Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) A businessman’s obsession with his competitor leads him down a rabbit hole of self-discovery, fantasy, and delusion.
About: This one finished low on last year’s Black List. The writer, Aaron Rabin, has been making short films and writing for over 15 years.
Writer: Aaron Rabin
Details: 115 pages
As I pointed out yesterday, I’ve been having trouble finding movies to watch. This has led me down some strange paths where I’ve taken chances on movies that I’d normally ignore. One of those movies was a film called, “The Nest.” It starred Jude Law as a family man who enjoys the finer things in life, but doesn’t tell his family when he starts hemorrhaging money, resulting in him trying to live way above his means. Eventually, it catches up to him and his family, forcing him to finally tell them the truth.
Going off of that synopsis, you’re probably imagining an engaging story. There’s lots to work with there from a plot standpoint. But the writer/director made the classic writer/director mistake of lingering on every single mundane moment (lots of staring out at pretty scenery in this one) until it sucked every ounce of drama away. What we were left with was a moody piece that occasionally decided, “Oh, let’s add a plot point here.” And by ‘occasionally’ I mean every 25 minutes or so.
As a writer, these moody ‘tone poems’ as George Lucas once called them, are limited in their appeal. You get the hardcore cinephiles cheering you on and not much else. It’s been my belief that you can’t help these scripts. They’re doomed to be their inert selves. That was until I read today’s script, “Towers.”
40-something Jeff Armstrong works at a generic medium-height downtown building. We’re not told what his job is. It’s one of those generic job titles inside large corporations that don’t mean anything. Which is probably why his company is dying. It can’t even define its own workers.
Every day, Jeff stares over at the building across from them. It’s a giant blue tower that makes his building look pitiful. Jeff is convinced that he can change the course of his company and tells his boss, Clarence, how. He wants to build a club on top of the building, just like the blue tower has. But this one’s going to be better. It’s going to change the game.
Meanwhile, one day while Jeff is doing errands, someone steals his boring blue Dodge car. When Jeff gets home, he gets even worse news. His daughter, Mona’s, doctor believes she has leukemia. Strangely, Jeff is not concerned about his daughter’s health. He’s more focused on the fact that his company stopped their health insurance coverage last year. If Mona has cancer, treatment will be coming out of his own pocket.
After Jeff argues with his overweight wife, Serena, about how they’re going to pay the bills, he finally gets some good news. They found his stolen car. However, a group of street racers did the whole thing up so now it’s a flashy street racing car. Jeff is both horrified and intrigued. Driving the car around gives him a new sense of confidence, which he parlays into an affair with Catherine, the city planner overseeing his ‘club’ plan.
Eventually, Jeff comes up with an idea. He sees a group of drivers racing cars late into the night at a local impromptu speedway. They are offering 100,000 dollars to the winner of an upcoming race. If Jeff can somehow win that race, he’ll be able to put a down payment on the most expensive cancer treatment for his daughter, potentially saving her life. Jeff is in, to the bafflement of just about everyone he knows.
“Towers” is a script that shouldn’t have worked.
It’s written with that same character-driven vague narrative that The Nest used. At least at first. Everything about the story is vague. For example, Jeff will come into his boss’s office and ask him about the “investment” they both made. His boss will get a very serious look on his face, as if to say, ‘don’t bring that up,’ and Jeff will drop it. And that will be the scene.
Ditto the club. I wasn’t even sure what kind of club it was at first. He just kept referring to it as the “club.” A sports club? A rich people’s club? All of this was done on purpose. We’re not meant to know the details. And usually that bothers me. So I wondered why it didn’t here. I finally came to the conclusion that it’s because, unlike The Nest, Towers had a plot.
That plot was developed in three areas:
The first was Jeff wanting to create this club. This meant that, right off the bat, our hero had a goal. And it was a goal he cared about (even if we didn’t know what it was ourselves at first). What this does is it makes your hero active from the start. Active heroes are plot-movers. If they’re trying to get something, they organically pull the plot along with them.
Next, we have an “in” plot point. You might remember this from my article titled “In and Out,” – how it can help you become a better screenwriter. In that article, I say that there are two types of plot mechanics. You have the ones where your hero pushes OUT on the world (like the example I used above, with the club). And then you have the ones where the story pushes IN on the hero.
Here, we get our ‘IN’ when Jeff’s daughter gets a cancer diagnosis. This is now something your hero will have to deal with throughout the rest of the movie. ‘Dealing’ with anything creates plot. So you’ve now got two plotlines pushing the story along.
Finally, we have the car race. That becomes the big final goal of the movie. Jeff’s trying to win this race to save his daughter’s life. Stakes don’t get much higher than that. This is where Towers separates itself from other indie fare. Typically, the end of one of these movies is some late-starting half-realized low stakes affair. Towers is anything but that. Rabin started meticulously setting up this plotline in the first act, when Jeff got his car stolen.
Still, you’re not sure what to make of this script. It’s so understated and hides so much of its soul beneath its surface that a lot of it feels like a dream. It’s an interesting dream. One of those dreams you don’t want to wake up from. But it carries some of that weird dream-like logic where, afterwards, you’re not sure why you bought any of it. I mean, this guy becomes a street-racer despite never having raced a car. I don’t know. It’s trippy. But it somehow works.
If you’re someone who wants to understand how to write scripts with voice, this is definitely a script you want to check out. There are so many writers out there who write the exact same as every other average writer. This is not that writer. This is different. Which is why it made the Black List.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Give secondary characters something to do separate from your hero. This is how you flesh characters out. Serena, Jeff’s wife, could’ve easily been a stock character who was only there to be Jeff’s sounding board. Instead, she’s sick of being overweight and decides to do something about it. This gave her a goal, a purpose, an identity, all of which made her memorable. I can’t stress enough how few characters are memorable in the scripts that I read. So giving secondary characters their own goals and aims is an easy way to up their memorability factor.
