Last week, we looked at one of the greatest action movies ever made, a little indie flick called “Die Hard,” and discussed the numerous solid screenwriting choices that made it great. Today, we’re doing…well…the opposite. We’re discussing Die Hard 2, one of the worst (at least as far as the 90s were concerned) action movies out there, and the screenwriting choices that made it so bad. So here are ten ingredients you should never add to your own scripts, as they’ll most certainly taint the quality of the dish.

NO CONFLICT FOR JOHN MCCLANE
One of the most shocking choices in Die Hard 2 is that the main character has no unresolved personal conflict in the story. There’s no conflict John McClane has to emotionally resolve, either within himself or outside of himself. Remember all that emotion you felt in the first film? How you so badly wanted McClane to save his wife? That was born out of the unresolved conflict in their marriage. We wanted to see them reconcile. Here, there’s no unresolved conflict with McClane whatsoever, making this a purely surface-level endeavor. And boy does it feel that way. There isn’t an ounce of emotion in Die Hard 2’s entire running time. Take a look at how Star Wars tackled this. Han Solo’s conflict in the first movie was his selfishness (an inner conflict). He always chose himself above others. That conflict was resolved when he came back and saved Luke. In the second film, Han needed something new to battle. So the writers shifted the conflict over to Han’s unresolved relationship with Leia. Are they or aren’t they going to get together? As a result, Han’s character was just as compelling. Needless to say, the reason Han was so forgettable in Return Of The Jedi was because there was no unresolved conflict left. Ditto for Die Hard 2.

NO MORE UNDERDOG
Staying with McClane’s character, remember one of the main things that made him so compelling in the first film? He was the underdog. As I always say on this blog, EVERYBODY LOVES AN UNDERDOG. In Die Hard 2, McClane is a celebrity. He’s actually the opposite of an underdog. As a result, we’re not rooting for him nearly as much. We actually expect him to prevail, which is boring.

TOO MUCH PLOT
Part of the beauty of Die Hard is its simplicity. We understand the rules. We understand the players. Everything is clearly laid out. In contrast, Die Hard 2 goes plot-fucking-crazy with its story. There are way too many factions to keep track of (McClane, Airport security, Tower Control, the bad guys, the foreign military leader, the army, Dweeblezorp the Basement Guy) and way too many motivations within each of those factions to keep track of. Not only does this require a full 40 minutes of screenplay time to set up, but it prevents us from getting to know the key characters better so we can care about them. This is one of the principal fallouts of overplotting, is that it takes time away from character development. If we don’t develop our characters, nobody’s going to care about them. That little problem I had with McClane not having any unresolved conflict? I wonder if that’s because they didn’t think they had enough “time.” Of course, had they not overplotted their movie, they would’ve had plenty of time to explore the character.

DE-CONTAINING THE CONTAINER
One of the great things about contained thrillers is that your character is stuck. Him being stuck is a key piece that makes the drama work because it generates an exciting dramatic question: Will he make it out? In Die Hard 2, that element has been discarded and our main character has free reign to go anywhere he wants. Obviously, not every action movie has to be contained, but when we realize McClane can go anywhere (and he does go anywhere – at one point he’s driving around on a snowmobile for God’s sakes) it feels like a cheat and it confuses us. I think if they would’ve set this up as an uncontained film, we may have been more accepting of the decision. But the movie sneakily tries to play both sides of the fence, acting as if it’s a contained thriller, yet allowing characters to go wherever they want. So when you’re writing your own movie, make sure this is clear.

MOVIE LOGIC
While Die Hard 2 tries desperately to make its far-flung terrorist plot believable, the reality is, it doesn’t make sense. Everything hinges on you believing that these planes will just continue to circle until they run out of fuel, made somewhat plausible by the fact that the fake controllers keep telling them they’ll be able to land soon. But the truth is, this isn’t realistic. There are dozens of airports within the Dulles area that the planes can land on with less than 20 minutes of fuel. And if a plane is nearing that critical level of low fuel, they’re going to find another runway. But even if you say, “Carson, who cares about that shit? It’s a fun action movie. Just go with it.” The problem with this extremely complicated plot is that the screenplay has to spend pages upon pages explaining and filling in all these logic holes so that you believe it. Had the plot been simpler and more believable, that time could’ve been spent on…oh I don’t know…character development!

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF TIME
When movie-goers come out of a movie reciting that old adage, “I could write something better than that,” they’ve usually just walked out of a Hollywood sequel. The reason sequels tend to be bad is because the writing period is rushed. It’s hard to write a fully fleshed out compelling story with original twists and turns in a matter of months. The Matrix had over 40 drafts. The Sixth Sense was in the mid-twenties. Look at what happened to those same screenwriters when they had half that time. Or – shudder – a fourth of that time (Ahem, Lady In The Water). The movies were more confusing, less interesting, and less original. That’s not coincidence. So take advantage of that one commodity you have that the big timers don’t – time – to craft the richest, most detailed, most cleverly plotted, most unique screenplay possible.

THE VILLAIN IS BORING AS HELL
From the very first moment the villain in Die Hard 2 appears on screen, I knew the movie was screwed. Naked doing tai-chi in a hotel room?? Give me a break. These gimmicky introductions are usually an attempt to mask a lame thinly constructed villain. The only exception is if their actions teach us something about their character. This moment doesn’t teach us anything. It’s just a cheap setup for him using karate against McClane later on the plane’s wing. Readers see through gimmicks. They know when you’re compensating for a weakness. Do the extra homework and figure out who your villain is (what he wants, what he fears, what his weaknesses are, what pushed him to this point) and push yourself until each one of those choices is unique – not standard bad guy staples. You do that and you won’t need your villain doing naked thai-chi at the beginning of your movie.

SO HOW DO YOU MAKE US HATE YOUR VILLAIN?
There’s usually a moment in every action film where the villain will do something to make you hate him, to ensure that you’ll want to see him go down. Let’s compare that moment in the two Die Hards. In the first, Hans coldly kills Takagi, a man we’ve spent a little time with and have begun to like. As a result, his murder hits us on a personal level. Contrast that with Die Hard 2, where the villain (I still don’t remember Mr. Boring’s name) kills an entire plane full of passengers. Now to the inexperienced writer, this might seem like the better choice. More people dead = bad guy badder. But they would be wrong. Cause we didn’t know a single passenger on that plane. They were faceless nobodies and meant nothing to us. The much more personal killing of a single man hit us harder because we cared. Remember that for you next “bad guy moment.”

CLEARLY LAID OUT ACTION SCENES
Every action scene should be a mini-story. There should be a setup, some conflict, and a resolution. Key here is the setup. You want the reader to understand the geography, the motivations, what’s at stake, and each character’s goal. Die Hard handles this masterfully, in part because its locations are always contained and therefore easy to understand. When McClane is up on the roof with all the hostages and realizes it’s about to blow up with an FBI helicopter sniper shooting at him because they thinks he’s a bad guy, it’s an exciting scene because we understand all the variables involved. We can participate in the problem as well as the solution (problem: people standing on huge bomb. Solution: get them out of there without getting killed yourself). In Die Hard 2, almost every time the good guys and bad guys meet, it’s an open area with no rules or clearly laid out motivations. The scenes quickly dissolve into a bunch of people shooting at each other as much as possible, which is why nearly all of the action scenes in Die Hard 2 are boring.

MAIN CHARACTER ISN’T NEEDED
Probably the single biggest failure of this screenplay is that John McClane isn’t needed. The great thing about the first Die Hard is that they had no choice but to deal with McClane. That was the beauty of it. They were stuck with this two-bit wild card New York cop who they felt was doing more harm than good. But they couldn’t stop him because he was inside the building. Here, they don’t need McClane at all, yet he still finds his way into every major meeting and conversation. It’s totally convoluted, feels false, and defies all believability. Granted he does have a strong goal (save his wife), but nobody on the ground has any reason or motivation to deal with him. So if you’re going to write your hero into a scenario, make sure it makes sense!

Obviously you can’t make the same movie twice. And I respect them for trying something different and bigger with Die Hard 2. But bigger means more complicated. And unless you have the time to figure out and hone those additional complex story threads, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Or, more appropriately, running around a glass filled room without shoes on. Die Hard 2 is the perfect reminder that bigger and better rarely go hand in hand. And if you’re going to aim for the moon, make sure you’ve done enough research so that when launch day comes, you don’t blow yourself up.

First of all, I know this has already made its way through the screenwriting community, but I still thought I should post it.  Some of the jokes here are misses but there are a couple of really good ones.  My favorite by far is “Escalation.”  Basically, if you’re sick of all these end-of-the-year screenwriting lists, you’ll want to check out “The Wish List.”

Also, if you’re like me, you’ve put off all your holiday shopping til the last minute.  Well, it’s time to jack into that Amazon account and order some DVDs.  Here are a bunch of staples as well as some deals!

THE TOWN (blu-ray/dvd combo) $19.99 – Really liked this flick.  Should fare well on my Yearly Top 10 list next week.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (blu-ray) $11.99 – I just re-watched Pulp Fiction the other day and man did I not appreciate the greatness of that film the first time around.  I was much better prepared to recognize the awesome in Inglorious Basterds.

 STAR TREK BOX SET (dvd) $44.49 – Six of what many consider to be the best Trek films.  None of this pansy wansy Chris Pine nonsense in these puppies. 

JUDD APATOW ORGASM-FEST (blu-ray) $25.99 – Three of Apatow’s creations, including comedy juggernauts 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up.  

 

ROCKY – THE UNDISPUTED COLLECTION (blu-ray) $47.99 – The entire Rocky collection in Blu-Ray??  Holy shit.  Oh, by the way, you can’t pay them to not include Rocky 5.  Trust me, I tried!

 

LOST: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION (blu-ray) 178.99 – I still think that final episode was the best ending to any series ever.  

 

STAR WARS: THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY (dvd) – $22.49 – For the one person who still doesn’t have this yet.  By the way, when is this thing coming out on Blu-Ray again?  Come on George!

                                 

THE WIZARD OF OZ (70TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) (blu-ray) $13.99 – No Wicked.  No origin of Oz b.s.  The original baby!

THE OTHER GUYS (blu-ray/dvd combo) – $22.99 – This movie was pretty funny.  Easily Mark Whalberg’s best performance of his career.  A comedic tour-de-force!

STONE (blu-ray) $23.99 – I’ll be honest.  I have no idea what this movie is.  I just saw De Niro and Norton on the cover and said, “What the hell are these two doing in a movie together that I’ve never heard of before?”  Is this is a biopic of Oliver Stone?  Someone tell me what this is. 

 

INCEPTION (blu-ray) $16.99 – I have a love hate relationship with this film.  It jumps in and out of my Yearly Top 10 on an hourly basis. 

BACK TO THE FUTURE TRILOGY 25th ANNIVERSARY ON BLU-RAY! (blu-ray) $38.99 – And we finish off with a classic.  Did you know Back To The Future is in my top 3…OF ALL TIME?!  I love it so much that I watch the second two movies and convince myself that they’re actually good.  

Genre: Fairy-tale Mash-up
Premise: Snow White teams up with a local hunter to take down her evil step-mother, Ravenna.
About: This is the spec script that sold for 1.5 million last week. Evan Daugherty was working as an intern a couple of years ago. He won the Script Pimp contest in 2008 with his script, “Shrapnel,” which John McTiernan later committed to direct. Something tells me that one’s going to be in development for at least another year. Shrapnel led to him doing a rewrite on He-Man, which eventually led to this huge sale. If there is such a thing as the moment every screenwriter dreams of, this would be it. 
Writer: Evan Daugherty (inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s “Little Snow White.”)
Details: 110 pages – undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. 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).

When this sale happened, my first thought was, “I couldn’t write a script like that in a million years.” This subject matter is so far out of my field of expertise (whatever that is) I felt a little like a member of the Cannes jury having just been told the plot to Star Wars Episode 1, The Phantom Menace. i.e. Confused.

So there’s…Snow White? And she…teams up with a huntsman? But isn’t Snow White dead? Doesn’t she live with dwarves? I was definitely the grandma someone was trying to explain the internet to.

Yet these reimagining fairy tale/historical mash-ups are plugging their way through the Hollywood pipeline and everyone’s banking on them becoming the next big thing (costing no money for rights cause they’re in the public domain certainly doesn’t hurt).

Snow White and The Huntsman follows Miss White’s life as a princess, which for all intents and purposes is pretty sweet. She’s got a strapping young prince doting over her. She loves her family. And paparazzi won’t be invented for another 300 years.

But then her mother, the queen, dies, and because pops can’t keep it in his pants, he marries some hot young trophy wife, the evil Ravenna. Ravenna’s got all sorts of issues, but her biggest one is her desperate desire to look prettier than everyone else in the land.

So obsessed is she with this desire that she hires a local huntsman to seek out the hottest women he can find, capture them, and bring them back to her. She then puts them through the hot girl juicer, a machine that sucks the youth out of these poor women, turning it into juice, which Ravenna then drinks so she can stay young and hot.

Well word on the street is that Snow White is eerily close to becoming the fairest woman in the land, so it’s time for that bitch to get juiced too. But Snow White doesn’t wanna get juiced, and runs into the forest, where she eventually teams up with The Hunstman, who reluctantly helps her escape to freedom.

Of course, in a nod to films like Romancing The Stone and The Princess Bride, these two simply don’t like each other, so there’s a lot of arguing, a lot of not understanding the other’s way, and a lot of repressed desiring.

Eventually Snow White realizes that if she’s going to survive in the wild, she’ll need the particular skillset of the huntsman, and so she forces Hunty to teach her the way of the land. Now I know the question all of you are dying to have me answer so I’ll confirm it right here: YES, our seven dwarfs make an appearance.  In fact, our seven dwarfs are pretty badass, and become a key component later in defeating the queen.  

I’m always amazed by the imagination of these worlds. First of all, let’s face it, fairy tales are fucked up to begin with. Who thinks up a story where a dead woman sleeps in a coffin with a bunch of gnomes?  Since when do wolves have super-human blowing powers and blow down houses…with PIGS in them???  And isn’t there a fairy tale where a bunch of people live in a giant shoe?  They must have smoked a lot of dope back in the 1600s, I’ll tell you that.  So to then take an already freaky premise and further freak it into something weirder has to be considered a unique talent.  So I give credit to Daugherty there.

From a structural perspective, I was also impressed. Snow White having to escape off into the woods was a solid first act break. But more importantly, Daugherty knows how to build through that second act, realizing that if he just gave us Snow White and The Huntsman arguing for 60 pages we’d be bored out of our minds. So he adds plenty of complications (the seven dwarves, an old boyfriend, some bounty hunters, Ravenna’s impending second marriage) to keep us on our toes. It all builds to a solid third act, where the forces of good and evil engage in a final smackdown, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it definitely works.

Now I’ve been reading quite a few of these mash-up scripts on the amateur front and the reason Snow White is better is that everything’s been thought through here. The amateur scripts always feel like a bunch of wacky ideas haphazardly spilled onto the page. It’s like the writers just want credit for being weird and different.  Form, structure, character, really aren’t that important to them.

But this script pays attention to the details.  Take the character of The Huntsman for example. This isn’t just a wise-cracking rogue who’s winking at the audience. His wife was killed years ago by a wolf, and he’s been hunting that wolf ever since. There’s a sadness to this man, a void in him that gives his character weight, that makes him a real person.

I really felt like all the edges of this house were inspected before they put it on the market.  I can’t say the same for the amateur scripts I read, where 60-75% effort is the norm.

I guess the big question I have about Snow White and The Huntsman is, who is it being marketed to? Snow White is very much a little girl’s fairy tale, so that’s your built in demographic right there. Yet this is an edgy grown-up reimagining of the character. So who goes to see it? Will 14 year old boy’s flock to see a Snow White film? I don’t know. And what about adults? Isn’t this too kiddie for them? It’s one of those weird films that seems to be targeted to everyone and yet to no one. Okay, I’m starting to sound like Matrix Reloaded dialogue now, so I’ll move on.

This was a hard script to judge. As a piece of screenwriting, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. But if I’m being honest there isn’t a single aspect of this subject matter that interests me. I felt like I was reading two stories, the one I was admiring as a screenplay and the one about a fairy tale I could care less about. In the end, there’s too much good here not to recommend, but you definitely won’t be catching me at the premiere.

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

What I learned: If I were a studio executive and this landed on my desk, I would’ve passed. My response? “Wasn’t my thing.” Does that mean it didn’t deserve to be bought? Of course not. One of the sucky things about this business is that many times when someone passes on a script of yours, you have no idea why. Talking with managers and agents and producers, one of the things I’ve realized is that sometimes people pass simply because it “wasn’t their thing.” It could be expertly written. It could be a great concept. It could have a killer main character. But that particular producer has no interest in that kind of movie. This can actually empower you when you think about it. If someone passes on your script, don’t let it get you down. Simply assume that it wasn’t their thing and move on to the next guy. Cause that next guy might end up paying you 1.5 million dollars for it.

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 be interested in. We won’t be able to get one up every Sunday, but hopefully most Sundays. Here’s Michael Stark with his review of “King of The Sunset Strip.”

Genre: True Crime / Memoir
About: Young Hollywood actor leaves the Mickey Mouse Club for Mickey Cohen’s gang. Think Public Enemies meets What Makes Sammy Run with a dab of The Freshman thrown in.
Writer: Steve Stevens (who has constantly worked in Hollywood for over 50 years) and journalist, Craig Lockwood
Staus: According to the book, Steve’s son, Mark, had written a screenplay, but I can’t find the development stats anywhere. Trust me, this one would make a great flick.

“Someone’s gonna die cause some broad is banging a bullfighter? It ain’t gonna be me.” — Mickey Cohen on both Sinatra’s and Bugsy Siegal’s women troubles.

Hey there, Hi there, Ho there!!! Welcome to another sporadic Scriptshadow Sunday Book Review, where we brave paper cuts and funky, old paperback stench to bring you the books we wanna see turned into movies. It’s our way of helping our nation’s starving writers, the dying logging industry and all those underdeveloped development gals.

With my own bookshelves bare and not enough scratch for a coffee to beard my word thieving ways at Barnes and Noble, the search for my next column brought me back to a place I vowed never to return to — the damn library. I asked the bookish blonde behind the counter what was good. She dutifully told me to go take a hike in the biography section…

…Where I got jumped by the stunning, Saul Bass reds and blacks of this little honey’s spine. Hypnotized, I read the blurbs and knew I had found the one! King of the Sunset Strip instantly intrigued me cause it’s about two of my favorite subjects: Old Hollywood and true crime noir.

It’s the late 50s in the city of angels, mere moments before the Raging Bulls and Easy Riders would seize power. The mighty studio system still ran the town and it was all so deceptively glamorous and magical like Cuba before Batista fell.

19-year-old, Steve Stevens, a graduate of the Hollywood Professional School and the Mickey Mouse Club, is getting a little too long in the Ultra-Brite-white tooth for the kid roles he’s been playing. He knows damn well that not every child star makes the transition to the adult’s table. For every Mickey Rooney and Elizabeth Taylor, there’s the cautionary tale of a Bobby Driscoll (Treasure Island and the voice of Peter Pan) who ended up dead at 31, just another junkie on skid row.

(Actually, Driscoll’s story would make a great movie too if Disney would allow the slight besmirch of their hallowed name.)

Waiting around his pad for his agent to call (No 4G or answering machines back then), Stevens was way closer to going broke then breaking in. But, then, a mysterious piece of fan mail arrives under the slot that will change the spin of his axis forever. An admirer named Mr. Michael invites him to his ice cream shop, saying “You play tuff guys real good.”

That Mr. Michael, for those gangland challenged, turned out to be the colorful, celebrity criminal, Mickey Cohen, the East Coast, Jewish mob boss who was sent out West to keep an eye on Bugsy Siegal. Ax ex-boxer and Chicago enforcer, Cohen pretty much organized all of the organized crime in the great state of California.

Cohen, a skilled blackmailer, had so much dirt on the denizen of Tinseltown, that the media had to protect themselves, painting him as a modern day Robin Hood. Newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, was a close friend. Or perhaps Cohen knew who Rosebud was? Even the FBI stayed away – supposedly the mob had the cross-dressing goods on J. Edgar too.

He was a bulletproof survivor, who lived through gang wars, feuds, assorted attempted hits and all forms of federal prosecution. The man was definitely charismatic but also totally ruthless.

Does it seem a little contrived that a notorious mobster would send a young actor a fan letter? Well, put that in the truth is stranger than fiction department, cause it happened. When adapting the screenplay, this may have to be finessed a bit. Stevens played a lot of juvenile delinquent roles and Cohen must have seen a little bit of his younger, scrappy self in those portrayals. Childless, perhaps he was looking for someone to groom.

Stevens starts hanging with the mobster and the mentoring begins. A natural charmer, the kid soon wins over Mickey’s gang of tough thugs with his heartthrob smile and autographed pictures of Annette Funicello.

Against the warnings of his friends, Stevens is soon a junior member of their little crime family. The flash, the cash and the hot women were just too enticing. Now, Stevens wasn’t exactly an innocent. He had an ulterior motive too. Cohen knew everyone from the Rat Pack to studio chieftains to then Senator Richard Nixon. Being seen with the smooth criminal might just kick-start his career – if he doesn’t get kicked in the head first.

With all the sexy star treatment came some real, fucking serious danger too. Cohen was Public Enemy Number One for good reason. His hair trigger temper was infamous.

Not only did he have the cops in his pocket, but most of L.A.’s best maitre d’s as well. At the exclusive Villa Capri, while Stevens is starstruck by his fellow diners, Cohen overhears a rude comment, extracts a champagne bottle from the bucket and proceeds to wail on the loose-lipped fella with it. After the lug is knocked unconscious and dragged outside, Cohen nonchalantly returns the bottle to the shocked patrons, sits down and puts the napkin around his neck.

The gentleman mobster was sometimes something of a sociopath.

My favorite scene is when Stevens accompanies Mickey and his goons to a comedy club and the brave (or perhaps suicidal) Don Rickles unleashes his trademarked “Mr. Warmth” tirade on the gangster. The kid and the gunmen are shocked silent, waiting for a reaction from their boss. Is he gonna a grab a baseball bat and show the disrespectful comedian just how it’s done in Brooklyn? Finally, after what seems like an eternity of deliberating, Cohen doubles over in laughter. The usual mercurial mobster can take a joke tonight. It’s one of the many moments that will kill on the screen.

When Steven’s parents get into a little scrape with some hooligans in the apartment upstairs, he calls in his first favor from his “Uncle Mickey”. Goons are quickly dispatched to take care of business. It’s another good, comic scene, cause we only hear the ruckus of broken furniture and ass stomping from his parent’s living room below.

Now, favors in the mob have to one day be returned. Stevens is soon dragged into some rather unsavory and increasingly dangerous errands for his uncle.

When he botches one of them up, Cohen explodes. To make sure it doesn’t happen again, he uses a little negative reinforcement, unmercifully kicking the living shitlights out of the kid. Good thing there weren’t any auditions that week.

In a parallel plotline, Stevens lands a juicy role in the B-movie, High School Caesar, as a sycophant patsy to the vicious JD running the school – a part he’s been basically preparing for the past two years. Shooting on location in a small Missouri town, he thinks he’s finally escaped from Cohen’s grasp till two goons from Kansas City come down to watch over him and show him a good time.

Returning home, the errands Mickey has him running get more and more dangerous, one landing him a savage beatdown from the LAPD. Another has him witnessing a near gangland slaying of a skimming nightclub owner.

With friends avoiding him and his acting career faltering, Stevens realizes that hitching his star to Cohen’s wagon might not have been the brightest idea. Hey, did you do anything stupid when you were 19? With more hit attempts on the gangster’s life and the FBI closing in, the kid may not even get out of there alive.

King of the Sunset Strip is a quick zip gun of a read, but it ain’t James Elroy. It’s more the chatty memoir of a very talented schmoozer. Thus, If it’s gonna get made into a movie, I suggest taking a few liberties and have it merely “based on a true story.” Also, we need to focus more on the famous gangster. After doing some research, I’m shocked that Hollywood has never made a movie solely about Mickey Cohen before. Both Bugsy and L.A. Confidential feature him in smaller roles.

As the book is told through Steven’s POV, we need to have more scenes cementing Cohen’s reputation – His scandalous Hollywood shakedowns, his escalating war with Jack Dragna, the Senate Select Committee on organized Crime and, of course, his involvement with Johnny Stompanato.

Stompanato was Cohen’s bodyguard and something of a legendary chick magnet. The sex tape Cohen recorded of Stomp and Lana Turner made the mobster a load of dough. He pressed copies of the starlet’s ecstatic squeals and sold them at fifty bucks a pop. When Turner’s daughter murdered Stompanato, the ruthless businessman pressed up a few thousand more. I have yet to see one of these platters turn up on Ebay.

There’s plenty of material to flesh this film out, including Cohen’s own autobiography and Brad Lewis’ Hollywood’s Celebrity Gangster. As biopics need clear arcs to keep them from meandering, Mickey’s friendship with the Mouseketeer is the perfect frame, keeping the crux of the tale in this two or three year period.

While clearly the comedic elements make it reminiscent of the charming Brando & Broderick team-up, The Freshman, (Man, why isn’t the great Andrew Bergman making movies anymore???) it could also aim towards a more sweeping crime epic like L.A. Confidential.

Either way, I’d love Brian DePalma to take a crack at it. He can atone for The Black Dahlia and prove he can make yet another Untouchables. Step up to the plate, sir. Step right up!

For Discussion: What Biopics would you like to see? And, please tell my fucking tightwad editor to give me a damn book allowance. GA rural libraries aren’t the finest funded these days.

Stark’s further rants and ramblings can be followed in his blog: www.michaelbstark.blogspot.com

Genre: Action/Comedy/Heist/Sci-fi
Premise: (from IMDB) When a terrifying plague destroys crops and causes starvation on a global scale, the world’s greatest thief must break into the extremist-controlled Doomsday Vault to steal the one seed that could prevent the extinction of the human race.
About: Brian K. Vaughn is a comic book writer (Y The Last Man), a TV writer (Lost) and a screenwriter (Roundtable – recently reviewed on the site). The Vault is his newest spec, which hit Hollywood a couple of months ago and impressed many a people. It appears to be in one of those situations where they’re seeking out talent and/or a director before selling it.
Writer: Brian K. Vaughn
Details: 110 pages, January 2010 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’m loving how this thing was modeled after a sandcrawler

One thing you gotta love about Vaughn. He doesn’t hold back. The man lets his imagination go hog wild and I think part of that is because he started in comic books. In comic books, every idea of yours can be realized by a jar of ink. You don’t feel the constraints because there are no constraints. Screenwriters don’t have that luxury because they know having their words realized as pictures is a virtual impossibility. Get too crazy with a character, location or situation (having your characters swoop in via space plane to a domed 2050 Tokyo for instance – one of the scenes in The Vault), and a producer might not be able to wrap their brain around it (or their checkbook). Hence a screenwriter is a mite more conservative.

That’s what took me by surprise with The Vault – is just how ambitious it was. This is basically Star Wars circa 2050. And we all know how eager Hollywood is to accept wild mega-budgeted material that isn’t part of a pre-existing franchise. But if there’s any one who can change their mind, it’s the man behind today’s script.

The year is 2050. Nearly all the crops in the world have been wiped out by something called “The Blight,” a malicious virus that has sent the entire world into starvation. Only the rich are holding on and even their stash is running out.

Introduce wisecracking Han Solo’esque Sebastian Card, a master thief. In fact, we meet Sebastian as he’s tunneling up and under Fort Knox, which doesn’t hold money anymore. It holds food. When Sebastian finally breaks in, we realize the whole point of this elaborate operation was to simply eat some cheese. No, I’m not kidding. He robbed Fort Knox for cheese.

Vaughn

Caught soonafter, the Secretary of Agriculture (the only 300 pound man left in existence – because he gorges on human meat) calls Sebastian in to propose a deal of sorts. In order to gain back his freedom, he wants Sebastian to go to an island near the North Pole where a vault is holding all the world’s seeds. Records have shown that the Vault contains a seed that is immune to The Blight. If they can get that seed, they can regrow the crop population and singlehandedly save the world.

There is a catch of course. The impossible to penetrate Vault is being guarded by someone named Baron, an African extremist with his own agenda. Baron is offering the seed to the first nation who gives him all of their nuclear submarines. He’s got the U.S. on the clock for 48 hours. If they don’t come up with the nukes, he’ll move on to one of the other superpowers. And if that happens, the most dangerous man in the world will have himself an arsenal of nuclear weapons which will allow him to basically make any demand he can think up. To put it simply, Sebastian has 2 days to break into the Vault and get that seed!

He’ll be joined by Maxine, a hot bald marine chick whose previous attempt at getting into the Vault resulted in capture by Baron. After months of torture she finally escaped. She knows the Vault inside out. Of course, Sebastian and Maxine dislike each other immensely, which makes their pairing entirely inefficient. However, since she’s the only one who knows her way around once they get inside, there’s nothing Sebastian can do about it.

The team zips around the world in a super plane capable of traveling thousands of miles in minutes, all in preparation for the biggest and most important heist in the history of the world.

Did you get all that?

I don’t know for what part, but I think Patton Oswald needs to be in this movie.

The Vault is….weird. There’s no other way to explain it. Then again, I’m sure people described the script for Star Wars the same way. There’s a guy in a black mask and cape? There’s a giant walking dog who doesn’t speak? While The Vault not only embraces its absurdity but flaunts it, there’s no avoiding just how absurd it gets in places. From characters breaking into Fort Knox for cheese to the Secretary of Agriculture feasting on human remains ground up from the prison population to a band of snowmobiling eco-terrorist soldiers. Sometimes these moments are fun. Other times they have you wondering if you’ve stumbled onto another screenplay. For example, it’s implied that Maxine was repeatedly raped and defiled while in Baron’s captivity. For a movie which I thought was a fun comedy, wedging in the whole rape angle felt a little out of place.

For me personally though, I just wanted the logic to be sound. I understand this is a comedy and that some leeway has to be given, but there were definitely logic issues that bothered me. For example, I had a hard time believing that the U.S. couldn’t break into the Vault on their own. If they still have nuclear weapons, they can probably scrounge together an army of 100,000 troops and I’m pretty sure that army could break into a Vault guarded by a couple dozen eco-terrorists. You put “eco” in front of anything and it immediately makes that thing four times more wimpy. So I’m not anticipating much of a battle there.

Then there’s Japan. Tokyo has domed their city to protect itself from The Blight. There’s green grass everywhere and they can grow any plant they want. While I can buy into the idea that exporting these plants would still result in them being affected by the virus and therefore dying, the existence of thousands of healthy plants in the world, domed or not domed, made the pursuit of a single seed seem a lot less important.

And while I’m guessing Vaughn will fix this in rewrites, I wasn’t crazy about spending an entire sequence flying to Los Angeles just to walk through a replica of The Vault to see what they were up against, mainly because there was no drama to the sequence. It was obviously there for exposition and exposition only.

But I liked a lot about The Vault too. I liked the Han Solo/Princess Leia like banter between Sebastian and Maxine. Their whole relationship definitely felt like an updated version of that memorable duo. I liked how brave Vaughn was with his choices. He really wasn’t afraid to do anything that popped into his head. There are sword-wielding killer female androids for God’s sake. I love the discussion it inspires. This may be fiction but all it takes is watching one of those History Channel specials to realize that if the farming and food distribution system broke down in any significant way, there’s a good chance our government would fall apart within months, maybe even weeks. Seeing the extreme version of that here just got me thinking how thin the line between prosperity and chaos really is. And to top it all off, it’s a good time. Most everyone I’ve talked to trumpets how fun the script is, and I can’t argue that.

Still, I think Vaughn may have hit the streets with The Vault a little too soon. That may be due to his experiences with Roundtable, which was also a little rough around the edges when it was purchased. But the difference here is that this is an entire universe, an entire mythology that needs to be created. And as exciting and imaginative as it is, there are times when it doesn’t feel fleshed out. The pieces are there, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Vaughn take another couple of passes and really weave a tapestry as opposed to just laying out the yarn.

I think that anything Vaughn writes is worth reading, and The Vault doesn’t change that opinion. But there are a few too many puddles in the journey to make me go gaga. If you have it, read it, and tell me what you think.

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

What I learned: Vaughn uses a lot of underlining in his screenplays. A lot. And unlike how it affects most readers, heavy underlining, bold, or italics doesn’t bother me, as long as there’s a purpose and a uniformity to it. But I have to admit, the more you accentuate your text, the less effective the purpose behind it becomes. So if you underline 3 times a page, sooner or later I just tune out the underlining. As a reader, I’ve found that underlining works best when it’s used sparingly, and as a tool to set up an important moment later in the story. So for example, in Back To The Future, if you remember the opening scene, we pan around to all the clocks, then come down to the door as it opens and Marty’s foot appears. He kicks his skateboard over to the bed. And underneath the bed, we see a radiation suitcase. That radiation suitcase is the perfect thing to underline because everything else in the scene is so irrelevant. The reader’s reading fast and if you don’t bring to their attention this item that sets up a HUGE part of the story later, we might not catch it. Ideally, there are probably five or six of these “underline-worthy” moments in a story. I’m not going to say you can’t underline to your heart’s content like Vaughn – everyone has their own style – but in my experience, that’s the way underlining seems to have the most effect on a reader.