Pitched as “Home Alone on acid.”
Genre: Magical Realism
Premise: An eleven-year-old boy left alone while his parents vacation stumbles upon a surreal late-night TV broadcast of lizard musicians, leading him into a strange adventure through Chicago’s hidden corners where he runs into a bizarre guy known as The Chicken Man.
About: Recently, Benny Safdie debuted his The Rock film, The Smashing Machine, at the Venice Film Festival, where Safdie took home the ‘Best Director’ trophy. The two must have had a great time working together because, just yesterday, they announced that they were making another movie. This is the first time Safdie is using material other than his own for a film. Lizard Music was published in 1976 by Daniel Pinkwater. It is considered a cult classic in children’s literature, combining a basic story about a kid home alone with a tone that embraces the drug-fueled craze of America’s wildest decade.
Writer: Daniel Pinkwater
Details: about 170 pages
Believe it or not, I do appreciate good directing. It’s not all about the screenwriting for me.
But there really aren’t many interesting directors left. Marvel has turned the profession into a glorified TV director gig, where you’re a hired hand that makes sure you get all the required shots for the day. Try to impose your artistic vision and you get canceled faster than Roseanne.
So thank god young talent like Benny Safdie is still out there. One half of the former brother directing team that made Good Time and Uncut Gems, Benny is the more celebrity-obsessed of the two, eagerly accepting any opportunity to get in the spotlight.
But he’s still talented as hell. I infamously gave his pilot script, The Curse, that he wrote with Nathan Fielder, a “what the hell did I just read” rating. Then I saw the show and realized it was genius! In order to overcome screenwriting weaknesses that big, you have to be exceptionally talented. And this guy is the real deal.
11 year old Victor lives in the Chicago suburb of Mcdonaldsville with his parents and 17 year old sister, Leslie. His parents head off on a vacation, leaving Leslie to take care of Victor. But the second the parents are gone, Leslie tells Victor she’s going on a camping trip with her friends, leaving Victor all alone.
Victor starts off spending his time watching a lot of TV. In the 1970s, that’s basically all you did, and Victor is no exception. However, late one night, Victor is surprised to see that four lizards, in a band, are playing music on television. Their music is hypnotizing and Victor is sad when their set is over.
The next day, he decides to go to a nearby town called Hogboro on the bus. It’s on that bus that the Chicken Man shows up. The Chicken Man takes off his hat, which has a chicken underneath it of course, which then starts doing all these tricks. Later, Vince sees the Chicken Man in town and the Chicken Man opens his hand which has in it, A LIZARD!
Victor freaks out and books it home. He is now convinced that the Chicken Man and the late night TV lizard band are connected somehow. But how? He has to know. So he does some investigation and gets in touch with Chicken Man (who has like a dozen different names), and the two meet at the Hogboro Zoo.
Chicken Man explains that the Lizards are from another planet, or more like, another existence. And that there music is, like, important or something, man. Because Victor is now obsessed with the Lizard Group, he gets Chicken Man to help him figure out where they are. He must meet them! As he is sure that the Lizard Group will have all of life’s answers, or at least a few to get him through the rest of the summer.
Lizard Music is a terrible book yet I have no doubt that Benny Safdie will turn it into a great movie. This reminds me very much of what Spike Jonez did with Where The Wild Things Are. It’s going to be a kids book adaptation but with some dark adult gravy slathered over it.
So, what’s my problem with this? My problem is that Lizard Music was clearly written in one draft. It’s got that “I’m coming up with all of this on the fly” feel to it. You can almost feel the writer realizing story developments as they come.
One of the easy ways to identify this is when writers repeat locations right away. For example, Victor is talking to Chicken Man at the zoo and convinces Chicken Man to have a meeting with him. He asks Chicken Man when and where their meeting should be and the Chicken Man says, “We’ll do it tomorrow at the zoo.” Well, we’re already at the zoo. Why wouldn’t we just have the meeting now?
If the Chicken Man is busy now, then, it makes more sense to meet somewhere else tomorrow. But, when you’re writing quickly, you don’t want to strain yourself. Your brain doesn’t give you great options. It knows the characters have to meet somewhere, it knows we’re at the zoo. So let’s have them meet at this same zoo! It’s lazy and it’s usually something you fix in rewrites. But if you don’t rewrite, then you never fix it. And that’s what a lot of this book reads like.
There is a bonus to writing this way, though. First drafts, while often sloppy, tend to have the most energy of any draft you’re going to write. So even though there’s a lot of repetition and meandering, you can feel the writer’s excitement on the page. And the writer will often take more chances in the first draft, which can be more interesting than the safer edited options you use down the road.
So, there can actually be a strategy to only writing one draft. And I know that, back in the 70s, there was more of a freewheeling approach to writing. So I’m sure that worked its way into the writing of Lizard Man.
And while this freewheeling approach helped some of the sequences such as the bus ride when we first meet Chicken Man and see how weird he is, it hurts the book in so many others. There are countless scenes of Victor just sitting on his living room floor watching TV. Which is incredibly boring to read.
Another way I can tell when a writer hasn’t written many drafts is when the main character is a complete loner. We tend to think about what we WANT TO DO IN A STORY as writers so obsessively that we forget to ask what would really be happening in this person’s life. Writing a singular character all by himself is so much easier than trying to imagine a full life with friends and relationships. So you write the easy version.
You’re telling me Victor doesn’t have a single friend? Not one!? And this is the 70s. You couldn’t not have a friend if you tried. They were forced upon you!
If you know the primary things I get upset about in screenwriting, you know that laziness is up there near the top. If I feel that a writer just slapped together a story without a lot of thought, I get pissed.
So, then, why did this sell? It sold because Benny Safdie is a weirdo (in a good way). He likes weird stuff. This story is definitely strange. And it also has a bizarro character that actors would love to play, in the Chicken Man.
I would not try to replicate a story like this yourself. This is the definition of a random purchase. It’s unlikely anything like it will happen again.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Put a chastity belt on your logical mind when writing the first draft of any script that benefits from a strong imagination. If you’re writing The Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter or Lizard Music, you want to let yourself fly in that first draft because these types of scripts don’t do well when there’s restriction. But you do need to reel in the stuff that’s too crazy in future drafts. You have to ground the core journey so that the story feels like it has an actual purpose and isn’t just a trippy writing experiment.
