Underground (Roger Review)

 Hey, how bout that?  It's Turkey Week!  Again, for those outside the U.S., we have a holiday this Thursday where everybody thanks themselves.  Or each other.  Or someone.  For reasons unknown to I, we need an entire day to do this thanking, so even though my own personal thanking will last a total of 25 seconds, I will be utilizing the other 23 hours, 59 minutes and 35 seconds to prepare for the chaos that is Black Friday (by the way, if you're going to do your Christmas shopping, don't forget to get either this or something from here for your screenwriting friends).  So no review this Thursday unfortunately.  But that still leaves four reviews, which include a contest winner, a sci-fi spec that made some noise, and maybe an amateur script (I haven't figured out if I'm doing Amateur Friday this week or next).  Right now, Roger brings us another Blood List script, and one of the crazier sounding ones at that, Underground. 

Genre: Horror

Premise: An ambitious young chef ventures into the terrifying underbelly of extreme cuisine.

About: Underground was on 2010's Blood List with 2 votes, but before that list was released, the script got some press in the trades back in August when it was reported that Neil Marshall ("Dog Soldiers", "The Descent", "Doomsday" and "Centurion") signed on with Ozla Pictures to direct. Taka Ichise ("The Grudge"), Jeremy Platt ("The Haunted World of El Superbeasto") and Erin Eggers ("The Hoax") are the producers.

Writer: David Cohen

Details: Draft dated February 13, 2009 (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

You know, sometimes I don't understand Neil Marshall's schizophrenic editing style, especially during action sequences. It worked in "The Descent" because the setting was so claustrophobic, and fear and terror were the emotions that reigned in both the characters and the audience, but I get all discombobulated and frustrated when I see it in one of the duels in "Doomsday". Makes me wonder if the director is agoraphobic, afraid to film wide open spaces without chopping it up and reassembling it like some William Burroughs protégé playing with celluloid.

However, I think the style will induce nausea if he manages to nail David Cohen's "Underground", a ghoulish and delightful tale of gourmet horror. I can see the glistening frames of sweetbreads and human organ meats assaulting the viewer now.

Bon appetite.

Does this script read like the bastard child of Chuck Palahniuk's "Fight Club" and Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential", Rog?

That's definitely what came to mind when I read the logline, and when I read the script I felt the same type of visceral thrill, the same type of forbidden titillation like I was reading something I shouldn't be, like I was feeding the twisted homunuculus on my back that needs to consume dark and seedy details and stories.

However, this script is more of a modern "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" with its snobby supper club backdrop and the world of perverse gourmands it explores, and not only did it peripherally remind me of Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover", but by the time I got to the second half I thought this could be the third movie in Eli Roth's "Hostel" franchise.

Who's the ambitious young chef?

Charlie Dover is waiting tables at Crudo, a monument to international renowned chef, Seamus Hanley. Charlie's boss is not only a nod to hothead Scottish chef, Gordon Ramsey, but for some reason I thought of the poet Seamus Heaney and his poem, "The Underground". The restaurant is what you'd expect from a slick celebrity chef and he rules his kitchen with a no-nonsense iron fist. The atmosphere amongst the kitchen staff is hushed and tense, and the veterans know that their chef can be prone to violence and histrionics at any moment.

Charlie works here because he wants to be closer to Seamus, as he's a burgeoning talent himself. He lives with his pastry chef girlfriend, Quinn, and they're both preparing a menu for a supper club event that they hope is going to attract investors and benefactors so they can open their own restaurant together.

While Charlie may be a gifted chef and he talks a good game, he's not the brightest of waiters when he talks up the Wagyu beef to a diner and discovers that Crudo is out of the Wagyu beef. To make matters worse, the diner is Henry Talbot, the food critic for The Times. This incites the wrath of Seamus as he is now in danger of losing a star, and he tells Charlie his life is on the line and berates him to suggest an alternative, trying to humiliate him in front of the kitchen staff.

Charlie surprises Seamus when he begins suggesting dishes not on the esteemed geniuses' menu, "Or, I'm thinking a braised liche nut soufflé with a dried roe dressing. Or..." Seamus tells the waiter to get out of his kitchen as he thinks about what to do, and at the same time, a clumsy Fry Cook stumbles and he ends up forearm deep into a fryer.

Voila!

Seamus has an idea. He prepares chicaron over creamed cartilage coulis. Charlie serves the food to the critic, and Talbot is a bit puzzled as to why he's being served pig skin. Or wait? Is it really pig skin he's eating?

So, what happens?

Although Charlie is tempted with working in Seamus' kitchen when a new fry cook position opens, his girlfriend, Quinn, helps him stay focused on what was always their goal: Opening their own place together.

They throw a dinner and supper club at their friend Nikki's loft, and it quickly fills up with hipster-friends-turned-waiters, partygoers and curious diners. And, hopefully, the rich entrepreneur and investor the sexy Nikki has lured to the event.

Of course, Seamus shows up and scopes out the place and the people, and surprisingly, he seems impressed by the food. Not wanting to have an employee-turned-competitor in Charlie, he approaches him after the event. Yes, Charlie and Quinn bag the billionaire investor who runs two hedge funds, but Seamus plays to Charlie's pride and his need to be accepted by a famous mentor figure.

Will a little kitchen with a little menu really satisfy Charlie? Or, is he capable of much more? Seamus tempts Charlie again, says that he has a challenge for him.

Does Charlie accept?

He does, but he keeps the challenge a secret from Quinn. To raise the stakes and complicate matters, Quinn discovers that she's pregnant the morning as Charlie leaves to meet with Seamus. Instead of talking about it with her, Charlie gets the location text from Seamus so he opts to leave Quinn, confused and angry.

Honestly, this part felt a little rushed. I understand that Charlie was in a rush, but dude, he just found out his girlfriend's pregnant! I'm not saying that they have to talk about it, but the circumstance and the way in which it was written felt a little too easy. It should have been harder for him to get away from Quinn. It doesn't really cripple the script, because you still want to know what happens next, but I do think it needs to feel more believable.

And, I suppose that's my main criticism for the script. It moves at such a fast pace, and it's a fun and twisted page-turner, but the character moments and logic feels shoe-horned into the plot. I would have liked to see smoother moments for the story where the plot doesn't take over, but I think it's all fixable stuff.

The strength of "Underground" is not only its foodie backdrop (loved all the details of kitchen life and the effort into creating believable culinary characters and settings), but the sinister dread and the moments of disgusting horror that will make you cringe and want to brush your teeth. The sense of dread and anticipation in the first forty or so pages is enough to warrant a gander at this script, and I think there's stuff to learn from it.

What is Seamus' challenge?

Charlie shows up to the warehouse district and a faceless building, its only discerning features are its dilapidation and its security cameras. The inside exists in stark contrast, pristine and well-guarded by men with guns.

The kitchen gleams, and Charlie notices some of the kitchen staff from Crudo manning their stations.

Discussing the rest of the script gets into heavy spoilers after this part, but let's just say Charlie is put through several chef trials with different ingredients with Seamus hovering over his shoulder. This sequence is juxtaposed with what's going on with Seamus' butcher, the aptly named Sawney Beane (which will give everything away for those who recognize the name) and his "livestock".

In the dining area, we meet the wealthy and weird foodies, who have seemed to have paid a hefty sum to buy a plate at this table. There's a senator and his wife, a wealthy Russian woman, and a Takashi Miike-esque Japanese weirdo. We watch as waiters serve the various courses, and as we watch them eat we get a little sick, if we're not already from watching Charlie (who gets more and more suspicious) prepare the dishes.

By the time Quinn rolls up to the building (how she finds the location I'll let you discover and think about for yourself) to yell at the security cameras because she wants to talk to her man, we're all but aware that we're experiencing those stomach-churning moments before we know a train-wreck is about to happen.

What happens next thrusts the story into "Hostel" or "Saw" territory, and it's pretty disgusting, and some fates are rather inventive in a culinary horror type of way (especially the foie gras torture), but I found it pretty familiar. Oddly, I was reminded of another spec, a horror script called "Pet" by Jeremy Slater.

Does it work?

Certainly.

If you're a fan of New Wave French Horror, you'll dig this script. There's some shocking stuff in it, even if it does seem a little familiar. The chef's world angle perhaps makes it fresh enough to serve such familiar fare, but despite my criticism concerning events seeming too forced, I found it a chilling and a perverse page-turner. I think this a good example of material matching up perfectly with a director and his cinematic sensibilities.

Will scare meat-eaters into vegans.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?

[ ] wasn’t for me

[x] worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: Dread. The anticipation that something horrible is going to happen to a character you care about. If you want to create moments that truly terrify (you are aiming for terror, not horror, which are two different things), learn how to create dread. Charlie is a smooth-talking wanna-be chef. I suppose his likeability can be argued, but I cared about him because I liked his relationship with Quinn. I was interested in their goal, which was their dream to open up their own restaurant and build a future together. Orbiting this couple was Seamus, a threat who wasn't above serving fried human skin to a food critic. We know that Seamus was into bad, nasty stuff, that there was a monster within him lurking. We were waiting for the moment for this monster to reveal itself. Stakes are raised when we find out that Quinn is pregnant with Charlie's child, and our minds can't help but wonder, "Is this unborn child going to be put in danger? And not only that, but what kind of danger?" Because the writer put the elements of characters we care about in the orbit of a perverse monster, we anticipated a collision of the two worlds. That anticipation is dread, and it not only does it create unease and gets the imagination thinking unpleasant thoughts, but it keeps the reader wanting to know what happens next. You want to write good horror? Dread should be the bread and butter of your horror scripts.
 

Yeeeeeeeeehaw!

Imagine

Genre: Dramedy
Premise: A lost letter written to him by his idol, John Lennon, inspires an aging musician to change his life.
About: Dan Fogelman’s using the buzz from his recent writing triumphs to jump into the directing arena with his newest spec, Imagine. The script sold for 2 million dollars and Fogelman will receive another 1 million when/if the film is made. The 3 million dollar payday beats the 2.5 million dollar sale he made earlier this year with Scriptshadow favorite, “Crazy Stupid Love.” Fogelman’s muse, Steve Carrell, is said to be starring as the son in Imagine (he also stars as the lead character in “Crazy Stupid Love”). Fogelman made his name doing assignment work on large-scale animation projects such as Cars, Bolt, and Tangled. Fogelman made last year’s Black List with yet another script, “My Mother’s Curse.”
Writer: Dan Fogelman
Details: 111 pages – November 2, 2010 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

There aren’t many writers whose scripts I eagerly await, but Dan Fogelman is one of them. He is the most successful screenwriter in the world at the moment, pulling in over 5.5 million dollars for original screenplays this year. That beats the next closest guy by about 4 million. And who knows what he's making touching up other scripts. I loved his last spec, “Crazy Stupid Love,” and although My Mother’s Curse didn’t blow me away, it was a solid read. So when I heard that Fogelman wasn’t done making money in 2010, I wanted in on his latest offering.

Imagine is about Danny Collins, an over-the-hill but embarrassingly successful 60-something rock star who makes his living touring the countryside, playing the cheesy but popular hits that made him a star a few decades ago.

But while Danny’s wildly rich in stature, he’s a broken man everywhere else. He’s got a fiance half his age who cheats on him daily. He’s got no real friends, no sense of home, and worst of all he has a son he’s never met, the result of some post-concert partying he did in the 60s.

But Danny’s life is about to change. On his 60-something’th birthday, his manager hands him a gift-wrapped letter from his idol, John Lennon. You see, when Danny was first starting out, he gave an interview for a Rolling-Stone like magazine where he talked about his fear of becoming a star. Lennon read that interview and sent him a letter, advising him how not to fall into the trappings of being a rock star. It was sent to the interviewer though, who greedily realized he could make a buck off it, and sold it to someone else. His manager figured this out through a fortunate mistake, and now here Danny was, receiving a letter from John Effing Lennon!  To him!

The letter basically says that friends and family are what’s important in life, not material things (sounds very John Lennon'esque, doesn't it?). So Danny decides to become the person he would’ve been had he received that letter when he was supposed to. He politely tells his cheating fiancé (and her lover, who’s hiding in the closet) that they’re over, leaves his Manhattan mega pad, and moves into a hotel. His goal? Reconnect with his son and start writing music again.

But Danny has no idea how steep the hill is he’s about to climb. His son, Tom, hates him. Hates him with every fiber of his being. And when Danny tries to nudge his way into Tom’s family, which includes his perfect wife and asthmatic six year old daughter (Danny’s granddaughter), Tom tells him to fuck off.

Back at the hotel, Danny starts writing new music for the first time in forever, and befriends the pretty manager there, Mary, who may be the first age appropriate woman he’s fallen for since he was…oh…30.

He doesn’t give up on Tom either. Danny wants to help fix his granddaughter’s crippling asthma, and his star shines bright enough where he can get her into the best asthma doctor in the country. Slowly but surely, Danny gains his son’s trust. However just when things are looking up, some catastrophic news arrives that slams Danny back to reality. He’s about to learn that you can’t just make up for 40 lost years. Sooner or later, you’ll have to atone for your mistakes, and Danny’s mistake is that he’s never been responsible…ever.

A commenter brought it up yesterday and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. Dan Fogelman is the new Cameron Crowe. I don’t know how his scripts are going to translate once they hit the screen, but Fogelman is doing the same thing for the family dynamic that Crowe did for the romantic dynamic back in the 90s. Which is skating that fine line between emotion and humor. Both of these guys know how to walk right up to that line and milk it for everything its got, without crossing it.

Somewhere over the last five years though, Crowe's line has become scribbled, and while Imagine does make a critical mistake later in the script, Fogelman is now the only writer who can toe this line throughout an entire screenplay. Indeed, this feels almost like a movie Cameron Crowe would write. It’s based on a musician, it’s steeped in music, and it’s not afraid to test your stash of Kleenex. In fact, you might even call it an unofficial 30-years later sequel to Almost Famous.

 Might Kevin Costner be in the mix to play Danny?

But let’s avoid the Crowe comparisons for now and look at what Imagine does well structurally. There’s a few things that make it work. First, you have the hook. There’s something magical about receiving a letter from someone who’s been dead for 30 years, especially since John Lennon is a mystical figure in himself. So it's a nice "gimmick" to pull us into what's essentially a family reconnection story. 

Next you have the change. While there is a major plot point driving the story (which I’ll get to in a second) just from a character perspective, we have a compelling situation. A 60-something man, a man near the end of his life, decides to make a major change. There’s some irony in that. It doesn’t really make sense to try and change yourself that late in life, and since we're all trying to change, we think that if this man can do it (at this late stage), why cant' we?  So there’s a vested interest in seeing Danny succeed right from the start.

Finally you have the unobtainable goal. Danny wants to be a part of his son’s life, but his son hates his guts. Remember, giving your hero a goal is good. But giving your hero an unobtainable goal is great. The more difficult the goal is, the more convinced we are that it can’t be achieved, and the more convinced we are that it can’t be achieved, the more we’ll want to see if our hero can achieve it.

So there’s a lot of good stuff going on here, but Imagine had some faults which I’m hoping Fogelman will address. The asthmatic daughter worked, but just barely. It felt like our heart strings were being tugged a little too hard with this girl, to the point where I could feel the writer’s hand. But the real gamble Imagine takes is a late-story twist that tests the threshold of what the audience is willing to accept.

It’s hard to talk about it without spoiling it so step away from the laptop if you don’t want spoilers. A key character in the story gets cancer. And here’s why I didn’t like it. First, it comes in late. As a result, it feels like the idea doesn’t have enough space to breathe. And second, we already have a major medical complication with another character in the granddaughter. To throw two major medical complications in the same movie….I’m just not sure the audience is going to buy that. I mean until that point, I was giving Imagine an “impressive.” But once that happened, it immediately dropped to a “worth the read.”

The story salvages itself though through the music subplot . I imagine Imagine will really come to life when its soundtrack is added, and I’m curious to hear some of the songs Fogelman’s team comes up with as Danny’s “hits” from his past, which are supposed to be in the vein of “Sweet Caroline.” That could be fun. There’s also a music related scene near the end where Danny has to make an in-the-moment decision about whether he truly wants to commit to this new life or fall back into that old worthless role. Since the choice gets to the essence of who he is as a character, since it forces him to make that choice at such a critical juncture, it’s extremely powerful, and shows why Fogelman is selling scripts for the GNP of small countries.

This had the potential to be better than Crazy, Stupid, Love but that aforementioned medical storyline kept it from obtaining great heights. Still another solid piece of writing from Fogelman though.

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

What I learned: I love all the little mini-subplots Fogelman adds to his scripts. Even the tiniest characters have a little story going on. For example, two potentially throwaway characters, the valet and the hotel desk girl, have a little love story going on which Danny orchestrates. It’s just 1/8 of a page here and ¼ of a page there but when you add it all up, it’s a little mini-story. It’s these little touches and details that make Fogelman’s scripts stand apart.

Tick Tock

Genre: Action
Premise: A terrorist has planted a series of bombs inside several malls in Los Angeles. Although they capture the man before the bombs go off, a bout of amnesia prevents him from remembering where he put the bombs, or if he’s the terrorist at all.
About: Mondry and Bagarozzi met as teen-age video store clerks back in 1987. In 2000, they sold this script for 1 million dollars. "Every night we worked, we took home videos and we would find a director whose work we loved," said Mondry. "We'd just basically go through the whole catalog and watch one film after another. It was sort of a self-taught film history course." Bagarozzi sold one screenplay on his own before this called "The Tin Man," a revisionist noir L.A. detective story, to the Walt Disney Co. for $250,000. Unfortunately, this is not the spec draft that sold, but rather a draft from a few years later.
Writers: Anthony Bagarozzi & Charles Mondry
Details: 128 pages – 12/21/04 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I remember first posting my views of this script on a screenwriting forum a few years ago. I’d only read 30 pages, but what I’d read, I didn’t like. I thought it felt like a wannabe Die Hard sequel written by someone who’d read way too many Shane Black scripts. In general, I’m not a fan of overly-stylized writing unless it helps tell the story, so when I got to passages where the writers would actually describe what happened to the camera during an explosion, I didn’t think, “Cool,” I thought, “Is that necessary?”

Imagine my shock, however, when everyone else who read the screenplay absolutely loved it. In fact, I can’t remember a single person having a bad thing to say about it. Everyone kept talking about the “confidence” of the writing, how assured the writers were in carving out their words. I’d never really thought of writing in those terms before – “confidence” – so it took me awhile to figure out how that might affect someone’s reading experience.

To me, writing had always been about the story. Style and confidence are great, but they don’t address character arcs or sustain second acts. Could it be that style and confidence alone could carry a screenplay? I’m inclined to say no, but Tick Tock has a few other things going for it, namely that it’s never slow. This script moves at the breakneck speed of a Ferrari, and it should, since it’s being told in real time. I’m curious as to what the Scriptshadow readers will think of it. Does this spec-friendly real time confident action romp satisfy? Or is it pure sizzle?

Los Angeles.

Red-headed FBI Agent and tough-girl beauty, Claire, is racing to the Federal Building. She’s been informed of a terrorist threat. A man has threated to blow up some bombs in malls scattered throughout Los Angeles today, which just happens to be the biggest shopping day of the year.

The good news is they already have the bomber in custody. The bad news?

He doesn’t remember anything.

He doesn’t even know his own name. In fact, the FBI isn’t 100% sure this is even the guy. They just have some evidence to indicate he is.

The man, who we’ll refer to as Crosby, is a nice affable guy who’s convinced that he’s been misidentified. He doesn’t think he’s capable of doing something this terrible. But the doctors say that amongst other things, Crosby’s also lost his personality, which means if he were a true baddie, he wouldn’t even know it. The “good” news is they believe his amnesia will disappear within a few hours and the real “Crosby” will emerge.

But they don’t have a few hours! The bad guy’s taped threat says these bombs are going to blow up soon!

So Claire grabs Crosby along with a small crack FBI team and heads to Fox Hills Mall, where the first of the bombs is said to be planted. Her hope is that with a little visual stimulation, Crosby will remember where he put the bombs so they can deactivate them in time.

But wait! Crosby points out that even if he was the bad guy and all of a sudden remembered it, the last thing he’d do is expose his bomb locations. He’d just keep pretending he’d forgotten. I’m still not sure why Claire doesn’t see this as a problem, but she says something to indicate she’s not worried about it.

Basically, we jump from mall to mall as the threats get bigger and the bombs get explosioneyer. Claire and Crosby begin developing a friendship, even though they know that when Crosby finally realizes who he is and becomes Evil Crosby, that that friendship will dissolve faster than a lit bomb wick. Eventually they end up at The Beverly Center, a huge indoor upscale mall in Beverly Hills, where it appears this cat and mouse game will end with a big explosion.

Okay so first the good. Real-time. The real-time angle makes this movie a little different from the now two-decade long string of Die Hard copycats. It also keeps the script moving at a breakneck pace, which is always advantageous when writing a spec (faster more immediate stories tend to do better in the spec market).

Making the bad guy essentially a good guy was also a unique twist. Normally in these films the bad guy is obvious. Here, he’s actually helping our hero. When you combine this with the mystery of whether this really is the bad guy or not, I have to admit you have an interesting dynamic you’re not used to seeing in an action film.

However here’s the problem I had with Tick Tock. There’s a lot to buy into here, and the story almost feels like two movies trapped inside one. First you have a film about malls being blown up by some terrorist mastermind, and then you have a movie about a terrorist who doesn’t remember being a terrorist. They kind of go together but it all seemed a little too convenient that this was happening at the same time.

And that’s not the only thing you have to buy into. Tick Tock tests the limits of suspended disbelief. Let’s start with what I mentioned above. If this is the terrorist, once he remembers who he is, there’s a strong chance he’s not going to admit it. Also, our FBI team is running directly into malls that they know are going to blow up. Does that make sense to you? Cause I’m not sure it makes sense to me. Also, since they know all the bombs are placed in Los Angeles malls, why not just evacuate all the malls? There are attempts to explain this throughout the story, but for reasons I’m still not clear about, none of the malls are ever entirely evacuated. Also, it’s never clear how they know which mall to go to (they just sorta guess) or when the bombs are going to blow (they just sorta estimate).

All in all, there are a ton of rules you have to buy into to accept Tick Tock, a few too many for me, and that really prevented me from enjoying it. It helps that the script is not trying to be anything more than a fun action flick, but even that didn’t prevent a good handful of “Oh come ons!” during the read.

The funny thing is, Tick Tock incorporates a lot of things that I preach on this site. The writing is lean. The structure is sound. The script is the very definition of a ticking time bomb (it’s titled “Tick Tock!”). So I’m not going to go out of my way to say it has nothing to offer. It’s just that while I could buy into all these things on an individual basis, together they were too much. Not to mention that the reveal of the bad guy was lame.

I have a feeling some of you will find this fun, especially action buffs. But it wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: There is something to be said for confidence in one’s writing. If you charge ahead, are in control of your words, if you show conviction in your choices, you can almost fool the reader into believing anything you write. If you’re timid and unsure of yourself when you write, the reader will sense it. If we don’t believe that *you* don’t believe in your story, then we’re not going to believe in it. Just remember, confidence doesn’t mean aggressiveness. The aggressive in-your-face writing works here because it’s a testosterone filled action flick. “Confidence” might be written much differently in, say, a horror script.

Red Leaves

Genre: Mystery/Drama
Premise: When a young girl goes missing after a teenage boy babysits her, the boy’s family must endure a town who’s convinced that the boy killed her.
About: Nathan Parker is best known as the writer of the critically acclaimed sci-fi feature from Duncan Jones, Moon. Moon was Parker’s first produced credit but not his first assignment. It appears he was tasked with adapting this book, Red Leaves, a year before Moon made its way into production. Parker wrote another feature after Moon for Lionsgate, a little known film called “Blitz,” about a serial killer who slowly picks off London police officers. A motley crew of cops must track him down before he strikes again. While Red Leaves made this year’s Blood List for some reason (it’s now 3 years old), it’s not a horror film, which makes you wonder what the criteria for the list is.
Writer: Nathan Parker (based on the book by Thomas H. Cook)
Details: 122 pages – sept 15, 2007 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

One of my favorite films from 2009, which I unfortunately didn’t see in time to rank in my Top 10, was Moon. I’ve seen a lot of “trapped in a small location” films before and they almost always run out of ideas by page 40. Seeing two Sam Rockwells in the trailer also made me cringe. It felt gimmicky, a cheap trick to land a name actor (allowing the actor to play multiple roles).

But man, that movie unfolded beautifully, never overstepping its reach, coming up with just the right amount of mystery to keep the story fresh while never insulting your intelligence. It was endlessly engaging, everything the Soderbergh Solaris remake should’ve been. So I was excited to see what Parker had written before that breakthrough script.

Red Leaves introduces us to the Moore family. We have Eric, the practical father, Meredith, the frustrated mother, and teenager Keith, the rebellious son. The family threw it on autopilot a long time ago and like a group of zombies, stumbles mindlessly through each day. This is exactly what Red Leaves wants to explore, that we’re all on autopilot until tragedy strikes, until something comes along and forces us to face the issues we’ve been sweeping under the rug.

Well that rug’s about to be lifted up.

Amy Gardino is a pretty nine year old girl who Keith babysits every week. He heads over on a Saturday evening  and does the job just like he’s always done, except the next morning Eric gets a call from Mr. Gardino asking him if Keith knows where Amy is. Eric checks with Keith, who seems more annoyed than scared, and when it’s confirmed that, no, he does not, the town begins a frantic search to find the girl.

While at first it seems that Keith is merely someone with information that could help the search, it becomes clear that detectives believe he’s the number 1 suspect. This forces Eric to hire a lawyer for Keith, which in turn convinces the town that Keith has something to hide.

As the mystery unwinds, it appears that Keith is hiding something. Eric watches as the events Keith recalls to the cops are not the same events he knows to be true. Just like that, Eric finds himself lying to protect his son and his son’s lies, in a rapidly descending situation.

Of course, what this event really does is force the family to face those issues they’ve been putting off. Meredith has been drifting away from Eric for years, and may or may not be involved with a co-worker. She must inform the detectives of this in order to avoid any suspicion that she’s hiding something.

The real crack in the family, however, is Keith, who has become a social recluse, for which Eric has been in complete denial about. His son has needed help, needed someone to reach out to, and he hasn’t been there as a father. Figuring out the events of that night is going to tell Eric who his son really is, and it’s looking like that person may be a monster.

As if that isn’t bad enough, Amy’s father, Bill, is 100% convinced Keith killed his daughter. When the cops won’t arrest Keith because they don’t have enough evidence, Bill decides to take the law into his own hands.

What I liked about Red Leaves was that it approached its story from a realistic point of view and from an angle we haven’t quite seen before. While I liked Prisoners (another script about a disappearance), that script sensationalized its story, basking it in what might be considered cheap serial killer conventions. In contrast, Red Leaves is more interested in how things would really happen, so we get the first questioning by the cops, we get the more intense second questioning, we get the hiring of the lawyer, we get the search warrant.

And we see this all through the eyes of the kid’s father, not the kid himself, which allows us to worry about things that we wouldn't normally worry about in these movies. For example, the father must struggle with the question of if his son is guilty or not. He has to do his own investigating into his son’s case, but in such a way that he doesn’t draw suspicion from the town. He has to make some tough decisions. Does he force his son to go back and tell the cops the truth, or will that truth lead to his son’s arrest, in which case he’d be better off keeping it to himself? I think that’s what makes Red Leaves so compelling, is all this inner conflict going on inside Eric’s character.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of things holding this script back. The first is a glaring plot hole that almost ruined the entire story for me. Eric gets the call the next morning from the Gardinos, who say they just checked Amy’s room and she’s gone. This means that the Gardinos would’ve been the first family in the history of babysitting ever – we’re talking hundreds of millions of families here – who came home from a night out and instead of checking if their daughter was in her room, they went straight to bed.

Wait a minute. WHAT???

When has this ever happened?? This is really poor storytelling because if there’s one part of your script where you can’t have holes, it’s in the premise. The setup has to be airtight or else we’re not going to believe anything that comes after it.

I also thought Parker made a poor choice by including Eric’s voice over. Over the course of the story, Eric has very intense dramatic observations about what’s going on such as, (not actual dialogue) “Our children are our lifeblood. We raise them, coddle them, protect them. What does one do once they leave the nest? Do you pull them back in or do you let them fly and figure out their problems on their own?” It was just way over the top melodramatic and gave the otherwise realistic-feeling story a hammy center. I just felt like we already knew all these things through observing Eric’s actions. For him to say them out loud was superfluous.

Finally, the ending was a little too easy. I’m not going to get into spoilers but I’ll just say everything came together rather conveniently at just the right time. You’d like your finale to be challenging for you characters. If it’s too easy we feel cheated.

Maybe the biggest testament to Red Leaves is that despite these problems, I was still eagerly reading along, excited to see what would happen. Parker does a nice job increasing the stakes and building the drama until the climax. One of the more common mistakes I see in amateur screenplays is the story petering out as we approach the ending. Here we really feel like all of the sides are closing in on us, and that we're truly building, so even though the ending was kinda disappointing, it was fun getting there. 

The script also excels by not making the plot the main focus. This becomes about the characters, and specifically the characters inside this family, who are now being forced to deal with each other - which is in many ways just as horrifying as dealing with this accusation. So overall, despite some pretty big problems, I’d still say this is worth the read.

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

What I learned: I think this is a prime example of how voice over can hurt a script. Voice over is best used to make jokes in a comedy and for expositional purposes in overly complicated stories (At the beginning of Braveheart, we get some voice over to tell us where we are in history, who the main players are, and what this has to do with the story we’re about to read). If you’re using voice over to hear the thoughts of a person whose actions are already telling us the same thing (as happens in Red Leaves) then it’s going to feel superfluous. The only exception to this rule is if Morgan Freeman is performing the voice over, in which case it will always work. I want to say that’s a joke but I don’t think it is.

The Way Back

Genre: Drama/Period
Premise: A rag-tag group of prisoners from a 1940 Siberian Prison Camp escape, only to find that escaping was the easy part. They now must traverse hundreds of miles through enemy territory to find freedom.
About: Due to its weighty subject matter, World War 2 setting, “based on a true story” credentials, and prestigious director (Peter Weir), many are picking “The Way Back,” which is already finished and will premiere at the end of the year, as an early Oscar contender. The film stars Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, and a bunch of unknowns. Weir was born in Australia where he made a handful of films before breaking through with the internationally praised Picnic at Hanging Rock, the true story of a group of students from an exclusive girls' school who mysteriously vanish from a school picnic on Valetine's Day in 1900. It’s considered the film that first put Australia on the international filmmaking map.
Writer: Peter Weir
Details: 132 pages – 2008 draft – Inspired by the book “The Long Walk” by Slavomir Rawicz (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I’m a big Peter Weir fan. He’s one of the few big-budget directors who marches to the beat of his own drum. If you look at his filmography, he’s made some really interesting stuff. Films like Fearless and Dead Poets Society and The Mosquito Coast and The Truman Show. It can be hard to categorize his films and that’s refreshing in a world where every movie is prepackaged and presold to us before a single frame is shot.

Strangely, Weir’s been absent since his underrated (which, when you think about it, can be said of all his films) 2003 period piece, “Master and Commander.” While that film lacked any single great quality, it did just about everything well. I don’t know what Weir’s been doing for the past seven years, but he certainly hasn’t changed his approach to choosing material. The Way Back is a challenging story that isn't quite like anything you've seen before. 

The script starts out wonderfully. We meet a group of prisoners in a Soviet Labor Camp in the middle of World War 2. It’s the “Casablanca” of camps as you have captured soldiers from dozens of different countries all living together, including the U.S., Yugoslavia, China, Poland, and many others. Of equal importance to the prison’s make-up is the prison’s location. It’s in Siberia. I’ve never been to Siberia personally but I know that whenever anybody makes a reference to the middle of nowhere, Siberia’s usually the first analogy that comes up.

This puts our prisoners in a precarious situation. Even if they were to escape, where would they go?

But escape is exactly what our prisoners plan on doing. And it’s a motley cast of characters who make up the conspirators. There’s Valka, the gangster thief of the block. There’s Smith, an American who keeps to himself. There’s Kharbarov, an actor who was sent here after a controversial performance. There’s Zoran, the jokester. There’s Tomasz, the artist. And finally there’s Janusz, the young leader of the group, the one who’s determined to get out of here through hell or high water.

I ain’t going to lie. I was a little disappointed when I realized this wasn’t a jail break script – because that’s what it sets itself up to be. I thought we were going to get another “The Great Escape.” But our characters actually escape pretty early on, and the escape itself isn’t that difficult. You see, The Way Back isn’t about the escape, it’s about what happens after the escape.

When you’re out in the middle of Siberia, there aren’t a lot of places to go. You can follow the roads to the next town – however far away that is – but you’ve been told that there’s a price on the head of every escaped prisoner in these towns. So after some discussion about their predicament and location, they realize that the only country where they’re guaranteed to find safety is Tibet. Now like I mentioned, I never checked the map here, but my impression from their reactions was that Tibet was really fucking far away.

The Way Back is sort of a really sophisticated drama-heavy version of “Alive,” and if you’ve seen that film, you may be saying, “How the hell can you get more drama-heavy than a movie about a plane crash where the survivors start eating each other to stay alive?” Well read “The Way Back” and you’ll know.

We follow this group on a torturous journey through weather so cold your spit freezes before it hits the ground, through sand dunes, through mountains – basically any terrain that can’t be lived on. None of these men really know how to hunt or live off the land outside of a few isolated experiences, so they just kinda keep moving, getting weaker and thinner in their pursuit of Tibet.

There are no gimmicks here. Nobody eats each other. They don’t join the allied lines and become heroes. It’s just a story about survival. A very straightforward story about survival.

I think what’s most disappointing about The Way Back is that neither the characters nor the relationships between the characters is ever explored in any depth. Rarely do these guys talk about who they are or what their lives are like or what their aspirations are or what their philosophies are. A few give us the barest essentials about their past. But I’d be hard pressed to say I knew one character here on anything more than a surface level. I’m not asking for boring on-the-nose dialogue where a character mumbles on for 20 minutes about how his daddy left home when he was four, but this is a 130 page screenplay where the majority of time is spent following a group of people walking. If they’re not talking, getting into their lives, their problems, their flaws, their dreams, their goals, their secrets…how are we expected to care about them?

If there is an exception, it’s Janusz, whose bare essentials backstory is interesting even in its one-sentence soundbite form (He was arrested for being a spy, for which they tortured and killed his wife). I tend to like any character who’s active and leads and has a strong goal and who is sympathetic. Janusz is all these things, a man who would walk through a mountain on two broken legs as long as he was still drawing breath. It’s hard not to get caught up in his drive. But even with that drive, I still couldn’t tell you three things about Janusz after the script was over.

This lack of depth dribbles into the relationships between the characters as well. There’s virtually no conflict inside the group. When a choice is made, pretty much everyone agrees with it. You have a scary character in Valka, the Gangster, yet he turns into a docile puppy once they’re on the road. No real friendships form, and even those that do (between a girl and Smith) seem to evaporate as soon as they’re introduced.  It’s like Weir is challenging us to accept the blasé nature of this group dynamic.

And I’m sure the argument is that the conflict isn't supposed to be man vs man, it's supposed to be man vs. nature. That’s what this is about.  Guys going up against the universe's most lethal force - nature itself.  My only problem with that is, we’ve seen straight-forward “man vs. nature” movies before. I don’t think this is different enough to keep our interest.

Where this really starts to hurt the story is in the second half.  Because the interpersonal dynamic between the characters is so nonexistent, the only thing left to titillate us is the plot. And the plot has our characters, walking, looking for food, dying, walking, looking for food, dying, walking, looking for food, dying, wash rinse repeat wash rinse repeat.  It's extremely repetitive.  The only thing that changes is the locations (snow, desert, mountain), so by the end, we feel like the record is scratched, playing the same few notes over and over again.

If the script has something going for it, it’s that universal theme we can all relate to – Freedom. It may be the most valued commodity on this planet next to air. Watching our characters stare death in the eye in pursuit of this commodity does have a dramatic punch, technically speaking. I mean, despite my above complaints, the story has a very clear drive – Make it to Tibet – and that’s more than I can say for a lot of scripts I read. I just think Weir became so obsessed with that drive, he overlooked a lot of the character stuff.

The Way Back has a great opening act and is an intriguing story of survival against all odds, but its second half isn’t as good as its first. There were too many scenes where no required story information or character development were introduced, giving the story a feeling like not enough was happening. I’ll watch it in theaters because it’s Weir but I think this script has a lot of flaws.

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

What I learned: This is essentially a road trip film, albeit a bleak one, and one of the keys to making road trip films work is to mix in enough interesting and varying obstacles to keep the journey fresh. Everything that happens to this group is too similar (walk, eat, die, walk, eat, die), particularly in the second half, and as a result, it loses us.

Sprawl (Roger Review)

 It's Monday so it's time for that boring weekend to end and your script reviews to begin.  This week should be fun.  I review a recent big spec sale.  And I mean REALLY big.  We have two Blood List scripts, one of which Roger reviews today.  We also have an old spec sale in the vein of Die Hard.  So action nuts will have a chance to get their swerve on.  Finally, we have a review for a script which will likely be an Oscar contender.  People get ready.  Here's Roger with his review of Blood List script "Sprawl."

Genre: Horror/Urban Thriller

Premise: Suburban teenage misfits out for a wild night in Hollywood throw a bottle at a car and provoke the wrath of a faceless psycho who hunts them down through the urban sprawl of Los Angeles.

About: Sprawl was in the Top 10 of the best horror scripts at #6, according to 2010's Blood List.

Writers: Jordan Goldberg & Alex Paraskevas

Details: 102 pages - October 27, 2009 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Previous to this Top 10 script, the only script I was privy to read on this year's Blood List was "Chronicle", which I absolutely love. I'm not sure why I chose to read Sprawl, other than the fact that I ran across it earlier in the year and was always intrigued by the one-and-a-half page teaser where a "meaty tendril" rips a married couple from their Volkswagon and kills the lone witness, a wheel-chair ridden bum who's holding a cardboard sign that says, "PORSCHE FUND!" I assumed the carne coil belonged to a monster roaming the streets of Los Angeles, but forty pages in I realized I was mired in a different horror subgenre that was more slasher-killer than C.H.U.D.

Who are the players?

There's Ashley Boyer, the sixteen-year old cheerleader and daughter of a cop, who is in the middle of seducing the high-school quarterback, Chase, in his Mustang. Before he can get his hands on the sexy flirt, three hooded figures attack his car with potato guns and M80s. Ashley runs off in terror, and Chase thinks he's looking at a trio of grim reapers when they throw a flaming bag of shit at him and escape into the neighborhood.

The three hooded figures are Nathan, Ray and Tony. Nathan is the asthmatic one-hundred pound runt of the triumvirate, and our story's protagonist. His lifelong friend Ray is the muscular and volatile leader, and Tony is the red-headed gay friend who is sporting a black eye. See, Chase punched Tony in the shower room, all because he's gay, so he got his prankster friends to get revenge on the straight high-school hunk.

Our merry pranksters are joined by Micah, the overweight and undersexed teenage Falstaff who is the comic relief of the bunch, and Dana, the goth-y vixen who serves as their school's drug dealer. All of these guys are troublemakers, the type of kids who are all about mischief and acting out. Ray has the most anger out of the bunch, and he gets our group into trouble when he decides to get revenge on their chemistry teacher for a prank turned embarrassing shouting match by turning his backyard pool into a fireball with a hefty block of sodium metal.

There's a bit of a love triangle between Ashley, Ray and Nathan. Ashley is attracted to Ray's sexy danger and rebel-without-cause attitude, and Nathan is in love with Ashley, but is constantly crippled by his self-confidence issues.

Nathan gets a chance to impress and win over Ashley when they all learn that their favorite band, Fester, is going to be playing a secret midnight show at LA's Viper Room. Nathan seems to be the only one with a license and car (his Mom's), so he offers to drive them to the show with the hopes of scoring with the gal of his dreams.

So, what happens?

Nathan's mom is reluctant to lend him her car, so he slips some Xanax in her glass of milk, waits for her to fall asleep, then steals her keys and sneaks off in the car. He picks up his friends and off they go to LA.

Things get a bit rowdy when Dana whips out two bottles of Boone's Farm and a joint and everyone but Nathan starts to loosen up. He's in panic mode, afraid that they're going to get pulled over or his friends are going to do something stupid. To his dismay, Ashley is smitten with Ray, and not only that, but she seems to be the wildest of the bunch.

Which is totally proven when they pull up to a stoplight, right next to a gunmetal Toyota Prius. Micah dares Ray to throw an empty bottle at the most benign car ever, and Nathan gets into an argument with all of his passengers when Ashley hurls the bottle at the Prius and Nathan is forced to run a red light to get away.

Everything appears to be five by five when they disperse into the Viper Room. Until Dana's drink is spiked with about twenty tabs of mind-altering psychedelics and she runs in fear from her hallucinations through the nightclub. From her perspective, it's a Fear-and-Loathing style trip, and she's running from a pursuer she thinks is some type of beast.

She falls down a flight of stairs and breaks her leg. A cloven hoof stomps on her, and the beast jams a tire-pressure gauge into her temple, killing her. When her body is discovered, it's total chaos, and our teens exit the club, unaware of what's happened to Dana. While they regroup, Nathan's mother's Suburban careens down the hill and crashes into some cars.

It's totaled, and Dana's drug stash is scattered all over the interior.

They flee to an In-N-Out Burger, in full panic mode, when an employee comes up to them with Dana's bloodstained glasses, "Someone found them in the lot. It looks like they fell in ketchup." Shaken, the kids start confronting customers to figure out who found them. They see the Prius in the parking lot, and they figure it's the bottle-guy getting revenge on them.

They're forced to flee to a parking garage after Ray causes an incident in the restaurant, and that's when the Prius returns into their lives and everything goes downhill for our merry pranksters. That meaty tendril from the teaser? Well, it belongs to whatever is inside of the vehicle, and whatever it belongs to is thirsty for blood.

So, what happens?

At the end of the day, this is a story about a gunmetal gray Toyota Prius chasing teenagers around Los Angeles and running them over. You've got a bit of Stephen King's "Christine" sans the supernatural baddie, a dash of Spielberg's "Duel" with the faceless aggressor in a vehicle, and a sprinkling of "Death Proof" minus the transcending of genre.

If Death by Prius sounds like your type of movie, then you'll be entertained with the second half of this script, which is a cat-and-mouse game between the most unassuming of yuppy vehicles and the phoneless teenagers just trying to survive. Although our band of teenage misfits share some witty dialogue and funny exchanges (one character is frisked by a gang leader to discover that he has nine dollars and ten condoms to his name), there's nothing that really separates them from the other forgettable teenagers that die equally horrible deaths in other similar movies.

The protagonist has self-esteem and confidence issues and his goal is to win the girl, but halfway through the goal shifts to one purely of survival. There's no overarching theme that links the goal in the plot to the internal conflict in Nathan's story, other than the fact that he has to rise to the occasion and not hesitate to make decisions. As a result, I wasn't totally involved with the characters, but I kept reading, because, let's be honest, when a Toyota Prius is given the same role as the shark from Jaws, you're kinda curious to see how things are gonna pan out.

Yes, there are some grisly deaths, and one is particularly well-done (I'm looking at you, Trannie Tony), I found that the scenario pushed the envelope of my suspension of disbelief. No matter where these kids run to, be it a mechanic's shop, a car dealership, a parking garage or just about any stretch of the Los Angeles sprawl, they get trapped by the Prius. When they want to hole up, doors are locked. When witnesses try to help, they get run over. They can't call for help, because they gave all their cell-phones to Dana so she could sneak LSD into the Viper Room ("Because they'll search my purse, but not the phones.") Part of the fun of life-and-death scenarios is watching characters problem solve and draw into deep wells of courage they've never accessed before, and sadly, there's not really a moment where a character makes a decision that seems ingenious or super-inspired. We've seen plenty of car chases, and we know people can hide from cars and their pursuers because we see it all the time in other movies. Not here. This Prius is locked onto the teens like flies on shit and there's no escape. I'm the last person to complain about believability in stories, but in this case, I think the logic of it all needs to be stronger.

On film, I think there will be tense moments of vehicular terror, especially in the second half, and, hey, if that's your thing, then you won't be disappointed. However, if you're looking for characters that you care about and hate to see get killed, you might be hard-pressed to find that here. This type of movie is all about the frisson of seeing characters get mangled to death, not the moments in-between.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?

[x] wasn’t for me

[ ] worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: Movie Logic vs. Real World Logic. Regardless of genre, if you're writing a screenplay, you're working on top of several decades of stories, plot mechanics and conventions that have come before your latest opus. As such, sometimes you have creative license, grace and goodwill to write a scene based on the logic that an audience will just go with it because it's a movie. But, sometimes this creates discord in an audience member's suspension of disbelief because it goes against the grain of what they know to be true of humanity, which we'll call Real World Logic. You have to strike a balance between Movie Logic (let's not think too hard about it because it's a movie) and Real World Logic. That balance is called verisimilitude, which is the quality of realism in the artifice of story. In a script, if I'm questioning the decisions characters make and the logic of a particular scenario, then I know the level of verisimilitude isn't where it should probably be.