Genre: Comedy
Premise: A Twilight-like actor becomes the face of Bass Fishing in a desperate attempt to get an audition for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Old Man And The Sea.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted.
Writer: Gayne C. Young
Details: 105 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 got two words for you: colostomy bag.
If that doesn’t get your rotors revved up and ready to go, you might not want to “dive” into today’s amateur offering, Bass Champion. But if you choose not to take that leap, you’ll be missing out on one of the few worthy Amateur Friday screenplays I’ve read.
The first thing you gotta get right with a comedy is the premise. The premise has to be funny. And this premise passes the test. I’m not sure why, but it’s probably due to the insane combination of the Twilight
Tate Blocker is a hot young “Robert Pattinson” like actor on a vampire TV show called “Forever Youth.” Tate takes method acting to the extreme, going to whatever lengths he needs to to become the character, including believing he’s an actual vampire. The problem is, it’s all a bag of tricks. Tate doesn’t understand what it’s really like to “get dirty” and sacrifice yourself to something.
Which is exactly why Christopher Nolan won’t even consider him for a roll in his new adaptation of The Old Man And The Sea
Halfway across the country, Bass Fishing champion and overall stupid-ass Bud Milton has made the inopportune mistake of sticking his pecker inside a fish’s mouth for a few laughs. Problem is, one of his cronies taped it, and now it’s all over Youtube, creating some really bad press for the sport, culminating in PETA swooping in and demanding nothing less than the shutdown of Bass Fishing.
Tate’s agent realizes this is the perfect opportunity to bust her client out of the TV world. If Tate can become the new face of Bass Fishing, it will refocus the media away from PETA, and in the process win over Christopher Nolan to get Tate that audition. It’s the perfect plan! Well, sorta.
If Tate is going to compete, he’s going to need a partner. And that partner comes in the form of anger-management poster child Rod Bender, a one-eyed alcoholic former Bass Fishing champion whose repeated fighting got him kicked off the tour years ago. Rod’s the only partner good enough to make up for Tate’s unsettling lack of skill.
The problem is that Bud, our oral fishing friend, is dead set on making sure Vampire Boy doesn’t win jack shit, and he’ll do anything to make him and his washed up partner disappear. And to make things worse, Hark Herald, who plays Tate’s werewolf co-star on Forever Youth, is pulling his own publicity stunt to win over the lead role in Christopher Nolan’s film. With escalating pressure from PETA, Rod’s physically abusive teaching methods, backstabbing from his female co-star at Comic-Con, and Bud’s never-ending dirty tricks, does Tate stand a chance of becoming the ultimate Bass Champion and winning the role of Santiago in The Old Man And The Sea?
So, is Bass Fishing perfect? No. Gayne is clearly still learning the craft and maybe leans a little too heavily on cheap humor (colostomy bags in two of three scripts this week!). But what I like about this week’s comedy script is that finally we have an amateur writer who’s put his story on the same priority level as his comedy.
You can see that in how deftly he’s structured his script. We have a main character with a clear goal (get an audition with Christopher Nolan). We have high stakes (Bass Fishing gets shut down and Tate loses the role of a lifetime if he loses). We have a ticking time bomb (Nolan choosing Santiago soon). We have a great central relationship in Rod and Tate, two completely opposite characters who must learn to work together to achieve their ultimate goal. Every character here is properly motivated. Rod wants back on the tour. Bud has to win or his career will be over. Tate’s agent wants to leave behind her soul-sucking child-actor agency. Everything that happens in this comedy has a reason for happening. Structurally, this is one of the best amateur Friday screenplays we’ve had.
Another thing Gayne’s got going for him is he understands his material. He gets these two competing worlds (the vain-ness of Hollywood and the trashiness of the South) so well that when he brings them together, you feel like you’re reading a script that you haven’t read before. True there are some familiar elements, but who the hell places a Twilight actor in the middle of the deep south?? I just haven’t seen anything close to that idea explored before. And everything here is like that – existing in that coveted “familiar but different” bullseye territory that every screenwriter should be aiming for.
I also loved the little touches in the story like Hark and Tate going after the same role. And the Comic-Con stuff had me dying (guys wearing “I’m a Tate-o-Sexual” shirts and Rod beating the shit out of a girl in a wheelchair after being mistaken for a homeless person from one of Tate’s Forever Youth episodes). Tate’s dedication to researching his roles, like going to a castle and living with roaches for a week. I really felt like Gayne pushed the comedy limits and never got bogged down in the obvious (well, almost never).
On the downside, I can tell he’s still learning some things. The opening of the script doesn’t move us into the story as smoothly as I would like. Setting up a story is deceptively hard because it’s when you introduce all the artificial elements (the goal, the ticking time bomb, etc.) that make the car go. Introducing these elements in a manner that’s not herky jerky and doesn’t draw attention to itself isn’t easy to do. If you’re too lazy about it, the reader quickly becomes aware that he’s reading a script. For instance, when Rod is being recruited from Outdoor Empire, we’re very aware that this is the “recruit the crazy partner” scene. It doesn’t “flow.” It doesn’t just “happen.” You have to keep writing these scenes to death until they feel effortless, until they feel like a natural extension of everything around them, because if the audience doesn’t believe your setup, it’s going to be hard for them to believe everything that follows.
The other stuff I wasn’t so hot on was the crass-ness of the humor. But I’m torn about it. On the one hand, a lot of it stemmed from the characters. The word “fuck” is used in Hollywood and the South a lot, so it makes sense that it’s used a lot here (and I mean A LOT). As for the shit jokes. Well…hmmm. This seems to divide audiences. But for me, now that I’m no longer in high school, it doesn’t really make me laugh anymore, so when we basically extend a 15 second scene to 3 minutes so we can draw out a shit joke where the wheelbound president of Bass Champions dumps his colostomy bag into a urinal, I’m inclined to say, “Lose it and move on.” Then again, one of the funniest jokes ever onscreen was a shit joke, that being the blanket flinging scene in Trainspotting
In the end, I just love this premise (Did I mention I love this premise?). And the fact that Gayne actually built a story around it as opposed to stringing together a bunch of one-off sketches, puts him in a league above other aspiring comedy scriptwriters. Bass Champion still needs some work. I’d like the setup to be smoother and it gets a teensy bit repetitive in the middle. But concept wise, story wise, and execution of the premise wise, it does a really solid job. I’m thinking Gayne has a shot in this crazy business.
Script link: Bass Champion
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: All of your characters – not just your main character – should have something at stake. So here, the central stakes are for Tate to get an audition for Santiago. But his agent also has something at stake. If her client doesn’t get the role, she’s stuck in a shitty agency forever. For Rod, this is his last shot to get back into the sport he loves. For Bud, losing to Tate means he’ll lose the only thing he cares about, his fame. Even the sport itself has stakes attached to it. If Tate doesn’t win and squash PETA’s media attention, then the entire sport could close down. So add stakes wherever you can in your script, not just to your main character.
Am I upset that Source Code only made 15 million dollars on opening weekend and finished behind an irritating poorly animated bunny? Of course! I wanted the movie to make a bajillion dollars and prove to Hollywood that spec scripts can make good movies too, especially spec scripts as good as this one. It didn’t happen but I can still take comfort in the fact that critics enjoyed it, which is by no means a guarantee with sci-fi.
But that’s not why I’m writing today’s article. I’m writing today’s article because you guys have said you want more script-to-screen comparisons, an examination of the changes made from the original spec to the final shooting script, so we can try and discern what happens during the development process and if that process ends up helping the script or hurting it. Since there’s no script I know better than this one, I thought it’d be a great script to start with.
Before I get into the specific changes, however, let me give you my general reaction to the film. I liked it. Quite a bit actually. I thought Jake was solid. He has a strange quality as a leading man in that he definitely FEELS like a movie star but is missing that – I don’t know what it is – but I guess “swagger” describes it – the thing that separates guys like DiCaprio from the rest of the pack. You want to hang out with Jake. I’m not sure you want him to save the world for you. Still, I thought he worked. As for Jeffrey Wright – look – I know he totally overplayed the part. But I loved it. I love him as an actor and think he has such an interesting delivery that even when he’s hamming it up, I still believe it.
As for director Duncan Jones, I thought he made some good choices and some not so good choices. Someone else pointed out that the movie starts with sweeping shots of Chicago and the train Colter wakes up in. These shots are beautiful to look at but they were totally wrong for the opening, which is supposed to be our character waking up in a strange place with no idea how he got there. If we’re to feel the same way, shouldn’t that be our first shot? Him waking up? Not a $50,000 helicopter shot? It would be like in Buried if we showed sweeping shots of Iraq for three minutes before cutting to Ryan Reynolds in a coffin. Also, I’m not sure I liked the bright bubbly feel of the train sequences and was hoping for more of a cold steely tint, like that of Inception. I understand Jones wanted to clash the train scenes with the dark dreary feel of the source code chamber but that vibrant look just didn’t mesh with the tone of the story.
Having said that, Jones really kept the story moving and, even with the script changes, was dedicated to the spirit of the script. This was close to what I read on the page. And that doesn’t happen all the time. Anyway, here are five key script changes made from the spec script to the shooting draft and how I feel they affected the final product.
CHANGE #1 – 17 MINUTES TO 8 MINUTES
In the script Colter has 17 minutes on the train. In the movie he has 8. At first I didn’t like this change. It felt like too tight of a time-crunch. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. On the page, 17 minutes can be fudged to seem like it’s going a lot faster. You just cut out the boring parts. Onscreen, in this particular situation where we’re staying with Jake the whole time, that’s harder to do. Therefore, 17 minutes would’ve felt like a lifetime. 8 minutes is still a little too short for me. 11 minutes would have been perfect. But overall, I think the change worked.
CHANGE # 2 – THE GIRL
By far, the biggest change in the script was making Christina someone Colter knew of ahead of time, as opposed to someone he’d never talked to before. When I first read this change in Billy Ray’s rewrite, I was so pissed off I actually threw the script down and stopped reading. I feared that they’d completely ruined the story with this needless change. Here’s my problem with it. I’m of the belief that you want to make things as difficult as possible for your main character. If things are easy, you don’t have a movie. So for her to just be in his back pocket from the second he wakes up….it’s too easy. I got the feeling that if he’d asked her to marry him right then and there, she would’ve said yes. And how interesting of a relationship is that? That said, I think I know why they did it. And it goes back to the aforementioned time change. In the script, when he had 17 minutes, winning over a girl who doesn’t know you is somewhat conceivable. In the film, when he had 8 minutes, that conceit becomes infinitely harder to believe. He would’ve had to use every single second of those eight minutes before she trusted him enough to do the things he needed her to do. Therefore their only choice was to make it so that she already knew him, so he doesn’t have to use that time to convince her who he is every time he goes back into the train. He can just jump straight into the action. I don’t like it as much as the way the script handled it, but I understand the change.
CHANGE #3 – 120 pages to 90 pages
(note: I don’t know the actual page length of the shooting draft. I’m just going by the 1 page = 1 minute of screen time rule). Now you know me. I’m Mister “Keep your script to 110 pages MAX” Guy. The reason the 120 pages in Source Code never bothered me though was because each section of Source Code is its own ticking time bomb. It’s always a race. So you never feel time dragging. That said, there are a lot of advantages to cutting the script down to 90 pages. The most obvious is that less pages equals a lower budget. Each day you shoot is tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. So cutting even a single page saves a lot of money. Yet another reason to keep your screenplay lean. Also, thrillers just play better at shorter lengths, especially contained thrillers like this one. Finally, this particular format of movie, where you’re repeating actions, can grate on the viewer if not done right. Go watch the movie “Vantage Point
CHANGE #4 – MORE UPBEAT
I heard Duncan Jones talk about this in an interview – how he wanted to add more humor and a generally upbeat tone to Source Code. I’m usually okay with this. Too many writers drown their scripts in hopelessness and despair, squeezing the life out of their story page by endlessly depressing page. But Source Code’s thriller elements were all perfectly plotted, keeping our focus away from the fact that this was, indeed, a dark story, and instead on the main character’s tasks, which were to find the bomber and find out who Beleagured Castle was. Also, the relationship between him and the girl provided that necessary spark to offset the darkness. That was our “upbeat” storyline. Where I really had an issue with this “happier” approach was the “Here’s ten bucks now go do your comedy routine” scene at the end. You can always tell when an idea hasn’t been fully integrated into a script. The writer tries to squeeze a thin setup for it in early (“You know that guy. He’s a comedian!”) then a full 90 minutes later with no other insight into that character or that situation, we get his Last Comic Standing climax. It’s a total cheat and it felt forced as hell. I’m not saying it couldn’t have worked. It just needed a lot more setup. Overall, I would’ve preferred a darker feel on the train, like the script, so I wasn’t thrilled by this choice.
CHANGE #5 – THE ENDING
Personally, I thought the ending in the original draft was perfect. There’s a couple of reasons for that. First, the images that Colter keeps seeing between the train and the chamber are discussed in the dialogue so as to cue the reader in that they’re an important plot point. Colter asks Goodwin “What am I seeing? I’m seeing something after the train blows up.” This “middle time” is what helps us buy into the ending where they walk into the real world. But in the movie, we only SEE these images. We’re never informed that they’re supposed to be important. As a result, they just come off as a cool visual thing. Second, the ending in the spec draft was simple. They walk off the train, he checks his watch, it’s past 8 minutes, and he’s still alive. In this new ending, there was too much going on, four endings to be precise. We have the comedy freeze, which I admit would’ve been a dark cool way to end the film. Then we have the post freeze, where they realize they’re still alive. Then we have the real world text, where Colter informs Goodwin that he’s still alive in the Source Code. Then we have the “fate” finale, where Colter and Christina go to Grant Park and look at the mirror bubble exhibit. The thing is, I thought each of these endings worked in their own way. I enjoyed all of them. I just didn’t think they worked together. It had a bit of a Steven Spielberg “too many endings” effect that gave you that uncomfortable, “Shouldn’t this be over already?” feeling. So for that reason, I don’t think the ending in the movie worked as well as the ending in the spec script.
So what can we take from all this? Well, changes are going to happen in any script. But you know, they really didn’t change that much in Source Code. And that’s a testament to how well the script was written. This was more “rearranging the deck chairs” than “building a new ship.” And I think that’s why it ultimately worked – because the core elements of the script were always in place. Guy must keep going back in time to find a terrorist bomber before he sets off a much bigger attack. Complications ensue when he starts falling for the girl who helps him. The pace moved. The acting was good. Yeah I liked Goth Christina (from the spec) better than Peppy Christina but Michelle Monaghan is so beautiful that I quickly forgot about her. I really liked the added scene where they go out to the van and (spoiler) Derek kills them. Made him so much more evil and his downfall so much more satisfying. Is it the movie that the original script promised? No. But it was close enough.
What I learned: Whenever you rewrite a script, you’re adding new elements to each draft. Remember though, that while you may be on the 7th or 8th draft of your script, that new element you just added? It’s only on its 1st draft. If you don’t rewrite the script a few more times to get that element into its 4th or 5th draft, it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. And that’s what happened here with the “Last Comic Standing” ending. It needed a few more beats during the story to really sell it. But they squeezed the element in at the last second and were unable to put it through any drafts. Hence the forced feeling of that ending.
Genre: Black Comedy
Premise: After a high school kid finally lands the girl of his dreams, she becomes severely crippled in an accident, and fully expects him to continue with his boyfriend duties.
About: Head Injury made the lower half of the 2006 Black List. I don’t know much about the writers though, other than they have one project set up at Dreamworks called “Bromance.” I’d heard of the script but figured it to be yet another run-of-the-mill comedy. However, after reading Head Injury, I’m not so sure that’s the case. These two are not afraid to explore the deepest darkest corners of the mind.
Writers: Barry Schwartz & Raza Syed
Details: 104 pages – July 11, 2006 (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).
Ho. Ly. Shit.
Black (or “Dark”) comedies never do that well at the box office, but the screenwriting world loves them. From The Voices to The Beaver to Heathers
The question with Black Comedies is “How far is too far?” What is the line that can and cannot be crossed? To me, that line is Peter Berg’s “Very Bad Things
I bring this up because Head Injury is daring enough to walk that line. And while at its best it reminds you of films like Election, at its worst, it brings me back to the overbaked weirdness of Very Bad Things.
10 year old Ethan is a fatty. And 10 year old fatties, as you know, are easy targets. So every day at school, Ethan’s life is a living nightmare, with bullies stacked on top of bullies rearranging their schedules to bully him. And yet all Ethan can do is think about beautiful Kaitlin, the most popular and beautiful (if not the nicest) girl in school.
So one day, after getting embarrassed during one of those dreaded “climb the rope” sessions in gym class (no climbing of any rope can end well for a fat kid), Ethan decides to change his life. He starts exercising. He starts eating better. He starts lifting weights. And by the time Ethan hits 17, he’s one of the most popular kids in high school.
It is at the height of his powers then, during a school field trip, that the sparks between him and Kaitlin finally fly, in the back seat of the bus no less, and Kaitlin decides to orally reward him for his newfound popularity.
And then, during this exchange, the bus crashes. Everybody ends up being all right. Everybody, that is, except for Kaitlin, whose body has been mangled and twisted beyond recognition. But the good news, she’s still alive!
Or is it?
What Ethan doesn’t know is that by engaging in this act with Kaitlin, he has unofficially made himself her official boyfriend. Parents, teachers, friends, all look to Ethan to stand by Kaitlin’s side, and boy is that stand going to be tough. Kaitlin has a myriad of health issues, not excluding a “collapsed vagina,” whatever that means. And to make matters worse, Kaitlin, who’s now essentially the female version of Stephen Hawking, decides to come back to school.
Here’s the thing though. Kaitlin still acts like the same popular bitch she was before the accident. She still bosses people around, still expects everyone to bow to her, still wants to be part of the cheerleading team. But worst of all, she still treats her boyfriend (or in this case, her new boyfriend) like a puppy that must obey every command or feel her wrath.
Ethan has no idea how this all happened. He’s been chasing Kaitlin his entire life. And now, when he’s finally got her, she’s……this??? And he never even officially became her boyfriend! He was getting a blowjob from her on the bus! Problem is, he can’t break up with her. Kaitlin’s friends, her parents and school faculty, all keep telling him what an amazing person he is for sticking it out and helping Kaitlin through this horrible time.
In the meantime, Ethan’s former best friend from grade school, Sela, who he ditched when he became popular, has grown up into Alternative Hot Girl, and become the only person Ethan can confide in about all this. The two start sleeping together and plotting a path to freedom. Except that with each passing day, it becomes harder and harder to push Kaitlin out of his life. So if he doesn’t act soon, he’s going to be stuck with this…thing…forever.
This script is harsh. I mean it really pushes the boundaries. Kaitlin is the foreman of ultimate bitches. At one point, she tells Ethan that if he doesn’t have sex with her, she’s going to report to the police that he raped her. It’s reverse rape. And that sex scene (or attempted sex scene) has to be one of the most awkward unpleasant disgusting scenes I have ever read. It’s not for the faint-hearted, that’s for sure.
The problem with Head Injury is that all of the characters are either unlikeable or weak, so you don’t really have anyone to root for. Kaitlin is obviously the worst person on the planet. But Ethan just goes along with it. He’s such a weak individual that after awhile you want to punch him in the gonads and say, “Dude, stand up to her already!”
Sela represents an opportunity to salvage this, but then she too becomes difficult to like. She begins the movie as a calm cute slightly nerdy best friend. And when they’re older, she’s much the same way. But then out of nowhere she becomes this sex-addict triple-nympho who goes psycho ballistic at the mere mention of Kaitlin’s name, who she proclaims destroyed her life.
Herein lies the issue with Head Injury. Dark comedy can be great. But you need at least one character to latch onto. I’m not saying they have to be “likable” necessarily. But someone you care about enough to root for. And I didn’t see that here. Everyone was either despicable or annoyingly passive. And this goes back to something we always talk about. If your main character is too passive, it’s only a matter of time before the audience grows frustrated with them.
Technically, Ethan does have a goal – to dump Kaitlin. But the application of that goal is so wimpy as to be non-existent. He only tries to do it a couple of times, and the rest of the script is Kaitlin pissing on him in every way imaginable.
But there were character choices I liked. Such as keeping Kaitlin a bitch even after she’d become handicapped. This movie would have just been sad if she’d gotten injured and gurgled her way through conversations and ate everything through a straw. We wouldn’t have been able to handle that without wanting to slit our wrists. So the fact that she still thinks she’s little miss popular and that the world should revolve around her was kinda funny.
I can’t recommend Head Injury because it crosses that line I mentioned earlier. The reverse-rape scene pole-vaulted this thing to Disturbedville. But I will say this about the script. You remember it. I forget 90% of the scripts I read within a week. This script I will remember, and I suppose that’s why it ended up on the Black List. What did you think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Character consistency. You can’t just change your character’s behavior at whim. A character’s actions must stay consistent with their personality and motivations throughout the screenplay. Kaitlin and Selma are perfect examples of violating this rule. Kaitlin is the world’s most heartless person. She doesn’t have an emotional bone in her body. So in that reverse-rape scene, when she starts crying about how difficult it is to be crippled, we don’t believe a word of it, because it’s not in her nature, as set up in the previous 90 pages. Likewise with Sela. This girl is nice and sweet and thoughtful and smart one moment. Then the next moment she becomes a raging lunatic nymphomaniac. It was like reading an entirely different character. Always keep your character’s behavior consistent. If they are going to change, you must take the time to set that up, or else it’ll feel like it’s coming out of nowhere.
Info: The Beaver won the prestigious top spot on this year’s Black List and will supposedly be starring Steve Carrel in the title role.
Writer: Kyle Killen
When a friend brought up not too long ago that scripts get bought all the time for reasons other than their quality (starring vehicle, trend, etc.) I hadn’t yet read a script I felt fell into that category. Or if I did, I had no way of knowing the reason. Well I think I’ve found my first one. Because The Beaver was bought for one reason and one reason only: Steve Carrel and a beaver puppet on a poster together = 100 million dollars. That’s it. That’s the reason.
The story follows our suicidal main character, Walter, whose depression is so bad that his family has kicked him out of the house (what a loving supportive family!). Walter finds a sock puppet that likes to talk in a British accent and when he puts it on, it essentially takes over his life, doing all of the talking for him. Everything gets better – his work life, his family life, even his sex life. As a result, the puppet becomes a little greedy and decides he wants to live Walter’s life for good. Despite how warped that sounds, the script strikes a nice balance between silliness and drama and it’s probably one of the reasons the script was so well-received.
There were two scenes that really stuck out to me though: one in the middle and one towards the end, that both give very thoughtful and powerful assessments of how we as humans live our lives. The first is the beaver in an interview with Matt Lauer (yes, Matt Lauer) and is a voice over from Walter’s son. It’s heartbreaking stuff about how our life is pretty much set up for us and all we can really do is go along for the ride. They’re so powerful and so dead-on that you completely forget you’re reading a script about a man wearing a beaver hand-puppet.
The last thing I’ll say about this script is that it’s not the best I read of The Black List, but it’s definitely the most memorable. And I think there’s a lesson here. That maybe being quirky and out there in your scripts is more imporant than telling a traditional story, even if you tell it well. Because you won’t remember that nicely told tale. But you will remember a man with a puppet that talks in a British accent.
Genre: Fantasy/Procedural/Action
Premise: A hunter named Atlas must figure out why a human is being targeted by creatures from a parallel world.
About: Ben Magid is the writer of the dark serial killer fantasy “Pan,” which I reviewed a few weeks ago. He has a few other projects in development including Hack-Slash at Rogue and Invasion at Summit. Atlas originally went out on the town in 2009, but despite some initial interest, it didn’t sell. I’ve been told more than a few times, “Carson, you gotta read Ben Magid’s Atlas. It’s awwwesome.” And they say it like Jack Black but without the irony. Hey, I’ll admit it. I think fairies are for girls. So I wasn’t down with strapping my wings on. But if you want to expand your horizons, you gotta take some chances right?
Writer: Ben Magid
Details: 114 pages – 2/19/09 (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).
The people have spoken. You wanted more Ben Magid. I’m bringing you more Ben Magid. To be honest, I always thought this script was the script for Atlas Shrugged, so I stuffed it in my “never read this for the rest of your life” pile. I mean, did you see the trailer for that abomination? If you can watch that trailer and tell me what that movie’s about, apply to Harvard now cause you’re a certified genius.
Okay now you’re going to have to excuse me if I don’t get this right. I’m not a fairy expert. I don’t build troll replicas. The only witch I know is my ex-girlfriend. The parallel fairy worlds are confusing so take my description with a grain of pixie sand. Or dust. Or whatever it’s called.
We start on a 16 year old girl named Willa running from a creature. She’s not too sure why a creature is chasing her and quite frankly neither are we. But her big mistake is turning into an alley. Rule number 1 when anything is chasing you. Never EVER turn into an alley! You ESPECIALLY want to abide by this rule if any sort of creature is chasing you.
Lucky for Willa, Atlas Goodfellow, Creature-killer extraordinaire, has experience with people making the dumb decision to turn into alleys and decides to end this creature’s comfort, dragging a confused Willa back to the hideout afterwards to figure out what’s going on.
See, we’re in the human world. And creatures aren’t supposed to come into the human world due to some pact we made with them back in the olden days. Atlas is a hunter. He hunts down any of these things that come into our world and sends them back – if sends them back means killing they asses.
Atlas figures this girl must be pretty darn special if she has creatures risking their lives to come into the human world to execute her. And he wants to get to the bottom of it. Now here’s where things got a little confusing. I couldn’t figure out if the human world was our world as we know it now, or a heightened version of our world where fairy creatures co-exist with us. Because sometimes our heroes would, say, go to a club, and there’d be trolls and fairies hanging out. I’ve been to a fair share of nightclubs and I haven’t ever seen a fairy except for when girls dress up in slutty fairy costumes on Halloween. I suppose they could be real fairies PRETENDING to be slutty Halloween fairies but I doubt it. Anyway, I couldn’t figure that out.
But getting back on track, Atlas eventually realizes that Willa is special. Verrrrry special. And that’s why the people from the creature world want her. In the end, the two will have to team up to stop the baddies from getting their hands on her. Cause if they don’t, the human world and the creature world will collide in one giant world jumbolya and if that happens we’re all going to become human stew.
Atlas was a neat script if you like this kind of thing. Did you see that movie with Nicolas Cage? The one with the dragons in New York? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Specially on the inventive part. Ben Magid’s really created his own world here. And that’s not easy to do WHILE keeping us entertained. You know how easy it would be to get bogged down in fairy names and troll guild descriptions? I see it happen all the time in fantasy scripts and it makes me want to claw my eyes out. “The Lisp Fairies are an ancient fairy tribe that once warred with the Carmine fairies, who would eventually give their allegiance to the Naksor King, who ruled the land of Falsettosoon before being consumed by the great Jigsaw plague, eventually reemerging as the Genky fairies, who were a combination of the original two factions, but who now only answer to Queen Xafulfa.”
Like I said. Ben doesn’t do that here. He tells us only what we need to know about the world and then keeps things moving so we can focus on the characters and the story. ALWAYS follow this rule when you write a fantasy movie. Know your world inside out, but don’t tell every single detail about it.
The thing is, the few times Ben does get into detail, it’s pretty cool. Like when Atlas whips out some strange bio-duo-loaded steam gun that shoots huge bullets. Except when we move in close, we see that these are not bullets at all, but rather fairies, who then burrow into their target’s skin, and suck the life out of them from the inside. Fairy bullets? Okay, I admit, haven’t seen that in a script before.
On the problem side, though, are a few things. Starting with the dialogue. It’s either too plain or too “summer action movie’ish,” and the reason it stands out is because everything else is so imaginative. For example, when Willa asks Atlas about a witch they have to see, Atlas replies, “More bitch than witch. It’s too risky. And there’s a price. No. We’ll find another way.” I don’t know. It’s not bad. It just never feels like people are *really* communicating with each other. Rather, they’re just shooting movie lines back and forth.
I also thought Atlas’ motivation was kind of wishy-washy for the majority of the story. He risks life and limb (literally death at every corner) because he’s “curious” about why the baddies are after this girl? Later on it starts to make more sense when he realizes that the world he’s protecting is in danger. But at first his obsession with protecting her at all costs didn’t have merit.
Likewise, I wouldn’t have minded a little more urgency, a ticking time bomb of sorts. They are getting chased a lot, which keeps the pace upbeat, but for the longest time there was no looming problem, allowing a leisurely pace through some of the second act, such as when they had unlimited time to visit Black Annis the Witch.
Atlas is unique. It’s a procedural that happens inside a hybrid human/fairy world. And I have to admit, I hadn’t seen that before (still haven’t read Killing On Carnival Row – is that script the same thing?). Would I have liked the relationships to be better explored and the backstories a little less clichéd (My parents were murdered right in front of my eyes!)? Yeah, probably. But none of these things are so bad that they’re story killers. The main reason I can’t personally recommend Atlas is because I’m just not into this kind of thing. But I have a feeling that those of you, men and women, who like to dress up as slutty fairies on Halloween, will like this quite a bit. So if you’re in that camp, read it and tell me what you think.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful when you’re writing a “summer type” movie, that your characters aren’t all speaking in trailer lines. Those lines have their time in the sun, such as the climactic moment of a speech or during an action scene where your characters are in danger, but for all the lines in between, have your characters talk to each other like real people.
