Genre: Action
Premise: In an apocalyptic future, a woman rescues the five wives of her insane leader, and tries to take them to her childhood home.
About: George C. Miller has been trying to make this movie FOREVER. With Miller getting older, it was looking like it wasn’t going to happen. He finally scraped together $150 million though to get his dream film finished. The movie debuted this weekend and took in 42 million dollars, a respectable sum, but not enough to defeat a group of crooning women. That’s right, Pitch Perfect 2 took in 65 million dollars.
Writer: George C. Miller (he was the only writer on the draft that I read)
Details: 120 minutes
They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
That definition has now been retired.
The definition of insanity is George Miller.
And I mean that in the most glorious way.
I read this script almost three years ago and I remember thinking, “This is the best written chase in the history of cinema.” But even what I read on the page could not possibly prepare me for what I saw on the screen this weekend. Miller didn’t just run with his chase. He fucking stashed the thing into a nuke blender and created the second Big Bang.
Fury Road’s story is both simple and complex (remember, we’re talking about an insane person here. Many things you read in this review will contradict themselves). The simple part is that this woman, Furiosa, a dependable driver in a post-apocalypitc town run by a madman named Immortan Joe, decides to ditch her city and head back to the town she was kidnapped from as a child (the Green Place). Immortan Joe then sends his entire brigade of cars to stop her.
We have a clear goal (get to the Green Place), urgency (they’re being chased the whole time), and stakes (death). And this is where the complexity seeps in. Furiosa has kidnapped five drop-dead gorgeous women who breed babies for Immortan Joe. She doesn’t like that the five sirens are being enslaved and wants to bring them along. Almost all of these sirens are pregnant.
Now you may be saying, “Well wait a minute. Where the hell is Mad Max?” Ooh, we’re going to get all sorts of into that in a bit. But basically, Max has recently been kidnapped by Immortan’s clan, the War Boys, and is now being used as a “blood bag.” Lots of people in this town have janky blood and need to be constantly pumped with healthy blood to stay alive.
One of these pale-as-a-sheet boys is Nux, who really really really wants to join the chase for Furiosa. But he won’t survive without blood. Hence he comes up with a plan to chain Max to the front of his car and use him as a constant influx of blood during the chase.
As you can imagine, Max eventually gets free, teams up with a tepid Furiosa and the sirens, and the group tries to get to the Green Place together. It’s not without its share of challenges though. Out here in the nowhere lands, there are NUMEROUS tribes and clans, all with their own types of cars and styles, determined to take Furiosa’s team down.
Let me just start by saying this is probably going to be my favorite movie of the year. This is unparalleled filmmaking here. You can tell that this is the movie George Miller originally envisioned in his head 30 years ago but only had 1/10th the budget to bring it to life. Well, he finally got 10/10ths of his budget and the result is magnificent. Almost everything is done practically. The style is unlike anything at the movies right now. It’s imaginative. It’s bold. It takes chances that lesser filmmakers wouldn’t even dream of.
But the film is not perfect because the screenplay is really strange. First of all, you have Furiosa. If it was just her and these sirens trying to get to this land of hers, everything would’ve been a lot smoother. Instead, we have this weird Max subplot where he’s literally silent for the first 50 minutes of the movie, strapped to the front of this car, watching everything happen around him. Mad Max, the character who’s name is in the title, HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FIRST 50 MINUTES OF THIS MOVIE.
In fact, as crazy as it sounds, you could take Max out of this movie and barely anything would change. This isn’t Max’s movie. It’s Furiosa’s. So how the hell did that happen?
Well, here’s my theory. We all know that Miller’s been trying to make this movie forever. He’s had near-starts maybe a dozen times, many of them with Mel Gibson.
When Mel got too old to play the part, Miller started searching for younger actors to play Max, and that carousel went on for awhile without success. Finally, he decided to give up on Max and build a new character to center the movie around, Furiosa. That, for whatever reason, got him a green light, but then at some point somebody wised up and said, “We can’t have a Mad Max movie without Max,” and rising star Hardy was cast.
However, the script was already written and Charlize was cast. So how the hell did Miller infuse Max in the story? This is how. And this is why Max seems to always be on the outskirts of a plot that clearly favors Furiosa.
Now I happen to know a couple of people on the production of this film who confirmed exactly why this was a problem. According to them, both Charlize and Tom were pissed off at the fact that the other thought it was THEIR movie. And they were completely justified. Charlize’s character’s the one who’s driving the plot. Tom’s character has his name in the title of the movie. A series of carefully worded conversations needed to be had with each actor to convince them that THEY were in fact the star and not the other way around.
This speaks to a problem that I’ve been preaching to screenwriters forever. Unless it’s a team-up scenario (Safe House) stay far away from the dual-protagonist screenplay. It’s just too hard to pull off and you’re always going to be struggling to find that balance between each character.
So why does the movie still work despite this flaw? Because the chase scenes here were the single greatest chase scenes in the history of cinema. If you have something in your script/movie that is the single greatest in history, your script/movie can survive a lot of flaws.
This is the same thing I say to writers who point out that When Harry Met Sally had no plot, no goal, little structure, and basically followed two people sitting down and talking about nothing for 2 hours. That’s all true, but When Harry Met Sally also contained the best dialogue in the history of romantic comedies. Hence, it was able to overcome these issues.
So what changed between the draft that I read of Fury Road and the final movie? Not much. They gave Furiosa an amputated arm for some reason, I imagine because it gave her a little more to play with as an actor. Plus she has a mechanical arm that looks cool now.
Nicholas Hoult’s character, Nux, got a more developed part. I barely remember him in the script but here he gets to come over to the good guys, strike up a relationship with one of the sirens, before redeeming himself in the end. My guess is that the studio was always unhappy with the fact that there’s no love story between Max and Furiosa (a super bold move on Miller’s part) and they wanted a love story somewhere. Hence, they created the Nux love story.
The last thing about the script that drove me crazy was the ending. And this keeps Fury Road from becoming a true classic. The entire movie is geared towards getting to the “Green Place.” However, once they get there, they find out that the place is dead. It’s no longer there.
So what do they do? Max decides that they should simply… go back!
I’m sorry but WHHHHAAAAA???? We spent the last 100 minutes getting to this place and now the last 20 minutes are going to be about going right back??? Um, no. No no no no no noononojoajono. NO GEORGE MILLER! You had something amazing on your hands here. Why couldn’t you have come up with a better ending!!!!???? Anything would’ve been better than going right back where you started.
So did that mean the ending sucked? No. The ending was saved by the same reason the whole movie was saved. Because the chases were so freaking spectacular that you forgot all about the story. I mean, there is a guy in one of the cars CHAINED TO A FUCKING GUITAR that he is playing for the ENTIRE MOVIE. There are gunners who SWING FROM 50 FEET TALL SWINGING STICKS, grabbing our heroes. There’s a buzzsaw truck. There is a tuck with a bulldozer mounted on it. I mean, how can you not forget about story when that’s happening?
I guess I’m just selfish. I wanted my Australian Desert Cake and to eat it too. Still, even with these weaknesses, Fury Road is a visual feast and the must-see blockbuster of the year. I even saw it in 3-D, which I never do, and the extra four bucks was worth it. I implore you to do the same.
Movie Rating
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
Screenplay Rating
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Stay away from the dual-protagonist story unless it’s a team-up movie. There are movies where it has worked, yes, but it usually doesn’t, as a story naturally wants to wrap itself around a single hero.
I hope you’re working hard on your Scriptshadow 250 entry. As of this moment, I’m allowing you to take a break to weigh in on yet another batch of…. AMATEUR OFFERINGS!
Title: Insatiable
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a law student’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes from a truck stop diner, he suspects a shady trucker is to blame. But as he races to save her life, he discovers that the only thing more terrifying than her captors is the reason she was taken.
Why You Should Read: I need the help of the ScriptShadow community! I like scary things and enjoy a good horror film. I’ve been writing for quite some time and have advanced in some of the more well known contests including Nicholl. INSATIABLE was a semifinalist in Austin in 2011. A revised version was a finalist in ScreamCraft last summer and a semifinalist in Page. It has received some positive feedback, yet here it sits on my laptop. My question is this — is the story worthy of a movie? Can it get over the hump? Is the script worth revising or should I consider it a building block, leave it on my laptop, and move on? Please help!
Title: Hell Singers
Genre: Action/Horror
Logline: Victor Kalas and Chris Sheridan are Hell Singers, members of an elite secret service that uses scientific precision to quietly eliminate vampires in New York City. When Chris and his fiancee are attacked and turned, he sets out on a vengeful quest to find the vampires responsible, while Victor is hot on his tail with a direct order to kill him.
Why You Should Read: Assuming you’re still reading this after getting past the word “vampires” in the logline, Hell Singers is like a James Bond film set in the vampire subgenre, with a hint of noir. It’s pretty cool, why not give it a shot?
Title: Three or Out
Genre: Dark Comedy
Logline: In the final days of a yearlong deadline to either improve his life or end it, a sheltered mama’s boy, with nowhere else to turn, appoints a would-be criminal as his new life coach.
Why You Should Read: March 9, 2012, a day dubbed as “the Jai Brandon experiment,” Carson reviewed a script of mine titled, “The Telemarketer.” — When I originally wrote that screenplay, I thought “entertainment value” outweighed plot, structure, “rules,” or anything else you want to throw out there. I was a screenwriter with all of 18 months on the job and thought I had this craft figured out. I was confident in my ability to entertain, though I never made claims that The Telemarketer was “better than every script sale out there,” or “better than some of the classics that have graced our movie theaters for years.” I wasn’t ever that clueless. However, I did think the story could hold my readers’ interest throughout.
Boy was I wrong.
The most memorable feedback, to me, wasn’t even about the script. What stuck with me the most were comments along the lines of “I put this down at page XX.” Or “I bailed after page XX.” It sucked to fail at the very thing I thought I could accomplish.
Since that time, I’ve read tons of screenplays and penned another unconventional script that never went anywhere. Enough is enough. I wanted to prove to myself that I had the discipline to follow the rules. As a struggling actor, I also wanted to create a story that would be relatively easy to produce, with me as one of the leads. I decided to use the central idea behind The Telemarketer – as well as a couple of scenes from that script – and write a dark comedy called Three or Out. Hopefully this time I succeed in accomplishing what I failed to do earlier: hold my readers’ interest with a compelling and conventionally structured screenplay.
Title: The Shadow
Genre: Action/Crime
Logline: A medical student busts a hit man known as The Shadow out of the hospital to help her get revenge on the man responsible for her sister’s death.
Why You Should Read: I’m a Canadian author and screenwriter, and dedicated cinefile with a affection for horror, science fiction, action and crime dramas. I’m influenced by filmmakers such as Luc Besson, Tony Scott, David Lynch, Robert Rodriguez and David Cronenberg, and bow down to the screenwriting awesomeness of people like Quentin Tarantino, Diablo Cody, John Logan, the Coen Brothers and the one-and-only Shane Black.
The Shadow is one to read because it showcases a female lead that is both smart (she’s a doctor!) and bad-ass(she get trained by a stone-cold hit man!), and uses both to extract revenge for a transgression NOT motivated by a personal sexual assault (let’s face it this is overdone and in most cases simply exploitive) or lost love. There’s a lot of blurring between the “good” and “bad” guys, and an action-fuelled examination of the many layers of grey that people have to work through in terrible situations without betraying their personal morals or losing their humanity. Enjoy!
Title: Heart Storm
Genre: Action/Adventure
Logline: A tough nurse and a bumbling policeman have two hours to get a transplant heart across a chaotic city as a hurricane makes landfall around them.
Why You Should Read: This is my latest script and it’s a big budget blockbuster of the kind that we’ve been debating on Thursdays. I challenged myself to sum it up and ended up with, “Get a heart through a hurricane.” That sounds like fun to me. I believe this is original enough to have a chance at getting made, and if the people who say that’s impossible are correct, then I’m happy to stand by this script as a sample. Thanks.
Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.
Genre (from writer): Euro Horror
Premise (from writer): A Transylvanian Countess struggles to conceal her dark inheritance from
two investigators when she finds herself drawn to a bereaved English girl. A love
letter to European vampire cinema of the 1970s.
Why You Should Read (from writer): Because I’d love to see Carson plunge into the hypnotic, eroticized world of Euro Horror! Sure, LET US TOUCH THE SUN is a zillion miles and at least 40 years removed from multiplexes and opening weekends; but I’d like to think it can find an audience among the fanatical followers of dvd labels such as Blue Underground, Redemption and Shameless. Indeed, LET US TOUCH THE SUN was my attempt to write something I would purchase myself from one of these labels, a film possessed by its mysterious female vampire, unerring sense of place, and all-pervasive sensuality. —The script also represents my learning and assimilation of craft techniques over the past four years (I’ve been working on other projects in that time, but nevertheless this one has been through 100+ iterations!) Certainly, its pages incorporate elements I probably wouldn’t utilize again in a hurry; but ultimately I hope the reader leaves with something not dissimilar to the feeling expressed by Linkthis83 last time around: “… I’m adrift in realms, and being guided towards moments where I’m privy to exchanges and happenings that once all these moments are totaled I will have experienced something that I can neither quite describe nor possibly express in a manner that exhibits understanding… but a knowing that something occurred because I felt it… and struggle to define it.”
Writer: Levres de Sang (selected dialogue from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872)
Details: 102 pages
Scriptshadow Nation has finally been heard! If I had a dime for every time someone asked me to review amateur entry “Let Us Touch The Sun,” I’d have a big jangling jar full of dimes to take to the grocery store to put in that coin machine, which would then return 20% of my money and give the other 80% to orphans and spit out a special receipt which stated that if I did not cash the receipt within 90 seconds, I not only wouldn’t be able to receive my funds, but I would now owe the supermarket money.
I’m not going to lie. I’m a little scared here. I’m not entirely sure what “Euro Horror” is and I’ve never read a script before that included selected dialogue from another source, much less a source from 140 years ago! I feel like Snoop Dog walking into Carnegie Hall. But as has been the case in the past, you can experience a lot of great things when you go out of your comfort zone, so let’s see if Let Us Touch The Sun does so for me……
It’s 1978 and Countess Valerie Kristeva is under suspicion for the disappearance of four young women. Detective David Chang from America and Inspector Rollin from Interpol are closing in on Valerie’s trail of death, but there’s no way to connect her to these women. It’s gotten so weird that Rollin has come up with this cockamamie idea that Valerie might be a vampire!
Valerie, of course, is a vampire, and not a very patient one. She has a weakness for young women and her latest target is a beautiful 19 year-old hottie named Malika. Valerie invites Malika on a voyage across the sea and when you’re 19 and a beautiful woman invites you to travel the world, how can you possibly say no?
While Valerie plots her seduction of young Malika on the boat, David Chang and Inspector Rollin are off following their respective leads in the killings of the previous girls. Valerie will eventually take Malika home to her castle, where she’ll either turn her into vampire lunch meat or Malika will finally figure out that it’s a little weird a random woman has invited her to a castle and run the hell out of there.
This is going to be a tough review because I love how much Levres has contributed to the site. He’s an invaluable part of the daily conversation here at Scriptshadow. But I’d be doing a disservice to him if I reviewed the script with kid gloves and it sounds like Levres understands that this script is a little… offbeat. So I’m going go at these notes like I would any other script and Levres can determine if they’re relevant to what he’s trying to do or not.
I’ll start by saying, I could see this movie in my head. Levres has a very distinct style that echoes a 1970s casualness, an almost presumptuous pace that assumes you’ll spend the rest of your day sipping a coffee in the park and then writing in your diary. There is a patience to the story and boy is that brave in this day and age. I commend Levres for it.
But it should be noted that this style is hard to make work no matter what era you’re in. A story is a story is a story, and stories need to move. If Let Us Touch The Sun were a blender, it would be turned to the lowest setting, and I had trouble waiting for my drink to be ready.
The CAA coverage department’s first note of Let Us Touch The Sun would likely be: “Overwritten.” And I wouldn’t argue with that. A quick look through the pages and here are some words and phrases I pulled out: Photogravure, Casa Angola, Cossack style, Foster Grants, Noh mask, perspex screen, slimline Dunhill, somnolent lapis lazuli, afga c60 cassette,
I don’t mind a flourish here and there but when there are a 100+ words I’ve never seen before in a screenplay, or that I’ve seen infrequently enough that I have to read them twice to place them, that can take its toll on a read. I like to enjoy a script, not work for it. And too much of the writing here made me work – squinting through the fog of prose to discern what was really being said.
Indeed by page 50, I was only understanding around 60% of the information on the page. For example, I didn’t understand why Valerie was waiting to turn Malika into a vampire. Why not just turn her into one right away? To be honest, I didn’t even know where they were going on their trip. I know that information is in the script somewhere but that’s the danger of stressing purple prose over clarity, is that the reader is more likely to miss important details.
And that’s how this read. Every 10 pages, I felt like I understood the story less instead of more. I knew there was an internal logic to the plot and I knew that Levres knew where he was going. But the fog-like prose really made it hard for me to keep up. I feel guilty about this and I considered going back and re-reading the script to fill in those gaps but I realized that the average reader isn’t going to do this, so I can’t either.
On the story side, I thought Levres could’ve done more with the detectives. Here we had Valerie on the boat with Malika for a majority of the script and the two detectives were halfway across the world doing their own thing. I wanted them to be closer. I wanted Valerie to feel that pressure, of them putting the pieces together. And really, I wanted there to be only one detective. Having two was confusing and spread the inspection storyline too thin.
What about putting the inspector on the boat with them (I know he starts out there but then he leaves early on)? And actually, if we’re using yesterday’s article as a guide for how to improve a screenplay, what about making the victim and the inspector one and the same?
So you make the Inspector a woman, the female version of Michael Douglas’s character in Basic Instinct. Valerie, who would now play the Sharon Stone black widow character, invites (the now older) Inspector Malika on the boat trip to question her about the missing girls. The two then engage in a twisted game of deception where the lines keep crossing.
That’s off the top of my head but still, I guess I’m looking for ways to beef this story up. Everything here comes across so subtle that too much tension is left on the table.
In Levres’ defense, this is not a “screenplay friendly” movie. It’s clearly stylized in a way that only film can capture, like the difference between reading a Terrance Malick screenplay and seeing a Terrance Malick movie. So that has to be factored in here. Still, I think the script is focused more on imagery than story and when I sit down and read a script, I want a good story.
Screenplay link: Let Us Touch The Sun
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s a famous story about an agent who told a screenwriter client of his that his script was “too smart.” And that makes for a funny story but I understand what he meant. Hollywood isn’t looking for high art, perfect prose, or the painting version of a screenplay. They’re looking for a great story. Let me repeat that. THEY’RE LOOKING FOR A GREAT STORY. And if anything in your script takes precedence over that, they’re likely to dismiss it. Here, it seems like Levres is more interested in how his script reads than how his story is told. Strip away all the prose here and ask yourself if the story mechanics (what happens and when it happens) are compelling enough. I think everything’s happening too slowly, even for an inherently slow film, and that more plot can be packed into the pages. Of course, this isn’t a genre I understand well so I’ll gladly leave the final decision in Levres’ hands! I wish you the best of luck, Levres, and keep commenting!
Scriptshadow 250 Contest Deadline – 78 days left!
So the other day I was reading a script and while it wasn’t bad, it was missing something. It took me a good 60 pages to figure out what it was, but when I did, I realized how much better the script could be IF the writer became aware of the problem. So what was missing?
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
Connective tissue is the way the individual storylines and individual characters in your script link up. This is where you show your mettle as a writer. You want to connect and interweave as many story threads as you can so that everything works together. Connective tissue is the difference between having tortillas, lettuce, cheese, and beef, and having a taco.
To use a simple example, let’s say your story takes place at a barbershop. Like in most movies, you’ll probably have a love story. That gives us two story threads. The stuff that happens at the barbershop and the stuff that happens in the love story.
Well, wouldn’t it better (and easier) if you could connect these two threads together? Why not make the love interest work at the barbershop with our main character? Or make her the daughter of our hero’s boss? Or make her a businesswoman who’s trying to buy the barbershop?
Why would these connections make the script better? Well, when you connect story threads, then something you do in one thread will AFFECT the other thread, sending ripples through the entire story as opposed to just one part of it.
Let’s say, for example, that the love interest is accused of stealing from the register and gets fired from the barbershop. Furious for being accused of something she (supposedly) didn’t do, she expects our Hero to leave with her. But he doesn’t want to leave because it’s a good job and he likes working here. It’s a sticky situation without an easy solution.
Contrast that with an unconnected storyline, where the love interest works at, say, Macy’s. If she gets fired there, it doesn’t affect our hero in nearly as personal of a way. He consoles her and they move on. The connected situation clearly gives you more drama.
The amateur script I mentioned at the beginning was about a kid who plays for his college basketball team. Because he’s broke, he begrudgingly takes a job managing the books for his criminal father, who’s a local drug kingpin.
The script follows these storylines separately. Over in one lane we have Hero leading his team up the standings. And in the other, Hero struggles through an awkward relationship with his father, whose respect he’s never earned. The two storylines don’t cross over at all. There was NO CONNECTIVE TISSUE.
So I suggested to the writer, instead of the father being a drug kingpin, why can’t he be more of a mobster, with his main business being gambling? That way, he can start betting on his son’s games, eventually asking him to shave points to help him cover the spread. All of a sudden, these totally separate storylines become very connected, offering the writer a story with way more dramatic potential.
The most obvious example of connective tissue is probably Back to the Future. Now you have to take a step back (go back in time, one might say) to imagine this story before it was fully-formed.
On one side of the story, you have this kid who gets stuck in the past and must find a way back to the future. That’s a pretty fun idea, but by itself it’s B-movie material. On the other side of the story, you have Marty’s relationship with his quirky parents, who have sort of given up on life.
The smart writer says, “How can I connect these two storylines so they affect one another?” Well, since Marty’s parents met in this town, what if he’s sent back to the year they met? And what if Marty accidentally meets his mom before his dad does, and she falls in love with Marty instead of him? Now the time travel storyline is directly linked to the parents’ storyline. By utilizing connective tissue, this went from a decent movie idea to one of the best ideas in the history of cinema.
We actually see the reverse of this in Cameron Crowe’s upcoming film, Aloha. The consensus for everyone who’s seen the movie is that it’s incomprehensible (including from the studio head herself, as the Sony leaked e-mails revealed). I remember reading that script and thinking the same thing. And the reason was obvious. There was no connective tissue between any of the storylines.
I specifically remember there was a story about needing to sacrifice something into a volcano as well as a story about launching a satellite. You couldn’t get two more unrelated threads. And when things don’t connect, the audience loses interest, which I’m positive is the reason this film is getting hammered.
So how do you find these connections? Well, first of all, you have to be looking for them. Literally, every story thread in your script, you need to say, “How can I connect that thread with that one?” Sometimes they won’t connect. And that’s fine. But often, you’ll find that just by asking the question, new story opportunities will present themselves.
Most of the time, you’ll find your connections in rewrites. In fact, this should be one of your MAIN GOALS DURING YOUR FIRST FEW REWRITES. That first draft is always the thinnest. Only a few things connect. Reading through a finished draft will help you see things from a bird’s eye view, allowing you to better spot puzzle pieces to connect.
I should note that there is such a thing as OVER-CONNECTING. This is when Joe’s girlfriend is also his father’s step-daughter who happens to own the bike shop that Joe’s best friend works at and the bank Joe is planning to rob is being taken over by his father, etc., etc.
The thing is, I rarely see this. And I don’t think you should worry about it. You can always dial the connections back if people complain. I see way more missed connections than I do over-connections.
You actually know when you’ve got a really inter-connected script when making one change affects MANY OTHER THINGS. If you can just pop a character or a scene or a plot thread out of your script and not have to change anything, then you didn’t do a good job connecting your threads.
And that’s pretty much the gist of it. It’s a simple concept to wrap your head around and it’s one of the more powerful tools in screenwriting. A script where all the story threads are linked together is probably a damn good script.
Genre: Thriller
Premise: After being kicked out of the Navy, a cocaine addict is forced to pilot a narco sub to the U.S. carrying one ton of cocaine.
About: This is the third sale from Dominic Morgan and Matt Harvey, who are starting to make a name for themselves in the action/thriller genre. Their scripts The Bridge and The Controller are both being made into films (by Simon West and James McTeigue respectively). Hyperbaric has landed Tomorrow Never Dies helmer, Roger Spottiswoode.
Writers: Dominic Morgan and Matt Harvey
Details: 94 pages
You may not have seen many submarine movies lately. But that’s about to change. Studios are all developing their individual sub flicks for their once-every-five-years foray into the genre (or should I say SUB-genre – heh heh).
So why, with submarine films not being nearly as popular as they used to be, are studios still betting on them? Because they’re cheap! You only have to build one set. Also, unlike a lot of “single location” films, submarines aren’t stationary, which opens up many more story possibilities than, say, a group of people stuck in a bomb shelter.
And as long as we’re talking about submarine movies, I’m going to give you a free submarine idea to write yourself, since I’m never going to write it. You ready?
So a couple of years ago, the U.S. located two nuclear-armed Chinese subs hanging out a few miles off the East Coast. All you need to do is create a modern day “Cuban Missile Crisis” out of the situation. The U.S. spots some Chinese subs hiding off its shore. They send one of their subs to take them down. They hit one, but the other escapes. Tempers flare between the nations and in the meantime, you now have an angry rogue Chinese sub with nuclear capabilities off our coast.
Boom, count the billions. Just give me an associate producer credit.
Conall McGinty is an addict of the highest order. The guy will drink cooling fluid to get a buzz, and I’m not even sure that has alcohol in it. Conall’s biggest weakness though, is coke, and that’s what’s gotten him into his latest predicament.
Conall owes a gang of Mexicans thousands of dollars after snorting more cocaine than he sold. They were set to kill him until they found out he used to pilot subs in the Navy. This makes him a hot commodity on the homemade sub circuit – you know, those crazy motherfuckers who build their own subs to smuggle drugs into the U.S.
So a crazy beast of a man named Gamboa buys McGinty from the Mexcians in hopes that he can pilot 1 TON of cocaine (yes, you read that right, TON) to America. The two are joined by the sub’s creator, an OCD mad scientist type named Ethan Bellhaus.
When Ethan explains to Conall that his sub is made out of fiberglass, Conall nearly falls down laughing. That’ll barely get them 30 feet below sea level, a good 30 feet higher than they need to be to pull this off. Conall says that if they try to go any lower than that, the sub will collapse in on itself, but Ethan insists the sub can take it.
As they head to their destination, they’re bombarded with a series of obstacles: They’re chased by the coast guard, a 19 year old pregnant stowaway has snuck onto the ship, and at one point, the sub takes on so much water that it begins sinking. It’ll take every bit of skill Conall has to pull this off, which isn’t much, since we find out that Conall never even made it out of sub school.
I can’t stress this enough. If you want to sell a spec screenplay, this is the perfect way to go about it. Start with a marketable genre (Thriller), a marketable premise (submarine on the run), keep the action sparse and easy to read (Most action paragraphs here are 1-2 lines), have a low character count so it’s easy for the reader to remember who’s who without having to take notes (this is so important), and finally, make the concept cheap. Like I said at the outset, this is essentially a one location movie.
The nice thing about checking these boxes is that readers will be a lot less judgmental when reading your screenplay. One of the first things a reader asks himself after reading the premise is, “Would my boss want to turn this into a movie?” If the answer is “Yes,” they’re going to read your script with a favorable eye. When they see a lame choice, they’ll say, “That’s an easy fix.”
However, if your premise is boring or, worse, bad, readers are practically hunting for problems. The sooner they can discard your script, the sooner they can start skimming. Checking those boxes is kind of like having a magic shield over your script.
So I’m not surprised that Hyperbaric sold even though it’s far from perfect. For starters, the setup is flawed. You have this man who built this submarine, and yet they need someone else to pilot it? If you can build a submarine, don’t you have a fairly good idea of how to pilot it yourself?
I was willing to let this go but then there’s this entire day where Conall is chained up in the engine room while the sub floats along. If that doesn’t prove how little he’s needed, I don’t know what does.
The script also lacked urgency. There wasn’t a ticking time bomb on WHEN they needed to get to the U.S. by. Let me give you a script-related example of why that’s a big deal. One of the scenes in Hyperbaric had the engines dying. So Conall and Ethan had to go back to the engine room and fix them.
The scene plays like drying paint because there’s no reason for them to finish quickly. They can finish in 2 hours. They can finish in 2 days. It didn’t affect their mission either way. You can’t have that in a movie, especially in a thriller. You have to feel tension in every single scene. I recently heard a saying, “Your characters shouldn’t be able to sit down in the second act,” and it’s so true. If characters can “sit down” or hang out without anywhere they have to be, there’s a good chance there’s something wrong with the underlying structure of your screenplay.
But it wasn’t all bad. Morgan and Harvey did some interesting things with Conall, making him a coke-addict stuck on a tiny submarine with 1 ton of cocaine he can’t touch. That was a crafty choice.
And the script had some exciting sequences as well, such as the coast guard battle. I’m going to give you another tip here that ALWAYS WORKS in a movie. It doesn’t have a name so I’ll just call it the SET NUMBER TRICK.
What you do is you set a number that the heroes absolutely positively cannot go beyond. And then later in the script, you write a scene where they have no choice but to GO BEYOND that number. So here, Conall makes it clear that if this sub goes down to 50 feet below water, they’ll be crushed. However, when the coast guard starts dropping water grenades on them, their only chance for survival is to dive to 100 FEET! Since all of us know that that’s TWICE AS DEEP as this vessel is capable of diving, we feel an intense amount of fear for our characters when they perform the dive.
Hyperbaric is a perfectly conceived spec screenplay. I just wish its execution was a little more consistent. For those of you just starting out wanting to see how a saleable spec reads, though, you’ll want to find this one for sure.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Conveying distance is something a lot of writers ignore, which can kill the tension during an important moment. Say, for example, that you have one character spying an another character in a bookstore. If you don’t tell us how close the spyer is, we’re forced to guess, and we might guess wrong. Whereas you imagined your character to be just several feet away, we might think they’re all the way on the other side of the room, creating a much less exciting scene. So make sure to always convey this information. In Hyperbaric, there’s a scene where our sub is approached by the Coast Guard. And for a moment, I didn’t know if the Coast Guard was 30 feet away or 1 mile away. But then the writers say that our characters can “see the faces” of the Coast Guard. That immediately oriented me to how close (and therefore how dangerous) the Coast Guard boat was.
