A Walk Among The Tombstones

Genre: Crime/Drama/Noir
Premise: A retired detective is hired by a drug dealer to find the men who brutally murdered his wife.
About: The other day, I reviewed a new (old) script that made it on to my Top 25, After Hailey, by Scott Frank. Afterwards, I sought out more Scott Frank scripts hoping to strike gold again. This is an old screenplay by Frank that was originally supposed to star Harrison Ford. It was a critical moment in Ford’s career, if I remember correctly. He’d been making a series of blasé films and people were starting to question if he’d ever challenge himself again. This script was supposed to be him challenging himself. But alas, he pulled out at the last minute and the project died.  Frank, however, holds a deep passion for the script and believes it will still get made. --- Frank talks about what to do when you get stuck in your script in this interview: “If I get stuck it means I haven’t done my homework on the characters. I don’t know enough about the people in my story to write about them. So I'm just trying to make things up. If I’ve created real people, they start to develop a life of their own and take over the story from me at some point. What is inconsistent or dishonest to the people I’ve created sticks out. I also read a lot books that inspire me more than movies. If I’m stuck, I’ll force myself to stop—which is hard for me—and pick up a book. Something that inspires or relaxes me. Something that makes me want to write and that gets the juices flowing. Something that’s fun when you write, it's about play so you should have a good time now and then even though it's so damn hard.”
Writer: Scott Frank (based on the novel by Lawrence Block)
Details: 131 pages (revised 3/7/04) (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).

When you bust out a script called “A Walk Among The Tombstones,” you’re not exactly expecting a quick read. You know it’s going to require a lot of concentration, a lot of thought, and a big time commitment. I’m not usually willing to take that risk unless I’ve heard a script’s amazing ahead of time, because most of these dark dramas can be found at the intersection of Depressing and Slow. But after After Hailey was so awesome, and with my Scott Frank love growing, I had high expectations for Tombstones.

So did it deliver?

Matt Scudder is a former cop who was forced out of law enforcement because of a screw-up stemming from a nasty drinking problem. These days, the haunted Scudder just tries to make it to the end of the week. He doesn’t do shit to the world and he doesn’t expect the world to do shit to him.

But that changes when a drug dealer named Kenny Kristo approaches him about the murder of his wife. Some nasty dudes not only kidnapped her and took 400 thousand dollars from him, but they didn’t deliver on their promise. Instead of returning his wife, they killed her, cutting her up into little pieces. Well, I guess technically they did give her back, just not all together.

Kenny wants to find these men and do to them what they did to his wife, so he contacts Scudder. Scudder refuses at first, but then Kenny plays the tape of the men raping his wife which they sent, and Scudder is in.

As he starts his investigation, he runs into an African-American teenager named TJ who always seems to be sick, always seems to be causing trouble, and is, overall, just a weird little dude (he keeps a backpack full of fresh vegetables with him at all times). Although I’m not sure how common it is to keep randomly bumping into the same person in a giant city over and over again, wherever Scudder goes, TJ’s not far behind, and soon the two develop a friendship.

In the meantime, Scudder is getting closer to our dynamic duo of killers (which consists of a very tall man and a very round man). When they target yet another drug dealer, Yuri (snagging his daughter), who’s an acquaintance of Kenny’s, Scudder realizes that this will be his only opportunity to take these guys down. He becomes point man on the operation, installing his own reckless brand of negotiating. When it’s all said and done, the big showdown happens in a cemetery, and either our killers or Scudder are going to go down.

Okay, I’m hoping that a lot of these problems are because this isn’t the final draft, but man, I’m not sure all these issues can be rectified. There are just so many things fundamentally wrong with this screenplay. I’m really disappointed. Hailey was so good. Tombstones, unfortunately, is a mess.

Let’s start at the top. As I’ve stated before with these kinds of stories, there needs to be some sort of personal connection to the case for the protagonist. So in Chinatown, Gittes falls in love with Evelyn Mulwray, making it more than just an in-and-out investigation. Or even in the more bubble-gum pop world of Taken, the protagonist is looking for his own daughter. If you don’t have that, there should at least be a logical motivation for your main character to get involved, particularly in something as dangerous as this. Here in Tombstones, I can’t make out a single definable reason why Scudder takes the case. He’s not doing it out of a sense of duty since he’s no longer a cop. He doesn’t need any money. He doesn’t know Kenny so he’s not doing it as a friend. He didn’t know the woman who was murdered, so there’s no connection there. The thing that gets him to sign on the dotted line is listening to the wife get raped, which kind of works but it’s not like something happened in Scudder’s past that makes him want to avenge all rapes. He signs on…well, so that we have a movie. And that was my biggest problem with Tombstones. There was no reason for our protagonist to get involved.

But if not knowing one client wasn’t bad enough, the final act actually goes one step further and introduces us to A NEW client, Yuri, whose story we’re even less invested in. Who the hell is Yuri? Why the hell do we care about Random Drug Dealer #2’s daughter? At least I experienced Kenny’s pain when he found out about his wife’s death so I could sympathize with him. I have no idea who Yuri is at all.

The next thing was TJ. Boy, this character was just a huge miscalculation. He felt like a “written” character from the get go: He illogically runs into our protagonist whenever he's in the city, he carries vegetables in his backpack, he tells you what’s on his mind whether you like it or not, he’s got sickle-cell anemia (which doesn’t have anything to do with the story if you were wondering). He was just a manufactured fake person from his very first line. And to top it all off, he had nothing to do with the story. If you took him out of the script, it wouldn’t affect the plot one iota, which is why every time he showed up you said, “Why are we wasting our time on this guy? He doesn't have anything to do with this story!"

The details here are also choppier here than a flight over the Rocky Mountains. For example (spoiler), late in the movie, Scudder finds out while questioning one of the main bad guys that, shockingly, Kenny’s wife was a cop. I admit I’ve never investigated anything in my life. But wouldn’t one of the first things you did in your investigation be a background check on the person murdered? One internet search would’ve probably told you that the wife was a cop. --- Also, our serial killers? The bad guys? One of them is seven feet tall. I’m sorry but you will never ever find a 7 foot tall serial killer. You don’t sneak around successfully pulling off murders if you’re seven feet tall. No matter where you go or what you do, every single person in the area is going to remember you. Serial killers are people who can blend in with the rest of the world. I'd be willing to bet that you could not find a single serial killer in history who was over 6 foot 2.  I don’t’ know. It was stuff like this that really bothered me.

About the only thing I liked in this script was the ending. Despite not caring about Yuri or his daughter, I have to admit that the trade-off in the cemetery was packed with tension and very well-written. I wanted to see the bad guys go down, particularly the “round” guy. But overall, this was a frustrating read for me. The goal here (find the bad guys) is ten times more clear than the goal in After Hailey, and yet the story has 1/10 the impact of that perfectly constructed script. It just goes to show that in the end, it’s about the characters and the relationships you create between them. If you have a character who doesn’t have any emotional connection to anything related to the case, you’re dead in the water, cause no one’s going to care whether he succeeds or not.

I admit that a lot of my frustration here comes from my high expectations, but man, this could’ve been so much better.

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

What I learned: A bit of a spoiler here. But it’s something I feel strongly about. Please. Never. Ever. Ever. Include a backstory where your cop accidentally shoots a kid. The moment we find out that Scudder’s career ended because he accidentally shot a kid when he was drunk is the end of the screenplay for me. It’s so melodramatic, so clichéd, so ‘been done before’ that it kills the character and by association the story.

Amateur Friday - Real Men Play Futebol

Genre: Drama/Sports
Premise: A teenage boy hoping to escape the poverty of his West African village finds the opportunity when a professional futebol scout comes to town.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted (feel free, however, to use an alias and a fake title).
Writer: Andrew Bumstead
Details: 106 pages

After reading dozens of contained thrillers, goofy comedies, zombie flicks, and white male 20-something coming of age stories, I often need a giant helping of “different” to get the juices flowing again. “Real Men Play Futebol” fit the bill. Usually these scripts get passed over by the Hollywood elite (I’ll get into why later) but on this particular day, when I was rooting for the underdog, I decided to give this potentially uplifting tale a shot.

14 year old Ze lives in a small West African town where the average family consists of single mothers who’ve been left high and dry by the men who fathered their children. Why take care of others when you can go out and continue to nail other women and get them pregnant too! To cope with this reality, Ze finds solace in his favorite sport, Futebol, of which he’s become quite good at. His hope is to one day play for a professional team and leave this dark depressing town behind.

So imagine his excitement when a professional futebol scout announces he’ll be flying in to find the town’s best player. The “winner” will receive 50,000 dollars and head back with him to the national team. It’s that once-in-a-lifetime lottery opportunity. And Ze is going to do anything to win it.

His training is interrupted, however, when his mother’s ex-boyfriend (the father of Ze’s little sister), Carlos, comes back into town. Despite leaving them high and dry for years, Carlos waltzes back in like he’s just come back from a Sunday stroll.

Ze is furious. Not only does he hate this man for taking advantage of his mother. But he hates his mother for how easily she gives in to him. However, Ze senses an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. He knows that Carlos is a good futeboler, and so offers him an opportunity to train him. If he wins the national team spot, he’ll give Carlos half of the 50 grand. The only catch is that Carlos can never talk to his mother again. Seeing dollar signs, Carlos agrees.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, Carlos teaches Ze everything he knows, and despite Ze’s rival being favored to win the spot, it’s looking like Ze can pull off the upset. In the end, however, he will have to decide whether to leave this crumbling world behind, just like every other man from this town, or stay with his family and make it a better place.

Okay first the good stuff. Dramatically, this is very well-structured. We have a clear goal for our protagonist (Win the futebol contest), a solid ticking time bomb (only 2 weeks to prepare), some nice conflict (the push and pull relationship between him and Carlos) and a strong theme (selfishness vs. selflessness – does he stay and help others or leave and help himself?). The writing speeds along and has plenty of plot points to keep the story fresh (I particularly liked Ze’s attempt to leave early, ultimately getting conned), so just as a pure reading experience, it was solid.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this script had a lot of hills to climb before even a word was written. Dramas are hard sells. I don’t state that in a mean “Don’t ever write a drama” way.  More in a "Know what you're getting into" way.  The fact is dramas don’t make as much money and are therefore harder to get off the ground. For that reason, many producers avoid them. Jewerl Ross, a manager who sold Father Daughter Time to Warner Brothers a couple of weeks ago, had this to say about the subject: “Please know that 90% of new writers are writing dramas. That is ok if that is all you can and want to write. However, your chances of breaking into the screenwriting biz writing dramas are so very, very slim. Most people break into the business writing genre material: comedies, horror, thrillers, etc. If you expect to break into Hollywood writing a period piece about Abraham Lincoln and his obsession with calligraphy, that script is not going to be read by a lot of people. Also, so few of the jobs that I can get for writers are dramas. Most drama jobs go to super A-list writers. Temper your passion with the wisdom of what people are actually reading and buying.” (you can read more from his interview here)

On top of this, “Futebol” is a FICTIONAL sports movie. It doesn’t take much research to find that, these days, the only sports movies studios make are comedies or “based on real life” stories. I don’t know why. I loved Field Of Dreams. I loved Rocky. But they just don’t seem to be interested in these kinds of movies anymore.

My point is that as an unproven screenwriter, you’re stacking the deck against yourself. These dramas (or sports dramas) can still sell. But the margin for error in the writing becomes considerably slimmer. They don’t just have to be good. They have to be GREAT. And it’s hard for even seasoned professionals to write great scripts. But hey! Every once in awhile someone breaks through and writes that great script that proves the world wrong. So was “Futebol” that exception?

While “Futebol” had some great things going for it, I had a lot of problems with the screenplay. Usually in sports movies, the hero has some defining clearly labeled problem preventing him from becoming great. So in The Karate Kid, it was discipline. Daniel Son thought you could learn a couple of cool punches and kicks and be able to effortlessly take down the bullies. Mr. Miagi had to teach him discipline by making him paint the fence and wax the cars. I never got a sense of what Ze was missing in his game, and for that reason, all of his practice sections with Carlos felt empty.

Carlos was a huge problem for me as well. First of all, making it so that Carlos wasn’t Ze’s real father was an odd choice. To me, if your father left you then came back a dozen years later, I’d imagine that would be an emotionally confusing experience, particularly if you weren’t sure he was there because of you, or there because he wanted the money you could make him. So making Carlos unrelated to Ze was a huge missed opportunity. Now he’s just some guy who dated Ze's mom, lessening the conflict between the characters a hundred fold.

The reward money was also an issue. My favorite aspect of the story was these two characters (Ze and Carlos) developing a friendship, while we wondered whether Carlos was in it for Ze or in it for the money. As long as that question hung over the story’s head, every scene between Ze and Carlos would be dripping with conflict. By having Ze offer Carlos half the money right off the bat and Carlos accepting, we now know for sure that Carlos is in it for the money. So where’s the tension? Where's the conflict? Where’s the mystery? Not only that, but the choice didn’t add anything to the story. It’s supposed to raise the stakes by getting Carlos away from Ze’s mom. But Carlos ignores this agreement right away anyway (continuing to hang out with the mother), leaving me to wonder what the point of the agreement was.

Another issue I had was the confusing nature of the climax. The great thing about sports movies is that the finale usually comes down to a clearly identifiable “win or lose” scenario. Hoosiers, Karate Kid, Rocky. We understand exactly what’s going on at the end. Here, the vague-ness of this tryout and the randomness of the drills and activities led to an anti-climactic resolution. I guess you could make the argument that a final game would be too cliché, but this is a movie about futebol so a pure game scenario might be a better option.

On a more nit-picky front, people tend not to like scenes where characters brutally murder animals. Even if it comes from your villain. The scene where Bruno puts a cat in a bag and violently bashes it against the wall until the bag is bloody and the cat is dead is just going to disgust a lot of people (even if it comes straight from real life). There are a lot of more creative ways to get us to hate your villain, and I’ve just found that the majority of people don’t react kindly to animal violence unless it’s absolutely essential to the plot.

Real Men Play Futebol is an example of strong writing with some missed opportunities. In particular, I think reconfiguring the “father-son” relationship here (so that Carlos is his real father) would help a lot.

Script Link: Real Men Play Futbol

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

What I learned: As is evidenced here and in a lot of scripts that I read (but not all! I’m not making a declarative statement!), 1-2 weeks seems to be the perfect time frame for most stories told in movie format. It’s short enough so that the story’s forced to move quickly, yet long enough to give the impression of passing time. For most scripts, particularly genre material, I would suggest keeping your storyline within this 1-2 week timeline.

10 Screenwriting Mistakes To Avoid Courtesy of Alien 3

So last week I gave you ten screenwriting tips to take away from Aliens, one of the best sci-fi action films ever. This week, we’re looking at the sequel to Aliens, Alien 3, which a young David Fincher directed. Now originally, I wrote this long impassioned opening about how terribly directed this movie was. The setting was beyond boring. The casting was uninspired. For some reason Fincher had every character whispering to each other. I’ve since done some research and learned that Alien 3 had an extremely complicated development period even by Hollywood standards. 30-some takes were written over the course of six years and when they finally hit production, they were still rewriting the script. Fincher was so upset about the experience that he parted ways with the project and left the studio to cut the film. Does this mean I’m going to take it easy on the script? Hell no. They had six years to write this thing. They made the choice to go ahead with it before it was ready. Casablanca was rewritten during production, right? No, I’m not going to be easy on it because even with these excuses, Alien 3 is still terrible beyond comprehension. With that in mind, here are ten mistakes to avoid when writing your next screenplay.

PASSIVE STORY
You’ve heard about passive heroes a lot – characters who let everything come to them, who let outside forces dictate their actions instead of taking charge and doing it themselves? Well there’s another passive activity you want to avoid – passive storylines! Alien 3 spends the first half of its running time with absolutely NOTHING going on. Where is the goal? Where is the story? Where is the DESIRE from any of the characters (alien included!) to do ANYTHING?? It’s just a bunch of people sitting around with occasional cuts to an alien growing up. Contrast this with Aliens where there’s always a strong goal for the characters (go in and kill the aliens). Or even in the first Alien, which is closer in spirit to this one, the alien itself was active (searching out and killing its prey). Here, no one’s pursuing anyone. Even when they decide to catch the alien, they do it in a passive way (they try to lure him to a spot on the base – forcing them to run away from it the whole time). Reflecting on this film, I can’t remember a single active pursuit by anyone. This alone killed any chances the movie had of being good.

ACTING OUT OF CHARACTER
In the real world, people act out of character all the time. In the movies, the rules are different. If someone who’s perennially shy busts out the Dougie on the 3rd Street Promenade, the audience is going to be really confused (unless it’s properly set up of course). One of the quickest ways to lose a reader is to have your character act completely out of character, as is the case here with Ripley. Let’s recap, shall we? Ripley survives her entire crew being killed by a crazy ass alien. Ripley goes into cryo-sleep for 57 years. Ripley is asked to come help some marines dispose of some more aliens. She does, kicking ass and being one of the only survivors. She again goes into cryo-sleep. Her ship crash lands on a prison planet, and everyone onboard besides her dies, including the little girl she’s unofficially adopted as a daughter. After a few minutes of crying, what does she say to the big creepy ugly personality-less weird dude taking care of her? “Are you attracted to me?” Yes, all of a sudden Ripley wants to fuck!!!! Despite us not seeing Ripley have a single sexual urge for two movies, now she’s a nymphomaniac! Seriously, who the hell wrote this?

YOU WILL NEVER GET AWAY WITH LAZINESS
For some weird reason, certain writers believe they can skimp on the details and we’ll just go with it. We will not go with it. We will always spot when a writer is lazy. Let’s look at the prison here in Alien 3. This is supposed to be a maximum security prison right? So then why are there NO RULES!?? Why is there NO STRUCTURE!?? Prisoners can walk around wherever and whenever they want. There are no prison cells…IN A PRISON! There is no structure besides an occasional meal in the common area. It’s unclear who the warden is. It doesn’t even look like a prison. It looks like a series of interconnected tunnels. If you’re going to write a movie about a prison, learn how prisons operate so that your script will at least be somewhat plausible. Laziness gets you nowhere.

LOGIC MISTAKES EVERYWHERE
I’m always disappointed when writers ignore logic. But especially in a sci-fi movie. The rules are much more precarious in sci-fi because you’re already asking your audience to make a leap and believe in a world that doesn’t exist. Throwing a bunch of logic holes into that story is like shining multiple spotlights on the illusion. We are asked to believe, in Alien 3, that in a maximum security prison with the most lethal prisoners in the universe, that there isn’t a single weapon in the entire prison??? This is such a preposterous notion that it alone could be used as a legitimate excuse for hating the movie.

TRUST YOUR GUT
I have a theory I’ve formulated over time and I think it’s a solid one. When it comes to key decisions in your story, trust your gut. If your gut tells you it’s bad idea, it’s probably a bad idea. Even if it feels right from a logistical-standpoint. Even if it feels right from a character standpoint. If there’s that little voice in the back of your head saying, “This doesn’t feel right.” Trust it. To prove this theory, go back to all those reluctant choices you made in your previous screenplays. Chances are on an overwhelming percentage of them you turned out to be right. They didn’t work. I bring this up because while Ripley getting pregnant with an alien and having a special cross-species relationship with it may have sounded cool in the room, it’s one of those things that, at a gut level, you know isn’t right. Ignoring this gut feeling led to one of the dumber storylines we’ve seen in the franchise.

ALL THE CHARACTERS LOOK AND ACT EXACTLY THE SAME
There are a lot of reasons for you to differentiate your characters. One of the most important ones is that the more different your characters are, the more they bring out the differences in the other characters. If a person is nice, for example, we’ll obviously see that they’re nice. But we’ll see that niceness more clearly if we put them in a room with a mean person. Their qualities are exaggerated by being in proximity to their opposite. In Aliens, Burke’s sliminess is brought out in large part by what a good person Ripley is. In Alien 3, every single character looks the same and acts the same. They’re all a variation of annoyed, twitchy, and angry, except for maybe the doctor, who’s so boring in his own way that it doesn’t matter. You need variety in your characters. If you were to ask what’s the biggest reason for why Aliens is so great and Aliens 3 is so terrible, the unique cast of characters would likely come up as the top answer.

NO HUMOR
This is a common beginner mistake. Someone wants to make a dark film. So they make every single stinking frame as dark as humanly possible. Dumb move. Emotions are like anything in life. If you get too much of one, you’re going to get bored. I love cake. But that doesn’t mean I want to eat it three times a day. When it comes to emotions, you need to bring the audience to the other end of the spectrum every once in awhile to mix things up. Again, look at Aliens. There’s some bleak ass shit in that movie. But it’s peppered with a lot of humor (and plenty of hope as well). Alien 3 is one long bleak-fest. I counted a single joke, one joke!, in the entire movie (“No need to get sarcastic”). It could be as simple as adding a comedic relief character (Hudson) or throwing in a reasonable amount of gallows humor. Don’t think of it as selling out the darkness. Think of it as reminding the audience what darkness is.

IDENTIFY THE CENTRAL PROBLEMS – FIX THEM
At some point in the writing process, you should note the major problems in your script (the things that don’t quite make sense or aren’t yet working) and formulate a plan to fix them. Bad screenwriters allow many of these lingering issues to stay in the script, figuring they won’t be a big deal. If you aren’t striving for perfection, why even bother pursuing screenwriting? Let’s take a look at a really lazy mistake in Alien 3. In the final act, where they confront the alien, it’s established that the alien won’t hurt Ripley, because she’s impregnated with another alien. So let me get this straight. The only person on this entire base that we even halfway care about – your HERO no less - CAN’T BE HARMED BY THE ALIEN????? How stupid of a story decision is that? Identify your major problems and fix them. Or else you get ridiculous situations like this one.

WOE-IS-ME
Let me make something clear. Audiences hate woe-is-me characters. They hate them more than any other character you can possibly put in your screenplay. Whoever was dumb enough to turn Ripley from an active intelligent ass-kicking take-charge protagonist into a whispering, whiny, mousey annoying whisperer who can’t shut up about how awful she feels should never be allowed near a copy of Final Draft again. There are very VERY rare occasions where woe-is-me protagonists work (Mikey from Swingers comes to mind) but my suggestion would be to avoid them like the plague. The audience will hate your hero, and by association your movie.

BEWARE OF CLICHÉ/PREDICTABLE MOMENTS
Audiences are savvy. Many of them have seen enough television and film to have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next. However, if your script is packed with scenarios where the audience can predict EXACTLY what’s going to happen next, chances are you’re being too cliché and need to make a better choice. There’s a moment deep in Alien 3 where Ripley asks Rock (I don’t even know his character name so I’m using his real life one) to chop off her head because she’s pregnant with an alien. She turns away and puts her hands up on the bars, waiting for him to do it. There is then a 60 second build-up where he brings the axe back and prepares to kill her. Oh no! Is he going to do it??? I’d say of the 5 million people who saw this film, 4,986,000 knew Rock would deliberately swing and miss, making the loud dramatic “THONK” on the bars, we'd stay on Rock’s face so as to momentarily wonder if he'd killed her, we'd show that Ripley was indeed still alive, then give Rock a rah-rah speech about how much he needs her. What do you know? That’s exactly what happened! You can’t always avoid your audience being ahead of you, but with a little effort, you can avoid cliché moments and at least keep them guessing.

IN SUMMARY
I don’t know what else to say. I guess if there are great screenplays like American Beauty and Dogs Of Babel out there where every single choice the writer makes is perfect, there can also be screenplays where every single choice the writer makes is disastrous. Such is the unlucky distinction of Alien 3. But maybe it was a nice reminder to the studios that you can’t fake it. That even the death of some of your biggest franchises is one bad script away. I’ll finish this breakdown with another question for all you Alien nerds. To this day, I’m still confused about the Alien 3 trailer that came out promising aliens coming to earth. What the hell was that? Why would they play a trailer that had nothing to do with the movie? I guess it’s just one more nonsensical thing associated with this catastrophe of a film.

Did Carson See Everything Must Go?

No!

Lots of people have been asking me if I went to see my favorite screenplay, Everything Must Go, yet.  The answer is, no, I have not.  The reason?  Because I'm terrified of ruining the perfect movie that is in my head.  I'm hearing mixed things about the film and I'm afraid if I go see a watered down version of the script, it's going to taint that reading experience forever. Of course a huge part of me is curious about what first time writer/director Dan Rush did with it. And I'll definitely break at some point.  But right now, I'm holding out, still enjoying the perfect movie in my head. :)

P.S. Here's a podcast with Dan Rush over on Script - Dan Rush podcast interview.

Carson

The Watching Hour

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Premise: A young woman watching over a blind child must protect her when the home is invaded by the unthinkable.
About: The Watching Hour sold a couple of weeks ago. The Van Dykes are related to the great Dick Van Dyke, and there was a big comment war over on Deadline Hollywood that this sale represents nepotism at its best, which made me burst out laughing. Not only is this a ridiculous reasoning for why this script sold, but the Van Dykes have been writing, rewriting, assignment writing, working their asses off for years to get to this point. This isn’t a case of having a name. This is a case of good old fashioned hard work.
Writers: Carey and Shane Van Dyke
Details: 99 pages – undated (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).

Every once in awhile I’ll read a script and I’ll say, “I don’t know if I have an opinion on this one.” The Watching Hour is one of those scripts. The writing is professional, as you’d expect it to be from two veterans like the Van Dyke siblings. But after reading After Hailey, where each page was packed with gobs and gobs of character development, I can’t help but feel that The Watching Hour is too thin, that there isn’t enough going on where you want things to be going on.

However, I do understand why it sold. In fact, if I were telling you to choose between writing a script like After Hailey or The Watching Hour, I would choose The Watching Hour every time. After Hailey is a once in a decade deal – nailing every single emotional beat in a complex character driven drama. It just doesn’t happen often. Whereas with a home-invasion thriller, the marketable premise and genre ensure a buying audience that'll be much more forgiving. If they can see the poster, they’ll invest in fixing your mistakes.

20-something Shelby specializes in providing care for children with special needs. If your child is blind or deaf or physically limited in some capacity, you don’t call up a normal babysitter, you call up Shelby. As 9 year old McKenzie fits this criteria (she’s blind), her parents bring Shelby into their small rural home (far enough away from the neighbors so that they can’t hear you scream – heh heh) to take care of Mckenzie while they’re out for the night.

McKenzie’s parents are a little nervous about Shelby at first, but when they see how quickly she bonds with McKenzie, their fear disappears and they’re off for the evening.

Across town, another family is experiencing quite a different evening. Their 9 year old daughter, Katy, disappeared two weeks ago, and friends and family wade through the house to lend support. The curious thing about Katy is that she’s mute. I say curious because a few years back, another handicapped girl who lived nearby (a paraplegic) was found drowned in a pond. It’s clear that somewhere out there is a sick man snatching these helpless girls up, doing god knows what to them.

Which segues back to Shelby and McKenzie, who begin to receive strange phone calls with distant scratchy 50s music on the other end. This is accompanied by a pair of headlights at the edge of the property, headlights that just sit there, that seem to be watching them. Is this the man who’s been snatching up all the children? Is he coming to get McKenzie?

The answer to that? They wish!

In a nice little homage to Close Encounters, the headlights RISE off the ground STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR. And soon we start hearing feet outside, pitter-pattering. Something’s out there. But what? I’ll tell you what. Aliens motherfucker! Shelby and McKenzie are being attacked by aliens. Why they’re here, what they’re doing, what they want? We don’t know. But we assume they’ll do anything to snatch McKenzie away, so it’s off to every crevice in the house to prevent that from happening.

Okay, here’s my main gripe with The Watching Hour. And it’s not even really about The Watching Hour. It’s about these kinds of movies in general. You have the audience in the palm of your hand before the aliens/monsters/whoever show up. But as soon as they show up, the mystery is gone. And what usually happens after that is a series of repetitive chase scenes inside the house/base/building/whatever. If there isn’t enough variety to those chase segments, the audience gets restless, and I can’t speak for anyone else, but I definitely became restless with the repetitive in-house alien chases. Alien pops out, run to another area of the house, hide, alien pops up again, run to another area of the house, hide. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now the Van Dykes do break up the monotony a little with the occasional hop over to Katy’s house (the other girl who’s missing). The problem with this is, we’re never clear on why we’re in that house. It’s a whole bunch of people grieving, but it’s been two weeks since Katy went missing. Have they been here the whole two weeks? Or if not, why are they here today? Is today special? That isn’t made clear and therefore its entire reasoning for being in the script feels suspect. If there was more going on in this section, it could’ve worked, but whenever we cut back to this house, I kept asking, "Why are we here?"  

There were little things that bothered me as well. The haunting 50s music will definitely play well onscreen, but I hate when “cool” things are forced into the story instead of stemming organically from the situation. Why would the aliens use 50s music? Was this a callback to the time when Roswell happened? I wasn’t sure. You also have what is quickly becoming the single biggest problem in modern day horror flicks – the fact that nobody has a cell phone that works. I can kind of buy it since they’re out in the boonies, but since audiences have become so savvy to this cheat, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Overall, I wanted more meat to this story and these characters. While Shelby becomes three-dimensional in the final ten pages, her and the rest of the characters feel paper-thin during the previous 90. You’re never going to write characters in a thriller that are as deep as characters in a drama, but this script came at a really bad time, since I had just read After Hailey, and that script was a master course in character development. I kept thinking over and over again with Watching Hour, “I barely know anything about any of these people.”

Here’s the thing though. The Watching Hour still gets a worth the read. Barely. And I’ll tell you why. First, this is a great spec premise. A fast paced marketable genre picture with high concept elements. Second, the twist ending. Now I’m not going to spoil the ending here but I’ll just say this. While I had suspicions, I genuinely didn’t see it coming. Is it perfect? No. It’s not The Sixth Sense. But it’s good enough to make us go back and reevaluate everything we just saw.

I get the sense, however, that the Van Dyke’s are resting a little too heavily on this ending. It’s almost like they know that they have an ace up their sleeve so they put the rest of the script on cruise control. The scenes at Katy’s house in particular go nowhere.

I’m going to guess that the younger crowd will like this but the savvy vets will take it to task for its thin characters and plot. We’ll see. :)

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

What I learned: In an interview with the writer of yesterday’s script, Scott Frank, he was asked about twist endings. This is what he said, which I think is good advice: “If you’re writing simply to have a twist [ending] then you’re in trouble. If the twist comes to you organically, then I think you’re on much firmer ground.”  There are parts of Watching Hour where it seems like it's being written just to have a twist ending. 

After Hailey

Genre: Drama
Premise: After a newlywed war photographer’s wife dies, he must decide whether to help out her troubled son from a previous marriage or move on and start a new life.
About: Scott Frank is one of the biggest screenwriters in town, the guy you pay a million bucks to to put your script on the development red carpet. Frank has over a dozen produced credits, including Dead Again, Minority Report, Out of Sight, The Lookout and Get Shorty, which got him nominated for an Oscar. After Hailey is an adaptation of a book by Jonathan Tropper (How To Talk To A Widower). It, like yesterday’s entry, made the 2008 Black List. I’ve done some digging and found that the script has a lot of fans in the industry (Bill Martell and Mystery Man on Film being a couple).
Writer: Scott Frank (based on a novel by Jonathan Tropper)
Details: 128 pages (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 first busted out After Hailey two years ago and promptly threw it down 14 pages later. A heartfelt drama about an Iraq war photographer (NO! No more Iraq vets!) grieving the loss of his wife? Every sentence I read indicated this was going to be a slow sorry depressing “woe is me” snore-fest.

But one of our longtime readers has been telling me at every turn that I need to review more Scott Frank scripts, that in the battleground that is the Hollywood screenwriting business, Frank writes circles around even the mightiest money-earners. He is the guy you go to when you want to get a script right. He doesn’t come cheap, but he’s worth every penny. I squinted skeptically at the reader’s e-mail. Hmmm, I thought, do I really want to try After Hailey AGAIN and willingly bring depression into my life for the next two hours? Not really. But I popped the script open for a second chance anyway, hoping for a miracle.

Guess what? I got one.

24 year old Doug Parker is a talented war photographer. Buoyed by his fearlessness, he’s willing to get in close to capture the moment, however horrifying that moment might be. What Doug doesn’t realize is that the accumulation of these moments has stripped him of any feeling, of any emotion. He is a walking zombie. Photographs are all he has left.

Until he meets Hailey.

Hailey is a magazine journalist 14 years his senior. But that age gap means nothing to Doug. This is love at first sight. This is “spend the rest of our lives together at all costs magic.” Hailey, a divorcee, is hardened by real life the same way Doug is hardened by his career, and for that reason, she’s nervous about becoming involved with him. She wonders if he can handle being with someone who has a past, who has baggage. In the end she decides to take a chance, and the two get married.

Cut to two years later. A suburb of New York. Doug’s come back for a few weeks to sell the home he and Hailey bought together. Hailey’s dead. Died in a plane crash. And if he could run away and just let this home rot, that’s what he would do. But he’s trying to be strong. He’s trying to be responsible.

There’s one complication however. Hailey had a son, 15 year old Russ, who’s lived a real shitty life. Besides his mother dying, his father is a total asshole. So at the beginning of Doug’s week, Russ gets hand-delivered by the cops who say they won’t take him to jail if Doug keeps an eye on him for the rest of the night.

Although we only get bits and pieces of their past, we get the sense that Doug married Hailey, not Hailey and Russ, and that that caused a lot of distance between him and this boy. So with Hailey out of the picture, the last thing Doug wants to do is deal with her troubled son.

In addition to Russ, we have Laney, Hailey’s best friend, who keeps coming to check up on Doug, and is willing to do anything – and I mean anything – to make him feel better. There’s his twin sister Claire, who’s pregnant and wants to leave her husband, eventually leading to her moving in (Move in?? He’s trying to sell the house!). There’s Russ’s real dad, Jim, who’s moving to Florida and is trying to cast Russ off on Doug. And then there’s Doug’s family, highlighted by his brain-damaged-for-the-better father (who used to be a total dick but now is the life of the party). All of these people are pulling at Doug in their own way, when all Doug wants to do is get out.

If there’s a script out there that challenges my proclamation to stay away from passion projects, this would be the one. This is your horse in the “prove Carson wrong” race. There’s no strong character goal in this story. There’s no sense of urgency. It’s a straightforward character piece with the only thing driving the story being, “What’s going to happen with Doug and the rest of these people?” So why does it still work?

Well, let’s take a closer look. While the character goals don’t dominate the narrative like they would in a more traditional “Hollywood” movie, they are there. Doug’s goal is to sell the house so he can get the hell out of this town and never come back. Now because Doug is so passive about it, it never dominates the narrative, but it’s definitely there.

There are actually two soft ticking time bombs set up. The first is needing to sell the house (although I would’ve liked the time frame to be more defined) and the second is his younger sister’s wedding. Although it’s never said that this will be the finale of the movie, viewers are trained to know that usually, when there’s a wedding, it’ll be close to the end.

But what really makes this story great are the stakes. You quickly realize that unless Doug and Russ find some connection, unless they become a permanent part of each other’s lives, they’re doomed. And that feeling only grows as the script goes on. This, in turn, becomes the main engine that drives the story. We want to see if these two “get together” so that we know they’ll be okay. In that sense, it was a lot like the structure used in a Romantic Comedy.

The character work in After Hailey is almost flawless. I talked about this with Maggie the other week, how when you have a depressing situation, you need someone to come in and add some levity so the audience isn’t ready to slit their wrists by Act 2. Bringing in Doug’s twin sister, Claire, who calls it like it is (her commentary on Doug’s bedroom exploits with Laney are particularly hilarious), was the perfect remedy for distilling a script that could’ve easily slipped into melodrama.

And even the relationship that we barely saw, that between Doug and Hailey, was different and new. I can’t remember a movie where they so deftly explored the marriage problems between a younger man and an older woman as realistically as this one. This idea that some people are a package deal, and how that can be hard for a younger person to understand, helped contribute to the freshness of After Hailey.

Like all good writers, Frank/Tropper tell the story through ACTION instead of dialogue whenever possible. So as Russ starts enjoying time with Doug, instead of saying, “I don’t want you to sell this house. Let’s just keep it.” - which a rebellious teenager like Russ would never say – Frank/Tropper instead show Doug repeatedly coming home to find the “For Sale” sign hidden, trashed, even run over. I mean that’s really good writing.

Truth be told, almost all of Frank and Tropper's choices were spot on. In Doug’s younger sister’s wedding, for example, Doug takes the mic near the end and we think – oh, here we go – the typical heartwarming wrap up the theme of the movie speech. But we’re shocked to see Doug totally choke and then a drunk Russ pick up the mic and use the toast to propose his love to Doug’s younger sister – the one who just got married! It was unexpected and not like any movie I’d ever seen and therefore perfect.

I was sure at the beginning of the story that the photography stuff was going to be boring and stupid. One of my pet peeves is when writers give characters cool jobs even if it doesn’t fit the character. But here, Frank/Tropper use the photography to show how distanced Doug is from the real world (hiding behind a lens), he uses it to help bond Doug and Russ (Doug gives Russ a camera to go out and shoot with), and finally he uses it as a later plot point (the job threatens to take him out of the city). There was an actual plan here with the job, which is nice, cause I usually don’t see that.

If I have any complaints about After Hailey, they’re minor. Doug’s family may have been a little too wacky (the brain-beaten dad was kind of over-the-top). And since his younger sister was barely around during the screenplay, her wedding at the end felt thrust upon us. But Frank and Tropper did such a good job that most of these things slipped by unnoticed. Can’t say enough about this one. Great script!

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 25!)
[ ] genius

What I learned: That you can take successful elements from other genres and use them in genres they weren’t meant for. I loved how this was essentially a romantic comedy format. We’re wondering if Doug and Russ are going to “get together.” Just like we were wondering if Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts were going to get together in Notting Hill. Just like we were wondering if Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock were going to get together in The Proposal (okay, maybe we weren’t wondering that, but you get the idea). That was a neat trick I plan to take with me.

Bachelorette

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