Genre: Crime-Thriller
Logline (from writer): When a Minnesota homeowner exploits the state’s self-defense law to get away with the murder of two teenage girls, their parents start looking for various hitmen to break into his fortified safehouse and kill him.
Why you should read: “Castle Doctrine” is a topsy-turvy “Fargo”-esque small-town thriller that plays around with some of the genre conventions (who’s the hitman, and who’s the prey) while at the same time respecting the classic noir formula.
It takes place in 2016 and shows modern Minnesota in the grip of high-speed Internet and social media. Its “richest man in town” character may have made his fortune in startups while its “vengeful mother” archetype may run an Etsy crafting shop out of her house and hire her hitmen online. It even may take place in the nice little township I was born and raised in, and not in the usual backwoods sort of place.
But it portrays (unflinchingly, I hope) the downward spiral of a community destroyed by a particular kind of crime where EVERYBODY knows who the killer is, but NO ONE has the guts (or the means) to do something about it. It chronicles the last days of several individuals who live out their lives thinking of either murder or survival and not much else. Its plot driver is the pendulum of retribution, the one you draw back in the first act, let fly in the second and watch it bring about a 24-hour bacchanalia of blood and mayhem in the violence-steeped third. — It doesn’t get any more noir than that.
Writer: Alexander Bashkirov
Details: 109 pages (this is an updated draft that used notes from the Scriptshadow community)
Another script I’ve consulted on wins Saturday. Congrats to Alexander! I went back to my original notes on Castle Doctrine and this was my initial observation: “You used Fargo as a reference in your e-mail and I think that’s appropriate. There’s an unpredictable twisty-turny quality to this script that echoes what made that film so incredible. But twisty-turny narratives are a lot like bucking bulls – very hard to control. If you don’t have a good grip, you can easily get thrown 20 feet from the ring.”
When I originally read this, I felt Alexander got thrown from the ring. There were too many threads going on and while it looks easy to do that from the outside, it’s actually one of the hardest things to pull off in screenwriting. Let’s see if Alexander has fixed this problem with his latest draft (and with the help of you guys!).
Wydell is one of those psycho gun nuts who bleeding heart liberals and Europeans point to to bolster their argument that America is crazy. But to be fair, Wydell’s way over the top. I mean, he’s got every gun known to man and he’s built himself a CIA-level safe room in his basement.
I don’t have a single friend with a safe room.
Yet.
When Wydell hears that teenagers are breaking into houses around town, he posts on a website that he’ll be out of town for awhile, when in actuality, he’s very much in town, in his house, waiting to spring a trap. His plan works. The teenagers, two girls, come to rob his place, and because in Minnesota you’re allowed to shoot anyone who enters your home uninvited, Wydell does just that, killing them both.
The story then shifts to the parents of each victim. There’s Gillian, a single mom with a clothing business she runs out of her home, and Leo, a single father and the richest man in town. Both of them want revenge.
At first, they do their own thing. Gillian does some internet searching to find a hitman, and Leo hires some local thugs to do the job. The thugs run into the crazy that is Wydell, who easily kills them, so Leo decides to spring for half of Gillian’s hitman fee.
The “hitman,” it turns out, is actually a hitwoman named Nell. Nell has killed over 50 people, most of them in Mexico. You’d think that after playing for the cartels, this bitch would be unstoppable. But she hasn’t met the insanity that is Wydell yet. Get ready for the showdown of the century, folks.
Not that it’s fair to compare an amateur script to an Oscar winner, but since Alexander brought Fargo up as inspiration, I thought it’d be fun to do just that!
The big difference I noticed between Castle Doctrine and Fargo was that one sets up its story in a single scene, while the other takes the bulk of its second act to do so.
In Fargo’s first scene, our main character hires the kidnappers to pretend-kidnap his wife. From there, we’re off to the races with the kidnapping, the accidental murder, and what becomes the bulk of the movie, the fallout – Jerry desperately trying to cover his ass.
With Castle Doctrine, we start with the event (two teenagers getting killed), a court case, then the bulk of the second act turns into the setup – Gillian and Leo preparing to kill Wydell.
I don’t know what to think about this because we do have a GOAL driving the story – our characters planning to kill someone. So it’s not like we don’t have something to look forward to. But it did feel like a lot of screenplay real estate to cover something that probably could’ve been covered a lot faster.
Both scripts also have dual-protagonists. In Fargo, it’s Jerry (the man who hired people to pretend-kidnap his wife) and Marge (the cop who investigates the murder). In Castle Doctrine, we have Gillian and Leo, the two parents of the slain teenagers.
Here’s my issue. In Fargo, there was a symbiotic relationship between the two leads. One was trying to get away from the other. In Castle Doctrine, we have a repetitive relationship between the two leads. They’re both attempting to do the exact same thing.
This, in part, contributed to the first issue. Since TWO people are attempting to try and kill Wydell, it meant TWICE the set-up time.
While noticing these differences, I reminded myself that these are different movies and therefore require different story choices. You can’t copy and paste choices from one movie to the next because, even if they worked, you’d be rewriting the same story.
However, since I wasn’t as engaged as I wanted to be with Castle Doctrine, I kept looking for reasons why.
The more I thought about it, the more I went back to the “repetitive” thing. Something felt off about TWO people attempting to do the exact same thing. It’s kind of like having two MVP candidates on the same baseball team. Neither wins because they end up splitting the votes.
Then something hit me. I didn’t like Leo. His choices are surface-level (throw money at the problem), whereas Gillian makes scarves for a living. Now that’s a character. The pleasant little mother who makes scarves has to figure out how to hire a hitman and kill a man. Something about her being a woman also makes her decisions more compelling (the gun-happy macho Leo doesn’t have to think twice about putting a bullet in Wydell’s head – but for Gillian, it’s a much tougher moral decision).
If you added this component to her character that she’s the poster child for anti-violence and anti-gun, and she decides to use violence and guns to kill a man? You don’t need any other characters to tell that story. You have a strong enough character to carry the whole shebang.
I believe Alexander included two parents because there were two victims involved. To ignore one of the parents would’ve seemed odd. Hence the repetition. But maybe Leo commits suicide after the murder, leaving only this nice suburban mother to deal with the problem. That would draw a huge actress to play that part – I’m sure of it – and you wouldn’t have to reel in this extensive ensemble to tell your story.
Then again, I’m not convinced that’s the movie Alexander wants to write. Either way, I’d like to hear your takes. Simplify it? Keep it the same? Did you like Leo? Am I off here? This is one of the tougher scripts I’ve reviewed on the site. Usually I know exactly what’s wrong with something. But Castle Doctrine’s got me baffled.
Script link (new draft): Castle Doctrine
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make it so your main character has to make tough moral decisions that conflict with what they believe in. If you have a character who doesn’t believe in guns realize that the only way to solve the problem is with guns, you’ve got yourself a compelling character.
