Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: An Air Force pilot who’s been forced into retirement hijacks an F-15 for a joyride that may be his last.
About: We’re going back to the past today. This script sold in the 80s and some thought it to be on the fast track to a green light. It went so far as attaching Bruce Willis when he was the biggest movie star in the world. What happened next depends on who you talk to, but apparently studio politics got involved. Publisher Howard Meibach, an authority on script sales at the time, had some interesting things to say about why scripts do or don’t get made which still seems applicable today. The biggest screenplay killer comes “when one studio head goes out and a new one comes in. They always want to wipe the slate clean.” Also, a lot of great material gets lost “when production companies go under.” Icarus is a script, Miebach said, that even 21 years after he read it, still stays with him. Wow, might this be a diamond in the forgotten rough?
Writer: Patrick Sheane Duncan (based on the original screenplay by Robert Stitzel)
Details: 134 pages – 198? draft
A strange anomaly in cinema history is Top Gun. That movie came out, became a monster hit, made every 12 year old in the country want to be a fighter pilot. You would’ve thought we’d be seeing a new fighter pilot movie every five years.
And yet here we are, 30 years later, and we have what? Stealth? Flyboys? Red Tails?
I’m not sure why this sub-genre went extinct, but I always perk up when I see a fighter pilot script. “Could this be the one to bring the genre back?” I wonder.
And I like when someone takes a genre that’s traditionally one way and explores it a different way. A fighter pilot script that’s actually a character piece? Hmmmm…. That could be good.
50-something fighter pilot Albert Fiske is given the notice by his commander, General Benjamin Holbart, that he will not be getting promoted. That means that, because of his age, Fiske will be relived of his Air Force flying duties.
Fiske doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t have kids. All he has is his plane. So when no one’s looking, he jumps in that thing, takes off, and starts flying along the West Coast.
Holbart notifies Fiske’s best friend and fellow pilot, Colonel Jerry Gill, that his buddy’s gone rogue, and gives him a chance to talk his buddy down so they don’t have to send the calvary after him. The problem is, nobody can find Fiske. He and his plane have disappeared!
At this point, we jump back in time 20 years, to when Holbart, Fiske, and Gill were all young pilots, and all in love with the same girl, a young nurse named Bobbie. Holbart had her first, then Fiske snatched her away. But it turns out, Bobbie was in love with Gill all along, and married him.
Back in the present, Fiske takes joyriding to a whole new level, screeching across the desert, just 10 feet above the sand. If this is the last day he gets to fly, he’s going to get every last thrill out of it. Meanwhile, Gill is finally able to reach him via radio, and make a plea for Fiske to come back.
What follows is a multiple-cutting narrative that jumps between the present, the Academy, the Vietnam War, and the months before Fiske was fired, painting a complicated 4-way friendship that has led Fiske to this flight. Will they be able to talk him back down? Or will they have to take him down?
Stakes.
These days, a script can’t get through the system without having high stakes. Things have to MATTER. If they don’t matter, we don’t care. Every script in the studio system goes through numerous meetings where people ask, “What are the stakes?” and “Can they be higher?”
But when you write a character piece, injecting stakes into your story becomes tougher. You don’t have the world to blow up. You don’t even have a city to demolish. The stakes have to be character-driven, just like the story.
And here’s where a lot of writers screw up. They think that because they’re writing about character, they can somehow soften the stakes. The thinking seems to be people = feelings = stakes aren’t important. And actually, it’s the opposite. It’s because the story is so much smaller that the stakes matter more.
So I look at Icarus and I ask, what are the stakes? A suicidal older pilot might kill himself?
There are a couple of problems with this. For one, it’s not nearly as easy to root for someone trying to kill themselves as someone who’s trying to save themselves. If they want to live, we’ll want them to live. If they want to die, we don’t necessarily want them to die, but we’re kind of like, “Okay, well, if he dies, he gets what he wants. So what’s so bad about that?”
The other problem is Fiske isn’t putting anyone in danger. He’s off flying around the desert, over the ocean, high up in the stratosphere. Literally NOBODY is going to get hurt by this guy’s antics.
I was hoping the flashbacks would provide the kind of insight into the friend dynamic that, even if the exterior stakes were weak, the character stakes could be high. And they seemed to be on the right track when we find out that Fiske was in love with Holbart’s girlfriend, Bobbie. This would explain why Holbart didn’t promote Fiske, choosing to put him out to pasture instead.
But then the writers make the strange choice of having the third friend, Gill, get the girl. At that point I was like, “Whaaaaaa??” To me, this script gets so much better if you make Holbart a bona fide villain, someone who hates Fiske and is set on getting his revenge for his “friend” stealing his girl 20 years ago. So why pass that storyline off to a third party? It was strange.
I’ll tell you where I would’ve liked to see this go. Start off playing nice with Fiske. They tell him, “You bring the plane back, everything will be fine.” Fiske disobeys, and so they get serious, sending a couple of planes up to scare him. Fiske shakes them, and that’s when the problem gets kicked over Holbart’s head.
A higher ranking official comes down and tells them to blast Fiske out of the sky. You could then decide how far you’d want to take it. Maybe Fiske totally loses it and gets in legitimate firefights with pursuers. Maybe he gets in a final one-on-one duel with either Holbart or Gill.
But I think you see where I’m going. Something has to happen here. Something where more lives are at stake. It can’t just be a dude in a cockpit feeling sorry for himself with the occasional flashback.
It was fun reading this though. I’ve noticed there’s a lost art in screenwriting. That of the “macho line.” It used to be in every script. They’d have 10-50 lines of guys saying the most macho “gotcha” things to one another. Here’s one from Icarus: “Albert, you’re in shit so deep you won’t be able to walk out of it on stilts.” And we got this one earlier: “You’re dick’s too short to fuck God.”
There was a time when I thought you weren’t a real screenwriter until you could write one of those lines. So I would try to write them all the time. It didn’t even matter the genre. Horror movie. Romantic Comedy.
The thing is, I could never write a good one. And after awhile, I realized why.
It was because there was no truth to the lines. Nobody ever says those things outside of movies. And in the 80s, when every movie was packed with larger-than-life characters who didn’t talk like real people, lines like that made sense. But over time, as we’ve moved towards a more “realistic” form of dialogue-writing, a lot of those lines have disappeared. Still, I thought it was interesting.
I was rooting for Icarus but I think it gets lost in its desire to be character-driven, to the point where it avoids the kind of stakes a movie like this needs.
Script link: Icarus
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Small premises need small page counts. A guy goes up in a plane for his last joyride? That doesn’t need 135 pages.
