You didn’t think we’d go through an entire Weird Scripts week without reviewing a David Lynch script, did you?
Welcome to Weird Scripts Week! This week, I’ll be reviewing odd scripts, odd ideas, and writing that’s just plain odd. It will all culminate Friday when I review the strangest premise I’ve ever reviewed on Scriptshadow. To check out Monday’s cross between an aquarium and a power drill, click here. Tuesday’s script will turn you into a vegetarian. Yesterday’s script will send you off into your own 24 hour video. And today is… well today we’re talking about spit.
Genre: Comedy?
Premise: When a guard’s tiny saliva bubble shoots out of his mouth and into the circuitry of a top-secret government project, it starts a chain reaction that discombobulates an entire town.
About: After some grandstanding from both Showtime and David Lynch on budget issues for Lynch’s new version of Twin Peaks, the series will be making a return later this year. A couple of low-rated Showtime shows may pay the price for that but if you want to work with visionary directors, there will be casualties. Speaking of casualties, One Saliva Bubble is Lynch’s passion project, and I don’t think he’s ever gotten over having to move on from it. The director of such films as Eraserhead, Dune, and Mulholland Drive actually had a co-writer on this script named Mark Frost, who went on to write the two 2000s Fantastic Four movies. He was also a writer on the original TV version of The Equalizer.
Writers: David Lynch and Mark Frost
Details: 140 pages (first draft – 5/20/87 draft)
For our fourth script in this week’s Weird Scripts series, we’re going to the granddaddy of weird – the maestro of misinterpretation, the grand pooba of pointlessness, the conductor of confusing. Yup, I’m talking about David Lynch. The old school Lynch came up during a time where you were actually encouraged – gasp – to be different. To try new and offbeat things.
What Lynch’s mentors didn’t know was that telling him this was like telling Homer Simpson he could design his own donut line. You talk about a guy who took advice to heart. Sheesh. I’d expect more sense out of an Amanda Bynes and Miley Cyrus collaboration than I do this man’s movies. Does One Saliva Bubble fall in line with the rest of his work? We shall see…
Somewhere near the tiny town of Newtonville is a secret military base. It just so happens that on this evening, at this base, a few guards are joking around near an exposed computer panel, and a spittle of saliva shoots out of one of their mouths, lands on the panel, and short-circuits a tiny portion of the wiring.
This causes a malfunction whereby the panel erroneously sends a signal to a military satellite to start a countdown sequence for some top secret weapon. 24 hours later, this satellite shoots a laser beam down to Newtonville, which bounces around, hitting almost everyone in town.
The hardest hit is the airport. It’s there where our four protagonists are located for various reasons. There’s the psychotic contract killer, Horton Thursby, the genius Swiss scientist, Professor Hugo Zinzermacher, the loser middle-aged family man, Wally Newton, and the town idiot, who’s just come back from the insane asylum, Newt Newton.
What this laser beam does is it displaces the minds of our four characters, so that Horton and Wally switch bodies and Hugo and Newt switch bodies. For reasons I can’t even begin to explain, while their personalities have been transported, none of the characters actually know they’re inside new bodies.
This leads to mayhem. For example, a major company has brought Professor Hugo in from Sweden to help them come up with a winning formula to defeat their nemesis. But instead, they unknowingly get Newt, who carries a sock full of toys with him wherever he goes. When brought to the company, Newt as Hugo starts playing with his toys on the floor, and the entire company rushes to figure out what it all means, what this genius is trying to tell them.
Horton, on the other hand, heads home to Wally’s home life, a life where the “old Wally” gets bossed around by both his wife and his son. When they try and pull that bullshit on him this time, he tells them that if they ever fuck with him again, they’ll regret it for the rest of their lives. Wally’s home problems: solved.
Wally, on the other hand (who’s now in Horton’s body), finds himself as the head of an organized crime ring, and his tough guy underlings are confused about his new nice-guy managing style. The professor, meanwhile, is brought back to Newt’s house, a place where Newt is assumed to be retarded. Which, of course, becomes very confusing when “Newt” starts solving math equations that would frustrate Will Hunting.
When an outside U.S. military division suspects something is amiss in the town of Newtonville, they send a couple of guys out there to get to the bottom of it. But it might be too late. Our characters have already turned, and it’s only a matter of time before they undo the balance of the town and the military establishment that birthed this horrid experiment.
There’s actually a lot more to this story (more characters – more body switches) but to try and summarize them all would require the help of Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are people dressed in Heinz bottles, a roller skating rink where everyone skates in rhythmic unison, and an obsessive thread where everyone keeps complaining that there’s “no cheese” in town.
So did it work?
Well, I’ll say this. This is easier to follow than your average Lynch movie. That’s probably because Lynch has a co-writer this go-around. When you don’t have to explain anything to anyone, you can follow whatever whim you fancy. But if you have a co-writer, he needs to know what you’re doing so he can do the same.
The simple act of having to explain yourself requires you to follow some sort of logic, and that’s not how Lynch prefers to write. As a result, there’s something of a story here. I’m just not convinced it’s very good.
Body-switching movies are essentially dramatic irony movies. We know who the person in the body is, but the other characters do not. This allows for a lot of fun scenes that write themselves. For example, we know that Wally’s wife and son run his life, that they bully and berate him every day. So when a cold-blooded killer shows up at home that night in Wally’s body, we know mom and son are in for a world of hurt.
The problem with the premise is that Lynch and Frost are trying to bullshit us. “Bullshitting” is when you fudge something you know you shouldn’t be fudging and hope the reader either doesn’t notice it or goes along with it. The thing is, the reader always smells the bullshit. You might get it past a few really dumb people, but any reader or audience member worth their salt is going to smell your shit from a mile away. I’m going to say this once: You’re not as sly as you think.
The bullshit here resides in the form of the body-switching rules. The switches allow for every single trait of the characters to be transferred into the new bodies EXCEPT their knowledge that they’re in a new body. This becomes a major plot hole because how are we supposed to believe that a contract killer isn’t all of a sudden aware that he’s not with his gang anymore, but hanging out in a middle class suburban home with a wife and son?
It doesn’t make sense. And eccentric directors like Lynch shouldn’t get a pass just because they’re weird. I’m fine with doing the crazy dance on your pages. But you can’t bullshit us on the major hook of your story.
Speaking of story, while this is more coherent than most Lynch films, it’s far from perfect. The body-switching and subsequent division of characters into their new lives is just a reaction to this laser beam event. Once that’s happened, the characters lack a point or a goal.
Lynch and Frost attempt to bring in this second military presence to draw the story to some sort of conclusion, but it’s a half-hearted attempt at best. It comes in so late that we’re not even sure what the military’s goal is or what they’re trying to do. Stop it? Turn these four people back to normal? Does that really matter?
And I think that’s the most telltale question of all. “Does it really matter?” If fixing the problem inherent in your story (in this case, the body switching) doesn’t matter (or only barely matters), that means there are no stakes to the story, which would explain why, when you read One Saliva Bubble, you’re not ever engaged.
Think about this in terms of Tom Hanks’s “Big.” If he doesn’t change back, he misses 30 years of his life. He never gets to see his family again. There are some real stakes attached to him not going back to his kid body.
This would also explain why the script is 140 pages. Usually, when don’t have some sort of structure in place to push you towards the third-act climax, you just keep writing more and more scenes. And why wouldn’t you? If your characters have nowhere to be (no problem to fix, no goal to achieve), you’ll naturally just keep exploring the premise (in this case, body switching).
So where does One Saliva Bubble fall on the Weird Scripts Week scale? That’s a great question. I think it lands at number two behind “Bessie.” It’s a weird script, but it’s not Lynchian weird. I’m still debating whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Script link: One Saliva Bubble
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Playing something as a gimmick compared to playing something as authentic. When you play a concept as a gimmick, you won’t be able to explore your characters in a meaningful way, and, as a result, those characters will never resonate with your audience. So here, Lynch and Frost choose to play their premise as a gimmick. You could almost call this “The Zany Adventures of Four People Who Switch Bodies After Being Hit by a Laser Beam.” For example, the writers aren’t interested in, say, Horton the Killer learning to take care of a family for the first time in his life. They just want to show the fun scenes of a school bully beating up the son character so that our contract killer in disguise can square off against the bully and make him piss his pants. And I’m not saying those scenes aren’t fun. But they’re surface-level scenes. Unless you’re reflecting on how the unfamiliar experience you’ve put your character in CHANGES that character, you’re not really exploring that character or making them compelling to the audience.
While most of this week’s scripts have been forgotten by Hollywood, this one was recently chosen by a major star to become his next big project.
Welcome to Weird Scripts Week! This week I’ll be reviewing odd scripts, odd ideas, and writing that’s just plain odd. It will culminate Friday when I review the strangest premise I’ve ever reviewed on Scriptshadow. To check out Monday’s cross between The Terminator and Jaws, click here. Yesterday’s talking cow screenplay can be seen here. And today, we head to the land of musicals.
Genre: Dramedy/Musical
Premise: When a buttoned-up company man is involved in an accident, the world around him becomes one giant musical number.
About: Bob The Musical is a project that’s been kicking around Hollywood for many years, likely due to its tricky tone. Whenever you’re dealing with something this unusual, every inch of the script is going to be scrutinized until it feels right. And with “Bob” being drafted by more writers than the perpetually developed “Akira,” we’re thinking they want to make sure this one’s just right before going forward. Tom Cruise to the rescue! Cruise attached himself to Bob recently, which means one of his writers will be brought in to write the definitive version of the film and they’ll go forward whether the thing’s ready or not (the power of the movie star!). This is an old draft of the script (couldn’t find a new one) but the concept’s so unique, I had to check it out. I have no idea how close this draft will be to the final film. The script was written by Mike Binder, who gave us films like The Upside of Anger and Reign Over Me. But there have been many drafts since.
Writer: Mike Binder
Details: 112 pages (undated – but I think this draft is about 10 years old)
Now you’d THINK that Mr. Cruise would’ve exited musical theater after Rock of Ages. But we’re talking about a guy who’s navigated a 30-year career in Hollywood, and he seems to understand something a lot of other stars who have faded don’t – which is that if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you’ll be forgotten.
With films like Rock of Ages, Edge of Tomorrow, Valkyrie, and now Bob the Musical, Cruise is taking chances. And maybe they don’t all pay off. But you’d much rather go down swinging than get walked. Even his Mission Impossible franchise reflects this, as each entry feels a bit different from the last. Let’s see how this one shapes up for him.
Hit it, Charlie!
Stiff-as-a-board Bob Bowman works for one of the richest men in Philadelphia, Ronald Gold. The Trump-like Gold wants to build a brand new skyscaper. But he’s given his team an impossible task. He wants his building on LAKE FRONT PROPERTY.
The thing with Philadelphia is, all the lake-front property is protected by these historic landmark clauses and can’t be purchased. Except for one building, Bob learns. A single building is a week shy of hitting the required 100 year mark to be considered “historic,” which means if Bob can get them to sign a deal by Friday, he’ll become partner.
Bob goes to check the building out, which houses a struggling theater run by the nicest woman in Philadelphia, Mary (when faced with cutting her actors’ salaries due to slow sales, she opts to absorb the hit in her own paycheck – awwww).
It becomes clear to Bob that in order to secure this building, he’ll have to lie to Mary, pretending to be interested in the arts, get her to sign a partnership deal, then use Gold’s legal muscle to wrangle the property away, bulldoze the hopeless theater, and build his partner-making skyscraper.
However, on the way out of that first meeting, one of the old Gargoyles from the building falls onto Bob, knocking him out and sending him to the hospital. When he wakes up, he starts hearing… music. But not just any music. The people around him, they’re…. SINGING. And… DANCING.
When he’s riding down the elevator, a kid starts rapping how his mom won’t leave him alone. When he walks to work, the city becomes one giant song-and-dance routine. When he gets to work, his secretary sings a tragedy about how she hates her boss (Bob) more than anything. When he goes to a basketball game and a fight breaks out on the floor, the players segue into a scene from West Side Story.
While Bob is understandably freaked out, he realizes that this is a new part of his life, and that he must fight through it to close the building deal. But when he starts to fall in love with Mary, and the song and dance numbers become more invasive, Bob will come face-to-face with his own song, a song where he can either croon his way to partner, or Celine Dion his way into Mary’s heart.
The setup for this script was actually pretty solid. Weird Scripts Week has been an exercise in sloppy screenwriting, but Binder sets up a tight story, cluing us in on who Bob is (very selfish and uptight), what he wants (to be a partner in Gold’s company) and what he needs to do to get it (cheat the girl he’s falling in love with to sign a deal that secretly gives Gold control of her building so he can tear it down).
This conflict of needing to lie to a character you’re falling for in order to achieve a goal is a well-worn trope, but when done well, it usually works. And it works here up to a point.
Bob the Musical begins running into trouble in its second act, where it gets stuck somewhere in between a Charlie Kaufman joint and a 1990s Jim Carrey comedy. Things eventually become so formulaic (Mary gets mad at Bob and states the deal is off. So Bob must apologize and try a new approach to get her to sign!) that the brilliance of the premise loses its luster.
Even the songs and dances start becoming predictable, with the tough pissed off teenager spouting out, of course, Eminem-style raps.
And this is where a lot of these scripts die, in fact. With writers playing things too safe. There’s a form of execution in these screenplays that’s just cute enough to get a polite smile from the reader, but not big enough to impress them. And Bob The Musical starts to feel like one big polite smile. I remember specifically that polite smile on my face with the West Side Story scene.
If I know screenwriters, they’d be more okay with a woman telling them post sex that their manhood wasn’t big enough than to hear that someone “politely smiled” while reading their script.
It goes back to the “first choice syndrome” we talk about here. On a clever premise like Bob the Musical, you can’t use first choices. You have to throw those out and think of something crazier. And then throw that out and think of something crazier! Really push yourself because that’s the only way you’re going to get to those truly outrageous memorable ideas.
Even more so in scripts like this. I mean, if you have a weird or crazy premise, why would you restrict it? Why would you play it safe? If you’re making a movie about being inside John Malkovich’s head, you want a scene that includes a 7th and a half floor.
That’s not to say you throw all rules out the door. You still need some structure and focus to keep the story on track. But you don’t want to be the false advertiser. You don’t want to promise your audience something and give them something else. That’s the fastest way to get a crowd to turn on you.
With that being said, this script has always had an uphill battle. It’s one of those stories that you don’t truly know if it’s working until you see it on the big screen. We need to hear the music, hear the singing, see the dancing, in order to ingest the power of the storytelling, and that’s just not possible on the page. So I have sympathy for the project and this draft that Binder wrote. But I still wish he would’ve done more with it.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Drop CLUES to help your reader know who your hero is. When a reader reads a script, one of the first thing’s he’s looking for is CLUES about your hero. What is the hero doing? How is he acting? What does he say? We’re trying to figure out who this guy is and the clues you drop are going to tell us. For example, one of the early description lines in Bob the Musical is, “Bob rounds the corner, looking serious as usual.” That phrase there, serious as usual, sticks in our head. Later, someone’s on the street singing. Bob, who’s talking on his phone, covers his free ear and STARTS TALKING LOUDER. Another clue. He’s easily annoyed. Then later, after a co-worker expresses excitement about something, we get this line: “Bob walks out of his office displaying no emotion at all.” Just by highlighting those three clues, I’m betting you already have a great feel for who Bob is. Yet most writers, and in particular amateur writers, are very vague and general when describing their hero or conveying his actions. Without those vital clues, we never get a feel for who he is, and we go through the story imagining some vague figure leading us. It’s only a matter of time, then, before we become bored with them.
What I learned 2: One of the craziest realizations to come out of this week has been how influenced we are by the times. Especially with yesterday’s and today’s scripts, where you could FEEL the late 90s influences guiding these writers’ choices. I mean Bob The Musical was hitting Liar Liar and What Women Want story beats almost to the tilt (After hearing their struggling inner songs, Bob shows up to work and starts paying attention to people and complimenting them). So when you’re writing your script, think into the future. Ask yourself, will someone who reads this in 2030 be like, “Oh my God, this feels so 2015.” If so, you’re probably being too influenced by the films of the moment. Try to look for other inspiration to stand out. Movies from the 1960s, 1970s. Unique paintings. Strange music. Find inspiration that allows your screenplay to feel unlike anything that’s out there right now.
The weirdness continues. Today, we go back to the turn of the millennium to check out a script that was once considered to be one of the craziest in Hollywood.
Welcome to Weird Scripts Week! This week I’ll be reviewing odd scripts, odd ideas, and writing that’s just plain odd. It will all culminate Friday when I review the strangest premise I’ve ever reviewed on Scriptshadow. To check out yesterday’s shark-tastic entry, click here. Otherwise, slather yourself in Jake Gylennhaal selfies and prepare to milk some sluglines.
Genre: Weird
Premise: After a dying scientist creates a talking cow, a team of people decide to market her into the biggest thing since prime rib. That plan goes about as bad as you’d expect it to.
About: For those too young to know who Richard Kelly is, at one point in the early 2000s, he was the equivalent of, say, Nicholas Wending Refn, a writer-director with an edge to his work, a filmmaker whose every move inspired geeks to imagine what he’d come up with next. That buzz died down after the Donnie Darko director released Southland Tales, a sprawling tale that seemed to pack every genre known to man into a single movie. What’s become lost in the Richard Kelly lore is the fact that he did a lot of writing both before and after Darko, so he has quite a few scripts out there. Bessie was written a year before Donnie Darko came out.
Writer: Richard Kelly
Details: 116 pages (Valentine’s Day draft, 2000)
Oh yeah.
You knew we had to push the envelope with Weird Week. James Bond fighting robot sharks was pretty out there, but if we wanted to truly enter Kookoo Land, we needed a script and a writer so batshit bananas, I’d get calls from the local mental asylum asking me for the writer’s contact information. That moment has come, my friends. It’s time for Bessie, the walking-talking cow.
35 year-old manager Ron McKittrick is sick of managing the career of his Justin Bieber like star, Sebastian Knight, particularly after Sebastian is accused of raping a fan. A day after quitting, he gets a surprise call from an old friend who demands that he come up to Iowa. She’s got a surprise for him.
McKittrick begrudgingly heads to the land of baseball fields that talk to you, but anger turns to delight when he learns of the reason he was brought in. His friend introduces him to Bessie, a walking talking cow with the mental capacity of a 3rd grader and a special affinity for Ashley and Mary Kate Olson. McKittrick’s friend wants him to manage a team that will introduce Bessie to the world, and make billions of dollars in the process.
This team consists of Dominique, a culturally-agnostic music video director more pretentious than an all-night poetry slam, Katherine, a lawyer with a temper quicker than Uwe Boll after a failed fund-raising campaign, and Kimberly, an ugly fat teenager who McKittrick makes his personal assitant after she tells him that if he doesn’t, she’ll start hooking for cash.
“Team Bessie” hops in a tour bus and starts travelling across the United Sates. Unfortunately, there are a few bumps along the road. When Team Bessie gets in a diner brawl with a bunch of rednecks, the cops are called in and it looks like their moo-happy secret is going to be milked onto the 24 hour news cycle. That is until Bessie screams a high-pitch yowl that somehow makes all the locals pass out while keeping Team Bessie awake and fine.
As Team Bessie gets back on the bus, they start to wonder if Bessie isn’t keeping a few secrets from them. It doesn’t take long to figure out she is. It turns out Bessie can levitate things, telepathically talk to people, and oh yeah, might be Jesus Christ!
When the group finally gets to Hollywood, Bessie’s had enough. She drops the 3rd grade act and reveals that she’s actually the smartest person-cow in the world. She demands to speak with Mary-Kate and Ashley immediately or else she’s going to blow up Los Angeles or something. It’ll be up to McKittrick to come up with a way to stop Bessie, but as we all know, once it’s out, you can’t put the cow back in the barn.
I’m trying to think of a way to discuss this script productively. I’m not sure it’s possible though.
I suppose that with “Ted” having come and gone, a movie about a talking animal shouldn’t phase us. But this is nothing like Ted. Bessie is closer to the meals they used to serve me at college. You’d go down the cafeteria line, they’d put a bunch of stuff on your tray, and afterwards, you’d try to figure out what each dish was. Those were some tough times, I tell ya. I mean, the milk at our school was blue. BLUE MILK. How’s that for a cow reference?
If I had to guess, I’d say this is a satire. But of what, I’m not clear. People maybe? The universe? I guess it could be a satire about Hollywood and our obsession with anything that’s marketed to us, but it’s just so damn weird, I’m tempted to take it at face value. Maybe this is just about a cow, who has the power of telepathy, and is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
Taking a step back, I did notice a few teachable moments. Whenever you write a script, one of your biggest goals is to give the reader something to look forward to. A destination. A culmination. If you’re not creating that desire within the reader, it becomes harder and harder to keep them engaged.
Remember when you were a kid in those endless family car trips? What did you keep asking? “Are we there yet?” “Are we there yet?” If you don’t keep reminding the reader where we’re going, you’re risking that same kind of agitation. It’s your job to keep reminding the reader: “Hey, this is where we’re going, this is how we’ll get there, and this is how long it’ll take.”
I’m not saying you have to provide exact times. But it should be clear how much closer we’re getting to our destination. So many writers keep their readers out of the loop and if we’re out of the loop, we can’t complete the task.
The opposite of this is something I call “drifting.” This is when you’re allowing the story to unfold, but not giving the audience any indication of where it’s going. Going back to the car trip analogy, it’s like asking your dad, “Are we there yet?” and hearing the response, “Anybody need to go to the bathroom? There’s a rest stop ahead.”
If you “drift” for too long, the audience/reader starts to lose focus. And loss of focus is the death-knell for any read. If that drift goes on for as little as five pages, the reader is done with your story.
So here, Team Bessie jumps into this tour bus but Kelly doesn’t immediately make it clear why. There’s a vague notion that we’re going somewhere with Bessie, and the marketing angle of Bessie is mentioned, but we’re still not clear why getting into this van helps achieve this goal. Are we going on some sort of 19th Century presidential campaign, where we go from town to town, introducing Bessie? I don’t know. Nobody explains it to me.
I get on writers about this all the time but it’s REALLY important. Too many writers are obscure when it comes to WHAT their characters are doing and WHY. That’s fine if you’re creating a deliberate mystery (“What’s the smoke monster?”). But if we’re talking about nuts-and-bolts story beats, you got keep us in the loop!
By the time we figure out we’re going to Hollywood to announce Bessie to the world, it’s way too late in the story. By that point I’d drifted off into several daydreams. One of which involved a talking moose named “Gerald” who had the ability to teleport.
Compare the differences between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Look at how BIG of a deal was made of the Ark in Raiders (heck, it’s right there in the title!). So we’ve got something to look forward to right from the get-go. The importance of the Ark is reinforced a dozen or more times throughout the script, making us only more obsessed with reaching the destination. Imagine if the Ark had only been mentioned in a single scene leading up to the climax. Do you think our anticipation for what was in the Ark would’ve been nearly as obsessive? Of course not.
With Crystal Skull, we’re not really sure what we’re after. At first it’s a crystal skull, but that seems to be a small piece in a much bigger murkier puzzle that only gets less clear the further into the movie we go. You could see a bit of this in Tomorrowland as well. We knew we were trying to get to Tomorrowland, but we didn’t really know why, and after not knowing for so long, we just got bored and checked out. This could’ve easily been solved had the writer tried harder to keep us in the loop.
Having said all that, Bessie probably isn’t a movie that should be broken down via conventional methods. In classic “Weird Week” fashion, it creates its own rules, and you either buy into them or you don’t. Heck, you’re talking to a guy who thought Birdman was a pretentious taxidermy experiment gone awry. And there are a lot of parallels between Bessie and Birdman. To really get a feel for this script, you should check it out yourself, which is why I’m including a link. Read it and let us know how you feel!
Screenplay link: Bessie
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Every screenwriter should write this kind of script once in their career – a script where you throw logic and form and rules out the window and let your instincts and imagination guide you. I’ll be honest with you. 99% of the time the end result will be disastrous. But doing so will teach you to TAKE CHANCES, to BE A LITTLE CRAZY, and to GO WITH YOUR GUT. And you’ll need those muscles every once in awhile if you’re going to be a great writer.
Is it possible that a James Bond script could be worse than a Sharknado script? Read on because the answer may shock you. Then eat you.
Welcome to Weird Scripts Week! This week I’ll be reviewing odd scripts, odd ideas, and writing that’s just plain odd. It will all culminate Friday when I’ll be reviewing the strangest premise I’ve ever reviewed here on Scriptshadow. So buckle up, snort the nearest hallucinogen, and get ready to mutter “WTF” at least 182 times!
Genre: Action
Premise: When a plane goes down in the Bermuda Triangle, the United States and Britain enlist none other than James Bond to find out what happened.
About: This is an old discarded James Bond script from 1976 that was deemed too weird and “out there” by the studio. The fact that Sean Connery decided to pitch in on writing duties (a man who doesn’t have a single writing credit to his name in his 50 year career) probably didn’t help.
Writers: Len Deighton, Sean Connery, and Kevin McClory
Details: 150 pages (first draft – November 11, 1976)
I admit I’m not the biggest Bond aficionado. While I appreciate the character and understand why he’s so popular, I haven’t been a fan of the franchise’s direction as of late. My frustration boiled over while watching Quantum of Solace, a film that clearly had no script to speak of. That movie seemed to be more concerned with winning a Guiness record for most countries shot in than it did entertaining an audience.
I liked the films a lot more when I was younger. My favorite scenes were always the “cool gadgets” scenes, where a character would introduce a number of killer gadgets for Bond to use on his mission. Ever since Bond went dark, however, these scenes have been dropped, distancing me even further from the franchise. Strangely enough, franchises like Batman and Mission Impossible have thought these scenes good enough for their films, making Bond look even more out-of-touch.
Luckily, today, we get to go back to a time of Bond purity, a time when James didn’t take himself too seriously. The problem is, they may have strayed too far off the reservation, as the feedback I’ve heard about this script makes Sharknado sound like a contender for the Palme D’or. Let’s find out palme d’more, shall we?
As if sensing that it would eventually be featured on Scriptshadow Weird Scripts Week, “James Bond of the Secret Service” goes cuckoo almost immediately. We start out on a seaplane that’s carrying the United Nations Secretary General. As the plane enters the Bermuda Triangle (we know this because the Secretary General says, “I’ll be okay once we get past the Bermuda Triangle”) a laser beam from an undisclosed location (Europe??) shoots the plane, killing its power, forcing it to land on the water.
Once in the water, a giant contraption rises up, “takes” the plane, and pulls it underwater, bringing it all the way to the sea floor, where we see, among other things, planes, boats, stacks of gold bars(??) and oh, AN UNDERWATER KINGDOM!!! It turns out the Bermuda Triangle has been the haunt of a city/kingdom called Arkos. Never mind the fact that to build an underwater city in the year 1976, it would’ve cost 30 trillion dollars.
Eventually, we meet the creator and president of this secret underwater society. His name is Blofeld and I kid you not, he has a white cat which he strokes throughout his conversations with everyone. Blofeld, believe it or not, actually has a very legitimate goal. He wants to rid the world’s seas of pollution. How sweet of him. And yet, it just makes things even more confusing (why does the bad guy have a noble goal??)
So he sends a wire to all the world’s leaders telling them that if they throw any trash in the ocean, even an empty potato chip bag, there’s going to be hell to pay. I’m not sure what that means, since his influence seems to be restricted to the Bermuda Triangle, but it’s enough of a threat to scare most of the leaders.
Now you may be asking, where’s James Bond in all of this? I’m glad you asked. In the first 67 pages of the screenplay, James Bond gets THREE SCENES! And two of those scenes consist of a girl applying sunscreen to his back. I’m not kidding. In a script titled, “James Bond of the Secret Service,” James Bond is onscreen for 12 of the first 67 minutes.
Eventually, the United States and Britain figure out where Arkos is and send James Bond to a nearby island to infiltrate it. Luckily, Bond has a cover-story. He’s actually a finalist in the international backgammon championships and is set to play Largo, Blofeld’s evil underling. Once there, he gets attacked by a shark, only to find out that the shark is actually a robot!! It turns out the whole of Arkos is protected by an army of robot-sharks.
Not only that, but Largo’s deranged head-scientist has found a fitting way to deliver his nukes to the offending nations. By using Hammerhead sharks! Apparently the wider eyes make it easier to rest the nukes on top of their body. A full two pages is dedicated to explaining this concept.
This all culminates when Largo decides enough is enough, and sends his army of sharks to Manhattan. His plan? To blow up the statue of liberty and then program his sharks to go into New York City sewers and attack the local population. Eventually, the city of Arkos itself uproots and heads to Manhattan, where city battles city. The End.
Oh man.
Oh dear Jesus.
This started off weird but then just got bad. And I mean really really bad. Who gives their main character – the most iconic action hero in history no less – three scenes in 67 pages?????
And get a load of some of the writing here. I’ve hand-picked some gems for you:
“He has a large shark laboratory – for cancer research.”
Largo has faded the last sentence of his own dialogue. (what does that even mean???)
“Frankly, we don’t know what’s happening in this so-called Bermuda Triangle.”
“I’ve seen that man. He’s called Emilio Largo. Runs the Shark Island op. quite close to Shrublands. As a matter of fact, I’m playing him in the backgammon finals in Nassau.”
“You’re not Fatima.” “No. She was my twin sister – she’s dead.”
“So you see, even with the brain removed, the shark will continue its motion.”
Blood trickles down the cheek of the Statue of Liberty like a tear.
Is 1976 the year LSD was invented?
They couldn’t even get the sluglines right. At the end of every slugline, instead of putting “day” or “night,” they’d put the names of the people in the scene.
The script’s biggest faux-pas by far, though, was its inadequate use of Bond. The first half-dozen times we were with him (so, maybe, the first 85 pages of the script), he was either getting sun-screen applied, sleeping with a girl, listening to his bosses talk about Arkos, or being told what to do.
A main character is supposed to be ACTIVE. Preferably, you want your protagonist making decisions on his own, driving the story with those decisions. Now you can’t always do that because the story may dictate otherwise. With Bond, for instance, he works for people. Therefore, they need to give him orders before he can act.
However, the ideal scenario is to get those orders out of the way early, and then have your hero start creating his own storyline. If he has to check back in every 10 minutes to get a new order, then you have a hero who’s 100% reactive. And reactive characters aren’t nearly as compelling as active characters.
The reason Ripley, from Aliens, is considered one of the top 5 action heroes in history is because of how active she is in that movie. Outside of the opening act, she’s making all of her choices. She’s deciding what she and the others must do. We LOVE THAT as audience members. And while I’m by no means a Bond expert, I’m guessing that we see a much more active Bond in these recent movies.
I was hoping to read five scripts this week that were so weird, you’d all be able to read them and laugh with me. I can’t even recommend “Secret Service” for that, because I know you’ll be bored out of your mind by page 30. Let’s hope for something a little more fun tomorrow. But, if you’re into self-torture, download this script and give it a try.
Script link: James Bond of the Secret Service
[x] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Audiences want to follow your hero. It’s okay if you throw a teaser scene into your opening before you get to your protagonist, but preferably, you should start with your protagonist or get to him as soon as possible. The interest in your story will sink exponentially the longer your hero isn’t on screen.
What I learned (practice edition): It’s advisable that you avoid adverbs in screenwriting. They just sound clunky. So here we get a couple of lines: “Bond dismally enters the plane.” And: “Bond drags himself wearily into a waiting car…” How would you change these lines to eliminate the adverbs, yet still get the requisite feeling across? Show off your writing skills in the comments section below!
I was thinking, the comments go off-topic so much that why don’t we just put up a post that’s all about staying off-topic?! You can talk about anything and get it out of your system! Buuuuuuuut… I’d rather you pitch your loglines to others to get some peer feedback, talk about The Scriptshadow 250 Contest (only 54 days left!), discuss the awesome fact that none other than DARK HORSE contacted Adam yesterday about his script (I’ll update you when I know more), or guess what scripts will be reviewed next week during “Weird Scripts Week” (I still have one slot semi-open, so if you can think of a weird script you think I should review, let me know). I haven’t read the Friday script yet but I can assure you, from the premise alone, it’s going to be the craziest f&%*ing script ever, and a sure bet to end up on this year’s Black List.
