Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A billionaire gives up all his money before joining 200 passengers on a ship that will fly to a new planet.
About: Today’s short story was bought up out of the The New Yorker by Simon Kinberg’s production company. As you may remember, this is the second high-profile short story Kinberg has purchased in the past year. The first was Pyros, which I liked a lot. The writer, Thomas Pierce, will be adapting the story himself, and John Carter of Mars director Andrew Stanton, who has been steadily making up for that film with lots of TV directing gigs, will likely direct.
Writer: Thomas Pierce
Details: About a 15 minute read.
As I’ve said before, when you’re looking at short stories to turn into movies, you shouldn’t be looking for direct translations. You’re looking more at the potential of the story and where it can go.
Nowhere is this more true than with today’s New Yorker entry. Chairman Spaceman is an offbeat science-fiction story with little science fiction on display. One might even call it science-fiction adjacent.
It follows a guy named Dom Whipple, a 45 year old former billionaire, who has given up all his money and possessions to a church that is funding a trip to a distant planet. The church hopes to start a new society on this planet, and because Dom was so generous with all his money, he’ll be one of the 200 passengers.
We meet Dom 24 hours before the ship leaves. He’s having one last goodbye party with all his friends and ex-wife. The church assigns every passenger a sponsor. Dom’s sponsor is Jerome, who comes from the opposite end of the financial spectrum. He and his wife aren’t even able to make rent this month.
Dom, in a moment of weakness, has sex with his ex-wife and is convinced, for a couple of hours, that he doesn’t want to do this. He starts plotting a plan to get some money back and start over on earth. But a couple of hours later, he wants to go on the ship again.
That’s the thing with this story. It just sort of wanders aimlessly. It doesn’t seem to have a purpose. Dom wants this one minute. Dom wants that the next minute. At the very least, we know it’s going to end with him on that ship, so there’s reason enough to keep reading.
We learn a little more about the church and its plan. Apparently a first ship was sent two years ago with 10 pre-settlers (The Intrepid 10). It takes 16 years to get to the planet and if the first ship gets there and doesn’t like what it sees, it will alert the second ship, which will then turn around and fly back to earth.
The night before Dom is to leave, Jerome’s wife asks him for money. She’s convinced he’s got some squirreled away in the Cayman Islands or he can call one of his rich buddies and they can wire him a few hundred grand within minutes. Sorry, he says, he really has nothing left. Pissed off, she takes the last remaining money in his wallet and storms out of the room.
The next morning, Dom is shuttled to the ship. An attendant lies him down in his cryo-chamber and says that when he wakes up, he’ll be on the new planet. It’ll all happen instantaneously. He then closes the chamber and Dom begins freaking out. He changes his mind. He doesn’t want to go on the trip.
But the chemicals overpower him, he falls asleep, but a second later he wakes up and he sees all this activity outside. There are lots of people around, including a military officer and an old woman. That old woman turns out to be his ex-wife.
It’s been 30 years, they explain to him. When that other ship got to the planet, they found another intelligent species living there that attacked them, so Plan B was triggered in the second ship, which then turned around and went back to earth.
The final image is his ex-wife telling him that the world has changed a lot since he left it. The church that funded the trip isn’t even around anymore. So it’s going to be a rough transition. The End.
The only way I can categorize this short story is “frustrating.”
It’s impossible to figure out what it’s actually about. It doesn’t help that it tries to weave this religious thread into the story. In my experience, religion and science-fiction don’t mix. We just saw this a couple of weeks ago with the similarly constructed “Raised by Wolves,” which, coincidentally, has this same two-ship storyline, but focuses on the first ship arriving on the planet.
Chairman Spaceman bounced around from idea to idea so recklessly that it could never settle in to what it was trying to say. There’s this theme about rich people giving all of their money and possessions away that holds some potential. But here it’s treated as backstory. It’s so detached from the plot line that it only barely informs Dom’s character.
There’s the weird decision to give him a sponsor. Why does he need a sponsor? Usually a sponsor has a purpose. Like, if you’re a drug addict, you can call your sponsor to help talk you down from shooting up heroin. But this guy is a sponsor in name only. He’s there to follow Dom around and talk to him once in a while.
The moment where Jerome’s wife asks Dom for money is the only true “scene” in the story, something you could imagine being in the screenplay. And yet it’s so random. We barely know Jerome. We know his wife even less. Why is she getting one of the only memorable scenes in the story? And what does this moment have to do with anything else?
There could’ve been a cool thread about how this religion exploited super-rich people to fund this mission. But Dom is the only rich person on the trip. It’s one of many outlier variables in this story that contribute to its pointless feel.
There are only two interesting things in the story. The first is that Dom seems to have a sketchy past. He did some horrible things to become as rich as he did, including possibly killing a man. I wanted to learn more about this but, as was the modus operandi of the author, anything interesting was barely given focus.
The other thing – and this is where I think the movie is – is when Dom gets back from the trip. This is where I would start the movie if I were the producer. This is a man who had it all. But then he gives it away to go on this trip. The trip fails. He comes back 30 years later. He has no money. He has no business. All his contacts are dead or no longer in the game. I want to see how that man reintegrates into a future society.
Or, another way you could do it is you make the short story the first act. You set the movie up as if it’s going to be about going to this planet. You would NOT tip the audience off (like they do in the story) that the mission has a failsafe to send them back if something goes wrong. You want that twist to be a surprise. So you set the movie up to be about them arriving on the planet at the beginning of act 2 and then – BAM – the mission was a failure, 30 years has passed, and he has to reintegrate into a society that he doesn’t understand.
The only other way I could see this narrative working is if they do a 25th Hour sort of deal where the movie focuses on the 24 hours leading up to him leaving. How you say bye to everyone. You start to have second thoughts. Inject some uncertainty as to whether he’s going to go through with it. But I find the 30 Years Later idea to be way more compelling.
What do you guys think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Start your screenplay as late into the story as possible. If you’re writing a short story, like this one, and especially if you’re writing for The New Yorker, you can experiment. Short fiction is one of the more experimental writing mediums. But when you’re writing a movie, it’s a different ballgame. You’re writing something that will hopefully make millions of dollars. So experimentation is mostly off the table. For that reason, you want to start your story as late as possible. The most friendly scenario for a movie would be starting with Dom waking up after the mission failure. That way, you’re jumping in right at the beginning of when things get interesting. That doesn’t mean you can’t do what I said above – have the first act be him prepping to leave and then leaving. But the further back you go from the moment your story gets interesting, the harder it is to hook the audience. They’re going to get bored and they might not even make it to the good part. So keep that in mind when you’re adapting something AND when you’re trying to figure out where to start your own movie idea.
