Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Premise: During a graveyard shift in a local air traffic control tower, a passenger flight goes missing, setting off a series of unexplained occurrences in the sky and leaving it up to a single determined tower operator to untangle the mystery.
About: Today’s script is the culmination of our 7th month journey toward the Mega-Showdown. Congratulations to Joseph Fattal for claiming the top prize!!!
Writer: Joseph Fattal
Details: 98 pages
Major spoilers throughout this review. I recommend you read the script yourself first.
Coming up with a great concept is hard. Most people WHO WORK IN THIS BUSINESS don’t even come up with a single great concept in their entire career. So when you run into someone who’s come up with two of them, as today’s writer, Joseph Fattal, has, you want to know what their secret is. If you don’t remember Joseph’s previous awesome concept, here it is: An Amazon truck driver is ambushed in Mexico by a group of mobsters who mistake him for a drug cartel deliveryman and must survive using only the packages inside his van.
So I went to the source and asked Mr. Fattal what his concept-generating secret was.
“I don’t have a magic bullet, but my best advice on this front is to just brainstorm a lot, hedge your bets, come up with a TON of story ideas and write them all down. I have folders with hundreds of concepts and I section them by genre. Then I do a lot of field testing, pitching the best concepts to anyone who’ll listen.
As for technique itself, I try not to get too attached to the initial logline when I start developing ideas. Like, I think of things very technically. I come up with a concept and then start attacking it from all angles of screenwriting techniques to make it better (lots of techniques that I learned from Scriptshadow). Does it have clear GSU? What market does this appeal to? Is there a good main character in this? Can I convince studios that this will make more money than it would cost to produce? And then I adjust it accordingly.”
So there ya go. I’m sure Joseph will be in the comments willing to answer more questions about this topic. In the meantime, let’s check out his contest-winning entry…
Emily is an ATC operator at a small airport on the east coast of the US called Bedford. When we meet her, she’s dealing with a passenger jet from Atlas Airlines that is frustrated with some bad fog that they’ve hit on their descent. The only problem is, Emily doesn’t see any fog on her radar.
Things get worse from there. Their call sign disappears from her radar and none of the other planes in the area seem to be able to find Atlas. Emily makes the other controller in the room, Crane, aware of the situation, but he doesn’t seem too bothered by it.
When Emily finally gets Atlas back on the line, the captain’s voice sounds clipped and awkward. He’s still looking for landing coordinates but Emily can’t even figure out where he is so she can’t help him.
Soon after that, she hears some angry military guy on her radio demanding help. He keeps talking about “Delta” formation and insists that Emily clear a landing strip for him. Emily has no idea who this guy is or where his airplane is. This is then followed by a lot of different languages over her radio, culminating in a guy named Mike in a Cessna who claims that he’s come from Cambridge… IN ENGLAND.
Now Emily is really freaking out. Mike says that he’s almost out of fuel and he needs to land but Emily refuses because they’re not allowed to just let any plane land if they don’t know who they are. So she, instead, keeps him up in the sky, and starts asking him to look around for her and see if he can spot Atlas.
To make matters worse, we learn that Emily’s ex-husband is on the Atlas flight. This husband is not a good guy and Emily has zero contact with him. But he’s coming here to spend time with their daughter. And her daughter is very excited about that, which Emily has mucho conflicted feelings about.
As Emily continues to try and figure out where Atlas is, the FBI invades her radio and tells her to stay the F away from Atlas. Atlas is their focus now. She’s been dismissed. But Emily is not giving up that easily. She’s determined to get Atlas down safe. But to do that, she’s going to have to get around not just the FBI, but the US freaking military!
Now that we’re at the end of the contest, I can confess, this is the script that I was hoping would win. It has a lot of the things I love in a spec script. Airplanes! Contained location. Condensed time frame. An angle into a subject matter we haven’t seen before. I always loved that scene in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind where they’re in the control tower tracking a UFO that’s about to crash into a plane. To create a feature-length version of that? Sign me up!
Was the feature-length version of that a perfect landing? Or an epic Tenerife-like crash for the ages?
Good news.
Bedford is a lot closer to the former than the latter.
This script does a lot of things right but the biggest thing it got right was the mystery. I’ve read a lot of screenplays and seen a lot of movies so I know my way around a plot prediction. But I was STRUGGLING to figure out what the heck was going on here all the way until the last twenty pages.
Usually, when that happens to me these days, it’s rarely because the script is written well. It’s more often because the script is such a mess that it’s impossible to decipher much of anything that’s going on.
But Fattal’s script is purposeful all the way through. He understands his mystery and he understands how to dole out clues, red herrings, side mysteries, and escalating plotlines in a way that makes you want to turn the pages. Which is all this game is really about – is your script good enough to get the reader to keep turning the pages? And this script is!
To give you a little more insight into HOW page-turnable-it is, there are three levels of page-turnability for Scriptshadow. One is that it’s not page-turnable at all. So I stop reading. Two is that it’s “script review page-turnable.” That’s when I’m interested enough to keep turning the pages but if I wasn’t reviewing it, I probably wouldn’t. Three is legit page-turnable. I would keep turning the pages even if I wasn’t reviewing the script. Bedford is the third one.
The thing that Fattal did that really got me was he created four mysteries that were all interesting in their own right but they were different enough that I was desperate to figure out how they connected. Why was Atlas frozen in place? Why was Atlas’s communication so weird? How did a Cessna from England get to Bedford? And who was this angry military type who kept yelling at Emily from the radio?
I needed to see how all those puzzle pieces fit together! That kept me racing through the script all the way til the end. I didn’t even check the internet! Which is RARE when I read a script these days.
I believe Bedford will be made into a movie.
But there are certain things it has to improve in order to get there. Some of them are easy. Some are quite difficult. But the good news is, there’s a path forward to production for this script. How often do we see that here even with professional scripts?!
Let’s start with Crane. Here Emily is going through the strangest craziest series of events that have ever happened to her and have probably ever happened to any ATC controller, yet here Crane is, over on the other side of the room just chilling out! Give this a guy a six-pack of Mountain Dew and a Nintendo Switch and he’s just fine hanging out in his own little world the rest of the night. We need to do something about Crane. His lack of action does not match up with the situation at all.
Next, we have the personal storyline – daughter and absent dad. I commend Joseph for trying to connect the personal story to the plane story. But it just doesn’t feel right. The dad being on the Atlas plane is way too coincidental. And the connection between the daughter and the dad is okay but not nearly as compelling as it could be. We have to rethink that part of the story. It’s too cute, like you can feel the writer wrapping everything up in a perfect bow, which is why it reads false.
Mike.
Mike Mike Mike Mike Mike.
I like the idea of Mike. But Mike has some issues. For one, I still have no idea how he got to the US. So there’s that. Two, Emily is WAY TOO FREAKING CASUAL about poor Mike who LITERALLY has 2 gallons of fuel left in his plane and he’s desperate to land. Yet she turns him into her own personal errand boy, having him fly all over the place looking for clues. It was like, “DUDE! EMILY! GET THIS MAN DOWN ON THE GROUND! HE’S ABOUT TO CRASH!” And why is Mike listening to her?!? He would be way more focused on living. Not every plot beat needs the ultimate ticking time bomb. Maybe Mike has plenty of fuel. He’s just confused as hell about how he ended up in the US.
I kind of like Emily and Mike (via his plane) coming together at the end. But something tells me there’s more we can get out of this moment. Maybe, for example, Mike has to fly into the triangular alien formation to save the plane or something. Having him just safely crash-land nearby was anticlimactic.
The real thing that scares me, though, is the ending. It’s kind of cool but I’m afraid it won’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s better than M. Night’s infamous ending to Signs, where aliens visiting a planet with 80% water realize that water kills them. But I’m not convinced that aliens would need humans to help them triangulate the path back to their planet. I’m not going to say to get rid of that as the ending. But I wasn’t totally buying it.
I’ll wrap this up by saying I like the concept of the “Contained Adjacent” genre. What that means is, you spend MOST OF THE TIME in the contained location. But then, in order to create some variety in the plot, you take them out of that contained location late in the script, like Joseph did here. With that said, I think there’s a version of this ending that needs to end in the control tower. That’s what our hero does best. So let’s put her back in there (think about how Tom Cruise must get in a plane at the end of Top Gun because that’s where he’s most effective).
I definitely dug this script and I’m curious what everybody here thinks as well. Some of you guys give really great notes. I think, together, we can help Joseph solve these problems and turn a “worth the read” into an “impressive.”
Great job, Joseph! Had a lot of fun with this one. It’s worthy of the Mega Showdown Title. :)
Script Link: Bedford
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This one comes from Joseph himself. Try not to get too attached to your concept because there could be a better concept inside of it. Here’s Joseph…
“Here’s a fun story about Wish List (my script about the Amazon driver). It was originally called Extermination and was about two government guys in a post-apocalyptic world that get sent to drive a truck containing an exterminating bomb into the heart of a zombie-infested city. I really wanted to write a contained thriller, and I chose a truck/van to be the contained setting. And it was around Covid, I wanted something to do with viruses, so I put in the whole zombie angle.
But it didn’t feel right, it was too much “fantasy” because it was a post-apocalyptic world (and I’m not great with fantasy), and the story just felt very forced in a lot of ways. So I started rethinking it entirely one day, even though I had already spent so much time outlining it. How do I make it more marketable? Can it be a van in the modern world? How do I add more elements that drive the story forward (i.e. the Amazon packages)?
Then I came up with the Amazon angle. And I loved it, and everybody I pitched it to loved it. Even then I had a hard time throwing away the original idea, because I had spent weeks on the treatment at that point, and I was emotionally attached to a lot of aspects of that story. But I’m glad I redid the whole thing. Because now I’m 4 years into Wish List and many drafts later, and still manage to get eyes on the script and showcase my writing because people love the idea. So I try not to get too attached to the ideas, that way I can better determine what works and have the strength to throw out what doesn’t, even if I already worked super hard on it. This has been a very useful mindset for handling feedback, too.”
