So last week I gave you ten screenwriting tips to take away from Aliens, one of the best sci-fi action films ever. This week, we’re looking at the sequel to Aliens, Alien 3, which a young David Fincher directed. Now originally, I wrote this long impassioned opening about how terribly directed this movie was. The setting was beyond boring. The casting was uninspired. For some reason Fincher had every character whispering to each other. I’ve since done some research and learned that Alien 3 had an extremely complicated development period even by Hollywood standards. 30-some takes were written over the course of six years and when they finally hit production, they were still rewriting the script. Fincher was so upset about the experience that he parted ways with the project and left the studio to cut the film. Does this mean I’m going to take it easy on the script? Hell no. They had six years to write this thing. They made the choice to go ahead with it before it was ready. Casablanca was rewritten during production, right? No, I’m not going to be easy on it because even with these excuses, Alien 3 is still terrible beyond comprehension. With that in mind, here are ten mistakes to avoid when writing your next screenplay.
PASSIVE STORY
You’ve heard about passive heroes a lot – characters who let everything come to them, who let outside forces dictate their actions instead of taking charge and doing it themselves? Well there’s another passive activity you want to avoid – passive storylines! Alien 3 spends the first half of its running time with absolutely NOTHING going on. Where is the goal? Where is the story? Where is the DESIRE from any of the characters (alien included!) to do ANYTHING?? It’s just a bunch of people sitting around with occasional cuts to an alien growing up. Contrast this with Aliens where there’s always a strong goal for the characters (go in and kill the aliens). Or even in the first Alien, which is closer in spirit to this one, the alien itself was active (searching out and killing its prey). Here, no one’s pursuing anyone. Even when they decide to catch the alien, they do it in a passive way (they try to lure him to a spot on the base – forcing them to run away from it the whole time). Reflecting on this film, I can’t remember a single active pursuit by anyone. This alone killed any chances the movie had of being good.
ACTING OUT OF CHARACTER
In the real world, people act out of character all the time. In the movies, the rules are different. If someone who’s perennially shy busts out the Dougie on the 3rd Street Promenade, the audience is going to be really confused (unless it’s properly set up of course). One of the quickest ways to lose a reader is to have your character act completely out of character, as is the case here with Ripley. Let’s recap, shall we? Ripley survives her entire crew being killed by a crazy ass alien. Ripley goes into cryo-sleep for 57 years. Ripley is asked to come help some marines dispose of some more aliens. She does, kicking ass and being one of the only survivors. She again goes into cryo-sleep. Her ship crash lands on a prison planet, and everyone onboard besides her dies, including the little girl she’s unofficially adopted as a daughter. After a few minutes of crying, what does she say to the big creepy ugly personality-less weird dude taking care of her? “Are you attracted to me?” Yes, all of a sudden Ripley wants to fuck!!!! Despite us not seeing Ripley have a single sexual urge for two movies, now she’s a nymphomaniac! Seriously, who the hell wrote this?
YOU WILL NEVER GET AWAY WITH LAZINESS
For some weird reason, certain writers believe they can skimp on the details and we’ll just go with it. We will not go with it. We will always spot when a writer is lazy. Let’s look at the prison here in Alien 3. This is supposed to be a maximum security prison right? So then why are there NO RULES!?? Why is there NO STRUCTURE!?? Prisoners can walk around wherever and whenever they want. There are no prison cells…IN A PRISON! There is no structure besides an occasional meal in the common area. It’s unclear who the warden is. It doesn’t even look like a prison. It looks like a series of interconnected tunnels. If you’re going to write a movie about a prison, learn how prisons operate so that your script will at least be somewhat plausible. Laziness gets you nowhere.
LOGIC MISTAKES EVERYWHERE
I’m always disappointed when writers ignore logic. But especially in a sci-fi movie. The rules are much more precarious in sci-fi because you’re already asking your audience to make a leap and believe in a world that doesn’t exist. Throwing a bunch of logic holes into that story is like shining multiple spotlights on the illusion. We are asked to believe, in Alien 3, that in a maximum security prison with the most lethal prisoners in the universe, that there isn’t a single weapon in the entire prison??? This is such a preposterous notion that it alone could be used as a legitimate excuse for hating the movie.
TRUST YOUR GUT
I have a theory I’ve formulated over time and I think it’s a solid one. When it comes to key decisions in your story, trust your gut. If your gut tells you it’s bad idea, it’s probably a bad idea. Even if it feels right from a logistical-standpoint. Even if it feels right from a character standpoint. If there’s that little voice in the back of your head saying, “This doesn’t feel right.” Trust it. To prove this theory, go back to all those reluctant choices you made in your previous screenplays. Chances are on an overwhelming percentage of them you turned out to be right. They didn’t work. I bring this up because while Ripley getting pregnant with an alien and having a special cross-species relationship with it may have sounded cool in the room, it’s one of those things that, at a gut level, you know isn’t right. Ignoring this gut feeling led to one of the dumber storylines we’ve seen in the franchise.
ALL THE CHARACTERS LOOK AND ACT EXACTLY THE SAME
There are a lot of reasons for you to differentiate your characters. One of the most important ones is that the more different your characters are, the more they bring out the differences in the other characters. If a person is nice, for example, we’ll obviously see that they’re nice. But we’ll see that niceness more clearly if we put them in a room with a mean person. Their qualities are exaggerated by being in proximity to their opposite. In Aliens, Burke’s sliminess is brought out in large part by what a good person Ripley is. In Alien 3, every single character looks the same and acts the same. They’re all a variation of annoyed, twitchy, and angry, except for maybe the doctor, who’s so boring in his own way that it doesn’t matter. You need variety in your characters. If you were to ask what’s the biggest reason for why Aliens is so great and Aliens 3 is so terrible, the unique cast of characters would likely come up as the top answer.
NO HUMOR
This is a common beginner mistake. Someone wants to make a dark film. So they make every single stinking frame as dark as humanly possible. Dumb move. Emotions are like anything in life. If you get too much of one, you’re going to get bored. I love cake. But that doesn’t mean I want to eat it three times a day. When it comes to emotions, you need to bring the audience to the other end of the spectrum every once in awhile to mix things up. Again, look at Aliens. There’s some bleak ass shit in that movie. But it’s peppered with a lot of humor (and plenty of hope as well). Alien 3 is one long bleak-fest. I counted a single joke, one joke!, in the entire movie (“No need to get sarcastic”). It could be as simple as adding a comedic relief character (Hudson) or throwing in a reasonable amount of gallows humor. Don’t think of it as selling out the darkness. Think of it as reminding the audience what darkness is.
IDENTIFY THE CENTRAL PROBLEMS – FIX THEM
At some point in the writing process, you should note the major problems in your script (the things that don’t quite make sense or aren’t yet working) and formulate a plan to fix them. Bad screenwriters allow many of these lingering issues to stay in the script, figuring they won’t be a big deal. If you aren’t striving for perfection, why even bother pursuing screenwriting? Let’s take a look at a really lazy mistake in Alien 3. In the final act, where they confront the alien, it’s established that the alien won’t hurt Ripley, because she’s impregnated with another alien. So let me get this straight. The only person on this entire base that we even halfway care about – your HERO no less – CAN’T BE HARMED BY THE ALIEN????? How stupid of a story decision is that? Identify your major problems and fix them. Or else you get ridiculous situations like this one.
WOE-IS-ME
Let me make something clear. Audiences hate woe-is-me characters. They hate them more than any other character you can possibly put in your screenplay. Whoever was dumb enough to turn Ripley from an active intelligent ass-kicking take-charge protagonist into a whispering, whiny, mousey annoying whisperer who can’t shut up about how awful she feels should never be allowed near a copy of Final Draft again. There are very VERY rare occasions where woe-is-me protagonists work (Mikey from Swingers comes to mind) but my suggestion would be to avoid them like the plague. The audience will hate your hero, and by association your movie.
BEWARE OF CLICHÉ/PREDICTABLE MOMENTS
Audiences are savvy. Many of them have seen enough television and film to have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next. However, if your script is packed with scenarios where the audience can predict EXACTLY what’s going to happen next, chances are you’re being too cliché and need to make a better choice. There’s a moment deep in Alien 3 where Ripley asks Rock (I don’t even know his character name so I’m using his real life one) to chop off her head because she’s pregnant with an alien. She turns away and puts her hands up on the bars, waiting for him to do it. There is then a 60 second build-up where he brings the axe back and prepares to kill her. Oh no! Is he going to do it??? I’d say of the 5 million people who saw this film, 4,986,000 knew Rock would deliberately swing and miss, making the loud dramatic “THONK” on the bars, we’d stay on Rock’s face so as to momentarily wonder if he’d killed her, we’d show that Ripley was indeed still alive, then give Rock a rah-rah speech about how much he needs her. What do you know? That’s exactly what happened! You can’t always avoid your audience being ahead of you, but with a little effort, you can avoid cliché moments and at least keep them guessing.
IN SUMMARY
I don’t know what else to say. I guess if there are great screenplays like American Beauty and Dogs Of Babel out there where every single choice the writer makes is perfect, there can also be screenplays where every single choice the writer makes is disastrous. Such is the unlucky distinction of Alien 3. But maybe it was a nice reminder to the studios that you can’t fake it. That even the death of some of your biggest franchises is one bad script away. I’ll finish this breakdown with another question for all you Alien nerds. To this day, I’m still confused about the Alien 3 trailer that came out promising aliens coming to earth. What the hell was that? Why would they play a trailer that had nothing to do with the movie? I guess it’s just one more nonsensical thing associated with this catastrophe of a film.
No!
Lots of people have been asking me if I went to see my favorite screenplay, Everything Must Go, yet. The answer is, no, I have not. The reason? Because I’m terrified of ruining the perfect movie that is in my head. I’m hearing mixed things about the film and I’m afraid if I go see a watered down version of the script, it’s going to taint that reading experience forever. Of course a huge part of me is curious about what first time writer/director Dan Rush did with it. And I’ll definitely break at some point. But right now, I’m holding out, still enjoying the perfect movie in my head. :)
P.S. Here’s a podcast with Dan Rush over on Script – Dan Rush podcast interview.
Carson
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Premise: A young woman watching over a blind child must protect her when the home is invaded by the unthinkable.
About: The Watching Hour sold a couple of weeks ago. The Van Dykes are related to the great Dick Van Dyke, and there was a big comment war over on Deadline Hollywood that this sale represents nepotism at its best, which made me burst out laughing. Not only is this a ridiculous reasoning for why this script sold, but the Van Dykes have been writing, rewriting, assignment writing, working their asses off for years to get to this point. This isn’t a case of having a name. This is a case of good old fashioned hard work.
Writers: Carey and Shane Van Dyke
Details: 99 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).
Every once in awhile I’ll read a script and I’ll say, “I don’t know if I have an opinion on this one.” The Watching Hour is one of those scripts. The writing is professional, as you’d expect it to be from two veterans like the Van Dyke siblings. But after reading After Hailey, where each page was packed with gobs and gobs of character development, I can’t help but feel that The Watching Hour is too thin, that there isn’t enough going on where you want things to be going on.
However, I do understand why it sold. In fact, if I were telling you to choose between writing a script like After Hailey or The Watching Hour, I would choose The Watching Hour every time. After Hailey is a once in a decade deal – nailing every single emotional beat in a complex character driven drama. It just doesn’t happen often. Whereas with a home-invasion thriller, the marketable premise and genre ensure a buying audience that’ll be much more forgiving. If they can see the poster, they’ll invest in fixing your mistakes.
20-something Shelby specializes in providing care for children with special needs. If your child is blind or deaf or physically limited in some capacity, you don’t call up a normal babysitter, you call up Shelby. As 9 year old McKenzie fits this criteria (she’s blind), her parents bring Shelby into their small rural home (far enough away from the neighbors so that they can’t hear you scream – heh heh) to take care of Mckenzie while they’re out for the night.
McKenzie’s parents are a little nervous about Shelby at first, but when they see how quickly she bonds with McKenzie, their fear disappears and they’re off for the evening.
Across town, another family is experiencing quite a different evening. Their 9 year old daughter, Katy, disappeared two weeks ago, and friends and family wade through the house to lend support. The curious thing about Katy is that she’s mute. I say curious because a few years back, another handicapped girl who lived nearby (a paraplegic) was found drowned in a pond. It’s clear that somewhere out there is a sick man snatching these helpless girls up, doing god knows what to them.
Which segues back to Shelby and McKenzie, who begin to receive strange phone calls with distant scratchy 50s music on the other end. This is accompanied by a pair of headlights at the edge of the property, headlights that just sit there, that seem to be watching them. Is this the man who’s been snatching up all the children? Is he coming to get McKenzie?
The answer to that? They wish!
In a nice little homage to Close Encounters, the headlights RISE off the ground STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR. And soon we start hearing feet outside, pitter-pattering. Something’s out there. But what? I’ll tell you what. Aliens motherfucker! Shelby and McKenzie are being attacked by aliens. Why they’re here, what they’re doing, what they want? We don’t know. But we assume they’ll do anything to snatch McKenzie away, so it’s off to every crevice in the house to prevent that from happening.
Okay, here’s my main gripe with The Watching Hour. And it’s not even really about The Watching Hour. It’s about these kinds of movies in general. You have the audience in the palm of your hand before the aliens/monsters/whoever show up. But as soon as they show up, the mystery is gone. And what usually happens after that is a series of repetitive chase scenes inside the house/base/building/whatever. If there isn’t enough variety to those chase segments, the audience gets restless, and I can’t speak for anyone else, but I definitely became restless with the repetitive in-house alien chases. Alien pops out, run to another area of the house, hide, alien pops up again, run to another area of the house, hide. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Now the Van Dykes do break up the monotony a little with the occasional hop over to Katy’s house (the other girl who’s missing). The problem with this is, we’re never clear on why we’re in that house. It’s a whole bunch of people grieving, but it’s been two weeks since Katy went missing. Have they been here the whole two weeks? Or if not, why are they here today? Is today special? That isn’t made clear and therefore its entire reasoning for being in the script feels suspect. If there was more going on in this section, it could’ve worked, but whenever we cut back to this house, I kept asking, “Why are we here?”
There were little things that bothered me as well. The haunting 50s music will definitely play well onscreen, but I hate when “cool” things are forced into the story instead of stemming organically from the situation. Why would the aliens use 50s music? Was this a callback to the time when Roswell happened? I wasn’t sure. You also have what is quickly becoming the single biggest problem in modern day horror flicks – the fact that nobody has a cell phone that works. I can kind of buy it since they’re out in the boonies, but since audiences have become so savvy to this cheat, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Overall, I wanted more meat to this story and these characters. While Shelby becomes three-dimensional in the final ten pages, her and the rest of the characters feel paper-thin during the previous 90. You’re never going to write characters in a thriller that are as deep as characters in a drama, but this script came at a really bad time, since I had just read After Hailey, and that script was a master course in character development. I kept thinking over and over again with Watching Hour, “I barely know anything about any of these people.”
Here’s the thing though. The Watching Hour still gets a worth the read. Barely. And I’ll tell you why. First, this is a great spec premise. A fast paced marketable genre picture with high concept elements. Second, the twist ending. Now I’m not going to spoil the ending here but I’ll just say this. While I had suspicions, I genuinely didn’t see it coming. Is it perfect? No. It’s not The Sixth Sense. But it’s good enough to make us go back and reevaluate everything we just saw.
I get the sense, however, that the Van Dyke’s are resting a little too heavily on this ending. It’s almost like they know that they have an ace up their sleeve so they put the rest of the script on cruise control. The scenes at Katy’s house in particular go nowhere.
I’m going to guess that the younger crowd will like this but the savvy vets will take it to task for its thin characters and plot. We’ll see. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In an interview with the writer of yesterday’s script, Scott Frank, he was asked about twist endings. This is what he said, which I think is good advice: “If you’re writing simply to have a twist [ending] then you’re in trouble. If the twist comes to you organically, then I think you’re on much firmer ground.” There are parts of Watching Hour where it seems like it’s being written just to have a twist ending.
Aliens is, quite simply, awesome. It’s one of those movies that works if you’re 15 or you’re 35. It’s got action. It’s got mystery. It’s got emotion. And it’s in the running for best sequel ever. When I give notes, there’s no movie I reference more than this one. I’ve been known to bring up Aliens while consulting on a romantic comedy. That’s how rich it is in screenwriting advice. Now I could sit here and whine that “Studios just don’t make summer movies like this anymore.” But the truth is, they’ve never made these kinds of summer movies consistently – movies with depth, movies with thought, movies where the story takes precedence over the effects. But when they do, it’s probably the best moviegoing experience you can have. So, keeping that in mind, here are ten screenwriting lessons you can learn from one of the best summer movies of all time.
KILL YOUR BABIES
Listening in on the director’s commentary of Aliens, you find out that Aliens was originally 30 minutes longer, as it included an extra early sequence of the LV-426 colonists being attacked by the aliens. Under the gun to deliver a 2 hour and 10 minute film, Cameron reluctantly cut the sequence at the last second, and wow did it make a difference. Without it, there was more build-up to the aliens, more suspense, more anticipation. We were practically bursting with every peek around a corner, every blip of the radar. Now Cameron only figured this out AFTER he shot the unnecessary footage, but let this be a lesson to all of us screenwriters. Sometimes you gotta get rid of the things you love in order to make the story better. Always ask yourself, “Is this scene/sequence really necessary to tell the story?” You might be surprised by the answer.
NOT EVERY FILM NEEDS A LOVE STORY
There’s a temptation to insert a love story into every movie you write, especially big popcorn movies, since the studios are trying to draw from every “quadrant” possible and therefore need a female love interest to bring in the female demographic. But there are certain stories where no matter what you do, it won’t fit. And if you’ve written one of those stories, don’t try to force it, because we’ll be able to tell. I thought Cameron handled this issue perfectly in Aliens. He knew a love story in this setting wasn’t going to fly, so instead he created “love story light,” between Ripley and Hicks, where we see them flirting, where we can tell that in another situation, they might have worked. But it never goes any further than that because tonally, and story-wise, he knew we wouldn’t have accepted it.
ALWAYS MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR YOUR CHARACTERS
As I’ve stated here many times before, one of the most potent tools a screenwriter possesses is the ability to make things worse for their characters. In action movies, that usually means escalating danger whenever possible. Aliens has one of the most memorable examples of this, when our characters are moving towards the central hub of the station, looking for the colonists, and Ripley realizes that, because they’re sitting on a nuclear reactor, they can’t fire their guns. The Captain informs his Lieutenant that he needs to collect all of the soldiers’ ammo (followed by one of the greatest movie lines ever “What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?”), and now, with our marines moving towards the nest of one of the most dangerous species in the universe, they must take them on WITHOUT FIREPOWER. Always make things worse for your characters!
USE YOUR MID-POINT TO CHANGE THE GAME
Something needs to happen at your midpoint that shifts the dynamic of the story, preferably making things worse for your characters. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of your second half feeling a lot like your first half, and that’s going to lead to boredom for the reader. In Aliens, their objective, once they realize what they’re up against, is to get up to the main ship and nuke the base. The mid-point, then, is when their pick-up ship crashes, leaving them stranded on the planet. Note how this forces them to reevaluate their plan, creating a second half that’s structurally different from the first one (the first half is about going in and kicking ass, the second half is about getting out and staying alive).
GET YOUR HERO OUT THERE DOING SHIT – KEEP THEM ACTIVE
Cameron had a tough task ahead of him when he wrote this script. Ripley, his hero, is on the bottom of the ranking totem pole. How, then, do you believably prop her up to become the de facto Captain of the mission? The answer lies inside one of the most important rules in screenwriting: You need to look for any opportunity to keep your hero active. Remember, THIS IS YOUR HERO. They need to be driving the story whenever possible. Cameron does this in subtle ways at first. While watching the marines secure the base, Ripley grabs a headset and makes them check out an acid hole. She then voices her frustration when she doesn’t believe the base to be secured. Then, of course, comes the key moment, when the Captain has a meltdown and she takes control of the tank-car and saves the soldiers herself. The important thing to remember is: Always look for ways to keep your hero active. If they’re in the backseat for too long, we’ll forget about them.
MOVE YOUR STORY ALONG
Beginning writers make this mistake constantly. They add numerous scenes between key plot points that don’t move the story forward. Bad move. You have to move from plot point to plot point quickly. Take a look at the first act here. We get the early boardroom scene where Ripley is informed that colonists have moved onto LV-426. In the very next scene, Burke and the Captain come to Ripley’s quarters to inform her that they’ve lost contact with LV-426. You don’t need 3 scenes of fluff between those two scenes. Just keep the story moving. Get your character(s) to where they need to be (in this case – to LV-426).
THE MORE UNLIKELY THE ACTION, THE MORE CONVINCING THE MOTIVATION MUST BE
You always have to have a reason – a motivation – for your character’s actions. If a character is super happy and loves life, it’s not going to make sense to an audience if they step in front of a bus and kill themselves. You need to motivate their actions. In addition to this, the more unlikely the action, the more convincing the motivation needs to be. So here, Burke wants Ripley to come with them to LV-426 as an advisor. Answer me this. Why the hell would Ripley put herself in jeopardy AGAIN after everything that just happened to her – what with the death of her entire crew, her almost biting it, and barely escaping a concentrated acid filled monster? The motivation here has to be pretty strong. Well, because the military holds Ripley responsible for their destroyed ship, she’s basically been relegated to peasant status for the rest of her life. Burke promises to get her job back as officer if she comes and helps them. That’s a motivation we can buy.
STRONG FATAL FLAW – RARE FOR A SUMMER MOVIE
What I loved about Aliens was that Cameron gave Ripley a fatal flaw. Usually, you don’t see this in a big summer action movie. Producers see it as too much effort for not enough payoff. But giving the main character of your action film an arc – and I’m not talking a cheap arc like alcoholism – is exactly what’s made movies like Aliens stand the test of time while all those other summer movies have faded away. So what is Ripley’s flaw? Trust. Or lack of it. Ripley doesn’t trust Burke. She doesn’t trust this mission. She doesn’t trust the marines. And she especially doesn’t trust Bishop, which is where the key sequences in this character arc play out. In the end, Ripley overcomes her flaw by trusting Bishop to come back and get them. This is why the moment when she and Newt make it to the top of the base is so powerful. For a moment, she was right. Bishop left them there. She never should’ve trusted him. Of course the ship appears at the last second and her arc is complete. She was, indeed, right to leave her trust in someone.
SEQUENCE DOMINATED MOVIE
One way to keep your movie moving is to break it down into sequences. Each sequence should act as a mini-movie. That means there should be a goal for each specific sequence. In the end, the characters either achieve their goal or fail at it, and we then move on to the next sequence. Let’s look at how Aliens does this. Once they’re on LV-426, the goal is to go in and figure out what the fuck is going on (new sequence). Once they find the colony empty, their goal shifts to finding out where the colonists are (new sequence). After that ends with them getting attacked by aliens, their goal becomes get off this rock and nuke the colony (new sequence). Once that fails, their goal becomes secure all passageways so the aliens can’t get to them (new sequence). Once that’s taken care of, the goal is to find a way back up to the ship (new sequence). Because there’s always a goal in place, the story is always moving. Our characters are always DOING SOMETHING (staying ACTIVE). The sequence approach is by no means a requirement, but I’ve found it to be pretty invaluable for action movies.
ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS (SHOW DON’T TELL!)
Aliens has one of the best climax fights in the history of cinema (“Get away from her you BITCH.”) And the reason it works so well? Because it was set up earlier, when Ripley shows the marines she’s capable of operating a loader (“Where do you want it?” she asks). Ahh, but I have a little surprise for you. Go pop Aliens in and fast-forward it to the early scene where Burke first comes to recruit Ripley. THIS is actually the first moment where the final fight is set up. “I heard you’re working the cargo docks,” Burke offers, smugly. “Running forklifts and loaders and that sort of thing?” It’s a quick line and I bring it up for an important reason. I bet none of you caught that line. Even if you’ve watched the film five or six times. That line probably slipped right by you. And the significance of it slipping by you is the point of this tip. You should always SHOW instead of TELL. When we SEE Ripley on that loader, it resonates. When we hear it in a line, it “slips right by us.” Had we never physically seen Riply on that loader, and Cameron had depended instead on Burke’s quick line of dialogue? There’s no way that final battle plays as well as it does. Always show. Never tell.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT
I actually had 15 more tips, but contrary to popular belief, I do have a life, so those will have to wait for another day. I do have a question for all Aliens nerds out there though. How do they pull off the Loader special effects? I know in some cases it’s stop motion. And in other cases, Cameron says there’s a really strong person behind the loader, moving it. But there are certain shots when you can see the loader from the side that aren’t stop motion and nobody’s behind it. So how the hell does it still look so real? I mean, these are 1986 special effects we’re talking about here! Tune in next week where I give you 10 tips on what NOT to do via the disaster that was Alien 3.
These are 10 tips from the movie “Aliens.” To get 490 more tips from movies as varied as “Star Wars,” “When Harry Met Sally,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!
Genre: Drama
Premise: After a newlywed war photographer’s wife dies, he must decide whether to help out her troubled son from a previous marriage or move on and start a new life.
About: Scott Frank is one of the biggest screenwriters in town, the guy you pay a million bucks to to put your script on the development red carpet. Frank has over a dozen produced credits, including Dead Again, Minority Report, Out of Sight, The Lookout and Get Shorty, which got him nominated for an Oscar. After Hailey is an adaptation of a book by Jonathan Tropper (How To Talk To A Widower). It, like yesterday’s entry, made the 2008 Black List. I’ve done some digging and found that the script has a lot of fans in the industry (Bill Martell and Mystery Man on Film being a couple).
Writer: Scott Frank (based on a novel by Jonathan Tropper)
Details: 128 pages (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).
I first busted out After Hailey two years ago and promptly threw it down 14 pages later. A heartfelt drama about an Iraq war photographer (NO! No more Iraq vets!) grieving the loss of his wife? Every sentence I read indicated this was going to be a slow sorry depressing “woe is me” snore-fest.
But one of our longtime readers has been telling me at every turn that I need to review more Scott Frank scripts, that in the battleground that is the Hollywood screenwriting business, Frank writes circles around even the mightiest money-earners. He is the guy you go to when you want to get a script right. He doesn’t come cheap, but he’s worth every penny. I squinted skeptically at the reader’s e-mail. Hmmm, I thought, do I really want to try After Hailey AGAIN and willingly bring depression into my life for the next two hours? Not really. But I popped the script open for a second chance anyway, hoping for a miracle.
Guess what? I got one.
24 year old Doug Parker is a talented war photographer. Buoyed by his fearlessness, he’s willing to get in close to capture the moment, however horrifying that moment might be. What Doug doesn’t realize is that the accumulation of these moments has stripped him of any feeling, of any emotion. He is a walking zombie. Photographs are all he has left.
Until he meets Hailey.
Hailey is a magazine journalist 14 years his senior. But that age gap means nothing to Doug. This is love at first sight. This is “spend the rest of our lives together at all costs magic.” Hailey, a divorcee, is hardened by real life the same way Doug is hardened by his career, and for that reason, she’s nervous about becoming involved with him. She wonders if he can handle being with someone who has a past, who has baggage. In the end she decides to take a chance, and the two get married.
Cut to two years later. A suburb of New York. Doug’s come back for a few weeks to sell the home he and Hailey bought together. Hailey’s dead. Died in a plane crash. And if he could run away and just let this home rot, that’s what he would do. But he’s trying to be strong. He’s trying to be responsible.
There’s one complication however. Hailey had a son, 15 year old Russ, who’s lived a real shitty life. Besides his mother dying, his father is a total asshole. So at the beginning of Doug’s week, Russ gets hand-delivered by the cops who say they won’t take him to jail if Doug keeps an eye on him for the rest of the night.
Although we only get bits and pieces of their past, we get the sense that Doug married Hailey, not Hailey and Russ, and that that caused a lot of distance between him and this boy. So with Hailey out of the picture, the last thing Doug wants to do is deal with her troubled son.
In addition to Russ, we have Laney, Hailey’s best friend, who keeps coming to check up on Doug, and is willing to do anything – and I mean anything – to make him feel better. There’s his twin sister Claire, who’s pregnant and wants to leave her husband, eventually leading to her moving in (Move in?? He’s trying to sell the house!). There’s Russ’s real dad, Jim, who’s moving to Florida and is trying to cast Russ off on Doug. And then there’s Doug’s family, highlighted by his brain-damaged-for-the-better father (who used to be a total dick but now is the life of the party). All of these people are pulling at Doug in their own way, when all Doug wants to do is get out.
If there’s a script out there that challenges my proclamation to stay away from passion projects, this would be the one. This is your horse in the “prove Carson wrong” race. There’s no strong character goal in this story. There’s no sense of urgency. It’s a straightforward character piece with the only thing driving the story being, “What’s going to happen with Doug and the rest of these people?” So why does it still work?
Well, let’s take a closer look. While the character goals don’t dominate the narrative like they would in a more traditional “Hollywood” movie, they are there. Doug’s goal is to sell the house so he can get the hell out of this town and never come back. Now because Doug is so passive about it, it never dominates the narrative, but it’s definitely there.
There are actually two soft ticking time bombs set up. The first is needing to sell the house (although I would’ve liked the time frame to be more defined) and the second is his younger sister’s wedding. Although it’s never said that this will be the finale of the movie, viewers are trained to know that usually, when there’s a wedding, it’ll be close to the end.
But what really makes this story great are the stakes. You quickly realize that unless Doug and Russ find some connection, unless they become a permanent part of each other’s lives, they’re doomed. And that feeling only grows as the script goes on. This, in turn, becomes the main engine that drives the story. We want to see if these two “get together” so that we know they’ll be okay. In that sense, it was a lot like the structure used in a Romantic Comedy.
The character work in After Hailey is almost flawless. I talked about this with Maggie the other week, how when you have a depressing situation, you need someone to come in and add some levity so the audience isn’t ready to slit their wrists by Act 2. Bringing in Doug’s twin sister, Claire, who calls it like it is (her commentary on Doug’s bedroom exploits with Laney are particularly hilarious), was the perfect remedy for distilling a script that could’ve easily slipped into melodrama.
And even the relationship that we barely saw, that between Doug and Hailey, was different and new. I can’t remember a movie where they so deftly explored the marriage problems between a younger man and an older woman as realistically as this one. This idea that some people are a package deal, and how that can be hard for a younger person to understand, helped contribute to the freshness of After Hailey.
Like all good writers, Frank/Tropper tell the story through ACTION instead of dialogue whenever possible. So as Russ starts enjoying time with Doug, instead of saying, “I don’t want you to sell this house. Let’s just keep it.” – which a rebellious teenager like Russ would never say – Frank/Tropper instead show Doug repeatedly coming home to find the “For Sale” sign hidden, trashed, even run over. I mean that’s really good writing.
Truth be told, almost all of Frank and Tropper’s choices were spot on. In Doug’s younger sister’s wedding, for example, Doug takes the mic near the end and we think – oh, here we go – the typical heartwarming wrap up the theme of the movie speech. But we’re shocked to see Doug totally choke and then a drunk Russ pick up the mic and use the toast to propose his love to Doug’s younger sister – the one who just got married! It was unexpected and not like any movie I’d ever seen and therefore perfect.
I was sure at the beginning of the story that the photography stuff was going to be boring and stupid. One of my pet peeves is when writers give characters cool jobs even if it doesn’t fit the character. But here, Frank/Tropper use the photography to show how distanced Doug is from the real world (hiding behind a lens), he uses it to help bond Doug and Russ (Doug gives Russ a camera to go out and shoot with), and finally he uses it as a later plot point (the job threatens to take him out of the city). There was an actual plan here with the job, which is nice, cause I usually don’t see that.
If I have any complaints about After Hailey, they’re minor. Doug’s family may have been a little too wacky (the brain-beaten dad was kind of over-the-top). And since his younger sister was barely around during the screenplay, her wedding at the end felt thrust upon us. But Frank and Tropper did such a good job that most of these things slipped by unnoticed. Can’t say enough about this one. Great script!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 25!)
[ ] genius
What I learned: That you can take successful elements from other genres and use them in genres they weren’t meant for. I loved how this was essentially a romantic comedy format. We’re wondering if Doug and Russ are going to “get together.” Just like we were wondering if Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts were going to get together in Notting Hill. Just like we were wondering if Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock were going to get together in The Proposal (okay, maybe we weren’t wondering that, but you get the idea). That was a neat trick I plan to take with me.
