This is going to be a good week at Scriptshadow. We don’t have a single script that receives less than a “worth the read.” One of those scripts is shockingly good exorcism story, one a comedy, and one a script that wasn’t very good but has an insane approach to it that, combined with the “universally loved by all geeks” director, is going to make it a must read. Finally, we’ll finish off with a new Top 25 script, a crime drama that blew me away. And I don’t even like crime drama, so you know it’s good. Right now Roger’s going to review a genre and a screenwriter he knows well. Let’s give him our full attention.

Genre: Old Fashioned Ghost Story, Gothic Horror
Premise: When Arthur Kipps, a young widower and solicitor, leaves his son in London to settle the legal affairs of the recently deceased Alice Drablow, proprietor of the Eel Marsh House in Crythin Gifford, he finds himself in a life and death struggle with a specter whom is killing all of the town’s children.
About: Based on a 1983 novel by English author, Susan Hill, “The Woman in Black” was adapted into a stage play (which still runs today in the UK), a couple of radio plays and a TV Movie for Britain’s ITV. Under the newly resurrected Hammer Film Productions, the script was written by Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass, Stardust, The Debt, X-Men: First Class) and is set to star post-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe with James Watkins (Eden Lake) as director. Presumably this is the first script coming out of Goldman’s recent signing with William Morris Endeavor.
Writers: Jane Goldman, inspired by Susan Hill’s 1983 novel.
Details: 2^nd Draft. Dated August 3, 2010.

This is how it’s done.

Let’s forget the pedigree for a moment. Let’s forget this was a novel written by Susan Hill, a lady inspired by English ghost story masters M.R. James and Daphne du Maurier, a lady who understood setting, suspense and atmosphere. Let’s forget that said novel was creepily satisfying enough to be adapted into a stage play, a radio play and a TV movie in Britian. And, let’s forget that newly resurrected Hammer Horror returns to the cinemas swinging, not only with Let Me In and The Resident, but with this deliciously Gothic ghost story written by the foxy Jane Goldman (a former paranormal tv show host) and helmed by Eden Lake (have you seen this flick?!) director James Watkins.

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: A frustrated Young Adult writer obsessed with her High School days goes back to her hometown to try to win over her married high school sweetheart.
About: Young Adult is Diablo Cody’s latest script. Just this week Jason Reitman, Cody’s director for Juno, announced that he’d be directing the screenplay for his next project.
Writer: Diablo Cody
Details: 107 pages – undated draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

It hit me like a hockey stick the other day that Diablo Cody is the best self-promoting screenwriter of all time. In a profession where your job is be invisible (or at least have everybody wish you were), it’s really hard to build a name for yourself. Cody, with her heavily-trafficked blog, her impossible-to-forget name, and her great plucked-out-of-obscurity story, has become that catchy pop song you can’t get out of your head. It’s only natural that Cody began her own online talk-show recently because, well, she’s Diablo Cody!

But life isn’t all peaches and white raspberry truffles for someone who shoots to the top of the entertainment stratosphere without paying their dues. It all seems so easy when everyone’s patting you on the back and calling you a genius, but it doesn’t take long to realize that this is one of the hardest professions in the world. Just ask Christopher McQuarrie, who loves to talk about how awesome it is to win an Oscar with your first screenplay then sink to the middle of screenwriter-for-hire land for the next decade.

That’s not to say Cody is anywhere near the middle of the pack. If there’s anyone who knows how to exploit this world of new media, it’s her, and that’s going to keep her relevant for awhile. But let’s be honest. Jennifer’s Body was as anorexic to the box office as Ellen Page’s pinky toe, and while The United States of Tara was good enough to warrant a second season, I don’t know a single person who’s actually seen it. No matter how good a self-promoter you are, if you don’t contribute material, you’re about as relevant as a box of cereal. Yes, I rhyme now in my reviews.

Tomorrow I might even sing the blues. Sorry, I didn’t mean it. Does anybody have a peanut?

So it was nice to see Cody use her producing skills to hook her old Juno-collaborator into directing her latest screenplay, Young Adult. The fact that Reitman passed up a shitload of great projects to direct this PDF gave me hope that Cody was back and ready to play ball. But I don’t think I was prepared for just how dark and just how daring Young Adult was. This is a departure for both Cody and Reitman, and for strange reasons that makes my nether regions tingle.

Mavis Gary is a mid-30s writer for a young adult novel about prep school in which she doesn’t receive credit. It’s a series of books created by another author and poor Mavis is just the invisible pen, always forced to prove her involvement whenever doubts arise. Despite a 30-second work commute from the bedroom to the living room, Mavis detests her job. In fact, Mavis pretty much hates life. She lives in the bright lights-big city tundra known as Minneapolis, and makes enough money to buy cool cars like the Mini-Cooper, but Mavis can’t get over the fact that this is a far cry from her Princess-like super-status back in high school. The now-divorced Mavis is a bitter bean, and never imagined her life would end up this…empty.

So when this woefully empty life is interrupted by a picture of a baby, Mavis goes berserk, – the reason being that this is Buddy Slade’s baby. Buddy, ya see, was Mavis’ high school sweetheart, the one perfect thing she had in her life. And now here he’s gone, accidentally including Mavis on some mass e-mail send-out of his new baby’s picture. Mavis is so upset and thrown by Buddy’s budding familial life, that she inexplicably jumps in her Mini-Cooper and races back to her hometown, where she concocts a scheme to win Buddy back.

Once home, Mavis runs into the sweet but slightly clingy Matt Freehauf, an overweight bear of a guy who used to go to school with Mavis, though the two never had any history of communication. Mavis ran in different circles. Matt ran in his own square. As if being a high school nobody wasn’t bad enough, Matt was the victim of gay-bashing, and was beaten within an inch of his life, even though the beaters later found out Matt wasn’t gay. Never fully recovered, Matt must now limp around with a permanent crutch. Despite Mavis’ best attempts to avoid any contact with Matt, the two begin hanging out by default (brought on mainly by Mavis’ need to get drunk with someone).

Through pure determination, Mavis is able to get Buddy to spend a couple of lunches with her, yet is totally oblivious to the fact that he has no interest in her at all. This leads to a series of increasingly pathetic encounters between the two, where Mavis’ blatantly desperate advances clash with the standoffish Buddy in a way that made Allie dumping Kasey in the middle of the arctic after he said he’d guard and protect her heart seem like a marriage proposal. No matter how much Mavis bats her eyes, no matter how low-cut her top is, no matter how shamelessly she flirts, it’s clear she has absolutely no shot with this man, and everyone sees it except for her.

As Buddy becomes less and less interested in making time for Mavis, the main relationship shifts over to Mavis and Matt, which is really the strength of the screenplay. I know the gay-bashing thing sounds a little forced, but Cody really makes it work, as Matt is a fully-fleshed out character. And even though we’ve seen the “high school princess and nerd reunite in present day” storyline before, I guarantee you, you’ve never seen it like this.

What I really like about this script though is that Diablo Cody has gotten rid of a lot of her Diablo Cody-isms. She’s listened to her critics, and there’s no overly cute dialogue to distract us from the story. Despite this, Diablo is still able to maintain some sense of style, which I think is one of her biggest strengths. Even though I hate using the term “voice” as its one of the most subjectively used terms in screenwriting, you can’t argue that Diablo doesn’t have a unique voice.

I also like how challenging the story is. Mavis is probably one of the most likable unlikable protagonists since Lester Burnham in American Beauty. This girl is so pathetic. She lives her life by a coda of lies and deceit, and is so self-serving and cruel that you occasionally want to give her a slap in the face. But there are just enough relatable qualities in Mavis, things we don’t like about ourselves but lean on anyway, that we kind of understand where she’s coming from.

But this script doesn’t depend on our feelings towards Mavis. Even with some good qualities, there’s no way we’re rooting for her to succeed. This is another entry into the little-known Train-wreck genre. You see this in scripts like “The Voices” and movies like “Chuck and Buck,” where we as an audience know this is going to end in a really bad way, yet we can’t look away. We have to see our character crash and burn. I don’t think anyone knows that this genre officially exists, yet when I do come across it, it tends to work more often than fail.

As for the story’s faults, there are a few. While the final act has a couple of great scenes, it culminates in a scenario that’s both awkward and really difficult to buy. It was the only time I was pulled out of the screenplay and I get the feeling they’re going to be working on this scene right up until they shoot it. It’s just such a risk, and I’m afraid that right now, it doesn’t work. I’m not even sure it can work. But I understand what they’re trying to do.

The other issue is this odd completely-out-of-left-field sequence in the middle of the script where Mavis goes and visits her parents. The scene doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about her and it doesn’t do anything to move the story forward. It almost feels like the movie has stopped for intermission and then this short movie is played for ten minutes until we sit back in our seats and start again. It wasn’t a bad sequence. It was just an odd choice.

In the end, I have to say I was quite surprised by this script. And I didn’t even mention its secret ingredient, the fact that we’re constantly wondering how much of this character is Diablo Cody. There are enough similarities in what we know about her life to indicate a lot, which makes the read fascinating on a whole nother level. Anyway, this was easily the best script of the week for me. Hope you guys dig it.

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

What I learned: Whenever you bring a new character into the story, use the surroundings to tell us who they are. When Mavis wakes up in the first scene, she walks into her living room, where we spot a couple of EMPTY WINE BOTTLES on the table. That tells me a TON about the character right there and without a lick of dialogue. You can extend this to what the character’s wearing, what they’re reading or what they’re doing. Look at how we meet George McFly in Back To The Future. The guy is still wearing a hairstyle straight out of the 1950s. Later, he’s watching a rerun of The Honeymooners. Right away we realize this guy is living in the past. Pay attention to a character’s surroundings as you can use them to tell us exactly who that character is.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A struggling entrepreneur takes his mother on a cross-country roadtrip to reunite with an old flame.
About: Dan Fogelman wrote “Cars,” “Bolt,” and the year’s biggest spec sale so far, the untitled Steve Carrel comedy which sold for 2 million dollars. Today’s script, “My Mother’s Curse,” was purchased by Paramount and landed on this year’s Black List with, I believe, 13 votes. Before Fogelman made the jump to features, he wrote on several failed TV series. Ann Fletcher (“The Proposal”) is set to direct and Seth Rogan and Barbara Streisand are rumored to star.
Writer: Dan Fogelman
Details: 112 pages – June 5, 2007 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I’ll just say it. I don’t think “parent-related” humor is funny. It’s why I never watched Everybody Loves Raymond, why the Seinfeld episodes I hated most were the ones with the parents, and why I never jumped on this “Shit My Dad Says” bandwagon. I don’t know why but I guess it’s because the humor is so…obvious. Oh, those wacky parents are saying the darndest things again. What will they say next??? The only parent-related movie I like is “Meet The Parents,” which I thought was one of the best executed comedies of the last ten years. The reason it passed the “parents” test was because the parents were in control instead of out of control, and that was a nice change. To prove my point, the franchise imploded the second they brought in Streisand and Hoffman for the sequel. Once it became “parents say the darndest things,” it was the same old “Everybody Loves Raymond” jokes catered for the big screen.

Anyway, Fogelman’s a really hot writer and I thought it was ridiculous that I still hadn’t read any of his work, so I saw that this made the Black List and wanted to check out what was under the hood.

My Mother’s Curse is a simple story (a welcome change from yesterday, huh?) about 29 year-old Andy Brewster, an entrepreneur with commitment issues. He lives in LA and has created a completely organic cleaning formula, like Fantastik, but so pure you can actually drink it. This is Andy’s big pitch. He cleans up some dirt, then downs a shot of the formula. It impresses everyone who sees it, but still hasn’t made him any sales.

Before Andy goes on a big cross-country pitch fest, he stops back home to check on his single mother, Joyce. Since his father died, Joyce has lost all ambition. Her days consist of watching TV and chugging M&Ms. The only joy she has left in life is Andy coming home to visit.

So after hearing about one of Jocye’s ex-flames, Andy googles him and finds out he lives in San Francisco. Playing the role of Cupid, he invites his mother along for his business trip, planning to secretly surprise her at the end with her ex. Sounds like a trip on the Crazy Train to me.

Andy and his mom get stuck in topless bars, eat a 72 ounce steak, have inappropriate conversations about Andy’s penis problems as a baby, and probably my favorite part, listen to a “books on tape” version of “Middlesex” as they drive, which has tons of uncomfortable sexually descriptive chapters. I know these types of scenes are par for the course in roadtrip comedies but Fogelman makes them fresh somehow. I think it’s because the characters, and specifically the relationship, feels so honest. It’s like we don’t need all the bells and whistles to distract us. The characters are working so it doesn’t matter where they are.

What’s the key to a good road trip script? Well, the good ones tend to have a strong goal. Wherever the characters are going, it needs to be really important to them. The audience isn’t going to care if our heroes only kind of want to get there. What’s unique about My Mother’s Curse is that only one of the characters knows the true goal of the journey. Joyce is out of the loop. This withheld information gives the story an added layer because on top of wondering what this guy’s going to say when they get there, we’re wondering how Joyce will react as well. Will she lash out at her son, embrace the moment, run away? This “why have one reaction when you can have two,” approach makes the endpoint twice as exciting.

The other thing I like to encourage on roadtrip script is having a ticking time bomb. If the characters need to be somewhere by a certain time, the script moves faster. If you remember the movie “Roadtrip,” for example, it’s about a college kid who has sex with a girl on tape, then accidentally sends that tape to his girlfriend back home. The ticking clock is he has to get back home and intercept the tape before it gets there. In the upcoming Zach Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr. film, “Due Date,” they have to get home before the baby is born. And in a less obvious example, the ticking time bomb in Little Miss Sunshine is the pageant.

Surprisingly, My Mother’s Curse doesn’t use a ticking time bomb, and I think it suffers a little for it. Had Andy found out that the ex was leaving on an extended business trip in three days, that could’ve infused the story with some immediacy. Maybe something happens to the car late in the trip with only 12 hours to go (not unlike the grandfather dying in Little Miss Sunshine) and the rush to get there in time gives that third act an extra kick in the ass.

But hey, I think Mr. Fogelman knows what he’s doing and probably has a good reason for nixing the hurry-up option. In fact, outside of a few minor issues, I thought this script was pretty awesome. The mother-son stuff is done with just the right mixture of comedy and emotion. I didn’t break down at the end or anything but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Nobody’s reinventing the wheel here but if you want to know how to execute an idea in screenplay form, you could learn a lot from this script. Good stuff. :)

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

What I learned: Good scripts have three central areas of conflict: external conflict, internal conflict, and inter-character conflict. So in My Mother’s Curse, the external conflict is Andy trying to sell his cleaning solution. The internal conflict is his inability to commit. And the inter-character conflict is Andy and Joyce’s different approach to life. A lot of writers get lost in the second act. Remember, this is what you should be using your second act for – to explore these three areas of conflict. If you don’t, you’ll have a bunch of lame boring characters, talking to each other with nothing to say.

Watch Scriptshadow on Sundays for book reviews by contributors Michael Stark and Matt Bird. We try to find books that haven’t been purchased or developed yet that producers might find interesting. It’s been a few Sundays since we’ve had our last one, and that’s mainly my fault, but Stark is back, and he’s doing something a little different – a look at the best characters in crime fiction. Check it out!

Welcome back to another edition of Scriptshadow’s Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy Book Club. While we hardly wield an ounce of Oprah’s mighty literary clout, we do hope a few trolling producers and story editors listen to our glowing endorsements. May there be little rest for their reading department as they write massive tons of coverage over this holiday weekend.

Today, we’re gonna talk about some of our favorite crime fiction characters and wonder aloud (Insert dirigible-sized thought balloon here) why the hell they haven’t been brought to the big screen yet. Now, all but one of ‘em are from best-selling novelists. All have had their rights quickly snapped up. And, mysteriously, all seem to be languishing in some dreaded level of development hell.

But, at Scriptshadow, we don’t fear the reaper. Let’s pay the damned boatman, throw Cerberus off our scent with some strategically placed Omaha steaks and try to free a few of the damned good reads held captive here.

1. Harry Bosch by Michael Connelly

“Everybody counts or nobody counts.” – Harry Bosch

I am indebted to Michael Connelly not only for nearly 20 years of excellent reading pleasure, but for introducing me to the classic, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section, one of his character’s favorite albums and now one of mine. The recording session of that historic slab of wax is pretty damned worthy of a movie in itself — Pepper, a smack-addict, played through all of it with a broken reed and it’s still bloody brilliant — But, as usual, I digress…

Connolly went from cub crime beat reporter to one of America’s most respected novelists with over 23 bestsellers to his name. So far, there’s only been one film adaptation of his work, Clint Eastwood’s Blood Work. We have yet to see his most famous and beloved character, Harry Bosch, hit either the big or small screens.

And, that’s a crying shame!

Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch was named after the 15th Century Dutch painter known for his surreal landscapes of sin, punishment and hellfire. This pretty much mirrors this LA cop’s beat — and life. His mother was a prostitute who got murdered (shades of the Black Dahlia) when he was 11. He bounced around various orphanages and foster families till he finally ran away and joined the army, serving a still-soul-scarring-stint in Vietnam as a sewer rat, navigating the enemy’s deadly mazes of underground tunnels.

Even above ground, and in the light, Bosch still works the same way through LA’s toughest cases, meticulously and stubbornly, with little regard that it all might suddenly blow up in his face.

Bosch’s mission is to speak for the dead. He is a relentless case closer, even if it means defying authority. Following his career and character arc for the past 14 books, we’ve watched him age, find and lose love, become a father, make new enemies and rise through the ranks to Homicide Detective.

He’s even been thrown off the force, working unsolved cases as a P.I.
In The Last Coyote, he’ll solve the 30-year-old murder of his mother, the motivation for his profession and his dogged persistence. He’s worked many of the city’s politically sensitive cases, still hounded by the schmucks from internal Affairs and still getting in the face of his higher ups.

Much of his life is a something of a mess. His romances with both cops and civilians are strained and complicated. Even the house he bought working as a cop show’s technical advisor is condemned after the Northride quake. Confrontational to the end, he ignores the yellow tape and keeps sneaking back inside.

Where to start? From the beginning. His first book, The Black Echo, won Connolly an Edgar award. Follow Bosch through to the most recent, Nine Dragons, where he’s way out of his element, rescuing his daughter from Triad leaders in Hong Kong. To watch the author segue from journalist to novelist, I recommend Crime Beat, a collection of his articles from the Sun Sentinel and The LA Times.

Connelly is case and point that Hollywood purchasing your novel can be a mixed blessing. He is currently suing Paramount, trying to get the rights back to his first three Bosch books. After 15 years of non-action, he should be able to buy his babies back. But, beware of studio accountants and their evil abacuses. His bill got padded by years of “Out of pocket” development costs and pricey producer fees.

2. Jack Reacher by Lee Child

“Lee Child’s tough but humane Jack Reacher is the coolest continuing series character now on offer.” – Stephen King

Highly prolific, Lee Child has written 14 bestsellers in 13 years. So, why is his vastly popular creation, Jack Reacher, taking so much damned time getting to the silver screen?

We’re talking international best sellers here!!! Published in 51 countries and 36 languages!!! Uh, I thought foreign markets were supposed to be a good thing?!! Where are those studio accountants with the evil abacuses when you actually need them?

Instead, Hollywood fast tracks a comic book which sold a grand total of half a baker’s dozen copies, a board game that no one has played in over thirty years and a 3-D animated feature based on a breakfast cereal no sane parent would ever feed to their kids.

Do we really need Cookie Crunch – The Movie? Probably not. Do we really need a Jack Reacher series? Yeah, you’re darn tooting we do!

Lee Childs a British television director. has created the ultimate, iconic, American action hero. Reacher is James Bond with just a toothbrush and the shirt on his back. He’s Jason Bourne but with memory (of stuff he’d rather forget). He’s Bill Bixby’s Incredible Hulk, a knight-errant, wandering the countryside helping out fair damsels and regular joes who coincidentally just happen to be in distress. Guess Reacher has some serious when-shit-is-gonna-come-down radar going on.

He doesn’t look for bad luck and trouble. It just kinda finds him.

Reacher is a former Army MP Major who grew disenchanted with all the bureaucratic military bullshit and retires to an uncomplicated life of aimless drifting.
Raised as a military brat, the dude comes with some major assets – premium fighting skills, lighting fast reflexes and near bionic powers of observation. He relies every now again on some of the brass he knew back in the day for a little intel.

He also doesn’t come with much baggage. Worrying that actually washing his clothes might lead to needing more possessions like a suitcase or a house, he keeps his life zen-monk simple. The guy travels the country either by bus or by thumb, buys new clothes when the ones on him get too ripe and resorts to manual labor (or ripping off a bad guy’s stash) when his wallet gets empty.

Many of the Reacher books have the same MO. He ambles into a small town, smells trouble, takes care of trouble, leaves a lonely, local beauty quite satisfied and unceremoniously drifts away. Nothing wrong with a little familiarity. It’s a damned good MO.

According to Child’s website, all of the Reacher books have been optioned. Yet, there’s only one currently in any form of pre-production — One Shot, with Josh Oslon (A History of Violence) as the hired scribe.

Note to Paramount. Listen to the fans on this one. Hell, I think if you’d give Josh Holloway a shave and a haircut, you’ll have yourself a nice franchise. With MGM’s James Bond on hold, we need Jack Reacher more than ever.

3. Gabriel Allon by Daniel Silva

“He is the prince of fire and the guardian of Israel. And, perhaps most important, Gabriel is the angel of revenge. “ Daniel Silva on naming his protagonist.

We asked for a thriller. We asked for political intrigue. We asked for an awesome Mossad agent that comes out of the cold.

What we got was You Don’t Mess With The Zohan.

Oy!

There are nine books in this series Silva launched back in 2000. Universal acquired the rights to the entire catalogue in 2007. But, again, there’s only one in any stage of pre-production, The Messenger with Pierre Morel (Taken) tapped to direct.

Daniel Silva was the Middle East correspondent for United Press International – the perfect background for one about to embark on a career of writing spy thrillers.

His creation, Gabriel Allon, comes with much of the same skill sets as Reacher, but with a truckload of more baggage. His cover is also damned fascinating. The spy happens to be one of the world’s most renowned art restorers. Thus, we know the man is patient, deft and has a keen eye for detail. Guess it takes some of the same talents to kill a well-hid terrorist as it does to touch up an aging Caravaggio.

He’s the son of two Holocaust survivors and grew up in the Jezreel Valley of Israel. German was his first language. Languages would be one of his many giftings. The other is art. It’s in his blood — his mother being one the country’s most famous painters. Recruited back in art school, Allon becomes an assassin for the Israeli Secret Service, killing six of the twelve Black September members responsible for the 72 Munich Olympic murders.

But, payback can be a bitch. Exacting a few eyes for an eye, the PLO retaliates years later in Venice, killing Allon’s son and disabling his wife with a car bomb meant for him.

Allon is a spy that would rather stay out in the cold. He is an able killer but conflicted with a conscious and the ghosts of his past. His wife has been confined to a mental hospital all these years. He’s rather concentrate on saving the great works of art decaying in the old, damp cathedrals of Venice. Yet, current events keep bringing him out of retirement. The world keeps needing saving as well.

One of my favorite recurring characters is the spymaster who recruited him, Ari “the Old Man” Shamron, a legendary operative himself who captured Adolf Eichmann back in the day. He basically created Allon and pretty much won’t allow the unhappy spy to ever retire and live in peace.

Allon’s missions have dealt both with both “unfinished” Nazi business (looted art, the Vatican’s involvement and war criminals) and terrorism (the PLO, Saudi Arabia’s role in al-Qaeda and the rise of militant Islam in Europe). These thrillers are timely, taunt, globe trotting and nearly impossible to put down. They’re everything you want for a good summer read and — ahem — a summer blockbuster.

With a new book, The Rembrandt Affair, coming out later this month, Allon will be – luckily for us — laying down his brushes and picking up a Beretta one more time.

4. Angela Gennaro by Dennis Lehane

“Now, would you like to eat first, or would you like a drink before the war?” – John Cleese in Faulty Towers

Okay, technically, the low rent, south Boston PI team of Kenzie and Gennaro have already made it to the big screen in Ben Affleck’s Gone, Baby, Gone. And, although the movie had some awesome, Oscar-worthy performances, Gennaro’s character was pretty much sidelined for almost all of it. And, how did this spunky, Italian fireball become so damned Monaghan cute, quiet and Irish all of a sudden?

Gone, baby, were their sexual tension, their wisecracking, her mobbed up family members and all the psychic damage from her abusive marriage.

I’d love to see these guys a bit truer to the books in an HBO series. Think of it as Southie Moonlighting with the infamous, gritty Lehane edge.

Growing up together on the blue-collar streets of Dorchester, Patrick and Angie have always been friends, sometimes been lovers and seem to work pretty well together in cracking a case. They run their agency out of the belfry of a church where “all manners of unholiness cross their threshold”.

At times, they rely on a little help from their old friend, Bubba Rugowski, an arms-dealing ultra-violent psycho — A dude even Spenser and Hawk wouldn’t tangle with.

Lehane seems to experiment a bit with each of the books in the series. Darkness, Take My Hand is a search for a serial killer. Sacred is a bit of a surreal, screwball updating of Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Gone, Baby, Gone, as you know, gets pretty dark and grim. Not all of their cases end up with Dave and Maddie popping open champagne bottles and speaking in iambic pentameter.

Fans of the six Kenzie-Gennaro novels will be relieved to hear that after an 11 year hiatus, they’ll be back sleuthing this November in Lehane’s latest, Moonlight Mile.

5. Allen Choice by Leonard Chang

“The key is character. Chang works like a painter, carefully brushing strokes of truth and depth on all of his characters.” – Michael Connelly

So, our past four have all sprouted from the Underwoods of best selling authors. Here’s the one character you probably don’t know about, but should. So, buy the books now and thank me later.

Choice is a Korean-American, Kierkegaard-reading executive protection expert, who by the third installment of the series, becomes a full fledged, hard-boiled, private investigator.

Unlike most PIs, he doesn’t crack wise too often. Unlike Spencer (My gumshoe standard), who passes the time during stakeouts making mental lists of his favorite baseball players and ranking the gals he’s seen naked, Choice seems to worry a lot, brood and doubt almost every decision. I like that. I identify with that. It sets him apart from most of crime fiction’s overconfident detectives, making him and thus the stakes that much more real.

He also deftly dispels the stereotypical baggage of the inscrutable Asian sleuths of yore like Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto. Choice doesn’t know any karate and he can’t fix your fucking computer. He also doesn’t speak a word of Korean and knows very little about his heritage, which is a huge stumbling block when meeting his girlfriend’s extremely traditional parents.

At one point he calls himself “an ethnic dunce”.

He’s both assimilated and alienated at the same time. Everything about Choice seems in conflict. Orphaned at a young age, he doesn’t have much of a compass when it comes to family or relationships. He tries to compensate by reading the great philosophers. I think it just mixes him up more. Imagine the soul of 60s stand-up era Woody Allen sucked out and transferred into the body of a former linebacker.

The third book of the series, Fade To Clear, would make a pretty neat, little flick. The plot, in some ways a distant relative to Gone, Baby, Gone, involves a bitter custody battle with the abusive father abducting his daughter. Choice is hired to find the girl. The case is far more complicated than it appears.

First off, the mother is something of a bitch. Her ex-husband is involved with some rather shady shit. The ex-husband’s brother is a professional psychopath. And, the worried mother’s sister happens to be Choice’s old (but not completely burned out) flame.

Treating it like a routine skip tracing case turns out to be a big mistake when we learn that he wasn’t the first PI they’ve hired. Seems the sisters neglected to tell him that his predecessor ended up quite dead.

Like Lehane, these streets (These Streets of San Francisco this time) get dark and gritty and noir to the bone. It’s good work. I hope Chang returns to this character real soon.

Daniel Dae Kim (Lost) has optioned the first two Allen Choice novels. But, like all the books we’ve mentioned here, this project needs a Get Out of Limbo card stat!

So, my case is finally drawing to a close. I’m optimistic though. Warner Brothers has just recently resurrected one of my favorite books, Carter Beats the Devil. Hopefully, other studios will follow suit and go back to their libraries, refocusing on some of the books that they’ve already paid damn good money for.

More of Stark’s naughty kvetchings can be found on his blog — http://www.michaelbstark.blogspot.com

Genre: Drama
Premise: A 17 year old New York girl witnesses a bus crash that kills a woman and battles with the secret that she may have been indirectly responsible.
About: This has got to be one of the craziest stories to ever come out of Hollywood. “Margaret” had a great cast: Matt Damon, Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, and Olivia Thirlby. They shot and finished the movie all the way back in 2005. But guess what? It’s never been released! Why? Well, it appears that Lonergan (who wrote and directed the film) can’t finish the edit! Apparently, he and the producer can’t agree on a cut of the movie. Numerous other producers have tried to come in and help, but no matter what anybody does, a consensual cut of the film has not emerged. This has, of course, resulted in tons of lawsuits. Making this even more mind-boggling is that Martin Scorsese watched a 2006 cut of the film and dubbed it a masterpiece (it should be noted that Scorsese directed Lonergan’s “Gangs of New York.”) – The Los Angeles Times did a nice lengthy article on the troubled film here. Fascinating stuff.
Writer: Kenneth Lonergan
Details: 185 pages – July 15, 2003 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Paquin plays Lisa

I have never read a script like this one in my life. To give you an idea of what you’re in for, the script is titled “Margaret,” yet there’s nobody named Margaret in the script. It’s also 185 pages long. Back up, read that again. It’s not a misprint. The script is 185 pages long. Here’s the thing though. Numerous people have told me the script is awesome. Someone even went so far as to call it “brilliant.” All of this just adds to the mystique of the project. And Lonergan, for those who don’t know, wrote and directed the great “You Can Count On Me,” one of my favorite indie films of all time. He also wrote the respectable “Analyze This” and “Gangs Of New York.” But this script is in an entirely separate class. It’s an epic tale about…a girl who witnesses a bus crash?? What the hell is going on?

Lisa Cohen is a 17 year old New York girl butting heads with her emerging adolescence. Emotions converge with confusion and create this dark uncertain path which Lisa’s been walking down, blind as a bat. She lives in New York, goes to a private school on scholarship, has a commercial director father who lives in L.A. and a struggling theatre actress mother who lives with her and her brother in their small New York apartment.

In anticipation of a horse-riding vacation she’s been planning with her dad, Lisa goes out to find a cowboy hat. The search yields a big fat donut hole but just as she’s on the verge of giving up, she spots a bus driver wearing a cowboy hat worthy of a John Wayne film. She tries to flag him down but he’s already on the move. Eventually he spots her and engages in flirty back and forth wave. As a result, he misses the red light, and plows into a woman crossing the street, who dies soonafter.

Matt Damon plays Lisa’s teacher

Feeling partly responsible for the accident, Lisa doesn’t reveal the blown red light to the police, which gets the bus driver off the hook. But as time goes by, Lisa begins to feel more and more uncomfortable about what she’s done, and decides to change her statement. She gets in touch with the woman’s best friend, the bus driver himself, and a team of lawyers, and brings a lawsuit against the MTA to try and get the bus driver fired.

But this is not all Margaret is about. Oh no no no. There are tons of secondary storylines going on here. These include her mom dating a semi-creepy foreign guy , Lisa’s crush on her teacher, Lisa’s friend’s crush on her, Lisa losing her virginity (to yet a third character), Lisa’s phone relationship with her father, countless private school classroom debates about racism and terrorism (keep in mind – this was written 2 years after 9/11), Lisa’s friendship with the bus victim’s best friend, a school play, and probably a few others I’m forgetting. In other words, there’s a lot going on in Margaret.

If I’m being honest, I don’t know how you *couldn’t* have problems in the editing room with this script. Let’s call a spade a spade. A story about a girl who witnesses a bus crash and tries to get the driver fired is not worthy of 180 pages of script. It just isn’t.

Olivia plays one of Lisa’s friends

I mean yeah, all these additional story threads tell us more about Lisa, but there’s so many sides to her, and these sides are so disconnected and random that it’s nearly impossible to grasp what she or the movie is about. For example, we have these long drawn out debates in the classroom about Israel and Palestine, or terrorism and the middle east. Yet what does any of that have to do with a girl who wants the truth to be known about a bus accident? If there was some connection – any connection – between the two worlds, then I could buy it, but there isn’t. For example, if the bus driver were Middle Eastern, there’d be a physical link between the 30 minutes of terrorism debates they have at school and the personal problems she’s having outside of school. But each storyline is so compartmentalized, it feels like it could be its own movie.

Her mom’s relationship with the strange admirer is another example. I couldn’t find any connection between that relationship and Lisa’s situation. The long calls with her father and this phantom horse-riding trip also perplexed me. I honestly believe that had you taken these storylines out of the script, absolutely nothing would be lost. The core of the story here is Lisa’s desire to release the truth. Anything that doesn’t have to do with that isn’t necessary.

There are other things that bothered me too. Lisa acts completely retarded at times. She keeps saying she doesn’t want to get anybody in trouble, yet she’s filling out police reports accusing a man of killing someone. In what dimension does she think nobody gets hurt here? Also, her motivation is constantly changing. One moment, all she cares about is taking down the bus driver, and the next she’s hellbent on losing her virginity. These segues are so jagged I felt like we were cutting between different dimensions.

Strangely, despite all this, I found myself compelled to keep reading. I wanted to find out what happened. I wanted to see the bus driver fall. I wanted to know how all these threads were going to come together. The fact that they didn’t was upsetting, but you can’t discount the fact that you just read a 185 page script in one sitting. From a pure writing standpoint, that’s really hard to do. So I give Lonergan some dap for that.

It’s just…I guess I’m shocked that this script was even made in the first place. These problems they’re rumored to be having in the editing room – well of course they’re having problems. How do you edit a movie where you can make the argument that 9 of the 12 subplots aren’t necessary to making the story work?? Editing a film is about serving the story. You’re supposed to get rid of anything that doesn’t push the story forward. The issue here is that Lonergan had no intention of making the kind of movie that lived by those rules. This is one of those “trust me, I know what I’m doing” deals and it looks like they didn’t trust him.

If this were my story, I’d chop it down to a reasonable 2-3 subplots and allow the bus crash plot to drive the film. Cause do we really need to spend 25 minutes watching a man court Lisa’s mom? Does that add enough to the story to warrant its existence? I’m assuming they’ve already asked these questions a thousand times. So I’ll take my opinion train to the next stop.

A fascinating screenplay but man was it all over the place.

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

What I learned: While long screenplays are risky as hell, they’re okay IF the subject matter warrants the length. A biopic that spans 30 years? I can buy that as a 3 hour movie. A fantasy film with dozens of characters sprawled over a huge geographical landscape. You can make an argument for needing 200 pages to tell that story. You can’t convince me that a movie about a girl seeking justice after a bus accident warrants a 3 hour running time. You just can’t.