic disarray.

“We don’t need that scene,” Amelia said. “It’s long and it doesn’t really accomplish that much. Besides, she goes and meets the love interest and explains every single thing that happens in the scene.”

My take: “I’d rather go back and work on making her dialogue with the love interest less redundant.” There’s a little rule of screenwriting called “show, don’t tell.” What she wanted to do was write a brief scene leading up to the main event, then cut to her explaining what happened to the love interest. No main event. I get the idea, and I’ve seen that sort of thing in movies, but all it says to me is “tell, tell, tell.” She’s explaining what she’s going to do, then she’s explaining what she did. Isn’t it more interesting and dramatic to see her doing it? It’s a long scene because it’s basically the moment the narrative and character arcs collide. She’s tested with a decision that will show the audience whether or not this experience, or her feelings, has changed her in any way, and — yes! It did! Huzzah, she can be taught! So why excise it?

I sat there, in dead silence, for about 10 minutes, contemplating, rereading that scene, reconsidering everything we’d changed and everything we had yet to change, realizing it was 3 a.m. and my fight was gone. All her dialogue edits had dulled the edges. The satirical content had turned into a basic Scooby Doo-esque “overhear shady producers laughing as the plot the demise of their latest Idol. The Big Scene no longer fit, and we didn’t have the time to work on it until it did fit. Besides that, I liked too many of the other changes to say, “Let’s go back and reinsert all the hostile, satirical humor to justify this scene.” So, ultimately, Amelia was right, but she was the architect of her own righteousness. I felt duped, but it’s my own fault. I could have argued more about keeping the dialogue. Part of the problem is with me: I just wanted to get it over with. Part of the problem is with her: I sort of hate to admit it, but she’s a captivating speaker who’s incredibly self-assured despite not really knowing what she’s talking about. The sort of person who can lead 10,000 men into battle without having a plan, so they end up resembling an electric football set. (Yes, I’m that old, or maybe just that poor. Also, I have The Simpsons to remind me of my horrible childhood toys.)

I did go on record as saying I hated this change, and the first thing we’d need to address in the rewrite is making it a dramatic confrontation instead of a series of bland “tell, don’t show” scenes. But we we were gaining daylight (by the time I went to bed, I was annoyed because the rising sun was creeping through the sides of my window shade), so we didn’t have the time to argue about it or rewrite it as something retarded. It was bad writing, but for the moment, it was easier just to cut it.

I still hate the change, but I have to admit, the script turned out better than I expected. It’s not what I’d call good. If they started shooting the script we submitted tomorrow, I’d toss around phrases like “mildly amusing” and “relentlessly mediocre” while hoping the actors’ chemistry redeems what doesn’t work on the page. Again, I fall back on my general philosophy that a script should be required to say something about the human condition or the state of society. If you don’t think a romantic comedy can sustain such high ideals, let me point you back to The Purple Rose of Cairo, or Defending Your Life or The Hammer**. I got depressed over the weekend and watched a bunch of movies I love. Those were three of them, and in all cases, I just kept thinking, “This is what our script needs to be.” But the more depressing thought is: That’s what it was, until that Friday night note session. (Not that I’m comparing the quality — just the fact that it conforms to the romantic comedy genre while attempting to say something insightful about the state of things.)

As I view it, our collaboration is over. I don’t hold out much hope that Murdstone will like the script. Maybe this is crazy — after all, he did love Easy Virtue — but I’d like to think he has slightly higher standards. He won’t buy the script, he won’t help us in any way, so to that end, what’s the point of continuing to work on the script? At the end of the day, Amelia and I wanted to tell two completely different stories. It frustrates me because, I realized, she never read that nine-page outline I sent her six weeks ago. It’s not just that she had problems with what’s on the page — it’s that she didn’t seem to know why it was on the page, which is all explained in the outline.

Look, I’d love nothing more than to fall on my sword and say, “Yes, I wrote a script in four days, and it sucked. It didn’t make any sense, so it needed all the changes Amelia suggested and I was crazy to think my version could work.” However, I sent it to two readers who have never led me astray, and they had some good notes but deemed it pretty solid. So I get confused and annoyed when the end result is a worse product. I understand that this is a business that’s interested in making money. I just don’t understand why peddling a shitty product is the only way to make money. And when Murdstone says, “Nobody will want to see this crappy script” while suggesting a number of changes that previously existed in the script, maybe I’ll be proved right. Or maybe not, if his chief complaint is that it’s still too cynical.

Update: I wrote this post over two weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure about posting it. As of Thursday, the verdict is in: Amelia texted me that Murdstone read the script. However, while she’s convinced herself that both he and Assistant Jim loved it, everything she told me is contradictory: he found it “impressive” and “very well put together,” but he won’t reach out to any agents he knows to help us get it read. He considers the storyline — which, I’ll remind you, combines the frequently abused It Happened One Night storyline and a satire-free homage to American Idol, the most popular television show in the fucking world — “of limited appeal and not terribly commercial,” but in the same breath he says the script is “ready to be shopped around.”

There are ways to interpret the seeming contradictions in a positive way. For instance, maybe what he meant about it not being commercial yet ready to be shopped around is that it’d be good as a writing sample, but it’ll never get made). The positive takes are optimistic at best. I know everyone in Hollywood is a pussy and afraid to admit anything is good (yet, ironically, they’re all pretty okay with turning horrible scripts into worse movies), but people don’t say, “Wow! Impressive! Anyone would want to snatch this up… Except me and everyone I’m on good terms with, so you’re on your own.” I really think he was just trying to politely (and, let’s face it, generically) compliment the script while shoving a little bit of realism down Amelia’s throat. Message received on my end, but as I said, she’s convinced he loved it.

After I groused with a lot of (justified, I think) pessimism, she IM’ed me today saying, “Just re-read our script. I’m pretty damn proud of it.” More pessimism: I tried to re-read the script earlier this week and got so angry at the first three pages that I had to stop. Yes, I agreed to the cuts she wanted. It’s my fault for trying to compromise. I know this. But the fact remains: even the cuts I deemed “not so bad” really kill the flow. I want the characters — even the minor ones, who only appear very briefly in the script — to breathe a little and feel as much like real people as a character who’s only in four scenes can. Is that so wrong? And all of that is gone. It’s exactly what I said I didn’t want to happen: they’ve turned into exposition-spewing robots instead of humans having conversations. Worse than that, Amelia added a joke that is sort of funny — but at the expense of our protagonist’s intelligence. It’s exactly what I frequently rail against when I examine comedy scripts: no internal logic.

I know it’s my fault for giving up and not arguing with the appropriate level of passion and gusto. I can’t say I’m proud of the script we submitted. I wish I could.

*Maybe I’m alone, but I’ve never been able to write a script this way. I think — but I can’t really remember, so I can’t dig up any evidence to back myself up — some people say it’s okay to skip past a difficult-to-write scene and continue with the story. Maybe it’s okay for one scene, but look at it this way: if the scene isn’t easy to write, that probably means it’s important. If it’s important, doesn’t it seem like a bad idea to gloss over something that sets up the scenes you’re skipping to? I don’t know about you, but when I write an outline — even this solid, nine-page outline — I end up deviating from it.

I know I’ll sound like Captain Pretentious here, but when my characters actually start interacting at a human level (rather than the general overview of an outline), things change. My conception of them and their interactions change, and that, in turn, changes the story. Maybe in small, subtle ways — or maybe I have to stop and completely change the outline. If you skip over a scene and come back to it later, you’re stuck. You can’t let the characters surprise you in the scene, because it’s gone from a pivotal scene to something to bridge the gap between Scenes A-D and Scenes F-L. If you follow the natural pull of the characters, you’ll just have to rewrite Scenes F-L, anyway — or you’ll end up with a dull Scene E. [Back]

**This is a great romantic comedy from 2008 starring former Loveline host and current podcast kingpin Adam Carolla. It’s mistakenly marketed as a sports movie, I assume to bring in Carolla’s Man Show audience. It operates on both levels, but it has a lot more in common with Annie Hall than Rocky, and I mean that in a good way. More people should see this movie. [Back]

Posted by Stan on June 6, 2010 10:17 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

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 on January 26, 2010 2:45 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

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 on January 1, 2010 1:42 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)

December 25, 2009

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 on December 25, 2009 7:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

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 on December 5, 2009 5:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

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 on December 3, 2009 5:23 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

October 2, 2009

Not to Sound Like (More of) an Asshole, But…

I don’t care about the Creative Screenwriting Cyberspace Open. At all. To the degree that I didn’t even know it existed until I got a half-dozen e-mails from people begging me to rant about how outraged I am that they did a poor job of explaining the rules this year. I’m not outraged, because I don’t care. My comments on this sort of thing have been expressed in a rambling, barely coherent podcast.

Please stop e-mailing me about this subject. Please start dropping some comment science on the blog itself, so I don’t seem so whiny, passive-aggressive, and insane. Thanks!

Posted by Stan on October 2, 2009 5:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

August 27, 2009

Query Letters I’m Confused By…

So confused, in fact, that I can’t figure out if it’s a query letter, a description of a nonexistent movie trailer, or a bizarre rant from a frustrated amateur golfer. Enjoy.

Dear Sir,

I have a full length tragedy movie script title: RANKLE Jones The Golfer. It is a new idea, full of suspense and thrill. I need a production company and financial investment into this movie production as it will make a block buster.

Jones enjoys golf playing, hoping to be a professional golfer like Tiger Woods. Professional golfers play in golf field, ours play at home. No fucking son of a bitch will accept correction. The pride of what is yet to be is a destroyer. Jones: Everyone in life have a dream and aspiration to fulfill, so I am too. My life, my all will go to a sport I love and cherish most. Golf is my dream game, a sport I love. Let’s go golfing.

Rudolf drug life flashes of wealth caught Jones napping as he was convinced to take part in one of the most bloody drug cartel deal.

Shelly is a desire of every men but her stinking lifestyle of prostitution can’t let her settle for a man.

Jones fought Elvis in the night club all because of a fames sex machine Shelly with Rudolf, Alex and others watch with no one allow to separate until someone quit for the other.

There are a lot of happenings at the night club.

Gangsters and Police combat force.

Why is Jeff called the master by Rudolf, Elvis, Jimmy and others?

It is traumatic to live with nutty breed of human, all in the name of family-hood. Traumatic experiences of Ray of hatred, alienation by all his family members, his emotional disgust and good moral negligence on the part of his parent on the family.

His erratic brother Jones gave him a blood bath, living his life-less body after which he was in oblivious state. Ray is cast away and also an object of mimic.

Hilda gave Ray a taste of love life which has been missing for years. I love you mum because you hate me. Cassandra my sister is no different from my mum Vera. Ray’s love life with Hilda left nothing to be admiring as it is an ocean of perfect love for both of them.

Jones finally golfed out daddy’s ”Kenny” breath, as he was left to his pool of blood. Jones life turns sour of no savvy as he committed suicide. Those that bury mines indiscriminately will one day fall victim to mine explosion.

Guns blazing as the government troop fight the drug cartel men.

There are golf scenes, fist fighting, snake scenes, club scenes, sex scenes, drug scenes, Police shoot out, gangster, hovercraft, Apache helicopters and Belgian attack dogs.

The script is over 120 pages.

This production has good advert spaces that will be integrated into the movie without it interfering, as the production is purely commercial. This is a viable promotional vehicle to boost your products and services across the globe considering the much success this movie will achieve.

Thanks for finding time to read through. Only get back to me if you are ready for us to proceed with this viable movie production.

Best Regards.

PRODUCER

[Name redacted]

The funniest thing to me is that they’re e-mailing this query to me, as if I have any power or authority over…anything.

Posted by Stan on August 27, 2009 8:24 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

June 25, 2009

Out of the Moment

I always tend to worry about this problem, which I’m sure I’ve complained about before: novice writers reading shooting drafts. Everybody knows the phrase “development hell,” but few seem to realize that, even if a script doesn’t spend a decade or more in development, all scripts go through a process of development between their selling and shooting drafts. Even ones with largely apocryphal “we told them to shoot it as-is, because it was perfect!” stories attached to them. I worry that certain writers don’t know this, and as evidenced by one of the comically ignorant comments I received for my Fuckbuddies analysis, I have a basis for my concern. (This is not to ignore the fact that many scripts even change between the shooting draft and he actual, finished film — but that issue has little to do with what I intend to talk about today.)

Think about the audience of a selling draft, versus a shooting draft. A shooting draft is sold, and it’s going to get shot. It exists as a blueprint for technicians to follow in pursuit of a good movie. You can clutter it with sarcasm, inside jokes, meta-commentary, whatever you want. I’m still of a school of thought that you shouldn’t, but that’s my choice. Other people can do other things, and it doesn’t make much of a difference to me. (Although, as someone who reads shooting drafts for a living, I can tell you that when a writer’s style drives me nuts, it colors my opinion of the overall work whether I want it to or not. Again, that’s sort of beside the point for the moment.)

On the other hand, a selling draft exists to get sold. This is where skill as a writer comes into play, big-time. Raymond Chandler famously said, “The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.” He wasn’t wrong 60 years ago, and he’s even less wrong now. (Seriously, go look at one of Chandler’s scripts, or any other script from the ’40s and ’50s, and compare it to screenplays from today. He sounds like kind of a whiner, doesn’t he?) On top of that challenge, you have to give people a sense that your screenplay will make a great movie. In order to do that, you have to give your prospective audience the experience of your script as a movie.

You can’t rely on pithy William Goldman and Shane Black crap. Writing “this is the best swordfight in screen history” when you’ve won two Oscars for screenwriting is a lot different than doing it when nobody knows your name. You have to actually write the swordfight, and give it the sweaty, breathless excitement you imagine in your head.

Here’s what you don’t do: “He punches a wall or something.” That’s a line of action block from a shooting script. I get it — it’s a bit of sly meta-commentary, showing the writer really gets that the director controls everything. He or she might choose to have the character throw a tumbler of whiskey at a wall or something, or maybe the scene will be filmed in one of those rare but very much existent wall-free living rooms. It’s all about options, right? You don’t want to step on the director’s toes.

You also don’t want to step on the toes of your prospective selling-draft audience: one-rung-above-bottom assistants and readers, followed (once can only hope) by producers or agents. You want to keep them absorbed, and the easiest way to pull them right out of the moment is annoying meta-commentary. Tell a story — don’t constantly remind your readers they’re just reading a screenplay. It’s not clever, it doesn’t show your exstensive knowledge of the filmmaking process — it’s a combination of distracting and annoying, and it could singlehandedly result in a “pass” instead of a “recommend.”

Posted by Stan on June 25, 2009 11:11 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

June 20, 2009

Bad Twist 2: Twist Badder

When I last ranted about awful twist endings, I focused mainly on the “twist for the sake of twisting” problem that plagues so many screenplays — twists that not just come out of nowhere but actively undermine the story and characters. Lately, I’ve come across something infinitely worse: scripts that actively telegraph some of the world’s most misguided Shyamalan twists (more misguided than murderous trees, even).

The most egregious example has a setting I immediately fell in love with: New York City, at an unspecified time in the future, after some sort of hinted-at Apocalypse that left the city at the center of a vast desert. Water is scarce, and it’s suggested early on that, much like Chinatown, he who controls the water supply controls the entire city. Unfortunately, the writers squander the setting by using it as little more than a backdrop for a dull, cliché-ridden detective procedural about urban corruption. Because, no, the water-supply motif is not the only allusion to Chinatown. This always bugs me: why create a unique setting to tell a story we’ve seen a thousand times before? The setting alone doesn’t make it worthwhile.

But wait, it gets worse: throughout the script, Our Hero (a.k.a., the world’s dullest antihero) has these strange flashes. He sees himself, bathed in white, fighting battles. He also has long scars running vertically down the sides of his back. He also has only the foggiest memory of his past. As he works his way up the chain of corrupt command, Our Hero discovers — wait for it — that the chief villain is the Great Satan (as portrayed by a super-hot stripper — eat your heart out, Freud!), and that Our Hero is…an angel.

No, really. An angel. Those visions? His vague memories of fighting the battle for Heaven. The scars? Where his wings once were. Now he’s fallen to Earth and fallen in love with a mortal, and he must trade the chance to return to Heaven in order to allow his one true love — also a stripper — to enter the Pearly Gates.

The thing that bugs me is, if I said, “An angel? Are you high?” I’d get the following response from Murdstone & Grinby: “Sixty percent of Americans believe in angels.” Because that statistic alone makes the script great, right?

Look, having the big twist of your sci-fi wannabe-noir turn out to be “he was an angel the whole time,” that’s fine, but make it count. This entire script felt like 100 pages of wheel-spinning, followed by 10 pages of “big twist.” In other words, the script exists solely for this twist, and that’s not good enough. Let’s quickly apply this structural model to your average road movie. The fun of road movies, theoretically, are the hitches thrown in the perfect travel plans and/or the wacky stops along the way. If this script were a road movie, the main characters would have driven 2000 problem-free miles before running into a slight hitch on mile 2001, then reaching their destination at mile 2001.125.

This is a Screenwriting 101 thing: the first question you ask — just before “How do I sell this?” and “How do I get an agent?” — is “Why does this story need to be told?” If your answer is, “Because he turns into an angel, and that’s awesome,” congratulations! You fail! I would have accepted something along the lines of, “His ‘past life’ as an angel guides every action he makes on Earth, and it’s only when he learns the value of self-sacrifice that he can truly ‘become’ human, although he has to pay a steep price.” It’s not mind-blowing, but at least it gives him some relatable, human struggle and doesn’t mention the repetitive, poorly written gunfight sequences.

Here’s a phrase I love: inevitable but not predictable. This should describe the last 10-15 pages of every script you ever write.

Make no mistake, though: “not predictable” is not synonymous with “big twist,” because in this case, the twist was predictable. When you have a main character named Samhain and random flashbacks to your main character in gladiator-esque costuming, fighting an epic battle amid a backdrop of blinding white… What else could it be? Unlike the earlier rant about twists that undermine what’s already established in their efforts to blow our minds, this new brand of twist is even worse: they tell stories that exist solely for the twist. They can’t undermine a halfway decent story because there’s no story to undermine. I can’t figure out which is the bigger cheat: the one that takes a halfway decent story and throws it down the toilet, or the one whose story is a total waste of time aside from a slight moment of surprise at the end.

I guess the former is disappointing, because it squanders some small amount of potential, but the latter is fucking irritating. It doesn’t even have potential to squander. Hollywood spends all their time wondering why movies keep making less and less money — or, more accurately, they spend all their time accusing pirates of ruining their industry. The fact of the matter is: THIS SHIT IS WHY MOVIES MAKE LESS MONEY. It’s the “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” principle. You can only be burned with so many waste-of-time twist-ending piles of garbage before you start to realize seeing them is a waste of time and money.

Adding insult to injury, two extremely high-profile, justifiably well-regarded actors signed on to play roles in this anal fissure of a movie, elevating it to an undeserved level of importance that will probably cause moviegoers to waste some hard-earned cash, only to walk out two hours later saying, “Angels?! Were they high?!”

But you know what? Maybe next time, they won’t fall for it. After all, Robert De Niro hasn’t been in a financially successful non-comedy sequel in a decade. Deservedly, despite his stellar past work. I just feel bad audiences have to get screwed this time, but you know how it is. Kids have to touch the stove flame in order to know not to do it again.

Posted by Stan on June 20, 2009 4:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 17, 2009

Attachments

I’ve mentioned this before, but I hate sycophancy. I especially hate it when I get yelled at for not being sycophantic enough. I’m much more willing to bend to the whims of those paying me money for my opinion, but I’ll never figure out why some people think pointing out writers and attachments will suddenly impress me. Usually, it just makes me lose a little respect for those involved.

Here’s a little background: over Memorial Day weekend, I was sent a script with no title page and no suggestion of the author’s name. This is not uncommon. I read it, hated it, and shit all over it. Almost immediately, I received an e-mail from my boss at Murdstone & Grinby, Jim, who snidely pointed out who wrote the script and asked me to include more details if I was going to crap all over such a genius’s script. I’m keeping the details as vague as possible, but shrewd readers can piece together the truth: the writer won one Oscar and received another nomination for writing several years later. In between, he wrote a whole bunch of shitty movies. So, awards and nominations or not, his bad scripts outweigh his good ones, so the fact that this one, whose title rhymes with Stink, stunk should shock no one.

This also came on a bad day for Amelia, who had called me earlier in the day to complain about what a prick Jim had become as the stress of Cannes wore on him. Receiving the e-mail annoyed but didn’t shock me, and my reaction was to call Amelia to vent and get some advice. Because, see, all they keep telling me is to be less detailed. My coverage goes too in-depth, so they keep asking me to scale it back. I thought I finally reached a nice equilibrium, and then Jim demands more.

“No,” Amelia laughed. “Jim is a retard who can’t express himself. They don’t want you to be more general — it’s just that, once in awhile, all you do is harp on one single point, without giving an overview of the entire script.”

Let me explain my typical mentality: if a script sucks for a lot of reasons, I’ll go into all of them. If I feel like the script would go from bad to good with the simple removal of a subplot or a horrible ending, I will beat that point like a dead horse, because otherwise the script is fine. I like to use the synopsis in conjunction with the notes, so they can refer to it and say, “I can see this story works except for this horrible ending.” What they’ve decided they want — after telling me for months that I send them nothing but solid gold — is to not read the synopsis at all. Three pages is too long — they want it all in the notes, even though I still have to write a synopsis. I don’t have any problem with this — not now, after talking to Amelia. Prior to this, I’d been struggling to adhere to Jim’s sporadic, confusing, inconsistent feedback.

Nonetheless, while I upped the detail, finding out who wrote the screenplay — and finding out from Amelia that two A-list, award-winning/-nominated actors took the two lead roles — did nothing to change my opinion except, as I said, disappoint me. I like the two actors, I have some respect for the writer’s good scripts, but learning of their involvement does not magically make the script good. It doesn’t make me think I’ve misjudged a gem. The thing sucked, and I don’t have a clue what anybody involved was thinking.

Just to show I’m not being a whiny bitch, here’s an example of what’s wrong with this script. The story focuses on a college graduate with an unparalleled ability to read facial tics and shifty eyes. He’s the star of TV’s Lie to Me, only he does nothing interesting with his power. I guess it’s supposed to be all deep and insightful that he can expertly read everyone except his shady father and his love interest. What’s wrong with his love interest? He thinks she’s roughly his age, but she’s 14. When he finds this out, he’s effectively creeped out…but continues to pursue her. While the script lacks “bad touching,” the girl’s age adds nothing to the story except an element of inappropriate sleaze on a guy we’re supposed to like. This script’s Oscar-winning screenwriter never takes a moment to give this relationship any real meaning, so it’s left as a creepy red herring that doesn’t enrich either character — in fact, it does the opposite to the protagonist. It makes him even more of an irritating enigma.

The Oscar-winning screenwriter compounds the problem when the protagonist solves his central dilemma — what to do with himself after college — by deciding to teach…elementary school. Although the script tries to be a comedy, the Oscar-winning screenwriter does not portray this resolution as ironic or amusing. It’s a serious, theoretically uplifting ending. I’m all for movies — especially comedy and pornography — shattering taboos, but I don’t generally like it when pedophilia triumphs and it’s not a demented joke. I know I won’t make any friends by saying this, but I don’t think pedophiles are good people.

The script sucked. Nothing except extensive rewriting will change that, and anybody who thinks I should love this script just because of who wrote it or who’s attached to star can blow me. Just keep in mind, I’m over the age of 10, so you might not be into it. On the plus side, it’ll draw a massive audience of frail, glassy-eyed men with inverted pompadours, whose tiny erections visibly press against their too-tight leather pants as they approach the ticket booth.

Posted by Stan on June 17, 2009 11:19 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

June 14, 2009

A Movie for Cat Ladies

Here’s where I live up to my reputation as a misogynist film blogger. This week, for the first time, I read a script where I kept having one thought repeatedly: “This is the first script I’ve read that seems to want to capture the cat-lady demographic.” It’s not so much that they want to hit this demo — it’s that they want to exclude everyone else from possibly enjoying this movie.

First, let’s take a step back and ponder what I consider the “cat lady” personality type. I know it’s harsh and stereotypical, and as a dude, I’m opening myself up to obvious accusations of sexism, but I’ve spent a lot of time reading television forums, and it’s impossible to not notice this small but vocal group of people — the kind of people who hate some people for being fat hos and hate another because she needs a sandwich, the kind of people who rage against bad parenting while glorifying rapists as misunderstood and quietly pondering brother-on-brother incest.

I don’t care if these people are lonely save for their 25 cats, or if they’re married with five kids and no pets. They’re all cat ladies, based more on personality type than actual cat ownership. To put it bluntly, their defining trait is not so much possession of a certain domesticated feline. In fact, I know women who own cats but don’t fall into the “cat lady” category. It’s more about the type of person who has some kind of damage causing them to not simply enjoy a work of entertainment, or to not level any valid criticism. They watch, and they judge characters in shockingly simplified terms: if they’re good-looking men, they can do no wrong no matter how many women they rape and/or beat; if they’re good-looking women, they can do no right even if they devote their lives to all manner of saintly deeds; if they’re dowdy female sidekicks, they’re abused and mistreated by their beautiful friends; if they’re dumpy, unattractive male sidekicks, they’re obnoxious and need to get off my TV screen.

This personality type seems to work best with TV shows, because unlike other forms of entertainment, the characters (and/or the actors who play them) can be judged on a weekly basis. Each new set of actions creates more and more discussion. You don’t get that with movies; even in a franchise, you have to wait a year or two for a sequel. It doesn’t suit the “call-and-response” of people speculating Izzie can’t get more obnoxious, then patting themselves on the back when that fat whore parallel parks on a hill without angling her tires and setting the parking brake. As a result, it seemed odd to me that they’d target this demographic for a feature film, but then, it’s not a feature film designed for cat ladies to hate. They ought to embrace it like that doughy sidekick from Gilmore Girls.

Here’s a general synopsis of the plot, which I don’t mind giving away because it’s a beat-for-beat remake of a Korean movie that, I assume, sucks just as hard: recently divorced Woman A has been compelled to do two things all her life: cook and fuck. As a consequence, she’s suffered from a slight weight problem, which puts a crimp into her second compulsion, and she grows increasingly obsessed with dieting. She’s also shrill and needy, yet cartoonishly judgmental. Her new next door neighbor, Woman B, is an ex-child star with an active eating phobia masquerading as an eating disorder. It keeps her stick-thin and sexually appealing to men, but she is also terrified of sex. After meeting Woman B and discovering the phobias, Woman A simply cannot understand it and decides to devote her life to forcing Woman B to eat something. Woman A fails repeatedly, and her increasing frustration manifests itself as bitter judgment of Woman B as frigid.

Because Woman A constantly forces herself on Woman B, eventually they form an uneasy bond. Woman B opens up about her history of repeated sexual abuse, sleazy producers forcing themselves on her as early as 12. Perhaps most traumatically, one of them continuously shoved food into her mouth while raping her, in order to keep her quiet. Instead of giving us an equally compelling childhood trauma to explain Woman A’s behavior, the writer treats us to a baffling flashback illustrating how her divorce happened. When her workaholic husband decided he no longer wanted to spend his limited free time doing nothing but eating, Woman A concluded that he was cheating and, in a confusing act of revenge, cooked their pet — a parrot — in a dish for the husband. When he discovered what she had done, the husband filed for divorce immediately. In the present, revealing these nuggets of backstory causes Woman A and Woman B to settle into an alarming, far-fetched lesbian tryst. Soon after, Woman A discovers Woman B has started sleeping with her ex-husband, so Woman A slits her throat. Then, she has a dream of the ghost of Woman B visiting her, grateful for what Woman A has done. Woman A sleeps soundly.

I should also mention that this script is told in a nonlinear fashion, starting with a police detective investigating the disappearance of Woman B. It has nothing to do with the story, really. It doesn’t build any suspense (we know Woman A is the culprit because, from the moment we meet her, SHE’S FUCKING NUTS) and makes a simple — if retarded — story seem much more convoluted than it is.

Despite its many, many problems, I have to give the writer props for one important thing: he knows his audience. This is a script that doesn’t take the time to justify the protagonist’s actions in order to make her sympathetic or, at least, empathetic. Who needs to waste time on that when you know cat ladies will instantly align with a doughy, sexually frustrated woman trying to win over an evil harlot whose life has been destroyed by her desirability?

Seriously, though, the writer really commits to appealing to the cat lady demographic, and that’s a fairly important lesson for writing. (I’d question the decision to appeal to this base, because while they may rule Internet TV forums, I don’t think they necessarily speak to the broad spectrum of viewers. If they did, shows’ ratings would go up instead of down when showrunners make the mistake of kowtowing to Internet fandom.) Recently, one of my friends sent me a new script he’d written and said, “I don’t know who would want to see this, but I know I would.”

To me, that’s just a bent antenna. In order to succeed as a screenwriter — not to write good screenplays, necessarily — you have to develop the instinct to say, “Here’s who will see this movie.” Taking it a step further, you have to have the smarts to say, “Here’s who will see this movie, and here’s a producer who wants to appeal to that exact demographic,” and then work some ass-talking-out-of-style magic. If all you can muster is, “Well… I like it, at least,” you’re already screwed.

You’re a writer, though. You want to write good before commercial, right? Why can’t you do both? I know it seems like an impossible dream with Hollywood’s current output, but it can be done. Broaden your prospective audience from “me and/or people like me,” but not all the way out to “lowest common denominator,” the thing that makes so many movies into shitstorms. Say you’re into sci-fi. This might be a bad example because it’s plagued with the “fanboy” mentality that tends to cause filmmakers to slip into pandering instead of telling a solid story; it’s also plagued with the perception that it’s box-office poison unless it’s loaded with ridiculous action sequences. Nevertheless, say you’re into sci-fi. You love it, you know the genre extremely well, and you have a story idea that manages to conform to the genre while offering sci-fi fans an experience they’ve never seen before. In other words, it’ll make both you and a broad base of sci-fi fans happy. As opposed to telling a story inspired by your Bergman-bleak struggle to move past your wife’s death and setting it on a space station to appeal to genre fans. It might make you happy, and people who love cathartic dramas might see it, but all those nerds who have never touched a woman, much less loved and lost? They’ll stay away in droves.

Like most screenwriting problems, it’s solved with a happy medium. If you can find a way to tell stories that fulfill you as a person and a writer in a way that appeals to (at least) one large sect of moviegoers, you’re on the right track. If you want to write stories that fulfill you and few to no others, try writing a novel. (That’s not an attempt to be condescending. If you have talent and drive, you can carve out a decent living writing novels about things movie audiences would reject. It’s the last bastion of verbal artistry, so you might as well take advantage of it before shit like Twitter kills both the printed word and society.)

Posted by Stan on June 14, 2009 12:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

June 10, 2009

Online Dating

All right, everyone. I’m back to beating the dead horse of believability once a-goddamn-gain. Here’s a tip for budding screenwriters out there: problems don’t arise from a far-fetched premise, plot, or even characters. There’s a little something called “suspension of disbelief,” without which no work of fiction could succeed. Assuming it’s a work of fiction that does succeed. At any rate, the writer bears the burden of making their audience suspend disbelief. It doesn’t happen by magic.

While there’s no foolproof method of getting the audience on your side, I think two basic writing goals will help immeasurably:

1. No matter how goofy and/or eccentric your characters, keep them rooted in some sort of relatable/believable struggle.

   I’ll use Rushmore as an example, because back when Wes Anderson made good movies, he did a pretty good job of making eccentric characters into believable human beings. Max Fischer’s personality is extremely out-there, but his central conflicts — falling in love with an older woman and trying to avoid getting kicked out of school — are extremely relatable. The story and characters are fairly ridiculous, but it’s easier to go along for the ride here than in something like, let’s say, Harold & Maude, the inexplicable “classic” that defines “quirky for the sake of quirky” characters.

2. Find a way to omnisciently acknowledge the absurdity of your story/characters/premise.

   You often find this in your middle-tier romantic comedies: the sarcastic best friend who periodically emerges to point out how ridiculous a character’s zany schemes have become. There are a thousand ways to accomplish this, though, and not all of them suck. To use the Rushmore example again, consider two things: Max’s father’s bewilderment of his son’s behavior, and Max’s initial dose of reality when he first attends public school. Eventually, he bends the school to his whims, but at first, taking Max out of the bizarre Rushmore Academy and plopping him down in a semi-normal school is an incongruous reminder that, even in the universe of the movie, Max is an oddball.

Keeping this in mind, it won’t surprise you to discover I got in a little bit of trouble for trashing an awful romantic comedy about online dating. The thing you have to understand is, I love romantic comedies. I just don’t think good ones are made very often — especially not lately — and it disappoints me majorly to read shitty ones. It disappoints me even more when the scripts have decent ideas inhibited by poor execution.

So with this online dating script, I identified two fatal flaws. First, the writer makes the mistake of assuming the audience will buy the idea of an online dating site as a relationship cure-all. Second, the writer makes the mistake of thinking every match on these sites will offer perfect compatibility. Make no mistake: the writer doesn’t portray these conclusions as comically absurd. They form the premise of his script, which is about a couple who put their seemingly idyllic relationship to the test by signing up to an online dating website.

In response to these flaws, I was told: “Five million people sign up to online dating sites every day.” I guess this contention shows that this movie will have an audience. I think it’s sort of a specious conclusion, though, especially in light of the flaws mentioned above. I’d love to get some statistics on why people sign up to these sites, because my personal observations — i.e., friends who have signed up to dating sites — have led me to think only two types of people sign up to these sites: those who have lost hope and gotten desperate, and those who claim to be too busy to socialize. (I say “claim to be” because, in all cases, it’s just a bullshit excuse for either getting rejected or not getting asked out.) In either case, they do not expect much from these sites. They certainly don’t assume it’ll lead to a perfect match, and after a few disastrous dates, they will laugh at the very idea of dating websites leading to perfect matches. They’ll laugh even harder if a movie expects audiences to take the idea seriously.

So I rewrote the coverage, strengthening my argument and proposing a simple fix. It would be so, so simple to turn this piece of crap into a middling, forgettable romantic comedy — clearly the writer’s goal. And it all goes back to believability: a major subplot revolves around the Pierce Brosnan-like creator of a new online dating site, reminiscent of eHarmony (in that the creator uses elaborate questionnaires and supposedly scientific methodology for making matches, although I think the character in this script would not disallow gays from using his site on religious grounds). Why not point out the unbelievable qualities of this site by, say, including a few lines suggesting this particular site has taken off because the character’s formula for matchmaking is shockingly good?

It’s not a perfect solution, but it acknowledges the believability problem and offers a way for audiences to suspend disbelief. Not everyone will buy it, but at least the script would be making an effort to acknowledge its own absurdity. At the end of the day, that’s all I want in scripts and movies: a token gesture. A little goes a long way, and I cut really far-fetched scripts a metric ass-ton of slack if they make mild efforts to keep things believable and relatable. (Do not confuse these with “realism.” I prefer it when movies aren’t realistic, frankly. Just as long as they’re unreal in relatable ways.)

Posted by Stan on June 10, 2009 6:04 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 5, 2009

Line-Jumping

The past month should have been agonizing, but frankly, both of my shitty jobs kept me too busy for me to stay in suspense about my imminent career launch. Also, I made a conscious effort not to think of it, on account of knowing (a) I did not submit my absolute best work, and (b) I could generously estimate the chances of success at one in a million. At the end of the day, I have no qualifications other than scripts, and scripts aren’t enough.

Mitch Michaels called last night. Sounding thoroughly nonplussed, he said, “There’s a lot to like, but it’s just too fucking dark.” I can’t say it surprised me, considering he had the exact same reaction to the feature script based on this character. I’ve always had a particular fondness for entertainment that seamlessly combines raucous comedy with brutal drama, and I thought maybe a fringe cable outlet would be more willing to embrace this than the Big Four. Of course, maybe they would, but I’ll never know because the production company rejected it without anyone at the channel knowing of its existence.

Mitch brought up other factors. He didn’t have any hard numbers — why bother, since he was rejecting me — but just from reading it, he decided it’d cost too much. He’s probably not wrong, but remember I didn’t write this with a budget in mind. Hell, I didn’t write it with an audience in mind, other than myself. These scripts were really… I don’t even know what they were anymore. If I really doubted their commercial prospects, I would have continued writing them as publicly accessible blog posts instead of private teleplays. I could call them an exercise or a pipe dream, but if I look a little deeper, I can’t deny it: I hoped that, someday, I’d gain enough respect/clout to make my depraved vision of rock-star decadence a reality.

At best, I can say now’s not the time. I have no clout or respect — hell, I couldn’t even get Mitch to say this stuff was good enough for him to consider me for the staff of whatever show he does try to get on the air. He’s just given me the world’s softest “no,” three times in a row. I guess it’s time to take the hint. Especially when he pointed out a few easy-to-remedy problems but made no suggestion that we take time to develop the material into something this channel would buy.

There is one plus side, though. It’s partly the reason for this post (the other part is to update you on the tragic conclusion to last month’s misguided optimism). I think people — both in and out of the business — spend far too much time terrifying newbies into thinking one false move will get them blacklisted for all eternity. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read panic-stricken accounts of meeting executives and blowing their One Big Shot. Hell, I even wrote one.

I won’t say it’s not true that you can screw yourself, quite easily, with false moves and misguided statements. I know the movie business is built on passive-aggressive behavior, but I sincerely believe two things: (1) if my writing really sucked, Mitch would have told me not to send him anything else, and (2) if he was too much of a puss to do that, he would have simply stopped e-mailing me. People have done both to me, so the fact that he kept coming back, and that he’s welcomed me to continue coming back (even after I practically begged him for a job and he turned me down)… It’s gotta mean something.

At the very least, it means you can send something that isn’t your best work, or isn’t a person’s cup of tea, and the world won’t crumble around you if they reject it. Like anything else, it’s a business of relationships. Mitch and I, despite a shaky past, have developed a good relationship, so I could probably fling shit at him until the day I die, and he’ll always read it. Maybe I’m off-base, but I really think that’s what it’s all about.

(Trivia: Mitch Michaels — not his real name — knows all about the blog. Even more mysteriously, he’s known about it since I worked for him in 2005, when I stupidly accessed it from a company computer. I don’t think he — or anyone else who has stumbled across this dung pile — would consider himself an “avid reader,” but I honestly think keeping this blog has a little something to do with his willingness to talk to me after a three-year communication lapse. He can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in the comments. Ironically, I’ve spent years trying to keep this blog as secret as possible for fear of offending and alienating people I know in the real world. Despite this suspiciously positive result, this blog will remain as secret as possible.)

Posted by Stan on June 5, 2009 5:56 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

May 9, 2009

…Not to Be

So there’s this script floating around by John “How the fuck did I get nominated for an Oscar twice?” Logan that adapts Shakespeare’s Coriolanus into modern action-movie context. Except for one little detail… It keeps the language. Here’s what the script reminded me of:

Now, I’m not terribly familiar with Coriolanus, but I think it’s safe to blame the scripts flaws more on the adaptation than the source. Shakespeare scholars can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the strong suspicion that Logan cut massive reams of dialogue in favor of long sequences of modern street warfare. If you’ve ever seen Death Wish 3, you’ve seen these action sequences. Except Death Wish 3 has guys getting stabbed in the head with a knife duct-taped to a loose floorboard, which puts it a little ahead of Coriolanus.

Because of the focus on action, and the strong desire to keep the story in a two-hour feature timeframe, dialogue has to get cut. Only problem: all Shakespeare had to work with was dialogue, so in cutting scenes, story and character development fly out the window. The entire second act is a clusterfuck of bizarre, rushed plot twists and double-crosses that, I assume, are properly set up and fairly dramatic in the play.

To me, the problem hinges on the choice to keep Shakespeare’s dialogue. Who do they want to come see this movie? Shakespeare fans, who will hate the poor adaptation even if they dig the action (which they probably won’t)? It honestly seems like they want this movie to be seen by teen boys who like watchin’ shit get blowed up.

As a former teenage boy, I can think of two problems with this decision:

1. The Shakespeare dialogue. I spent all of junior high and high school trying to avoid reading Shakespeare and watching Shakespeare adaptations, before developing a vague appreciation of him in my senior year and flat-out loving him the first time I read King Lear in college.

   Now, in my youth, I was this movie’s theoretical audience. I saw every horrible action movie that came out, and more importantly, I got HBO, which meant I got to watch stuff like Point Break roughly 480 times a week. If somebody had come out with an action-movie version of a Shakespeare play, I don’t care how balls to the wall it is, I don’t care if it starred Bruce Willis and Patrick Swayze, if I heard them talking in imabic pentameter, I’d skip it. The end.

2. The title. You’re making a raucous action movie geared toward teens and maybe college students, and you think a title with “anus” in it is a good idea? Especially a title that easily converts to, let’s say, “cornhole anus”? Look, I’m not an idiot: it’s adapted from a play, it’s the title of the play, and the title is named after the main character. I get it, but it’s still a horrible idea.

Now, in 1996, a little movie called Romeo + Juliet came out. A terrible yet wildly successful modernization of the play’s setting that still retains the Shakespeare text. A precedent! If you ignore the fact that other updates like the Ethan Hawke-starring Hamlet bombed like hell, a slick writer/producer could convince someone to back it. Except they’re appealing to the wrong audience. Teenage girls, who have more patience with the dialogue and are more attuned to the emotion (and they’d have to be, considering how horrible Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes are in that piece of shit), made Romeo + Juliet a success. At best, teenage boys accompanied their girlfriends on a date in the vain hope that they’d get some action.

Anyone involved in the greenlighting of this project is high if they think they could somehow convince 13-to-25-year-old males to sit still during this movie. Whenever people aren’t getting shot, they’re talking in Shakespeare! The horror! Maybe they think it’d serve as a date movie: guys would come for the action, girls would stay for the delectable rhythm of the text. Does anyone think that has any chance of working? This isn’t even the type of story where a Shakespeare-loving girl would drag her disinterested boyfriend, who would find himself surprised by the spectacle of the action. It’s just a movie with no audience.

So why not just do what screenwriters have done for decades: rip off the plot of what’s arguably a lesser known Shakespeare play for an action movie that’s entirely modern? What does retaining the language add, other than pretension? Especially in relation to what it takes away — plot coherence, character depth — because Logan can’t replace the soliloquies with terse, rapid-fire banter. Just call it Corey and have it star a taciturn ex-Green Beret named “Corey Storm” and call it a day.

I’ll point and laugh when this fails on both a creative and commercial level. Otherwise, you all can feel free to point and laugh when my prediction is wrong and it makes $5 billion and wins every Oscar (including Best Animated Feature and Best Documentary).

Edit: I was a little punchy when I wrote this, so I must clarify. Yes, it takes place in the modern world, but it takes place in what I can only describe as a moronic parallel universe where the Roman Empire still reigns supreme. This is essential because Logan retains Shakespeare’s dialogue (which is all “Rome this” and “Rome that”), and honestly, it’s yet another reason why it should be changed and updated.

Posted by Stan on May 9, 2009 12:32 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 23, 2009

Flotsam and Jetsam

Let me start by getting the pretentious bit out of the way:

I don’t consider myself an “artist.” I have no interest in creating art; I just want to entertain. If it happens I get some art in my entertainment, I’ll roll with it, but it’s never a primary goal. With that in mind, it might come as a bit of a shock when I tell you about a character I’ve created who I can’t shake. To me, it seems like a weirdo-artist thing to create a fictional character for a story and have him take on a life of his own, to the point where I can almost feel him living his life as I live my own — little more than an endless stream of fresh ideas.

What can I do with that? Well, it started with a screenplay, which turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever written (in the opinion of myself and, more importantly, everyone who’s read it except one person), but that wasn’t enough. When I came up with a harebrained scheme to get “published,” the screenplay I adapted into a novel was this one. But this was no mere novelization — this was a full-on, THE BOOK IS NOW THE MOVIE adaptation of a living, breathing work of fiction. It allowed me to add depth both to the moment — gasp! directing on the page! — and the past, really digging deep to understand this character, his friends and family, and the world that surrounds him.

But that wasn’t enough. I wrote a first draft, set it aside while I worked on some scripts, came back to it for a rewrite, but suddenly this story was in the character’s past. What kept entering my mind was what happened after — where did he go from there?

I came up with a solution: a fictitious blog chronicling the character’s misadventures, which I worked on as I rewrote the novel. When I got too busy, the blog fell by the wayside, and I’ve been meaning to get back to it.

I finished the rewrite a few months ago, which coincided with my friend Amelia finally reading a different, unrelated script. To my surprise, she loved it, and talk of shopping the script around to a group of disparate people transformed into talk of targeting one single person, Mitch Micheals, who I didn’t think would get back to me. As luck would have it, he did, and he told me he’d take a look at the script.

All of this happened in sort of a friendly way, I guess. I e-mailed Mitch as if I was seeking advice, not trying to sell him on the project. He asked to read it, I sent the PDF, and that was that.

Almost like clockwork, I got a response a month later: Mitch loved the script but can’t do a thing with it. What else did I have?

Here’s where things get tricky. It’s a difference between my perception of how the industry should work versus the way it actually does. How it should work: “Wow, this script is great, but it’s not right for our company. You know who’s looking for something like this? [Name of company.] Let me introduce you to [name of executive].” Admittedly, these companies all compete for various things, but in many cases they have to work together, and everyone always knows what’s going on everywhere in town, so why not just pass me off to somebody who wants something along the lines of the script I’ve written? I think the short answer is, if I have talent has a writer, eventually I’ll come up with something they want, and that something won’t land in the lap of their competition.

The other part of my perceptual problem goes like this: they say, “We loved this script, but it’s not right for us. What else you got?” Shouldn’t they just say, “We’re looking for [insert genre] for an [insert actor name] type”? But I guess that’d be like an encyclopedia salesman asking an uninterested customer, “What do you want me to sell you?” It just doesn’t work that way.

The script Mitch read is not my best script (the one featuring the character I can’t shake). So, naturally, I pitched that one to him. Everyone says it’s my best, so why not? Conventional wisdom might say that I should build up to the best, but what if I don’t get another chance? He said it sounded good, so I sent that over to him, too.

But I couldn’t play the waiting game. Mitch wants two things: comedy or action. The first script I sent him was a action-comedy, the next one a straight comedy, but I didn’t have much left in my arsenal in terms of commercial properties.

Prior to the “best script,” much of what I’d written is what’s largely considered funny but a little too weird for mainstream. I had this notion, thanks to movies like Being John Malkovich and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, that weird, dark, vaguely creepy comedies could get made fairly easily and turn into smash hits. Eventually, Hollywood beat that out of me, but I have a grand total of five screenplays that one might consider commercial. Mitch was in possession of two. The third is an action script — not his genre. And the fourth and fifth, while commercial, are in bad shape.

So what would happen if he came back at me in another month wondering what else I had?

While I rewrote the novel and worked on the goofy blog, I kept coming up with screenplay ideas. By this point, all of them were pretty much fully formed outlines. I have a habit of knocking out mediocre to bad first drafts in about 10-12 days, then setting them aside for rewrites. I thought, I could either work on rewrites of the two commercial scripts, or I could get to work on the new scripts. With decent first drafts, I could pitch them and then say, “Oh, this script needs some work. Can I have a few weeks to polish it?” And then I’d gut it.

That was the route I took, but as I started to write, something occurred to me. This character who had stuck with me did not consume me for any real artistic reasons. Remember the part where I wrote a bunch of weird, offbeat comedies with no commercial prospects? The script featuring this unshakeable character was basically my Annie Hall: it had a lot of the weirdness, mostly in the form of this larger-than-life, ridiculous character, but overall it tells a commercial story in a commercial way.

From then on, I’d worked on scripts that were fully “commercial,” intentionally devoid of the usual weirdness. Not uniqueness — I hope, at least, that I’ve retained that in spades. I just got rid of the stuff where I knew, even while writing it, “Nobody’s ever going to read this script. It’s too fucking out there.” It occurred to me, finally, that this character kept nagging at me to work on the blog, work on rewrites of the novel, etc., because I need an outlet for the weird.

It’s the law of conservation of creative energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed, simply changed. Instead of putting the weird into screenplays I want to remain commercial, I used the blog and novel as outlets for it. So I have pristine screenplays and fucked up, bizarre, creepy, funny-in-a-way-that-makes-you-feel-guilty-for-laughing blog posts contained elsewhere. Like pasteurization.

I still needed an outlet for the flotsam and jetsam, but my dealings with Mitch — who is much more professional and generous than the Big-Shot Producer, despite not being nearly as big-shot — led me to start feeling like a real, genu-wine writer. Why post stuff on a blog, for free for all to read, when I can capture lightning in the bottle in the form of…

Teleplays! That’s right… It’s not commercial enough for the silver screen, but Mitch’s company has a deal with a particular fringe cable network that has shown a singular interest in my brand of offbeat humor. The pie-in-the-sky dream was that maybe he’d ask for something else, I’d show him these teleplays, and he’d get the ball rolling on a pilot. The reality would be more mundane — they’d serve as writing samples that might — might! — get me hired on whatever TV project… As a writer’s assistant.

And it just so happened that I felt like this character, and the supporting players in his absurd world, would work well in a weekly format. It stands to reason, with a serialized blog of their adventures, that it has potential. In fact, I outlined a six-episode season — thinking that would be the bare minimum episode order — and used a few blog posts as models for plots. The teleplays are still uniquely television, but the story ideas from the blog have proven useful.

I also thought, “I don’t need to do any major work — I’ll write a pilot script and a show bible outlining the characters, the world, and how it’ll work as a weekly series, which will include lengthy treatments of the six-episode arc.” I know it’s coloring a bit outside the lines, but I hoped it’d show, more than a generic House spec, that I get TV and am just as willing to get involved in that arena as features. Of course, I also told myself I’d never bring it up unless Mitch rejected all my script pitches and/or if I could work the conversation to get him to ask if I had any interest in TV writing.

Deep down, though, the reality was this: the germ of the idea came from Mitch’s TV deal, but it’s a pipe-dream project that’ll never go anywhere, nor should it. The scripts exist for me to shake the flotsam and jetsam out of my head so I can make my “legitimate” writing a bit more mainstream. Unlike the blog, I stare at the ceiling, daydreaming like a kid about the day I have enough power to get my retarded TV show on the air.

Back to the story: weeks passed, during which time I wrote diligently during my limited spare time. Then, Mitch called. Didn’t e-mail — called. Usually that’s a good sign, and what he told me knocked me flat on my ass.

“This script is great,” he said. “I love the main character, but the story might be a little too much of a downer for the masses.”

Oops? I won’t deny that it gets a little heavy in the third act, but it ends on mildly optimistic notes. I didn’t want to argue with him, but of all the comments I’ve heard about this script (and some of them have been pretty odd), nobody ever implied that it’d be too depressing to be commercially viable.

Where did that leave us? I’ll let Mitch answer:

“By the end, I wanted to see this character in a different story,” he said. “He has this separate life that we never learn about, and that’s okay, but you’ve surrounded him with all these depressing people. I want to see him in his element, with more larger-than-life characters like him.”

I could have argued.

I can’t beat around the bush anymore: the “larger-than-life” character is a washed-up L.A. rock star (largely modeled on Axl Rose, but pretty much a composite of all the goofy heavy-metal icons I grew up with) who returns to his hometown in rural Iowa after finding out his high school sweetheart is getting married. The “depressing people” are the rock star’s old friends, who feel like they’re wasting their lives, especially in the presence of somebody who had some success (even if he’s floundering now). Obviously, the separate life is his L.A. life.

So why could I argue? The script is more a coming-of-age story about immature adults, using a familiar structure to tell an unfamiliar story. It’s not really a goofy movie about rock stars, music, or anything else. He doesn’t even have to be a rock star — that’s just where my interests lie. He could have been an athlete, a captain of industry, a politician, an actor… Anyone who has a little bit of fame and a little bit of success by leaving his dump of a hometown.

Although I’ve written reams of blog posts and chapters putting him “in his element,” it wouldn’t make the script better. It insulted me a little bit that Mitch thought it would, so yeah, I wanted to defend what I’d written…

…but I had that horrible TV project. It was probably a mistake, but I pitched it to him. I made it clear how it would work as a weekly series, who the characters — most of whom don’t appear in the feature script — were, the intent of the satire, the style of comedy, etc., etc.

I figured he’d say, “That’s a disaster. What else you got?”

Instead, Mitch said, with a dubious tone to his voice, “Why don’t you send it over?”

Which doesn’t really mean anything. Him loving two scripts means little more than I have a contact who thinks I know what I’m doing — maybe, assuming he’s not just verbally glad-handing. Him asking to read a pilot and a show bible written by an unrepped writer with no television experience… Like I said, probably the best-case real-world scenario is a job as an assistant to a TV writer. The worst-case scenario is that he decides I’m nuts and keeps his distance.

This just happened a few days ago, so I won’t know for awhile.

But here’s hoping the pipe-dream turns into a pipe-reality…

Posted by Stan on April 23, 2009 3:23 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

March 2, 2009

Podcast: Screenwriting Scams / How Not to Get an Agent

Be warned that this podcast contains a rainbow of obscenities, so consider this not safe for work.

Click the Play button to listen to Podcast #4: “Screenwriting Scams / How Not to Get an Agent” (64kbps MP3, 23:44, 10.9MB)

Posted by Stan on March 2, 2009 6:37 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (4)

February 27, 2009

Podcast: Tyler Perry / Iced / Shitty Internet Thrillers

Be warned that this podcast contains a rainbow of obscenities, so consider this not safe for work.

Click the Play button to listen to Podcast #3: “Podcast: Tyler Perry / Iced / Shitty Internet Thrillers” (64kbps MP3, 30:17, 13.9MB)

Posted by Stan on February 27, 2009 5:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

January 19, 2009

Spy vs. Spy

I’ve never been the biggest fan of espionage movies. In fact, I can think of only three that I really like: North by Northwest, Three Days of the Condor, and The Manchurian Candidate. However, if I were to shove everything into weird subgenres, then none of these would even qualify as espionage movies. True, they have all the usual craziness associated with spy movies — coded messages, shifty-eyed people in trenchcoats, elaborate conspiracies, possibly duplicitous love interests — but they don’t have what I typically associate with spy movies: the spy protagonist, or “spytagonist.” Okay, not spytagonist.

You know what I’m talking about: your James Bonds, your Ethan Hunts, your Jack Ryans, your… I dunno, does Jason Bourne count? They might get in over their heads and face dozens of double-crosses and explosions and inaccurate technobabble, but at the end of the day, they have the training and tradecraft to pull off the job. They almost rise to the level of “superhero” (especially Bond), performing extraordinary feats in order to save the planet.

With that in mind, it’s no surprise that I’d lump movies like North by Northwest and The Manchurian Candidate into the “conspiracy thriller” subgenre, not spy thrillers. Both focus on ordinary people trying to unravel elaborate conspiracies — both of which involve espionage — that are over their head. To some degree, the Bourne movies share this characteristic (especially the first one), but he still has that “spy superhero” quality, even if he can’t remember why. Either way, the “superhero” spy protagonist, in my mind, defines the distinction between the conspiracy thrillers I love and the espionage thrillers to which I’m fairly indifferent.

I can’t explain my indifference, except to say that these moves toe the razor-thin line between mind-blowing awesomeness and laughable excess. One wrong move, and I’m out. I can’t explain why I enjoyed Mission: Impossible 3 while merely tolerating the first two. I can’t explain why I can barely sit still during a James Bond movie but can watch slower paced movies like The Parallax View repeatedly. I don’t lose much sleep over it; my preferences don’t matter, as long as I can look at scripts from this subgenre and say, “I may not like this a whole lot, but I can recognize it’s well-written and somebody who does enjoy this kind of thing will love it.”

It helps that I spent much of my life unenthusiastically watching incredibly popular, well-regarded spy flicks. I’m assuming the recent glut of spy movies in production has to do with the unexpected success of the inexplicably beloved Casino Royale (seriously, it’s not bad, but it wears out its welcome about 30 minutes before it actually ends — maybe an homage to current Spielberg movies?) and maybe even the last Bourne movie (which made a metric shit-ton of money). It certainly doesn’t have to do with the unexpected “failure” of Mission: Impossible 3 or Mr. and Mrs. Smith (both of which were regarded as flops despite making decent money overseas and on DVD).

You know what intrigued me about this recent crop of spy scripts? Two of them spoofed Bond-type superspies, another involves an array of superspies but focuses on a clueless yuppie, and two more used a kind of cheesy “spies in suburbia” angle for their stories. None of them has a Bond type or a Bourne type. I don’t know how I feel about this. I actually preferred some of these scripts to most of the spy thrillers I’ve seen, but with superhero movies thriving and superspy movies making a comeback, why do so many of these scripts either shy away from or mock the archetypal superspy? I guess this is Hollywood’s version of originality.

It’s ironic, then, that three of the scripts that try so hard to avoid the tropes of spy thrillers share so many common elements:

• The weakest of the espionage scripts I’ve read tells the story of a vacationing couple whose relationship goes sour when the woman meets a Bond-esque superspy and falls for him, throwing the man into a jealous hissy-fit. So you have the James Bond spoof, but you have the “ordinary,” “relatable” conflict of a couple with relationship problems. Problems with the script arise when it becomes clear that the writers believe this extremely dysfunctional couple’s behavior is absolutely normal. A great vehicle for examining a problematic relationship is wasted as a result.
• The second script tells the more subdued story of an international assassin (not exactly a spy, but the beats of the story echo spy thrillers) who retires when he meets the woman of his dreams. They settle into a bland, suburban life; years later, a group of assassins — many of them neighbors planted nearby — are “activated,” so the couple races through various suburban set-pieces while trying to work through a relationship built on dishonesty. So here we have a minor variation on the spy archetype (he’s an assassin, not an intelligence-gatherer), but we retain the dysfunctional couple and roll in this idea of suburban-blandness-as-action-playground. It’s actually both a decent thriller and a decent comedy, and the couple is not nearly as problematic as the first script. The couple has problems and spend the script trying to find some common ground, as opposed to having significant problems that go largely unacknowledged.
• And then there’s the third script, which takes another Bond knockoff and drops him into suburbia. When his next-door neighbor discovers his not-very-well-hidden secret, the spy is forced to take him on as a partner. Yes, this is ridiculous; no, the writer doesn’t seem to have any awareness of this fact. Unfortunately, the script concentrates too much on an overly convoluted plot and doesn’t tap into the interesting notion of a debonair British spy/playboy/adventurer failing to conform to American suburbia. Pairing him up with the neighbor is the right idea, but they opt to turn the neighbor into the spy (which leads to reams of exposition instead of reams of hilarity), not the other way around. And let’s face it: when a random account makes you in less than 24 hours, can you really be considered the world’s best spy? At any rate, this has the Bond clone, the suburban setting, and even — to some extent — the relationship issues (he has some issues with his wife and family that are not explored satisfactorily).

This is a small sampling of the billions of spy scripts I keep reading, but I still have to comment on the lack of diversity here. Three movies, all in production, all with extremely similar themes, settings, and/or characters. It’s 1998 all over again. Should we see Deep Impact or Armageddon? Will this influx of spy movies — especially ones that are so similar to one another — burn audiences out? I have my suspicions, so consider this a warning, writers. Time to dust off that old spy thriller and try to sell it before there’s another decade-long dry spell.

Posted by Stan on January 19, 2009 8:32 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)

January 14, 2009

First Impressions

I’ll never forget the first time it really dawned on me what an impact the first ten pages could have on a script. I’d heard adages about the importance of those pages from the moment I developed an interest in screenwriting, and all the reasoning behind it made perfect sense. Maybe it’s just my learning style, but for me, no description of the pitfalls and problems of the first ten pages could compare to seeing good and bad examples in action; unfortunately, you can’t truly understand their effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) without reading more than just pages.

The best opening I’ve ever seen from a script was probably right out of Field or McKee or some other guru — it lasted for exactly ten pages, and it had a damn near perfect setup. A dorky “regular guy” makes googly-eyes at an attractive woman inside a diner. He watches as a different woman walks by and lifts her purse. Wanting to play hero, the dork gives chase, manages to catch the thief and get the purse back. When he returns, the attractive woman has gone, so he decides to “innocently” dig through her purse to find an ID with an address or some way to contact with her. Instead, he finds a gun, $10,000 in cash, a pair of airline tickets to Bangkok, some unlabeled CD-Rs, and dozens of vials of blood that obviously came from a a clinic of some kind.

The dork finally finds her address and seeks out her apartment. He finds it empty and freshly repainted, and uses the cash in her purse to bribe the landlord into letting him rent the vacant apartment on the spot.

This opening hooked me immediately. Forget the plausibility issues, forget the lack of motivation to rent this woman’s apartment — this is the opening, and it starts with a bang. It might not sound exciting, but the opening foot chase is very well laid out, almost Point Breakian in its scope. A 100% visual opening (there’s no dialogue at all), followed by this particular foot chase, following by the reveal of what’s in that purse and the rash decision to rent the mysterious apartment… Who wouldn’t want to find out what happened next?

Unfortunately, the writer followed this great opening with, no exaggeration, 60 pages of people yammering in circles. It could almost be a stageplay, considering he contains most of the action for the first and second act to the apartment. It’s all just characters explaining the plot instead of doing anything interesting, and the writer punctuates each dialogue scene with characters raising suspicious guns at one another. That’s it until the third act, which is little more than an extended car chase.

Don’t get me wrong — I like talky movies, and the “whiz-bang opening/lots of people talking/car chase ending” essentially follows the Rockford Files approach to drama. But even Rockford goes places during his investigation. He’ll go meet someone at a bar, then get his ass kicked; he’ll go spy on someone outside a drugstore, then get his ass kicked; he’ll visit Rocky or Becker and they’ll all get their asses kicked. Usually he gets arrested at some point, as well. There’s a little more variety than “Rockford hangs around his new apartment waiting for criminals to show up and solves the case by asking them to explain what happened.”

As a script, it didn’t work… But the opening did such a nice job of pulling me in, I didn’t realize that nothing had happened until around page 60. That’s both a good and a bad thing — you can only fool a reader for so long before they realize the story is totally inert from page 11 on, and it’ll probably frustrate them to discover you tried to hide your script’s problems in such a cheap, obvious (but, they’ll have to admit, effective) way.

More often, though, the first ten does show you what to expect. In general, if the first ten pages are pretty good, the script can range from mediocre to great; if they’re tedious/incoherent, the script will range from mediocre to terrible. I’ve never, ever read a script with an unbearable opening that works its way around to getting good. It’s really just a matter of how bad it’ll get before you’re done. And trust me, nothing is more crushing than reading a terrible ten pages and knowing you have 100 more where that came from.

There’s some tricky gray area in there, though. The first script I mentioned is a rarity — I have never read another script with such a fantastic opening with so little payoff. I have, however, seen quite a bit of openings that don’t exactly wow me. They can go either way, and although they usually tend to end badly, sometimes they turn out great.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a few openings that impress me at first, but they remain microcosms of the badness to follow. I don’t mean to keep ragging on that atrocious sci-fi/action script, but it’s hard not to. It has an opening that I considered flawed but pretty good — I hated the pompous narration from page one, and I wasn’t crazy about the framing device in the diner or the fetishistic obsession with Japanese culture. It was confusing as hell, which all things considered set the tone nicely, but it confused me in an intriguing way. I wanted to find out how it all connected, despite the glaring initial problems. Then I found out how it all connected and wondered why I wasted my time.

At any rate, I wouldn’t have necessarily guessed that the script’s first ten pages were a petri dish of the badness to come, but that’s how it turned out. Does that make me automatically red-flag scripts with openings that, while interesting, contain massive, possibly destructive problems? Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. I’m still willing to say, “Wow, I can’t even pretend to care about this love triangle, but the story about hunting for treasure on a deserted island could be fun!” Chances are, the love triangle will take down the entire story, but maybe on page 11 the characters will put aside their romantic problems for the rest of the story, or maybe the writers will get around to making us care. You can’t know, but certain laws of probability suggest that if it’s a problem on page nine, it’ll be a problem on page 86.

Not long ago, I made reference to a couple of scripts with terrible twist endings. The one about the kidnapped “doctor” (actually a CIA agent) forced to fight a series of deathmatches, is one of the more interesting cases. Its first ten pages make absolutely no sense — but not in a good way. It opens by cross-cutting between what we’re told is a Viking battle circa 1000 A.D. and a bunch of guys watching this deathmatch as the signal cuts in and out. It also cuts to some of the technical people who run the TV show, but no connections are made in the writing between all of this stuff, and then it inexplicably cuts to our hero, enjoying a picnic lunch.

I’ve read enough scripts to know this will somehow converge with the fights we saw earlier, but I had no clue what to expect. I’d read enough terrible mythological action-adventure and sci-fi scripts to assume it would involve time travel or parallel universes or some other chicanery. The writer doesn’t even try to make anything clear, so I was ready for yet another frustrating read.

What makes it interesting to me is that, I did like it for awhile, but ultimately it turned into a frustrating read. By the time I started to forget about the terrible opening, the awful ending kicked in and retroactively ruined the rest of the story. I guess the lesson there is that, even if you start to like a script after a rocky start, it’ll ultimately break your heart.

What about this script? I take notes while I read. Here’s what I jotted after reading the first scene: “Opening — ???” That about sums it up. It opens with a static five-page scene in which our hyperactive idiot “protagonist” discovers the woman he’s sleeping with has been married the whole time, then tries to argue with her about whether or not she’s lying. Then he goes home and, in a four-page scene, discovers his longtime roommate is moving out, then tries to argue with him about whether or not he’s lying.

Admittedly, by page ten he’s set up the two major story ideas that lead us on a collision course with wackiness, but we’re also introduced to reams of insufferable dialogue uttered by our insufferable main character. He’s passive, whiny, uninteresting, and — worst of all for a comedy — unfunny. I can’t express in words how much I loathed this screenplay, and I knew I’d hate it… I was going to say by “page ten,” but I knew it on page one. I knew it in the first moment of the script, the first word is the main character’s ridiculous first name, and I just knew it would be an uphill battle. By page 100, the writer didn’t even make it halfway up the hill. Good Christ, why would anyone write something like this? Even ignoring the idiots who bought it and nurtured it and produced it, why would somebody sit as his computer or typewriter or legal pad or whatever and say, “You know what’s funny? This guy’s name. You know what’s funny? Dudes who sleep with married chicks and then — wait for it — don’t believe they’re married”? And just keeps going on and on and on with these things that are barely funny conceptually, much less written down as actual “dramatic” “scenes”?

Where was I?

The point is, readers can tell a lot from an opening, and they won’t be charitable of the opening sucks. Look, it goes one of two ways: they have to read to page ten and decide whether or not it sucks before putting it aside, or they have to read the whole thing and dread it based on the craptacular opening. If they put it aside, things do not look good for you. If they have to read the whole thing, maybe it will get better. Maybe it won’t. I can count on one hand the number of scripts that have absolutely hooked me, so I can tell you the goal is not really to make my pants wet. The goal is to make me say, “Thank God, a script that seems less terrible than the usual shit.” If you can’t do that, you don’t get any slack. That’s it.

Posted by Stan on January 14, 2009 6:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

January 5, 2009

Bad Twist

I just finished a script with one of the stupider twist endings I’ve seen. Leading up to the twist, the script told a serviceable but unexceptional story of a clever high school student tracking down an unusual serial killer. Also on the case is her father, the local sheriff. The killer has a strange M.O.: he goes to his victims and gives them a torturous choice, with either option generally resulting in the victim’s death. For instance, he offers a struggling pianist this choice: he can either never play music again (meaning he’ll chop off the pianist’s hands), or he can never hear music again (meaning he’ll deafen the pianist in some way).

I want to ridicule the script’s twist ending for undoing the goodness coming before it, but first of all, it wasn’t that good. Secondly, this M.O., and the father-daughter relationship that drives the rest of the script, both come into play in this twist. Here’s what it is: the killer turns out to be the protagonist’s BAD TWIN. No, really. The classic schlocky soap-opera twist becomes the stuff of 2009 horror-thriller denouements.

Surprisingly, that’s not even where the story goes wrong. The twist itself sort of works — the backstory revolves around the father, whose wife died during childbirth. They didn’t know she was pregnant with twins, and he was a newly single father who had no clue about raising one kid, much less two, so he had to choose one to give up to the foster-care system. The son was tortured and abused to the point of insanity, and now he’s out for revenge. It’s about in line with the script’s overall just-above-mediocrity quality.

No, it actually goes wrong when the killer tries to “prove” to the daughter that he’s a twin. Because the explanation needs to happen quickly, we can’t exactly have a DNA test to solve the problem. They’re standing in the middle of a cemetery (don’t ask), and she has to make a bunch of snap decisions after her newfound brother “proves” the truth. Except… He uses as his proof a peanut allergy and a birthmark they both share.

Is it not common knowledge that male/female twins are fraternal and, therefore, don’t usually share traits like allergies and pretty much never share the same birthmarks? The script goes off the rails into Stupidtown, never to return. The daughter is surprised by the reveal, then reacts with thundering indifference, electing to kill the killer to save her father. It’s not unreasonable, considering he is a killer and she shares no bond of any sort with him (other than genetics), and the adrenaline fueling the situation, but what about the emotional rollercoaster after this happens? She (a) kills a man, (b) finds out her father gave up a kid and lied to her for decades about how her mother died, and (c) her BAD TWIN brother turns out to be a deranged serial killer. This has no impact on her at all?

You might think, “It doesn’t matter, because the story ends, right?” Wrong. It keeps going, flashing forward three months, where things with the daughter are not only fine — they’re even better than they were before. Then, there’s a second twist, the old “the killer’s still alive” thing, which doesn’t so much set up a sequel as suggest no sequel possibilities (it’s implied that the killer has already gotten the dad, so who would he have to terrorize in the sequel?).

This script led me to ponder one of the many problems plaguing the movies: twists for the sake of twisting. The kind of twist where you get to the end of the movie and you wonder why you just wasted your time watching it. It changes everything (in a bad way) or it causes the story to not resolve or it’s just plain stupid.

Actually, plenty of these twists mix and match from the bargain bin of problems associated with twist endings. Probably the worst twist-ending I’ve ever read occurs in another just-above-mediocre script, an action story culled from the age-old “let’s throw a bunch of guys in a pit and make them fight to the death, against their wills.” You’ve seen it in gladiator movies, you’ve seen it in at least one episode of every sci-fi television series in history — soon, you’ll see it on the big screen.

The script is light on sci-fi — it has some “technogeek” crap involving a pseudo-pirate Internet pay-per-view structuring so these battles can be streamed worldwide, and it has these boots that, when “activated,” lock the fighter’s feet in place — but heavy on action and, to my surprise, character development. The villains are all aimless morons, but three of the main characters had surprisingly decent dimensionality…

…or so I thought. Here’s the problem with the twist: it’s both mind-numbingly stupid and it changes everything. Toward the end, convinced he’s going to die, the protagonist begs his shifty-eyed love interest to call his brother. Turns out, his “brother” is a CIA handler, and her call alerts the agency to the protagonist’s exact location. Before he can get killed in the ring, a bunch of well-armed agents burst into the secret compound and take down the whole operation, all because the protagonist was an undercover agent the whole time. Pretty cool, right? Wrong again!

In one way, this script has a clever conceit — we learn, in flashbacks, that the protagonist is haunted by the murder of his wife and daughter. We’re led to think, at first, that the protagonist is a disgraced doctor who accidentally killed several patients, and that his family was killed as revenge for his medical misdeeds. The cleverly ambiguous flashbacks hold up just as well when it turns out he’s an undercover CIA agent. The whole doctor thing was his cover, but his family really did die, they really were revenge killings (for his CIA good deeds), and the protagonist really does suffer.

However, in the present timeline, the protagonist does a wide variety of stupid things that the twist completely undermines. See, he’s “kidnapped” by this group, imprisoned, and forced to fight for his life. On one occasion, he nearly gets both himself and another man killed by screaming that he’s been kidnapped and is not a willing participant (in the middle of a match streaming live across the world). A perfectly (in)sane action from a man with nothing to lose — it makes no sense from a CIA agent infiltrating the organization. In general, the story would have us believe that no man — until the protagonist showed up! — has survived more than three fights. The protagonist kills 11 men. Eleven. All of them innocent kidnapping victims, not bloodthirsty animals. The love interest is shown as taking a shine to the protagonist immediately, so it would not have been unreasonable in any way for him to beg her to call the brother before, say, his third match — the one where he’s destined to die. Of course, then the movie would be about 20 minutes long. Without the twist, though, none of that narrative doubling back is necessary. I bought the pain, the nothing to lose, the idea that he fights these men because he wants to punish himself. It all goes away when the writer introduces the twist.

Worse than that, the protagonist “honorably” kills one of his cell buddies. He wants to spare the buddy from suffering the indignity of this hell. Except the protagonist knows he’s an undercover CIA agent, and he knows the guy only has a few more days to suffer. But he kills him anyway. Again, it’s sort of a reasonable action if this guy wasn’t a CIA operative all along, but he was.

So why have the twist? The whole script builds to this fight against the über-badass villain — the one man who is there to fight willingly — and the deal is, if the protagonist wins, he gets to go free. Why not just let him fight, win, and go free? Why have this twist that undermines some decent stuff earlier in the script? What’s the point? The audience will react with five seconds of “mind blown” wonder, followed by an eternity of rage and disappointment upon realizing they’ve been had. A straightforward ending would work better. Despite the cleverly devised flashbacks, the twist doesn’t work at all. The only way to make it work sacrifices better material.

A few weeks ago, I ranted about a horrible action/sci-fi script. I kept its big twist a secret because I knew I would eventually get around to writing this entry. So here it goes: the script is overloaded with voiceover narration and characters. If you’re too lazy to click the link, it also has this body-swapping conceit where people can swap their minds using a machine. I’m going to use the actual character names here, because it’s too confusing to give them generic descriptors:

You have Cray, a supposed master criminal who’s hired to lead a diamond heist. The script opens with Cray sitting at a diner with another guy (unidentified in the script) in a tense face-off. In voiceover, Cray gives a long Fight Club*-style monologue overloaded with pseudo-philosophical bullshit, and then it flashes back to the overly complicated story. Eventually, we come to find out that a man named Usagi was hired to retrieve a kidnapped little girl, and the diamond heist was just a cover to distract her kidnappers. In order to pull off the heist, Usagi and the little girl’s mother paid off Cray — who is famous in the criminal underworld — to swap bodies well in advance of the story. So basically, it’s been Usagi’s mind in Cray’s body since the beginning of the script. Meaning the thoughts in the narration are actually Usagi’s, not Cray’s.

It would spoil the twist to have Usagi narrating from the start, obviously, but shouldn’t that just be a sign that the twist doesn’t work? Or maybe that the framing device doesn’t work? Or the voiceover (really, really, for the love of all that’s holy) doesn’t work? I would even cut it some slack if Cray were the only narrator, but he isn’t. Several of the other characters narrate, and when they switch bodies, the narration still comes from their original characters’ voices. Ipso facto, Usagi should narrate. Or nobody should. Yeah, let’s stick with nobody.

Why can’t a story just be a story anymore? Why can’t it go from Point A to Point B, instead of a zigzag from Point A to Point Z, hitting all intermediate stops? How many of these twists actually work? One of the biggest — the one that arguably relaunched the “twist ending” craze — The Sixth Sense, doesn’t work at all if you bother to watch a second time. Once you know the ending, you’re like, “Wait, he’s been hanging around for six months and hasn’t figured out nobody talks to him, nobody sees him?” I could only buy that twist if Shyamalan explicitly stated that Willis’ character somehow fades in and out of existence without realizing it and only appears in the scenes dramatized within the movie. If you think about anything else — going grocery shopping or making a phone call or any of the things he’d have to do offscreen that involves interacting with people or objects — it doesn’t hold up at all. At least The Usual Suspects’ ending was gleefully nonsensical. It’s not a great movie, but they didn’t even try to make sense. (And for those of you thinking I’ve just hoisted myself on my own petard, after griping about people who think The Big Sleep makes no sense because they haven’t paid enough attention — trust me, I’ve seen The Usual Suspects more than once, I’ve paid careful attention, and it’s ending is just a twist for the sake of twisting. It makes no goddamn sense, and it’s only slightly different because nobody involved seems to care whether or not it makes sense. It’s almost a spoof of arbitrary twist endings.)

So why is Hollywood still twistin’? Well, aside from the fact that these movies still make money, I have to imagine it goes back to the belief that all stories have been told. The only way to keep going is to tell a familiar story with an unfamiliar ending. According to Hollywood.

According to me, applying a twist ending to a mediocre (or flat-out shitty) script just to give it a “gee-whiz” effect is as lazy as stealing jokes or masking your weaknesses with florid, hilarious-for-all-the-wrong reasons dialogue.

*Don’t even get me started on that movie’s twist. [Back]

Posted by Stan on January 5, 2009 3:16 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

December 31, 2008

Mythological Action-Adven… Zzzzz

Nothing bores the shit out of me faster than the genre I will lazily identify as “mythological action-adventures.” This genre also encompasses the general, non-mythological “historical” action movies because, frankly, they might as well be mythological for all the historical accuracy they preserve. Now, I don’t really care much about accuracy if they tell a good story, but nine times out of ten, they tell a story that bores the shit out of me. Gladiator? Troy? Alexander? 300? Christ, how could 300 bore me? It’s specifically designed for the ADD generation. I am convinced there’s not a scene in that movie longer than 30 seconds or an individual shot longer than 0.25 seconds. And don’t get me started on anything older than Gladiator — the older you go, the slower the pacing, which means they get progressively more tedious. Spartacus? Ben-Hur? Never made it through them, and this is from a guy who thinks 1941-1952 and 1968-1981 are the golden and silver ages of cinema. I have a very high tolerance for movies not directed by Michael Bay, but this particular genre is just the height of tedium for me.

The weird thing is, I like history and I like mythology. What are these movies doing wrong? Maybe, because of my familiarity with history and mythology have led me to a point where these movies don’t show me anything I don’t already know. Actually, once in awhile they do, but it’s usually wrong. Not to say I’m some sort of genius historian/theologian/anthropologist or anything — it’s more like, “These movies are so goddamn braindead, even an idiot like me has culled more knowledge from History Channel documentaries than the jackasses who wrote the script.”

This idea of getting bored by the lack of new, interesting information makes some sense to me. Many of these movies exist as bland, generic action movies with bland, generic stories and bland, generic characters, and theoretically the only bright spot is the “unique” historical setting, or the “unique” presence of strange, mythological creatures and/or gods. I liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for instance. The movies are long, but (ironically) I could never get through the books, so everything after the first ten minutes of Fellowship of the Ring was news to me. These movies visualize a made-up mythology that I’ve never seen before and populating the world with compelling characters and interesting stories, so even when we aren’t watching badass action sequences, we’re engaged.

However, thanks to the unfortunate success of 300, I’ve read a glut of shitty mythological action-adventures script. 300’s influence is evident in every shitty story much more than the superior Lord of the Rings movies. They’re all boring action stories, using either significant historical or mythological events to drive boring action sequences. I love action movies, but I don’t love them when they don’t add any kind of new, ridiculous spin to the genre. If the best you can do is craft a plodding Seven Samurai retread around the signing of the Magna Carta, congratulations! You’ve just bored the shit out of me!

It’s funny, too, because as a budding screenwriter trying to find my way in the world, one of the early lessons I received was, “Make sure to make your script between 100 and 110 pages.” Everyone had a thousand different reasons why this had to be the sweet spot — 111-119 are too close to 120, and anything over 120 is way too long. Similarly, anything under 99 is double-digits, so even if it’s 98 or 99 pages, the psychology of the reader will tell them, “It’s too short.” I always thought this was sort of ridiculous, but now I understand… Except I sort of think differently. I don’t give a shit how long the script is. I read one that was only 73, and I was damn happy the jackasses didn’t waste my time for 103. I’m not gasping at the lack of professionalism, because that’s not my job. I get paid to read the shit, no matter how long it is, so shorter is always better.

When I see a script that goes over 120, I pray to God the first ten pages don’t have any explosions or long Greek names. I’d rather read the worst 135-page comedy ever written than the best 135-page mythological action-adventure. That’s all there is to it. The comedy might be horrible and unfunny, but 90% of comedies have brisk, snappy paces that I can breeze right through. Mythological action-adventures don’t have that; in fact, many of them go overboard on period detail, making already-leaden scripts into a new form of torture.

In the past month, I’ve read five mythological action-adventure scripts. These include:

• The aforementioned Seven Samurai retread surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta, whose chief problem is its portrayal of King John as an incredibly one-dimensional villain. Plus, it has a failed attempt at a romantic subplot. Sounds like every shitty action movie ever made, doesn’t it? Well, you’re wrong! This one has ancient English politics! Different!
• A Greek mythology Star Wars knockoff with the world’s most passive protagonist. (Seriously, nothing motivates him to do anything. Zeus keeps having to whisper things into his ear to move the plot forward. I am not making that up.) It plunges to depths of silliness rarely seen in deadly-serious action movies when the gods descend from Mt. Olympus to fight. Maybe this will come across differently when visualized, but I can’t imagine anything funnier than oiled, white-bearded musclemen doing battle in a pit that makes me think of a wrestling arena more than anything godly.
• A retread on every creature feature ever made, from the 1931 Dracula through something like S.S. Doomtrooper or Dinocroc 2: Supergator. I came closest to liking this one, because it tried to explore the unstable relationship between Druids in what is now Scotland and the Christian Romans who conquered England. Despite what could have made for an interesting conflict, the entire first act is devoted to introducing us to what feels like a cast of thousands, many of whom die. Who cares? They don’t impact the story in any way, their deaths mean nothing to any of the characters, so why not just concentrate on the core group of people and develop them into interesting people. They waste too much time, so the whole story suffers.
• A Nicholl Fellowship pick almost as inexplicable as Butter. In fact, until I read Butter, I was willing to assume the badness of this script came from it being a later draft. All bets are off now — this draft could very well be the Nicholl draft. Anyway, it’s basically The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with a few changes. Replace 1920s Mexico with post-Plague France, replace a group of American bums with Crusaders returning from the Holy Land, replace gold with a witch, and replace insight into greed and its decaying effect on the psyche with action-movie clichés and a bland “religious crisis” that’s solved by the protagonist realizing this girl is of the Devil, and if there’s a Devil, there must be a God. Next!
• And finally, the Conan remake, which I reluctantly admit I sort of liked. Maybe I liked it because it makes up its own mythology and is very different from the original movies. Or maybe I liked it because it’s a pretty great vehicle for mindless action, if you ignore the awful romantic subplot and the weird “twisty for the sake of twistiness” problems in the third act. I blame Shyamalan for this idea that every non-comedy has to have 15 different mind-blowing twists in the third act. I’d rather know pretty much what’s going on with maybe one well-thought-out twist. Instead, you get a bunch of really goofy, nonsensical twists to create the illusion it’s one-upping the last hit action movie.

What’s the point? I know, I know. “Making money.” But bear with me for a second. You’re a writer. You have a story rooted in ancient mythology or history, but rather than making it something interesting about the time of the people involved in the myths, you make it into a cheesy action movie. No interesting characters, a story you’ve seen done better 1000 times before, and as far as accuracy… Like I said, I’m not a stickler, but why would you change the history of, say, the events surrounding the signing of the Magna Carta when what actually happened is infinitely more interesting than an action movie?

This script, in particular, would have you believe that it’s all about freedom! It makes some of the least subtle comparisons to the Bush administration that I’ve seen in quite some time, but that just makes everything way too simplified. The guys who banded together to force King John to sign the Magna Carta had more complex reasons for their actions. It was more about not wanting to pay taxes than it was about civil liberties or having some sort of say in government. Remember, this was over 500 years before “no taxation without representation.” This was just “no taxation ‘cause I don’t want to pay.” Isn’t that a more interesting motive than freeeeeeeedommmmmm? Wouldn’t the Magna Carta, which forced an early Parliament-type group of representatives on the hitherto unquestioned divine right of the king, cause some trauma for him? I mean, what a legacy: the first question who got his balls stuck in a vise by a group of bitter farmers. You don’t think that would upset him? Nah, you’re right. It probably is just about cartoonishly evil tyranny to prevent his royal subjects from having any individual freedoms.

The other scripts have more of a fantasy/horror tinge to them, but they’re equally rife with interesting, human material that gets sacrificed for been-there-done-that action-movie plots. Why do these stories always miss so many opportunities?

Maybe I’m just bitter about this genre in particular because, in addition to finding it boring as shit, I can’t help thinking of my friend Ryan. Some years back, he wrote the best script I’ve ever read in this genre — one of the best scripts I’ve read, period. And I’m not saying that because I’m his friend. I barely knew him when I wrote it and, in fact, decided I’d force him to be friends with me. I like hanging around with people like that in the hopes that their talent rubs off on me. (It doesn’t.) At any rate, he pitched it to the Big-Shot Producer, who almost literally laughed in his face. Actually, he merely laughed at him in a press release after dollar-optioning a different script Ryan wrote.

Why wouldn’t that piss me off? The Big-Shot Producer, for those too lazy to read it, said of that script, “He [originally] pitched me some giant-epic-action-biblical-save the universe from a flood type thing (or something like that).” You can practically hear the smug chuckle accompanying that statement. Little did he know, a year later 300 makes a shit-ton of money and suddenly “giant-epic-action-biblical-save the universe from a flood type thing[s]” are the flavor of the month, and he could have been sitting on the king of them all. Instead, he opts to laugh and indenture Ryan to do free punch-ups on scripts for movies that will never get financing. And when I tried to convince him he was sitting on a goldmine, he just reminded me he has a job, three kids, and a mortgage in Chicago and can’t do much to sell a script in L.A.

Looking back at Ryan’s script, it occurred to me how to solve the two major problems in these scripts:

1. Getting bogged down in ancient mythology

   Old mythology is insane and complex. Writers need to realize that few people care about the details and mechanics of mythology. The writers need to know all of this valuable information for their own background information, but in all these scripts (including Conan, the one I liked), huge chunks of exposition and even entire subplots could go away without affecting anything. They exist to flesh out mythological backdrops that have very little to do with the characters or story. Who cares? Writers need to remember to approach fantasy stories the same way they’d write any other — draw people into the world, establish rules, but don’t go overboard on exposition and backstory. The recent failure of Delgo shows just how severely convoluted mythology can affect an otherwise affable flick.

2. Trading real people for archetypes (or stereotypes)

   Many of these scripts — especially the ones that feature actual gods and goddesses as characters — tend to treat the people in the story as symbols rather than people. It’s not just the mythological action-adventure that has this problem — it’s actually one of the reasons I’ll never stop railing against Butter. They do things for inexplicable, plot-driven reasons and have few (if any) believable or relatable qualities. Myths have endured, even after the religions associated with them have died out, because they portray the gods as having human flaws. I guess people ignore that because, in the Christian Bible, only the human characters have flaws. Portraying them as people, with the same problems as any human, makes them relatable. If they audience can relate, they might actually care. Isn’t that the goal?

Conan works, at the start, because it models itself as a revenge movie. Conan’s entire civilization is wiped out, and he sets out on a mindless quest to kill the people responsible. The first several pages establish Conan’s relationship to his family and his people, so we actually care a little bit when they all die. For all its flaws, his quest is a lot easier to relate to than Zeus whispering in his ear the whole time.

I guess, when I think about it, Conan’s success has less to do with its original, semi-unique attempts at mythology and more to do with it operating as a story on a human level. None of these other scripts, including the non-fantasy Magna Carta script, accomplish that. So which of the screenwriting gurus is running around saying, “The rules of drama don’t apply when you’re writing a mythological action-adventure”? Because I’d love to punch that guy in the scrotum.

Posted by Stan on December 31, 2008 11:27 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 25, 2008

Black List 2008 – Black Christmas Wrap-Up

To recap:

• The Beaver — A disaster of a script that the development process may or may not redeem.
• The Oranges — Terrible. Everything it tries to do has been done better elsewhere.
• Butter — One of the worst scripts I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of bad ones.
• Big Hole — This is a movie that should be made. Not a perfect script, but pretty great despite its few flaws.
• The Low Dweller — Decent writing but boring as hell. If this embraced its schlocky action-movie roots rather than trying for “pretentious meditation on tedium,” it could be very enjoyable.

• Fuckbuddies — One of the most inept and grating scripts I’ve ever read. Holy Christ, why would anyone favor this over some of the other stuff making the rounds?
• Winter’s Discontent — A winning but wildly uneven screenplay that needs to undergo a major rewrite before it’s worth considering.
• Broken City — Boring as shit — like Fuckbuddies, it tries way too hard and suffers for it. All the rawness feels completely artificial.
• I’m with Cancer — Shocking: a comedy in the top ten that’s consistently funny. I know — I couldn’t believe it, either. Like any comedy, the humor is hit-or-miss, but unlike the other scripts in the top ten, the hits overwhelm the misses. It has some story and character problems, but it’s in much better shape than 90% of the scripts on this list.
• Our Brand Is Crisis — A fictionalized version of the documentary, it’s a decent enough script but feels aimless, content to tell us things we already know instead of giving us something interesting or challenging to think about it.

I read these scripts not (entirely) to entertain and enrage the blogging (m)asses, but to gain a better understanding of the market. I wanted to find throughlines, or some kind of consistency, so I could gain a better understanding of what Hollywood wants. Rumors abound that over the years, the list has been tainted by politics. After reading the scripts, I find it hard to argue with those rumors. However, if film executives do like these scripts more than anything else out there, it’s important to understand why.

So why? I haven’t got a goddamn clue. Much as I want to hone in on derivative concepts like Fuckbuddies and Our Brand Is Crisis (hate to single that one out since it’s not a bad script, but it is a remake that doesn’t quite justify its existence) and call the industry on its unwillingness to look at new ideas, I can’t quite do that. I don’t think The Beaver is particularly original or clever, but it’s clear that Hollywood does — it suggests, no matter how misguided, they’re trying. Besides which, two scripts I didn’t hate (Big Hole and Winter’s Discontent) are clever reinventions of standard formulas — inching toward actual creativity. I’m with Cancer has a certain Judd Apatow vibe, but it also has an unusual story that gives it an edge of uniqueness.

I guess that’s it: Hollywood wants a regurgitation of something that’s already been done successfully, only with a thin veneer of originality they can hopefully buff out during the development process. Also, they want the concept, not the words on the page. (If all they wanted were shooting-draft-quality scripts, there would not be a development process — never has this been more clear than in reading the top ten Black List scripts.) Not surprising conclusions, but I guess it was inevitable.

Looking at the scripts from a qualitative standpoint — not necessarily the Hollywood way — I noticed something fairly interesting. I can’t speak to the genesis of Big Hole, hands down my favorite of the ten, but I know I’m with Cancer is inspired by actual events, and Will Reiser’s connection to the material is evident. In addition to its unexpected verisimilitude, it had a certain current of “passion project” flowing through it. This is an almost indefinable quality in a script, but if you read enough of them, you can feel the difference between “labor of love” and labor of work.” Only Big Hole and I’m with Cancer felt like labors of love. The others felt like writers trying to cash in with high-concept, low-quality shit sandwiches.

Most of the time, I found myself ranting about believability. Characters are the engine that drive the story, but they have to follow something like railroad tracks or, at least, a paved, well-marked road. If they veer off the beaten path of plausible human behavior, audiences won’t buy the story. It could be the most straitlaced, realistic story in the world, but if the things the characters do strain credibility, the whole script suffers. At the same time, I’m more than willing to buy the story of a depressed guy who betters himself with the help of a beaver hand-puppet if the writer gives believable reasons for this behavior. Most of these scripts suffered from impossible-to-believe actions and reactions, and I have to believe this is part of the “cash-in” mentality. These writers have not observed anything like the situations they’re writing about firsthand, and they’re not good enough writers to fake it with any sort of plausibility. That’s a problem.

I can’t help wondering where this leaves the state of Hollywood. The answer might be, “Nobody knows anything.” I prefer, “Forget it, Stan. It’s Tinseltown.”

Posted by Stan on December 25, 2008 2:29 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 24, 2008

Black List Script #10 – Our Brand Is Crisis by Peter Straughan

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 eponymous documentary. James Carville and a team of U.S. political consultants travel to South America to help Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (aka ‘Goni’) become President of Bolivia.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

PEDRO IGNACIO GALLO maneuvers triumphantly through a joyous crowd after winning a presidential election in Bolivia. Fifteen years later, the nation is crumbling. He walks through a supermarket in what’s supposed to be a photo op, but the store has no customers because nobody has any money. His campaign manager, HUGO, is angry about this. He tries to get Gallo to leave, but he won’t. EDDIE CAMACHO, 20s, enters the store and approaches Gallo. Hugo gets between them and forces Gallo to leave.

Pollsters BENJAMIN CARVER and MAX TALBY goes to rural Virginia to seek out WILD BILL BODINE, supposedly the best political strategist alive. At the moment, he doesn’t look so wild — he mostly looks depressed. Carver tries to convince Bodine — known as “the King of the Comeback” — to join the campaign, noting that Gallo has made some mistakes but he won his first victory handily. He can win again. Bodine contemplates this and agrees to go with them. In Bolivia, they regroup with SCOTT BUCKLEY, a media consultant. They drive through La Paz and find their path blocked by protesting Indians marching in the street. When they arrive at the president’s mansion, the group hears what sounds like gunfire. It doesn’t alarm Gallo, who leads them inside and asks about his chances. With 100 days left in the campaign, Gallo has 8% and his primary opponent, River, has 36%. Carver, Buckley, and Talby restate the obvious, all of them subtly looking toward Bodine for insight. He has none — in fact, he seems a little out of it, dispirited.

They try to be understanding, citing jetlag and altitude sickness. But Bodine’s in something akin to depression. Four days later, he’s barely left his hotel room. Gallo is sent out to a debate, where he accuses the moderator of stealing his watch. Buckley observes Gallo’s smile — it’s a terrifying sneer. They ask Bodine for advice, and he’s still a little useless. Eddie Camacho shows up to campaign headquarters, looking to do volunteer work. Buckley jokingly suggests they make him a strategist — at least he wants to work. Buckley has arranged for a commercial shoot where they can exploit the Bolivian people’s obsession with llamas. Gallo, with a lovely pet llama, describes their multiple uses — meat, wool, milk, even their dung can be used for fuel. As he rehearses, Carver, Talby, and Buckley discuss Bodine’s issues. Buckley tells them he’s heard rumors that Bodine has gone off the deep end. Since he has the room next to Bodine’s, he can confirm hearing strange, animal moaning coming from Bodine’s room. Suddenly, a truck blasts through the shoot, running over the llama.

At their hotel, Max Talby tells Bodine what happened, and Bodine recognizes the work as Pat Candy’s, a rival strategist. He explains — and we see in flashback — that as a kid, he learned to fight dirty when a Kennedy-supporting female schoolmate beat him up for wearing a Nixon button. He also told himself that he would always triumph over his enemies, no matter what. (This statement is shown as a young Candy watches Walter Cronkite announce Kennedy has been assassinated, resulting in a small smile from Candy.) He won student government presidency in college by doctoring photos that made it look as if his opponent marched in a gay-rights parade. Bodine mentions that if he’d known what Candy would become — and what he would have made Bodine become — he would have killed him.

In the present, Bodine seeks out Pat Candy, to make his presence known. Candy is as much of a dick as we would expect, which kind of lights a fire under Bodine’s ass. After a debate, a man in a devil mask accosts Gallo. Eddie rushes to get between them, but before he can, Gallo pounds the crap out of the man. Carver decides they’re finished and tried to draft an apology. Bodine tells him not to, assuring them that the man was set up by Candy. Instead, he explains to them all about Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy” ad. Gallo is feared and unliked, so rather than trying to change his image, they have to change the narrative. They have to play Rivera as an inexperienced blind optimist, they have to show Gallo as a strong leader able to navigate Bolivia through difficult times. If they can scare the Bolivians, they can wind the election. They have to create a crisis. “Our brand is crisis.” Bodine runs into Eddie, thanks him for his attempt to help with the devil man, and hands him a bottle of Newman’s Own steak sauce as a reward. Buckley and Carver coach Gallo on diction.

With 70 days left in the election, Rivera’s up 39% to Gallo’s 10%. Bodine brings in an operative named HAROLD LEBLANC, known primarily for digging up dirt on candidates. Bodine tells Gallo and Hugo they have to go negative. Hugo protests that Bolivians don’t like negative campaigns, but Bodine doesn’t believe they have a choice. Bodine wants LeBlanc to dig into Gallo’s shady past in addition to Rivera’s. Gallo refuses, saying he already knows about himself. There’s nothing to find out. After some cursory digging, LeBlanc finds that Rivera’s mayor’s office paid $35,000 apiece for 27 Ford Explorers but claimed them each at $40,000. Bodine suggests getting photos of their occupants using them for personal activities.

Rivera’s wife gives birth to twins, immediately raising his polls. Bodine sees this as despicable — they’re blocking the Gallo campaign’s ability to go negative. Meanwhile, flyers have been distributed by the Rivera campaign that insinuate an affair between Gallo and a staffer. Although it’s true, it’s both ancient history and something Gallo’s wife already knows about. Bodine feels like this gives them carte blanche to go negative. They create a TV spot about the extra, unaccounted-for Ford Explorer money, juxtaposing the cost figures with Rivera’s multiple homes throughout Bolivia.

Bodine and the rest of the consultants offer Eddie a ride home. He lives in a poor neighborhood with his brother, PEPE, and a couple of friends. Pepe and his friends hate Gallo and hate the yanquis, and it occurs to Bodine that these are the people they need to win over. They all get hammered together, and by the end of the evening, they’re getting along. The next morning, one of Rivera’s staffers announces that Bodine has undergone psychotic treatment, including electroshock therapy. Rivera spins this as having had the information for a long time but not wanting to use it — until Gallo went negative.

Bodine admits that it’s all true. He also admits that he’s taken on Candy before — and lost every time. Carver urges Bodine not to let it get personal, but Bodine says it’s too late. Bodine describes losing an election ages ago because Candy played dirty, while Bodine respected his candidates’ wishes to play it straight. This culminated in Candy planting a bug in his own candidate’s office and accusing the other camp of doing it. This is what led to Bodine’s institutionalization and subsequent problems with depression and alcoholism. After hearing this, Gallo decides if his strategists want to play dirty, they can get as dirty as they want.

A montage follows, showing Gallo trying to hold his own in the campaign despite his increasing discomfort. After his staff preps him for a radio interview, the host asks Gallo questions about things he might have done differently in the past. Following his staff’s orders, Gallo admits he’s made mistakes. When the interviewer asks for a specific example of a mistake, Gallo freezes up — they didn’t give him this information, and Gallo doesn’t believe he’s made any mistakes. Carver thinks it’s a disaster, but the worst is yet to come. Talby discovers Candy has distributed flyers showing Gallo in some goofy robes, standing with a well-known quack of a minister underneath a steel-framed pyramid. Gallo grumbles that he visited his son in California. His son’s a member of this church, they forced anyone who visited to wear the robes. Bodine wants to use that information, but Gallo doesn’t want to bring his family into the campaign.

As a result of this, Gallo becomes the subject of ridicule. People show up to rallies wearing tinfoil pyramids on their heads. Gallo begins having nightmares about the man in the devil mask, and he simply cracks up — stops speaking, is barely aware of his surroundings. The team tries to hide this while they resolve the situation. When he realizes he’s needed, Gallo snaps out of it and becomes a suspiciously charismatic, compassionate leader. Bodine puts Gallo on a talk show, where he’s charming and witty and able to play off his associations with the Cult of the Cosmic Wind. More than that, he becomes genuinely emotional when the host veers the conversation to his son. The interview alone raises him five points.

With 30 days left, Rivera’s at 41%, Gallo’s at 15. Rivera continues to play up his “man of the people”/hope/change image, as well as his twin sons, which infuriates Gallo’s staff. Suddenly, LeBlanc finds something resembling a smoking gun. He drags the entire staff out into the middle of the rainforest, where he shows them a photo of Rivera in military fatigues. He explains that Rivera didn’t merely join the army — he enlisted to become a part of an elite group of Panamanian assassins with Nazi ties. Bodine wishes he could find a photo of Rivera standing with Klaus Barbie, who was in Panama at the same time; instead, he offers up the next best thing, citing a Lyndon Johnson campaign strategy: no one will believe it, but it puts Rivera in the awkward decision of having to deny it.

The strategy succeeds — Gallo doesn’t get a significant gain, but Rivera suffers a significant loss. Driving along a treacherous road, Bodine spots Rivera’s campaign bus. He tells the driver of Gallo’s bus to pull up alongside it. Bodine hurls insults at Pat Candy, then bribes the bus driver (who is afraid it’s too dangerous) to pass the Rivera bus. Talby realizes “Wild Bill” has returned. With ten days left, Gallo is up to 17% and Rivera is down to 26%. Candy responds with a manufactured illness-related crisis with Rivera’s twins. Bodine’s angered because they’re so close, but they just can’t close the gap. They decide, since it’s difficult to bring Gallo’s points up even more, they simply have to get Rivera down — by helping another candidate, Campero. Bodine has some friends at the State Department convince the Bolivian ambassador to the U.S. come out in support of Campero. As his team questions him, Bodine contemplates in voiceover what he’s become and insists he’s trying to shield the others from turning into someone like him. As he speaks, a flashback reveals that Bodine actually did bug Candy’s office way back when, behind a framed picture of Richard Nixon. As Bodine replaces the photo, his face blends with Nixon’s.

In the present, Bodine has a run-in with Candy. They compare strategy. Bodine is reading Goethe and quotes what he’s reading. At the final debate, Rivera uses the quote Bodine supplied. Bodine tells them everything Rivera has said is easily spinnable and sends the team down the press room. As they leave, he mentions offhandedly that he must have accidentally misattributed the Goethe quote — it was actually said by Joseph Goebbels. On Eleciton Day, there’s a montage of people voting as the campaign staff agonizes. The final tally comes back: Gallo with 21.5%, Rivera with 20.8%, and Campero with 19.9%.

Everyone’s thrilled with the results — except for the Bolivian people, who riot in protest. The American team barely makes it to the airport. Gallo finds he’s lost without the team engineering him. After the election, Eddie is tossed aside, his help with the campaign disregarded. In the midst of the riots, his happiness that Gallo won turns to rage. He picks up rocks and begins to hurl them at the soldiers trying to quell the rioters. The Americans watch from the plane as the country crumbles below.

Notes

This script isn’t bad from a writing standpoint, although it’s a little talky for my tastes. Straughan does a nice job of giving each character just enough depth and balancing a large group of characters in a complex but tight story.

My only sticking point is with the main theme, which strikes me as a bit redundant. Does anyone raised in a post-Watergate world believe anything good can come from a political election in any country? Hell, has anyone in a post-“smoke-filled room” world believed that? Maybe we think we’ve gone from a culture of “may the best man win” to “eh, let’s just vote for the lesser of two evils,” but we probably haven’t. Nonetheless, especially in the current political climate, the fact that political strategists are a bunch of low-down muckrakers will come as a surprise to no one.

I wanted to pin all my hopes and dreams on the other theme, about American globalization destroying the rest of the world, with us fleeing the scene rather than staying to clean up messes that we create. I like that… I like it a lot. It’s a theme that’s more relevant today than it has been in awhile, yet not many (good) films seem interested in tackling it. Unfortunately, Straughan doesn’t pin all his hopes and dreams on these theme. It’s underplayed in favor of the “what lows won’t these guys stoop to?” attitude that prevails throughout.

I guess the unique spin is the idea that American strategists do work in foreign elections. Still, it concentrates more on the muckrakers and their spin than on the way the Bolivians respond to it, an essential component of making this script feel fresh instead of superfluous. It also downplays the real-life truth that “Gallo” (in reality Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada) was raised and mostly educated in the United States. This important dimension illustrates something the script misses — Gallo’s never portrayed as having much desire to win, aside from the fact that he’s willing to pay Americans to win for him. If we understood his American-educated foundations, we would understand that he might feel this is the only way. Americans, from his perspective, know how to win elections. Hugo’s just a rube.

Still, it’s not a bad script. I just wish the story concentrated more on the things we haven’t seen than on the things we have.

(As a stylistic side-note, the rampant Britishisms drove me nuts. Nothing shatters the suspension of disbelief more than a lack of verisimilitude. Things like spelling words with “s” instead of “z” or “ou” instead of “o” don’t bug me nearly so much as using expressions like “good job” instead of “good thing,” “at University” instead of something like “in college,” “chat show” instead of “talk show” — none of these will matter in the long run, because if it’s produced and somehow this draft goes from sold spec to shooting draft, one would assume the Americans involved in the production will iron out these details. Purely in terms of reading, though, each instance of a Britishism took me right out of the story.)

The Bottom Line

Not bad, but not great. With some more polish and an A-list (or at least B-list) cast, this movie could do very well. Without that, it’ll end up among the hundreds of other bland, forgettable political movies out there. George Clooney is supposed to produce this, and despite what some might think, he’s basically been a quality magnet ever since he got some control over his career. I have no doubt that this script will reach its potential within a draft or two, go into production, and end up a solid movie. (I’m one of the few people on the planet who didn’t hate the Ocean’s… sequels, though, so your mileage may vary on the quality of Clooney’s choices.)

Posted by Stan on December 24, 2008 10:17 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 23, 2008

Black List Script #9 – I’m with Cancer by Will Reiser

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 autobiographical comic account of one man’s struggle to beat cancer.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

On a gorgeous San Diego day, ADAM SCHWARTZ (26) is forced to go to the hospital. A receptionist who treats Adam like dirt gives him a gown to get into, and he’s greeted by JOANNE, a cheery nurse leading around a group of students who observe his behavior. She gives Adam a sample cup for urine — he has trouble with that. By the time he gets through the lengthy process of a full-body X-Ray and MRI, Adam has to pee. The next day, Adam’s alarm clock/white noise machine goes off. Adam finds himself unable to turn it off — it merely switches from a braying alarm to various forms of white noise. This wakes his girlfriend, RACHEL, who’s irritated by it. By the time she gets it off, he’s fully awake. She runs her fingers through his hair and spots a gray one. Adam freaks out and investigates it in the bathroom. He smiles when he finds it.

After showering using Rachel’s shampoo/body-wash, Adam is picked up by his longtime best friend, SETH (25), who rolls down the windows to get rid of the girly scent. Waiting in line at a coffee shop, single Seth wonders why a couple ahead of them can’t keep their hands off each other. Adam laments that he and Rachel used to be that way, but the relationship has slowed down. Adam thinks Rachel is waiting for him to take the next step by asking her to move in. Seth suggests Adam dump Rachel, but Adam loves her. Seth doesn’t care — Adam’s good-looking and could get laid easily. To prove it, Seth asks the gay baristas if they’d sleep with Adam, given the opportunity. They’re all enthusiastic.

Adam and Seth go to work at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, where Adam is the nerdy intellectual obsessed with historical accuracy, Seth is apathetic, and their friend GREG is the kind of idiot who puts a velociraptor fossil into a diorama of early man because people like dinosaurs. Later, Adam returns to the hospital, where DR. ROSS has the results of his tests: he has a malignant tumor as the result of a rare gene mutation. Dr. Ross claims it’s risky to operate on, so he wants Adam to start chemotherapy ASAP. When Adam starts freaking out, Dr. Ross suggests Adam start seeing a psychologist to help him work through this experience. Adam goes to the public library to use the Internet, where he looks up more about his specific cancer: “Neurofibrosarcoma Schwannoma.”

At home, Rachel has made a meal of vegetarian goulash. She’s cute and perky and alarmed by how unenthusiastic Adam is. When she asks what’s wrong, Adam gently broaches the subject by asking if she’s seen the movie Beaches. Once Rachel puts together that Adam has cancer, she’s upset and a little terrified — even more when Adam remembers his parents are coming for dinner. EDITH (a bundle of overbearing energy) and ART (a little strange and not quite himself since suffering a stroke 10 years ago) arrive. Edith is immediately unimpressed with the goulash, specifically its lack of meat. Adam tries to break the news to Edith and Art by asking if they’ve seen Terms of Endearment. Rachel tells him just to come out with it. Adam does, and Edith panics. She goes to make him green tea, citing the belief that it reduces the risk of getting cancer. When Adam notes that he already has cancer, she pulls a wide variety of pills out of her fanny pack — none of which have a thing to do with cancer treatment — and tries to convince him to take them. She wants to move in, but Adam talks her out of it. Rachel chimes in that she understands how Edith must feel, but she’ll take care of Adam.

At the coffee shop, Seth ogles a woman while Adam impatiently waits for Greg to decide what he’s going to order. Seth wonders why Adam’s suddenly so impatient. Adam tells Seth about the cancer. Seth is hurt that Adam didn’t tell him immediately. On the bright side, Seth realizes Adam can take this time to do everything he always wanted — plus, he’ll get plenty of trim. Adam goes to a therapy session with a young doctor, KATIE (26), who has no apparent sense of humor. In fact, she accuses Adam of repressing his emotions and using humor to mask his fear.

To compensate for the cancer, Rachel buys Adam a gift: a tiny shih-tzu. At first, Adam’s disappointed; then he’s angry, but Rachel guilt-trips him into keeping the dog. The museum workers throw a party for Adam, who will not be able to work during the chemo. Everyone tries to warn/help him, and Adam leaves feeling dejected. Afterward, Rachel reassures Adam that everything will be okay. At home, they attempt to make love, but the dog starts scratching and barking, demanding to be let out. Adam takes the dog for a walk, and when he gets back, Rachel’s already asleep. At their synagogue, Edith uses Adam’s cancer for sympathy points. Their RABBI urges Adam, in his time of crisis, to consider looking toward religion. Adam is disinterested.

At the hospital, Adam watches an outdated cancer-awareness film starring ALAN ALDA, designed to help new patients acclimate to chemotherapy. Waiting for his treatment, Adam meets MITCH (85) and ALAN (84), two cancer patients with different perspectives on life — it can’t end fast enough for Alan, but Mitch hangs on to dear life. They introduce Adam to the wonders of medical marijuana. Adam has a dream. He’s at an amusement park, but the carny won’t let him on a roller coaster because Adam has cancer. Adam tries to deny he has cancer, but the carny points to Adam’s t-shirt, which reads I’M WITH CANCER. Next to him is a huge, bald, fat man with a shirt labeled CANCER and an umbilical cord attached to Adam. Adam wakes in terror and rushes to the bathroom to vomit.

Katie asks Adam how he feels after the first treatment. Adam tells her he doesn’t feel well. At all. Katie tells Adam he needs an outlet for the emotions he’s experiencing. She recommends a list of books to help him deal with it. Adam and Seth go to a bookstore. Seth decides going to Mardi Gras would be a better emotional outlet. Adam has no interest, so Seth decides if Adam won’t use his disease to get laid, Seth will. He continues to hang around the cancer self-help section, where he spots a cute girl and tells her how profoundly affected he has been by his best friend’s cancer.

Adam buys a 50” plasma TV and gets high with Seth. Meanwhile, Rachel is in the process of moving in — boxes everywhere. She yells at Adam for getting high, then yells at him for the placing the TV where she intended to hang one of her paintings. She takes the dog for a walk, and Seth tries to argue with Adam that Rachel’s lack of sympathy suggests she’s not into the relationship, and they should go to Mardi Gras. Adam insists they’re just going through a rough patch.

Adam starts to read some of the books Katie recommended and is surprised that they make sense. Katie’s so excited, she decides to recommend alternate forms of therapy. Seth accompanies Adam to a laughter therapy session, which is strange but effective. A time lapse shows Adam begin to wither as his health deteriorates and his hair falls out. At a chemo session, Mitch asks why he and Alan have never met Rachel. Adam offers that she’s been stressed and bringing her to something like this would just make that worse. Alan thinks women are a waste of time, but Mitch has been married for decades. He shows Adam a photo of his wife. Alan, meanwhile, contends the day his wife left was the best day of his life. Adam considers both points of view.

After his session, Adam waits for Rachel to pick him up, but she never shows. Eventually, Katie sees Adam and offers him a ride home. Her car is cluttered with junk she won’t throw away. Adam explains he never got a driver’s license, because he failed the test by driving into a garden full of endangered plants. Adam makes her stop the car. He throws away her junk for her. When they get to Adam’s house, he invites Kate inside. She refuses, then relents. They play video games until Rachel comes home. She’s not happy to find another woman in the house, even after the explanation. After Katie leaves, Adam and Rachel fight about her not picking him up. Rachel gets sympathy points from Adam because she’s having as difficult a time watching Adam fall apart as Adam is. They try to have sex, but Adam can’t get an erection.

At Adam’s next chemo session, he asks Mitch where Adam is. He passed away. Adam and Mitch attend his funeral. Adam dreams of the afterlife — a Boca Raton retirement community where there’s still a 45-minute wait for frozen yogurt. In his waking life, Adam visits his rabbi to ask about the afterlife. He asks if he’ll go to heaven, and when the rabbi says probably, Adam asks if there’s any way to just die with no afterlife. The rabbi suggests Adam find a new religion. At a therapy session, Adam confesses to Katie his fear that he’ll die. She tells him helplessness is normal. Adam decides therapy isn’t working and leaves. Adam reminds Rachel of his next doctor’s appointment — “the big one.” Rachel ignores him, frustrating Adam. After repeating himself, she promises she’ll be there.

Left alone, Adam is bored out of his mind. He decides to try to go back to work. There, he creates a truly disturbing diorama of Pompeii during the Vesuvius eruption, then passes out. His boss, PHIL, likes and respects him, but they both agree Adam just can’t work until he gets through this. Adam waits for his ride to the doctor, but Rachel doesn’t show up and isn’t answering her phone. Adam tries Seth, who also doesn’t answer. Reluctantly, Adam dials Edith. Edith and Art accompany Adam to the hospital. While they wait, Edith’s nitpicking overwhelms an already-stressed Adam, who blows up at her. Edith tells Adam how difficult things can be — she loved Art more than anything in the world, but since he’s stroke, she’s “lost” him. She’s terrified of losing Adam, too.

Dr. Ross arrives to tell Adam the MRI shows the chemo has been ineffective — the tumor is still growing, and they have to perform a risky operation that could result in lower-body paralysis. Adam and Edith are terrified, but what else can they do? Trying to look on the bright side, Adam asks if he’ll also get handicap parking. Adam comes home to find Rachel has cooked a nice meal. Her phone vibrates with a text message. Adam asks who it’s from, and he doesn’t believe the response. When she sets down the phone, he checks the texting history and finds it’s from a guy named “James,” and many of his texts seem vaguely romantic. As he questions Rachel about this, Adam continues to scroll through, finding a variety of “artistic” nude photos of her. Angered, Adam throws Rachel out of the house.

Seth takes Adam to the Yacht Club, where they get drunk and reminisce. Adam decides he should drive home; despite his lack of license, Seth is too drunk to drive. Also, Adam wants to do something new before he dies. Seth reluctantly gives in, and Adam slams into a statue of Neptune before turning the wrong way down a one-way street. Freaked out, Seth starts to argue with him. Pissed, Adam throws Seth out of the car and sits in the street, where he calls Katie and lets out all these fears. He apologizes for storming out on her. Katie tells him she believes Adam is brave, and Adam suggests going on a date if he doesn’t die. Katie doesn’t think it’s a good idea. Adam passes out while still on the phone. Seth manages to get Adam back to his apartment. As Seth shoves Adam into bed, he notices a book on Adam’s table: Coping with Your Loved One’s Cancer. He’s touched and realizes he had Seth all wrong.

Adam prepares for his funeral — buying a suit, picking out a plot and casket. Dr. Ross schedules his surgery. He goes through the surgery, which is mostly successful — they got the tumor, but they had to remove enough that his mobility is hindered. Katie arrives while Adam is in recovery. Two months later, at a beach house, Mitch’s wife, MARGARET (80), knocks tentatively on the door. A wheelchair-bound but glowing Adam answers the door. He was sad to hear about Mitch but is thrilled she’d come for what may or may not be Thanksgiving dinner. Katie’s inside, playing video games with Seth. Edith serves dinner, and they all gather around.

Notes

This script took me by surprise, because my feelings on the other Black List comedies have ranged from utter contempt to mild disappointment. I’m with Cancer isn’t perfect, but it’s second to Big Hole as the best of the top ten. Even if Our Brand Is Crisis unseats it, it’s still in the top three. Not bad.

Reiser does a nice job of laying out the gags. Some of them don’t work, but the conceptual ideas are there. In fact, the museum material surprised me because, in that initial scene, I didn’t feel like the gags about Adam’s nerdiness or Greg’s dinosaur worked at all — but they dole out the necessary setup for Adam’s return to work, in which Adam builds the laugh-out-loud funny Pompeii diorama. Still, the gags that don’t work could use some more polish, but the plot is there, and the characters are mostly there…

I wish Rachel had received a little more development. In a possible unfortunate byproduct of the “based on a true story” aspect of this script, Reiser writes the relationship as very one-sided. I know Adam has cancer, and overall the beats of their disintegrating relationship work dramatically… But Reiser sort of hangs it on, “She cheated on Adam and therefore must move out,” after which she disappears from the story. Despite building it up and tearing it down reasonably well, Reiser doesn’t give us nearly enough of Rachel’s perspective. There is a very slight, subtle suggestion that their relationship isn’t working even before the diagnosis. I wish Reiser had addressed this more, because cheating on a cancer patient without a satisfactory explanation paints her as a monster.

Somehow, though, the way Reiser built the relationship with Katie worked well for me. I didn’t expect it to, but she gets just enough depth and development to remain interesting, and the arc of their relationship feels natural. Same goes for Adam and Seth’s friendship, as well as Adam himself — going from sunny yet cynical to soul-shattering depression. Every change, no matter how subtle, feels natural.

Overall, it’s a comedy with actual, funny scenarios and actual, funny behavior within those scenarios. That’s more than I’ve gotten from any other Black List comedy. Besides that, I’m with Cancer has a certain affable nature that makes it easier to look past its flaws — unlike a wall-to-wall disaster like Butter, I want I’m with Cancer to succeed in spite of the occasional misstep.

The Bottom Line

Going into it, I already knew this was being developed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, but I’d like to think that even if I had no idea, the ramshackle but deceptively complex story has the feel of a Judd Apatow-style comedy. The Rogen/Goldberg pair are a good match for this script, and if anyone can polish the gags that don’t work, it’s them. Hopefully this will turn into a solid movie.

Update, 3/23/09 — A new draft of I’m with Cancer came across my desk today, and I have to say, I still like it. Mainly because it’s the exact same script, with a couple of changed scenes and teensy snippets of new dialogue here and there.

The new scenes change Adam’s job from a museum employee to an NPR producer. Although I sort of bagged on the work scenes from the older draft, I acknowledged that they built to a more-than-satisfying punchline. I just sort of hoped they’d go back and polish or shorten the earlier scenes, not completely change his career. NPR producer is a much lamer endeavor, and Reiser doesn’t come up with much material. In fact, there is no third act “Adam returns to work” punchline. It’s just a rewritten version of the scene where Phil’s uneasy about putting chemo-ravaged Adam back to work — only this time, he tells Adam no. What a stinger!

There’s also one new scene, where Adam and Seth seek medical marijuana from a general practitioner who’s described like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The humor comes from the disparity between the quaint environs and their impure motive for visiting the kindly old doctor. It’s an okay scene, but it doesn’t add a thing to the story and feels tonally out of place — a little too surreal. Then again, maybe the Pompeii diorama that made me laugh out loud was a little too surreal. At least that had something to do with expressing Adam’s blackening mood.

Posted by Stan on December 23, 2008 2:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 22, 2008

Black List Script #8 – Broken City by Brian Tucker

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 New York private investigator gets sucked into a shady mayoral election.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

At the Bolton Village housing project, Detective BILLY TAGGART (mid-30s) stands over the dead body of a 16-year-old kid, MIKEY TAVAREZ, who has been shot in the head. Sirens approach. Some time later, Taggart’s murder trial has become a zoo, the courthouse steps flooded with protesters and media. Mayor NICHOLAS HOSTETLER, 50s, discusses the possible outcome with police chief COLIN FAIRBANKS. Fairbanks tells Hostetler a witness came forward with a videotape of the shooting. Hostetler wants a copy, which Fairbanks says will arrive later; meanwhile, the original is being “misplaced” in evidence control. Billy’s verdict comes back innocent, and as he descends the courtroom steps, Billy hands his badge to Mikey Tavarez’s father.

Eight years later, Billy is bathing with his attractive, long-time girlfriend, NATALIE BARROW. She’s an actress and is flirting with the idea of moving to L.A. to pursue more lucrative work. Billy’s willing to go with her, but he’s concerned about how quickly these changes are coming. He offers to fool around; Natalie tells him no. The next morning, the media is buzzing with news that the city has sold the Bolton Village project to “Solstein Donagan” for $6 billion. HENRY LUDLOW, a convicted stalker, rejoices at an early release. Others involved in the parole hearing console Billy, who testified to keep Henry in prison.

Angry, Billy drives back to his rundown office. KATY BRADSHAW, 26 and madly in love with Billy, works as his secretary. Billy’s landlord grumbles that Billy’s four months behind on rent. Billy writes a bad check and gives the landlord football tickets. After the placated landlord leaves, Billy tells Katy to stop payment on the check. He calls various old clients trying to get a payment but to no avail. Then Mayor Hostetler calls and offers Billy a job. Meanwhile, Hostetler’s election rival, ADAM VALLIANT (mid-30s), gives a rousing speech about the injustice of selling Bolton Village.

Billy and Hostetler catch up, but neither is particularly pleasant to the other — Hostetler feigns politeness, but Billy insults the mayor and reminds him he’s behind in the polls. Hostetler offers Billy $20,000 to find out who’s sleeping with Hostetler’s wife and photograph them in the act. Billy agrees. At a tech rehearsal for her play, Natalie receives a phone call and breaks, but she looks a little guilty. Billy trails JUSTINE HOSTETLER from a reading-to-sick-children photo op to a black-tie fundraiser to SoHo. This is where Katy, on the street, gets into the act. With her help, Billy manages to lift Justine’s cell phone, find out who she’s calling, and get it back to her without Justine knowing. Back at the office, Billy and Katy investigate the number. It belongs to ZACHARY ANDREWS, City Council President. Billy tells Katy it’s a good lead, but it’s not enough.

That evening, Billy and Natalie have a cutesy but suspiciously snooty conversation about fish, followed by an awkward conversation about premiere apparel. Natalie wants multiple dresses but is indecisive, irritating Billy. Billy mentions RYAN, a fellow actor who’s supposed to be arriving in town for the premiere. The conversation suddenly gets awkward, and the awkwardness increases when Billy finally mentions the parole hearing, that Henry’s out. Billy promises it’ll be different — Henry won’t come near her. Natalie’s not so sure.

The next day, Billy waits outside the mayor’s mansion for Justine. He tails her all day, until he finally ends up at a beach house on Long Island. Meanwhile, a fellow named SAM LANCASTER comes to Hostetler with grave concerns about someone figuring something out. It’s all very ambiguous, but it has to do with the Bolton Village deal — Lancaster is a contractor whose business depends on this deal going through. Billy makes Katy come down to Long Island and assist while he snaps photos of Justine and Andrews. At a hotel, Natalie meets up with the aforementioned RYAN BLAKE; they have sex. Billy hears moaning and whimpering from inside the house, but they have it “fool-proofed” — he can’t take any pictures. Billy and Katy wait it out. When Andrews gets back in the car and leaves, Billy’s confused — why is Justine still inside? Katy suggest waiting, but Billy decides it’s time to leave. Inside the house, a mysterious off-screen voice suggests to Justine that something ambiguous is “not enough to go on.”

That night, Billy and Natalie have dinner with Ryan. Billy takes an immediate shine to Ryan. Natalie feels awkward. The next day, Valliant is angry that Hostetler is handling his attacks so well. They have nothing substantial to pin on him. Andrews, working with him, says they’re working on it. The Lancasters — Sam, SAM JUNIOR, and TODD — meet with HARRIS SARGENT at Solstein Donagan. They ink a contract for Lancaster’s construction company to tear down Bolton Village. For an unknown reason, Todd looks guilty. Billy and Katy flip through their developed photos. Katy reassures Billy their evidence is solid, but Billy’s not so sure. Billy goes to a black-tie engagement to meet Hostetler and hand off the photos. He bumps into Justine and they flirt — it becomes clear she knows he was photographing her, but neither lets on. Justine slips a business card into his jacket. Billy also has an awkward run-in with Fairbanks, who seems to still like and respect Fairbanks.

When he meets with Hostetler, Billy’s suspicious enough to think there’s more involved than just an affair. Hostetler refuses to answer, just asks for the pictures. Reluctantly, Billy gives them up. Hostetler’s surprised. Afterward, Billy pulls out the card Justine gave him — it’s Harris Sargent’s. Billy gets ready for Natalie’s premiere when Katy calls with some news. Immediately, Billy rushes out the door. Andrews is dead; nobody knows a thing, but a detective named JANSEN wants to know what it has to do with Billy. So does Fairbanks, who knows this has something to do with the work Billy did for Hostetler. Meanwhile, Natalie and Ryan dance at the premiere after-party. Fairbanks tries to get Valliant — who was with Andrews — to tell him exactly what he saw happen. Valliant accuses Fairbanks of being dirty. He claims he knows everything. Billy shoves Valliant’s head into cold water repeatedly until he breaks out of his shock.

Valliant tells them Andrews was going to meet Todd Lancaster, that he was late and rushed out the door. Valliant heard the shots, knew it was Andrews. That’s it. Billy and Fairbanks dress Valliant like a uniformed officer, and Billy drives him home. Natalie and Ryan sleep together again, but Natalie decides to break it off. She can’t handle this anymore. She goes back to the apartment, where Billy apologizes for not showing up to the premiere.

The next day, Billy wakes up. He realizes this is all about Bolton Village but doesn’t know how all the pieces fit. He puts Katy on some research, then goes out to City Hall. Hostetler exploits Andrews’ death for his own political gain. Afterward, Billy demands to know whether or not Hostetler had Andrews killed. Hostetler gives Billy a cashier’s check instead of answers. Billy and Jansen reconnect, and Billy fills Jansen in on everything. They visit Harris Sargent, who tells them of their intentions to tear down Bolton Village and redevelop it as commercial property. Billy is stunned. Jansen tells Billy that if Lancaster & Sons is involved with tearing down those buildings, it will make the Lancasters rich. Billy goes back to his office, where Katy hasn’t found much. Solstein Donagan is mostly clean, but as Billy goes through a last of old city contracts, he finds several for Lancaster & Sons.

Billy seeks out information at Lancaster & Sons, but instead the shit is beaten out of him. It turns out to be Sam Junior and Todd, but Billy can’t do anything about it in his condition. He wakes up in the hospital. Hostetler and Valliant have a televised debate, where Hostetler plays the part of the wise, experienced mayor and paints Valliant as an inexperienced rube. In the audience, Fairbanks and Justine are both dumbstruck that Hostetler has turned the electoral tide in one evening. Jansen provides Henry with a tape recording of Billy laying out some “rules” for him — he’s to go take care of his grandmother and never come anywhere near Billy or Natalie. Jansen adds that if Henry is that stupid, and Jansen gets called in on Henry’s murder, he’ll murder Henry again.

At the hospital, Natalie stays with Billy. She tells him she took the week off to be with him, but Billy wants her to go. She does. Later, Katy shows up. Billy asks her if she found out who owns the Long Island beach house. Katy says Natalie told her Billy’s thinking of quitting. Billy tells Katy she should find a new job. Katy tells him the information on the beach house doesn’t matter, then leaves. That night, Todd Lancaster shows up to apologize to Billy for beating the hell out of him. He explains that he was tricked into the beating thanks to a guilt trip, but Todd knows shady things are going down and wants them to stop before his family gets in too deep. Todd hands Billy a few papers. Billy looks at them — founding articles for Lancaster & Sons, which cite Hostetler as a silent co-owner of the company.

Armed with this knowledge, Billy leaves the hospital and finds Justine. He accuses her of being a significant part of this, selfishly getting Andrews killed to save her husband so they could make more money. Fairbanks emerges, training a gun on Billy. Enraged, Billy leaves. He shows up at Natalie’s theatre. She’s surprised to see him out of the hospital. Billy tells her his phone’s dead; he needs to borrow hers. Just as he calls Katy and gets her VoiceMail, a call rings — Ryan. Natalie promises she ended it, but Billy’s livid. He simply walks away, telling her something came up and it’s not safe to go home.

As Billy makes copies of the Lancaster papers and seals them into various envelopes, Natalie returns to Ryan, and they resume their affair. Billy confronts Hostetler, giving him an ultimatum: Hostetler can resign and withdraw from the campaign and Billy will keep silent forever… Or Hostetler can try to keep going with this, and Billy will send out his envelopes. Hostetler wants to negotiate, but Billy laughs…until Hostetler shows him the videotape of Billy murdering Mikey Tavarez. Hostetler demands the original contract, gives Billy time to think it over and come to a decision.

Billy seeks out a puzzled Henry. They go to a hotel — the same hotel where Ryan and Natalie are making love — and Billy gets a room for Henry, room 1912. He ties Henry to the bed, as Henry pleads that he’ll live by Billy’s rules. Billy shoves some vodka down Henry’s throat. Half an hour later, Henry’s untied and passed out on the floor. Billy goes to a pay phone and calls Fairbanks, who’s already at the mayor’s mansion, preparing to arrest him. Billy tells Fairbanks he owes him for this; Fairbanks agrees. Cryptically, Billy tells Fairbanks, “Your shooter’s in room 1912.” He bursts into Ryan and Natalie’s hotel room, where they make love in the shower. Billy shoots Ryan dead. Natalie’s horrified and enraged. Fairbanks and Jansen storm the hotel, where they find Henry vomiting in the toilet. Seeing Henry, Jansen realizes exactly what has happened, what Billy has done.

The next morning, the news is flooded with word that Hostetler was arrested for the murder of Andrews and that successful actor Ryan Blake was murdered in his hotel room. Billy and Fairbanks share a drink, toasting Adam Valliant. In City Hall, Valliant finds the videotape of Billy murdering Mikey Tavarez. An aide questions whether or not to destroy the tape, but Valliant suggests they keep it — they may need to use Billy in the future. Valliant takes a meeting with Solstein Donagan.

Notes

Broken City wants to be film noir, but it makes the mistake of not understanding or embracing the classic noir antihero archetype. Those antiheroes became compelling characters because they had more interest in justice and righteousness than money, personal happiness, or even the law. In their world, the punishment has to fit the crime, and the crime would have to be pretty severe to respond with murder. For instance, I can’t think of a single lead character from a film noir (or any good, hardboiled fiction from the ’30s and ’40s) who would be cool with the idea of walking into a hotel room, emptying a clip on the man his girlfriend is sleeping with, and pin the murder on the terrified, pathetic lowlife who once stalked her.

In the first place, the usual antihero is a little too cool for that — doesn’t let his emotions rile him to such a degree. In the second, she’s having an affair. Does this justify murder? It might justify a break-up and kicking the dude’s ass, but anything beyond that is overkill — literally. Henry, himself, is sort of a pathetic deus ex machina character who exists only to make the ending neat-‘n’-tidy. The framed murderer could have been a random bum off the street for all the difference it makes to the story. The existence of Henry is, I guess, supposed to create the illusion that Billy isn’t such a bad guy. He may have murdered Ryan right in front of Natalie, but at least she won’t have to worry about that pesky stalker. In the same vein, what could Mikey Tavarez have possibly done that warranted getting shot in the head? We only know that, according to Billy, Mikey “fucked him, and now [he’s] fucking lying to [Billy].” The details are left to our imaginations, but considering the reasoning for shooting Ryan, I could easily imagine Mikey as an uncertified accountant who made a mistake on Billy’s discount tax return, and Billy got mad because the IRS chose to audit him.

Another fatal character flaw: a real antihero would have never, ever handed over the photos. Hell, considering the history with Hostetler, a real antihero wouldn’t have even taken the job. “I need money” is a pathetic excuse. Philip Marlowe would go broke before he’d hand over photos of a man he knew would suffer severe, undeserved consequences. Maybe he’d hand them over if he didn’t know, but that’s the problem: Billy knew. Billy knew the whole time. Billy’s reluctance to hand over the photos stemmed from an obvious awareness that harm would come to Andrews. And then, after Andrews gets killed, Billy has the gall to whine and bitch and moan throw hissy-fits to everyone involved. Film noir protagonists don’t whine. They crack wise and lean against walls with aloof, sarcastic grins that tell everyone they meet, “Hi, I’m a badass. Don’t fuck with me if you don’t want to get fucked with.”

So it’s settled: Billy is not an antihero. He’s an asshole. By the end of Broken City, what little sympathy we might have for him has evaporated. I’m all for movies about irredeemable assholes if I understand where they’re coming from, but the script tries to have it both ways: Billy’s an enigma, but he’s also a normal guy trying to work on a troubled relationship; he has a moral code, but one that isn’t strong enough to withstand substantial sums of money or jealous rage. I have no clue who this guy is or what drives him, and even before the last 20 or so pages — where he turns into a real asshole — I didn’t have much interest in getting to know him better. I can totally understand why Natalie would cheat on Ryan to flee this disaster of a relationship.

The character doesn’t work. How about the plot? It manages to be both convoluted and head-slappingly obvious at the same time, which is an impressive feat, I guess. Look, nothing infuriates me more than the people who criticize Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep film for not making any sense. It’s complicated and doesn’t spell anything out, for sure, but it makes perfect sense if you pay attention. Part of the unwillingness to spell things out is that the film, like the novel, limits its perspective to Marlowe. We find out what Marlowe finds out when he finds it out. This is a common film noir storytelling choice, especially with detective stories — the limited perspective keeps the filmmakers from tipping their hands. Broken City is nothing but tipped hands. We find out pretty much everything well in advance, but I took no joy in waiting around for Billy to catch up. It would be serviceable (but kinda dull) if Tucker eliminated every scene that doesn’t involve Billy in some way. However, if he did that, the script would be about 20 pages long. (Not because there’s so much else going on, but because Hostetler and Valliant never shut their fucking mouths.)

Like Fuckbuddies, Broken City tries way too hard and suffers for it. It doesn’t try to be funny — though some levity could have helped break up the tedium a bit — but it does try very hard to be gritty and complex and raw. It didn’t do much for me. It felt too artificial, especially when I realized I hated Billy and had nothing to focus on but the attempts at atmosphere and drama. Instead of grit and rawness, we get melodrama and kind of a stagey theatricality to the grit — everything is two or three shades over the top.

(As a minor stylistic note, I found myself irritated by the endless use of gerunds in the action. Billy doesn’t get out of the car. “Billy getting out of the car.” I guess in some ways it cuts down on the passive voice, but holy shit is it grating. The dialogue, too, has kind of a poor-man’s Mamet quality to it, which some people like but it’s not really my cup of tea. I’m not usually put off by the writing itself, but in this case, it got under my skin by about page 25.)

The Bottom Line

To make the obvious joke, Broken City is broken. Its problems aren’t insurmountable, but it seems two or three rewrites away from being worthy of any real accolades. It surprises me that this was well-liked. It could end up turning into a good movie, but I don’t have my hopes high.

Posted by Stan on December 22, 2008 11:40 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 21, 2008

Black List Script #7 – Winter’s Discontent by Paul Fruchbom

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): “When Herb Winter’s wife of fifty years dies, the faithful but sexually frustrated widower moves into a retirement community to start living the swinging single life.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

On HERB WINTER’s 75th birthday, he attends his wife’s funeral. In voiceover, he gripes that, while he maybe didn’t want her to die, he hasn’t had sex in decades. He’s been faithful, but now it’s time to get some. At the wake, Herb talks to mourners and his best friend JULES ROSENBAUM, described as “a Jewish Mister Rogers.” Throughout his conversation, voiceover continues, providing ironic commentary to the relatively innocuous things Herb says. (This device continues intermittently throughout the script.) Herb bugs Jules for details on Spruce Gardens, a retirement community with a 4:1 woman:man ratio. Jules sarcastically plays it off and grumbles about Herb’s lack of compassion for his own wife. CHERYL (40s), Herb’s good-looking real estate agent, approaches, and Herb thinks lewd things while discussing the sale of his home.

When Herb arrives at Spruce Gardens, KATE BENTLEY (late 50s) gives him a grand tour. She shows Herb the music room and asks if he plays an instrument. Herb tells her piano, years ago. She shows him the gym and asks if he works out; Herb says he hasn’t since he served in Korea. Kate says her dad was in Korea, which stings Herb. WANDA NEWTON (70s) walks by, “eye-fucking” Herb as she passes. Kate asks what Herb used to do for a living; Herb sold typewriters, and not very well. Kate suggests it was a good fit — piano and typing.

Later, in the cafeteria, Herb tries to discuss all the feminine potential at Spruce Gardens, but Jules has no interest. Instead, Herb finds like minds in ELMER WILLIAMS and CHARLIE HASSELBACK, longtime residents who have a good thing going with the women at Spruce Gardens. They immediately welcome Herb to the fold, as they discuss fond wartime memories of women. Elmer and Charlie give Herb the lay of the land, describing each woman and her foibles. Herb’s really interested in Kate, but the others believe she’s too young — there’s no way she’ll give him the time of day. Herb asks who he should approach instead. They ask how long it’s been since he’s had sex. Herb can’t even remember. Elmer and Charlie suggest Wanda Newton.

Later, Herb watches TV in his room. EVA JANIKOWSKI arrives, offering him a carrot cake while make lewd advances. The process repeats with IRISH SHALOV and homemade toasted almonds, PATTY DELANO and a meatloaf, and Wanda Newton and…nothing. She just volunteers to have sex with him. Wanda asks if Herb has a condom, but Herb is baffled by the suggestion. Fortunately, Wanda has one for him. Herb goes into the bathroom to get it on but is unable. Wanda has extras. After several unsuccessful attempts, he finally gets a condom on…only to lose his erection a few seconds into it. The next day, Charlie and Elmer chastise Herb for not taking Viagra and not having his own condoms. Herb takes their abuse, but the others agree to help him. That night, he has some pills, some condoms, and an illustration of how to put one on properly. Everything’s going according to plan… Except Wanda dropped dead.

Kate, waiting with some paramedics, is surprised to see Herb there. They have an awkward conversation, during which Kate politely consoles him. The next day, Herb is enraged that Wanda dared to die before Herb could sleep with her. Charlie and Elmer tell him it could be worse — she could have died during the act, which would cause Herb to get blackballed in Spruce Gardens. Women don’t want to take chances. Jules is offended by the course the conversation has taken, but the others ignore him. They tell the detailed story of one man who “killed” a woman through sex, then suggest to Herb that Eva might be his best bet now that Wanda’s out of the picture. They tell him to wait a couple of days, and then things should be back to normal.

The instant he says that, MIKE MILLER arrives. A tan, well-muscled Lothario in his mid-60s, Mike’s an instant hit with the ladies — witty, charming, loaded with stories and life experience. Charlie, Elmer, and especially Herb see their chances dwindling before their eyes. They try to convince Mike that Spruce Gardens is filled with frigid women at death’s door, but Mike doesn’t fall for it. That night, through the thin walls, Herb overhears the sounds of Mike having sex with Eva. Weeks later, Herb is livid, even more than the others — after all, they had their fun before Mike arrived. Herb never got his chance. Jules uncovered that Mike used to work in pharmaceuticals and has access to experimental, unapproved drugs that provide super erections. They’re all angry, but they have no recourse. Mike has them beat.

Late one night, Herb has trouble sleeping. He gets up and pounds out the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. He stops suddenly when Kate arrives, telling Herb one of the residents complained about the noise. They have a drink together, during which time Kate talks nonstop about Herb’s wife. Later that night, Herb once again pitches the idea of sleeping with Kate to Charlie, Elmer, and Jules. They agree it’ll never happen; while Charlie and Elmer suggest that Iris remains untouched by Mike, Jules knows better. Herb is ready to bust, though — he needs to sleep with somebody. Instead, they start masturbating and smoking again.

Herb proposes a plan for them to recondition themselves in order to compete with Mike, but neither Charlie nor Elmer is interested. For some reason, Jules sticks by Herb. They start walking, which Herb suggests will eventually build up to running. Meanwhile, Mike blows by them, running along the jogging trail. Herb decides they can’t compete in stamina, so they should try technique. They drive to a dilapidated house. Jules explains he found a sexpert on the Internet who offers a training course.

JACKSON JOHNSON, a scruffy loser in his 30s, invites them inside. Jackson tells them he usually likes to take things slow, but he can tell they’re motivated. He says he’ll skip nipple play and clitoral stimulation, because he assumes they already know how to do all that. When Jules protests, Herb subtly kicks him and agrees that yes, they do. Jackson moves them to more advanced techniques. He produces some sex dolls for them to practice various positions and techniques. That night, Jules is concerned he slipped a disk. Herb grumbles that he shouldn’t be so negative, suggesting they just stretch next time. Herb is pleased with the results of their tutoring session.

Next on the agenda, Herb decides they must get involved in some form of cultural appreciation, to create the illusion of sensitivity and “outclass” Mike. Herb and Jules go to a painting class, run by Kate. Herb’s work isn’t very good, but Kate compliments it anyway. Kate presents a live, nude model, exciting Herb — until he finds out it’s Mike. And he’s hung like an horse. And he’s shaved. Herb breaks the bad news to Charlie and Elmer.

Late one night, Kate comes to Herb’s room. She tells him she was thinking about her (deceased) husband’s old piano and wants to take some lessons. Herb is surprised and a little deflated. He says he’d be happy to teach her, but he’s mainly interested in classical music that’s too advanced for a novice. Kate shrugs, suggesting she’d rather learn something more modern, like the Beatles. Herb’s never heard of them, but he agrees to give her lessons anyway. Herb borrows some Beatles records from Jules and is surprised by how good they are. Jules is surprised that he’s never listened to the Beatles. Herb gripes that there are a lot of things he hasn’t done, but nothing’s going to stop him this time — he’s going to fuck Kate. He gripes about his dead wife, whom Jules tries to defend, but Herb won’t hear it. He wants sex.

Herb goes to a record store and buys Beatles sheet music. He preps for Kate by practicing with a sex doll, practicing the Beatles songs on the piano, shaving his pubes, buying some penile enlargement pills, but everything screeches to a halt when Herb catches sight of Mike and Kate waving at each other and having a conversation that almost seems romantic. Some time later, Herb realizes how to take Mike out of the equation — they engineer a situation to get his cock blackballed at Spruce Gardens. Herb asks Jules who’s the most decrepit, at-death’s-door woman in the place. Jules suggests ROSE CHANDLER. Herb gives Mike some “friendly advice” about Rose. That night, Herb eavesdrops and hears what he assumes is Mike fucking Rose to death. The next day, they all discover that not only is she alive — she looks and acts 20 years younger.

Kate has her piano lesson. Herb teaches her to play “Let It Be,” and as she sings along with the music, Herb leans in. He’s ready to make a move when Kate stops, declaring piano playing better than sex. Herb offers another piano lesson. He goes back to the record store and asks the clerk for sheet music for a song that’ll get a girl to sleep with him. Herb gets ready for the next lesson — Viagra, condoms, looks. He plies Kate (and himself) with some gin, then teaches her to play “Faithfully” by Journey. As she plays, Herb leans in to make his move —

— and Kate’s horrified and offended. Herb’s embarrassed, especially when she tells him to go and Herb has to ask for a ride home. Herb goes to Jules to tell him about what happened, but he and Jules get into it about Herb’s wife. Jules is very passionate on the subject, and Herb slowly figures out that Jules was in love with her. He never crossed the line, but he spent decades in love with Herb’s wife. Before he can react to this, Jules collapses. Some time later, Christmas is arriving and rumors have floated around Spruce Gardens, and suddenly Herb is blackballed — and not just his cock.

Mike Miller sits with Herb and tries to extend an olive branch, as a thanks for his tip on Rose Chandler. They go to a bar and get loaded, and eventually Herb confesses that he’s never even gotten a blowjob. Mike’s aghast, so he drags Herb to a “gentlemen’s club” — as a Christmas gift. Mike gives Herb one of his secret pills, and the effect is instant. Herb gets into a room with a prostitute and realizes this isn’t what he wants. Before he has the chance to say anything, Mike drops dead in another room. Herb attends Mike’s funeral and gives a nice eulogy about him. This puts him back in the good graces of the Spruce Gardens folks. After the funeral, Herb lies next to his wife’s grave and recalls a few happy memories, but he realizes she loved Jules all along, as well. He apologizes for that. He wishes he had died, so she and Jules could be happy. Kate catches Herb lying on a grave, talking to himself. He explains the situation and apologizes for the incident at the piano lesson. Kate suggests maybe they could have another lesson, and then they start to kiss.

They go back to Kate’s apartment and make love. In the middle of it, Herb tries a complex maneuver and they both end up in the hospital with back injuries. While at the hospital, Herb visits Jules and apologizes for never treating him like a friend. Jules asks why Herb’s in the hospital, but Herb’s reluctant to tell for fear of giving him another heart attack. Jules insists, and he nearly has one after the shock of learning Herb and Kate had sex. Herb says that as he collapsed, he had a near-death experience and couldn’t help thinking that all the good times in his life involved hanging around with Jules. Later, Herb and Kate have an awkward reunion, but Kate mentions a “next time,” which encourages Herb. At his 76th birthday, everyone’s at the party, and Kate marches out with his birthday cake — and he’s never been happier in his entire life.

Notes

Dear Advertisers,

I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television. We are not all vibrant, fun-loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive.
     — Grampa Simpson, “Bart the General”

Although much better than the other Black List comedies (so far), Winter’s Discontent nonetheless suffers from the usual problem — believability. I’m sure I sound like a broken goddamn record at this point, but too many sloppy moments shatter my suspension of disbelief.

A man who would have only been 30 in 1964 has never heard of the Beatles? This is not “never listened to” or “never liked,” both of which are reasonable explanations for Herb’s ignorance. But to have never heard of them? The Beatles weren’t just a moderately popular band like, let’s say, Coldplay; they were a phenomenon that changed the face of music forever. And as someone who prefers the Beach Boys to the Beatles, that’s tough to admit — but it’s true. This inconsistency speaks to a larger problem, however: these characters are elderly, but it doesn’t feel like they have any history. They mention the Korean conflict on occasion, but aside from that, they don’t feel like people who have lived. Big Hole is not a masterpiece, but its elderly protagonist feels like a real man who really lived for 78 agonizing years.

The larger problem of the lack of believable life history manifests itself both in the dialogue and the attitudes of its characters. I’d overlook the “attitude” part, because half the joke is the idea that these elderly men are acting like drunken frat brothers, and that’s actually a funny concept. However, the dialogue gets me riled — not the obscenities or the casual nature of their sex banter so much as the diction of their speech. They sound like 20-year-olds in addition to acting like them. Nobody uses outdated slang or expressions, they knowledgeably drop references to things like MySpace… Not only is it not convincing, it diminishes the comedic possibilities. Isn’t it funnier to hear somebody called a “slattern” instead of a “whore,” “nancy” or “queer” instead of “gay,” “bishop” instead of “cock”? The dialogue basically turns the whole concept into a one-joke story (“Isn’t it funny how these old dudes act like the guys from Porky’s LOLOLOL?!!!!!”), which does a disservice to the occasional legitimately clever joke or idea.

The idea of them finding a sex guru on the Internet is funny, if you ignore the fact that Jules has no business — and no believable motivation — for going along with Herb’s plans. The fact that Jules is savvy enough to instantly navigate to Craigslist is neither funny nor believable. Look, my grandfather — approaching Herb’s age — worked with computers for the bulk of his career. He was a nerd, but he retired right on the cusp of the Internet revolution and completely stopped caring. Now, he can’t figure out how to send an e-mail to save his life. He wouldn’t know Google, MySpace, or Craigslist from any other site in the Internet. Jokes about old people using the Internet have become somewhat of a cliché, but I don’t think the idea has been mined for its full potential. I could imagine a lot of good comic hijinks coming from two horny old men with no Internet savvy seeking out a sexpert and ending up with a dumpy, unshaven, chain-smoking 30-something.

What about that scene, though? Two elderly guys with obvious homophobia are A-OK with a creepy, male stranger walking them through sexual techniques? Without a single moment of terror or discomfort? It’s almost refreshing that Fruchbom doesn’t make the inevitable homophobia joke, but in this scenario it becomes an elephant in the room. Why wouldn’t these particular characters say something, or behave in a certain way that suggests their awareness of this strangeness? Even worse than that, the goal of getting lessons from Jackson Johnson is to outdo Mike Miller in the technique department, so why in God’s name would they turn down a chance to learn foreplay techniques? They admit (to the audience) they know nothing about it, but it’s not a pride thing because the guys hunker over sex dolls in front of this dude, so a kind-of funny moment turns stupid in record time. Come on!

Last word on the humor: the voiceovers are hit-or-miss, used too frequently, and are way too reminiscent of — but not nearly as impressive as — Kevin Nealon’s “Subliminal Man” bits on Saturday Night Live. It’s not that they’re not funny (sometimes they’re not, though); it’s just lifting a well-known gag without using it as cleverly, sort of like the condom scene that rips off The 40 Year-Old Virgin. It’ll probably still be funny, but it’s the exact same joke. And my last word on the ridiculous, persistence-of-disbelief moments: I know he’s going for a sort of bookend idea by having it start with birthday/funeral and end with birthday/happiness, but here’s the problem I had: it’s not like funerals happen on the same day as the death. If she died on his birthday, it’d be dramatic. Having the funeral on his birthday is just dumb and kind of melodramatic, especially when he gripes about how it’s his birthday, as if it’s his dead wife’s fault he scheduled the funeral on that day. Come on!

The plot isn’t bad. Fruchbom does a good job of introducing variety in the gags — some clever, some tired — and raising stakes every couple of pages. The romance with Kate and Herb’s slowly changing feelings are solid, although the notion of a guy learning relationships are about more than sex at age 75 is a lot more pathetic than learning the same lesson at age 25. Nonetheless, it worked for me, in part because it was so pathetic…

On the other hand, the impetus of Herb’s horn-dog outlook did not. I wanted to buy into it, but Herb comes across as such an asshole by page two, he has a long, long road to redeem himself. Basically, “I want to get laid because my dead wife wouldn’t put out” isn’t good enough for me. It’s a plausible motivation, which is more than I could say for the characters in Butter or The Oranges, but it makes the guy we’re supposed to like into somebody we don’t like. Call me crazy, but I’m not going to automatically root for the guy who’s talking about banging retirees at his late wife’s wake. Meanwhile, Jules is supposed to be the old fuddy-duddy, described as “the Jewish Mister Rogers” — he’s just no fun, Fruchbom wants us to believe. It’s never that simple. It’d be much more interesting if Herb’s newfound obsession with sex came from a deeper place. Maybe his wife isn’t simply uninterested in sex; maybe she’s shrew-like, withholding both physically and emotionally, and her death makes him feel free. Maybe he’s using sex to fill that sense of loss he feels for a wife he legitimately loves.

I don’t know. This isn’t my script, but this whole believability issue traces back to yet another tiny moment — a little throwaway moment at the funeral, where Herb mentions his wife was too liberated to take his name, a rather shocking and interesting character trait considering they would have married at some point in the early ’50s. Without having more information, I can’t accept that someone this liberated wouldn’t just divorce her husband. We’re supposed to buy into the idea that Jules loved Herb’s wife and vice-versa, even though neither acted on this impulse. I could buy generational mores as an explanation, but it all goes back to that “liberated” thing: if she’s so liberated and so unhappy, what’s the problem? Even if she were devoutly religious and part of a denomination that frowned on divorce… If they frowned on divorce, chances are, in the early ’50s, they also frowned on wives keeping their last names. Why stick with one tenet and not another? Maybe if we got more development from Jules, this “why didn’t they divorce?” issue would reveal itself. Maybe Jules sticks with the male code of ethics, which states (in part) that if your best friend has dated a girl for more than six contiguous months, you’re not allowed to get involved with her when they break up. (The rule compounds the deeper and longer the relationship goes — married for 20 years, you’re not allowed to speak to the woman if they divorce.) Or maybe Jules loved his own wife just that much more. Maybe he and his wife had kids and stayed together for their sake. I don’t know — I’m spitballing ideas because Fruchbom doesn’t provide enough information. He should.

The Bottom Line

The plot works. Much of the character stuff works. Even a lot of the humor — comic premises and the occasional one-liner — works. The dialogue doesn’t. The aspects of the characters that don’t work certainly trump those that do, and this nearly sinks the whole script. It’s salvageable with a solid, thorough rewrite.

Posted by Stan on December 21, 2008 1:43 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 20, 2008

Black List Script #6 – Fuckbuddies by Liz Meriwether

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 guy and a girl struggle to have an exclusively sexual relationship as they both come to realize they want much more.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

EMMA FRANKLIN and ADAM KURTZMAN lie in bed together, discussing the word “fuckbuddies” and trying to find an alternative to it.

In 1994, a group of 13-year-olds at summer camp sneak to watch the girls dance — specifically, the one girl in the group whose recently developed breasts bounce with each movement. Adam is among them, but he’s not looking at this girl — he’s looking at Emma, tall and scrawny. He asks her if she wants to “freak.” Moments later, they’re freaking to TLC’s “No Scrubs.” Emma doesn’t understand the song lyrics, so Adam attempts to explain in a faux-black patois. Annoyed by the noise from other campers, Emma invites Adam to “the Dumpster.” Adam’s surprised. We discover this is a mysterious make-out spot because of the moderate privacy it affords. Adam and Emma talk about themselves — Emma’s “life is pretty fucked up,” Adam’s parents are getting divorced, Emma believes marriage is bad and that people aren’t meant to be together forever. A couple of other campers ask for their spot since they aren’t even making out. Instead of leaving, they make out, which causes Adam to cry. Emma’s not very sensitive to the situation.

In 2001, Adam is at a University of Michigan frat party with his friends SCOTTIE (athletic) and ELI (unknown). Adam makes out with his girlfriend, VANESSA. When she goes to get a beer, Eli gripes that Adam’s never going to have sex with Vanessa. Adam doesn’t mind. Eli observes that Scottie, who’s dancing shirtless, has a gay nipple. This prompts Eli to mention that he was raised by two gay dads and he’s proud of them. Adam catches sight of a girl walking into the party — it’s Emma. He hasn’t seen her since camp. Adam approaches her, and she knows exactly who she is and where they met, immediately. Surprised to see her, Adam asks if she goes to the school. Emma says she goes to MIT but grew up in nearby Ypsilanti.

Adam and Emma flirt with each other until Emma asks if he has a girlfriend. Adam points out Vanessa, whom Emma describes as “fat” and having a “McDonald’s face.” She asks why Vanessa won’t sleep with him; Adam is surprised she guessed that but denies it. Adam’s baffled, but Emma explains she’s pre-med and is, therefore, comfortable talking about the human body. Also, she’s kind of a slut, so she knows a lot about the genitalia in particular. Adam reluctantly confides that he and Vanessa are waiting until they’re ready. Emma doesn’t understand this logic. They go out to her car and have sex. In the midst of it, Adam feels a little uncomfortable about cheating on his girlfriend. He starts to ramble, so she gives him his pants back.

Walking around campus, Emma explains that, while she doesn’t regularly sleep around, she doesn’t have a problem with it because people just want to have sex, so why deny those feelings? Emma invites Adam to go to “this stupid thing” with her tomorrow. It turns out to be her father’s funeral. At the wake, a neighbor approaches Emma to share sympathy, and Adam claims to be Emma’s “baby-daddy,” much to her amusement and the neighbor’s confusion. Emma has a conversation with her mother, SANDRA, about what a bastard her father was. Sandra wonders why she loved him, and Emma insinuates it’s Sandra’s belief in hopeless causes. Sandra wonders why Emma doesn’t believe in anything that’s hopeless. Sandra decides to go inside and watch Bambi and cry. Inside, Sandra watches the movie and sobs. Adam also watches and cries. Emma sits between them, dry-eyed. Emma drops Adam off at his dorm, telling him he’s wonderful and she hopes she never sees him again.

Los Angeles, 2007. Adam plays personal assistant to a precious child sitcom star. After a taping, he goes to his father’s huge house. ALVIN is in his late 50s, but he’s tan and muscular. He tells Adam that he’s now dating Vanessa, with whom Adam broke up eight months earlier. Adam’s enraged. He goes and gets drunk with Eli and Scottie. Once he gets drunk enough, Adam decides to call every woman he knows and tell them how wonderful Vanessa was. Eli and Scottie try to stop him. The next morning, Adam wakes up…in Emma’s apartment. He’s confused, because she doesn’t live in L.A., but she tells him she just moved. Adam apologizes for the state he must have been in when he called. They have sex. Emma gripes about Adam’s Nixon-esque “sex face.” When he orgasms, Adam tries to impersonate Nixon, which disturbs Emma.

Afterward, Emma’s all business. She’s okay with Adam having meaningless but safe sex with her, as long as they lay out some ground rules. A montage follows, during which they have sex amid endless quips and banter. The only relevant information delivered is that Emma is now at UCLA Medical School and Adam has a strong desire for a career in standup comedy. While at the teaching hospital, Emma discusses the notion of fuckbuddies with friends SUMAIRE and CONNIE. Connie is puzzled as to why Emma doesn’t long for more, while Sumaire’s unhappy marriage is a textbook example of why she doesn’t long for more. DR. METZNER, their good-looking mentor, sends them back out to work. Scottie, Eli, Emma, and Scottie’s gay dads watch Adam’s standup debut. It’s awful. A fat woman throws jalapeño poppers at him. When Emma isn’t around, Scottie double-checks to make sure Emma and Adam aren’t really “dating,” because he wants to ask her out.

Adam asks Emma if she sleeps with other guys, even though asking such a question violates their rules. Emma asks why he’d ask, and Adam tells her that Scottie wants to ask her out. Emma gets mad that Adam already told Scottie “no,” so Adam gives her Scottie’s number and they get into a passive-aggressive argument about seeing other people. Some time later, Adam notices a cute assistant making eyes at him. While having sex, Emma gives Adam some pointers on asking the assistant out. Adam humiliates himself in front of the assistant and a bunch of others. Alvin comes to work to invite Adam out to dinner with himself and Vanessa. Adam goes to the teaching hospital, where he tries to hit up Sumaire for some drugs that will numb him mentally for this dinner. For some reason, Sumaire does, so Emma is forced to take Adam to the restaurant for the dinner. Throughout the dinner, Adam’s lowered inhibitions prompt him to say a variety of stupid and/or bizarre things, while Emma tries to explain his behavior as symptoms of an allergic reaction “to his own hair.” Adam tries to pick a fistfight with Alvin, at which point Emma drags Adam out of the restaurant. Later, while coming down at his apartment, Adam tells Emma this arrangement is no longer working. He tells her he loves her and begs her to be his girlfriend. Emma leaves.

At the teaching hospital, Emma loses her first patient. She calls up Adam and asks to come over, but Adam’s on a date (with CARMEN, the assistant he humiliated himself in front of earlier). She finally responds to Dr. Metzner’s subtle flirtations, going with him to a hotel room for sex. She doesn’t respond well to his bailing on her afterward, the way she usually does. Meanwhile, Adam tries to inject his and Emma’s cutesy sex talk into the act, but Carmen doesn’t respond to it. Adam’s immediately bored and going through the motions. Later that night, Emma and Adam talk to each other on the phone, each griping about their respective sex partners. When Emma hears Adam had sex, she gets jealous. When Adam accuses her, she denies it, but Adam knows better. He dedicates the next few days to intentionally trying to make her jealous by describing outlandish, untrue sex acts. He goes to an improv class where he meets an actual woman, who finds him funny. They make out in the parking lot when Emma calls. For some reason, Adam answers. They snipe at each other, then Adam hangs up. When he and Joy arrive back at his apartment, they discover Emma waiting. She claims to be Emma’s doctor, who performed a testicle transplant on Adam. Emma and Joy get into a verbal girlfight, until Joy gets pissed off and leave. Adam and Emma have sex. Afterward, Emma gives Adam a belated birthday present — a rubber chicken. They discuss the many uses of a rubber chicken.

Adam convinces Emma to go on a real date with him. He dresses up nice, buys her a flower bouquet, takes her to a museum to look at art and a meditation garden. In the middle of the garden, Emma freaks out. She hurls dozens of hypothetical “bad” scenarios at Adam, who has a rational and/or “funny” and/or “cutesy” solution to all of them. Nonetheless, it descends into an obnoxious argument that results in Adam dropping Emma off at the hospital and telling her he can’t see her anymore. She agrees, so he follows her into the hospital, repeating over and over that he’ll never see her again. Adam gets wasted and decides to embrace Emma’s fuckbuddy philosophy, getting laid multiple times in the process.

He performs his standup act, which has improved significantly enough to garner the attention of a talent agent. The agent claims Alvin told him to go to Adam’s show. Adam goes to Alvin’s house and thanks him sincerely. At the hospital, Emma robotically breaks the news of breast cancer to an older woman. Angered by Emma’s emotionlessness, the woman forces Emma to just sit with her, holding her hand, and then maybe she can try again. Dr. Metzner approaches Emma in the hall, but Metzner blows her off. She gets a VoiceMail from Adam — ostensibly for the first time since they broke up — inviting her to his standup act. Emma shows up and watches him with pride.

After the show, Emma seeks out Adam but sees him talking confidently to a bunch of girls. She panics and leaves; Adam, meanwhile, scans the crowd for Emma but doesn’t see her. Emma goes on a date with MIKE, an obnoxious financial guy who’s the grandson of the cancer woman from earlier. Emma tells Mike she wants to take it slow. Emma picks up Sandra from LAX but is embarrassed when her mother acts like an obnoxious, rube-like tourist. Sandra also surprises Emma with a new boyfriend, TUCK, whom Emma immediately hates. Mike calls and invites Emma out to meet her friends. She’s uneasy but agrees to it. Before the date, Emma and Sandra talk about men. Emma demands to know why Sandra feels the need to be “taken care of.” Sandra explains that she wanted to be their for Emma’s father and wanted to raise Emma, and now she just wants to be loved and taken care of. Emma doesn’t agree with this mindset, but Sandra argues that Emma doesn’t have much room to talk, since she’s never experienced love.

Thanks to his agent, Adam has a one-line guest spot on a crime show. A makeup artist works up a massive head wound. Emma meets Mike, his friends, and their girlfriends at a bar. They’re all vapid and obnoxious. On the sound stage, a P.A. hands Adam his cell phone — it’s Emma. She’s drunk, stoned, and irritated by everyone talking about weddings. Immediately, Adam bails on the job, races to the bar. Still in his bloody wardrobe and head-wound makeup, Adam baffles the bar patrons as he approaches Emma and they make out. Emma confesses that she loves him, and they have sex. It’s different — intense, intimate. Later, Emma suggests they have breakfast. Adam’s scared. When Emma wakes up the next morning, Adam’s gone.

Before leaving for the airport, Sandra gives Emma some sage advice: Emma was forced to grow up tough, but now it’s time for her to stop being so strong. She can let herself hurt. Emma sees them off, then goes to another of Adam’s standup performances. He’s surprised to see Alvin and Vanessa in the audience, laughing loud at his bits about them. Afterward, Emma tries to run away when she sees Adam chatting up yet another girl, but this time Adam sees and goes after her. He apologizes for not staying and explains that she can’t just decide everything’s different after he spent so much time trying to get over her. He suggests that they might have blown it — their timing is off. Emma says maybe that’s true, but she’s still in love with him, and she’s sorry she spent so much time pretending not to care. Somebody in the comedy club whisks Adam away. He asks Emma to wait; she leaves.

After everyone’s cleared out, Alvin and Adam have a heart to heart that basically amounts to: Adam’s not an asshole, so he should stick with Emma since he clearly loves her. Emma goes to have some meaningless sex with Dr. Metzner, but it depresses her. Emma calls Sandra to tell her she thinks she finally gets it. Adam rushes to the hospital in search of Emma, who’s not there. Suddenly, she calls him and tells him to turn on channel 27. Adam changes the waiting room TV. Bambi plays. Getting it, Adam rushes to Emma’s apartment, where she’s finally mourning the loss of her father. Adam holds her, and they both bawl. Then they have sex. Then they discuss how great things will be now that they’re really a couple — they’ll break all their rules. The next morning, Adam wakes her up and asks what they’re going to have for breakfast.

Notes

I have a theory about how this script came into existence. Maybe it’s wrong, but it feels right. Screenwriter Liz Meriwether tape-recorded an improv group whose main game involved asking the audience for three things: a generic scene from their favorite romantic comedy, a non-sequitur not commonly associated with romance, and five or six “shocking” obscenities the troupe has to work into the scene. After taping these improv scenes, Meriwether transcribed the dialogue and cobbled together Fuckbuddies, 124 pages of schlock masquerading as sharp, edgy wit. I want to give it points for trying so damn hard to be funny. Unfortunately, any points I would have rewarded for effort would get canceled out by how severely it fails.

Picture 124 pages of dialogue like this:

Crammed into the confines of a bland romantic comedy that hits all the typical beats, Fuckbuddies lacks the psychological and biological insight of the movies it’s most obviously ripping off (Annie Hall and When Harry Met Sally…, mainly, but there’s also a heady dose of the Seinfeld episode “The Deal”). The foundations of their respective relationship perspectives work for me. Emma’s fear of intimacy stems from an abusive, alcoholic father, and Adam’s obsession with rescuing his partners is a direct result of his philandering, drug-addicted father forcing him, as a child, into a caretaker role with possibly both parents. However, it seems like Meriwether picked up these plausible motivations through cultural osmosis rather than genuine understanding of human behavior. My only evidence is the rapid, nonsensical character changes in the third act, which misidentify the characters’ hang-ups and solve them in dumb, inorganic ways. Oh, also, this line of dialogue (Emma justifying why she’s attracted to jerks): “There must be some biological reasoning, like assholes used to be the better hunters or something.” Careful readers will remember that Emma is supposed to be a doctor, and yes, there is a biological explanation, and she would know what it is and probably be in therapy to work through the problems. This is why screenwriters shouldn’t be allowed to give people any profession more advanced than retail “customer associate.”

The plot lingers far too long on backstory and the “fuckbuddying” section of the script. Because it adheres to the most generic possible formula, the story needs to move past the “gettin’ along, fuckin’ fine” section much more quickly. It lacks conflict, which in turn causes it to lack momentum, which means we’re watching a flabby, overlong Saturday Night Live sketch with Tourette’s syndrome and even fewer funny jokes. Because of this, the script is about 30-40 pages longer than it needs to be, and much of that extra page-count comes from aimless, conflict-free scenes that mostly involving rhyming, repetitive dialogue peppered with pop-culture references (most egregious example: “Not even if you’re a Care Bear giving me a care-stare”). Meriwether is the first screenwriter I’ve seen that makes Diablo Cody look like Woody Allen.

The inevitable “we no longer get along” section isn’t much better, but at least it has some forward motion. Still, allow me to linger on the “fuckbuddying” stage for as long as Meriwether does. After all, it’s the title of the script, so why not? Look, I don’t want to get on my soapbox about what’s wrong with romantic comedies, but this script just plays into all the typical problems — juvenile, unbelievable romances; hacky rehashes of scenes lifted from better movies; generic conflict/plot/resolution; and so on. Yet, it has… Well, I can’t call it a “fresh” concept, but it’s hitting the culture at the right time. When Harry Met Sally… is better in every conceivable way (and it’s a movie I don’t particularly like, which should illustrate Fuckbuddies’ overall quality), but in the intervening 20 years, the “fuckbuddy” concept has become more of a social norm. Rather than using that to her advantage, Meriwether is content to pilfer reliable but overused ideas and offer simplistic solutions instead of facing the real challenges her characters need to overcome.

The disaster area Fuckbuddies calls its third act undoes what little the script has going for it. Meriwether’s evident but poorly developed “female-empowerment” subtext works fine until she decides Emma’s only problem is being too tough to cry. The overall message goes from “if you can make it work, fuckbuddying is A-OK” to “the only way for a woman to make it in a man’s world is to turn into a puddle of mush and let the man take care of you.” The less said about Adam’s quick change-and-change-back bullshit, the better, but I’ll say this: Adam’s a rescuer. This is evident in everything he does — until he ditches Emma for breakfast. It’s evident from the first moment we see him, attracted more to the sullen, damaged girl in the corner than the perky girl with big tits. It’s part of who he is, so the instant — the very second — the words “I love you” escape from Emma’s lips, he’d be attached at the hip. What’s with the crisis and the false drama? Meriwether never even tries to make it coherent, but if she wants to give him a crisis, why not have him identify his “rescuer” tendencies during that brief broken-up period? Maybe he goes for a little therapy, maybe he just reads a psych-101 textbook, and he says, “Hey, I’m that guy,” and works on trying to fix it. So Emma tries to work her way back into his life, and that’s where the conflict comes from. It’s more believable than whatever the hell his crisis is supposed to be the way it’s written now. I still don’t know. Feel free to drop a comment explaining it to me. Nevertheless, something like this could lead to roughly the same treacly, happy ending with maybe 10% more satisfaction.

Anatomy of an Unfunny Joke

This special section is devoted to one particular scene in Fuckbuddies that drove me nuts. It takes place in 1994, when Adam and Emma are 12-13.

What’s wrong with this picture?

1. “No Scrubs” came out in 1999, but this scene takes place in 1994, the year of their breakthrough CrazySexyCool (which didn’t come out until November, long after summer camp). I’m not even a TLC fan and I knew that off the top of my head. Okay, I didn’t know the November part, but you know what? It took me ten seconds to look it up. Why is basic research so difficult for writers?!
2. The lyrics aren’t even transcribed correctly!
3. Extremely white people talking like black people hasn’t been funny since Silver Streak.
4. The joke exists solely to turn the idea of “freaking” into a bland sex joke and make a stale pop-culture reference. I’ve already gone into the fact that the pop-culture reference is almost as anachronistic as Juno’s Blair Witch Project reference, but how is this even a punchline? “It sounds like he’s propositioning her, but they don’t cuz it’s innocent cuz they’re 13.” LOLOLOLOL!!!!! I see where the funny is supposed to be, and yet it’s not there. Maybe my sense of humor is not sufficiently drenched in retarded irony.
5. I hated this script. Worse than Butter, if you can imagine (I couldn’t).

In fairness, Fuckbuddies did have one dialogue exchange that made me laugh (which is more than I can say for Butter and The Oranges (even though those are still, in terms of story/structure/character, better scripts — we’re talking varying degrees of shit, of course):

The Bottom Line

It’s not an original idea, but as I said, with some good, insightful writing, it could fit nicely into the current cultural zeitgeist. It could even remain relevant in the future, the way the movies Meriwether rips off have, by concentrating more on believable human behavior than cheap jokes and clichés. Human behavior won’t change in the next 25 years; how people respond to a “No Scrubs” joke will. Hire someone else to rewrite this. Someone with a better understanding of the psychology and biology of both genders, someone who can play with the conventions of romantic comedies instead of just adhering to them, someone with insight into the current generation of 20- and 30-somethings… Or maybe just somebody who’s funny.

Posted by Stan on December 20, 2008 10:41 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

December 19, 2008

Black List Script #5 – The Low Dweller by Brad Ingelsby

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 trying to assimilate into society after being released from jail discovers that someone from his past is out to settle a score.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

CHARLIE “SLIM” HENDRICK (late 20s), identified in the script as the low dweller of the title, wakes up disheveled, under a tree on a summer night. Sheriff’s deputies, led by MULBY NOLAN (late 20s), tries to get the disoriented Slim to talk. When he doesn’t, Nolan cuffs Slim.

FOUR YEARS LATER. 1986. LOWLANDS. SOUTHERN INDIANA.

Slim is released from prison. He walks to a roadside diner, where the owner automatically knows the story — anyone passing through this town on foot could only come from one place. The owner invites a fat trucker to give Slim a ride into nearby Easton. Slim refuses it. He makes the 23-mile walk into Easton and arrives at his brother’s home. CORMAC, Slim’s younger brother, lies in bed next to an obese girl when Slim shows up. Cormac welcomes his brother home by yelling for him to shut the bedroom door.

A month later, Slim is working a farm. He asks the owner for more hours. He goes home to Cormac’s, offers to go out with him for a burger. Cormac tells him he already ate, so Slim goes alone. He eats in silence at a tavern frequented by local day-laborers. Days later, Slim goes to a restaurant, Jilly’s, run by JOHN O’RILEY (60s, also the local bookie), and asks where Cormac is and “who did it.” Cormac got his ass kicked over a woman, and he lies in a bloodied heap out back. After taking a look at him, John warns Slim that Cormac changed when Slim “left,” and also that he’s into John for a lot of money. Slim offers to pay half in a few days, which John grudgingly accepts.

GABBY O’RILEY (30s) comes out back. She and Slim share a meaningful glance, then Gabby berates John about keeping her late. When he still won’t leave, she wordlessly climbs into Slim’s truck. As Slim shoves Cormac into his pick-up, BUD DEAKINS (50s) arrives. A mystery man stays inside Bud’s shadowy car. Slim drives away as Bud walks into Jilly’s. Inside the car, the mystery man’s hands move skillfully as he slices into a pepperoni log with a box-cutter. He gives the slice to his dog. Inside Jilly’s, Bud menaces John, insinuating he’s skimming off the top to pay for medical bills owed by his late wife. Bud leaves the restaurant, and a moment later the mystery man enters. He is SAM NEBRASKA (40s and unattractive). John hides a knife up his sleeve, but Sam’s too quick for him — he stabs John with the box-cutter.

Slim and Gabby share a long, awkward silence, broken by Cormac’s unconscious farting. Slim apologizes for not dropping by sooner. She says nothing, going inside her house, where Slim sees her greet a five-year-old son, BEN. Slim drives Cormac home and flops him on the couch. Meanwhile, Bud and Sam drag John out into the middle of a cornfield. Bud is a little unsettled by how many “accounts” they’ve had to “close” lately. He examines John’s business log and sees Cormac Hendrick’s name on the top of the list.

Early the next morning, Nolan (now sheriff) is awakened by a phone call. He’s disheveled, an angry, functioning alcoholic with a chronic cough. He looks 10 years older than he is (now 30). He takes care of his elderly mother before leaving. At Cormac’s house, Slim carefully chastises Cormac over his drinking and gambling. Cormac tells Slim that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who taken and those they take from. Cormac accepts his fate. Slim hands Cormac some of his farming earnings, which enrages Cormac. He tells Slim he has a party to go to that night so not to expect him, then storms out of the house and drives away.

Nolan comes upon BRADY O’RILEY (22), who lies naked and unconscious in some shrubs outside a woman’s house. Nolan awakens him, and Brady insists this was a prank. The woman who owns the house is not pleased. Nolan drags Brady away, and Brady asks Nolan if he plans to tell Gabby (his sister) about this. Gabby watches Ben play catch with himself as Nolan arrives with a now-dressed Brady. Brady goes into the house without a word. Nolan talks to Gabby, who woke him up in the first place, because John’s missing. Nolan wonders who saw him last. She says Slim, which immediately rubs Nolan the wrong way. Nolan says he’ll check around for John, then confesses he went out on a date with another woman. Gabby doesn’t care — she just wishes he’d stop telling her. Nolan leaves.

After work, Slim finds Brady waiting in his pick-up. Brady punches him in the jaw for “what [Slim] did ta [his] sister.” He promises whatever comes next will be for what Slim has done to John. Slim shrugs and tells him to check with Gabby — he didn’t do anything. Brady claims he remembers “what happened down in Rittsfield.” Slim doesn’t want to hear this, so he throws Brady out of the truck and drives off. Late at night, Cormac staggers out of the party and to his car. Sam Nebraska, .45 in one hand and box-cutter in the other, waits. Sam slices open one of Cormac’s hands and urges him to drive into the backroads.

Nolan waits for Slim inside the Hendrick house. They have an awkward, angry conversation about John. Nolan suggests a motive — the money Cormac owed John. Nolan asks where Cormac is; Slim doesn’t know. He tells Nolan to check with Gabby, because they left together. Nolan leaves. In the middle of the field, Bud watches as Sam pounds the crap out of Cormac. In the end, Sam kills him. Meanwhile, Slim waits up for Cormac, who never shows up. The next morning, a passing police cruiser sees Cormac’s car sitting in the middle of the field. As Nolan and the deputies speculate on what may have happened, rain begins to pour.

After Cormac’s funeral, Slim goes to the basement to seek out his old 12-gauge shotgun. He gets into the pick-up and finds Brady at a burger joint. Slim demands to know if Brady knows John’s business. Brady says he doesn’t know much, but he gives Slim the name of a collector, who once worked for his dad, who will most likely no more. Slim heads in the direction of the collector, dragging Brady along for the ride. Outside a diner, Slim and Brady confront CULLEN the ex-collector. After some fisticuffs and gun-based threats, Cullen coughs up a name (Terry Adams) and a town in Ohio.

On their way back into Easton, Slim and Brady visit JONAH FINN (60s), who runs a shop for antique gun repair. Slim catches Jonah up on the situation as he attempts to stock up on weapons. Jonah volunteers to go with them, since he’s dying of asbestos poisoning and doesn’t have long to live. Slim wonders about LEENY, Jonah’s 18-year-old deaf daughter, but Jonah shrugs her off, claiming she takes care of herself better than Jonah could. They make plans to leave the following morning.

That night, at Cormac’s house, Gabby confronts Slim. Brady told her everything, and she is not happy he’s going on what’s effectively a suicide run (it’ll either leave him dead or in jail). She slaps him and tells him that, while Slim may have ruined what they had, she won’t let him ruin Brady, too. Then she leaves. The following morning, a farmer finds John’s body in his field. As he leaves to pick up Jonah, Slim notices a sheriff’s cruiser parked nearby. He picks up Jonah. As they head out of town, they find a cruiser parked across the road, blocking the path. Slim gets out, and Nolan confronts him about the situation. It immediately turns into a conversation about Gabby, not the potential crimes, which leads Slim to attack Nolan. Jonah gets out to try to calm Slim down. They get back in the truck and move past Nolan’s cruiser.

Jonah regales Slim with old-man stories until Slim parks at a rest stop. Brady’s waiting for them, pissed that they left without him. Even more pissed that they found John’s body. Together, the three of them drive into Bowenville, Ohio, and head to the local diner to ask around about Terry Adams. They get resistance from one man until Slim shoves his head into a used, unflushed toilet. The man tells them Terry runs a drive-in theatre at the edge of town. The three men head to the drive-in, where they’re ready to assault Terry Adams in the projection booth. He’s a little more even-tempered, asking them to wait until the movie’s over, and then they’ll talk. After the movie, Terry tells him he used to collect for a Philadelphian gangster named RICHIE NEBRASKA, and that the men they’d be looking for are his muscle — Bud and Sam. Terry warns them about Sam by telling them about an experience he had collecting with Sam once. He ended up killing an entire family — husband, wife, teenage children, grandparents. Terry gives them the name and location of Richie’s Pennsylvania bar, Cooz’s. He says Bud and Sam live upstairs at the bar.

Later, Slim and Jonah sit in the back of the pick-up, watching Brady flirt with one of the drive-in employees. Jonah asks about Gabby, and about whether or not Slim is up for what’s coming next. Slim tells Jonah he feels like he failed Cormac, so he has to do this to make up for that. The next day, the three head up to Coatesville, PA. That night, at Cooz’s, JIMMY PERCY (40s) tends bar and gripes about the leaky roof. CC and ELLIOT HARDINGS, twins in their 40s, have a “That boy ain’t right”-type argument about an unknown kid, then wander out of the bar. DOC BARSTOW comes from the bathroom, and the two of them discuss the same kid, named “Magwynn.” Upstairs, RICHIE NEBRASKA (50s) mentions to Sam (his brother) his intentions to retire. Outside in the rain, Slim, Brady, and Jonah load their weapons and discuss the plan to bust inside. Slim excuses himself to urinate, and Brady asks Jonah what it’s like to kill somebody — if the guilt haunts you. Jonah tells him the haunting thing is knowing you’re capable of murder.

Slim and Brady enter the bar from the front. Jonah goes up the rear fire stairs. Two separate shootouts ensue: upstairs, Sam gets the drop on Jonah, shooting him twice; downstairs, Slim and Brady kill Jimmy, Doc, and Richie. Bud, meanwhile, is in a bedroom receiving oral sex from FRANCIS, a crackhead transvestite. Bud jumps into the fray as Francis lights his pipe, oblivious. Slim tells Brady to go into the bathroom and hide out. On the stairs, Sam spots Bud and kills him. Downstairs, Jimmy Percy is still alive. He tries to shoot Slim, but Slim gets him first. High as a kite, Francis heads downstairs, turns on the jukebox, and begins to dance. Creeping back upstairs, Slim enters Sam’s room. He finds Jonah on the floor, dying. Jonah indicates the upstairs bathroom. Slim bursts into the bathroom, where the tub water overflows but the faucet still runs, and a struggle ensues.

After Slim gets the upper hand, Sam dives out the window just as Jonah aims to shoot him. Slim calls for Brady to get upstairs. He tells Brady to stay with Jonah, then heads downstairs after Sam. Slim doesn’t spot Sam until it’s almost too late, but before either man can do anything, the ceiling collapses from the bathtub water. Sam divebombs Slim, knocking his gun away, and tries to cut him with the box-cutter. Brady, who fell through the ceiling, manages to shoot Sam before he can do any serious damage to Slim. Police sirens rise in the distance. They grab Jonah’s body and get the hell out.

Back in Easton, Slim and Brady try to go back to business as usual. They go to the Easton Folk Festival, a modest fair. Brady gripes about trouble sleeping. Leeny approaches Slim for a dance. Gabby sees this and is unhappy. After the dance, Leeny sits near Brady and Ben. Brady flirts with her, not realizing she’s deaf. Slim picks Gabby out of the crowd and goes to her. Now it’s Nolan’s turn to be unhappy. He watches them dance. Slim watches mournfully as Gabby leaves him. He goes home, gets loaded, and stumbles into the bedroom — where Gabby waits. They make love. Afterward, she tells Slim she knows he killed the people who killed her father, but she doesn’t care. She tells Slim that Ben isn’t hers — he’s Nolan’s. She laments the fact that Nolan loves her but she can’t love him because she loves Slim, who doesn’t love her. Slim doesn’t say a word.

The next morning, Nolan’s waiting for Slim. As before, a conversation that begins with Nolan menacing Slim about the incident at Cooz’s turns into a brawl over Gabby, whom Nolan loves. This time, the fight is interrupted by Gabby, who consoles Slim instead of Nolan. This makes Nolan even angrier, and he mentions that if anyone comes after him because of what happened at Cooz’s, Nolan won’t stop them.

At a hospital, Sam Nebraska has survived. He tells doctors and detectives he doesn’t remember anything, but the fiery glint in his eyes suggests otherwise. When he’s discharged, Sam immediately gets a gun, rounds up the Hardings — CC, Edward, and Magwynn (17) — and they head out for Easton. At the O’Rileys’ house, Brady asks Slim what he remembers “that night…down in Rittsfield” — the incident that landed him in jail. Slim remembers nothing — just drinking and waking up, covered in blood, under a shagbark hickory tree. Nolan arrives to tell Gabby that he’s going to Pennsylvania to question Sam Nebraska. When Slim and Brady find out he’s still alive, they’re petrified. Slim charges Brady with the task of protecting Gabby and Ben while he’s gone. Sam and the others kill Terry Adams in Ohio, then move on to Easton. Along the way, Sam gets so irritated with Magwynn, he starts cutting on him with his box-cutter. CC does nothing to intervene.

In Easton, Sam gets the O’Rileys’ address by intimidating a pharmacist. At the farm, Brady starts packing suitcases and prepping to leave. Slim, meanwhile, has gone to Leeny’s and packed a suitcase for her. They head out. Before Brady can even get to Gabby, Sam and the others are there. Sam shoots Brady, demands to know where “the other one” is. He follows Brady’s gaze outside to Gabby. From the other direction, CC and Elliot descend on Gabby. Slim returns to the O’Rileys’ with Leeny and finds the wounded Brady. He tries to get information, but Brady can’t speak. While Leeny discovers Ben (apparently unharmed, just terrified) in his dark bedroom, Slim finds Gabby upstairs, in a bloody-water-filled bathtub.

That night, Nolan arrives at the farmhouse and sees the blood on Slim’s shirt. He’s terrified for Ben, but when Slim says he’s safe, it dawns on Nolan, who blames Slim for her death. They have yet another fight, interrupted by the return of Sam, CC, and Elliot. Slim and Nolan come after the three men, guns blazing. They manage to hit CC on the first go-around. Elliot gets the drop on Slim, shooting him twice. Slim drops. Nolan kills Elliot. As Nolan tries to move Slim into a safer part of the house, Slim begins to see something resembling heaven — a golden wheatfield where Cormac, Jonah, and Gabby wait. Nolan pulls Slim back to reality as Sam enters the house. Slim gets to his feet, barely, as Sam comes upon Nolan. He kills the sheriff. As Sam reloads, Slim shoots Sam, this time killing him. Slim’s adrenaline drops, and he collapses again. Magwynn is the only one left, relatively unharmed. Slim tries to walk away from the scene, but he collapses. Fade to black.

“Years later,” Ben is now seven, walking through a wheatfield. Slim, looking serene, emerges from the wheatfield, as well. They walk toward the O’Rileys’ farmhouse, which has now been painted and refurbished. Brady sits with Leeny on the porch swing outside.

Notes

The Low Dweller has a low-rent Cormac McCarthy vibe to it, which makes it easy to compare it to the Coens’ treatment of No Country for Old Men. Eerie similarities abound, in pacing, moral ambiguity, and taciturn main characters. It also features characters speaking in an oddly cadenced, faux-Southern patois more at home in Tennessee or West Texas than southern Indiana. Even the fact that it’s inexplicably set in the 1980s is kind of similar.

The main point of comparison, however, is its primary difference: while No Country for Old Men is about the nature of violence and humanity, The Low Dweller is about…? It escapes me, but I’m sure it’s about something. Although I can’t call it anything special, The Low Dweller is not a bad script, and the story is so plodding and aimless it just has to be some kind of deep exploration of… Something. Or somebody. Pass?

Slim feels he has a duty to uphold, to avenge the death of his brother. He feels he screwed up Cormac (McCarthy shout-out?), so he has to clean up the mess…by making a bigger one. I guess it’s sort of about a screwed-up family loyalty, but it doesn’t quite work as a meditation on the subject because… Well, there’s no actual meditation. Multiple perspectives on the topic are not explored through its subplots or other characters. Everyone on the side of killing Sam Nebraska and his men agree; everyone on the other side is opposed, and these dueling perspectives don’t meet until each side is aiming guns at the others’ faces.

What does that leave? A drawn-out action movie with all the pretensions of epic drama but none of the insight. Stock action characters and relationships, none of them even reaching the depth of Raw Deal (whose classic “You should not drink and bake” exchange says more about those two characters in one action and one sentence than The Low Dweller spits out about its characters in 123 pages), following a standard revenge story. It meanders to create the illusion of depth, poignancy, and drama, but it’s nothing but a mirage that makes the script as tedious to read as it will be to watch.

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 Ingelsby (or whoever produces it) wants the story to be. As it stands, The Low Dweller 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.

The Bottom Line

Legend has it that Leonardo DiCaprio and the Scott brothers will produce this script, which could still go either way. Ridley Scott is the king of ambitious, pretentious Oscar bait (some of it good, some of it awful), while Tony Scott is the king of schlocky yet efficient action movies. DiCaprio, too, has had a mixed-bag career of misguided epic drama (Gangs of New York, Blood Diamond) and confounding, mediocre action flicks (The Quick and the Dead and Body of Lies, which was also directed by Ridley Scott). It’ll be interesting to see where they go with it, but it’ll probably still hover around “mediocre,” never rising to its full potential but, at least, not getting worse.

Posted by Stan on December 19, 2008 10:45 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 18, 2008

Black List Script #4 – Big Hole by Michael Gilio

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): “An old cowboy goes on a mission to recover his money after a million dollar sweepstakes scam cleans out his entire bank account.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

FRANCIS LEE, SR. (78), is a curmudgeonly old Montana ranch owner with a simple ritual: on the first of each month, MAYA (30s, Blackfoot Indian) comes to clean his house and take him into town. In Glass Valley, Lee gets a trim at Dutch’s Barbershop, picks up his prescriptions and buys his groceries from the Cole Mercantile, does his banking at Wachovia, and has lunch at a restaurant called the Steak Knife. His lunch has a ritual of its own: the waitress brings him a thick, juicy steak and a plate of French fries. He cuts up the steak, savors the juices, and spits out each piece, then sucks the salt off the French fries.

In September, the routine goes off without a hitch, despite the minor irritation of DEAN (Dutch’s technophile son) acting like an idiot, young bank teller LORETTA ignoring him as he philosophizes, elderly checkout clerk ALMA griping that the Cole Mercantile is struggling against a competing warehouse store, and seeing HECK — a mysterious man who once knew Lee very well — at the Steak Knife. Also, Maya gets stuck behind a long freight train and is late picking Lee up. Irritated, Lee threatens to fire her. Maya acts like this is a normal thing and pays it no mind.

Back at Lee’s ranch house, he’s left alone. He impulsively dials an unknown phone number but hangs up before completing it. A moment later, the phone rings. It’s a polite, young, male voice informing Lee that he’s won a $1 million sweepstakes. Lee doesn’t react with any surprise at first — he’s sent away for hundreds of sweepstakes over the years. Gradually, it sinks in. He’s so overcome with emotion, he begins to open up to the voice on the phone, a Canadian calling himself JEFFREY SMITH. Lee rambles about his plans — among other things, he’ll go on a fishing trip at Big Hole. The last time he went was years ago, with Heck. Jeffrey asks about Heck, but Lee just says it was a happy time and asks Jeffrey about fishing — since he’s in Canada, he must fish. Jeffrey doesn’t, though. He’s polite, but he edges Lee toward giving him his banking information in order to deposit the winnings. Lee does so, then invites Jeffrey to come down to Jackson for a prime rib dinner, on Lee. Jeffrey continues to be polite but gets off the phone quickly. Lee excitedly tells his parakeet — his only companion in the house — that they’re millionaires.

October. Still happy, Lee invites Maya and her family to dinner. This shocks her, and she says she’ll think about it. Lee goes to Dutch’s but finds Dean’s the only one there. He’s set up a plasma TV on the wall in front of the barber chairs, and he doesn’t know or care much about Lee — doesn’t even know his usual cut. He tells Dean that Dutch passed away in September, and he told Heck assuming Heck would pass it along to Lee. Lee tells Dean they don’t talk anymore.

Lee passes by the Cole Mercantile, surprised to find a FOR LEASE sign in the window. He goes to The Corner Store, the bulk warehouse store that crushed the mercantile, to buy his groceries and pick up his prescriptions. His inability to find anything in the huge store flusters him, and the discompassionate sales clerks piss him off. He goes to the pharmacy, explains that he used to get his prescriptions from Cole’s, but the pharmacist explains that if he wants medication, he needs a new prescription from his doctor. Lee doesn’t know what to do — his doctor’s in Great Falls, Lee can’t remember his name, and he needs the prescriptions. The pharmacist’s apathy infuriates him, so he leaves the pharmacy empty-handed. At the grocery checkout line, the cost is much higher than Lee anticipated. He doesn’t have the cash. The clerk asks if he has a debit card, which he does, but he hasn’t activated it yet. He’s forced to leave the cart of groceries.

Lee goes to Wachovia to get the card activated. ICKE, a young CSR, tells him he’s activated the card, but it can’t be used because Lee doesn’t have enough money in his account. Lee questions this — he has nearly $35,000 in his account. Icke tells him that he only has $130. Lee tries to argue, but Icke refuses to help. Despondent, Lee visits the Steak Knife, but he’s both lost his appetite and his money. He simply stares out the window at the rain.

November. Maya arrives at Lee’s ranch, but she finds an unsettling sight: a month’s worth of mail still clumped together in the box, a dank mess inside the house, Lee’s banking information littering the table. The lights and heat are out, not because Lee’s stopped caring but because the respective utilities have been shut off. Lee demands that she leave. She tries to give him the mail, but he wanders away without taking it. Maya notices many of the letters are from Wachovia Bank. She opens them and starts reading. Later, she tells Lee the bank is conducting a fraud investigation, that they recovered some of his money — $1500 — but the rest of it isn’t looking good. These people didn’t just take his money; they wrote unsigned, personal checks and cashed them. Most of his money will not be recovered. Lee doesn’t get enough to live on from Social Security or his military pension. That’s it. Lee tells Maya that when you’re old and make a mistake, there’s no time to learn from it — you simply are it.

Maya gently suggests Lee sell the ranch, which throws him into a such a rage that he both fires her and throws her out of the house. Maya’s disappointed, but she respects his wishes. Later, Lee dials that mystery phone number again. A woman named SISSY answers, but the line goes dead before Lee can get to the point. The phone company finally cut him off. Lee wanders the kitchen when he realizes no chirping is coming from his parakeet’s cage. DUKE lies dead at the bottom.

That tears it. Lee bursts into the barn, where he collects his saddle and its bag, shotgun, buckskins, boots, duster, and hat. He empties what’s left of his canned goods and water into the saddlebag; loads up with ammunition; saddles up FLICK, his old, ailing horse; and sets out for Glass Valley, a real old cowboy. A kerchief covering his face, Lee goes to his Wachovia branch, where he berates and browbeats the MANAGER, demanding to know if they accept unsigned checks. The Manager reluctantly admits that yes, they do. The Manager tries to calm Lee down, but Lee raises his shotgun and demands his money. A security guard has called the police and has his own gun trained on Lee. Lee tells the Manager to tell “Jeffrey Smith” that he’s coming for him. The Manager’s baffled.

Lee crosses the town square to the Corner Store, where he fires his shotgun at a huge wall of display-model TVs blaring Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue.” Everyone in the store freaks out. A security guard trails Lee as he arrives at the pharmacy and demands his various medications from the pharmacist. As he moves to leave, the security guard starts firing. He misses. Lee shoots blind, not hitting anything. He grabs a road atlas and runs out an emergency exit, through the back lot to a children’s playground, where Flick grazes. Lee rides away.

FRANCIS “HECK” LEE, JR. (50s), the Glass County sheriff, arrives at the Wachovia Bank to investigate. DEPUTY RANDOLPH (late 20s) is already on the scene. According to the eyewitnesses, an elderly man calling himself “El Toro” attempted to rob the bank after claiming they ripped him off by accepting unsigned checks. Heck talks to the still-rattled Manager, who mentions the puzzling “Jeffrey Smith” remark. Before Heck can get more information, Randolph tells him about the Corner Store.

Heck talks with the security guard and the pharmacist. Based on the medication the old man demanded, Heck tells Randolph to search for someone with heart disease, diabetes, and stents. Randolph wonders why Heck would knows these things — Randolph doesn’t even know what a “stint” is — and Heck explains he “used to know someone” afflicted by these ailments. They freeze the security tape, and Heck recognizes Lee but says he has no idea who this old man is.

Lee rides through barren valleys deep into the night. Eventually, he makes camp. He consults his map and spiral notebook for the address of Wachovia’s headquarters in Edge City, then studies the map of northern Montana and Alberta. Heck goes to Lee’s ranch house and finds it empty. Going through the house, he notices Lee’s investigative papers — Wachovia Bank, Jeffrey Smith, Alberta, Windfall Investments. Heck moves on to his old bedroom, presumably left exactly as it was when he left home. In an old box, he finds more mementoes of his childhood — including photos of her mother, photos of him as a sullen teenager, photos of he and Lee fishing at Big Hole. He’s a little overwhelmed by it all, so he calls his wife — Sissy.

Later, Heck goes to a saloon in town for a drink. The bartender questions whether or not Heck really want this. Heck ignores him, calling Maya to set up a time to interview her about Lee. He meets her at Maya’s trailer home, where she lets slip with her nickname for Lee (“El Toro”) and tells Heck everything she knows about the fraudulent sweepstakes, the problems with Wachovia, etc. After learning all of this, Heck recalls everything he saw in Lee’s house and considers the probability of Wachovia’s headquarters being his next move.

Lee continues through an open meadow. In the distance, he spots vaqueros driving cattle. Lee approaches, but they don’t speak English. Their Spanish irritates Lee, but he picks out a few English words and identifies which ranch they work for. He explains he’s from the Lee Ranch Company. He says he’s headed toward Edge City. Although Lee doesn’t immediately understand, they’ve offered to let him ride along with the drive. Heck meets with Randolph privately to explain his theory that “El Toro” is heading for Wachovia Headquarters in Edge City, beyond their jurisdiction. Heck wants Randolph to go with him but keep the whole thing under his hat. Randolph’s reluctant, but he wants to stop “El Toro” as much as Heck. They go.

Edge City is little more than a series of corporate towers incongruously set in the middle of barren prairie land. While Heck stakes out the parking lot, he sends Randolph in to wait in case Lee gets past them. Security guards are immediately on Heck, wondering why he’s loitering. Before Heck can explain the situation, he hears a low, distant rumble. He spots the brown cloud of dust indicating the cattle drive. Heck barely makes out the image of Lee leading the pack before he vanishes in the dust once again. Heck leaps into his patrol cruiser and heads toward the cloud.

Heck comes upon the vaquero TRAIL BOSS, who keeps a poker face and denies any knowledge of the mysteriously absent Lee. Randolph, meanwhile, encounters Lee face-to-face and preps the guards to take him down. Lee lives up to the “El Toro” name, terrifying them just by standing there. He demands to see the bank president, forces them to hand over their weapons, then takes the elevator up to the top floor. As soon as he leaves, Randolph radios. The Trail Boss suddenly commands his men and the cattle back in the other direction, confusing Heck, who accidentally hits the lights and sirens — causing an immediate stampede in the direction of his cruiser.

The bank president’s assistant, KELLY, insists that he’s gone and almost never at the bank in the first place. Lee doesn’t believe her, bursts into the office — and finds it empty. He demands everything she has on Windfall Investments. Shaken, a bloodied Heck falls out of his car as Randolph radios again. Heck gets to his feet and walks toward the bank as Randolph brings him up to speed on “El Toro.” Kelly returns with a thin manila folder, which disappoints Lee. He waits for Kelly to leave, and in a fit of anger, he shoots up the office. Heck sees the glass hit the street below. He goes inside and tosses Randolph a shotgun, telling him not to let Lee leave the building — and not to shoot him.

Lee asks Kelly for an alternate exit. She leads him into the service elevator, and he tells Kelly to tell Jeffrey Smith that “he can’t stop what’s comin.” This confuses Kelly. After he’s gone, Kelly leads Lee to the service elevator and tells him it goes to the back alley. Heck radios to Randolph, who leads the security guards to the alley. Lee’s prepping Flick to ride when Randolph approaches. Unafraid, Lee simply rides away. Heck arrives just in time to see Lee riding off. He shoots in the air, but Lee doesn’t follow. Heck goes back upstairs and gets a copy of the Windfall Investments information from Kelly, who asks if he is Jeffrey Smith. Just then, the BLAINE COUNTY SHERIFF arrives, displeased with Heck overextending his authority. As it starts to snow, Heck reluctantly asks for a ride home.

In the open range, Lee faces a veritable blizzard. He manages to get Flick to an abandoned flour mill, where he sets up camp for the night. The Windfall Investments file isn’t thick, but it does contain the company’s address in Bradston, Alberta. With a Sharpie, Lee traces the route from Edge City to Bradston. Out on the plains, Heck’s all bandaged up and watching them tow away his damaged cruiser. Randolph arrives with more information, then questions Heck’s sketchy thinking about the situation. Heck turns hostile — as hostile as Lee was with Maya — but Randolph gives as good as he gets, leaving them at a stalemate. Heck decides to go it alone, renting a car and hitting the road for Canada.

Meanwhile, Lee continues to ride through a full-on whiteout. Flick doesn’t make it. Saddened, Lee puts the horse out of his misery and starts walking. He makes it to Bradston, a tiny rural town. He finds the address easily, and it leads him to a tiny, sleazy office. Lee pulls a gun on the only man working there. The man first denies any knowledge, then amends it to say he didn’t know until recently that they were doing anything wrong — he was just an office manager. He hands Lee a massive pile of incriminating papers in exchange for his life. Lee demands to know the whereabouts of Jeffrey Smith. The man is baffled, but he looks through the payroll documents and can only find a Jeffrey Somers. Lee asks for his address and for a ride to Jeffrey’s house. He leaves the file behind, which Heck finds when he arrives at the Windfall office.

There, Lee’s surprised to find a woman in her late 30s. She calls to JEFFREY, her son, who shouts for her to send the visitor downstairs. He’s 18 or 19, a polite kid who’s baffled by this shotgun-toting cowboy. Lee demands to know why they ripped him off. Jeffrey says he only worked there for a couple of months, but he felt so guilty, he quit. He needed the money to pay for community college. Lee repeats: why him? Jeffrey tells him his name was on a list. Lee’s extremely angry — he told him personal things, things he never talks about to anyone. Jeffrey claims he doesn’t remember, but Lee badgers him until he blurts out, “Big Hole.”

Lee slaps Jeffrey hard. Jeffrey begins to cry, apologizing all over himself. Lee collapses on the bed. That night, Jeffrey’s mother makes a great meal — a big plate of steaks, mashed potatoes, biscuits. Lee’s freshly showered and shaved. He cuts off a piece of steak, takes a bite, and swallows, savoring it. Lee realizes he only has one pill left in each of bottles. He keeps eating, like a king. Later, Lee sleeps in a recliner. Jeffrey’s mother notices his frostbite-blackened feet. Lee tells her not to bother. He puts his boots back on and walks into town. He goes into a saloon and asks for a shot of straight-up Jack Daniels. He downs the shot, stares at a wallet-sized photo from his saddlebag, considers. He goes to the bar’s phone booth and dials that mystery number. A teenage girl’s voice answers. Lee tells the girl, Chloe, it’s her grandpa. She says Heck isn’t there. Lee tells her he has some important things to say. He tells her Heck is a good man, better than Lee, and that he loves Chloe and he loves Sissy, too. He also tells Chloe to let Heck know that Lee’s proud of him, and he loves him. Chloe says she will, and Lee breaks down, insisting, almost pleading that he’s a good man. Baffled, Chloe asks if he’s all right. Lee tells her everything will be fine and hangs up.

Lee walks out of the saloon, leaving his saddlebags behind. He trudges off, disappearing into the wilderness. Heck enters the saloon, where he finds Lee’s saddlebags. He asks the bartender about them, then rifles through until he finds the empty prescription bottles with Lee’s name on them. Heck finds the wallet-sized photo and picks it up. It’s an old family portrait — Heck with Sissy, who’s black, and Chloe at age three, all smiling. Heck goes outside, staring into the darkness, screaming for his father.

Notes

Up until the ending, I loved this script. I had a few minor nitpicks (e.g., why would Lee, anonymously robbing the Corner Store, have his name printed on the prescription bottles?), but this is a well-observed character study about a dying breed of man. Maybe it’s because I recently watched a double-feature of Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Furies, but I couldn’t help picturing Walter Huston as Lee — all fire and rage, with that cackling, sardonic, old-timey prospector laugh masking contempt for everyone he meets. Gilio does a nice job laying out the rift between Lee and Heck, hinting at it without ever spelling out what happened until the last two pages. More than that, he does a great job of painting these two men who have very similar personalities but stand at opposite ends of the law. That’s the stuff of classic Westerns, and Gilio stays true to the archetypes even as he makes the story feel authentic in the modern world.

This old man is one of the last of his kind. They don’t make them like that anymore, and the story seems to lament this fact. It also mourns the way the modern world no longer cares about him. The apathy contributes to his loneliness and the desperation that eventually drives him to fairly insane circumstances. Tonally, Gilio manages to toe the line between comedy and tragedy. He acknowledges the absurd image of a Wild West cowboy wreaking havoc on a warehouse store, but because he’s painted such a relatable, well-developed character, we still buy into the tragic circumstances that led to this ridiculousness.

The ending doesn’t work because it undercuts the sorrowful theme. Although it’s loaded with funny-yet-bleak moments expressing the problems with aging, loneliness, and the Wild West mythology, for me the most powerful image was that of Lee — a real cowboy — taking a shotgun to a wall of Toby Keith-blaring plasma TVs. That says it all. The family portrait reverses this by kinda saying, “We lament the passing of this type of iconic, archetypal American personality, but don’t forget what a bunch of racist dicks they were.” It turns Big Hole from a tragedy into an “Eh, no big loss” type of story, which does a disservice to Lee. This script could honestly be about the same from cover to cover without ever showing us that photograph, and it’d still work. In fact, it would have more of an impact. We know there’s a rift between Lee and Heck, we know it has something to do with the family, but we never have to know the details. It could have something to do with Patty, the woman he keeps screaming for in his sleep (ostensibly his deceased wife), or it could be some stupid teenage argument that got out of hand or Heck’s law-abiding choice of occupation or his decision not to take over his father’s ranch. Gilio’s provided more than enough material for us to draw our own conclusions, so why not let us? If someone wants to conclude the racism ending, that’s their prerogative. I don’t like it, so that’s not where I’d go with it, but the script gives me no choice.

Nonetheless, it’s a great story, well-told, and not nearly as ridiculous or over-the-top as it probably sounds stacked up next to the other ridiculous loglines in the top five. This is not Butter. This is a movie that should be made.

The Bottom Line

I came very close to giving up after the disastrous top three, but I figured I’d plow through the first act and keep reading if it was good. I’m glad I did. I’ve regained a tiny amount of faith in Hollywood.

Posted by Stan on December 18, 2008 1:39 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 17, 2008

Black List Script #3 – Butter by Jason Micallef

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 small town becomes a center for controversy and jealousy as its annual butter carving contest begins.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

Dueling voiceovers introduce us to the two main characters, LAURA PICKLER (40s, shrill, trophy wife) and DESTINY (12, black, orphaned). Laura narrates the story of her husband’s success. For the past 15 years, BOB PICKLER has won the blue ribbon in the butter-carving competition at the Iowa State Fair. His most recent sculpture was a life-size take on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Destiny narrates the story of her struggles in the foster-care system, which has led her to a number of bad parents. After visiting the butter-carving display, Destiny goes to a nearby 7-Eleven to buy a stick of butter. She takes it back to the Last Supper display and carves a perfect replica of Jesus’ chalice. Bob notices this and is genuinely impressed by her talent.

Destiny is introduced to a new set of foster parents, yuppies ETHAN and JILL. They awkwardly introduce Destiny to her new home. At the State Fair butter gala, committee judge ORVAL ANDERSON makes a jokey speech, then plays a video tribute to Bob Pickler. He congratulates Bob on 15 years of wonderful service to this art form. After bedtime, Destiny sneaks to the beautiful, modern kitchen and searches the refrigerator for butter. All she finds is soy spread. After the speechmaking section of the gala, Orval approaches Bob and Laura. He gracelessly suggests that Bob should step down and let someone else have a chance to win. Bob’s fine with it, but Laura is not, so Orval has to put his foot down and ban Bob from competing.

At the Pickler home, daughter KAITLEN (16) watches Laura flip out about the decision. Bob tries to gently calm her down and make her see reason, but Laura wants to take a petition to the governor. She accuses Bob of not standing up for himself, says she should have married the more ambitious BOYD BOLTON because he would have fought for this. Laura storms over to the Andersons’ home, where Orval and wife HELEN watch Deal or No Deal. Hearing her bang on the door, Orval hides in the basement and forces his wife to cover for him. Much later, Orval sneaks out and drives away. Laura roars that this isn’t over.

At a strip club, Bob gets a lap dance from BROOKE, who’s clearly manipulating him for money. As Laura drives, babbling paranoid rants to herself, she notices Bob’s minivan outside the strip club. She cautiously approaches and finds Bob and Brooke having sex inside. Laura plows her SUV into Bob’s minivan. She drags her husband home, insisting that he’d better get a good night’s sleep (on the couch) because tomorrow they need to get butter. Bob reminds her that he’s not competing. Laura tells him she is.

A month later, Ethan takes Destiny for her first day of school. (He’s a teacher at the school.) HAYDEN, a blond boy, takes an immediate shine to her, as does the art teacher. Destiny’s weirded out by all the white people treating her so well. After school, Destiny asks Ethan for butter. Ethan chuckles that Jill means well with her soy spread and other assorted healthy, organic foods, but if Destiny wants butter, Ethan’s more than happy to buy some. Destiny asks for 200 pounds.

Laura springs the notion of her competing on Kaitlen, who mocks the idea, reminding Laura she’s never made a butter sculpture in her life. Laura notes that she’s stood by Bob for 20 years, so she thinks she’s more than capable. She goes upstairs, and there’s a knock on the door. Bob answers — it’s Brooke. She wants more money and thinks she’s entitled because she let Bob do it with her. Kaitlen catches sight of her briefly and asks who she is. Bob says, “Nobody,” which Brooke overhears. Enraged, she pounds the minivan with her purse, which Laura sees from upstairs. Bob rushes out and tells Brooke that Laura controls his money. Brooke is baffled that Bob would dare let his wife come between them. She delivers some vague threats before leaving.

Laura signs up for the county butter-carving competition. NANCY tells her she’s the first to arrive and that registration ends at noon. It’s after 11. As Ethan drops Destiny off, he notices she’s nervous. He tells her to think of all the bad things that could happen — the absolute worst thing — and then consider the likelihood of any of them really happening. Then he asks about the worst thing that could really happen — she could lose. How bad does that seem compared to racist ninjas or a mass murderer who only kills little girls? A little more hopeful, Destiny hops out of the car.

CAROL ANN STEVENSON, a heavyset Pickler sycophant, registers for the competition. She’s thrilled to see Laura there. Neither are thrilled to see Destiny sign up, but since they don’t know who she is, they assume she’s no real competition. Just before noon, Brooke shows up to register. Before leaving, Brooke informs Laura that Bob owes her an additional $600, then chastises Laura for getting between her and “her man.” Laura laughs, noting she’s just one in a long line of whores. Brooke seems genuinely hurt by this remark, but she’s going to stay in the contest because it clearly enrages Laura. Laura and Carol Ann try to convince Nancy to ban Brooke from the competition, but Nancy refuses.

A montage follows, showing the three days of the competition as each character works on her sculpture. Laura’s intense, Destiny’s laid back, Carol Ann quickly realizes she’s out of her league and doesn’t finish, and Brooke doesn’t even show up until the last day, where she makes a few cursory carvings in a hunk of butter before leaving. Destiny’s sculpture is of a train and Harriet Tubman, symbolizing the Underground Railroad. In voiceover, Laura ridicules Destiny for playing the race card. Laura’s sculpture is also fairly well done — it’s of a happy family at a dinner table, praying.

At the judging, Nancy introduces each competitor and allows them to give a brief speech. Carol Ann’s is all about kittens. Brooke arrives in a surprisingly dainty Sunday dress, looking not-at-all stripper-like, and talks about how an absentee father led her down the path of sin, but she is now born again. Next, Destiny’s long, wise-beyond-her-years speech describes the greatness of the Iowan people and the greatness of a country that allows a poor orphan to participate in such a prestigious competition. The audience is blown away. Laura’s speech to the crowd is all about family, but afterward, she delivers an impassioned, vaguely racist tirade to the judges, about how this is about butter and talent, not overcoming adversity. Despite this (or maybe because of it), Destiny wins the contest, which means she gets to compete in the state fair.

Afterward, Laura’s racism is no longer vague. Kaitlen calls her on this, which leads to Laura hurling insults at her daughter. Kaitlen, upset and angry, wants out of the family. Hayden shows up at Destiny’s house the next day with body lotion for Destiny, as a gift in honor of her winning. Meanwhile, Laura vandalizes the house with a spray-painted YouTube URL. The video shows Jill, in 1991, vandalizing a Land O’ Lakes (sponsors of the state competition) dairy farm for PETA. Later, Laura goes to Boyd Bolton’s Ford dealership under the guise of replacing the minivan. Instead, she makes lewd advances until he sleeps with her. Back at Destiny’s house, Jill and Ethan try to scrub off the paint. Jill breaks down, afraid she can’t handle motherhood. Destiny overhears the whole conversation.

Kaitlen gets high as Brooke throws rocks at her bedroom window. She asks to come up. Brooke asks Kaitlen if she knows where Bob keeps his money. Kaitlen insinuates she might tell Brooke if they played a game of Truth or Dare, but before Brooke can ask anything, Kaitlen dares Brooke to go down on her. She raises her price to $1200, which Kaitlen says she can get as long as Brooke doesn’t stop.

Nancy calls Ethan and asks them to come down to the county moose lodge. There, they’re greeted by Laura, Bob, Orval, some judges, and a rep from Land O’ Lakes. The rep asks if Destiny denounces Jill’s actions. Destiny refuses, noting that, although she wouldn’t do what Jill did, Jill is entitled to express herself however she wants. The rep is moved and allows Destiny’s win to stand. Laura brings out the big guns — Boyd Bolton, who reads from an index card explaining that he snuck into the moose lodge late at night to sculpt Destiny’s butter on her behalf and that he’s coming forward out of guilt. This puzzles everyone, but they have no way to prove it’s a lie, so the win is up in the air. Laura suggests a butter-carving rematch. Destiny agrees immediately, flummoxing Laura.

At home, Bob tries to talk Laura out of her proposed butter sculpture — it’s far too ambitious for a novice like herself. Meanwhile, Destiny pitches a variety of concepts to Ethan, Jill, and Hayden. In the midst of that, Carol Ann shows up to apologize for supporting Laura. She throws all her support behind Destiny and gets involved with the pitching process. Eventually, Destiny comes up with an idea that impresses all of them.

After another sapphic tryst, Kaitlen finally hands Brooke the money. Brooke peels out and seeks Destiny. She drives her to a Williams-Sonoma store and presents her with a very expensive set of knives. Brooke gives a speech about how she could spend $1200 on Victoria’s Secret, but she thinks it’d be put to better use helping Destiny beat Laura. Destiny thanks her. Later, a woman from Human Services arrives at Destiny’s house to inform them that they’ve finally located Destiny’s biological mother. Although she’s passed on now, they did manage to track down a single photo — taken shortly after giving birth, cradling Destiny. She’s suitably touched. That night, Destiny prays to the spirit of her mother, showing forgiveness and understanding for her abandonment and hoping that, if she’s not too busy, she has time to watch Destiny kick Laura’s ass.

As Laura and Destiny carve, sculpt, and mold, an ever-increasing crowd gathers. Destiny’s final sculpture is of a new mother cradling her baby a la Da Vinci’s Madonna with Child, obviously inspired by the photo. Laura’s carving, on the other hand, depicts a frame from the Zapruder film, with JFK’s head in mid-explosion as Jackie O. crawls behind the limo. Laura herself wears a pink Jackie O. dress and pillbox hat. The crowd hates its tastelessness, which nobody but Laura finds surprising. Mysteriously, before the judging, “somebody” sabotages Destiny’s sculpture by melting it with a blowtorch.

Despite this, Destiny wishes Laura good luck. Laura’s rude, noting that Destiny’s young but this is all Laura has — how dare she take it away. Orval announces the winner, Destiny. In front of the entire crowd, Destiny thanks Laura for making her a better competitor. She hugs Laura, who breaks into a genuine smile for the first time in 20 years. Laura narrates a parable about a penniless, elderly loser who went on to become Colonel Sanders, over a montage of Bob divorcing Laura, Kaitlen trying to rescue Brooke from her strip club, and Boyd throwing his blowtorch into a pond. Destiny narrates a montage of her getting second prize at the state fair and being permanently adopted by Ethan and Jill.

In the end, Destiny and Hayden ride their bikes through a cornfield cluttered with cows. The camera hangs on a cow as we fade out.

Notes

Setting is important. Remember that, because I’m about to attack Butter’s choice of setting. It’s important to note that Micallef writes, more than once, that Iowa City (apparently) qualifies as suburbia. It’s a very important distinction, because parts of these story and some of these characters could work in a story set in a bona fide suburban environment. But let me ask: if Iowa City is a suburb, what exactly is the urb? Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second-largest city, is 30 miles away (and that 30-mile stretch contains little more than cornfields and little shithole towns, not suburban sprawl). The Quad Cities are 80 miles away. Des Moines is over 100 miles away. I’ll be exceedingly generous in describing towns like Coralville and North Liberty as suburbs of Iowa City, but they aren’t, really. Iowa City is reasonably large by Iowa standards, but Iowa’s a funny place: its larger cities are basically just small towns with lots of people. In attitude and values, in architecture and politics, Iowa City has much more in common with Tiffin than Chicago.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Iowa, which instantly affects my opinion of this script. It has many problems beyond its setting, but for me, choosing Iowa as the location is a big sticking point. Micallef didn’t choose Iowa because he hails from the state or has spent any time there. No, upon reading the script, anyone who’s ever set foot in Iowa — even for 30 seconds — will spot how off everything feels. It serves as a lazy, generic shorthand for “Middle America,” and he could have just as easily substituted Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin… Any Midwestern state. Even though the script still suffers from numerous problems beyond the choice of setting, the attitudes and behaviors of the characters would feel a lot more at home in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Chicago, or the Twin Cities than it does in any square foot of any rural environment.

Little things add up: Destiny goes to a 7-Eleven instead of a Kum ‘n’ Go (that’s not even a matter of preference — there are no 7-Elevens in the entire state of Iowa), everyone’s driving SUVs and minivans instead of pickup trucks, both Jill and Laura shun all dairy products for health and political reasons, a strip club is empty except for Bob and its employees… I don’t want to generalize too much, but Butter is little more than an over-the-top, verging-on-slapstick satire that treads largely on suburban stereotypes. So if we’re gonna talk stereotypes, Micallef could at least get the small-town stereotypes right. Helen’s appalled by the idea that Orval would be fishing at night (that’s his excuse when Laura shows up unannounced)? Night fishing is incredibly popular in the Iowa City-Coralville area. Even if Orval doesn’t do that, it’s not like it’d be some ridiculous, unheard-of excuse. Possibly worst of all, the last shot hangs on cows grazing in a goddamn cornfield. I’ve never set foot on a farm in my life and I know how retarded and wrong that is. All this bugs me because, hey, I don’t even live there and I know these things. Thirty seconds of cursory research would solve 80% of problems like this. Iowa is a state with three million people, and probably three million more who have spent significant time there (attending college and/or living and/or working). Screenplays don’t have to be 100% realistic, but let me tell you, nothing alienates an audience more than filmmakers getting little details wrong when the audience knows better. The script’s imperfect, but I probably would have suspended much of my disbelief had the setting felt even a little authentic. It never does. Ever. You wonder why Hollywood has such a bad rap among conservatives, who accuse the industry of being nothing but liberal elitists who pander to Middle America? Screenplays like this lend credibility to that belief.*

That rant aside, Butter has bigger problems. It’s an incredibly unsubtle take on the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama primary duel. How unsubtle is it? Consider, first, the character names. “Destiny.” Subtle! “Pickler” is almost subtle, but think about it for a moment. Think about a cucumber. Think about a pickle. Think about Bill and Hillary Clinton, then about Bob and Laura Pickler. Yeah. Subtle.** Then there’s the amazing Destiny-Christ imagery: when we first see her, she buys a stick of butter and, presumably for the first time, has the talent to shape it into an exact replica of the Holy Chalice (which, I’ll casually point out, isn’t even in Da Vinci’s Last Supper painting! — see, setting isn’t the only thing Micallef couldn’t get right). At the end, Destiny is inspired by a photo of her birth mother and her newborn self to create a butter rendition of Mary and the newborn Jesus. Subtle! (On a semi-related tangent, holy fuck should all these “Obama is Jesus” people be shot. I voted for him and hope he’ll do a good job, but that’s the problem: those people make people like me seem like fucking nutcases.)

So when Micallef isn’t ripping off the vastly superior Election, we’re treated to obvious yet inept symbolism and caricature surrogates of real political figures who can’t quite stand on their own two feet. If you strip away the obvious metaphors, you’re left wondering why Laura is so obsessed with this butter-carving contest? Other than reflected glory, what’s in it for her? I can understand her desire to keep the legacy going, I can understand her overly assertive tendency to defend her husband at all costs, but I can’t figure out why this — more than anything else in her life — is so important. We don’t find out much about her life outside the butter contest, so we never get answers about what drives her. Because she has no motivation, I spent the entire script just waiting for an explanation or, even better, a depiction of her otherwise-empty life. Instead, she tearily admits this contest is “all she has.” Why?!

Destiny has similar problems. I don’t know if anyone other than Spike Lee is allowed to use the phrase “super-duper magical Negro,” but if any movie character is one, it’s Destiny. In addition to the unsubtle name and the Christ imagery, she has near-supernatural artistic talent, alarming insight for a 12-year-old of any race or gender, and she spends about 80% of the script silent, looking poised and wise. On the rare instances when she speaks, she says exactly the right things in exactly the right way. I know she’s supposed to be a metaphor for Obama, but I’m pretty sure the man didn’t come out of the womb giving elegant, off-the-cuff speeches. His eloquent speech on race relations, which is parodied in this script, certainly was nice, but it wasn’t off-the-cuff. I understand it makes no sense to give a 12-year-old butter sculptor speechwriters, but imbuing her with such gifts, without any explanation for where they came from, forces Destiny to fall prey to this stereotype. (Another random tangent: I always love it when writers assume that, because someone is gifted in one art form, it’ll automatically translate to another. Like a guitarist who’s magically an expert violin player just because they’re both stringed instruments, or a sketch artist who can perfectly sculpt butter and make brilliant collages. Artists can excel in multiple media, but it takes a shitload of effort.)

The Bob-Laura dynamic could have been interesting, especially once Brooke comes along, but I had a hard time buying any of it within the context of their relationship. Bob fucks a prostitute because Bill Clinton’s a horndog. Laura is a frigid shrew because that’s the way Hillary Clinton is perceived. Why doesn’t Bob pursue “artificial” women like strippers and prostitutes so he can regain the power in the relationship? Or because he wants somebody who listens to him without browbeating? Maybe Laura’s masking the intense insecurity that comes from being the assertive half of the relationship without getting the glory for Bob’s success. Micallef doesn’t give us anything like this, so the Picklers never feel real. Same goes for bit players — calling Brooke “inconsistent” is a polite understatement, Ethan’s effectively Bob Saget’s Full House character, Jill’s a liberal hippie, and none of the other characters matter much. Everyone just has to fill a role so the story can chug along as an analogy to the primary battle.

The entire second half of the narrative feels like wheel-spinning. Gripping the real events so tightly, Micallef doesn’t seem interested in how boring and pointless the “rematch” is. Of course, without the rematch, the script would be about 65 pages long, but maybe he could re-inflate the page count with novel concepts like character depth and real conflict. This is one of those stories where a bunch of shit happens at such a frenetic pace, you’re almost tricked into noticing it lacks anything resembling drama, aside from its treacly Full House moments and the laughable “Destiny’s big heart wins over Laura” scene.

Maybe it would help if Micallef had any sort of satirical aim. Butter is overstocked with broad jokes and toothless social commentary, but I can’t even figure out the overall agenda. Is he trying to say that politics in general and primaries in particular are as pointless as a county butter-carving competition? Any election year in which two old white dudes face off to see who can bore America into political apathy, I could buy it. Not this election. Not even this party, as the first viable female and African-American candidates duked it out for the nomination. Based on the hostile portrayal of Laura, it seems as if Micallef believes Hillary Clinton is outrageous for daring to stay in a competition against Jesus II. I did not support Clinton and, on a couple of occasions, she did seem to play a little dirty… But not nearly as dirty as Laura Pickler, so if that’s the aim, he stacked the deck more than a little unfairly.

Maybe Butter, like Election, wants to show how petty and juvenile people can act in a competition like this. Despite lifting from Election on several occasions, I don’t think Micallef lifted the theme because, well… Nobody in the script acts juvenile or petty except Laura. Everyone else, including Bob (whose real-life counterpart said much harsher things about Obama than Hillary did — whether she put him up to it or not, feel free to face that reality), is all about order and fairness and “may the best man win.” Going back to Destiny’s absurd “magical Negro” qualities, she has a few moments of anxiety but never has a moment of anger, pettiness, irritation, or disappointment. Again, Obama’s a politician, and a charismatic one, but to think he never felt any of those things during this election season is absurd. The most even-tempered people on the planet don’t just let shit roll off their back. Either they internalize everything and explode, or they follow this much healthier course of action: bottle it up in public, shout obscenities behind closed doors, then calm down, then go out publicly and give articulate speeches to win back favor. Despite what you may have read, Obama’s only human. If nobody saw his clear irritation during the debates with McCain, they weren’t paying close enough attention.

So what is it? What’s the goddamn point? Figure that out, and maybe this script can work.

The Bottom Line

Despite how much I hated it, this script can work. Election wisely took a look at its characters and made them people, eschewing the obvious parallels to the 1992 campaign (which are much more prevalent in the novel) in favor of just telling a story. Since Butter lifts enough from that movie already, maybe Micallef can take it a step further and fashion it into a story about slightly crazy people with believable reasons for doing the things they do. Locking the narrative to real events prevents any of these characters from being more than a chess piece participating in one of those one-man games they print in the newspaper: they can’t waver in their plot function because the real events have preordained the narrative path. Fuck the real events. There’s a start here, but now it’s time to go back and make it work on its own merits. Dig deeper, find out who these people really are, and let them behave like something more than a symbolic construct. Oh yeah, and set it in Generic Suburb, U.S.A. Pretty please!

*For those of you questioning my professionalism — and you should be — if I were writing this coverage professionally, I may have ignored the setting completely. It personally offends me, but it’s not the worst thing about Butter. It just adds insult to injury. If I mentioned it at all, I would have taken a sentence or two to note that the rural setting is unconvincing. [Back]

**To give Micallef some credit, he isn’t the only one falling prey to the “least subtle names imaginable” problem. Let’s not forget Walter Black from The Beaver, and Winter’s Discontent features an elderly main character named Winter. Subtle! [Back]

Posted by Stan on December 17, 2008 10:27 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 16, 2008

Black List Script #2 – The Oranges by Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss

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 has a romantic relationship with the daughter of a family friend, which turns their lives upside down.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

[Removed by request.]

Notes

Here’s the problem with Christmas movies: they’ve already made all the good ones. I wish Hollywood would stop trying, because when was the last time anyone made a truly outstanding Christmas movie? (Answer: 1983.) I don’t think everything has been said about the holiday, but Hollywood certainly hasn’t bothered to say anything interesting or unique. I noticed most of the characters in The Oranges have incongruous, Jewish-sounding names (for people hellbent on celebrating Christmas). It made me wonder if this would be a better script if it abandoned the overused Christmas holiday in favor of the less-exploited Hanukkah. That made me further consider other less-exploited holidays that are common for family reunions. Some of my most exciting and traumatic family experiences have occurred over Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Independence Day. Why not tap these reservoirs to at least create the illusion of uniqueness?

That rant aside, I’ll pretend for a moment that this isn’t a Christmas movie and say that The Oranges still doesn’t work. At all. I can see why Hollywood likes it — it suffers from the exact same problems as 2007’s inexplicably successful Juno. I’ll go out on a surprising limb and say that even Juno has more nuanced, believable human behavior than this one.

Let’s start with the Paige problem. We’re supposed to like David and Nina, which turns Paige into the de facto villain. In her early scenes, she and David get into mild, ineffectual arguments that I guess the writers think justify David’s “I’m just not happy in this marriage” mantra and his eventual infidelity. Then, she disappears from the script for what feels like 60 pages. She’s referenced a couple of times by Vanessa during the lazy, narration-infused montages this script apparently inherited from The Beaver, but we don’t see or hear much from her (and when we do, it adds nothing to the plot or her overall characterization). When she does return, she sort of acts like a psychopath. If we knew more about her or saw her in the intervening 60 pages, maybe this change would make some sense. It’s just another example of unbelievable human behavior by writers who know plot mechanics but don’t understand people.

The Oranges gets weighed down with examples of the writers’ unwillingness to explore actual relationships. What’s really at the heart of this failing marriage? What’s up with Nina dropping out of college to party her way around the world, fucking every imaginable man along the way, then returning home and getting involved with a man twice her age that she’s known for her entire life? Why would anybody in his or her right mind react to David’s galling speech (the one about how it doesn’t matter what kind of chaos he brings into the lives of his family members and neighbors/best friends so long as he’s happy) with quiet awe, followed by polite acceptance of this arrangement? Even minor things like a prospective employer being impressed when the applicants cell phone rings in the middle of the goddamn interview go a few steps beyond ringing false — half the scenes in this script don’t make any goddamn rational sense. Any attempt, no matter how half-hearted, to create some semblance of relatable behavior (starting by answering some of those nagging questions) would make the script infinitely more palatable.

The script’s fatal flaw, though, is the unbelievable way in which the relationship between David and Nina develops. Let’s ignore the male-fantasy notion that a 24-year-old party girl would be totally into a middle-aged guy whose idea of a good time revolves around watching television and eating. Just put that out of your minds. Instead, consider that, in nearly every early scene as their “relationship” blossoms, the writers have to make special notes of how sexy and intense certain moments are. Consider that, in later scenes after their affair is in the open, David and Nina either have to remind each other how much they love one another or remind the other characters of how “real” the relationship is. The writers have to do this because nothing about their actions or dialogue, aside from the on-the-nose stuff, suggests that this relationship is believable in any way.

I know some women go for older men; I know plenty of men go for younger women. I also know that such desires have rational psychological and biological explanations. In this script, this relationship doesn’t come across as believable even once. Every character suffers from something akin to the Paige Problem (or the Juno Problem), as the writers eschew genuine conflict and real insight into their characters in favor of uninspired, unfunny gags. Problems with the characters lead to problems with their interactions lead to problems with the believability of the relationships. End of story (literally).

I don’t want this script to transform into a dark, brutal exploration of families in turmoil. Funny movies have been made from bleak subjects like collapsing marriages (The War of the Roses, Husbands and Wives), infidelity (every other Woody Allen movie made before 1998), dysfunctional families (Home for the Holidays, Moonstruck), and May-December romances (Murphy’s Romance and The Graduate, which this movie namechecks as embarrassingly as Overdrawn at the Memory Bank does Casablanca). The thread connecting all of these movies is that the comedy comes from who the people are, not the mere fact of them doing unexpected, vaguely taboo things for unknown, unmotivated reasons.

Now, let me bring the holidays back into it for a moment. Why does this story have to take place during Thanksgiving and Christmas, other than the fact that it’s the world’s laziest shorthand for “dysfunctional family” (in the first two acts) and “treacly sentiment” (in the third)? Nina comes home because he relationship fell apart and she has nowhere else to go. Toby disappears from the script not because he lives elsewhere but because his job took him out of the country. These across-the-street neighbors are also best friends, so it’s not like they don’t spend any time together outside of holidays.

And then there’s Paige’s over-the-top Christmas obsession, an idea that could be funny if the writers ever addressed what she does from January to, let’s say, early November. I sort of love the idea of a woman who’s hellbent on organizing all her Christmas stuff as early as February, but these writers don’t put any thought into the concept since anything beyond November and December doesn’t happen in this script and is therefore irrelevant to them.

The Bottom Line

This script is terrible. Everything it tries to do has been done better elsewhere. I didn’t like The Beaver, but I feel sort of bad for trashing it so much when this is infinitely worse. At least The Beaver had some interesting ideas at its core; The Oranges has nothing.

Posted by Stan on December 16, 2008 12:38 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 15, 2008

Black List Script #1 – The Beaver by Kyle Killen

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 depressed man finds hope in a beaver puppet that he wears on his hand.”

Jump to:
Synopsis
Notes
The Bottom Line

Synopsis

THE BEAVER, in voiceover, introduces us to WALTER BLACK, mid-40s, a depressed man at the end of his rope. Appointed to CEO of a toy company — a position well beyond his abilities — he’s led the company to the verge of bankruptcy, his youngest son (HENRY, 8) is depressed and withdrawn himself, his oldest son (PORTER, 18, “emo kid”) wishes his parents would divorce, and his wife (MEREDITH, late 30s) spends much of her time weeping openly. Now, The Beaver continues to explain, Meredith is at the end of her rope and has finally taken it upon herself to throw Walter out.

At school, jock JARED tries to convince Porter to write papers for him. Porter explains that it’s a gradual process of building the grade up over a series of weeks, so he’ll only help Jared if he commits for the long haul. Jared reluctantly agrees and pays him. NORAH, a good-looking cheerleader, approaches Porter for roughly the same reason. Porter’s surprised because, academically, she’s smarter than he is. Norah says she needs help writing her valedictory speech.

Meredith picks Henry up from school and finds out a classmate threw him in the Dumpster. Aghast, Meredith encourages him to be more social so he stops being a target. Henry asks about Walter, but Meredith says his being gone is the best thing for all of them. At a liquor store, Walter emerges with a full stock. His car is loaded with crap. In a fit, Walter tosses all his possessions into a Dumpster. Surveying the refuse, Walter notices a beaver puppet. He tosses the liquor into the trunk, followed by the beaver puppet. At his hotel, Walter drinks and weeps as he watches Dr. Phil. He hugs the television.

Porter, Henry, and Meredith share an awkward meal, apparently their first at the dinner table. When the “conversation” thing doesn’t work out, they switch to the living room, where they watch television. Back in the hotel, Walter eyes the beaver puppet. He puts it on, and The Beaver begins to speak. He gives Walter a long, obscenity-laced pep talk about how Walter’s searching for answers in the wrong places — self-help books, medication, alcohol — but if he follows The Beaver’s guidance, he’ll save Walter’s life.

At school, Porter reads from a medical journal about genetic psychology as Norah approaches. She asks about the magazine, and he treats her like crap. When she calls him on it, Porter apologizes, saying the defense mechanism for “unattractive people” is to reject the beautiful and popular before they reject him. Despite the apology, he continues to hurl hostilities at her until she blows up and tosses an enormous stack of papers — writing samples for Porter to peruse — at his feet.

Meredith arrives at school to pick up Henry and is surprised when the teacher informs her that Walter has already picked him up. At home, Walter and The Beaver teach Henry woodworking in the garage. They show Meredith a memory box they carved together. Meredith’s baffled when only The Beaver speaks to her. Walter hands her a 3x5 card explaining his radical, new therapy treatment. She’s dubious yet somewhat pleased at Walter’s initiative. He’s allowed to stay for dinner, which enrages Porter (who eats by himself, watching TV, as the others chat in the kitchen).

Henry asks where Walter learned woodworking. The Beaver tells a long story about Walter’s youth. Walter’s father died, so he had nobody to teach him anything about tools. He had to carve a Pinewood Derby racer, and even though it looked like shit, it was faster than the other kids’. They didn’t care, however; the car was The Turd, whether it won or not. Enraged, Walter spent the next year reading books about tools, carving, woodworking, and engineering — he came back with a beautiful car, but the kids still called it The Turd II. It never raced because Walter told the other kids to go to hell and left. This story bowls over Henry and Meredith.

Later, Meredith wishes The Beaver goodnight and urges Porter to do the same. Porter runs into his room and blasts music. The Beaver shrugs it off as typical teenage rebellion. When The Beaver mentions going to work, Meredith is surprised and concerned. Porter calls Norah to tell her he’s been reading her stuff, and he wants to talk more about the speech. She invites him over the following day, after school. Seeing Walter and The Beaver going to his car, Porter freaks out and angrily pounds his head into an already-dented wall (covered by a poster).

The next morning, Walter and The Beaver go jogging, shower together, get all decked out in nice clothes, leave the explanatory 3x5 index cards on every employees’ desk, and host a company-wide meeting. To the surprise of the employees, The Beaver lays out a complete overhaul of corporate strategy. He asks the employees to give him two weeks to see how the changes affect them, and if anyone wants to quit at that time, he’ll give them eight months’ severance pay and a glowing recommendation, no questions asked.

Norah leads Porter into her bedroom. He’s impressed by her various awards. Norah complains that she’s been on a certain track for so long, she can no longer relate to the average student. As they talk, while Porter continues to act like a dick, he’s surprised and intrigued to learn she was expelled from junior high. Prior to her turnaround as an academic goddess and popularity queen, she went through a “rebellious artist” phase to get attention from her parents, who preferred her older brother’s overachieving. She did a complete turnaround when, after a floor-mural prank gone bad, the brother drove off to get a bunch of floor-repair material, had a car accident, and died. Norah shows Porter some of her paintings. He’s surprised by how good they are.

A montage, narrated by The Beaver, follows, explaining that his new initiatives turned the company around. The Beaver/Walter have eased their way back into the Black home, which continues to anger Porter and cause him to pound his head into the wall. Porter learns HECTOR — another student who pays Porter to write papers — has won an essay scholarship. His crush on Norah heightens. The Beaver/Walter renew their romance. Despite how well things are going, both Meredith and the company executives are a little concerned about how to present The Beaver to outsiders. Henry, meanwhile, becomes obsessed with wood and woodworking.

After the montage, Meredith goes to a gossipy book club full of Soccer Moms, who warn her about Walter’s “role-playing therapy,” offering that “people don’t put on a disguise unless they’ve got something to hide.” Even more concerned, Meredith asks The Beaver about Walter’s therapist and a possible timeline on ending the treatment. The Beaver shrugs off the notion of a timeline — you can’t rush treatment like this. Later, Meredith wakes The Beaver and sends him to the garage, where Henry is woodworking long past bedtime and refuses to move. Henry and The Beaver have a discussion about his disobedience, but The Beaver reluctantly lets him continue. It suddenly dawns on him how interested Henry is in woodworking. He immediately dashes off to work to orchestrate a new plan, which he pitches to the rest of the company the next morning: they’re going to drop their traditional middling toy lines in favor of a brand new woodworking kit and beaver puppet.

At school, Porter tries to work damage control with Hector. Porter’s “personal” essay went into detail about Hector’s own family, but when it became apparent that Hector doesn’t know any of the details about his own family or their lives, the family realizes he didn’t write the paper. They want him to confess to the principal. Porter promises he’ll set up a dummy paper-purchasing website that can’t be traced to either of them; getting caught writing others’ papers could lead to expulsion. Norah arrives, and Porter tells her he has an opening on the speech. They make a pseudo-date after school to discuss it.

The Beaver and Meredith go out to celebrate their 20th anniversary. Meredith demands to spend the evening with Walter, not The Beaver. The Beaver allows this, but the whole evening is awkward and miserable. Meanwhile, Porter and Norah discuss the speech. Porter continues to hype up Norah’s great paintings, which frustrates her. Despite this, he leans in for a kiss and notices one of his father’s mannerisms popping up — twisting a lock of her hair in his fingers. He freaks out and starts bashing his head again, confounding Norah, who talks him down so they can continue to make out. At the evening’s game, Norah’s parents notice she’s not among the cheerleaders. Just as The Beaver takes over to yell at Meredith about Walter’s condition and lack of progress — blaming her and the family for his problems — her cell phone rings. It’s Porter.

Porter and Norah wait at the police station as Norah’s parents talk to the cops. They’ve apparently been arrested (or at least detained) after getting caught making out, after Norah’s parents called the police to say she was missing. Porter’s parents arrive as Norah’s parents drag her away. Porter tries to keep eye contact with her, but she ignores him. At home, Porter pounds his head so hard against the dent in his wall, he breaks through. He pounds so hard, he knocks himself out.

After school, Meredith refuses to allow Henry’s many new friends to pile into their SUV. She also demands that he stop his excessive woodworking. He becomes sullen and withdrawn once again. Meanwhile, Porter makes sure Hector has the website address for his meeting with the principal. As Hector pleads that Porter doesn’t understand the situation, Porter blows him off for Norah. She’s not very friendly. He hands her a draft of the speech. She’s polite about it, offers him money, which he refuses. Norah gives him a kiss-off speech.

Meredith has called Walter’s therapist and knows he and The Beaver are lying — Walter hasn’t seen his doctor in nearly a year. The Beaver is so enraged by Meredith’s meddling, he finishes the insults he began on their anniversary and throws Meredith, Porter, and Henry out of the house. Alone, Walter wanders the big house and gets depressed again.

Some time later, a news reporter explains what a huge hit the “Mr. Beaver Woodchopper” toys have become. The Beaver forces his executives to book him on the morning shows. They agree but encourage Walter to get rid of the puppet. The Beaver laughs at the suggestion, nothing that Walter can’t. He’s not a mere puppet — he’s literally fused to Walter’s arm. The VP doesn’t believe it until he fails to pull the puppet off.

Norah’s ignoring Porter, who confronts her at school and demands to talk to her. Porter tells Norah it’s not her job to replace her brother. This enrages her. Porter presses on with his point until Norah shouts a few choices obscenities at him and storms away.

Walter and The Beaver appear on The Today Show and, after a lengthy treatise justifying his own existence, The Beaver becomes an instant hit. Another narration-infused montage follows, with The Beaver explaining the new phenomenon as the woodworking kits sell like hotcakes, average people all over the country begin wearing their own puppets, The Beaver gets a book deal and writes the same sort of self-help book he initially shunned, graces the cover of every popular magazine, appears on TV and radio shows across the country. As things go well for Walter and The Beaver, Hector puts on a puppet and tells the principal the truth, Porter loses his college acceptance.

As the montage ends, it becomes clear that, while The Beaver eats up the attention, Walter has become more depressed and disillusioned. Walter calls Meredith in the middle of the night, tries to talk to her, but The Beaver hears and forces him to hang up. Walter and The Beaver have a knock-down, drag-out brawl.* Afterward, a bruised and bloodied Walter is awakened by The Beaver, who complains about Walter’s lack of gratitude. Walter decides to do some woodworking to rebuild the team, when he notices the table saw. The Beaver realizes what Walter has up his sleeve, but he can’t stop the man. Walter saws his own forearm off.

An undisclosed time passes, and the fads of both child woodworking kits and adult self-help puppets have ended. Meredith drags Henry to a psychiatric hospital to visit Walter, who’s been fitted with a prosthetic hand and is making good mental progress. Despite this, Meredith is uninterested in having Walter released into her care.

At the house, Norah shows up to talk to Porter. He asks about the graduation ceremony — which he was not allowed to attend — and Norah tells him it was boring, but she decided to go with a different speech. Hers was about a concept where, with every breath a person takes, they inhale two atoms of everyone who’s ever lived. And so, therefore, her brother is still with them, and he’d want to tell them that each breath is a chance “to put [their] own signature on a trillion little pieces of the future.” Porter is impressed. Norah hands back Porter’s original speech and tells him the only reason she didn’t use it is because, whether he tried to write in her “style” or not, the content came straight from him. She tells Porter to read the speech.

Porter does, and over this extremely long narration (which basically just states, in bleak and blunt terms, the themes of change coming from within and our ability to control a very limited part of our own destiny — the way people perceive and remember us), a montage reveals Norah packing for college, Porter making reluctant amends with Walter, Meredith releasing Walter into her care, Henry quietly whittling… Norah blasts off down the highway. Porter sits on his driveway, waiting for something with a big backpack. Norah arrives, and he hops in. Together, they ride off.

Notes

I wanted to love this script. It’s loaded with interesting ideas, but the shoddy execution undermines every single one of them. Tonal inconsistencies, unbelievable characters (and/or actions), endless reams of redundant expository dialogue, and a theme that doesn’t exactly say anything new or interesting about the human condition despite having a perfectly weird platform? The script has significant problems.

At a certain point (around page 45 or so), I started to wonder why this screenplay isn’t titled The High School Nerd Who Got Hired to Write a Valedictory Speech. I haven’t tallied up the number of pages devoted to each storyline, but I swear this “subplot” got more attention, priority, and overall length than the “main” story of Walter and The Beaver. Maybe it just felt that way because the subplot was so fucking boring, repetitive, and unconvincing. I don’t care if this script is supposed to be a fantasy (or, at the very least, “fantastical”), very little about either character is believable or relatable. They don’t speak to each other like people; they speak like psych-101 sock-puppets, spewing therapy lingo as they profile one another and try to effect change despite barely knowing one another. I can buy them both as damaged goods — although the notion of a “forgotten” youngest child who has to rebel to get attention is, to put it politely, fucktarded — but the psychobabble would have felt a lot more convincing if both kids had spent most of their teen years in therapy.

Worse than that, the main story has very little impact on this cumbersome subplot (and vice-versa). The best we get is Porter’s anxiety over turning into his depressed father, which doesn’t amount to much. Porter catalogues traits he shares with Walter but does nothing to consciously break these habits and distance himself. He just whines about it and bashes his head against the wall (another supposedly inherited trait).

On a related note, possibly the worst reveal in the script is the development that Walter and The Beaver really are separate entities, with separate minds and goals. The idea of The Beaver as a construct of a damaged mind makes Walter fascinating, and you start to wonder how he’ll overcome this crutch and strike some sort of balance that allows him to function. The Beaver fusing itself to his arm and becoming its own thing destroys all of that. Instead, it forces us to the realization that we know very little about Walter aside from his depression. The woodworking story about his childhood was a little bit touching and shows the kind of drive, ambition, and loneliness that would both lead him to business success and depression. Even this is undermined by the throwaway joke that Walter doesn’t deserve his position and only received the promotion because the founder and CEO choked to death (roofles!) while on the town with an escort (DOUBLE ROOFLES!!). So… What? He doesn’t work hard, has no business acumen but was promoted beyond his competence… Because he’s so charming and witty? He loves toys? The original CEO owed him a favor? Without knowing anything about him other than “depressed,” this single, half-assed joke throws a massive wrinkle into the character. Why’d he get promoted? If he really didn’t deserve it, why aren’t the embittered executives gunning to have him committed as soon as he introduces The Beaver? It might seem like a minor detail to get hung up on, but if it’s so minor, why is it in the script? And why doesn’t it make any goddamn sense?

Since Porter does nothing to distance himself from Walter, couldn’t Killen at least have used the younger version of the same man to provide a window into Walter’s hidden-by-The-Beaver soul? Shouldn’t we see the early cracks in the façade that will lead Porter down Walter’s road of depression if he doesn’t change? Wouldn’t that make the dull resolution a bit more satisfying? Walter has to chop off his forearm and get committed to find peace, but Porter can avoid those pitfalls with the love of a woman who takes his verbal abuse with gentle good humor. Good times!

The frequent appearance of lazy, narration-saturated montages in place of real action and drama don’t serve this story well. We’re treated to dozens of pages of largely on-the-nose dialogue between Porter and Norah, but every time something interesting happens, a montage kicks in and The Beaver spoonfeeds everything to us — what’s happening and why, along with a dramatization of the events he’s describing. I don’t mind voiceover narration, and I don’t mind montages, but this script uses neither device effectively.

Tonally, the script clearly wants to be a genre-bending experience along the lines of Being John Malkovich (the movie it most closely resembles, despite lacking that film’s depth and insight), starting as a weird but bleak comedy and moving into something akin to drama. The tonal shift in Being John Malkovich came as a result of the natural evolution of the characters; in The Beaver, the characters spin plates for 100 pages, then change on page 101 and reflect on the change until the end. It does start with a few comic bangs — the introduction to Walter and his depression is pretty funny, and the opening montage quickly goes from funny to dire (which does, I must admit, hint at the jarring shifts later in the script).

The problem is, after the opening it pretty much stops being funny for virtually the entire script. The Porter-Norah mega-subplot is about as humorless as you can get, and the comedy in the absurd visual image of The Beaver disappears after the second time we see him. Beyond that, it just sort of struck me as lazy that the puppet has to be a beaver. Why a beaver, as opposed to any other small, rodent-like woodland creature? Because every time somebody says the word “beaver,” it’ll get laughs from the cheap seats. This kind of lazy comedy frustrates the crap out of me in general, but it’s more frustrating here because a solid dramatic story could come from some of these elements if Killen set aside the gimmicks and the hacky yuks — or at least made better use of them as reflections of his characters.

The Bottom Line

Right now, The Beaver is pretty much a disaster area. The development process gets a bad rap among outsiders, but this is a clear-cut case where sticking a script into the development wringer might yield a better product. A fresh take from a writer with greater insight into these characters could turn this from a bottom-rung chuckle-hut middle-act to something bordering on a dark masterpiece.

I can’t tell you how surprising it is that this received so many Black List votes — remember, this is the #1 pick with 67 votes. Considering the tepid loglines of the other top-ten contenders, it makes me worry about my sanity first and the state of the industry second.

*In case you’re wondering, the script kindly explains the tone: “If this plays with any humor at the start it very quickly disappears. This isn’t Liar Liar. Walter is truly self destructive and the damage he does is real.” [Back]

Posted by Stan on December 15, 2008 3:34 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 12, 2008

Black List 2008

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!

I’ve made the bold decision to cover the top ten on this blog over the course of the next two weeks — one a day, starting with The Beaver, ending with Our Brand Is Crisis. 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 250 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, 2008 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year.

This year, scripts had to receive at least four mentions 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, and questionable “2008” affiliations.

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

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

Click here for the slightly more detailed PDF.

67 mentions:

THE BEAVER by Kyle Killen
“A depressed man finds hope in a beaver puppet that he wears on his hand.”

61 mentions:

THE ORANGES by Jay Reiss & Ian Helfer
“A man has a romantic relationship with the daughter of a family friend, which turns their lives upside down.”

44 mentions:

BUTTER by Jason Micallef
“A small town becomes a center for controversy and jealousy as its annual butter carving contest begins.”

42 mentions:

BIG HOLE by Michael Gilio
“An old cowboy goes on a mission to recover his money after a million dollar sweepstakes scam cleans out his entire bank account.”

40 mentions:

THE LOW DWELLER by Brad Ingelsby
“A man trying to assimilate into society after being released from jail discovers that someone from his past is out to settle a score.”

39 mentions:

FUCKBUDDIES by Liz Meriwether
“A guy and a girl struggle to have an exclusively sexual relationship as they both come to realize they want much more.”

34 mentions:

WINTER’S DISCONTENT by Paul Fruchbom
“When Herb Winter’s wife of fifty years dies, the faithful but sexually frustrated widower moves into a retirement community to start living the swinging single life.”

29 mentions:

BROKEN CITY by Brian Tucker
“A New York private investigator gets sucked into a shady mayoral election.”

24 mentions:

I’M WITH CANCER by Will Reiser
“A autobiographical comic account of one man’s struggle to beat cancer.”

22 mentions:

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS by Peter Straughan
“Based on the eponymous documentary. James Carville and a team of U.S. political consultants travel to South America to help Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (aka ‘Goni’) become President of Bolivia.”

21 mentions:

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS by Quentin Tarantino
“American soldiers, French peasants, French resistance, and Nazis collide in Hitler occupied France.”

20 mentions:

UNTITLED VANESSA TAYLOR PROJECT by Vanessa Taylor
“After thirty years of marriage, a middle-aged couple attends an intense counseling weekend to decide the fate of their marriage.”

16 mentions:

GALAHAD by Ryan Condal
“A revisionist twist on the King Arthur legend from the knight Galahad’s perspective.”

THE WEST IS DEAD by Andrew Baldwin
“During the Great Depression, a group of semi-outlaws go on the run from the law when forced to vacate a town as the Hoover dam is constructed.”

15 mentions:

MANUSCRIPT by Paul Grellong
“A contemporary thriller about three bright, young New Yorkers with boundless literary ambition who will stop at nothing to get what they want.”

THE TUTOR by Matthew Fogel
“A twenty three year old recent graduate decides, at his mother’s insistence, to tutor his ex-girlfriend’s younger sister for the SATs. When they begin a romantic relationship, his ex-girlfriend moves back home for the summer and begins to fall back in love with our anti-hero as well.”

14 mentions:

THE DESCENDANTS by Nat Faxon & Jim Rash
“A newly widowed father — also one of the richest men in Oahu, Hawaii — takes off with his two rebellious daughters to track down his Kauai.”

SUNFLOWER by Misha Green
“Two young women struggle to escape from and exact revenge on the deranged college professor who holds them hostage.”

GOING THE DISTANCE by Geoff LaTulippe
“A couple tries to maintain a long-distance relationship.”

13 mentions:

THE AMERICAN WAY by Brian Kistler
“Two brothers are affected by their parents’ murder, leading one to the FBI and the other to a life of crime.”

NOWHERE BOY by Matt Greenhalgh
“The story of John Lennon’s rise from lonely, Liverpool teenager to iconic rock star.”

RAINDROPS ALL AROUND ME by Reed Agnew & Eli Jorne
“A socially awkward high school teacher learns to ‘dumb it down’ in order to fit in with those around him.”

SEQUELS, REMAKES & ADAPTATIONS by Sam Esmail
“The outlandish journey of a young man in search of love and what he’s meant to do with his life.”

12 mentions:

A COUPLE OF DICKS by Mark Cullen & Robb Cullen
“Two veteran LAPD detectives attempt to track down a stolen, mint-condition, 1952 baseball card that one of the detectives hopes to sell in order to pay for his daughter’s upcoming wedding.”

THE MANY DEATHS OF BARNABY JAMES by Brian Nathanson
“A teenage apprentice in a macabre circus for the dead yearns to bring his true love back to life, but not before encountering the many dangerous and mysterious gothic characters that stand in his way.”

GAY DUDE by Alan Yang
“A comedy about the friendship of two high school seniors that’s torn apart after one comes out of the closet.”

UNDERAGE by Scott Neustadter & Michael Weber
“A seventeen-year-old seduces a twentysomething man and then blackmails him into being her boyfriend in order to exact revenge on her high school aged ex.”

11 mentions:

CODE NAME VEIL by Matt Billingsley
“Based on actual events. A young CIA agent struggles to maintain his morality while navigating dangerous and absurd conditions in 1980s Beirut.”

THE FOURTH KIND by Olatunde Osunsanmi
“A woman investigates an extraordinary number of unexplained disappearances from one small town in Alaska.”

EVERYTHING MUST GO by Dan Rush
“A relapsed alcoholic loses his job and his wife and decides to live on his front lawn while selling all of his belongings in a yard sale.”

FOXCATCHER by E Max Frye & Dan Futterman
“Based on the true story of John du Pont, a paranoid schizophrenic who was heir to the du Pont fortune. After building a wrestling training facility named Team Foxcatcher on his Pennsylvania estate, Du Pont shot and killed Olympic gold medal-winning grappler David Schulz.”

THE PHANTOM LIMB by Kevin Koehler
“A troubled private detective uncovers a blackmail scam involving a gangster who runs a brothel that caters to amputee fetishes (and other taboo sexual interests) and the doctor who performs the body modifications.”

10 mentions:

THE APOSTLES OF INFINITE LOVE by Victoria Strouse
“When an upper class dysfunctional New York family learn their youngest daughter has joined a cult in the midwest, they recruit a cult deprogrammer and go on the road to save her while both parents and siblings confront their issues with one another.”

THE F-WORD by Elan Mastai
“Two best friends struggle with falling in love without ruining the bond between them.”

UP IN THE AIR by Jason Reitman
“A ruthless human resources executive, whose job is to fire people, looks forward to the only joy he has in life, his millionth frequent flyer mile, a goal he pursues with zeal as the rest of his life falls apart around him because he is constantly on the road.”

9 mentions:

BACHELORETTE by Leslye Headland
“Ten years out of high school, three unhappy single friends come together as bridesmaids at a classmate’s wedding, get drunk, get high, and trash the wedding dress while romancing new and old loves and settling old business.”

KNIGHTS by Nick Confalone & Neal Dusedau
“A kickass British adventure where knighted celebrities (an entrepreneur, a soccer player, a musician, and an actor) are called upon to defend their country.”

JONNY QUEST by Dan Mazeau
“Young Jonny Quest travels the world with his scientist father, adopted brother from India, Bandit the bulldog, and a government agent assigned to protect them while they investigate scientific mysteries.”

THE KARMA COALITION by Shawn Christensen
“A professor embarks on a quest to uncover the truth behind his wife’s death before the world ends.”

KEIKO by Elizabeth Wright Shapiro
“A white teenage girl, who was adopted and raised in Japan by Japanese parents, travels to America to find her long lost father, comedian Dana Carvey.”

TWENTY TIMES A LADY by Gabrielle Allan & Jennifer Crittenden
“Based on the book by Karyn Bosnak. After realizing that she has had twice as many sexual partners as the national average, Ally swears off new guys and decides to go back and visit the previous twenty guys and find out if she overlooked anyone.”

8 mentions:

CLEAR WINTER NOON by John Kolvenbach
“A hit man released from jail in his seventies tries to make amends for the innocent life he took.”

FIERCE INVALIDS HOME FROM HOT CLIMATES by Eric Aronson
“Based on the novel by Tom Robbins. An irascible, world-weary CIA operative is duped by his boss into helping re-place a listening device back in Russian hands that is vital to spying on them.”

ROUNDTABLE by Brian K Vaughan
“In modern day, Merlin attempts to assemble a bunch of knights to battle an ancient evil.”

7 mentions:

PLAN B by Kate Angelo
“A woman sets out to be artificially inseminated and falls in love.”

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF THE MONOGAMOUS DUCK by Neeraj Katyal
“A writer struggling with drugs and his girlfriend’s death leaves New York for Los Angeles where he falls in love with a teacher and straightens out his life.”

THE LAYMAN’S TERMS by Jeremy Bailey
“In the midst of the Great Depression, a prodigal son returns home to face his demons and resurrect the dust bowl town he left behind. But the arrival of a mysterious woman soon threatens his way of life when he discovers she is being hunted by the very same Chicago gangsters he used to run with.”

THE MALLUSIONIST by Robbie Pickering & Jace Ricci
“A wannabe illusionist travels cross country with his young son to compete against his archnemesis in a Vegas magic show.”

THE GARY COLEMAN-EMMANUEL LEWIS PROJECT by Dan Fogelman
“Emmanuel Lewis and Gary Coleman save the world from an evil madman.”

WHAT IS LIFE WORTH? By Max Borenstein
“Based on the memoir of Kenneth Feinberg, a dramatization of his involvement in the 9/11 victims compensation fund.”

6 mentions:

ACOD: ADULT CHILDREN OF DIVORCE by Ben Karlin & Stu Zicherman
“A grown man finds himself still caught in the crossfire of his parents’ divorce.”

BAD TEACHER by Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky
“After being dumped by her boyfriend, a foul-mouthed, gold-digging seventh-grade teacher sets her sights on a colleague who is dating the school’s model teacher.”

CHILD 44 by Richard Price
“Based on the novel by Tom Rob Smith. An officer in Stalinist Russia’s secret police is framed by a colleague for treason. While on the run with his wife, he stumbles upon a series of child murders and launches his own rogue investigation.”

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY by Charles Randolph
“The true story of former Assistant United States attorney Stanley Alpert’s kidnapping by petty thieves and how he bonded with them in a Queens, NY apartment in 1998.”

INFERNO: A LINDA LOVELACE STORY by Matt Wilder
“The story of Linda Lovelace, the first mainstream porn star who eventually overcame her past, found happiness in suburbia and led a crusade to stop pornography.”

EASY A by Bert Royal
“A good-natured high school student uses the rumor mill to personal advantage by pretending to be the school slut.”

GRAND THEFT AUTO by Jason Dean Hall
“Facing foreclosure on his repo yard, a young ex-con resumes a life of crime only to get blamed when his uncle’s coke deal gets hijacked. Caught in double crosses between Russian mafia, Yakuza, and the ATF, the young ex-con kidnaps a crime boss’s daughter and steals car after car on a Vegas bound suicide mission to retrieve the stolen drugs.”

HELP ME SPREAD GOODNESS by Mark Friedman
“When an email predator dupes a man out of his son’s college fund, the man travels to Nigeria to confront those who ripped him off.”

GIANTS by Eric Nazarian
“A teenager with Marfan Syndrome comes to terms with his estranged father, his overworked mother, and the possibility that he very well might die during his upcoming procedure.”

LONDON BOULEVARD by William Monahan
“Based on the book by Ken Fruen. Fresh out of prison, Mitchell lands a legitimate job as a handyman for a rich actress who’s eager to reward him with cash, cars, and sex. But Mitchell can never truly escape his violent past or the dangerous world of loan sharks, drug addicts and other bottom-feeders.”

SHRAPNEL by Evan Daugherty
“Two mortal enemies square off on a hunting trip to the death.”

YOUR DREAMS SUCK by Kat Dennings & Geoffrey Litwak
“An awkward teen with no self esteem regains his self-confidence after joining a Dance Dance Revolution team.”

MEMOIRS by Will Fetters
“Two college students who’ve experienced recent loss fall in love and heal their fractured families.”

GREETINGS FROM JERRY by John Killoran
“Jerry seems to have it all — money, women, and a ridiculously easy job as a greeting card writer — until a tiny mistake at work unravels his life. Having lost everything he had — but never earned —he’s forced to confront who he really is and start again from scratch.”

5 mentions:

AFTER HAILEY by Scott Frank
“Based on the novel by Jonathan Tropper. After a twentysomething man’s older wife dies, he remains in suburbia and struggles to raise her teenage son from a previous marriage.”

THE BLADE ITSELF by Aaron Stockard
“Based on the novel by Marcus Sakey. Two former childhood friends, who made their reputation committing petty crimes, are reunited years later, forcing one of them to decide how far he will go to protect his past.”

FRESHLY POPPED by Megan Parsons
“A teenage girl who works at a movie theater tries to decide to whom she wants to lose her virginity.”

GAZA by Frank Deasy
“A British woman goes to Gaza to recover the body of her dead daughter and comes to understand her daughter’s political ideals.”

BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE by Adam Cozad
“Two orphans, raised by a CIA operative to be assassins, become targets themselves.”

MAN OF CLOTH by Josh Zetumer
“When an English minister’s family (wife and youngest son) are unjustly punished and sent off to a prison colony in Australia, the minister and his oldest son travel to Australia to re-unite the family. Upon arrival though, the minister is informed of their death, and quickly vengeance is the only thing that can quiet his hurt.”

GROWN MAN BUSINESS by Justin Britt-Gibson
“An older man who was a gangster in his youth returns to his neighborhood after a long absence to find the boys who murdered the son he abandoned years previous.”

HOW TO BE GOOD by Cindy Chupack
“Based on the novel by Nick Hornby. A woman having second thoughts about her husband is pleased when he begins following a guru, but when her husband invites the guru to live with them, her point of view changes entirely.”

IRON JACK by Johnny Rosenthal
“A renowned novelist’s comic quest for hidden treasure in the 1930s.”

THE HERETIC by Javier Rodriguez
“The Roman Catholic Church asks a former inquisitor to assassinate rebel monk Martin Luther.”

UNLOCKED by Peter O’Brien
“A female CIA interrogator is duped into getting a terrorist to provide key information to the wrong side, thrusting her into the middle of a plot to plan a devastating biological attack in London.”

SLEEPING BEAUTY by Julia Leigh
“A haunting erotic fairy tale about Lucy, a student who drifts into prostitution and finds her niche as a woman who sleeps, drugged, in a ‘Sleeping Beauty chamber’ while men do to her what she can’t remember the next morning.”

STOP HUNTINGDON ANIMAL CRUELTY by Adam Sachs
“A lonely journalist finds love and inspiration in a quirky, unlikely manner -covering the misadventures of a young boy’s ‘protest’ of an animal rights movement.”

A TALE OF TWO CITIES by Beau Willimon
“Based on the novel by Charles Dickens. Set in Paris and London during the French Revolution, English aristocrat Sydney Carton sacrifices his own life for his unrequited love Lucie Manette and Frenchman Charles Darnay.”

THE SPELLMAN FILES by Bobby Florsheim & Josh Stolberg
“A family of private investigators use their gumshoe skills to crack cases and pry into one another’s personal lives.”

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED by Hanna Weg
“The tumultuous and doomed love affair of Jazz Age icons F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre.”

WHAT WOULD KENNY DO? by Chris Baldi
“A seventeen-year-old high school kid meets a ‘hologram’ of himself at thirty-seven-years-old and benefits from their friendship.”

4 mentions:

47 RONIN by Chris Morgan
“Forty-seven samurai seek vengeance upon a regional lord who is responsible for the death of their master.”

THE ZERO by Stephen Chin
“Based on the novel by Jess Walter. After a New York City policeman shoots himself in the head following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he is assigned to work for a shadowy agency at ‘Ground Zero’ and quickly finds himself drawn into a sinister government plot.”

BALLAD OF THE WHISKEY ROBBER by Rich Wilkes
“Based on the book by Julian Rubinstein.”

THE DEBT by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn
“Based on the Israeli film HaHov. Three Israeli Mossad agents discover that a war
criminal is still alive and set out to pursue him.”

A BITTERSWEET LIFE by Mark L Smith
“A crime boss asks his trusted lieutenant to determine if his young mistress is having an affair (and to kill her and her lover if she is.) The lieutenant confirms the affair but, entranced by the girl, chooses to let them live. Discovering this, the crime boss orders the lieutenant killed, only he escapes and seeks vengeance.”

BOBISM by Ben Wexler
“A shy college student discovers that life in one thousand years will be based on his blog — and he has to stop aliens from the future who want him dead.”

DEADLINE by Soo Hugh
“A discredited journalist navigates dangerous politics to find a missing aid worker.”

BOBBIE SUE by Russell Sharman, Owen Egerton, & Chris Mass
“A hard charging female ambulance chaser becomes the face of a prestigious law firm when an important client is sued for sexual discrimination.”

A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY by Susan Walter
“A female clothing designer struggles to find love and success after turning thirty.”

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Chris Terrio
“Based on a true story. The controversial love affair between an oil baron and his adopted daughter destroys the empire they built together.”

THE HOW-TO GUIDE FOR SAVING THE WORLD by BenDavid Grabinski
“A loser discovers a book on how to stop an alien invasion and is thrust into action to stop a real one.”

I KILLED BUDDY CLOY by Nick Garrison & Chase Pletts
“When a terrible act of violence shatters Ray’s hum-drum existence, his sociopath uncle lures him down an absurd, vengeful path.”

HEARTSTOPPER by Dan Antoniazzi & Ben Shiffrin
“A romantic comedy, with a serial killer.”

JAR CITY by Michael Ross
“Based on the film by Baltasar Kormakur. A police detective’s investigation of a murder leads to the uncovering of secrets in a small town.”

SAMURAI by Fernley Phillips
“Set in Japan during the 150 Year War, a ronin out for justice teams up with a ninja and a green-eyed English boy to rid Japan of an evil Lord. Their partnership becomes the stuff of myth.”

THE MOST ANNOYING MAN IN THE WORLD by Kevin Kopelow & Heath Seifert
“A man travels across the country with his annoying brother in order to get to his own wedding.”

THE MURDERER AMONG US by Lori Gambino
“Based on true events. Legendary filmmaker Fritz Lang contends with a mounting police investigation into the death of his first wife, the growing threat of the Third Reich, and a caustic relationship with his female collaborator; all leading to the production of the film M.”

MOTORCADE by Billy Ray
“The President of the United States and his motorcade are attacked during a visit to Los Angeles.”

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HELL by Brian McGreevy & Lee Shipman
“A gritty, contemporary retelling of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO set in the underworld of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish mob.”

‘TIL BETH DO US PART by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
“The friendship of two twentysomething men is put to the test when one of them becomes engaged.”

THE SCAVENGERS by Nate Edelman
“Based on the play Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge. A ne’er-do-well Irish twentysomething becomes infamous when he commits a haphazard murder and catches the fancy of a brazen barmaid who, bored with her small town existence, sees him as the rebel he always wanted to be and follows him on the run.”

SHERLOCK HOLMES by Tony Peckham
“A dark, sophisticated take on Sherlock Holmes and his trusted number two, Dr. Watson.”

SERIAL KILLER DAYS by Mark Carter
“A dark comedy blending stories of teen love and municipal corruption set against the backdrop of a town plagued by a serial killer that decides to profit the only way it
can — by creating a festival and economy around the fact that they have a serial
killer.”

SWINGLES by Jeff Roda
“After their best friends get engaged, a dedicated bachelor and a high-strung lawyer team up to help each other get dates by giving revealing insights into the opposite sex (thus inventing ‘swingling’) but complications ensue when they fall for each other.”

UNTITLED CHANNING TATUM PROJECT by Doug Jung
“A Los Angeles cop escorts a Korean gang leader back to South Korea. When the gang leader escapes, killing the cop’s partner in the process, he teams with a young Korean gangster in a bloody pursuit of revenge that takes them through the dangerous and exotic underworld of Seoul.”

Posted by Stan on December 12, 2008 4:15 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

December 10, 2008

Face to Face

‘Tis the season of giving, so I feel like an asshole trashing kids’ cartoons about Santa Claus. Who wouldn’t? I didn’t even rip it a new one like that torture porn script — nothing’s that bad, but when you combine painful mediocrity with words like “forgettable” and phrases like “sporadically amusing,” it ends up sounding like a big-time pan. My guesstimation? If these writer/producers are lucky, they’ll hit the 5-9 age range. They’ll be lucky to get kids as old as nine to enjoy the movie, but I tried to be nice and give it a wider bracket. Adults will hate it. It’s too creepy for kids under five. Anyone old enough to stop believing in Santa Claus will outgrow it. So that’s it.

I feel terrible, though. When you read a script, there’s a barely tangible, inexpressible difference between stories written from a place of passion and love and those written to maximize demo saturation by appealing to the lowest common denominator. This Santa Claus story had all the signs of a passion project — whether I think it sucks or not, the people making it have loads of obvious, misguided faith in it. This intrigued me, so before I started writing the notes, I made the mistake of Googling the writers.

Here’s a note to any readers out there: never do this. I learned my lesson the hard way — twice. The first time was several months ago, when I read the bad, quirky comedy. The title page noted that it was based on a book, so I Googled the title, and one of the first hits came from a movie website announcing Jessica Alba as the star of the film adaptation.

I don’t want it to sound like I wish Jessica Alba any ill will; I just don’t think she’s a very good actor, and like fellow sci-fi-TV-star-turned-mediocre-movie-star Sarah Michelle Gellar, she started out super-hot and then lost about 20 pounds too many and just looks emaciated and awful. (She looks maybe 10% better after having the baby, but I’m sure the healthy weight gain and the enormous breasts will disappear soon enough.) I point this out because I’m much more willing to accept mediocre acting from somebody who makes my man-parts go sproing. Dark Angel-era Alba had that effect; Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer just makes me shrug. The franchise-required bad blonde dye job doesn’t help, either.

Where was I going with this? Right, Jessica Alba isn’t very good. As I mentioned, the script paints the character as so creepy and crazy, you’d need a great actress to add the appropriate level of warmth and vulnerability — none of which exists in the script, as text or subtext — and they get Jessica Alba, whose vacant-eyed stare makes her seem creepy and crazy even when the screenplay repeatedly points out what an absolute dreamy sweetheart she’s supposed to be. Not a good sign, and although I want to say this didn’t color my judgment of the script, I read every scene picturing Alba in the role… It had an impact.

Consequently, I made the decision to stop looking up writers and titles before doing the coverage. Afterward, anything goes. Lucky for me, I’ve only recognized a few writers and projects from the title page alone. It’s easier to read scripts and trash them without the burden of even more badness hanging over my head.

This Santa Claus script was sort of the opposite scenario. I Googled the writers and the production company and found a group of warm, optimistic folks who spent literally decades working on many of the popular Saturday-morning cartoons of my youth. Even though I Googled them after I’d already read (and disliked) the script, I immediately felt worse. This was compounded by the production company website’s adorably upbeat blog laden with pictures of smiling folks (and their dogs) having a ball working together.

I was torn: look, this is a script that has a romantic subplot involving Santa and the woman who raised him from birth. Not his mother technically, but still… Just because the Oedipal ickiness will sail right over the heads of the target audience doesn’t mean it’s not there. All the good things the script does is plagued by uncomfortable moments of weirdness like that, so I felt like simply calling it “mediocre” and “cute but forgettable” had already overtaxed my generosity.

Seeing all those smiling faces made me want to submit a scan of a Crayola drawing of Santa Claus surrounded by hearts and smiling flowers in lieu of actual criticism. I’m sure I’ll feel guilty about my — shudder! — honesty for weeks or months. I learned a lesson: don’t be nicer about shit that doesn’t deserve it… Just stop Googling the people involved with these scripts.

Posted by Stan on December 10, 2008 4:00 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 8, 2008

Shotguns Spray

I’ve had another of those “final straw” moments. I just read a description in which a hunter blasts his shotgun at a girl, who manages to duck out of the way and avoid the shot by “a quarter of an inch.” Now, I’m not a gun expert, and I’d never claim to be. I write shitty movie scripts that, because they’re shitty movie scripts, often involve guns and gunplay. Even in a comedy, the type of gun is important — some guns just aren’t that funny (I’m looking at you, mini-Uzi).

I’ve touched one actual, bona fide gun in my life, and the experience didn’t do much for me. That doesn’t matter, though. I know there’s a difference between reality and movie-style unreality, but here’s some pretty basic knowledge about shotguns (knowledge I had even without doing any sort of in-depth gun research): shotguns spray. You don’t duck or scamper out of the way of the “bullet” (no seriously, I’ve seen shotgun shells described as bullets, and I’ve laughed), because unless you move at the speed of sound, the spread will at least maim you.

How hard is it to learn these basic truths? A writer — especially one of a genre that involves more guns per film than, say, a Renaissance-era costume drama — should know these things, and if he or she doesn’t, the writing reflects their idiocy and/or sloppiness, which in turn reflects badly on the screen. I’m all for suspension of disbelief in a work of fiction, but I have trouble accepting the fact that a writer of movie screenplays wouldn’t do basic gun research.

Posted by Stan on December 8, 2008 3:55 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 5, 2008

Stylistic Choices

I shouldn’t have to explain “style” in screenplays. I know I shouldn’t, but I keep reading these Shane Black wannabes who have no idea what their edgy, post-genre ironic detachment does to people reading their screenplays. Now, before I get a bunch of e-mails from people too cowardly to insult me in the comments (that’s why they’re there, people — I hurl enough insults, I may as well receive my own public shaming), I should have you know that I love Shane Black’s work. He’s great, but writers with a desperate desire to be him suffer from the age-old problem of knowing the notes but not the music. Because, you see, the ironic detachment and laugh-out-loud asides that populate scripts like Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang come from the fact that the scripts are irony-drenched comedies. Just because Lethal Weapon treats its characters like real people and has a serious third act doesn’t mean it stops being a crazy satire of the Joel Silver action empire — Richard Donner may have reigned it in a bit, but at the end of the day Lethal Weapon is every bit as nuts as The Last Boy Scout.

Black’s style works for what he writes because he matches the tone of the piece. In screenwriting, tone is really what style is all about. Dialogue has some stylistic leeway, but when you’re talking about action blocks (or body copy or copy block or any of the thousands of other names for script paragraphs indicating action), if you want the story taken seriously, they have to be serious — almost style-free, generic descriptions of people, places, and things. Every action block has to convey the tone of the moment. If you’re writing a tender, sincere love story, Shane Black’s ridiculous sex scene description (which satirizes other writers’, ahem, detailed attempts to capture the act on the page) will not work. At all. It makes no stylistic sense.

If you’re writing a suspenseful action sequence, you don’t want to break it up with some self-parodying sarcasm unless it’s a moment in the script. If it’s something along the lines of Indiana Jones shooting the sword-fighter, go with it. It matches the tone. If it’s something like the third act of Marathon Man, it’s inappropriate nonsense. Everything is about using the words on the page to make sure — without dreaded “directing on the page” accusations — you’ve captured the desired tone. If you can do that, you don’t need to direct on the page. The director will pick up your cues and roll with them; more importantly for a bottom-rung wannabe, the one-rung-above-bottom interns reading your shit will recommend it.

What happens when the style doesn’t match the tone? It’s easy enough to suss out, but it’s not going to win you any points with anyone. Recently, I read a screenplay — a very straightforward horror script — that is just nothing but wannabe Shane Black-isms. Every moment in the goddamn script is just endless hyperbole and sarcasm for no discernible reason. Here’s a brief example from the opening:

I want to give it bonus points. Hyperbolic or not, “an image that would give Ansel Adams a hard on” paints a definite picture, as do the first three sentences of the second paragraph. But what about every goddamn other thing? Sadly, this isn’t even the worst example of the tonal oddities. It’s just a grabber that prepares you for one thing and delivers something else entirely. You expect some kind of funny, weird, untrue tale from some asshole warrior-poet murmuring at the edge of a bar. Instead, you get a straightforward horror flick where the biggest surprise is its stylistic inability to convey the proper tone.

Like so many scripts, I actually enjoyed this one until its disastrous third act — the “biggest surprise” thing is my own example of hyperbole, because the story does contain a decent number of surprises. However, because of the style the writer uses, the entire story felt an arm’s length away from me — it never quite grabbed me, because I never lost the sense that I was just reading a script. One of the ways I measure a good script is whether or not I can get lost in the world or feel a legitimate emotional connection with the characters. As I said, this script isn’t terrible, but I never felt anything for anyone. The writer wouldn’t let me.

I understand it’s common for horror movies to treat deaths as frequent occurrences with little emotional impact on the remaining characters, but consider a scene in which two new characters appear — in gas masks, with one bleeding from a gunshot wound and just about at death’s door. This scene has enough melodramatic dialogue to make me think we’re supposed to take the death seriously, yet here’s the introduction of these characters: “The man is DWIGHT. A local. His wife’s name…well, it won’t matter in a minute so I won’t bother telling you.” Yeah, thanks for not bothering! I guess that gives me license to not bother giving a shit on the several occasions, later in the script, when Dwight gives her guts a mournful glance.

I hope this demonstrates today’s lesson: style = tone. Comedy? Make me laugh. Harrowing adoption-themed drama? Bum me out. Action? Make my pulse pound. Or maybe this is where you can exercise some of the Palahniukian masturbation seen above — assuming there’s an element of satire or, at least, philosophical ruminations on the genre archetypes. Horror? Scare me shitless. And on and on through all the genres. Oh hell, genres don’t even matter — you could write an action-psychological thriller-comedy-drama-horror-mythological-adventure and it doesn’t matter much. Just know what feeling you want to give audiences — until it’s a produced movie, anyone reading counts as your audience — and make sure you get that across verbally.

Posted by Stan on December 5, 2008 2:12 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 3, 2008

Diseased Freaks

Sometimes I feel like the quirky-character police. I don’t mind quirky characters, mind you — everyone’s a little off, which makes people interesting. However, there’s a fine line between “lovably eccentric” and “frighteningly psychotic.” Sometimes, it’s an intangible argument — why did I love the oddball characters in Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, but I felt the ones in The Life Aquatic were “quirky for the sake of being quirky” rather than feeling like real people? I’ve thought about that more than any sane man should, and I’ve come to no conclusions. Why did I think Juno and Napoleon Dynamite verged on creating stereotypes of the “quirky character” by applying well-known, overused peculiarities? Since the recent notion of “quirky characters” stems from the ’90s indie world’s frustration with mainstream fare, which started to rely increasingly on stereotypical (in many cases, outdated) characters and situations, does this mean we’ve finally lapped ourselves? Have the ’00s defined themselves as the decade of capricious-cum-crazy? It’s already given birth to the manic pixie dream girl archetype, so why not just go whole-hog and admit writers and filmmakers no longer have a clue what separates oddballs from nutjobs?

In the case of one quirky comedy script I read, things get a little more interesting. It was adapted from a novel, and while I haven’t read it (I’m not that dedicated to my work), I’ve gathered that the screenplay is pretty faithful to its source. The reviews are a mixed bag of folks praising Bender for poetic imagery and wonderful absurdity and denigrating her for irritating characters and a cutesy, overly precocious style. Taking for granted that many reviews of the book are favorable, and it sold enough to generate interest in a film version, the adaptation problem reminded me of Roger Ebert’s review of Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Her big competition: trailer-park cutie Amber (Kirsten Dunst), whose alcoholic mother, Annette (Ellen Barkin), is burned in a fire and spends much of the movie with a beer can permanently fused to the flesh of her hand.

Now there’s an example of how a mental image can be funnier than a real one—how a screenplay can fail to translate. You possibly smiled as you read about Annette’s hand being fused to a beer can. I did as I wrote the words. But the image of the charred can embedded in scarred flesh is not funny, and every time it turns up, it casts its little pall.

It reminded me of a similar passage in William Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell? I’m too lazy to dig out the book and quote from it, but paraphrasing from memory: he and Rob Reiner had long, vicious arguments about whether or not to include the feet-chopping-off in Misery. Goldman argued it’s essential to the story, but Reiner felt like visualizing that took things way too far. They compromised with the now-famous sledgehammer sequence, and when Goldman screened the film for the first time, it was so harrowing, he realized Reiner had been right.

How does that apply to this script? It seems to me that, in a book, it might be a little easier to accept the notion of a guy who spent 20 years wearing wax numbers around his neck to indicate his mood (higher numbers mean a better mood). Trying to imagine that on the screen… I’m about to go a long way for an analogy so bear with me. In high school, I was briefly on the speech team. The incident that caused me to quit was fairly simple: I was rocking ass at one tournament, doing Original Comedy, and if I broke to finals and did well, I would have made it to regionals. The first two prelims went great. Even the third — I knew I was on, like I’d never been on before. Then I made eye contact with the judge, whose face bore a look confusion and horror I would not see again until I lost my virginity. That tournament, I went 1-1-5, didn’t make it to finals, regionals, sectionals, or state. That was it. In a rage, I quit the team at the end of the run.

Getting back to the analogy, the look that judge had on her face? Probably the closest thing to the look on my face trying to visualize some of this “humor” on the screen. Maybe, like me versus the judge, it’s just a difference of opinion regarding what good comedy is. I won’t discount the possibility. However, from where I’m standing, the humor style and the characters do a disservice to the story, yet they’re the only thing differentiating it from any other romantic comedy.

See, at the end of the day, a guy with wax numbers around his neck? Not a big deal. The real problem, and perhaps the most significant adaptive flaw, is Our Heroine. A math lover inexplicably hired as a teacher despite a total lack of qualifications and experience (this, to the writers’ credit, does turn into a plot point), Our Heroine pulverizes the fine line between “adorable” and “terrifying.” It’s made all the worse by the notion that she’s let loose around kids. Everyone ignores her strange behavior, that she’s suffering from some kind of uncomfortable hybrid of depression, OCD, and borderline-personality disorder. She’s suffering, which is theoretically sad and relatable, but we never understand (a) why she’s suffering or (b) why she refuses to do anything to help herself. It’s made all the worse by the notion that she just turns it off like a lightswitch at the end.

I’ve ranted before about how both how much more fluid time can be in a book and how much more ground can be covered, and one or the other could account for the failure to gain any sort of real insight into Our Heroine. I didn’t find any of the characters’ quirks endearing, but Our Heroine is an unchecked wreck. I just wanted somebody to either tell her, “Hey, there’s no reason for you to act this way, so stop it!” or “Hey, you need help — follow me to the mental ward of the ‘Blue Hospital.’” If it sounds like I’m not sympathetic to her problems, it’s because the writers don’t make her sympathetic. They want us to believe everything she does, no matter how weird or frightening or inappropriate in front of seven-year-olds, is adorable. It’s not.

It’s worse than not adorable, though. Because we never fully understand anything about her but the tics — which seem to exist to keep others, and by extension the audience, at a distance — she turns into an inert protagonist. She has no particular goals — her mom throws her out and forces her to get a job, the school hires her because they have no one else, and she seems only to succeed because her weird, child-like behavior appeals to the kids. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind this — a character thrust into an environment outside her comfort zone who had to make a theoretical decision to succeed. Like everything else, though, we never learn that she’s made this decision. She succeeds because of plot mechanics more than an internal drive.

The only times Our Heroine takes an active role, she does something mind-boggling — eating an entire bar of soap to avoid intimacy, breaking into an old man’s house after leaping to the puzzling conclusion that he’s died, buying the aforementioned axe on a whim and bringing it to school. Because she’s too passive to let us gain insight from other actions, and the writers don’t dig deep into who Our Heroine is and what she feels, the rare moments of actions become stark, disturbing moments when the writers seem to be going for “adorably precocious.” This also contributes to the problem of her turning on a dime and abandoning her (psychosomatic?) craziness.

All of this leads to the creep-out ending where she gets so completely normal, she’s allowed to adopt one of her students. This made it go from a weird but possibly salvageable script into just a complete disaster. I can understand the structural mechanics that should be in play here — it’s the story of a woman who does not have her shit together, who discovers something more important (a child in need) and realizes she needs to clean up her act. But both story and character get lost in the overbearing eccentricities, to the point that nobody — least of all Our Heroine — resembles a human being. The conflicts don’t make sense, the actions and reactions are creepy, and the heartwarming ending left me unsettled. I feel bad, because maybe the novel’s great, and maybe there’s some hope for this script, but it’s missing huge chunks of important information.

Contrast this with a dramedy adapted from another novel. It has stumbling blocks of its own, but I found them easier to overlook because it gets plenty of things right that the quirky comedy gets wrong.

Here, you have a compulsive, suicidal bird-watcher and his creepy, codependent girlfriend. The writer doesn’t try to apologize for their behavior, and in fact, as it escalates, it becomes more apparent — both to the audience and the characters — that things are getting worse and will not end well for anybody. Like Art School Confidential, it goes from sharp character study to bizarre mess in record time, as the third act deals with the protagonist shooting a guy and eluding the police; the end result is his girlfriend committing suicide and leaving a note saying she killed the man, the ultimate act of codependence.

I wish the girlfriend had a bit more development leading up to the suicide, and I wish Our Hero (insane or not) had felt a bit more guilt over what he did. It’s one of those situations that’s played as an “accident” — and therefore he has nothing to feel guilty about — but he was chasing the guy with a gun, he fired without realizing the safety was on, then played around with the safety until the gun accidentally “went” off and killed him. What, was he just shooting to maim? Like the other script, I have to wonder if the novel goes into more intimate detail of this incident, so we understand full well how Our Hero feels.

I’m not enthusiastic about the ending, but the story did work for the most part — even sorta worked in the third act, whether I agree with the direction it took or not. More than not apologizing for their behavior, the writer doesn’t ignore it like the quirky comedy did. Maybe “ignore” is the wrong word — at the very least, those writers presented a great deal of strange behavior without giving any believable indications of where it came from and why it went untreated. This script fully acknowledges the weirdness but has the wisdom to not make it Our Hero’s defining trait.

What’s the solution? Not all “quirky comedies” want to be about the weirdness, so having them play up the legitimate mental problems of their characters won’t work. In the case of the quirky comedy, since Our Heroine’s major hurdle is overcoming said problems, maybe it would work. Most movies, though, want to imbue characters with some unusual qualities to differentiate them from every other movie character.

Writers just need to recognize two things: (1) the fine line between “quirky” and “crazy,” and (2) the difference between “believably quirky” and “nonsensical, inhuman behavior.” A woman who sees numbers in everyday objects and has trouble with intimacy? Quirky! A woman who brings an axe to a bunch of third-graders because she sees a “7”? Fucked up and impossible to believe without accepting she suffers from a crippling mental illness that should prevent her from working within 500 feet of children.

It’s not the easiest thing in the world, but anybody who’s taken a few bottom-rung psychology courses and/or understands male and female biological imperatives should be able to overcome this obstacle.

Posted by Stan on December 3, 2008 2:11 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 1, 2008

Torture Porn

I can’t say that I’ve ever seen an example of torture porn, a budding subgenre that’s like a more nihilistic version of slasher movies. There are apparently two distinctions between torture porn and slasher movies: (1) the killer always gets away with it, and (2) nobody survives, but in the unlikely event that someone does, nobody believes their story and they get sent to the nuthouse. This is almost a complete reversal of standard slasher fare, where usually all but one character dies, and the one left takes an axe or something to the head of the killer. Even if they have the old “you think he’s dead and then his eyes pop open” ending, there’s still a moment of triumph. Torture porn lacks that moment of triumph, relying instead (for the most part) on moments of queasy hope that maybe these people will escape their attackers; if they ever do, the attackers chase them down and re-catch them rather quickly.

Why would anyone watch a movie like this? I can dig watching a movie where a bunch of people get killed, but I draw the line at one where everyone gets killed and the villain is victorious. Without ever receiving a satisfactory answer to my question, I never even dipped my toe in the bloodied waters of torture porn.

That is, until I received Wichita.

“Inspired by True Events,” the title page helpfully announces, Wichita tells a story very loosely based on the Wichita Massacre. Until I reached the third act, the script unsettled me. It still didn’t explain to me why anyone would want to watch torture porn, but I did start to gather some ideas about the conventions of the genre and why a movie like Hostel or Turistas might theoretically succeed where Wichita repeatedly fails. Those movies have a certain “they had it coming” element — springing up in the wake of September 11th, those movies in particular are driven by the ethnocentric (or possibly xenophobic — or, hey, maybe both!) notion that if any American leaves the country for any reason — especially to fuck around and have a good, sex- and drug-fueled time, they will die.

Where Wichita goes wrong is with the idea that these people have nothing to feel bad about except being moderately well-off. Rather than traveling to some exotic location in pursuit of vice, these people simply decide to have a Christmas party. How dare they! You might think the writer is trying to make a statement about consumerism or class or race or something else, but trust me, you’re wrong; I just haven’t gotten to the laughable ending yet.

The writer introduces us to a racially diverse group of men and women — which eliminates racism and sexism as motives — before one is mugged and killed outside a gas station, then the muggers decide to invade his home (where the party’s being held). Nothing follows but rape, torture, abuse, and sadism. It doesn’t quite have a plot, aside from some initial personality differentiation there’s no character development, the attempts to humanize the villains are laughable at best, and worse than that, the villains are stupid. Ignoring the fear factor for a second, how hard is it for a group that includes two doctors and other well-educated professionals to outwit a couple of bumbling thugs? Also, stop trying to humanize them for a second to give them a real motivation — if they just want money, why do they torture and kill these people? What prompts this torture? Fear that they will be outwitted or overpowered if they don’t subject the victims to perpetual humiliation and degradation?

To find answers, I did some light research on the actual Wichita Massacre and found…surprisingly little. No information on the actual motive, except that prosecutors discounted a racial motive in favor of robbery — but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t racial, just that it wasn’t prosecuted that way. “But wait,” you’re undoubtedly asking, “didn’t you just say this is a racially balanced group?” In the screenplay, yes. In reality, all five victims were white and the killers were black. Because I couldn’t turn anything up in my research, I couldn’t say if race played into any of it. The defense of the brothers involved is so pathetic, I couldn’t even read between the lines and manufacture what I believe to be the motive.

So maybe it was both. Or maybe it had less to do with race than with class, or maybe it was a heady combination of the two — one of the more unsettling elements of the massacre is the killers’ growing discontent with the lack of piles of cash. I could buy the motive being robbery, but when they bust into a big, ritzy house and discover ATM cards instead of cash and a big-screen TV instead of a safe, they get angry. Maybe the anger manifests itself in the form of psychosexual torture because they don’t want to kill them — not yet, when they have no actual money — but they have no real ideas on how else to torment them. All of this is pure speculation, of course. It’s just that, from what I read, these guys come across like misinformed idiots whose anger and adrenaline frazzled them, not jackass thugs trying to teach some yuppies a confusing lesson.

In the script, that’s the motive the villains are ascribed. But that’s not ridiculous enough; it reaches its nadir when one of the brothers announces that he’s a veteran of the Iraq war, and the motive has nothing to do with robbery or class struggle or anything else — it’s because he wants people to understand they’re never really safe! I don’t care how you feel about that particular war — if you don’t find that laughable or offensive or embarrassing, congratulations! You are the target audience for a movie this stupid.

It never stops getting worse. The younger, non-Iraq-vet brother has a girlfriend who actually is a sociopath. She’s the kind of person who believes it’s the height of romance when her boyfriend steals an engagement ring from a hog-tied prisoner and uses it to propose to her. The kind of person who wants to girl-talk with a group of women who were beaten and raped hours earlier. Her behavior is so bizarre, I can’t figure out if she was supposed to be comic relief or something worse. She’s written in such a way that makes me think the writer finds her actions acceptable — normal, even.

But wait, there’s more. After going around to ATMs and killing a few random strangers for no discernible reason (he doesn’t rob them, and they aren’t bothering anybody or even witnessing anything they could perceive as a crime), the older brother takes one of the female hostages to the convenience store at the gas station that started it all. There, the SUV he stole is recognized by the clerk, who knows something’s up. So the guy takes him hostage, along with two video-game-playing teenagers. He shoots the clerk a few times for fun, then forces the teens to give each other blowjobs, then kills them all. Seriously.

Back at the house, the hostages have banded together and used a cutlery set (one of the Christmas gifts) to attack the other brother. This is the script’s single clever moment, but true to the genre, it’s short-lived. The older brother bursts in, forces someone to drive the wounded younger brother to the hospital, then forces the rest of them into the backyard swimming pool, where he shoots them all. I should point out that the swimming pool is not only filled — it’s unfrozen. On Christmas Eve. In Wichita.

You think that’s the end, don’t you? Bleak moral: stop doing anything. How dare you strive to professional success and moderate wealth! Really makes you think —

Oh God, there’s more. See, earlier in the script, the younger brother throws a puppy into an oven — but he forgets to turn it on, har-har! So the surviving brother pulls the dog out and takes it with him. He drives to a nice, suburban subdivision, enters a reasonably large home, drops the puppy onto his sleeping daughter as a surprise Christmas gift, kisses her on the forehead, then gets into bed with his wife. After a moment, he gets up and keys in a code for his alarm system. Fade to black.

Are you fucking kidding me?! I know the writer’s trying to get deep on us, but this is like if a non-humanoid alien received a news report of the Wichita Massacre and, with no knowledge of human biological or psychological imperatives, decided to write a story about How It Happened.

What are we to take from this? Was this guy the hero all along? Are we supposed to believe what he did — his goal and his fucktarded reasoning for it — is just or worthwhile? Good God, I can understand dramatizing the actual events of this case, but the artistic license taken has created such a trainwreck that nobody should call it Wichita, film it in Wichita, or associate it with that city or the massacre that took place there. I’m not generally big on moral responsibility within the movies, but this is a different case — merely “inspired” or not, this purports to be a true story that is almost comically disrespectful to the actual victims and their family members, not to mention the lone survivor.

So I go back to my initial question: why would anyone want to watch something like this? What the hell does it offer? Whatever message it tries to deliver makes about as much sense as its hero/villain’s motives. Whatever statement it might want to make about the human condition gets buried under a mountain of bizarre, inhuman behavior. Whatever dramatic tension it wants to cull from the circumstances fizzles because, whether you know the true story or not (I didn’t), you know by page 20 they’re going to lose — it’s just a question of how many failed attempts the writer can use to pad the story out to feature length. Does it want to make a point about the possible psychological trauma veterans face? Does it want John Q. Poorman to feel a little better because, hey, they ain’t dead — but if they’d gone to med school, they almost certainly would be? What’s the goddamn point?

I think this is why they call it “torture porn.” Like sexy porn, it’s not about getting anything meaningful from the experience — it’s about getting your rocks off as efficiently as possible. But wouldn’t you rather watch cartoonishly giant, round breasts flopping around instead of people getting stabbed and raped? I guess it takes all kinds, but seriously, what the fuck?

Posted by Stan on December 1, 2008 5:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

November 26, 2008

Sci-Fi Metaphors & Wasted Potential

On Monday, I talked a little about how much I liked a post-Apocalyptic western. I’ve also mentioned, on occasion, my disappointment about wasted potential. This seems to happen much more with sci-fi than other genres, but I’m not sure why. I’m not what you’d call a huge sci-fi fan, but I do enjoy imaginative forms of unreality — bleak futures, alternate Earths, alien worlds, etc. The problem comes when a writer creates a vivid, unique world…and tells a shitty story within it. The Time Machine was pretty great until he travels into the future, which is problematic since nobody but me will see a movie called The Time Machine that’s about a 19th-century tinkerer trying to rescue his slain girlfriend. The Final Cut isn’t what I’d call great, but it had good ideas and could have made some very interesting statements about paranoia and the “Big Brother” culture. Instead, it settled for ripping off The Conversation and delivering a shockingly stupid ending.

More often than not, the problem with sci-fi stories — the reason they let audiences (i.e., me) down — comes down to the metaphor. Obviously, symbolism is one of the most important tools of the writing trade. It turns a bland conversation where people shout exactly what they’re feeling into a conversation where people shout about linoleum tiles to avoid confronting exactly what they’re feeling. It makes a moment where someone overhears a meaningless conversation into a moment that makes them realize their entire life is a lie. Symbols allow writers to express their unique views about the world.

In sci-fi, symbolism is incredibly important — especially the metaphor that forces you to say, “This story has to be sci-fi.” Want to tackle racism without facing controversy? Make it about humans and robots, or humans and weird-looking alien detectives. Want to write about the Cold War and Vietnam when NBC doesn’t even want to use the word “war” on primetime television? Meet the Klingons and Romulans. Like horror, it’s a great genre for expressing anxiety about where the world is headed or what secrets currently lurk under the surface.

It’s such a slippery damn slope, though. What if the metaphor is too on-the-nose? Or maybe it’s effective when subtle but horrible when repeatedly beaten over the heads of readers/audiences? What if the anxiety is ham-fisted or misguided? Although it’s a comedy, Idiocracy had the best sci-fi premise in years because it took a rational, real-world anxiety to its absolute extremes, delivering a satire that — if it hadn’t been dumped direct to video by a terrified 20th Century Fox — might have made people actually stop, think, and make changes. One can only hope.

Because it’s relevant to what I’m preparing to ramble about, I’ll also toss out a recommendation for Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca. It’s by no means a perfect film, but if you move past the gorgeous Danish modern aesthetic, it’s a quiet but solid meditation on the notion of class systems and supposed “perfection.” In a world where genetic abnormalities are bred out of the upper class, roguish Ethan Hawke is born without any sort of engineering and suffers the consequences. He buys the identity of “perfect” fuck-up Jude Law so he can enter a program that will let him fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling into space — the forbidden fruit of any non-“valid” humans.

The plot is about Hawke trying to hide his fake identity long enough to get into the rocket, but at its core, it’s about Hawke and Law. The latter has everything going for him except for, you know, the kind of deep-seated emotional trauma that comes from experience, not genetics. The former manages to succeed despite various hobbling factors. It’s basically the bleak opposite of Rich Man, Poor Man, but even the heavy-handed symbolism of the “brothers swimming” sequence manages to work because Niccol wisely downplays everything, letting us come to conclusions instead of spelling everything out. (The DVD, of course, has an awful deleted scene describing various notable figures — Abraham Lincoln, Vincent Van Gogh, Stephen Hawking — who would have never been born under a eugenics program like the one featured in the movie. But hey, Niccol — or someone involved in the movie — was wise enough to realize it was both redundant and pandering, so they get props from me for cutting it.)

So a few months ago, when Niccol’s new script landed on my desk, I got what I like to call a “reading boner.” This doesn’t often come (no pun intended) as a result of just seeing the author’s name on the title page. Look, I know there are all these horror stories about how no reader will read past page ten if he hasn’t been grabbed, but every shitty reading job I’ve had has required me to read the entire script. It probably works differently at bigger places, where they get more scripts, but these smaller places have emphasized to me that if they’re going to turn someone down, they want a reason why. And, bad as it is, you can’t glean that from ten pages. No, the first ten are important because they grab you. I didn’t know the writers of that post-Apocalyptic western from Adam, but it grabbed me on page one. (Despite what the gurus tell you, there isn’t a single line of dialogue until page four — but it still hooked me. It’s all subjective, though, so other readers might have gone out of their minds from the lack of precious, precious yammering.)

Like a gentle prostate massage*, the grab is what causes the reading boner, nine times out of ten. The other time, it’s a familiar name or title. “Ooh, I’ve heard about this one — should be good.” “Oh, this is based on a shitty book I read — I wonder if the script is better.” I loved Gattaca and liked Lord of War and The Truman Show**, and I got even more excited when I flipped to page one and read a long description of a futuristic society. Excellent, I thought, Niccol is back to sci-fi — we’ll have another Gattaca on our hands for sure!

How wrong I was.

Unlike Gattaca, which takes a plausible but theoretical sci-fi concept and turns it into the basis for a human story, this new script takes a real concept and, like Idiocracy, pushes it to its absolute extreme. And this story might improve significantly if, like Idiocracy, Niccol played it for laughs; instead, it’s written as a ponderous, impossibly heavy-handed melodrama about a futuristic bordertown. Although Niccol refuses to name the countries — to the point that he specifically mentions the flags of each country as not resembling any known flags at all. The names of the countries are not important, declares a title card. Every border is alike. Especially borders separated by a giant, winding river! And one country being exceptionally squalid and poor, with nearly every character having a vaguely Latin name, while the other is a TV-obsessed paean to wealth and technology. It’s as similar to Finland and Sweden or Kenya and Ethiopia as it is to the U.S. and Mexico!

I won’t deny, I found some of the characters intriguing to a point. Despite the protagonist’s inexplicable, laugh-out-loud funny “futuristic” name (Mylar — yes, like the stuff in spacesuits), his drive to overcome his roots and escape to a better world makes him compelling. His border-crossing ideas are clever enough to make him seem smarter by association, and aside from a disastrous third act, the similarities between Mylar and Gattaca’s Vincent Freeman are apparent but don’t feel redundant. Thematically, the class discrimination and the American-dream drive to better one’s position in life resonate as much today as in 1997. Some of the supporting characters — really, all of them except the Big Villain (who isn’t much of one) — are well-drawn archetypes who either hinder or help Mylar’s progress.

The metaphor — or lack thereof — kills it, though. Niccol creates a very obvious portrait of a post-border-fence U.S./Mexico border in the “not-too-distant” future (so not-too-distant that people are still using cumbersome CRT monitors, for instance), but he offers neither a viable solution nor any compelling “food for thought” arguments either for or against the illegal immigration problem. His “solution,” which makes the third act such a nightmare, revolves around the idea of the river being the arbitrary borderline — let’s go plant some explosives to reroute the river around our little bordertown. That’s great for the 14 people living here — but what about the rest of the country? Beyond that, how do you even extrapolate such a “solution” into real life? Is Niccol proposing that the U.S. simply annex Mexico, then Belize and Guatemala, then El Salvador and Honduras, and on and on until the U.S. occupies all of Central and South America?

Does it sound like I want to have it both ways when I say I want a human story that somehow encompasses both sides of the full illegal immigration argument and uses the prism of science-fiction to reflect on viable, practical solutions? If The Cross isn’t going to do this, why make it such an obvious parallel? Why not set it on two lunar colonies, one old one that’s falling apart and abandoned by its country (who no longer support the expense of the space program) while the other thrives? Why not set it at a border that has no obvious Rio Grande-type river splitting the two countries? Niccol chose this obvious parallel for clear reasons, but his reasons pay off neither thematically nor dramatically. “Let’s blow up the river” is as cheesy a deus ex machina for the story of these characters as it is a goofy suggestion to ease the illegal-immigration burden.

The obvious metaphor also kind of destroys the resolution. Being accepted as citizens of this nation because they’ve changed the border is stupid enough, but when you know one country is clearly the U.S. and the other is clearly Mexico… It’s not really an uplifting message. I know I won’t win any fans among the Sean Hannity-style nuts who believe the U.S. is the greatest, best, most free country on God’s earth, ever. I’m a much bigger fan of the tough-love approach I use with my obnoxious extended family: at the end of the day, I still love them, but I accept that they have many, many problems (just like I do) and will continue to ridicule them until they make an effort to change.

So how great is it for these Mexifuturists to live in the U.S.? How great is it for illegal immigrants now? Will amnesty make it better for them? This script leaves us on a triumphant note in the same way Gattaca does, but in Gattaca, he’s going into the unknown. Mylar and friends are going into someplace that, no matter how hard Niccol protests, is very, very known. At the very least, I would have given a few bonus points for a bleak acknowledgment that all this effort hasn’t led to any sort of improvement in their lives. It’s probably not exponentially worse, but it’s not the ideal life Mylar rants and raves about for most of the script.

I don’t want to continue to sing the post-Apocalyptic western’s praises too highly, but it’s hard not to. They have similar settings — tiny towns in bleak, dystopian futures — and protagonists fixed with OCD vigor on a single goal, but there’s one big difference: the western is much less heavy-handed in its metaphor. Surprising, considering the entire script is about the importance of the Bible as a foundation for either enriching or corrupting the lives of ignorant heathens. Ironically, I think the writers may have downplayed their symbolism accidentally. They recognize it as an unpretentious action movie, and the Bible essentially operates as a MacGuffin — but it’s one hell of a MacGuffin. As an important object that everyone wants but nobody (except the protagonist) quite knows why, it works better than most because even the most atheistic asshole in the audience knows something about the Bible — its content, its historical impact, its general importance as a document (even if you disagree with the radical, retarded interpretations of its content). Leaving it as a generic book, as Niccol tries to do with his countries, may have worked, but it would have given the story much less emotional impact (even if the resolution is kind of a hybrid rip-off of the different endings of the Fahrenheit 451 book and movie — the post-Apocalyptic western is better than both, so I’ll give it a pass).

Sci-fi writers have a tough time. It’s all just a plate-spinning act — if you can’t present a unique world, an emotionally resonant story, and some sort of theme or idea the allows contemporary society to reflect on themselves without realizing it, you’re going to end up with something bad. Maybe not Matrix Reloaded bad, but not Gattaca great, either.

*For those keeping score, that’s a metaphor. Sort of. [Back]

**Ironically, I read the widely circulated “early draft” of The Truman Show that’s set in New York. It’s actually pretty similar to the shooting draft, aside from the location switch, and while I enjoy the creepiness of a place as huge as New York turning out to be a gigantic soundstage — it’s a bit more effective for the paranoiac in me than the idyllic but clearly fake place created in the movie — the script is actually pretty bad. Whatever changes occurred between that and the shooting draft definitely improved the final product. [Back]

Posted by Stan on November 26, 2008 9:51 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

November 24, 2008

Action, Jackson

In a post-Matrix/Fight Club/Shyamalan world, apparently everything in the action genre is about upping the narrative ante to the point that nothing makes a goddamn bit of sense. You want to know how fucking terrible action scripts have gotten? I read a script about a group of thugs and assholes involved in some kind of… I don’t even know; it was half terrible noir, half fetishistic valentine to Japanese culture (by that, I mean it’s the type of script some pasty white guy would write after watching a bunch of anime and yakuza movies and assuming he’s an authority on Japan), centered around the kidnapping of the daughter of…someone.

See, it got confusing because the lynch-pin of the twisting and turning plot is a somewhat interesting concept involving a portable machine that allows people to swap minds. It’s like Face/Off, only with minds instead of faces and stupidity instead of goofiness. This could lead to good confusion — something intriguing and unusual, maybe even a moderately thought-provoking meditation on the nature of existence or mind vs. body vs. soul. But fuck it, it’s an action movie — let’s just keep character development to a bare minimum so it’s more surprising when one person’s body turns out to be occupied by another dude’s mind. That’s right, everyone gets the short shrift this time around, because if any character had a definable personality, we’d know the instant they swapped bodies with someone else.

But, okay, so it has thin characters and plot twists. It’s an action movie — that’s not so bad, right? Wrong. Here’s the kind of story this is: two women who bare a passing resemblance to one another get an elaborate series of plastic surgeries so they look like twins, then the main character — a male — switches bodies with one of the twins and has lesbian sex with her. For no other reason than “Whoa, man. Twins.” Remember the lack of character development? I understand the guy’s motivation, but what about the other “twin”? Narcissism? Doesn’t cut it. Past sexual abuse? Usually causes women to seek out something a little less healthy than a mirror image of themselves — maybe she abused herself as a child, but that’s meeting the writer more than halfway. It’s also the kind of story where the mind of a child is trapped in a random, unnamed body guard in the ultimate deus ex machina; the kind of story where the voiceover narration is spoken by one character whose body, it turns out, has been occupied the entire time by a different character — and even that wouldn’t be so retarded if not for other voiceover sequences where we hear the thoughts of characters’ minds in other bodies, only it’s their “real” voice, not the voice of the body they’re occupying. It’s only written this way to give us a Shyamalan-style twist, but I’ve said this a thousand times: don’t use a twist if it undoes everything that came before it. Christ!

It’s a complete disaster, pilfering some elements of The Matrix and Fight Club without understanding why people like these movies. Kind of like what the Wachowskis did with the Matrix sequels, only less boring and way more retarded (and trust me, that is a bold statement). Still, on some level, it’s understandable why the writer elected to do some of the things he did — it’s a sci-fi actioner, and Japanese fetishism is real in with the nerd crowd. It’s pretentious The Matrix, wannabe-gritty like Fight Club, it