Genre: Western
Premise: When his wife is murdered and baby taken, a young Preacher in 1880’s Colorado forsakes his calling to become a bounty hunter and get his son back.
Why You Should Read: This script is a cross between Taken and the Dark Knight but set in the old west. Authentic to its time period, it has a grittiness that is prevalent with this genre. Westerns are glorious to look at on the big screen, with sweeping panoramas and intimate close-ups. The stories are personal but feel larger than life. At its heart, On the Sparrow is a tale of two pathways. The story of a father desperate to get his baby boy back and fighting the darkness that descends on him and the villainous couple that ripped his family apart and seeks to settle down and live a good life resulting from the fruits of their wickedness. In the end the pathways must cross.
Writer: RW Hahn
Details: 121 pages (this is a slightly updated draft from the one that appeared on Amateur Offerings)
I’ll be honest. I had a long week. I’m tired. My brain is functioning at quarter-capacity. All I wanted to do was get to Friday, head up to the Arclight on Sunset, zone out, and watch some Ready Player One.
So when I saw that my last remaining duty before the week ended was to read a 121 page (121 page!!) Western that started with a horse drawn cart rolling through the Colorado countryside, I wasn’t exactly yelling from the rooftops, “YAHHOOOO!!! I LOVE MY LIIIIIIIFE!”
I’m hoping that slow-rolling cart isn’t a metaphor for this script. Let’s take a look.
Foster and Sassy are a couple of criminals who come across a Reverend and his wife horse-carting their way to the town of Dolor. They kill them both and pose as them in town. There they meet the local young handsome Reverend, Sparrow, and his wife, Marjorie. After Sparrow gives a sermon, he entrusts Foster (whom he believes is the real Reverend) to take the collection money to another town.
Foster and Sassy are greedy, however. When Sparrow goes hunting with friends the next day, Foster kills Marjorie and Sassy steals their young son. They set fire to the house and leave. Sparrow comes home as the house is still burning, runs inside, and in the process gets third degree burns all over his body.
With the money they’ve stolen, Foster and Sassy hightail it off to another town, buy a ranch, and start living the good life. It takes Sparrow a good two years to recover from his injuries. When he rips off the gauze, he looks like a monster. But he doesn’t care. All he wants is to find the people who killed his wife and stole his son.
So Sparrow gets deputized and decides he’s going to start, I guess, hunting down random killers first? Or maybe he hopes that by hunting down killers, he’ll come across the people who killed his wife. Either way, he spends the next 12 years (12 YEARS!!!) bringing in random baddies until, at the very end, he finds and has an encounter with Foster.
Okay.
I’m going to try and keep myself from getting angry as I break this down because I don’t think Randy was interested in writing the script that I wanted to read.
Still, I think this script has major structural flaws.
Let’s start with the obvious one. Go up and re-read the logline. I want you to imagine what page (or minute mark) you would expect our main character – Sparrow – to start the journey promised in that logline on. What would be an acceptable spot for you. Page 15? Page 25? Page 30? Page 40?
Well in this script, Sparrow doesn’t get deputized to go out on his mission until page 60!!!! That means that we have to endure 60 pages before the script’s main engine is ignited. I’m sorry but that’s unacceptable. And, to be honest, it’s a little bit insulting. All I do on this site is tell you guys over and over to KEEP YOUR STORY MOVING. Keep it moving. Keep it going! In fact, whatever you think is an acceptable pace for “keeping it going?” Go twice as fast as that. Readers get bored fast. Faster than ever these days. And to think that this most basic of structural tenets was ignored. I don’t know. I feel like I’m talking to myself sometimes. Waiting til page 60 to start the journey?? Come on. This is a Screenwriting 101 mistake here.
And then!
Once Sparrow actually does go out on his journey, he doesn’t even go after Foster! He just goes after random criminals who we know nothing about and therefore don’t care if they’re brought to justice or not.
As I got towards the end of this, I began to think maybe this was the whole point of the movie. Like Zodiac. It was more about a person going crazy in the search for revenge than it was the actual revenge? [Deeeeeep breeeeeaaaath]. I don’t know though, man. With that film it didn’t matter as much because our hero was a reporter with no personal connection to the killer. But in Sparrow our hero is the one whose wife is murdered. So I think we want to see him find and get his revenge. It needs to be more straight-forward.
I mean I could honestly make the argument that nothing happens here between the pages of 20 and 100. It’s just characters diddling around. A full decade passes of this. And it’s not interesting. I want to see my characters going after things (being active) that matter (going after the person who killed your wife, not randos who shot the local bartender).
I have a gut feeling that Randy became so enamored with the visual of this character – a sheriff whose entire face was burned off – that he lost sight of the simple and basic practices that build a good story. And that visual wasn’t even utilized properly. Had Sparrow been vain, or had he knowingly used his looks to manipulate others and get ahead in his profession, then losing those looks means something. If you burn him just to burn him, it’s an empty transformation.
Look, this is a good logline. It won a lot of people over. And that’s because it promises an exciting movie! This iteration that I read, though, is the opposite of exciting. To fix that, Sparrow needs to go off looking for Foster on page 25, not 60. He shouldn’t go on any detours to kill other people. His focus should always be on finding Foster. The timeline should be under a month, as opposed to 10 years long. This should be a 90 page script. Not a paragraph longer. And that’s that.
I don’t see the point in overcomplicating this narrative. It’s a simple story.
Script link: On The Sparrow
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I thought this was a known thing here on Scriptshadow but it’s obviously not so I’m going to repeat it for today’s What I Learned. The main journey that your character goes on – the one that’s promised in your logline – needs to start immediately after Act 1. Which is between pages 25-30. It should never start on page 60.
P.S. For the people who voted for this, I want to know why the 60 page setup didn’t bother you. It could lead to some interesting discussions about structure. So please give your thoughts in the comments. Thank you!
