Genre: Sneak-Into-Disney-World-And-Don’t-Tell-Anyone Genre
Premise: While on a family trip to Disney World, a man finds out that he’s lost his job. As the reality of this situation starts to hit him, he begins to see the famous park in a dark, twisted way.
About: Escape From Tomorrow debuted at Sundance where it quickly became a hot ticket for its unique backstory: the writer-director shot the film in Disney World and Disney Land without Disney’s knowledge. The buzz grew because everyone assumed that this would be the only chance to ever see the movie. How would Disney ever allow it to be released to the public? But after four months of lawyers combing through the film, they decided that even though many of Disney’s famous characters and landmarks were used, Disney wouldn’t be able to win a lawsuit (due to complicated legal terms like “fair use” that I can’t even begin to explain). As the film industry waited for Disney to roar, they never did, deciding instead to remain silent. The assumption was that any legal threat would bring more attention to the little indie film. Their position was that it would be ancient history within a few weeks if they just ignored it. They may have been right. The film made $66,000 in 30 theaters this weekend, for a $2000 average per theater. That’s low for a limited release. By comparison, Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine had a $102,000 average per theater on its opening weekend. For all the pub this film is getting, that’s surprising. Then again, it was also released on VOD (something I only learned AFTER I laid down $28 for two people), so that will probably determine if the film was a sound investment or not.
Writer: Randy Moore
Details: 90 minutes
I’m always telling you guys to limit your scripts to 110 pages. And if you have a comedy or a thriller, you should probably be closer to 100. You would think then, that I’d be happy to see a movie with a 90 page script. That means the story’s going to move even faster, right!? Not exactly. You see, 90 minutes is the minimum running time a movie must be to play in theaters (I think the actual number is 88 minutes). So when I see that, I subconsciously think that the filmmakers/writers didn’t have enough story for a feature film, and just padded their script with a bunch of filler to meet that minimum requirement.
There are exceptions. If you have something really contained with a low character count (“Buried,” for example) 90 minutes/pages might be just right. But Escape From Tomorrow had a family in Disney World. That story should’ve been longer. This was a prime candidate, then, for Padding Nation. But I was still hoping the film would prove me wrong.
Escape From Tomorrow introduces us to Jim, a father of two who’s on the last day of his trip to Disney World. Jim doesn’t seem to be the happiest guy to begin with, so when he gets a call from his company to inform him that he’s fired, it only adds fuel to his depression fire.
Naturally then, you’d expect to see this depression played against the happiest place on earth. And you’d be right. After the family goes on a few rides, Jim’s focus quickly becomes these two really young French girls (we’re talking 14-15 years old) who are frolicking around with barely any clothes on. Jim’s able to split from his wife by taking one of his kids, and follows the girls around to all the rides. The girls appear to notice him, and maybe even like the attention, but Jim can only get so close before his nagging wife keeps reappearing to nag some more.
What follows is a whole lot of nothing. We’ll go on a ride. Jim will watch the girls. Then his son will throw up. Jim will meet another mom, go to her room and have sex with her, even though it isn’t clear whether it really happened or not. Jim finds himself in the center of Disney World being held hostage by a crazy German scientist who turns out to be a robot. He’s shown images of a flight simulation and a naked woman. Jim loses his daughter, who he later finds out has been sorta kidnapped (I say “sorta” because she’s given back without any trouble).
Oh, and then there’s the ending (spoiler alert)! Jim succumbs to the anemically set-up “cat flu” and dies in the bathroom of his room! Only to show up again, alive and well, with that naked woman we’d intermittently seen jump cuts of throughout the movie (for no discernable reason of course). My friends, if you thought Upstream Color was too mainstream, then boy have I found the movie for you.
Okay, before I get pissed off about the storytelling here (and I am going to get pissed off), I have to give Randy Moore a TON of credit. He did the impossible. He broke into Hollywood. If you’re a reader of this site, you’re hopefully racking your brain every night to try and find a way into this exclusive club (at least I hope you are). In order to do it, you gotta write/make something great, inspired, clever, controversial or all of the above.
If you can find a way to break the rules in an interesting way, to create an excited discussion around your film or script, then the doors to Hollywood will open right up. Moore figured out a way to do that. Illegally filming a movie on the hallowed grounds of Disney World, a movie that smashes the very image the company likes to portray, was genius. It really was. One of the easiest ways to get people to discuss your film/script is to find an ironic slant. And what’s more ironic than an evil, twisted Disney World trip? And then to shoot the film in black and white? Stripping the Mouse House of the color they so desperately use to lure everyone in? Genius!
And when I did some research on Moore, I found out other good things. He worked his BUTT off to make this movie over the last three years. The first thing he did was come up with the idea. But here’s why Moore is where he is and you’re still sucking up black mold from your 400 square foot bachelor pad in Burbank – HE ACTUALLY WENT OUT AND MADE HIS IDEA. He didn’t stop at the concept point. He went to Mandy.com and found his crew. He planned meticulously for how he was going to pull off the shoot without Disney knowing. I mean, the guy went out and did it. And as crazy as it sounds, that’s the only thing that separates the successful and the non-successful people in this business. Some just talk about it and dream about it. The others GO OUT AND DO IT. And for that reason, I shall respect Randy Moore and others like him regardless of if I like or dislike their films.
But (oh, come on, you knew it was coming) I was SHOCKED to find out what I found out about Moore. You see, I had assumed this whole time that we were dealing with a filmmaker only who had a vision for a film but no money to hire a screenwriter. So he just did the best he could and scribbled out a bunch of scenes in order to get his movie made.
Then I learned that Randy Moore was a longtime [albeit unsuccessful] screenwriter?? That he was a reader and did coverage for people? That he consulted on scripts??? That blew me away because there isn’t a shred of ANYTHING good in this script whatsoever. If you stripped away the movie and read this script on its own, without a question it’s a “what the hell did I just read?” It’s that bad.
Let me try and break down some of the problems here. NOTHING LOGICAL HAPPENS. There is no cause and effect. In other words, one thing does not lead to the next. Random things just happen and you’re expected to go with it. Oh, our main character has sex with some woman he meets while his son waits in the next room. Oh, there’s a naked woman who keeps appearing on the screen and then in the end, the re-birthed Jim goes to Disney World with her. Oh, there’s a break-out of “cat flu” on the grounds (what the hell is cat flu????). Oh, a robot scientist locks Jim up (???????). Oh, Jim gets into a spat with a large, wigged man in a wheelchair. This film was built on set-ups that NEVER got a payoff (how can you screw that up? Setups and payoffs are some of the easiest things to do in screenwriting!).
The only narrative focus used here are these 14 year-old French chicks. That’s the only thing pulling the story forward – Jim’s pursuit of them. But their inclusion is so thin (we don’t know anything about them – they might as well have been carrots and Jim a mule) that we don’t care if he gets them or not. So they only seem to be there so we can see more places in the park and pad the story with more scenes (remember what I said about those 90 pages?).
There was a scene, when Jim’s daughter is “kidnapped” by a witch, where I thought, “Okay, this kind of makes sense.” We’re in Disney World. There are witches in this world. He’s going insane so maybe this is or isn’t happening. I can make some sort of connection there. If there was more of that, maybe the story might have actually been interesting. But instead we have cat flus and huge men with bad wigs on wheelchairs and the Epcot Center ball blowing up because it’s a fun special effects shot, things that don’t seem to have anything to do with Disney World.
I mean, coming up with a more cohesive story that still allowed Moore to play around with Jim’s insanity wouldn’t have been that difficult. Have him lose his family early. They go off one way, him the other, and the narrative engine is him trying to find them again. If you want to get trippy, maybe he starts to question if he ever had a family – if they weren’t a part of his imagination. Or his wife’s back at the room and he loses his kid and is so terrified of his wife’s reaction, that he decides to look for him himself. Or, if you really want to get wild, start by having Jim wake up in a strange room with a dead girl (the French girl?). No idea how he got there. He goes back to his family, sneaks in before they wake up, and must pretend like nothing’s wrong on their last day at Disney World, all while Disney guards become more and more suspicious of him and seem to be following his family everywhere. Things get really bizarre when he sees the impossible – the French girl, out and about, still alive.
Yeah, I’m not asking for awards for these ideas, but give us SOME sort of narrative thrust so we’re not randomly stumbling through a world with no rhyme or reason. That kind of thing is interesting for about 7 minutes before the audience gets impatient and wants a reason to stick around.
I suppose this kind of thing might work for David Lynch fans who are into trippy unconventional plots, but from what I’m hearing, even Lynch fans are calling this movie random and pointless. And that’s not a good sign because that’s the only audience that’s going to go for this. Again, I commend Moore for coming up with this idea and generating so much buzz. But the screenplay for this was so disappointing, I can’t possibly endorse it. I just can’t. It was so very bad. ☹
[x] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You are not as good as you think you are. I don’t care if you’re a script reader, a script consultant, or if you’ve sold a script – ALWAYS GET FEEDBACK! Always! Because the world doesn’t see your story the same way you see it in your head (ESPECIALLY stories like this, where you’re playing with reality). You need that outside perspective so you can identify the faults in your script and fix them. “Escape” could’ve become a classic if it was actually good. But it appears Moore never got any feedback on the script.
What I learned 2: Even “trippy” scripts need structure. You can’t use the excuse, “Well, it’s supposed to be weird” to explain away a wandering plot and wall-to-wall strangeness. Create the boundaries of your world first, then you can play within them.
