Genre: Indie Comedy
Premise: A lonely journalist finds love and inspiration in a quirky, unlikely manner –covering the misadventures of a young boy’s ‘protest’of an animal rights movement.
About: New Line picked this up. Energy Entertainment and Broken Road Productions will produce. This was Sachs’ first screenplay. The script landed him on the 2008 Black List with 5 votes.
Writer: Adam Sachs (Draft 5/5/08 — 110 pages)

Animal Cruelty is one of those scripts they tell you not to write because it’s not mainstream enough and it’s too weird and quirky and the comedy’s too “intelligent” but you ignore everyone, write it anyway, land yourself on the Blacklist and get enough buzz going that Lionsgate takes interest and then they’re like, “You know what? What do we have to lose?” and the next thing you know your tiny screenplay that never should’ve made it past the first reader is now paying for your new 2000 square foot loft on Venice Beach…. Well, maybe not Venice Beach. But between 11th and 18th street in Santa Monica.

Animal Cruelty is a strange little beast – a munchkin of a satire that pokes fun at both sides of activism. And let’s be honest. Activism is ripe for being poked at. Hell, I’m all for standing up for what you believe in, but there’s definitely a line activists cross. Most of the time, it’s more about the activist than what they’re activing about. Full disclosure: I used to work next to the Federal Building where someone was protesting every single weekend. It made it impossible to find a parking spot! I grew to hate those damn protesters. I even considered protesting their protests. And if I were someone who took initiative, I very well might’ve done that. Which is why I enjoyed Animal Cruelty. It finally allowed me to live a little bit of that dream.

Paul Nemser is 45, balding, and makes his living writing angry articles at the Vanguard Newspaper. Nemser is haunted by his father, a great reporter who won the Pulitzer. When The Vangaurd decides to cover an Animal Testing Laboratory protest, Nesmer sees a chance to write about something meaningful – something that will finally get him recognized. But instead of giving him the story, his boss gives it to the younger better-looking Mark. Nemser seethes but can do nothing.

All the way across town we meet Georgie, a 16 year old kid who’s so smart he dropped out of high school. As he tells his only friend, Rajiv: “I’m an autodidact, Rajiv. Do you know what that means? It means I teach myself. Do you know how I know that word? I taught it to myself.” Georgie drifts around aimlessly, spending most of his time at McDonald’s throwing french fries against the wall for his own amusement.

Lynda, a local reporter who’s abnormally obsessed with Paul McCartney, wants the local Animal Testing Laboratory shut down pronto. Because, like, animals get hurt in there and stuff. So she stages a protest in front of the building that somehow attracts almost everyone within a five mile radius. This hapens to be the same event The Vanguard newspaper was sent over to cover. But as she pounds out phrases like “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy!”, the fry-flinger Georgie is drifting by. Seemingly out of boredom, he yanks off his shirt and writes on his chest, “Pro Animal Testing!” and begins screaming out his own catch phrases, which admit that Lynda is hot but that what she’s saying sucks. For this oh so brief period of time, Georgie becomes the face *for* animal testing. Nemser, who sneaked here against his newspaper’s wishes, sees the potential for a great story.

Nemser follows Georgie home and asks him if he can write a story about him protesting. But since Georgie hates protests, he’s annoyingly appalled by his own protest, and therefore refuses to go along with it. Nemser, glimpsing the end of his career, makes the drastic decision to write the story anyway. It ends up being a huge success that spurns all sorts of controversy. Nemser is catapulted to the top of the reporter totem pole and ordered to do a follow-up. In the meantime, the public reacts by congregating around Georgie’s house and holding up signs that call for his death.

No matter how hard Nemser begs Georgie to continue his protest though, Georgie refuses. He can care less if all those animals are saved. A little later we learn that Georgie’s father was one of those batshit crazy activists, the kind that live for anything that allows you to fight the system. And so instead of raising his son and providing for his wife, his father tied himself to a tree for five years. So no thank you, Georgie says. He won’t be protesting anything…

Or will he?

Animal Cruelty wins points for its original premise alone and most of it is pretty unique. But it’s not without fault. The quirkiness that works so well in the first and most of the second acts, wears thin as we approach the latter parts of the screenplay. I see this a lot with scripts that forgo traditional storytelling in favor of humor or “quirkiness”. Playing everything up for laughs leaves little room to advance the story. And if you don’t have enough story at the beginning of your screenplay, there’s not going to be any at the end either.

Still, it was nice to read something different for once. And Sachs has a unique sense of humor that leaves you laughing most of the time. Lynda’s strange obsession with Paul McCartney was particularly funny. And when Nemser pisses her off by telling her that John was a better songwriter than Paul, the script was running on all cylinders. In this scene, one of the scientists is showing Georgie and Nemser around their testing laboratory:

[scrippet]
INT. HUNTINGDON LAB – LATER
Bergstrom takes Georgie and Nemser on a tour through the lab. Everywhere they go, scientists and ASSISTANTS are packing things into boxes, preparing to leave.

BERGSTROM
(walking and talking)
Here we were developing a drug to treat Alzheimer’s…This was a rat experiment for a novel Parkinson’s treatment…This was a comprehensive monkey trial of a new multiple sclerosis vaccine.

He opens a cage and a MONKEY grabs hold of him.

BERGSTROM (CONT’D)
And this little fellow is named Mr. Gibbs. He’s been with us for nearly a decade, and he’s one of our favorite pals around here. He and I have become very, very close.
(to the monkey)
Say hi, Mr. Gibbs!

An ASSISTANT looks up from his desk a few feet away.

ASSISTANT
Mr. Gibbs died during an experiment yesterday. That’s Boris. Bergstrom doesn’t bat an eye.

BERGSTROM
Say hi, Boris!
[/scrippet]
A great change of pace in a pool of scrips that seem to be written by the same hand. If you’re into stuff that’s a different and are searching for a few laughs, check this one out.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Never forget the power of showing and not telling, especially when it involves a potentially melodramatic backstory revelation. We discussed this in Due Date already. But the ideal way is always to *show* instead of *tell*. Nemser’s dad used to be a great reporter. But instead of Nemser disclosing this to another character, or another character disclosing it to him, we see Nemser sifting through some old black and white photos. And there’s his dad, marching with Martin Luther King. That tells us everything we need to know about him. And we don’t have to endure some cringe-worthy dialogue in the process.

So today we have a review of S. Craig Zahler’s script, “Incident at Sans Asylum.” Zahler is the writer of the number three script on my Top 25 list, the Western, “The Brigands Of Rattleborge.” That script is a town favorite, yet everyone’s terrified to make it. I have no idea why. Show this thing to one A-List actor and they’d die to play the part of Abraham, a character that has the potential to be one of the greatest movie characters of all time. We’re talking Hannibal Lecter territory here. But hey, you guys don’t want an Oscar? That’s cool with me. Anyway , this is one of Zahler’s earliest scripts, written in 1998 while he was still in college. He wrote the script as a directing vehicle and was actually going to shoot the movie for 75,000. I’m leaving the review in the trusted hands of Roger Balfour, a young man whose unique perspective on writing digs all the way to the bone of Zahler’s work. So take it away, Roger.

Genre: Nihilistic Horror
Premise: A group of struggling musicians who work as cooks in an asylum for the criminally insane get locked in with the inmates during a massive thunderstorm. Chaos ensues as the musicians/cooks struggle to escape and stay alive.
About: S. Craig Zahler, writer of the 2006 Black List screenplay, “The Brigands of Rattleborge”, wrote this script which has been developed by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures in conjunction with Vertigo Entertainment. Helmed by Spanish director, Daniel Calparsoro. To be released, one presumes…
Writer: S. Craig Zahler

Caveat lector: Forgive me. I’m going to season this review with references to other horror movies and writers of the genre in order to properly convey what this script accomplishes to do. We’re going to explore the coin of this sub-genre a little and look at the ideas that are reflected on both sides of the coin.

Confession.

I’m one of those struggling screenwriters outside of LA that worships at the stone altar of “The Brigands of Rattleborge”. I live in the Bible Belt. I don’t just surround myself with books that can be categorized as Southern Gothic, I live in the environment. I’m exposed to the Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy flavor grotesquerie every day. It’s part of the atmosphere here.

It’s the temperature.

And I only read it a few weeks ago. But when I finished, I wanted to hold the screenplay up in the air like the baby Simba and shout its ultraviolent majestic grandeur from the precipice.

“Look, some dude wrote a screenplay and he used the word ‘agglutinated’ in one of the prose passages when describing dried blood and brain matter! Fuck studio readers!”

“Rattleborge” was a bizarre and compelling morality play that explored a cycle of bloodshed and violence and bloodlust. It was about revenge. It was about what revenge does to a man’s soul. It was about the consequences of revenge. It was Shakespearean. It was Greek tragedy. It was Grand Guignol. It was Southern Gothic. It was “Unforgiven” if written by Cormac McCarthy. And I loved every fuckin’ word of it.

So, I was foaming at the mouth to read another Zahler screenplay. Here’s a guy who is obviously both a bibliophile and a cinephile. He knows his literature as well as his movies. And the motherfucker can write. So when I found “Incident” in my inbox, I burned through it immediately like a junkie jonesin’ for the rock.

And if the screenplay wasn’t a PDF file on my computer, I would have hurled it against the wall in frustration and disappointment. But, it was a PDF file on my computer and I need my netbook. It’s not very useful to me if it’s in pieces.

Did you expect to be disappointed?

No. I was supposed to be shaken, thrilled. I was supposed to be aroused viscerally and cerebrally. But instead…I was puzzled. I felt like I was attacked by an angry mob of natives on some alien continent where people don’t possess souls, and they tried to cut my limbs off and fuck me in the eye-sockets. And after the initial shock of that faded…I felt empty. Hollow.

But…

But something had slipped under my skin, kept nagging me throughout the day. I kept turning the story over in my head like a rock in a lapidary, trying to find its meaning. Surely, what I just read had to mean something, right?

Zahler is a writer that seems to be interested in eliciting dread. Which I think is an admirable pursuit in the world of Story. Dread is a useful ingredient, a powerful emotion that burrows past a person’s mental walls and pierces the heart like a stiletto fashioned out of ice. The sensation is like being impregnated with a seed of panic and as it grows and blooms and does war against your conscious and subconscious, the war that fights against this revelation can be best described as a paralyzing sensation, a numbness that tries to protect you from the horror that elicited the dread.

Dread pairs especially well with exhilaration.

Horror movies like “Alien” or “The Descent” are good examples of this. Both stories that are more Lovecraftian in nature than most of the intentional adaptations of his work out there.

They manage to explore the concept of Lovecraftian existentialist and nihilistic horror. The realization that man is an infinitesimally small speck in the order of the universe. Or: man is insignificant in the face of the alien, the other. H.P. Lovecraft, a master at eliciting dread, was an atheist who wasn’t scared by the concept of God and the Devil; Angels or Demons. So he created a pantheon of the other, whose very existence, when exposed to man, was capable of driving the individual mad.

Of course, the stories in “Alien” and “The Descent” have different outcomes…

Sure. Ripley is the light that pierces the darkness of the other. She blows it out of the airlock and wins. In “The Descent”, Sarah’s ordeal and exposure to the other drives her mad with a hallucination of freedom, but her dramatic need to be reborn in order to overcome her family’s death is a still-birth attempt at best. She doesn’t make it out of the cave. She’s left trapped in the caves with the other, wrapped in a bundle of raw nerves and reduced to a gibbering psychological state.

But I would argue that both movies are exhilarating. Cathartic even. We faced the abyss, we ran from the abyss, we fought the abyss. When all was said and done, we walked away from the theater and were entertained. No biggie. Just a fun roller-coaster ride of a story. Go on with our lives, rejuvenated for a while by our escapist encounter with the abyss.

So what’s the moral?

Distribute some darkness and dread with that creator’s wand, and pit it against light and hope, toggle in some thrills, and you have a heady potion of adventure. Adjust the contrast knobs if you want the tone to be dark fare, or lighter fare. If done right, manage to thrill an audience both viscerally and cerebrally.

But what happens when dread is the ultimate victor? What happens when dread is your only ingredient?

“Incident at Sans Asylum” happens.

It is not a ride.

It is not escapism.

It is a cold, serrated knife in the gut.

It’s watching a layer of torn skin be flayed from the bone with a potato peeler, and feeling every moment of it.

These characters are not heroes.

They are victims.

And we suffer with them.

So what’s the story?

George is a musician in his mid-twenties who moonlights as a chef at the local asylum. Seems to be a new job for him. His band-mate Max is his second-in-command and they spend a lot of time together, working in the kitchen preparing cafeteria-style meals for the populace of the institution. When we first meet them they’re pissed at a younger, undisciplined drummer of the band, Ricky. Why? Ricky was a no-show for a studio session that they all saved up hard-earned money for because of his questionable taste in women. Ricky also works with them in the asylum as a cook, and most of the humor in the script (which is kept to a minimum) is derived from George and Max making fun of Ricky and his dubious taste in the female gender. We’re also introduced to William, a likable Hispanic employee who works diligently for George as a kitchen grunt and is a bit ostracized by the other guys, especially Max, because he’s not a member of the band.

There’s a simple, naturalistic feel to the scenes and the dialogue. Spare, with the highlights of these scenes being the detail applied to George’s job as a chef. Zahler captures the weird, limanel state-of-being of the struggling artist: George and his band have a gig at a venue where they have to cover an extra set because a scheduled band dropped out at the last minute. Which means their gig is going to run to 2 am. Good news for the band, but George also has to be back at the asylum at 5 am to oversee a shipment of product that is set to arrive.

The details are right. The lack of sleep. The tedium and mundanity that accompanies chopping vegetables or cleaning up blood because the plastic bag that contains meat product ripped and it made a mess everywhere. Pretty ordinary stuff that chef’s deal with everyday, but the fact that they are mentioned in the script gives the scenes and characters a sense of verisimilitude.

This sense of simply being and living and working is shattered when a thunderstorm blows out the generators and fries up all of the electrical wiring in the building.

This means two things: (1) No more lights, and (2) The electronic security doors leading to the outside world no longer operate, and there is no way to open them.

J.B., the main security dude/orderly, needs the cooks to help him escort the inmates back to their cells from the cafeteria before things start heading south. Already, some of these mentally fragile inmates are starting to panic because the thunderstorm interrupted their mealtime and habitual sense of institutionalized routine, and more importantly, there is no fucking light anymore.

So the cooks argue about what they should do, some opting to barricade themselves in the kitchen, while George and Max decide to help J.B.

And of course, things go horribly wrong.

As violence erupts within the darkened walls of the asylum, we get the sensation that some of the alpha’s of this insane-convicted-felon populace have taken over and they have some plans for these cooks who have been preparing meals for them for the past few days.

What about the structure? Does Zahler do his own thing again?

Kind of. Zahler does eschew the traditional, time-tested 3-Act screenplay structure and does his own thing. But I get the sense that he turned to classic stories of the horror genre found in literature and studied what made them work. How they were put together. Hell, they were good enough in that medium, why try to interface it with the Hollywood way?

This is essentially a tale told in 2 Acts. With Act 1 being a 40-page setup; Act 2 plays out like a brutal and tragic 50 page survival mode.

Most comparable movie in structure, theme and style I can think of is “Wolf Creek”.

Let’s get to it already. Was it scary?

It’s pretty fuckin’ terrifying, dudes. Think about it. You’re a kitchen grunt who works in the cafeteria of an asylum for the criminally insane. A dark storm hits and transforms the asylum into a haunted house with no exits and no lights. Several of these inmates are roaming the haunted house. They raid the kitchen, find sharp objects, and begin attacking all the institution employees they can find.

As the characters look for asylum within the *cough* asylum, there’s even shades of zombie horror. Kind of like a dreadful game of hide and seek. They catch glimpses of the pale, naked flesh of the lunatics as they roam the halls. Some are harmless, some attack on whim, others have some kind of fucked up plans for our characters. Except, you know, these ain’t zombies. These are people. There’s nothing supernatural about them.

And that’s the idea. The only monsters in this story are the ones within ourselves. There’s probably nothing more revolting than the depravity and sickness a broken mind is capable of.

The realism and brutality and chiaroscuro murk gives the story a distinctive 70’s cinema vibe.

It sounds pretty good. Why didn’t you like it?

A few reasons which could be chalked up to a matter of taste. I’m not a fan of the genre. I don’t like Nihilistic Horror when it’s followed to its logical conclusion: I don’t like watching violence as it’s committed against a protagonist for the sole purpose of taking away any and all motivation for the protagonist to merely stay alive.

Here’s the deal. George isn’t a hero. He’s a victim. He exists to be broken down and ground into dust.

There’s a key scene that brought to mind Gregg Araki’s “The Doom Generation”. If you’ve seen it you probably already know what I’m talking about. Except this castration is performed with poultry shears instead of pruning shears.

The most disturbing part of the flick is that this is a horror movie where the final coup de grace is the protagonist offing himself. Sure, there’s a character in “The Exorcist” who kills himself. Father Karras kills himself, but he does so because he’s trying to kill the Devil. Even if he was driven mad by the Devil and opted to kill himself, it would be an act that would be seen as a man who was driven mad by a demon and was looking for respite.

George kills himself because he’s been emasculated, both literally and spiritually, by his fellow man. He’s a victim of the violent volition of sick minds, which any human being is capable of, and he refuses to recover after his ordeal because he feels like he has nothing to live for. Even though he survived, he comes to the conclusion that his life is over. George loses the will to live because his sense of peace has been irrevocably violated. There is no more sanctuary for George. His sense of asylum has been stripped away, stolen.

The only escape from the horror and dread is death.

And I don’t like that.

What did you like?

The details and the foreshadowing: The Shakespearean technique of evoking and harnessing storms and weather to parallel the emotions, moods and future of the characters.

I liked that the exposure to the inmates is limited to mealtimes, where cooks are separated from the rest of the institution by a plexi-glass window. At first, we never see any of the inmates. We only hear them being directed through the line by an officer.

In fact, whenever they hear ghastly screams coming from the bowels of the asylum, the cooks are so accustomed to it’s just white noise.

The symbology. Zahler knows what he’s doing. Some interesting stuff going on with violence and images. Particularly an image involving a calf’s head and a decapitated body.

There’s a brazen climatic scene of suggested violence and horror that involves an oven. If the director is capable, this sequence will become part of cult-cinema history.

I like that someone is writing dark, cerebral genre fare other than the Nolan brothers. Stuff that feels like it’d be as much at home in literature as it would be on screen. I’d like to see Zahler take a stab at “Blood Meridian” for Ridley Scott, or maybe even adapt Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” trilogy into an HBO miniseries.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I Learned: Theme, theme, theme. Your choice of theme can either invigorate an audience, or alienate an audience. Nihilistic themes always seem to come out of a dark place, and when followed to their logical conclusion, descend into an even darker place. As storytellers, we have a responsibility when it comes to deciding what kind of story we want to tell. Again, this is a matter of taste, but I like to think that stories of hope are more palatable than stories of despair.

Also – I was reminded of a quote concerning the distinction between horror and terror. Anne Radcliffe wrote, “I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil.“

Boris Karloff put it in simpler terms. Terror is anticipating the monster behind the door. Horror is the sense of shock and revulsion upon seeing the monster. Zahler seems to be a master of both, and uses both techniques impressively. This is an apt distinction for anyone who wants to know the secret to creating suspense.

note: If you know nothing about this script, I suggest you download it before reading anything below. The beginning plays out much better if you do.

Genre: Sci-Fi Dark Comedy
Premise: An alien who lives on Earth in female form searches desperately for a way back to her home planet. Best watch yourself E.T.
About: So on the Holy Grail list of best unproduced screenplays, this is usually mentioned in the top 3. It is said it would have been made had it not been for Men In Black. For a fascinating backstory on the script which chronicles its plight through a series of Hollywood legends, go here.
Writer: Claire Noto

THE TOURIST has always had incredible supporters and incredible detractors. Right from the very beginning it aroused very strong feelings one way or another. People were either very taken by it or felt it was the Anti christ. I still don’t, to this day, really comprehend what all the fuss was about. – Claire Noto

Richard Jenkins plays a college professor who discovers a pair of homeless, illegal aliens living in his New York apartment. But instead of giving them the boot, the lonely introspective Jenkins decides to let them stay. An unexpected friendship begins, dragging Jenkins out of his comfort zone and into the——Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That’s The Visitor. My bad.

Let’s start over. Grace is your average driven, if slightly eccentric, executive at a no-name corporation with more floors than ideas. But almost immediately we sense that something’s off about the chick. She’s constantly distracted and as far as I can tell, not very interested in her work. When her overworked assistant, Marty, pesters Grace about a flurry of messages from someone named “Frogner”, Grace’s unorthodox yet concerned reaction hints at an iceberg of a person we’re only seeing the tip of.

Hot and bothered by the Frogger messages, Grace hops over to a business party with her on-again off-again boyfriend. He tells anyone who will listen that Grace isn’t giving it up. Why he’s sharing this with complete strangers I have no idea. While the eternally-distracted Grace observes the party, on the other side of the room Sideshow Frogner, the bug-eyed over-caffeinated message-leaver, sneaks in and charges over to Grace like a lost dog. He bombards her with requests for business, to which she’s cautiously receptive.

But as Grace and Frogner lock into an intense stare, they see something in each other that freaks them the hell out. Enough to send Frogner racing out of the party. Grace goes chasing after him but obviously, once they get outside, Frogger’s got the advantage when crossing the streets, and easily ditches Grace.

The encounter rattles Grace enough that she makes it a priority to find Frogger at all costs. Over the next couple of days she follows a trail of clues that leads her to a funeral home. Except this isn’t your ordinary funeral home. Behind the walls, through a hidden door, Grace makes her way into a hidden backstage universe. Aliens from all over the galaxy are chatting it up in a dark eerie pub. Grace tiptoes through, shocked but also calm – as if she’s heard about this place. It doesn’t take long for us to figure out why. Grace is really an alien. And these fellows are her alien brethren. It is here, she hopes, that somebody will be able to tell her how to get back to her home planet.

Although Noto doesn’t care to get into some pretty important details – namely how the hell Grace got to this planet and why – she does give us clues. Apparently earth is some sort of galactic armpit of the universe – the biggest criminals and scum of the galaxy are sent here when there’s nowhere else to put them. This is one of the many nonsensical pieces of The Tourist. If these aliens are so bad, why the hell are they spending all their time hiding in the shadows? Why, in all these years, have they done nothing bad to us? I mean if they’re as bad as it gets, the universe must be a pretty fucking awesome place.

Connections she makes in the pub lead Grace to a new target, the elusive Taiga, the only guy who has the means to get off this planet. Hoping to hitch a ride, she begins a desperate search to find him.

The most surprising thing about The Tourist are its moments of unapologetic darkness. Grace walks into houses to find the disembodied eyeballs of a mother and daughter. When Grace visits the alien hangout, one of the aliens not so discreetly slips a tentacle up and into her nether-regions, performing a probe that definitely isn’t for scientific purposes. As all the aliens watch, Grace, who essentially allows it, nears orgasm until someone comes along and obliterates the offending alien. Weird sex runs rampant throughout The Tourist with scenes that are so odd, Dr. Ruth would have a hard time making sense of them. People die having sex. People grow cocoons while having sex. People dream of having sex as giant worms on other planets. I don’t know what else to say. Lots of weird sex going on here. Weird alien sex.

As the script went on, more and more rules are thrown out the window. I found myself getting increasingly annoyed. The last 30 pages were particularly baffling, as seemingly all structure and logic were jettisoned in favor of the most anti-climactic ending in cinema history. Grace is trying to secure a ride home from Taiga but the transport isn’t anywhere even close to nearby, and it’s clear they don’t have time to get to it, erasing any and all suspense about if Grace is going to make it. While this is happening all Grace does is bitch about how much she hates the planet. Then at the last second, she has some half-assed epiphany where she believes she’s bonded with a human. For the first time she’s “conflicted” [/me rolling eyes] At this point the writing and purpose are so sloppy and slapped together, I actually stopped paying attention.

I honestly couldn’t tell you why this script is so popular. There’s some imagination in here for sure. But they’re kidding themselves if they think Men In Black is the reason this didn’t get made. The script’s got major issues, especially the last 40-50 pages. What a mess. In interviews, Noto has practically bragged about her disregard for structure, inspired by the no-rules anything-goes attitude of the European New Wave. I’m not Structure Sammy or anything, but in my experience almost every script that ignores structure completely falls apart in the end. And what do you know? The Tourist completely falls apart in the end.

Noto’s complained that executives have been notoriously cruel to her in dealing with the script, telling her no one would go see the movie. Well I’m sorry to champion the evil empire here but in this case, THEY WERE RIGHT. What really did it for me though was Grace herself. Call me old-fashioned but I’m not about to do jumping jacks for a protagonist that spends the majority of the fucking screenplay whining about how much she hates my planet.

Ugh, I just didn’t like this. I’d designate it as trash if the first act wasn’t so intriguing.

[ ] trash
[x] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Even though I didn’t like this script, I want to focus on the positive because there is a great scene in the beginning. Early on, Grace is at a party and there are 3 separate things going on at the same time. First is her date, who she’s not paying attention to. Second is a handsome man hitting on her. She’s intrigued by the man and their chemistry upsets her date. The third is the mysterious “Frogman”, who comes crashing into the party to close a business deal with her. As we see each thread build, the tension builds along with it. A more inexperienced writer would probably write a straightforward scene that only involved Grace and Frogger. Adding these multiple elements made what could’ve been a boring scene an exciting one (If only she had done this with the rest of the script).

Genre: High School Rom-Com
Premise: A nerd and a cheerleader explore four years of high school as best friends.
About: Landed on the 2007 Black List with 7 votes, I believe this sold last year. It will be directed by controversial director and all around nutball David O. Russel (I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings).
Writers: Chad Gomez Creasy and Dara Resnik Creasy

I was really looking forward to this script. When Harry Met Sally is one of my favorite movies of all time and easily the best romantic comedy ever. So when I heard someone had written a high school version of it, I began banging my head on the wall and angrily muttering, “Why didn’t I think of that??” We’ve seen a million high school movies before, but none which take us through all four years of the experience.

Then I read the first few lines of Aaron and Sara and got really fucking worried. Aaron’s opening scene has him fucking a teddy bear. I thought, “Ohhh noooo. All this hype and another American Pie ripoff?” Fortunately the scene is an anomoly. There isn’t a single one like it in the rest of the script. What we get instead is a simple story about a great friendship that may or may not turn into something more.

We meet Aaron, your typical dorky high school Freshman (who wants to get into Yale), and Sara, your typical smokin hot high school Freshman (who wants to bang the soccer team). The two neighbors are forced to drive to school together and it’s a disaster from the get-go. Aaron is inquisitive and sweet while Sara is cold and cruel. As far as she’s concerned, Aaron is below her. She’s only weathering this ride because her mother told her to. As soon as they get to school, Aaron is just another dork in the crowd.

But as time goes by, being locked up in such a small space forces a friendship to blossom, if only to avoid the 20 minutes it takes to get to school. As they move into Sophomore year, the odd couple quickly become best friends, helping each other through the daily drama of the toughest 4 years of your life. Their best friends, BJ and Jayden, fall for each other quickly, leaving Aaron and Sarah as the 3rd and 4th wheel everywhere they go. It’s a great way to describe them because they’re never apart but they’re never together.

Sophomore year turns into Junior year and Junior year turns into Senior year. They get older, mature, chase guys, chase girls, experience the death of a friend, and hang out for endless hours in Aaron’s basement playing Grand Theft Auto.

When they do chat, most of their conversations revolve around what every high school conversation revolves around: sex. Aaron is saving himself for that perfect girl while Sara has sex with anything that walks. Although a twinge of jealousy surfaces here and there, for the most part whenever they’re involved in a relationship, the other is supportive, with Sarah going so far as to beg Aaron to have sex with his girlfriend. It’s kinda nice since in the end, they want what every pair of best friends want, for the other to be happy.

If I had to wage one complaint against Aaron and Sara, it’s that the years weren’t distinguished enough. Whereas Sophomore year felt different from Freshman year, Sophomore through Senior year pretty much felt the same. Each year of high school is different. Each title has its own distinctive identity. Remember the way the years felt in Mr. Holland’s Opus as they jumped from time period to time period? Granted they had more to work with, but I was looking for that same feel here and never quite got it. I couldn’t even tell you how to fix this but to hit the movie out of the park, it absolutely needs to be done.

But Aaron and Sara gets the relationship part right. These are two best friends who can’t figure out for the life of them that the person they love is right in front of their face.

I don’t know about you but I feel like every high school movie for the past 15 years has been exactly the same. Aaron and Sara provides the kind of twist the teen high school genre desperately needs.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned from Aaron and Sara: Aaron and Sara has an interesting structure in that it basically has 4 acts (the 4 years of high school – duh). In addition, there’s no driving force behind the story. There’s nothing that Aaron and Sara are trying to accomplish other than to experience high school. This doesn’t exactly propel the story forward, like most agents/managers/producers would like a story to do. So why does it still work? That’s a good question and it’s something I’m not entirely sure I know the answer to. My guess is that since we know where we’re going to end up (the end of high school), it allows us to calm down and enjoy the ride. I think it works.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a major volcano in Hawaii is slated to erupt within a week, the scientist responsible for managing the eruption learns that the US military has been hiding a secret on the outskirts of the island that threatens to turn the eruption into a world-ending event.
About: This is an interesting one. This was Michael Crichton’s (Jurassic Park) final book he was working on before he died. The unfinished novel, which is nearly 20 years old, made its way to super-seller James Patterson, who decided to finish it for him. The package recently went to auction this year and sold for 7 figures to Sony. The directors who will helm this film? None other than Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who directed one of my favorite films from 2021, Free Solo. Keanu Reeves is loosely attached to the project but is expected to officially attach soon.
Writer: Michael Crichton and James Patterson
Details: 420 pages

Michael Crichton is responsible for the most high concept movie idea of all time: Jurassic Park.

When you hit it big in Hollywood, you have this moment. That moment becomes bigger than you. It becomes bigger than the industry. You are “THE PERSON” that everyone and everything orbits around.

That moment happened with Crichton after Jurassic Park and, for a good five years there, every one of his books was slotted to become a movie. For some writers, that’s more than they can handle. But for Crichton, he was ready for this moment. Every one of his books was a big idea that felt tailor-made to become a summer blockbuster.

But the problem with having that big breakout hit movie is that it’s hard to live up to. How many writers can write a hit movie and have two, three other stories that will do just as well? The answer is very few. But Crichton gave it his best shot.

Not many people know this but he co-wrote the novel for Twister. That’s two bona fide monster hits there. Reality then caught up with Crichton as his follow-up films, Congo, The 13th Warrior, and Timeline, fizzled.

But that takes nothing away from a master of the “big idea.” Let’s see if his final book, ironically, is the beginning of a comeback.

36 year old John “Mac” McGregor, is the director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. He lives on the big island, in a town called Hilo, which has always been a tricky place to live since it’s right at the bottom of active volcano, Mauna Loa. There have been a couple of times in history where an eruption nearly destroyed the town.

When earthquakes start happening, it’s confirmed that Mauna Loa is going to blow, once again, in a week. Just as John starts preparing for that reality, he’s ushered away by the local military who bring him to a nearby cave.

It’s here that they reveal hundreds of containers of radioactive waste being stored. Mac is enraged that they would be this stupid but it gets oh so much worse. The containers are old enough that they’re starting to splinter. Even trying to pick them up will likely cause them to break.

Oh yeah, and this isn’t just normal radioactive waste. It’s been mixed with herbicide, which makes it insanely easy to spread. In layman’s terms, if these containers were to break, every human being on earth would be dead within four months.

Mac immediately gets to work on a plan to divert the lava as far away from those containers as possible. His plan is to build a wall along the side of the volcano to steer the lava. But then a douchey billionaire shows up with his own plan, creating all sorts of conflict regarding what to do next. They better figure it out soon because the hours are ticking away. Any time now, Mauna Loa is going to blow.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read something other than one of these so-so-so-very-serious Black List scripts. Everything’s so SERRRRIOUUSSSSS on the Black List. So insanely SERRRRIOUSSSSSS.

I don’t know when movies that are made for entertainment got such a bad rap but imagine the alternative? All these SEERRRRIOUUUSSS movies. Who comes away from those feeling anything other than bummed out? We have enough bum-outy things going on in the world. Movies should be there to make us feel better!

Which is exactly what today’s movie – err… book – is about. I nearly said ‘movie’ because this novel is written like a movie. There are 108 chapters here. In other words, each chapter is insanely short. Crichton and Patterson did this so that each chapter would read like a scene.

In the spirit of the high-concept idea, Crichton makes a decision here that every high-concept writer faces the choice of making. Which is whether to add a “multiplier” or not. A “multiplier” is when you take a big idea and add a similar big idea that “multiplies” the scope of the concept.

To understand this, let’s note what this idea looks like without a multiplier. Without a multiplier, this is a BIG ERUPTION movie. You could’ve even made it a “super eruption” which I hear is something certain major volcanos are capable of which could end mankind. That would be a big idea. But there wouldn’t be a multiplier in it. The concept is told to you straight away.

Here, we get the multiplier of the nuclear waste containers. I didn’t go into it in the plot but, basically, the herbicide acts as a virus whereby if birds or insects come in contact with it, they can easily spread it to other places. Which is why the entire planet would be in danger.

But the multiplier here is those containers at the bottom of the island. That’s what elevates this idea into something that feels BIGGER. With high-concept ideas, that’s what you should be looking for. You should be looking for any elements that make your idea BIGGER.

With that said, there’s a way to use multipliers and there’s a way not to use them. If I wrote a movie about dinosaurs and then, at the end of the first act, I introduced aliens, sure, by the letter of the multiplier law, this would be a “multiplier.” But for multipliers to work, there has to be an elegant or clever connection between them, which there was here.

Hawaii is a major military base for the United States. It makes sense that they would secretly store nuclear waste out there. And, for those of you hemming and hawing about why in the world would the US place nuclear waste at the bottom of a volcano, Crichton actually spends a good portion of the story explaining it and it made perfect sense (it essentially comes down to the government trying to cover its ass by hiding this stuff away).

Another thing I liked about this book was that it created a world-ending event that had nothing to do with nuclear bombs. When you’re writing these REALLY BIG ideas, you get lazy, and you go with the lowest-hanging fruit (nuclear bombs!). Writers have been using them for decades now.

Push yourself!

Come up with something fresh and new, like Eruption did. I’ve never seen this particular combination of concepts before and it was really fun.

My only pushback on the novel is that these ideas tend to have a “worth the read” ceiling. They focus so much on the plot and the bells and whistles that the characters rarely resonate. If you’re going to write one of these, put some extra work into the characters because if you can elevate a high concept to a double-worth-the-read or even an impressive, it’s like discovering plutonium. It’s a rarity and it will make your script unstoppable.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of my favorite phrases in screenplays is, “It’s better if I show you.” When the military picks up Mac to explain to him that this impending eruption is actually much worse than he realizes, he asks, “Why?” Their response: “It’s better if I show you.” From there, we get to see the actual containers. How fragile they are. A demonstration of what happens when an insect interacts with the herbicide. We SEE all this. That SEEING is our golden example of SHOW-DON’T-TELL and it’s so much more effective than a character just doling out exposition dialogue.