O’Gunn

Genre: Comedy
Premise: The most feared cop in Scotland comes to L.A. to solve a case and defeat his evil nemesis.
About: From the writers of Pierre Pierre, here comes O’Gunn, a spec that Reliance snatched up during the Cannes Film Festival (Reliance is the Bollywood company that is making a huge investment in Hollywood with the production of 20 new films). It should be noted that this is a first draft and therefore not the draft that sold. Whether there was an attempt to clean it up and make it more focused, or actually push the boundaries of taste and reason even more is anyone’s guess.
Writers: Edwin Cannistraci and Frederick Seton

Edwin and Frederick. I love you guys. I really do. If I could spend a night out getting plastered with any two writers, it would be you two. Pierre Pierre was hilarious. Couldn’t get enough of it. But what just happened here was not good. Finishing O’Gunn was like waking up with a really bad hangover. The kind where you’re in some random person’s dorm room with no memory of how you got there. Oh, and you’ve already graduated college 7 years ago. And the beautiful woman next to you isn’t a woman at all, but a man. The taste of stale beer feels permanently coated to the inside of your trachea. And you swear to yourself. *Swear* to yourself. That you’ll never drink again.

It’s hard to classify O’Gunn. I think I can safely say I’ve never read anything like it. No. No. I’ve *definitely* never read anything like it. Nor do I want to read anything like it ever again. I feel like I’ve lost at least 3 of my senses. Yes, parts of my sensory perception are definitely missing. To try and explain to you what I just went through is like a soldier trying to explain urban warfare to someone who’s never seen a gun before. I feel…violated. Not sure how anyone can physically feel pain from a script. But I felt it. The only thing that I can take away from this is that Cannistraci and Seton are so insane, that they could obviously care less what I think about their script.

Scottish cop Charlie O’Gunn was born without a mother. I know. I know. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. But if you’re going to survive the barrel of O’Gunn pointed in your face for two hours, you better throw sense out the fucking window. O’Gunn is the toughest craziest cop in the existence of mankind. Think Mel Gibson’s character in Lethal Weapon with a Scottish accent times a billion.

O’Gunn’s evil nemesis, a feminine-like British laddie named Lovejoy, has just stolen one of the most elaborate telescopes in the world and nobody knows why. O’Gunn and Lovejoy have an extensive and complicated history and it is believed he is the only one who can stop this Wimbledon-loving dentist-fearing Londonite. So O’Gunn flies to Los Angeles to find and defeat Mr. Strawberries and Cream. Once there, he meets his pansy partner, the Spaniard, “Bullet” (yes – O’Gunn and Bullet). Think of Bullet as a whiny useless version of Mandy Patinkin’s character in The Princess Bride (“You killed my father. Prepare to die”).

After O’Gunn beats the living shit out of the albino Chief of Police because all albinos are soulless devil-spawns who only want to feed off the souls of mankind, he and Bullet check out a mysterious character who works at a pet store. For some reason all the pets in the pet store are dressed up in S&M gear and are on mind-control. So when things go bad, they go really bad. The animals are released and try to obliterate the poor Bullet. Bullet barely escapes with his life. Later , they’re summoned to an elementary school where there’s a bomb threat. Unfortunately, it’s a trap, and all the kids are actually on mind control as well and try to attack O’Gunn.

Mind-control Kids are defeated, which natually means that O’Gunn and Bullet must attend a cock-fight. It gets Kentucky Fried Crazy and the cock fight turns into a human fight. O’Gunn “fists” two roosters by sticking his hands up their asses and uses them as boxing gloves. This leads to a huge car chase where O’Gunn jumps a small river. We then cut to the river where we meet two Navy high-tech dolphins with translator headgear. The dolphins start talking to each other in English. Yes, you heard that right. The dolphins start talking to each other.

After O’Gunn bangs Bullet’s sister, they get a tip that Lovejoy is at the docks. O’Gunn, who by this point has overcome his fear of albinos, asks one for directions. The albino rats him out and Lovejoy captures O’Gunn and Bullet as a result. The two are tied up in a box and thrown into the river to drown. The crafty Bullet somehow escapes but poor O’Gunn isn’t so lucky. He sinks to the bottom of the river and dies. Yes, ladies and gentleman, our main character is dead.

Or is he?

Later, at the funeral, we cut to heaven, where O’Gunn and Death square off in a game of chess. When Death is least expecting it, O’Gunn beats the shit out of him, allowing him to WAKE UP AT HIS OWN FUNERAL. Yes, O’Gunn is alive again.

O’Gunn and Bullet then go to a Lesbian strip club where they’re attacked by lesbians. Oh, by the way, Lovejoy also has a clan of ninjas working for him who are involved in most of the fights. Anyway, they finally infiltrate Lovejoy’s lair and find out what the hell it is this insane man is up to. Oh yeah, and Bullet fucks O’Gunn’s wife to get back at him for fucking his sister.

And that, my friends, was O’Gunn.

Was it funny? Ummmm…hmmm. Okay, I did laugh a few times. I particularly liked that instead of parking, O’Gunn would crash into whatever building he was going to. Outside of that, I mostly wore a puzzled expression on my face. If you like complete absurdity with no reason behind it then I’m thinking you’ll like this quite a bit. But man, it felt like Cannistraci and Seton locked themselves in a room and thought up a million things to make each other laugh…without ever checking to see if anyone else was laughing. They needed that referee in the room to say, “Okay wait a minute here guys. You’ve gone too far with this one.” O’Gunn didn’t just go off the rails. It went under-fucking-ground on a one way trip to the San Andreas Fault. This makes Balls Out look like The English Patient.

In order to be fair – because I do like these guys – I got some feedback from a few of our readers. Here are some of the things they had to say:

“I get it, it’s funny. But I don’t know if my mom would get it. Then again, I’d never let her watch this movie.”

“In the wrong hands this sort of thing turns into a Mike Myers “Austin Powers” style vehicle (my heart broke a little when “Pierre” was cast with Jim Carrey) – but in the right hands it turns into “The Jerk”, mixing scatological humor (poo+pee=tee-hee) and non-sequitor anything-for-a-laugh wordplay.”

“The writers are certainly talented, and I’m sure they believed in what they were doing. And why shouldn’t they? they write with conviction and flair. But like a couple of mad scientists they chose to create a frankenstein. A big ugly freak that can barely stand up straight, let alone walk.”

“Carson, never send me a script like this again.”

In the spirit of the recently completed British Open, I’m going to give these two a mulligan and chalk it up to too much Red Bull and the always exploratory first draft . I’m hoping number 3 in their million dollar spec sale trilogy will make up for this rather…strange experience.

Script link: No link

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Comedy is subjective, but I’m a strong believer in grounding your comedy – no matter how outrageous it is – in some sort of reality. If there’s no reference point, something for the audience to hold on to, it becomes a lawless state of nonsense. At the point where the dolphins started talking to each other I was like, “Okay, that’s it. I don’t know what the fuck is going on anymore.”

The Bounty (aka, “Bounty Hunter”)

Genre: Action Romantic Comedy
Premise: An alcoholic debt-ridden bounty hunter has two days to find and bring in his selfish manipulative dishonest ex-wife, who’s skipped bail.
About: Andy Tennant (“Hitch”) to direct. Starring Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler (who seems to be making a name for himself in the romantic comedy world). Sarah Thorp previously penned “Twisted”. This is shooting right now.
Writer: Sarah Thorp (1st draft, Sep 2007, 114 pages)

Why is it impossible to look at a picture of Aniston these days and not think of Us magazine?

Now to be fair, this is the FIRST DRAFT of the screenplay, dated two years ago. So we know some changes have been made in the meantime. But it’s my guess that the basic premise and story are the same. And unfortunately, that’s the problem with The Bounty. This thing is more forced than an episode of The Bachelor. And I understand that the forced setup is a romantic comedy staple that’s been around for years. But there’s a difference between “forced” and “forcing it down our throats” – when the setup becomes so ridiculously over-the-top that it can only exist in the movie world. And that’s what’s happened here. This place that Thorp has invented only exists in Never Never Land. There is nothing plausible or realistic about any of the characters or situations in this movie.

That’s a really nice way of saying I detested this script.

Butler’s motives in starring opposite all these Hollywood starlets likely has nothing to do with the movies themselves.

Cassidy Daley is a gung-ho news reporter who will stop at nothing to get her story. She receives that “tip of a lifetime” about some potentially dirty cops from a source of hers named Jimmy. So off she goes into the seedy underworld to find him. Unfortunately along the way she does something illegal and gets arrested. She’s dragged off to jail, but immediately posts bail and skips her hearing. As far as she’s concerned, this front-page story is way more important than a silly bail formality.

Milo is a drunken gambling mess of a bounty hunter. He owes every bookie in town and is quite a ways from his prominent life as one of the best cops on the force. On the eve of getting roughed up by his bookies, Milo’s bail bondsman buddy, Sid, offers him a face-saving bounty. 5000 dollars if he can catch and bring back this person by Christmas Day (48 hours away). There’s just a slight twist. It’s his ex-wife, Cassidy! Ahhhhhhh!!! What are the chances?????

In case you haven’t guessed, Milo hates Cassidy. And Cassidy hates Milo. Even more than Milo hates Cassidy! These two really hate each other! Yet there’s something about this opportunity that makes scumbag Milo happy. You see Milo didn’t always used to be a scumbag. He used to be a successful cop with a bright future. Then he joined up with a reporter on an important case. And said reporter solved the case before he did and printed a story about it, making Milo look like an incapable moron. That led to their divorce. That led to his drinking. That led to his gambling. That led to his firing. And of course, this reporter’s name was Cassidy. Milo is convinced – CONVINCED – that Cassidey stole some information from him in order to solve the case. And he’s finally going to get her to admit it.

Milo’s actually pretty good at his job and it takes him less than an hour to find Cass. He handcuffs her and within seconds the pair is back to their old skitter-skatter rat-a-tat-tat verbal bantering ways. I hate you. No I hate you. No I hate you. No I hate you. No I hate you. No I hate both of you!!!

Milo is so obsessed and scarred by this ancient case, he becomes more than a little interested when Cass informs him that the whole reason she skipped bail was she was onto a huge story about a bunch of dirty cops. Milo realizes that this is it! A chance for him to redeem himself. He’ll solve her case within the 48 hour allotted time before he has to have her in. This will prove he’s smarter than Cass, which will in turn gain him his reputation back, which in turn may even get him his job back! All he has to do is keep Cass within sight and make sure she doesn’t run away. Which essentially means they have to do this…together!!! Snnnnnnnnnn-ap!

Yes, you read that right. Milo is doing this to prove that he’s smarter than Cassidy.

Stirring the pot is the bookie, Dwight, who’s chasing Milo for the thousands of dollars he owes, while Milo and Cass chase the story. Milo and Cass are then put through all the romantic comedy staples like being mistaken for a couple and having to sleep in the same bed (didn’t we *just* talk about this in Leap Year???). But since they used to be married and know all each others’ secrets, they’re constantly able to one-up each other, as evidenced in one scene where Cass sneaks a request to the waitress to add sesame seeds to Milo’s burger because…HE’S ALLERGIC TO THEM! As he chokes to death, Cass scuttles away!

Will they solve the crime? Will Milo still get Cass to the bondsman on time? Will I ever recover from this experience?

The Bounty feels like bad cosmetic surgery. Everything about it is fabricated and manipulated, twisted and pulled and chiseled and tucked in a desperate attempt to look natural. But no matter how you dress it up, it’s still bad cosmetic surgery. There is nothing authentic about this person!

Even the mechanics are all over the place. The order in which the information is offered to us for instance. All the stuff about Milo’s life falling apart because of the case he shared with Cass. We don’t find out about any of that until well after the two have rejoined each other. That’s the kind of information you have to tell us before the two meet so that when we hear the person he’s going after is his ex-wife, our mouths drop. “You mean the person that did all those horrible things to him?? Oh shit!” Without that information, she’s just a name to us. We don’t know a single thing about their history. It’s details like this that drove me batty and that I’m really hoping are just first draft glitches. I’m not saying you don’t want to save some details about the past for later on. But you don’t want to keep everything a secret!

Pretty much nothing in this screenplay works. I laughed one time (when Milo tells Cass to talk dirty to her and Cass sexually utters things like, “Sewage, waste, bacteria”) and pretty much rolled my eyes the rest of the way through. Ratio of laugh to eyeroll = 1 to 1000. The hope appears to rest on the pages upon pages of “witty banter.” But the truth is, I couldn’t even tell you if it worked. I was so put off by the artificiality in which the situations were created that they could’ve been reciting secret scrolls revealing the meaning of life and I still wouldn’t have been paying attention.

Having said all this, I can see from an actress’ point-of-view why this role would look appealing. It’s a bit different. And Aniston basically gets to be a bitch for 3 months of shooting (note to all writers: Actors and actresses love when they get to be assholes). But I don’t think she’s seeing the forest through the trees here. The Bounty jams the ‘art’ into artificial. Then bolds it and italicizes it and ups the font size – The Bounty - until it no longer resembles reality.

I can only hope that subsequent drafts have given this script new life. But I’m afraid the concept is too flawed. Therefore, I’m sorry to say but…

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: There’s nothing less attractive than writing that’s trying too hard. If we can see you pulling the strings behind the curtain, the story loses its magic.

Untitled Cameron Crowe Project

Sorry, no link today! :(

Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: A private satellite contractor is sent to Hawaii to oversee the launch of a secret satellite.
About: Cameron Crowe’s next film was supposed to be released this year but got pushed back for unknown reasons. Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon were attached at one point, but I don’t know if that’s still the case. Crowe likes to shroud his projects in secrecy, though this draft has been floating around for a year now. There’s a chance this was a “vomit draft”, the first draft meant to “get everything out”, which would explain a lot in regards to what I read. But my sources tell me while there will be changes, all the main stuff will probably stay intact. Having said that, if I were a betting man, I’d say that production got pushed back because of script concerns. There are a lot of concerns here. A lot. And I can see producers getting all jumpy after reading this.
Writer: Cameron Crowe
Details: 142 pages (May 2008 draft)

The man who changed the romantic comedy game.

Cameron Crowe was an inspiration to me growing up. Say Anything. Singles. Jerry Maguire. These were movies that shaped my love of film. The guy accomplished something that no other filmmaker in history had managed to do: He made romantic comedies cool. I could go on and on about how much I loved every single word Crowe wrote but I don’t have enough time or enough space. What I can tell you is how difficult it was watching his movies lose their edge. I wasn’t in love with Almost Famous but I definitely found it enjoyable. The same can’t be said for his next two movies. The one-two punch of Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown was like showing up to your birthday party only to find everyone dead. There are many negative reactions you can have after a bad film, but the worst is easily disappointment. How difficult is it watching a film fall short of your expectations? Ugh. For me it’s the worst.

But hey, I still love Crowe. He seems like one of the true “good guys” in the business and one of the few people who genuinely cares about making good movies. Which is why this review pains me so much. I say this as a fan. I say this as someone who doesn’t want Crowe to fall back any more than he has: He shouldn’t make this movie.

The original satellite that inspired Dave Matthews

The script is incredibly ill focused. We’re talking private satellite contractors, Hawaiian military bases, government politics, Afghanistan, a potential war with China, a mystery character in Wyoming, native Hawaiian voodoo, cursed volcanoes, a military that won’t launch without the natives’ blessing. And all this is wrapped around…a romantic comedy??

As I was reading Crowe’s script, I found myself asking the same question over and over again: What is the appeal here? Who would go see this movie? Women don’t want to see a romantic comedy about satellite contractors. And men are going to be weirded out by all the spiritual Hawaiian mumbo-jumbo. And those are just the first two plots. There are 7 or 8 subplots in the film as well. If I haven’t made myself clear, there’s a lot fucking going on in this film. Every writer is told to ask themselves this question before, during, and after they write a script: What is your movie about? I don’t think Crowe ever asked himself that question because it’s just so all the hell over the place.

Military base/town in Honalulu

Brian Gilcrest is 37 and sells satellite systems to anyone who has money. And I do mean anyone. We start off in Afghanistan with Gilcrest explaining to a bunch of Afghani Tribesman how to operate their new satellite. When things don’t go well, Brian goes apeshit (the man has a bit of an anger problem), and as a result, gets killed by the Afghans. Yes, our main character is dead on page 3.

So then we fast-forward to Brian’s funeral back in the states. It’s here where we meet Tracy, his ex-wife and one of the many completely unnecessary subplots. Just as the priest is sending the coffin down, an officer pulls up, jumps out of his car, and announces to everyone that Brian is still alive! I’m assuming this scene is meant to be funny but man…it just felt…off. I mean, this kind of thing would work great in a Will Ferrell comedy. But here? In a movie we’re supposed to take seriously? It’s one of many miscalculations that pop up in the script. But whatever, I’m being picky. We flash forward to a year later where we find our main character on one of the most beautiful islands in the world…

HAWAII

After World War 2, Hawaii’s significance as a defense post diminished greatly. But recently with all the crazy shit going on (those wacky North Koreans), the army wants to have a strong presence on the islands. As a result, a small 60s-styled military town which was once deserted is now thriving again. Brian, who was blacklisted after the Afghanistan incident, is given a second chance here on the island as he overlooks the launch of a joint private/military venture: a secret satellite known only as “Elevation.”

While overseeing the project on the private side, he’s paired up with a strange Airforce Major named Lisa Ng, who represents the Airforce’s interest in the project. Brian is not happy as he thought he’d be flying solo here. The two’s first assignment is to establish a rapport with and get the blessing of the Hawaiian natives for the satellite’s launch. Getting this blessing is so important that the launch cannot be made without it. It is on this trip (to one of the other islands) where the two get to know each other, and learn more about the ancient voodoo myths surrounding the islands, which may or may not end up summoning the Gods if they don’t handle their business.

Crowe with Jimmy Page

The natives are skeptical but cool with the launch as long as it’s not military in nature, which Brian assures them it’s not. But later on, in a surprise that you’d be retarded not to have seen coming, it turns out the satellite is indeed very military in nature. When Brian finds out he’s pissed as all hell, but in another subplot, China has blown up a satellite with a ground-based missile, upping the need for a better satellite defense. A decision is on the table. Brian must decide if he wants to have a conscience and prevent this evil satellite from launching, or reap the personal and professional benefits of overseeing the successful launch of one of largest private space ventures in history.

As I sat there after reading this, I went through about 15 minutes of, “Is this just over my head?” Did I not “get it?” Could this be a case of reading a genius script but I’m too stupid to realize it? I was so pained by the possibility that I sent it out to two people. The first one, a girl I know who, interestingly enough, hates Jerry Maguire and loves Elizabethtown. And the other, a guy, who likes all the Cameron Crowe movies I mentioned plus has an unhealthy love for Almost Famous. I eagerly awaited their reactions. So I waited. And waited. The verdict? Neither of them could get past page 30. I begged them to keep going but they both said there was simply too much going on and none of it was any good.

Huh. Talk about breaking criticism down to the bare essentials. But they were right. We don’t know what we’re supposed to be focused on here. We don’t know what the end goal of the story is. I mean, I guess it’s the satellite launching. But we don’t have any reason to care about whether the satellite launches because the stakes of it not launching are zero. If Brian stops it, who cares? I’m sure Crowe would argue that world peace is at stake. If we launch the satellite, maybe, MAYBE, China might get mad and blow us up. Well yeah, and maybe swine flu will mutate into a plauge next week and we’ll all be dead by December. There’s a lot of things that could maybe happen. It doesn’t mean they will.

I will say this about Crowe. The man is fearless. He’s not afraid to ignore the rules and take chances. You have to admire that in an artist. When you look at Jerry Maguire, that movie had a funky structure and a lot of characters as well. But in that film, we really felt that if Jerry and Rod failed, that that was it for them. They were through. And so we desperately wanted them to succeed. I never felt that once in this script.

Let’s throw some Afghanistan in for good measure…

The one place where the script excels is, not surprisingly, the relationship between Brian and Lisa. Or I should say the early scenes between Brian and Lisa. Brian’s a broken down mess of a man trying to gain back some respectability. Lisa’s this socially retarded company woman who cares only about the next link in the chain of command. It’s all business for both of them in this endeavor but come on. We know it ain’t going to be business for long. Crowe writes these tension filled “I don’t like you but I really do” scenes better than any writer out there. And watching this relationship evolve was the lone shining star in the script. Unfortunately the characters become causalities of the sprawling unfocused story. After awhile, they just get swallowed up.

Speaking of the military I should get a medal for summarizing this script. The above is a supremely simplified version of what I read. There are tons of characters and countries and motivations and storylines involved that I didn’t even touch upon. Partly because it would be too confusing and partly because I didn’t understand them. I applaud Crowe for exploring such a unique world. But ultimately this story doesn’t work on any level. It pains me to say this about one of my idols, but if I were Crowe, I would not make this film. It simply isn’t a good story.

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: In a world where nobody gives you their honest opinion, how do you know when something you’ve written is bad (or good)? There’s no full-proof way to find out. But there are some things you can do. First of all, know that whatever friends and family say, they’re usually embellishing by up to 20-30%. So If they say they liked it, that probably means they thought it was average. If they say they loved it, it probably means they thought it was good. A good idea is to ask them pointed questions. What did you think of the protag? Did you like the relationship between the leads? Was the final act satisfying? If the friend is excited to talk about these things, chances are they were at least into it. If they seem disinterested and keep their answers short, chances are they weren’t. If you really really really want an honest opinion, have your friends give it to someone who doesn’t know you. Have them tell the person that they have no personal connection to the writer but need to know if the script is great or sucks. Make sure your friend asks them key questions afterwards. It’s not easy to find someone to read a stranger’s script, but I promise you, you will get that completely unbiased opinion you’re looking for if you do. I’ve found that being able to read people helps as well. The way someone talks can give away whether they loved or hated your masterpiece. If they’re reciting their favorite scenes to you unprovoked. If they say things like, “Did you really write this?” If they ask you two weeks or two months down the line, “What’s going on with that script?”, these are signs that you have something good. And of course, try to get as many opinions as possible. It’s not easy (this generation – more than any other – hates to read) but if you can convince a group of people to give you feedback, you can get a good sense if what you’re writing is good or bad. — P.S. Any other suggestions on this issue are welcome in the comments.

The Baster (aka Something So Right)

no link. :(

Genre: Romantic Dramedy
Premise: Wally is in love with his best friend Kassie. When Kassie tries to get pregnant via artificial insemination from the perfect guy, Wally replaces the sample with his own.
About: To star Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman, and Jeff Goldblum. Directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon (Blades Of Glory). The material is based on an original short story by Jeffrey Eugenides published in The New Yorker. What isn’t clear to me is if this is an assignment by Loeb (in which case he’s relieved of a ton of the blame) or if he bought this to write himself.
Writer: Allan Loeb
Details: 119 pages (Feb 2007 draft)

Who needs a penis?

When I reviewed “Solitary Man” last week, I knew it was going to be the kind of script that divided men and women. The main character was an aging womanizer who treated women like cheap Chinese food. And somehow I was rooting for him. Enter “The Baster,” where the roles are reversed. Now, it’s a strong and alienating female character at the center of the story. And I hated her. I mean hated her with every fiber of my being. But why? Is that fair? Shouldn’t I have rooted for her the same way I was pulling for Ben? These and other questions are answered in my review of The Baster.

Kassie Larson may be vying for the most villainous unlikable female love interest in the history of cinema. No wait, make that the history of entertainment. Kassie doesn’t want a man. She wants the genetic Holy Grail. You know that sign at the theme park that says you gotta be “this” tall to ride? Kassie has her own sign. A sign that says you have to be “this” tall, “this” strong, “this” smart, “this” funny. If you don’t have every single “this”, guess what? You don’t get to ride Kassie. In fact, if you don’t meet her stringent criteria, you’re no better than the homeless guy on East 32nd and Lexington. But that’s okay right? What’s wrong with high standards? No one should have to settle. Except Kassie takes her demanding selfish unrealistic view of the opposite gender and uses it as an excuse to treat her best friend, Wally, like complete and total shit.

Wally’s in love with Kassie of course. We wouldn’t have a movie if he wasn’t. But why Wally cares one iota for this destroyer of all happiness is a question that’s never addressed in The Baster. Because of Kassie’s stratospheric standards, she is without man. And because her biological clock is ticking, she wants baby. Wally, being her “best friend,” feels that he’s the best candidate. But Kassie wants to find a stronger, taller, smarter, better looking baby-maker – “Modern day natural selection” style. This leaves desperately-in-love Wally to strike out in his final attempt at everlasting love with Kassie.

“Why does Carson hate me?”

But this is New York. The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps. A place where an honest women can inseminate herself with a turkey baster. So when Kassie holds an “I’m Getting Pregnant Party,” Wally uses the opportunity to snatch her donor’s sperm and replace it with his own. This way, Kassie is going to have Wally’s baby and not even know it!

Afterwards, Kassie decides to spend the next seven years in Minnesota. So we skip that time and rejoin her when she moves back to New York – her young son in tow. Or shall we say, her and Wally’s young son in tow. Except she doesn’t know that. Thus begins a second courtship, with Kassie supposedly “maturing” and not putting as much emphasis on all those silly superficial things (translation: She’s gotten older and uglier and has a kid and therefore has to lower her standards). So after destroying Wally’s universe, Kassie now puts a relationship on the table. Wally dumps his longtime girlfriend for the chance he’s been waiting for his entire life. Then less than a week later, Kassie starts dating the original donor (or who she thinks is the donor), claiming this is okay because she never told Wally they were exclusive. Am I the only person who wants to throw this woman off a cliff?

Underneath it all is the slowly building suspense of what’s going to happen when Kassie finds out that Wally’s the real father. Except it’s hard to drum up any excitement for the revelation because I’m thinking, as soon as she finds out and gets all pissed off, Wally will finally be free of this blood sucking Devil-Spawn. So I was hoping for the revelation. But I think for the wrong reasons. We’re supposed to be *worried* that it will ruin Wally’s chances. We’re not worried. We’re hoping. Desperately hoping.

I don’t know why I’m hating all these Jenifer Aniston projects lately. I actually like Aniston. She manages to be sexy and funny –not an easy feat to pull off in this day and age. Angelina Jolie. Sexy. Not funny. Paula Poundstone. Funny. Not sexy. I can’t even think of another woman I’d characterize as funny and sexy. So I have respect for the woman (check her out in “Management.” She’s great.) But this script is a whole different beast. It’s practically begging you to root against it – challenging you to like one single character. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t. In retrospect, I’m not sure this is Loeb’s fault. I don’t think the premise works as a movie. Maybe it did as a short story. But man are these characters difficult to empathize with.

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One thing Loeb did well was establish a clear and consistent theme. The theme of “natural selection” permeates through the main as well as all the sub-plots. That message came out loud and clear. Though I’m continually at odds with just how important theme is when one of the more well-integrated themes I’ve read in awhile rests inside a story I disliked so much. Writers have been shot on message boards for suggesting as much. So I’ll frame this as a question: How important is theme to you?

Ghost Riders In The Sky

Let it be known: Roger does not like everything! And he proves that today. I can’t say I know much about this project, but I know that when Jan De Bont is attached to anything, that project is in trouble. Let’s go back a decade shall we? Do you remember The Haunting? A 100 million dollar scary movie that managed to not be scary…in any capacity? Do you remember Speed 2? Jan De Bont actually wrote the sequel to a movie called “Speed” and set it…ON A CRUISE SHIP. Everyone who signed up for that premise deserves what they got, but De Bont’s the one who wrote it. So when I hear his name associated with this project, I’m not surprised it never made it in front of the cameras. De Bont’s last directorial effort was 2003′s Lara Croft sequel, “The Cradle of Life.” Can’t say I saw that one. Maybe it was great.

For those of you curious about the logline contest, I’ll be making the official official announcement next Monday. So warm those loglines up people. I will say that there’s been a major change. You will only be allowed to submit 1 logline. And that must represent a script that’s already been written, as I’d like to speed up the timeframe of the contest considerably. If you’re wondering how to write a logline, here’s a good place to start. But before you go anywhere, read Roger’s review of “Ghost Riders In The Sky.”

Genre: Western, Science Fiction
Premise: As the U.S. military wars against the Apache, two Civil War veterans set out to help a woman find her missing anthropologist father. Everyone gets more than they bargained for when the Apache make contact with a race of creatures that might be from another planet.
About: In 1998, Warner Brothers postponed one of the many iterations of “Superman” and pulled the plug on the Protosevich-scripted and the Arnold Schwarzenegger-leading, “I am Legend”. Over at Fox, they decided to sideline an event pic of their own, an alien western helmed by Jan de Bont called “Ghost Riders in the Sky”. With a budget ballooning over $100 million and purported script concerns, Fox ultimately killed the project. However, everyone knows that the project’s death was directly tied to the disastrous box office of Speed 2, De Bont’s previous effort. Ironically, this was all Fox’s doing, as they were so desperate to set up a summer tentpole project, they announced Speed 2 without even an idea in place. De Bont spitballed a bunch of his ideas with his people, including an idea that would’ve focused on volcano bombing, but ultimately settled on a cruise ship, because he had so much fun D.P.’ing on Hunt For Red October. Keanu saw that idea and bolted. The only reason Bullock signed on was because she owed her career to De Bont. It is said that nobody at De Bont’s company understood what he saw in “Ghost Riders In The Sky,” a script that was plucked out of the slush pile by an intern.
Writer: Draft by W.D. Richter; Rewrite by Mark Protosevich

Debont and Angelina Jolie

One of my first movie memories is of my dad showing me “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” (another is of him renting “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen”; I have a cool dad), so I have much fondness for the name W.D. Richter. As screenwriters and lovers of movies, how can anyone not have appreciation for a writer whose oeuvre includes John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China” and Philip Kaufman’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”?

Admittedly, the only flick I’ve seen that has Mark Protosevich’s name attached is “The Cell”, which I like. I have not read his scripts for “I am Legend” or “Thor”, and rather than proffer an uninformed opinion, I’ll just say, “I hear good things about them”.

Which brings us to a script, a proposed sci-fi western that has both of these dude’s names on the cover. For some reason, Samuel L. Jackson’s name is on the cover as well (plastered in ominous fat font, no less), yet I’m hard-pressed to guess which character he might have played.

Isn’t “Ghost Riders in the Sky” the name of a legendary country song?

So it is. A scared-straight song about a cowboy who has a haunting vision of The Devil’s herd: red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky.

In our script there’s a red-eyed motif and a copious use of thunder and lightning (and ice, for that matter), but our beasties ain’t flying cattle. They’re more of the flying serpent variety.

Ever wonder where the inspiration for the Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl, came from? According to this script, it comes from the “chilling, gorgeous images of god-like bird humans” who serve as the eponymous aliens to our scared cowboys.

Who are our cowboys?

That would be Buck and Reb, Gettysburg veterans who abandon the railroad crews to venture to California, with the hope of making it big in the citrus industry.

No idea who this is.

Easily the best part about this script, Buck and Reb are a Union and Confederate screwball duo who aren’t above robbing trains in inventive fashion. Like when they try to use the corpse of a cow to stop a train, only to find that something else entirely has killed everyone on board and stripped the corpses and the locomotive of metal.

They have a lot of funny dialogue in an otherwise frustrating and messy script.

BARTENDER
Might say so. Betcha fifty cents can’t tell me what this is.

Out from under the bar…set down in front of Reb and Buck. A dark crusty object about a foot in length, sweet potato in shape.

REB
Sorry. Not a gamblin’ man.

BUCK
(however)
You’re on. It’s a yucca root. Been roasted in hot coals for…

REB
Buck…

BUCK
Fifty cents, Reb.
(back at the bartender)
…about five hours I’m guessin’. Makes for damn fine eatin’.

Buck picks it up, to smell it. He’s starved.

BARTENDER
You lose. It’s Luke Smith. Poor bastard was standin’ guard on the rail line last night when the Devil roared through.

This screwball duo becomes a screwball trio when they hook up with Alice Butterworth, the dainty daughter of an English anthropologist who disappeared while researching a mysterious Native American myth (our bird-god Quetzalcoatl thingies, which will later be referred to as ‘Sky Knives’) near the town of Mesa Gulch.

She’s searching for her aforementioned father, possessing one of his last letters sent from the Mesa Gulch post office. In an eyebrow-raising aside, she gets drunk with our clumsy cowboy lotharios after she shoots a man dead when he tries to rape her. The binge-drinking ends the next morning when all three of our players wake up in the same bed.

Yep, a risqué screwball ménage a trois.

What’s the big picture?

Let’s backtrack to the first 10 pages of the script. It’s an interesting break from form, where instead of being introduced to the heroes of the piece, we get an extended action sequence that establishes the historical climate and the alien menace.

A group of thirty Calvary soldiers trap the notorious Indian gunslinger, Wild Gun, and his band of Apaches in a box canyon. The Apache medicine man, Hawk Dreamer, works some of his juju and it’s not long before something sentient swoops out of the sky and comes to their aid.

Wild Gun

The Calvary troop is massacred by streaks of gold light and fireballs that descend out of the sky, leaving behind frozen corpses and scorched earth. Trust me, it’s as weird as it sounds.

Anyways, defying the old showbiz adage, the Mesa Gulch Massacre is not good publicity for Philander W. Beckwith, powerful railway magnate obsessed with manifest destiny. This captain of industry is so powerful he even gets into a public screaming match with the President of The United States, Ulysses S. Grant.

For a character that only has one scene, Philander sure has a lot of sway over our nation’s leader. “Well, then do something about reality. Because if you don’t, I will,” he tells The Hero of Appomattox.

Not to worry, the President is already on it. “I have cut loose a force of nature. I have summoned The Eradicator.”

What pray-tell is The Eradicator?

Not what, but whom. The Eradicator is no other than Colonel Harry Loveless Knowland, a scripture-quoting bounty hunter tasked with assassinating Wild Gun and any other Apache he and his mercenary army run across.

Not only is he a hypocrite, dickhead, and cold-hearted killer, he also has his eyes set on the presidency.

Things get dicey when Alice offers Reb and Buck one hundred dollars each to accompany her to Thunder Mesa, where she hopes to find the “Cave of Stars” and her father. Both cowboys (being broke and in love) are tempted by the offer, but ultimately decide they don’t want to get scalped by Apaches.

So they opt to rob the Mesa Gulch bank instead.

Only problem is, The Eradicator shows up for reasons I still don’t understand (perhaps he wants to rob the bank, too) and Reb pisses him off royally by escaping his clutches. Shenanigans ensue as Buck and Alice pretend to be a married couple and are taken under the wing of the Colonel and his men.

And for muddled reasons we’re all rollicking towards Thunder Mesa and the grand finale. There’s a stage-coach chase and another appearance by the Sky Knives, who save our heroes and whisk Alice away to the “Cave of Stars”. Reb surrenders to the Colonel so he can help Buck rescue Alice, as The Eradicator is hell-bent on getting to Thunder Mesa so he can kill Wild Gun.

The ruse is up when Buck helps Reb escape and the third-act showdown begins as The Eradicator receives back-up from the U.S. military to wipe out the Apache stronghold.

There’s a lot of The Weird (but more importantly, Confusion) as Alice discovers what happened to her father and witnesses the awe and wonder of the alien creatures. Which falls flat, because it’s opaque and I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on.

But I’ll try. Apparently her father is in some kind of trance, or perhaps he’s just frozen in time within the Cave of Stars, I can’t tell.

But inside the “concave bowl” within a mountain, she discovers that these golden serpent thingies are melting metal and mounds of gold coins and are feeding the molten liquid to their young. There’s also lightning shooting out of a hexagonal hole in the center of this milieu.

Yeah, don’t ask me, I only read the thing.

So, there’s a big battle, which for some reason is written in ALL CAPS, and the Sky Knives make a big show of killing some people but sparing others, and then their space ship flies out of the mountain and they leave planet Earth, presumably to teach The Eradicator (and you, dear reader), that violence is bad.

Hrrmph.

Why the long face, Roger?

This script has all the bizarro ingredients to create a feast that appeals to my oddball palette, but as a whole, it’s a savorless mess that leaves behind a disorderly kitchen with way too many dirty dishes.

It’s a screenplay that’s plagued with unclear storytelling. Just now, as I was trying to recap the plot for you guys, I felt like a mortician trying to make sense of a corpse mangled beyond all recognition.

There are a lot of prose passages in this thing. Which, personally, I don’t mind in a screenplay. I can read something by Walon Green, William Goldman, or hell, even Frank Darabont’s Indy script and feel like I’m rewarded for my patience. Nothing wrong with lots of words as long as they are good words strung coherently together.

But I do mind when the sentences are in ALL CAPS, and instead of periods there are copious amounts of ellipsis and comma splices. I don’t know, maybe that’s just an aesthetic preference, but my eyeballs had a fuck-all time wading through the long blocks of description and action. So much so that at times I lost all sense of narrative spatial awareness. I was constantly back-tracking trying to figure out what was happening on stage (or on the movie screen in my head).

I hate to say it, but there was some sloppy writing and use of language in this script.

Seems like whichever exec made the hard decision to pull the plug on this $100 million dollar turkey was struck by a sobering dose of wisdom and saved Fox some major face.

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Economy of words, people. Economy of words. Are your lines of action/prose passages clunky? Do you trip over them or run out of breath while trying to read them aloud? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then you might want to experiment with brevity. I’m all for dense and compelling lines of action, but I think there’s something to be said for the 3-sentence rule. If anything, if you limit your lines of action and description to 3 sentences, you’ll at least simulate a breezy read.

To The White Sea

Note: If you are a fan of both Scriptshadow and the Coen Brothers, I highly advise you not read the following review. There is a good chance you will never want to read Scriptshadow again. Please, I’m begging you, turn back now. You will hate me. As a result you will leave. Which means you won’t benefit from the future reviews and scripts that appear on the site. I know it’s tempting but I’m doing this for your own protection……..Still here? Okay, I warned you.

Genre: Drama
Premise: An American gunner for a B-29 bomber squad crash lands in Tokyo during World 2 and must find a way to escape alive.
About: This finished number 20 on the Scriptshadow Reader Top 25 List, which is pretty impressive when you consider it hadn’t been officially mentioned on the site. Joel and Ethan Coen adapted the novel over a decade ago, and many consider it to be one of the best screenplays not yet produced. James Dickey, who wrote the novel the script was adapted from, also wrote “Deliverance.”
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen (based on the novel by James Dickey)

Remember the large group of friends you used to hang out with in high school and college? For the most part, everybody got along. Being in a large group of people who just “get you” is probably one of the safest most comforting feelings you can have in life. But in those groups, there’s always that one person, that one guy or girl you just don’t see eye to eye with. Both of you know it. Both of you do your best to work around it. But because there is absolutely zero crossover in your interests, zero crossover in your sense of humor, because there seemingly isn’t a single thing in life that the two of you agree on, all you can do is tolerate each other and not let your dislike of one another screw up the group dynamic.

That person for me was Eli. I hated Eli. And it was clear he didn’t like me either. I couldn’t even tell you the reasons why I didn’t like Eli. He was just one of those people that rubbed you the wrong way. So deep was our dislike for each other, that if ever a segment of the group couldn’t make it somewhere, I’d have to check to see how many others were coming. If it was five people and Eli, I could handle it. But once it got down to four or three? Which meant Eli and I would actually have to talk? No thank you. I was out. And I’m certain he did the same. Over time, Eli and I basically became experts at hating each other.

Well when you go off into the real world and grow up a bit, you look back at things and you think, “Maybe I could’ve approached that better.” “Maybe I helped contribute to the misunderstandings just as much as he did.” You gain some perspective, and wish you would’ve tried harder.

So a couple of years out of college and a good six years since I’d last seen Eli, I flew in for one of my friends’ bachelor parties. The whole group was back together again, and there was Eli, grown up, matured, nice, a seemingly different man than the character I remembered. I knew right then that we were going to be okay, that we could work things out.

Eli also had with him a harmonica, which he was busting out occasionally, playing for people. And he was actually quite good. Better yet, it was the perfect conversation piece. At the time, one of my favorite bands was Blues Traveler, which, for those of you unfamiliar with them, has a lead singer whose trademark is his unprecedented harmonica mastery. It was the perfect topic to bring us together. I was certain that if I could just get Eli alone, we’d end up talking all night, forgetting every issue we ever had with each other, and becoming better friends than Selena Gomez and Demi Lavato.

Blues Traveler

About an hour later, I saw Eli getting a drink and decided to strike. I approached him with a big smile and asked him what he’d been up to. There was still a trace of distance in his voice, but I focused on the positive. At least he was engaging me. Eli told me he had gone into real estate where he was quickly becoming a force. He also recently asked his girlfriend to marry him. Things were clearly going well for him. When there was a brief potentially awkward pause, I knew it was the perfect time to bring up the harmonica. “So how long have you been playing?” I asked. “About five years now,” he said. “I heard you playing earlier. You’re really good.” “Thanks.” “What kind of stuff do you play?” “I like a bunch of different kinds of music but mainly blues.” It was exactly the way I had planned it in my head. I threw him the moneyball.

Harmonica

“I’m a huge fan of Blues Traveler. I don’t know anyone who can play a harmonica like that guy.” And he paused, looked at me for a moment. I noticed his face becoming a deep shade of red. For the briefest of moments, he actually looked like he was going to kill me. Though I’ll never remember exactly how he said it, Eli responded to me with something like: “Blues Traveler is a fucking joke. I hate John Popper [the lead singer]. He’s everything that’s wrong with the harmonica. They’re a piece of shit pop-group that fucked up everything that’s pure about music. I hate them with a passion and wish that dude would die.”

I stood there for what I’m pretty sure was six years of silence. I then offered a forced smile, turned, and walked away. I have not spoken to Eli since, nor do I ever plan on speaking to Eli again. That experience taught me a profound life lesson: Two forces that aren’t meant to be will never be. Time will pass. You can keep trying. But you’ll never like each other. This is the reason why I know I will never like the Coen Brothers.

The Coen Brothers would probably never be as rude as Eli, but just like the harmonically angry one, I don’t get them. I just don’t. Everything they do exists on a plane outside of what I’m willing to consider entertainment. I got through ten pages of “A Serious Man,” and thought it was a rambling incohesive piece of shit. Burn After Reading? A desperate attempt to grab A-list actors by creating a stupid story with overtly outrageous characters. More like Burn Before Reading. Ditto for “O Brother Where Art Thou.” In fact, that’s how they seem to approach most of their movies. And don’t get me started about No Country For Old Men, which, based on a novel or not, decided to deprive the audience of a fairly important piece of information: THE ACTUAL ENDING. I couldn’t even tell you what they did for the seven years previous to that. Didn’t they remake The Ladykillers?

Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the Coens aren’t talented filmmakers. They clearly have a vision – a unique eye, and they seem to have a pretty good grasp on the old “chase the guy with the bag of money” device. But I truly hate their writing. I will never ever get it.

To The White Sea is my Eli at the bachelor party moment for the Coens. I’ve heard about how good this script is many times, but when it scored so highly on the Reader List, I finally said, “I have to give this a shot.” So Wednesday I approached To The White Sea at the party, and had a conversation. Would the script prove my theory wrong? Or would I continue to lump the Coens in with Eli?

It’s March of 1945, roughly five months before the end of World War 2. A guy named “Muldrow” is supposedly the best B-29 gunner in his squadron. After we’re told a few times how awesome he is, he’s off on a mission to blanket Tokyo with more explosions than a Michael Bay movie (not including Bad Boys 2). As they’re flying along, their plane gets hit, he gets ejected, and falls, I think, right outside Tokyo. This coincides with the ending of all dialogue in the film, which I was really excited about, since it made a 90 page screenplay read like it was 180.

For reasons I’m still trying to grasp, we inexplicably flashback to Muldrow in Alaska(?) with a bunch of snow dogs. Neither Cuba Gooding Jr. or Paul Walker is nearby, so when Muldrow’s hands get a little chilly, he slices one of the dogs in half and shoves his hands inside to keep warm. I don’t know about you but I love me some dog killers. I was really warming up to this character.

“Slicey slicey little doggie.”

Back in the present, Michael Vick wakes up, seemingly okay after the fall, and must now find a way out of Tokyo without being seen or killed. A few pages after the wonderful dog murdering scene, he slices the throat of an innocent civilian and steals his clothes and hat, which he then hides under so people won’t see that he’s American.

He then wanders through Tokyo and its outskirts – though it’s never clear to me where he’s planning to go, as the last time I checked, Japan was an island. In the draft I read, there were occasional pages that had been omitted. And I suppose this could’ve been explained in one of them, but I considered these deleted pages to be more a gift from God, a tiny favor from him to shorten my read. But even God himself could only do so much. Every endless page was hell. In fact, I started to wonder who was going to survive longer. Me or this character.

Muldrow continues to sneak around Japan, eventually finding his way into a house and murdering an old blind man. He also bludgeons and beats to death a goat, rips apart some birds, and if that isn’t enough animal death for you, a cute cub bear gets torn apart later. By this point I had broken out the pom-poms, such was my rooting interest for this wonderful man. Unfortunately, Muldrow never finds that deaf school of children to massacre. I guess we can always hope for a sequel.

There’s a big ironic moment when American bombers fly over and start bombing the very city he now finds himself in. Except I was less focused on the irony and more concerned about the bomber’s errant aim. I knew if they got him, the script would be over. Or, at least, I hoped it would. But alas, the idiots kept missing. I guess they shoulda hired Michael Bay.

Even with it being only a couple of days since I read the script, I can’t really remember the end, other than I was bored to tears. I do remember him getting captured though, I think. And maybe almost dying. Alas, for those kinds of details you’ll have to carve out four hours of free time for yourself. Cause yes, it takes that long to read. (I know forgotten Egyptian cave languages that read faster than this)

Um, is there a movie in here? I suppose so, though I thought it woulda been way cooler if it was about an army official crashing in Hiroshima who had knowledge that the atom bomb was about to be dropped there in an hour or something. Now that’s a movie I’d wanna see. Hmm, maybe I’ll pitch it to Eli.

[x}What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Having your main character kill a lot of animals will make him extremely likable. Kill as many animals as possible always in scripts. Puppies, chipmunks, bunnies, and baby deer are preferable.

In the spirit of fairness, I decided to give a friend of mine, Aaron Coffman, who’s a great screenwriter himself and a huge fan of To The White Sea, a chance to offer his thoughts on the script. Obviously, he’s wrong, but I’ll let him talk anyway. :)

When Carson first hinted that TO THE WHITE SEA may receive a ‘trash’ rating, I politely demanded the chance to offer a counter review, for I, like many of you, rather enjoyed the script.

A couple years ago, when a friend sent me the Coen Brother’s adaptation of the James Dickey novel, I tore into it, smiling at the sandpapered words first spoken by a hardened Colonel:

Fire. We are going to bring it to him.

Like the opening of PATTON, a commanding officer stands before his men, issuing orders that not only asks them to be absolutely brutal to the enemy, but to their enemy’s families and to their way of life. He’s not just asking his men to make the other poor bastard die for his country, he’s demanding they mutilate that country in the process.

…we’re going to put it in his dreams. Whatever heaven he’s hoping for, we’re fixing to make a hell out of it… no ammo, no gunners. All bombs. All payload. All fire.

And so begins TO THE WHITE SEA.

The opening image of a sea bird, flying against the bluest of skies, suddenly overtaken by the thunderous roar of a B-29 speaks volumes about what the script will set out to achieve. The constant battle between nature and man coarses throughout the eighty-nine page script.

The year is 1945. The war in the pacific is violently inching closer to an end. We meet Muldrow, the tail-gunner of a B-29, preparing for the hunt — or in this case, a bombing raid over Tokyo. The crews are told that in a few days the wooden city will be firebombed, but before that, regular bombs will have to do.

It’s on the great hunt that Muldrow’s plane is shot down and he is the lone surivor to jump from the plane’s gutted husk and make it safely to the ground. The only problem is that he’s in Tokyo, and in a matter days the entire place will be hit with white phosphorous and napalm.

And here is where the script started to win me over. In any other circumstance the plot of the film would use the firebombing as a ticking-clock. The script would become about Muldrow trying to escape before the American bombers return. He’d surely have to kidnap a Japanese citizen, but by the end of it they’d come to understand each other, and the Japanese captive would sacrifice himself so that Muldrow could flee to safety.

But not here. After spending the night in a construction vehicle, Muldrow starts North, where he can escape into the Aleutians, and by page thirty-four, Tokyo is on fire. Clearly this script isn’t as interested in standard conventions. There will be no Japanese captive with whom he can share stories of his past; nor will his captive-turned-friend be around to save his life.

Through a series of short flashbacks, done with some of the more interestingly executed transitions I’ve read, we learn about Muldrow’s past. We see him, years before, steering sled dogs through the Alaskan wilderness. When he tries to untie a frozen knot, Muldrow loses his gloves in the snow, and with the night quickly approaching, and unable to start a fire with his frozen hands, Muldow takes one of the sled dogs behind a mound, slices it open, and sticks his hands inside for warmth.

It is a scene that not only develops who Muldrow is as a character, but also the overall theme as well. Through his actions we see that Muldrow can and will to do whatever it takes to survive, and do it without any hesitation. The scene also begins to establish the thematic element of caged animals. Much like in RAGING BULL, when Jake LaMotta is thrown in prison and begins to bash his head against the cement wall, screaming that he’s an animal, here to we start to get a feeling that Muldrow himself has been caged, and that now the animal has been set free.

As Muldrow makes his escape, many might be put off by brutality in which Muldrow kills. However, I would counter by saying each murder allows him to find a way to survive.

He kills a construction worker for his clothes so that he can get out of his flight suit. During the firebombing of Tokyo he kills a man his size so that he can get out of his combat boots which clearly would give him away.

In one of my favorite sequences of the script, Muldrow kills a man who feeds a flock of swan in a pool outside a house. The murder seems unnecessary at first because even though he does eat the swan (the one which fought back), it’s unclear why he clubs a handful of the birds to death. We see him plucking the feathers, shoving them into a bag and then setting out again, and yet the question as to what he’s up to isn’t made clear. Later, when he discovers a blind man’s house, he waits for the caregiver to leave, then sneaks in. He quickly goes through the house, searching for something, ignoring the blind man. The blind man, realizing an intruder is in the house grabs a blade and nearly kills Muldrow before he himself is dispatched rather violently.

It’s the first time Muldrow has come upon a person who he doesn’t kill on sight, simply because the man can do him no harm. He can’t tell the authorities that Muldrow is an American. It’s only after the man attacks that Muldrow kills him. The sequence comes to an end as we realize why Muldrow came into the house. He uses a needle and thread to sew the swan feathers into his jacket to add insulation. It’s going to be cold on his trip, and again survival drives him.

To cover his tracks Muldrow sets the house on fire, but stops to let a song bird out of it’s cage. Once again the use of caged animals comes into play. Unlike Muldrow, though, the song bird flaps about the burning room only to return to its cage to await certain death.

When a small tribe takes him in, the looming threat that he might have to kill them all hangs heavy over the sequence and drives up the tension. During a celebration, two caged bear cubs are brought before Muldrow. The villagers kill one in a ritualistic manner. Later that night, on his way out of the village, Muldrow kills the man in charge, then sets the remaining cub free. It’s an interesting moment because we’re left to wonder if Muldrow did so to cover his tracks, or if he felt an animalistic need to free the caged bear. He doesn’t kill the entire village, which seems like something he’d do if his motive was to cover his tracks. Instead, he kills the man who allowed the bear cub to be slaughtered in its cage. Once the murder has occurred, and the bear has been set free, Muldrow’s own sense of survival kicks in and he murders several more tribe members on the edge of town to make it appear as though the bear cub was responsible.
[**major spoiler below**]

When he finally makes it north, Muldrow encounters another man, who shows him his prized hawks. During a trek through the forest, as the hawk flies high above him, Muldrow is shot and killed by soldiers as they stalk through the snow. It’s not made clear if they were after him specifically, but they’re dressed in white camo to disguise them in the snow, and we get the feeling that they too were on a hunt.

As Muldrow lies dying, he watches the hawk above him, in the blue sky, like the bird we saw in the first moments of the script. Muldrow’s voice echos the words:

I was in the place I tried to get. I was in it and had it. And will be everywhere in it from now on.

And so it is that Muldrow, once a caged animal, returns to nature from which he was born.

What I learned: This isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. This is clearly written by two people who have never really been interested in the standard conventions of a Hollywood story. The fact that the font is in Times New Roman will make some feel as though they’re reading a book, however, I think writer’s can take some important things from it. Without dialogue or a high concept plot to push the story forward, the writer’s must focus on theme. Seeing such a thing on display here might help you incorporate that element into your own scripts in a more powerful way.

Screenplay Review – Rust and Bone

How does this art-house darling about a paraplegic look on the page? Pull up your wheelchairs and find out!

Genre: Drama
Premise: When a woman loses her legs in a killer whale accident, she engages in a strange friendship with a street fighter.
About: This is a Belgium film that’s heating up the indie circuit and is as an Oscar contender in the “Best Actress” category for Marion Cotillard. The film is directed by Jacques Audiard, who directed the hit 2009 French film, A Prophet. Audiard has been writing for film and television since the 80s. This is the promotional version of the screenplay being used for Oscar consideration, so I assume it’s the shooting draft.  I’ve also been informed that the movie is in French (didn’t know that when I read it) which means this is a translation.  However, it’s unclear who translated the screenplay to English, and why they wouldn’t format it properly upon doing so…
Writer: Jacques Audiard
Details: 125 pages – August 16th, 2011

Whenever you’re sitting around and someone says, “Oh my God. Have you seen xxxxx? It’s amaaa-zing,” you don’t forget that movie title. You place that one up there on the mental “must-see” list. That’s what happened a few months ago when I heard someone raving about Rust and Bone. I knew then I had to see this movie.

But let’s be honest. The title “Rust and Bone” doesn’t exactly have you microwaving a big bag of popcorn and melting down a half stick of butter to coat it in. It’s the title for a movie you watch alone in the dead of winter when your life is spiraling out of control and the only way you’re going to feel better is to watch something that’s more miserable than you. Sort of like the movie version of Hoarders.

I know, I know. That’s “title stereotyping.” I shouldn’t be doing that. For all I know, Rust and Bone is about two best friends who win the lottery and buy a candy factory.

Orrrrrr…..maybe not. Turns out this one is just as dreary as its title. Hold on to your Paxil people. Shit’s about to get depressing.

Rust and Bone introduces us to Ali, a sort of tough-guy brawler who’s yanking his tiny little kid, Sam, through the forest. After a few phone calls, we gather that he’s just stole Sam away from his ex because of her lousy parenting skills (which include using him to smuggle dope). After a long train ride, the two arrive at his sister’s, who’s not happy to see her bro but allows them to stay with her as long as they pay their way.

This forces Ali to get a job as a bouncer for, I think, boxing matches, though the writing was consistently vague when it came to anything important so that’s actually just an educated guess. It’s there where he meets Stephanie, a loner party-girl with an attitude. When she gets beat up in a fight, he ends up driving her home, where the two have a really awkward disinterested conversation.

The next day we learn that Stephanie is a killer whale trainer at a European version of Sea World, and during the very first stunt of the day, there’s a whale collision (I think??) that results in her losing both her legs. Stephanie goes through a depressing couple of weeks accepting her new life as a paraplegic, then decides to call her old bouncer buddy out of the blue, even though she seemed to hate him at the time.

Ali is surprisingly blasé about Stephanie’s lost legs, and agrees to fuck her if she’s ever horny, since there aren’t many stand-up guys looking for paraplegics (sorry, I had to go there). She goes along with this agreement and, soon, the two start to actually like each other. Ali eventually gets pulled in to the very boxing matches he’s bouncing, starts winning a bunch of money, and the two end up happily ever after – or as happily ever after as two can be when one person doesn’t have any legs.

Whoa. Where do we begin?

I was so dismayed by this screenplay that I couldn’t write a review without doing some research on the film and finding out how anyone was able to make it out of the theater alive. Things started to make sense when I found the trailer, which is actually really good. If that was my only reference to the movie, I would want to see it. I also found out it was from the same director who did The Phophet, which is one half of an awesome movie. And even though it eventually wanders into total randomness (Go watch it if you haven’t yet. It just keeps going and going and going), there’s no doubt that the director is extremely talented.

But the same problem with the second half of that film is the problem with all of this film. The story is all the hell over the place. I mean it’s a French film, so focus and structure aren’t going to be a priority. But there’s a difference between a script that doesn’t depend on structure and a script that completely ignores structure. This script felt like skin without any bones inside. There’s nothing propping it up.

Let’s start with the kid. Why was he in the movie? We start on him. The implication is he’s important, maybe even the primary focus. His dad having to take him away from his overbearing mom reinforces this. He then proceeds to disappear for 110 pages (spoiler) until he gets caught under an ice lake in the final scene!!! Wtf???

Then there’s Stephanie, who we meet out partying. The next morning, she’s all of a sudden a Killer Whale performer. Just something that seemed totally out-of-character from the person who had been set up (and not in a “that’s the idea” way).  But what was more startling was that one scene later her legs are chomped off during a performance. Don’t we need to establish her life as a trainer first before turning her into a Halfsie? It would be like in Million Dollar Baby if in the very first fight, Hilary Swank fell on that stool and became paralyzed. Not only that, but the scene was so poorly described, I didn’t know it was the whale who bit her legs off until page 95 when it was explicitly stated. At the time, I thought some electrical equipment fell on her legs. That’s how often I was confused while reading this.

Then there was the dialogue. Now, in retrospect, I realize this is translated, but still, the translator should’ve prevented unbearable lines like “Stop this car on the double!”  And when a defeated intern is being scolded for her job performance, she counters, “What are you trying to make me believe, that I wasn’t up to par?” I can’t imagine anyone saying that sentence ever.  If you’re having your script translated for Oscar voters, make sure it’s from someone who knows what they’re doing.

Then there were these elaborately described characters who were presented as potential cornerstones of the story, only to disappear two scenes later. Like Giles, the heavily scarred fellow paraplegic Stephanie meets in rehab. I mean this guy was more well-drawn and memorable than probably anyone except for Stephanie. Yet he’s gone before you can press your scroll button.

I’m still wondering if this is a culture thing. These character-driven movies with floating storylines and zero structure fit better with European audiences who don’t need everything to be so clean-cut, so buttoned-up. Their movies are more like real life (or as real-life as someone getting gobbled up by a whale can be). So I’m really curious what the European (and particularly French) Scriptshadow readers think of this. But I just could NOT get into it at all. I need structure! There’s a fine line between “purposefully unfocused” and “sloppy,” and this felt sloppy to me.  Despite this, I will see this movie based on the trailer.  In winter.  Up in a mountain.  Inside a shack.  With a stack of Hoarders DVDs.  Wish me luck.

[x] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I’m going to be honest. When something isn’t formatted correctly, I completely lose confidence in the writer. Every little misstep or confusing moment or badly described scene or muddled motivation I see after that is just confirmation of what I already assumed, that the script is going to be bad. Rust and Bone has left-margined character names in the dialogue, underlined slugs, lack of spacing between some action blocks. I’m not ruling out that this format may be commonplace in France. But if you don’t already have the movie made (like Jacque) and you’re writing for the American market, good formatting has to be a given. Once I see even ONE PARAGRAPH that’s incorrectly formatted in a script, I think to myself, “They’re not using professional screenwriting software which means they’re not serious about screenwriting which means this is going to be bad,” because that’s what’s happened the last 99 scripts I read with bad formatting. So please don’t make this very avoidable mistake!

Screenplay Review – Nostromo

Today’s script was written by one of the best directors of all time and was supposed to be his next movie before his death. I don’t know how the movie would’ve turned out, but I certainly have my opinions on the screenplay.

Genre: Period Drama
Premise: When a group of men find silver in a Spanish mine, they begin excavating it, only to realize that the local government wants a controlling interest in the spoils.
About: This was written by famous director David Lean (The Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) and Robert Bolt (who was a co-writer on a lot of Lean’s films). The script is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel. This was going to be Lean’s next film after PASSAGE TO INDIA but he died before it could start production. It’s one of several films Steven Spielberg was trying to produce for Lean. Martin Scorsese has expressed interest in making it. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nostromo 47th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “I’d rather have written Nostromo than any other novel.”
Writers: David Lean and Robert Bolt (based on the novel by Joseph Conrad)
Details: 92 pages (but feels like 192). January 1991 draft

Bardem for Nostromo?

Okay, I want you to imagine a movie where you have a hero WHO DOESN’T DO ANYTHING. Okay okay. I guess you could argue that that’s The Big Lebowski (and it did okay for that film). But now imagine you’re talking about a drama. And imagine, not only does the hero not do anything, but he isn’t in the movie for the first 25 minutes. And when he does show up, he just walks around and people stare at him. While he does nothing. But walk. Around.

Welcome to Nostromo, the most baffling screenplay I’ve read by professional screenwriters in a long time. Now here’s the thing. I didn’t grow up during the Lean era so I’m not as in awe of him as some people. But I do understand that this was a different time in movie-making. It was a lot harder to create spectacle – to create these big ambitious canvases. So if you were one of the few directors who could pull it off, like Lean, you were in high demand.

I also know that there weren’t screenwriting books back then. Storytelling had a lot more freedom. Some people argue this was a good thing. Some people argue it wasn’t. But as I’m looking back at this script…I’m sorry but this could’ve used some hardcore development help. I don’t know if these guys were writing in a vacuum or what but this story is just a mess. It never finds its footing. It never knows where it’s going. It doesn’t know who its main character is, even though his name is on the title page of the script.

I mean this feels like 60 different writers worked on it and someone took a scene from each of their scripts, threw them in a blender, and this came out. And the thing is, it could’ve been good! It has this big treasure at the heart of it. Who can’t make a treasure story good?? Ahhhh! This was so frustrating.

We’re in the Golfo Placido, which I’m guessing is in South America maybe but I’m not positive because it’s never stated. The year is “I don’t know when” because that’s not given either. A man named Charles Gould has come here because he believes there’s a stash of silver in one of the forest mines. He hires a local foreman named Nostromo to guide him to the location, and low and behold, he’s right! There’s lots of silver!

Gould hires a local crew of natives to start excavating the silver while Nostromo, the man we think is the hero because he’s on the title page, disappears. Not like, as a story choice. He just isn’t mentioned for the rest of the first act. In the meantime, Gould gets the third degree from the local authorities, who of course want their slice of the pie.

Now the plan is to excavate all of this silver and ship it back to the homeland. Unfortunately, there’s a government coup, and the new president doesn’t just want a piece of the spoils. He wants the whole damn thing, including the horse we rode in on. Naturally, Gould has put a ton of money into this endeavor so he doesn’t want to just give it away. So he hires Nostromo (this is around the midpoint – before that, we barely see Nostromo at all. And when we do, he’s basically standing around while people admire him. For what reason he’s so admired is never made clear) and a French guy who shows up after Act 1, to transport all the silver on a small boat and get it out of the reach of the government.

So that’s what Nostromo and Decoud (the French guy) do. You’d think they’d go on a lot of adventures along the way and that’s where the story would be. No. Instead, we’re stuck with these two guys who we know absolutely nothing about (except that people like to stare at Nostromo) wading down the river on a boat.

Remember the tip I gave you yesterday which The Big Lebowski pulled off so perfectly? Throw a lot of shit at your characters? Lean and Bolt didn’t get that memo. These characters just stroll down the river without so much as having to swat a mosquito. That is until a random steamboat passes them, tipping their boat over and sinking them. Yes, this is the big “obstacle” that challenges our characters. A wave.

But that wasn’t even the tip of this script’s problems. Who was the main character here? Was it Gould? Was it Decoud? Was it Nostromo? I have no idea. I do know that if they were trying to create three protagonists, it didn’t work. If you’re going to try the impossible and write a tri-protagonist movie, each character must be clear, with clear goals and clear motivations. Outside of maybe Gould, I had no idea what anybody was doing, especially Nostromo.

I mean this guy shows up at his village and he’s some hero there. Like he walks down the streets and people chant his name. WHY??? He’s a glorified assistant. Helping foreigners find their way around a forest. Why would that make you a king in your village? It’s just bizarre. And this isn’t some first draft either. We have numbered scenes and deleted scenes, even references to the score.

And the plot. This plot! What was happening??? Focus on one thing. Focus on the guys trying to get silver out of the country. Focus on the government trying to raid the mine and our heroes defending it. But we’re just all freaking over the place here. At one point we watch the bad guy travel across the Andes mountains. It was like a random game of hot potato. Whichever character caught the potato, that’s who they’d focus the next scene on.

I know this is going to sound like blasphemy to suggest Lean and Bolt take a screenwriting lesson from James Cameron, but this script could’ve been great with a Titanic structure. The ending of the script, as it stands, (spoiler) has Nostromo burying the treasure in a secret hiding spot, then dying. So no one ever finds out where it was stashed.

What if you started on a modern day treasure-hunting team looking for the Nostromo treasure, then cut back to the past in pieces as we get closer and closer to finding out what happened to the treasure? It would give this script some desperately needed structure and we’d actually have a reason (a point!) to keep watching.

And then focus on freaking Nostromo in this new draft! Follow him! Not these other losers. And explain to us why he’s a damn hero instead of cryptically showing everybody infatuated with him. And please, make him active! Have him doing stuff and going after stuff as opposed to taking baths in villages.

I wish I could say something nicer about this script but it really was a mess. I think it could be reworked into something worth making, but it would definitely need a page 1 rewrite.

[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I continue to notice that one of the best ways to describe a character is to describe their eyes via an adjective. Notice how wildly the impressions of these characters vary in your imagination as I use different adjectives: “Innocent eyes,” “Wild green eyes,” “Cautious grey eyes,” “Dark dead eyes.” Doesn’t that tell us so much more than had you just written, “Green eyes?”

Screenplay Review – Ronnie Rocket

Can Ronnie Rocket out-nonsense the king of nonsense, Upstream Color?? Side note: Both scripts contain pigs!

Genre: Surrealist
Premise: (described by Lynch himself) About a three foot tall man with physical problems and…60 cycle alternating current electricity.
About: Ronnie Rocket is a script that David Lynch has been trying to make forever. Typical of many Lynch projects, it’s always had a hard time getting funding. When one of the targeted studios asked what the script was about, Lynch replied, “electricity and a 3-foot guy with red hair.” The studio never got in touch again. Lynch himself is probably the most famous surrealist director in the world. Logic is not at the forefront of a lot of his stories, endearing him to some and confusing the hell out of others. Lynch broke through with his 1977 surrealist horror film, Eraserhead, then achieved more mainstream success with The Elephant Man. However, studios quickly realized they didn’t know what to do with him after he helmed the bizarre, “Dune,” which was a failure both commercially and critically.  Lynch’s most famous work is the TV show “Twin Peaks,” which became an immediate sensation upon its airing, then completely fell apart, pissing off everyone.
Writer: David Lynch
Details: 156 pages scanned (however, when transcribed to a regular document, the script comes in closer to 130 pages).

David Lynch

Okay, I swear to you. I came into this with an open mind. You guys know that I like stories which, um, make sense. So a storytelling mechanism designed to not make sense will almost always put me in a bad mood. But there are different ways to tell stories. Not everything has to have that perfect beginning, middle, and end. So you gotta be open to that, especially if you want to learn and grow as a storyteller. However, I will say this: if you’re not going to follow the traditional way of telling a story, you better be a freaking genius, and the story you’re telling better be amazing. You better wow us in ways that we’ve never been wowed. Because if there’s no direction or payoff to your script, all that’s left are the strange trappings of your mind. And we don’t want to be trapped in there with you if it’s just a bunch of bullshit.

Now to give you some background, I’m about as ignorant as they come about David Lynch. I’m aware of his career, but as for his movies, I’ve only seen Mulholland Drive and Dune. And in both cases, I was wondering what the hell was going on. I don’t think I made it through either. And that’s not through lack of trying. I was just seriously bored beyond belief and fell asleep. However, I admit I’m fascinated by Lynch for one reason: Twin Peaks. I never saw the show, but I just remember people being obsessed with it. And then, inexplicably, everyone HATED it. I don’t know what happened (or if someone can tell me), but to go from universally loved to universally hated that fast is something they write books about.

I will say this – I wish I was a surrealist writer. It seems like a hell of lot easier way to write. You never have to worry about structure or character development or any of those things that take so much time to figure out and get right. You just write whatever comes to mind “in the moment” and people either like it or they don’t. I could probably bang out six scripts a month if I followed this model. But alas, I, like everyone else, am limited by this whole “logic” issue. Sigh. Well, let’s see how much or little logic Lynch applies to this passion project of his…. Ronnie Rocket.

“Rocket” contains two parallel storylines. The first one follows two bumbling surgeons who steal a small deformed man from a hospital named Ronnie. Ronnie’s in pretty bad shape, having a hole in his face for a nose and all. So they take him to their home where they have their hospital-basement (they also live with a woman, who they appear to both be in a relationship with) and start rebuilding his face. The thing is, they’re not nearly as good at their jobs as they think they are, and end up fixing certain parts of Ronnie’s face but essentially ruining other parts.

They’re also forced to make Ronnie electrical because….well, I’m not sure why. But lots of wires are inserted into his body, and in a situation Jason Statham would be familiar with, Ronnie needs to be “plugged in” every 15 minutes or he’ll die.

Meanwhile, across the city, is this guy named “Detective.” Actually, I don’t know what his name is, but that’s what he’s called. Detective. Detective is getting frustrated because this city they’re living in appears to be getting darker and darker every day. He wants to find out what that’s all about, so he starts heading for the center of the city. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get to the center of the city. All the trains going there close down three or four stops beforehand. So Detective must enlist the help of a punchy old man, Terry, to navigate his way to the center.

Word on the street is there’s some guy who’s responsible for all this darkness. And if they can put a stop to him, they can get this city bright and happy again. But much like Oz, he’s heavily guarded and difficult to find. He often sends out bad guys (called “Donut Men”) in trucks, who wield electricity nightsticks to beat their victims into submission. These electricity masters have so much power that by just pulling up in front of a diner, they can incite multiple seizures from the patrons, which results in many of them dying.

Back in the other part of the city, Ronnie’s stumbled into music class where, while plugged in, he begins wheezing and screaming and chirping and buzzing… but in a melodically pleasant way! Somehow his beeps and chirps mesh seamlessly with the band’s music, and the teacher asks him to join the band. Ronnie doesn’t really answer “yes” or “no,” but a vague smile indicates he’s in. Somehow, maybe, possibly, but potentially not, Detective’s quest to find the Electricity Master and take him down, and Ronnie’s own special connection to electricity (and now music) will collide and they’ll end up saving the world…or something.

What to write about a movie that doesn’t make sense… Hmmmm… Ronnie Rocket wanders off aimlessly like a dog on a walk, sniffing anything and everything that looks even remotely interesting. The funny thing is, I was so prepared for this script to make zero sense, that I was actually shocked when the screenplay started off with a goal! Detective IS after something here – the City Runner. The problem is, I was never sure why. What’s the motivation? Was it to save the city? That’s what I wrote above but that’s just me trying to give the story a point. The story itself didn’t offer one to me.

Traditionally, characters have to have motivations for doing things. And those things must be clear to the audience. That’s one of the first rules of storytelling. You can, of course, HIDE the motivation in some cases, treating it as a mystery to be revealed to the audience later, but that’s one of the riskiest things to do in screenwriting (in my opinion). If a reader doesn’t know why his main character is doing all the things he’s doing, he’s eventually going to get frustrated with him. Then again, I’m sure this is the last thing Lynch cares about. I’m betting he never sits down and says, “Hmmm, why is my character doing this?” If it pops up in his head, that’s motivation enough.

The other key screenwriting device being utilized here is the parallel storyline technique. Surprisingly, Lynch incorporates this in a fairly straightforward manner. We stay with Detective for awhile. Then we stay with Ronnie for awhile. Back to Detective. Back to Ronnie. The big key when you’re writing parallel (or multiple) storylines is to treat each storyline like its own movie. Ask yourself, “Could this storyline carry its own movie?” Because what I often see happen, and it probably happens to screenwriters unconsciously, is that they begin to think that two okay parts will add up to one great whole. Sorry, but it doesn’t work like that. My philosophy is to make the individual stories work on their own (no matter how many there are), THEN work them into the tapestry of the entire film. That way, no matter where the reader is in the story, they’re always entertained.

I wish I had more to say about Ronnie Rocket but too much of it is over my head. I suppose it’s a difference in how we like to be entertained. I like to be entertained with a well-crafted story. But plenty of people watch movies to stimulate their minds, to be challenged, to see questions posed and never answered. They don’t want the answers themselves because that means there’s nothing to discuss afterwards. What’s frustrating about this is that there is absolutely zero form to this approach. There’s no craft to it. So the line between someone who’s good at it and someone who’s terrible at it is paper thin. I mean if I’m being honest, I thought this  script was a mess. Why the hell are we following Ronnie Rocket becoming a musician for 60 pages when it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything? And since anything is the equivalent of nothing in this screenplay, then which way is up? I’m not sure anymore. All I know is that I can’t ever read a script like Ronnie Rocket again. I might die of frustration.

[x] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: When writing multiple storylines, like in Ronnie Rocket, play a game of “top yourself.” Whatever your weakest storyline is, rewrite it until it becomes the best. And whatever the next weakest storyline is, rewrite it until IT becomes the best. Keep doing this over and over again until there isn’t a single weak storyline link in your screenplay.

Amateur Week SMACKDOWN – Observation Car

Today I take a train ride to Confusionville. All aboard!

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: (from writer) After witnessing UFOs and other strange phenomena, an insomniac on a cross country train trip suspects an alien invasion is underway, beginning with his fellow passengers, but when no one believes him, he must team with a fugitive stowaway to unravel the sinister agenda.
About: This is…. Amateur Week SMACKDOWN – 5 scripts, all of which have been pre-vetted by the SRF (Scriptshadow Reader Faithful), vie for the Top Prize, an official endorsement from whoever the guy is who runs this site. Good luck to all!
Writer: Brefni O’Rourke
Details: 105 pages

Holy Shozers.

Am I still alive? Am I living in the correct dimension?

I feel like my brain’s just been pulled out, sent to Planet Claxor, studied by several alien species, then placed back in my skull sideways.

I’m 83% sure that only 5% of what I just read made sense.

Okay, I have an assumption here and I may be totally off base, but I think a European writer wrote this. Why? Because it’s set on a train in America. And while trains are big in Europe, they’re dead in the U.S. I mean, it can cost twice as much and take 1000% as long to take a train from New York to LA. So people just fly. Whereas in Europe, train travel is much more evolved and makes much more economic sense. It’s part of the reason why Observation Car feels so weird. Nothing quite seems logical, or real for that matter. It’s like a daydream after drinking a case of Coke then crashing from the sugar high. You’re dehydrated. You’re confused. And your brain goes to Crazy Town.

Observation Car (we HAVE to change this title. I assumed it was about one of these new Google cars) is about a guy named Trevor who’s travelling on a train from the East Coast to the West Coast. He’s taking with him his lovely wife, and the two seem to be trying to escape something. It’s just not clear to us what. I often got the impression it wasn’t clear to THEM either. Every character here seems to be very… confused.

Anyway, on the first night of the train ride, while in the Observation Car portion (upper deck) of the train, Trevor sees a freaking UFO swoop down and nearly hit the train. What the! He starts barking to anyone who will listen, “Did you see that!?? Did you see those lights!!?” But no one knows what the heck he’s talking about, including his own wife.

That is until he randomly bumps into another passenger named Kowalski who says, “I saw that!” And the two begin considering all the alien possibilities. A little while later, Trevor falls asleep, only to wake up at some hospital, where he informs a doctor that he just had the strangest dream. He was travelling on a train with his wife. And it all felt so real!

Soon Trevor finds himself BACK on that train, where things get even crazier. Apparently, there’s a convict named Victor running around who the police want really badly. In fact, every time the train stops at a station, cops board to look for Victor. But these must be really incompetent cops because they can never seem to find the guy.

Then, while moseying down on one of the bottom floors, Trevor runs into Victor, who hands him a device and informs him that the world is being infested with aliens. They are the ones trying to capture him. However, this device keeps them from reading minds, so Trevor won’t have to worry about aliens stealing all his thoughts.

Back up to the Observation Car Trevor goes, where he sees the same UFO swoop down over the train car. But once again, nobody seems to be able to see this except for him (and Kowalski of course). To make things worse, all the policeman/agents looking for Victor on the train start focusing on him. There are references made to some government program Trevor may or may not have been a part of (it’s hard for him to remember and us to understand) but before long, it’s implied that Trevor may actually BE Victor.

What this means is that Trevor knows there are aliens and, for that reason, the aliens want to take him down. Or Trevor, in order to deal with this mind-numbing reality, has created this conspiracy involving all the people on this train, who aren’t actually real. Or Trevor may have been part of an experiment by aliens (and/or the government) and he’s escaped. Or he’s in a mental institution and is simply dreaming this all up. Got all that?

There are a lot of questions when one reads Observation Car, but I’m afraid not a lot of answers. I’m not going to lie. I don’t respond well to this type of material – the type where eighteen different realities exist at once and it’s up to the reader to determine which is real. Particularly when I don’t have the confidence that the writer knows the answers to all the questions he’s posed.

That’s the thing with this kind of script. They only work if the writer has total command over the page – if you get that confident feeling they know exactly what they’re doing. That’s not what I got from this. It felt too much like a writer making something up as he went along, and stopping about 9 drafts short of where he should’ve. This script just feels… shapeless. Government terrorist conspiracies and characters who are possibly dreaming and a UFO cover-up… Individually, all of these things make for good movies. But when thrown together in a blender, they feel like they’ve been thrown together in a blender.

Things looked bad from the beginning. From the overly on-the-nose title to the ill-advised use of an American train setting to the fact that I never even knew why my main character was on the train in the first place. A simple, “He’s just been given a new job in California,” would’ve helped.

If I were the writer, I would set this on a train in Europe. And I would get rid of all the conflicting conspiracy possibilities. Settle on one. Tell us more about our main character (I know nothing about Trevor). What’s his backstory? What are his flaws? Where is he going now and why? You gotta give us SOME SORT OF foundation – SOME facts – about our people involved, or else nothing will feel real, and we’ll just be confounded the whole time. Also, map out your story ahead of time. Outline it. It shouldn’t feel like every story twist was thought up on the spot. There has to be purpose to the choices. Each one can’t feel like the writer trying to write himself out of a corner.

Mysteries work best when there’s structure, logic, and purpose to them. Because I didn’t see any of that here, I turned on the script quickly. However, if you’re into shows like Dr. Who (which I only know from someone explaining it to me) or you’re a David Lynch fan, you may find more value in this than I did. It’s a trippy script, and some people don’t need the sort of story conventions I do to enjoy a film. So I’m hoping it finds some fans. But since I was so confused so much of the time, and since I never got that big payoff that tied all the confusion together, Observation Car just didn’t do it for me.

Script link: Observation Car

[x] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I think one of the most dangerous things a mystery writer can do is make everything up as he goes along. 99% of the time, it will feel to the reader like it was made up as it went along. Readers like writers who can craft a story, who can create a series of clever setups and payoffs that show a plan. It implies a writer who knows what he’s doing.

Why this script isn’t ready for a script sale: Lack of structure. More preparation (outlining) needs to be put in at the beginning of the writing process so things don’t feel so random. The writing here, like all the scripts this week so far, is solid. The sentences are well-written. They’re descriptive, clear. I don’t remember a single spelling mistake. That was never the problem. It was simply that the writer didn’t seem to know where he was going with the story, and that lack of planning implies someone who doesn’t understand the value of structure. In this business, structure is everything. Because you often won’t be writing for yourself. You’ll be writing for someone else. That’s where all the money is. And when these producers come to you and say, “What’s your plan for adapting this novel?” you need to be able to convey, from a structural (often 3-Act) standpoint, how you plan to wrangle in the story. You can’t just say, “Well, I fly by the seat-of-my-pants and just see where it goes.” They’ll have you out the door before you’re able to thank them for the opportunity.

Is it possible that a James Bond script could be worse than a Sharknado script? Read on because the answer may shock you. Then eat you.

Welcome to Weird Scripts Week! This week I’ll be reviewing odd scripts, odd ideas, and writing that’s just plain odd. It will all culminate Friday when I’ll be reviewing the strangest premise I’ve ever reviewed here on Scriptshadow. So buckle up, snort the nearest hallucinogen, and get ready to mutter “WTF” at least 182 times!

Genre: Action
Premise: When a plane goes down in the Bermuda Triangle, the United States and Britain enlist none other than James Bond to find out what happened.
About: This is an old discarded James Bond script from 1976 that was deemed too weird and “out there” by the studio. The fact that Sean Connery decided to pitch in on writing duties (a man who doesn’t have a single writing credit to his name in his 50 year career) probably didn’t help.
Writers: Len Deighton, Sean Connery, and Kevin McClory
Details: 150 pages (first draft – November 11, 1976)

I admit I’m not the biggest Bond aficionado. While I appreciate the character and understand why he’s so popular, I haven’t been a fan of the franchise’s direction as of late. My frustration boiled over while watching Quantum of Solace, a film that clearly had no script to speak of. That movie seemed to be more concerned with winning a Guiness record for most countries shot in than it did entertaining an audience.

I liked the films a lot more when I was younger. My favorite scenes were always the “cool gadgets” scenes, where a character would introduce a number of killer gadgets for Bond to use on his mission. Ever since Bond went dark, however, these scenes have been dropped, distancing me even further from the franchise. Strangely enough, franchises like Batman and Mission Impossible have thought these scenes good enough for their films, making Bond look even more out-of-touch.

Luckily, today, we get to go back to a time of Bond purity, a time when James didn’t take himself too seriously. The problem is, they may have strayed too far off the reservation, as the feedback I’ve heard about this script makes Sharknado sound like a contender for the Palme D’or. Let’s find out palme d’more, shall we?

As if sensing that it would eventually be featured on Scriptshadow Weird Scripts Week, “James Bond of the Secret Service” goes cuckoo almost immediately. We start out on a seaplane that’s carrying the United Nations Secretary General. As the plane enters the Bermuda Triangle (we know this because the Secretary General says, “I’ll be okay once we get past the Bermuda Triangle”) a laser beam from an undisclosed location (Europe??) shoots the plane, killing its power, forcing it to land on the water.

Once in the water, a giant contraption rises up, “takes” the plane, and pulls it underwater, bringing it all the way to the sea floor, where we see, among other things, planes, boats, stacks of gold bars(??) and oh, AN UNDERWATER KINGDOM!!! It turns out the Bermuda Triangle has been the haunt of a city/kingdom called Arkos. Never mind the fact that to build an underwater city in the year 1976, it would’ve cost 30 trillion dollars.

Eventually, we meet the creator and president of this secret underwater society. His name is Blofeld and I kid you not, he has a white cat which he strokes throughout his conversations with everyone. Blofeld, believe it or not, actually has a very legitimate goal. He wants to rid the world’s seas of pollution. How sweet of him. And yet, it just makes things even more confusing (why does the bad guy have a noble goal??)

So he sends a wire to all the world’s leaders telling them that if they throw any trash in the ocean, even an empty potato chip bag, there’s going to be hell to pay. I’m not sure what that means, since his influence seems to be restricted to the Bermuda Triangle, but it’s enough of a threat to scare most of the leaders.

Now you may be asking, where’s James Bond in all of this? I’m glad you asked. In the first 67 pages of the screenplay, James Bond gets THREE SCENES! And two of those scenes consist of a girl applying sunscreen to his back. I’m not kidding. In a script titled, “James Bond of the Secret Service,” James Bond is onscreen for 12 of the first 67 minutes.

Eventually, the United States and Britain figure out where Arkos is and send James Bond to a nearby island to infiltrate it. Luckily, Bond has a cover-story. He’s actually a finalist in the international backgammon championships and is set to play Largo, Blofeld’s evil underling. Once there, he gets attacked by a shark, only to find out that the shark is actually a robot!! It turns out the whole of Arkos is protected by an army of robot-sharks.

Not only that, but Largo’s deranged head-scientist has found a fitting way to deliver his nukes to the offending nations. By using Hammerhead sharks! Apparently the wider eyes make it easier to rest the nukes on top of their body. A full two pages is dedicated to explaining this concept.

This all culminates when Largo decides enough is enough, and sends his army of sharks to Manhattan. His plan? To blow up the statue of liberty and then program his sharks to go into New York City sewers and attack the local population. Eventually, the city of Arkos itself uproots and heads to Manhattan, where city battles city. The End.

Oh man.

Oh dear Jesus.

This started off weird but then just got bad. And I mean really really bad. Who gives their main character – the most iconic action hero in history no less – three scenes in 67 pages?????

And get a load of some of the writing here. I’ve hand-picked some gems for you:

“He has a large shark laboratory – for cancer research.”

Largo has faded the last sentence of his own dialogue. (what does that even mean???)

“Frankly, we don’t know what’s happening in this so-called Bermuda Triangle.”

“I’ve seen that man. He’s called Emilio Largo. Runs the Shark Island op. quite close to Shrublands. As a matter of fact, I’m playing him in the backgammon finals in Nassau.”

“You’re not Fatima.” “No. She was my twin sister – she’s dead.”

“So you see, even with the brain removed, the shark will continue its motion.”

Blood trickles down the cheek of the Statue of Liberty like a tear.

Is 1976 the year LSD was invented?

They couldn’t even get the sluglines right. At the end of every slugline, instead of putting “day” or “night,” they’d put the names of the people in the scene.

The script’s biggest faux-pas by far, though, was its inadequate use of Bond. The first half-dozen times we were with him (so, maybe, the first 85 pages of the script), he was either getting sun-screen applied, sleeping with a girl, listening to his bosses talk about Arkos, or being told what to do.

A main character is supposed to be ACTIVE. Preferably, you want your protagonist making decisions on his own, driving the story with those decisions. Now you can’t always do that because the story may dictate otherwise. With Bond, for instance, he works for people. Therefore, they need to give him orders before he can act.

However, the ideal scenario is to get those orders out of the way early, and then have your hero start creating his own storyline. If he has to check back in every 10 minutes to get a new order, then you have a hero who’s 100% reactive. And reactive characters aren’t nearly as compelling as active characters.

The reason Ripley, from Aliens, is considered one of the top 5 action heroes in history is because of how active she is in that movie. Outside of the opening act, she’s making all of her choices. She’s deciding what she and the others must do. We LOVE THAT as audience members. And while I’m by no means a Bond expert, I’m guessing that we see a much more active Bond in these recent movies.

I was hoping to read five scripts this week that were so weird, you’d all be able to read them and laugh with me. I can’t even recommend “Secret Service” for that, because I know you’ll be bored out of your mind by page 30. Let’s hope for something a little more fun tomorrow. But, if you’re into self-torture, download this script and give it a try.

Script link: James Bond of the Secret Service

[x] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Audiences want to follow your hero. It’s okay if you throw a teaser scene into your opening before you get to your protagonist, but preferably, you should start with your protagonist or get to him as soon as possible. The interest in your story will sink exponentially the longer your hero isn’t on screen.

What I learned (practice edition): It’s advisable that you avoid adverbs in screenwriting. They just sound clunky. So here we get a couple of lines: “Bond dismally enters the plane.” And: “Bond drags himself wearily into a waiting car…” How would you change these lines to eliminate the adverbs, yet still get the requisite feeling across? Show off your writing skills in the comments section below!