Many have called The Truman Show the best spec script ever written. Today I’m going to remove the film from memory, read the script fresh, and determine if that’s true.
Genre: Drama/Fantasy
Logline: A life insurance salesman slowly discovers that his entire life is actually a television show.
About: In 1997, hot upstart screenwriter Andrew Niccol, whose first feature film, Gattaca, was about to hit theaters, had just finished a new script called The Truman Show. The script, which was being read in every Hollywood circle as fast as they could get a copy delivered (no PDFs back then), was getting the kind of coverage that no script before it had received. We’re talking geniuses across the board. Many people were calling it the greatest screenplay ever written – easily the best spec ever written. With Scott Rudin producing and Peter Weir directing, the film would make the controversial choice to cast Jim Carrey in the lead. The movie did all right, and had its fans. But many remember it as a slightly-better-than-average film that couldn’t live up to the potential of its premise.
Details: 128 pages – Draft that sold
The Truman Show, whether you believe it’s a great script or not, was castrated by the one thing I hate most about Hollywood. That the town is more interested in putting together a great package than they are making a good movie. People want to parade their production around town, claiming they have “this” super hot director and “this” A-list actor. They don’t care if any of these people are actually right for the movie. As long as they can throw the perfect package in their rival agency’s (or studio’s, or productions company’s) face, they’re happy.
Jim Carrey doomed this movie. Doomed it. Look, I don’t know how much better the film would’ve been without him. But you could tell they saw an actor on one of the hottest streaks in Tinseltown history and allowed THAT to dictate their decision. As opposed to someone who was a better fit for this description: “TRUMAN BURBANK, thinning hair, a body going soft around the edges, appearing older than his thirty-four years sits at the wheel of his eight-year-old Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.”
People tried so hard to believe Jim Carrey was a good actor. There was that whole weird method acting Man on the Moon thing that cinephiles fell for for some reason. But Carrey has proven himself to be, at best, an average dramatic actor. And this movie needed someone who could act.
Luckily, I have a Forgetachine. It allows me to go back in time and forget certain things. So what I’m going to use it for today is forgetting The Truman Show movie. Everything about it. Jim Carrey. Ed Harris. All of it. This will allow me to read the screenplay the way Hollywood first read it back in 1997, and determine if it’s really the greatest spec script ever written. Wanna come with?
The Truman Show follows a 34 year old Truman Burbank, who lives in Queens, New York. Truman lives an average life as a life insurance salesman whose daily highlight is perusing magazines at a local magazine stand.
His wife, Marian, seems to be bored by his very existence. His best friend, Marlon, who he’s known since high school, is the only person he can share anything with. Lately, he’s been complaining that he’s never done anything daring with his life, never gone anywhere. He wants to change that.
Meanwhile, we see strange things start to happen around Truman. For example, a giant light just… falls in front of his car one day. Seemingly from nowhere. And whenever Truman isn’t looking, nearby people watch him, whisper about him.
Eventually we arrive in a giant room where a man named Cristof observes a series of people answering a single phone, one by one, each telling the person on the other end that, no thank you, they’re not interested in insurance. We then cut to Truman at work, and we realize that he’s the one making these calls. What the heck is going on?
Truman starts having bigger suspicions that something is up. And things go nuclear when his father, who he watched drown when he was seven, turns up looking like a homeless man. The father seems to be about to tell Truman something before men in uniform grab him and haul him away.
Truman begins walking into buildings he’s always passed by in his life, only to find out that they’re hollow shells. Finally, he gets on a boat, determined to get the hell out of this place, only to get to the edge of a city he now realizes is a giant movie set. He walks into the control room, confronts Cristof, the man who’s controlled his entire life, before storming out of this facade existence for good.
The Truman Show screenplay is a classic example of a killer concept that doesn’t stick the landing.
This specific concept, where the hero lives in a false reality, is tricky, because it’s hard to expand that storyline out for 120 minutes. Once we realize that we’re in a false reality, it isn’t clear why we should care anymore. We need the story to mature into something else.
A good example of this is another 90s movie, The Matrix. Once Neo realizes he’s in The Matrix, they don’t then spend the rest of the movie having him wonder if he’s really in the Matrix or if it’s all a figment of his imagination. He gets transported into the real world, maturing the storyline into something else entirely.
We don’t do that here. And you can feel Niccol stressing to extend his concept out for as long as possible. There’s a good 40 pages where we’ve clearly established that Truman knows the city isn’t real. The outside world knows this. Truman’s aware of it. The actors know he knows. Yet the story doesn’t evolve. Truman walks around a bunch, challenging everyone to admit that this is a facade (in one scene, which I’m almost positive was ditched for the movie, he takes a woman’s baby from her and threatens to slam it into the pavement if she doesn’t admit that she knows his name).
While I don’t remember how much of this was changed for the film, I do remember leaving that movie disappointed with the ending. Because the thing with these high concepts is that they generate bigger expectations, which makes it even harder to stick your landing, because you’re not just trying to write a normal great ending, you’re trying to write a great ending worthy of a great concept.
I’ll tell you this, though. Reading this script reminded me of how different writing was in the 90s, back in the spec age. In those days, because concept was king, writers were trying to keep your interest with story. You had people adding twists and turns and surprises into their screenplays. The Truman Show – a man finds out that his whole life is a TV show. The Sixth Sense – Our main character is dead. The Matrix – we’re living in a computer. Tarantino – every one of this scripts was built on surprising plot developments.
These days, we’ve supplanted this with spectacle. Studios are more interested in a giant set-piece than a clever plot development. And I think that’s the reason a lot of movie writing has gotten stale recently. Writers have lost the “unexpected story development” muscle because it’s no longer required of them.
And that’s where The Truman Show shines the brightest. I can imagine reading this for the first time, seeing a giant light fall from the sky in front of our protagonist’s car and thinking, “What the fuck is going on right now??” Seeing random men in an unidentified room answering Truman’s life insurance phone calls. “Who are these men?” “Where is this going??” It would’ve been exciting.
And the script has a dream lead role situation. A character who’s been lied to his whole life then one day awakens, no longer willing to to stick to the script. I could see actors everywhere wanting to play that part. And there’s some really interesting thematic questions as well – how much control do we have over our lives? Is there such thing as fate? Can we change the world around us if we exert our will to such a degree that it has no choice but to submit? These are universal questions that resonate with a lot of people. So if I’m reading this script, I’m not just thinking “clever concept.” I’m thinking, “Oh, this is addressing some deeper questions here.” And you don’t usually get that in a spec – both of those things. You get one or the other.
So it makes sense why this script made so much noise at the time. But you still have to stick the landing. Niccol probably needed to take this through a few more rewrites to figure out a midpoint twist that brought new life into the plot. Because while I was determined to see Truman overcome and expose what was being done to him, I got bored watching him spin his wheels while doing so.
It was an interesting reading experiment nonetheless. For those of you interested, here’s a copy of the script. Make a screenwriting course of it. Read the script and watch the movie and figure out why this never became anything more than an average film.
Script link: The Truman Show
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: We’ve forgotten how to use surprises in screenwriting. We’re being conditioned to believe that spectacle is the most important thing moving forward. I’ll prove this to you. What’s the biggest surprise in the last five Marvel superhero movies? Don’t look. Close your eyes and try to figure it out. Okay ready? It’s when The Vulture turns out to be Liz’s father in Spider-Man: Homecoming, right? That’s the plot development that got a big “whoooaaa” from the audience. And that’s not because it was the greatest twist in the world. It’s because audiences aren’t used to that sort of thing anymore – where they’re entertained by a story development as opposed to an action scene. So note to writers. If someone can write a script with a series of good surprises or one great surprise, your spec will probably make some noise.
