Genre: Horror
Premise: When an airborne chemical attack causes widespread madness, a woman drives cross-country in an airtight van to rescue her son after his father becomes violently insane.
About: This script finished number 7 in my contest, which had over 2000 entries! Jeff loves feedback and was adamant I post his script. So you can download it at the end of this review and give Jeff any notes you want. He’s got thick skin!
Writer: Jeff Debing
Details: 112 pages
Almost Airtight NEARLY made it into the Top 5!
It’s a nifty little concept we haven’t seen before. The air is contaminated and the only place of refuge is this specially designed truck that’s airtight. It gives the story a contained setting, but not contained in a way that we’re used to. This contained location is always on the move, giving us both contained and un-contained at the same time, which I thought was neat.
So why didn’t this cool ass concept make it into the Top 5? You’ll have to keep reading to find out.
When we meet 30 year old Quinn, she’s sweating and barely alive. Her car has crashed and she’s passed out. Since it’s 90+ degrees outside, she’s nearly suffocated. To make matters worse, her seven year old son, Jackson, is dead in the back seat. Or nearly dead. It’s not clear yet. Onlookers who’ve found the van break the windows and pull the two out.
Cut to a year later and Quinn is in the nuthouse. Everyone thinks she deliberately tried to kill her son. Took a bunch of bye-bye pills then drove them into a barricade. Quinn has a different recollection of events. Her prescription was changed. And her husband forgot to tell her that her son was sleeping in the back seat of the car. She didn’t even know he was there. Which version is true? We may never know.
When Quinn goes out for her daily walk, she notices an unusual number of fireworks being ignited, popping off in the sky. She gets a call from her son, now 8. It turns out the group saved him that day. “Dad’s killing the animals on the farm” Jackson tells his mom. As in, violently killing them. She asks for more details. Her husband is acting like a rabid animal. Quinn quickly realizes how dire the situation is and tells her son to hide. Hide right now.
Moments later, a van pulls up and two people in big scary containment-type suits grab Quinn and pull her in. Once inside, they take off their suits. It’s her scientist father, Kingston, and his co-worker, Nancy. Those fireworks everyone is hearing? They ain’t fireworks. They’re some sort of weapon that’s driving people insane. Quinn is skeptical until she sees people attacking each other on the side of the road. WTF is going on??
Kingston explains that these “airbursts” were exploding weeks ago. Their government-funded lab was able to study them, which is why Kingston created this van – it’s airtight. The psychosis-inducing contamination from the airbursts can’t get in. Quinn says that’s all great and everything but she needs to get to her son and save him. No, Jackson says. We need to get to the airport and fly to a secure location or we’re all dead.
Unfortunately, at the airport, they’re attacked by the infected pilot, who decapitates Kingston’s co-worker and shoots Kingston. Quinn is able to get her father back in the van and hightail it out of there, but her dad is seriously injured and isn’t going to live long.
Cut to a “hello” in the back of the van. A fourth member, Ashwood, a therapist at Kingston’s facility, chimes in and asks Quinn to please release him. Kingston kidnapped him and chained him to the truck. It’s one more annoying thing Quinn has to worry about.
Despite Ashwood’s pleas to drive to the secure bunker where they can wait out the end of the world, Quinn heads cross-country to save her son. But along the way she meets crazed hitchhikers, insane gas station customers, evil car-crash victims – all of whom are determined to do one thing: Kill and maim anybody who comes their way.
A good high-concept movie has a simple set of powerful rules. Once you establish those rules, you can play around inside of them. And the playing is the fun part. You establish Neo’s abilities and limitations in The Matrix then square him off against Agent Smith in the subway station.
I liked the rules here. Airbursts are contaminating every area they explode over. People who inhale the contaminated air go insane. The only refuge is this airtight van, which has been constructed specifically to deal with this problem.
If you go outside of the van, you must wear a contamination suit. You can’t run around willy-nilly. Restrictions are good in a screenplay. They make things harder on your characters. And that’s what you want. The fact that things are hard mean your characters must work harder to overcome all the challenges.
The script has a clean GSU setup as well. We have the clear goal – get to and save the son. Stakes – if she doesn’t, the father will kill him. Urgency – the son may literally be found by his father at any time. So time is of the highest importance in this script.
From there, the idea is to add enough obstacles, both small and large, that make the journey dramatically entertaining. With every obstacle or setback, we must wonder if they, our heroes, are going to make it.
Contributing to the fun was the mystery behind the contaminated air. Who was doing this? Was it local? Foreign? Extraterrestrial? We get clues but we’re never quite sure. A powerful mystery added to a powerful goal is the starting point for a lot of great movies. So structurally this script was… well… airtight!
The reason Almost Airtight (which probably needs a title change to, just, “Airtight”) didn’t make the Top 5 is that it incorporated a trope that I’ve never been fond of – the “Is the main character crazy and imagining this or not?” trope.
Some people like that question. It’s resulted in movies like Shutter Island and Black Swan. For me, however, it can too easily be used as a crutch. It all goes back to the “It was just a dream” explanation. You can include a dozen outlandish scenarios throughout your movie if all that’s needed to explain them is “Surprise, the hero is crazy!” I prefer the steady hand of a screenwriting surgeon who expertly carves out a series of intricate setups that organically come together in a surprising payoff.
I don’t dislike all of these movies. The ones I gravitate to are the ones where the writer exhibits a steady hand. His choices are tight and deliberate and can be explained rationally. “Joker” is a good example of this. Most of the movie was grounded in reality. It was only in retrospect that we realized we weren’t always being shown the truth.
Another risk you run when you go that route is: what if the reader liked the real-life version of the story? If you then tell them that none of it was real, they’re going to be disappointed. The further we got into this story, the more evidence there was that this might be an alien attack. I WAS INTO THAT because I’m a big alien guy. I like aliens. So when I’m told, “Nope, it was probably in her head,” I felt let down.
In the end, though, my decision came down to whether I could produce it or not. Road trip movies are deceptively difficult to make because you’re in the car a lot, which is never easy to shoot. You have a lot of different “on location” set-ups, which get expensive. So, in the end, I had to weigh how much I liked the script against how much it was going to cost and how difficult it would be to shoot. And my dislike of the ‘Is she crazy or not’ trope was the tiebreaker. If that wasn’t there and I loved everything else about the script, the scales might’ve tipped the other way.
Still, this was an entertaining script and could even get up to impressive territory if there was a tighter point-of-view. Vacillating so much between “it’s real” and “it’s fake” is preventing the script from finding its lane, in my opinion.
Download the script here! – Almost Airtight
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Urgency doesn’t have to be a set number. Not every “U” in “GSU” needs to be, “If you don’t pay the ransom, we kill your daughter in 24 hours.” As long as it’s clear that time is short and there are stakes attached, you have urgency. Notice that here, in Almost Airtight, there is no set number regarding Quinn’s son’s danger. But we know he doesn’t have long. That his father might find him at any moment. That will work just fine for the urgency in your story.
What I learned 2: One of the interesting things about moving from script analysis to producing is the way in which I judge a script. I’m not nearly as caught up in small or medium mistakes. For example, if the fourth-biggest character in the script is annoying, I don’t scream, “Screw this script!” and throw it away. Instead I think, “That’s easy to fix in a rewrite.” The end game for me now is: “Is there a movie here?” If I like the concept and I think a profitable movie can be made then every small to medium “problem” in the script can be overcome. But if there’s something at the heart of the script that doesn’t work for me? I know that kind of thing is going to take multiple rewrites. It always does. And because the script will be changing so much, there’s no guarantee that the rewrites will even make the script better. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. And what sucks is it usually takes six months to find out.
