Genre: Action/Hesit/Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) When a group of hard working guys find out they’ve fallen victim to a wealthy business man’s Ponzi scheme, they conspire to rob his high-rise residence.
About: While I’m not exactly sure what happened here, it appears that this script used to be about some guys ripping off Trump in Trump Tower. It has since changed considerably, focusing instead on ripping off a fictional “Bernie Madoff” type character. Tons of writers have taken this on, so clearly it’s had many iterations. Currently it’s shaping up to be Brett Ratner’s next film, starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.
Writers: Adam Cooper & Bill Collage, revisions by Russell Gerwirtz, Rawson Thurber, Ted Griffin. Current Revisions by Leslie Dixon.
Details: 117 pages, revised draft Jan 28, 2010 (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’m not sure when Brett Ratner became the most hated director among movie geeks in America, but I guess that’s where we’re at. I know a lot of it has to do with Harry Knowles’ out-of-character vitriolic tirades against the man, but regardless of where it came from, I was always shocked by just how quickly the piling-on happened.

I don’t know if it’s Geek PC to say this but…I thought Rush Hour was funny. It’s a silly movie but it makes me laugh every time I watch it. Maybe the fact that Ratner started getting Hannibal prequels and comic book films without cutting his teeth in those genres rubbed a lot of geeks the wrong way.

Whatever the case, it’s probably good he’s getting back to his roots, directing action comedy. Or at least I think he’s directing action comedy. Now that I’ve read the script, I’m not sure if I’d call it a comedy. There’s nary a joke throughout the first 80 pages. Unless I’m just completely misreading the thing, there isn’t any attempt to be funny here. Which makes the script quite an enigma. It’s got Stiller and Murphy in the leads.  It’s set up to be funny.  But this is a drama through and through. 

Tower Heist follows Cole Howard (Stiller?), a stuffy building manager for an upscale Manhattan highrise. A typical occupant might have a few hundred million in his Swiss account, so everything around here has to be catered to that kind of clientele. Cole is the man who caters it, due to his inscrutable attention to detail. This is a man who hasn’t smiled since the 80s – all because this job is his life, and it’s a never-ending race in which every stride must be perfect. 

This was the first problem I had with the script. Cole is bo-ring. I mean, if I owned a billion dollar building, I’d hire him this second.  But to play a character in my film?  Don’t you need to have a personality to be a character?  Not in Cole’s case.  This man is as straight as an arrow, and about as interesting as one. 

Anyway, one of Cole’s occupants is Arthur Braniff, a cocky selfish Bernie Madoff knockoff who quivers in ecstasy at the thought of people waiting hand and feet over him. Braniff’s the richest man in the building, and when the big crash comes, he’s exposed as having run a Ponzi scheme. The judge decides not to put Braniff in jail however, but instead places him on house arrest, back in his building. I’m still trying to decide if this is clever or ridiculous but it turns out that all of the building’s workers (doormen, concierge, maids) had their entire life savings wrapped up in Braniff’s company. This, of course, means that the people waiting hand and foot over our villain are the same people’s lives he’s ruined.

I have to admit, that’s a pretty good setup, having the workers serving the man who ruined their lives. But the strange thing about this twist is that it’s never explored. I think there was one scene that dealt with this unique conflict, and that scene was actually a dramatic one (again, isn’t this a comedy?).

Anyway, at some point, Cole gets so fed up that this guy ruined everyone’s lives, that he scrapes together a band of building workers to steal the rumored 20 million dollars that Braniff is said to be hiding in his penthouse. This was another weird choice in the script. The big heist is built on money that the heisters aren’t even sure exists.  ?

The best part about Tower Heist is the final act, when they realize what it is they really have to steal, and I’m not going to spoil that here.  But I will say it’s the saving grace in a script that’s obviously spinning its wheels until it can get here. What I’m surprised the writers didn’t realize is that the story would’ve been a thousand times better if they would’ve announced this as the heist object from the get-go.  The object is so crazy, so ludicrous, so impossible to steal, that the suspense and expectation of how they were going to do it would’ve added the awesome quotient this story was so desperately lacking.  I mean isn’t the best thing about heist films the impossibility factor – going after something that can’t be gone after? Why would you hide that information from the audience until the last act?

Indeed this was just one of my problems with the script. The story itself takes forever to unravel. The writers decided that the first act break should be Braniff’s Ponzi scheme reveal, so we don’t get that until page 30. They then decide that the midpoint is when our characters should decide to pull off the heist, so that doesn’t come until page 60! Which means in pages 0-30 and 30-60, there’s absolutely nothing going on in the script. We’re just biding time until we hit these crucial story points.

In my opinion, Braniff’s Ponzi scheme should’ve been revealed inside the first 10 pages, and the decision to go through with the heist should’ve been the first act turn. I mean the plot of the movie is the heist, right?  And we should know our plot by page 30 at the latest, right?  Why do you want to invite people into a heist film (with “Heist” in the title) when nobody even decides to pull off a heist until an hour into the movie?? 

Now I admit if you do move that moment up, you run into some new problems, such as having 60 preparatory pages for the heist instead of a more manageable 30, but if you cut this down to 100 pages instead of 117, you knock off 17 pages right there. Add a couple of obstacles via subplots to complicate the heist and that can easily take us through the 50 pages of Act 2.

I think part of the problem here is that the writers put too much emphasis on the theme and not enough on  plot. The theme of “Rich vs. Poor” is definitely everywhere you look in Tower Heist, and in this day and age when the less fortunate have grown increasingly frustrated with the rich, it’s a theme that can resonate. But in the end it won’t matter if the story doesn’t move at a brisk clip or doesn’t have an interesting story to tell.

I know Leslie Dixon is a good writer. She wrote one of my favorite scripts of the year in The Dark Fields. So I don’t know how much of this is hers and how much is everybody else’s, but this feels like a victim of over-development. I have no inside information to back this up but it sounds like this used to be a silly comedy about some schlubs who decide to rip off Donald Trump.

Over time, people were clearly in the writers’ ears saying, “We need to make the robbers more sympathetic. We need to make them more likable.” And so reason upon reason upon reason was added for why it was okay for these building workers to rob Trump.  So it’s not enough to simply have our villain deceive our heroes. He has to literally steal everybody’s life savings in the entire building so we have no choice but to root for them.  I mean at one point, to gain even more sympathy from us, the doorman, who Braniff’s already went out of his way to rip off, tries to commit suicide!  If this script proves anything, it’s that you can clearly go overboard with trying to create sympathetic characters. 

Anyway, this is a January draft and not the draft that went out and grabbed the actors, so let’s hope they fixed the problems and make the movie the fun piece of entertainment it can be.

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

What I learned: I think a lot of people mix up the inciting incident with the first act turn, placing the inciting incident on page 30 and the first act turn on page 60. Remember, the inciting incident is where your hero’s world is thrown out of whack. In Shrek, it’s when Donkey shows up. In Star Wars it’s when the droids escape. This should happen early, preferably within the first 15 pages. The first act turn is then when your hero’s goal is established. So in Shrek, it’s when Shrek learns he has to go save the princess to get his swamp back. In Star Wars, it’s when Luke decides to help Obi-Wan deliver the plans to Alderran. This usually happens between pages 25-30. If you mistake these two events, pushing the first to the 30 page mark and the second to the midpoint, your script will crawl. Imagine Star Wars if the droids didn’t escape Princess Leia’s ship until page 30 and Luke and Obi-Wan didn’t go to Mos Eisley until page 60. Or Shrek if Donkey didn’t show up til page 30 and Shrek didn’t go after the princess until page 60?? You’d have these long 30 page chunks to fill up that are going to feel endless to your audience. And that’s cause you’ve spread things out too far! Even if you don’t believe in stupid screenwriting terms like “inciting incident” and “first act turn,” I’ll break it down for you in simpler terms: “Make the important things in your script happen sooner.” That’s all. Just make shit go down earlier than you think it has to because that’s what keeps your script moving.

 Man, to prove how ignorant I am about comic books, I have no idea what the difference is between Green Arrow, Green Hornet, and Green Lantern.  There was a time when I believed they were all the same character.  And I’m still not sure that they aren’t.  All I can tell you is that, of the three, this is apparently the only one not in active development, which is surprising, as almost everyone who’s read the script has told me it’s great.  As for the rest of the week, we have a Ben Stiller flick, a duel that dates back to Nazi days, and possibly the craziest freaking script I’ve read all year.  I’m not going to say it’s crazy good, but there are scenes in this script that you have never read before nor will you ever read again.  I can guarantee you that.  I’ll save that one for Friday.  Right now, here’s Roger with Green Lantern.  I mean Green Hornet.  I mean Green Arrow!  I think. Who’s on first?

About: Justin Marks is the scribe responsible for drafts of Voltron, Grayskull: The Masters of the Universe, Hack/Slash and was the writer working on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Warner Bros. and director McG. He’s also written for videogames, contributing some levels to the Electronic Arts sequel to Army of Two, The 40th Day. He originally wrote Green Arrow: Escape from Super Max as a spec, an original idea he developed under the guidance of David S. Goyer and his wife, producer Jessika Goyer.

My only exposure to the Green Arrow is limited to the appearance of the character in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and the CW’s Smallville. I’m more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, and I am in no way familiar with the B and C-list villains of the DC Universe (although some are criminal analogues of super-powered characters in the Marvel U) who inhabit the prison of Green Arrow: Escape From Supermax.

If you’re a fanboy or girl, it’s hard not to be intrigued by the scribe, Justin Marks, who has penned the script adaptations for some major 80s cartoons and toy-lines. From Voltron to Grayskull: The Masters of the Universe, he’s the guy that got a lot of Internet buzz for being attached to such geek-friendly projects but was crucified by angry talk-backers when Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li was released (which contains an inscrutable performance by Chris Klein). But, in Hollywood, the reality of a writer’s job is different than the naivette that can characterize online screenwriting forums. You take an assignment, you turn in a draft, and then everything else is outta your hands. The movie in the can may not honor the vision that was on the page, and suddenly, on the film websites, you become that guy. 

The other day I posted my “favorite books” list and in the comments section a few people mentioned Tales From The Script as a must read. Hey, if you were laying down a challenge, why didn’t you just say so? Actually, I’ve heard about “Tales” from a handful of writers over the years and your ringing endorsement put me over the edge. I decided to delve in. And man I wish I would’ve found this earlier.

Basically what “Tales” is, is a series of interviews with 50 working screenwriters broken down into individual topics. So one chapter might be about breaking into the industry. Another chapter might be about the development process. Still another about the pitfalls to watch out for.  It’s just a bunch of insider stuff and the greatest thing about it is the sheer quantity of quality advice.  That’s because the writers giving it to you are top notch. You have titans like William Goldman and Frank Darabont. And you have proven superstars who demand million dollar paychecks like Ron Shelton and Shane Black.

Another feature I liked about the book were the interviews with the industry people who surround the writers.  So you have an agent discussing the ratio of scripts read per scripts sent to screen or a professional reader discussing the dos and don’ts of script presentation.  You have Greg Beal, the coordinator over at Nicholl, talking about what he tells the contest readers to look for. It’s just really comprehensive stuff.

There are a ton of great observations and a lot of sound advice, but here are some of my favorites. Adam Rifkin, a writer with over a dozen produced credits, says about the pursuit, “You’re a boxer. Your job is to get punched in the face and keep swingin. It’s easy for anybody to say, “I wrote five scripts. None of them sold. I gave it my best shot. I’m moving back to Chicago.” You can’t do that. If want a career in Hollywood, you can’t fail. You can quit, which most people do when they don’t achieve success as quickly as they’d like, but you can’t fail. There are as many opportunities as you can create for yourself. You can write a script a day, every day, for your whole life, if you’re that motivated.”

Andrew Marlowe, who’s writing the upcoming Nick Fury film opines about why scripts are sold, “They’re looking at you as an investment in their own career. They’re saying, “Okay, if I trust this guy with $80,000 – or $800,000 – is that an investment that’s gonna pay off for the studio, and pay off for me personally in my career?” All these people are worried about their jobs, and if they bet on the wrong horse too many times, they’re gonna get fired, and they’re not gonna know how to feed their families and pay their rent. I met a lot of writers early on in my career who seemed to have this entitled attitude of “I’m talented. Why don’t they invest $80,000 in this story about my grandmother’s trip to Russia?” Well, maybe they didn’t think that was the best investment.

Or Mark D. Rosenthal: “I always get in trouble when I say this: I believe there is no great screenplay that hasn’t at least been optioned. I believe there is no great screenplay that doesn’t get the writer into the business. Most screenplays are mediocre or just okay. Really great writing always, always gets noticed in Hollywood. When I hear someone say, “It’s who you know,” or “I couldn’t get it to the right agent,” that is the consolation of failure. When it really works, it might not get made, because you need a Jupiter effect of a perfect director and perfect actor – but if the writing is great, you always get into the game.”

You even get Shane Black reeling about “likable” heroes. “Movie stars are gonna give you your best ideas, because they’re the opposite of development people. Development people are always saying, “How can the character be more likable?” Meanwhile, the actor’s saying, “I don’t want to be likable.” You know, they give you crazy things like, “I wanna eat spaghetti with my hands.” Crazy’s great. Anything but this sort of likable guy that everyone at the studio insists they should play.”

The book is a particularly nice alternative for writers who hate screenwriting books, cause this isn’t about some formula or some method. It’s real writers giving you real-life advice. That’s it. Thanks for recommending it to me guys. What should my next one be?

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

Edit: As someone pointed out to me, the book inspired a Tales From The Script documentary as well.
*

This is Nolan Theme Week, where we’ll be breaking down Christopher Nolan’s five most popular writing-directing efforts in hopes of learning something about how he crafts a story.  Monday Roger reviewed The Dark Knight.  Tuesday I took on Batman Begins.  Wednesday was The Prestige, which surprisingly has garnered some of the more heated talkback, Thursday was the film that put Nolan on the map, Memento. And today, to finish it all off, I’m of course reviewing the script for his most recent film, Inception!

Genre: Crime/Sci-Fi/Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) – In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a highly skilled thief is given a final chance at redemption which involves executing his toughest job till date, Inception.
About: Inception came out in the summer and is currently the 5th highest grossing film of the year behind Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, and Eclipse. It cost 160 million dollars to make, opened with 62 million at the U.S. Box Office, finished with 290 million, and has made over 800 million worldwide, unheard of in this day and age for an original property (unless your name is James Cameron of course). Nolan is said to have worked on the script for ten years. When asked if he had done any dream research for the script, Nolan had a surprising response: “I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing. I took the approach in writing Inception that I did when I was writing Memento about memory and memory loss, which is I tend to just examine my own process of, in this case, dreaming, in Memento’s case, memory, and try and analyze how that works and how that might be changed and manipulated. How a rule set might emerge from my own process. I do know because I think a lot of what I find you want to do with research is just confirming things you want to do. If the research contradicts what you want to do, you tend to go ahead and do it anyway. So at a certain point I realized that if you’re trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it’s mostly from my own process, my own experience.”  For some further Nolan reading, there’s a nice profile on him at the New York Times.
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Details: 146 pages – shooting draft

Okay, if you’re a big fan of this film, you might want to steer clear of this review. I’m about to get into it with Inception because after watching Nolan’s five most popular movies this week, I’ve concluded that Inception is by far the weakest of the bunch. The attention to detail – the care he put into those other films – isn’t there in Inception. Things feel rushed, smooshed together, as if Warners gave him gobs of money with a note attached that said, “as long as you give it to us quickly.”

As I pointed out yesterday in my Memento review, Nolan was so careful and clever in how he slipped his exposition into the film. Here, it’s like he doesn’t even care, spraying it around like gang graffiti. This is the heart of my problem with the film, but there are plenty of other things to talk about so let’s quickly recap the plot.

Inception follows Dom Cobb, a “dream thief” who travels into people’s minds to steal information. Early on he’s approached by Saito, a man who owns one of the largest energy companies in the world, to break into his biggest competitor’s mind (a man named Robert Fischer) and plant a piece of information (an “inception”) in him that will eliminate him as a competitor. Cobb initially resists until Saito promises he can reunite him with his children, who he lost after being accused of his wife’s murder.

Cobb recruits the perfect team to complete the task and constructs a multi-layered dream within a dream within a dream approach to get to the center of the mark’s subconscious. Complicating the mission is Cobb’s wife, who has died in the real world but who still lives inside Cobb’s dreams. If he’s going to succeed with the inception, he’ll need to reconcile his relations with her first.

Okay, so I’ve seen Inception twice now and read the script once. While the most important viewing of any movie is the first, Nolan’s films are constructed to be viewed multiple times, in my opinion not only to make for a richer viewing experience, but to make him and the studio richer. On that front, compared to the rest of his films, Inception is a failure.

Why?

One word. Exposition.

One of the reasons we’re repeatedly told as writers to hide our exposition is because bad exposition is one of the quickest ways to alert an audience that what they’re watching isn’t real. If you hear someone say, “We gotta go here to do this and then we gotta go there to do that and we only have 3 hours to do it or we all die unless Joey can somehow deliver the money to Frankie in time,” you say, “Oh yeah, this is a movie.” Why? Because people don’t talk that way.  Because it’s not real life. It’s the mechanics of the plot translated into words in order to condense key plot points for the audience’s benefit.

So what you do is two things. You hide it as much as you can. And you only tell the absolute minimum of what you have to. Now there are a lot of ways to hide exposition. Back to The Future is pure exposition, but it’s hidden in comedy. We’re more focused on these two bickering back and forth than we are on that everything they say is so the audience knows what’s going on.

But that first rule, keeping exposition to a minimum, that doesn’t require nearly as much skill – just discipline. You’re simply looking to keep things short. That’s it. Nolan completely ignores this rule here, spending not one scene, not two, not three, but a full one hour of scenes on exposition. And he doesn’t stop there either!  We are getting exposition all the way into the 120s!  For that reason, when you try and watch this movie a second time, you are bored to death during the opening hour of the film.

I mean I’m just shocked at how sloppy it all is.

Now the script definitely picks up, and all of that explanation enables us to enjoy the complicated second half of the story, but I don’t think you ever really feel immersed in this movie the way you do in Memento or Batman Begins because the opening hour is essentially Christopher Nolan onscreen reading you the rules of his universe from a notepad. There’s no subtlety, no attempt to suspend your disbelief, and that’s probably why Inception feels less satisfying than his other films.

Having said that, it’s interesting to note that all the classic Nolan-isms are at play here, particularly his patented triple-crossing narrative opening to the film. This time we’re cutting between Cobb visiting an older Asian man, Cobb asleep in a hotel room with an approaching group of rioters, and Cobb asleep on a train. What I find fascinating here is that Nolan’s taken this device to its extreme. The opening of Inception is so confusing and so weird that we absolutely have to pay attention to keep up. It’s proof positive, as he’s done this now 5 times, how effective the device is.

Another thing I find interesting about Inception is that there’s no villain and there’s no love interest. In fact, what Nolan tries to do is insert both of these into a single character, Cobb’s wife. She’s this kind of fucked up love interest as well as a villain – the biggest obstacle to him achieving his goal. All the other “bad guys” in the film are essentially faceless. Unfortunately it doesn’t work, as Mal’s character in general is more of a confusing idea than a well-formed character.

The fact that our main character does not encounter these two dynamics (love or hate) in the story, is the reason I believe the film lacks any emotional resonance with the audience. And it seems like it shouldn’t be that way because Cobb himself is feeling SO MUCH emotion during this story.  But since we never see him have someone to love, since we never see him have someone to hate, we never feel any of that emotion ourselves. The emotional core of the movie is limited to Cobb trying to find closure with this woman who, for all intents and purposes (at least from how we see her), is kind of a bitch. Am I supposed to be emotionally connected to that?

In fact, this gets into a much deeper issue, which is that Cobb is the only character Nolan has put any effort into. We know barely anyting about Joseph-Gordon Levitt’s character. We know barely anything about Ellen Page’s character. Tom Hardy and the Indian Guy? I still don’t even know why they were in the movie! We’re talking about a 150 minute movie here, and only a single character is being explored on a deeper level. There’s no other reason to HAVE a 150 minute movie than to use that time to explore a bunch of characters!

So how did this happen? I’ll give you a guess. That’s right, because Nolan wasted the first hour of his film having his characters spout exposition! We can’t learn about characters if their only function is to explain things or ask questions!

Look, I enjoyed this movie. Nolan does enough right here to make the film work. The score alone is worth the price of admission (easily the best of the year – maybe the last five years). And as long as I’m bashing some of his writing mistakes, I have to give him props for how he wrote the dream within a dream within a dream climax.  I can imagine how complicated that must have been and yet it definitely holds our interest.  But when you read this script on the page, you really start to see its weaknesses. When it’s all said and done, I’d say this is his second worst film (behind Insomnia).

Although I can’t share the script, it is available, with concept art storyboards and handwritten notes by Nolan. 

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

What I learned: The biggest lesson I learned after watching Nolan’s films this week is to challenge the audience. There’s a misconception out there that the audience is dumb, that you need to serve them everything on a platter. Audiences are smarter than you think and they want to be challenged. Just know that there is a skill behind this and that skill is built through a ton of writing and a bunch of trial and error. You have to find out what works for you. You can’t just say, “Well Nolan cuts between 3 different storylines so I’m going to cut between 5!” and assume you’ve created a masterpiece. Being different, pushing boundaries, has great rewards, but it also means failing a lot bigger and more frequently. If you’re okay with that, then it may be something you want to try.

This is Nolan Theme Week, where we’ll be breaking down Christopher Nolan’s five most popular writing-directing efforts in hopes of learning something about how he crafts a story.  Monday Roger reviewed The Dark Knight.  Tuesday I took on Batman Begins.  Yesterday was The Prestige, which surprisingly has garnered some of the more heated talkback, and today I’m reviewing the film that put Nolan on the map, Memento.

Genre: Revenge/Noir
Premise: (from IMDB) A man, suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife.
About: Memento was Nolan’s second feature film and first large scale production. The inventive story and stylistic directing backpedaled Nolan onto the scene, making him one of the hottest directors of the time. The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar but lost out to Gosford Park. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance but lost out to…The Believer.  Boy, the judges sure got that one right (if you can’t see me, I’m rolling my eyes right now). Asked if he was ever worried whether the strange structure of his film would play to an audience, Nolan replied, “There’s this weird irony, because you actually find yourself as a filmmaker in the position of the protagonist that has to trust these notes he’s written himself. It sounds a bit trite, but it’s really true. I watch the screen and think, okay I read the script three years ago and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But it’s like you really are, at a certain point, you’re so immersed in the material. You’re just having to trust yourself. You have so many points along the way where the film stops being real and you just have to say: this is what I’m making, this is what I’m doing and switch that half of your brain off and absolutely trust your initial instincts, your editor, your actor’s instincts and your own instincts about whether you’re getting what you want. The weird thing is you go through these torturous creative machinations and then you look back at the original script and it’s pretty, pretty close to what’s on the screen. It’s almost exactly the same. You say, “Thank God, how did that wind up like that?”
Writer: Christopher Nolan (based on his brother, Jonathan Nolan’s, short story, “Memento Man.”)
Details: 139 pages

It’s been nearly ten years since I watched Memento. It was a different time. I looked at movies a different way. And all I could remember was that I kinda liked it but wasn’t too fond of the ending, probably because I didn’t understand it. Figuring the law of diminishing returns would be at play here, I anticipated a ho-hum encore presentation.

Boy was I wrong.

This movie nearly blew me away. So inspired was I by this film that I actually spent 20 minutes devising a way to write my review backwards. I made it about three sentences but still, just the fact that I was willing to try says something! Yesterday I said that The Prestige was my favorite of Nolan’s films. I might have to change that after watching Memento.

Memento follows a man named Leonard Shelby who has a unique illness whereby he can’t form short-term memories. His last memory is walking in on a man raping and killing his wife. He was hit on the head, fell to the floor, and passed out. When he awoke, he was afflicted with this problem.

Leornard has dedicated his life to finding and killing this man, who goes by the mysterious moniker of “John G.”  Because he can’t remember the pieces of his investigation, however, the only way he can keep track of his progress is through body tattoos and notes to himself. 

The film is told backwards, from the moment Leonard murders John G. all the way to the “beginning” of his investigation, when it started. Along the way, we learn not only how difficult this process is for him, but how the people who are supposedly helping him may not have his best interests in mind. It leads to a mystery deeper than the murder we witnessed at the outset. Did Leonard kill the right guy?

Well what do you know? How do we start off Memento? I’ll give you three guesses. Memento starts exactly like the rest of Nolan’s films – with a divided narrative jumping between three incoherent timelines. Once again, Nolan proves that a key trick to capturing the audience’s attention is to confuse and challenge them, forcing them to focus in or be left behind.

The first thread shows Leonard killing John G., but in reverse. We then cut to a hotel room in black and white where Leonard is mumbling to himself in voice over, trying to figure out what he’s doing there. We then cut to what we’ll eventually learn is our central storyline, Leonard’s pursuit of the killer.

Judging by what I’ve read from Nolan this week, writing this script must have been an orgasmic experience for him. Unlike his other films, where the cross-cutting eventually dies down, leading to a traditional easy-to-follow narrative, in this film he gets to play with time and confuse the audience all the way up to the end. And it works. I can’t remember the last time I was still guessing what the hell was going to happen this late in a film. And I’d already seen the movie!

But I think the reason every aspiring screenwriter needs to see this movie, or at least be aware of it, has nothing to do with the actual script, but rather with the concept. Memento takes a tired premise and turns it on its head. Go back and read that sentence again because knowing it could be the difference between you making it as a screenwriter or not.

I’d say that 99.99% of the writers out there either give you the same old thing or a slightly different version of the same old thing. And if you’re a great writer, you may be able to get away with that. But to really get noticed, especially if you’re not connected, turning a tired “been there done that” premise or genre on its head is the fastest way to rise above everyone else.  I’ve read a million procedurals. I can usually tell you who the killer is by page 30 and I know every beat you’re going to hit ten pages before you hit it. But if you give me a script where the procedural is done backwards?? I’m lost. I have no frame of reference. Every scene I read is going to feel like I’m reading something for the first time. That’s what Memento did. That’s why Christopher Nolan was noticed. That’s why he was able to go on and make Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Inception. Had he merely told a straight forward procedural-revenge film with a few stylistic flourishes, there’s a good chance we wouldn’t be talking about him right now.

I think another thing that separates Nolan from his competitors though, is that he wasn’t satisfied with the concept alone. He really sat down and thought about it. He tried to figure out what living a life like this would really be like. The result of that research can be seen in numerous little moments. In bed, when Leonard’s sitting there, thinking about how his situation makes it impossible for him to ever get past the grieving process, because his last memory is and will always be of his wife dying. I mean that’s some hardcore deep shit there.

Or the fact that it doesn’t matter if he ever gets revenge or not, since it will be impossible for him to remember it.

Another great flourish are the scenes in between the scenes. Whenever you do something different, you’re forced to make up some new rules because there’s no blueprint to draw upon. Nolan adds these black and white hotel scenes between the main narrative because he knows jumping backwards directly after a scene would be too jarring. This creates a rhythm by which the backwards storyline actually feels smooth and digestible. A unique challenge.  A unique solution.

But what I love about Nolan is that he doesn’t just rest on this device. He knows that if we’re jumping back into this room a dozen times during the film and nothing’s really happening, we’re going to get bored. So he uses the black and white scenes to tell the story of Sammy Jenkins, a man who had the same brain condition Leonard did. This way, when we get to these scenes, we’re not just waiting for them to end, we’re eager to find out what’s happening in Sammy Jenkins’ storyline. On top of that, he’s also using these scenes to give the audience exposition on Leonard’s complicated condition. In retrospect, it’s surprising how cleverly he slips this exposition in, considering how sloppily he adds it five films later, in Inception.

Not to be lost in all this are some of the simpler touches Nolan made that dramatically affected the script, such as making sure Leonard was a sympathetic character. Having this disability makes him an underdog, and the audience always ALWAYS loves an underdog! When you tack onto this that he’s avenging the rape-murder of his wife, I mean who’s not going to root for this guy?

My only real problem with Memento is that the ending is still confusing to me (spoilers). I love what Nolan is going for here with Teddy using Leonard to kill in multiple towns to make money, but I’m not sure it makes sense when you really start to think about it. It seems like Teddy’s only use for Leonard is to kill the drug dealers so he never actually murders anyone. That way if they get caught, it’s Leonard who’s the murderer, not him. But I think it would be pretty clear in court that he was tricking Leonard into performing the murders, making him a murderer as well. So if he’s a murderer anyway, why not just perform the murders himself?

Also, the way that the black and white storyline turns into the main storyline at the end so that we’re now right back at the beginning of the movie (or the end) definitely hurts my brain whenever I think about it. Even now, as I try to lock down the time frame, I can’t quite do it, and that makes me feel like I missed something.

But hey, that’s what’s makes this writer-director so popular. He likes to make you think. And this is his most thoughtful film. Memento is different and challenging and fun. A great film that every screenwriter should watch.

Script link: Memento

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

What I learned: Having someone take advantage of your character creates sympathy for your character. Nobody likes to see anyone get taken advantage of. It’s sort of the adult version of bullying. And whenever we see our hero get bullied, we develop a bond with them.  We get a feeling of, “We’re in this together now.”  Now lots of people take advantage of Leonard in this movie, but the most obvious is Carrie-Anne Moss. Her scene where she pretends to have just been beaten up by her drug dealer to take advantage of Leonard’s condition is easily one of the most memorable scenes from any movie that year. Not coincidentally, it’s the moment where we connect with Leonard the most.