Genre: Action/Comedy/Heist/Sci-fi
Premise: (from IMDB) When a terrifying plague destroys crops and causes starvation on a global scale, the world’s greatest thief must break into the extremist-controlled Doomsday Vault to steal the one seed that could prevent the extinction of the human race.
About: Brian K. Vaughn is a comic book writer (Y The Last Man), a TV writer (Lost) and a screenwriter (Roundtable – recently reviewed on the site). The Vault is his newest spec, which hit Hollywood a couple of months ago and impressed many a people. It appears to be in one of those situations where they’re seeking out talent and/or a director before selling it.
Writer: Brian K. Vaughn
Details: 110 pages, January 2010 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I’m loving how this thing was modeled after a sandcrawler

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

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

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

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

Vaughn

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

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

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

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

Did you get all that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre: Drama/Supernatural
Premise: A young man with a promising future is responsible for the death of his brother. When he realizes he can still see and talk to his brother at the cemetery where he’s buried, he abandons his former life and becomes a manager at the cemetery.
About: Starring Zac Efron, Ray Liotta and Kim Bassinger, this script was adapted from the Ben Sherwood novel. You may recognize Sherwood as the author of the book “The Man Who Ate The 747” which Stark reviewed just a few weeks ago. St. Cloud is the project Efron painstakingly chose over reinventing the Footloose brand. One of the writers, Craig Pearce, wrote both Romeo & Juliet (Baz Luhrmann) and Moulin Rouge. The other, Colick, wrote both Beyond The Sea and October Sky. Charlie St. Cloud hits theaters on July 20th.
Writers: Craig Pearce and Lewis Colick, based on the novel by Ben Sherwood
Details: 114 pages – Undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

So Zac Efron wants to be taken seriously. Gone are the dance moves and the high school cliques. Say hello to the new Efron. Period pieces like “Me and Orson Wells.” Thrillers where he plays a CIA spy. He’s even going to portray a coke runner in the drug-fueled Snabba Cash remake. I just feel sorry for those poor teeny boppers. Their pin-up has leapt off the wall. While 17 Again and Me and Orson Welles were appetizers, the first major entree in the “Take Zac Efron seriously” meal is “Charlie St. Cloud,” a drama where Efron actually gets to play a 30 year old (though I can’t imagine they haven’t made him younger since he signed on). It’s heavy on the drama and requires a wider range than anything Efron’s done before. So is the script he signed up for any good?

It’s 1995. Charlie (athletic, tall, good looking, senior class president, basketball star, sailing star) is one of those lucky bastards who won the genetic lottery. He’s got it all. And not only does he have it all, he lives in a town that beats it all – a small postcard of real estate right off the ocean. You know what people do here in their spare time? Sail. Talk about the life. Where I grew up you spent your spare time experimenting with heater forts in order to stay warm through the day.

Charlie’s best friend is his 12 year old brother, Sam. You couldn’t split these two apart with the jaws of life. And that may have been my first problem with the screenplay. In what universe are brothers best of friends, much less brothers who are 18 and 12. Not that big of a deal but my “huh? meter” did start beeping. Anyway, these two like to go sailing together, play catch together, watch the Red Sox together. They’re the best of buds.

Team Bieber? Team Efron? How am I supposed to choose??

But one night while driving home, Charlie smashes his car into something not soft and Sam dies. Wow, that sucks. However, Charlie’s shocked to find out that he can actually SEE Sam at the funeral. He quickly realizes that he has some power to see dead people, and in order to be around his kid brother, Charlie ditches all his previous life plans and takes the managerial job at the cemetery. Twelve years go by before we catch up with Charlie again.

All grown up (and 30 years old), the highlight of Charlie’s day is still seeing his bro. Now there are some rules to seeing Sam. He can’t wave his magic wand a la Harry Potter and say “Samus Appearus!” He can only spend time with Sam at sunset. Before and after the sun sets, no Sammy. Don’t ask me what happens when it’s overcast.

Now as you can probably guess, people in town think Charlie’s a little…….weird. He doesn’t talk to anyone, he doesn’t do anything. It’s all cemetery all the time. And since he can’t tell anyone why, Charlie has to pretty much sacrifice real life for an imaginary one. (On a completely unrelated note I’ve always wanted to write a movie called “Cemescary.” I just haven’t come up with a story yet).

Into the mix pops Tess, a 24 year old beauty who, like that really bad 16 year old Swiss sailor chick who likes to use government money to save her ass whenever she inevitably screws up, Tess too wants to sail solo around the world. In fact, Tess is a little bit of a celebrity, and she happens to be using Charlie’s town as her launching point.

So one day Tess secretly heads off to practice before her big trip and gets stuck in a huge storm. The last thing we see is a huge wave and a cut to black. The next day, Charlie notices Tess at his cemetery. Hmm, I wonder where this is going. So Tess and Charlie start hanging out and falling in love and stuff. This of course starts to infringe upon brother time, and that’s a huge problem, because if Charlie ever misses a day with Sam, Sam will disappear forever.

(MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW)

Amanda Crew plays Tess – I don’t know who this girl is but I’m officially in love with her.

Now this is based off a book, so I’m not really spoiling anything, but eventually Charlie and Tess realize that she’s dead, which puts a major crick into their relationship because you can’t marry a dead person. I think there’ a law against it somewhere. However, in a late double twist, Charlie realizes that Tess actually ISN’T dead. She’s barely alive somewhere out on her boat and she won’t live unless someone goes out and saves her. Charlie, with his added ESP powers, is the only person who can do this. Of course, if he goes after Tess, he’ll miss his daily meeting with Sam, and that means Sam will be gone forever. What ever will Charlie choose to do?

Man, I have some mixed feelings about this one. It starts off terrrrrible. I mean roll your eyes every 20 seconds cheese-factor times 8 billion terrible. For example, to show how close the two brothers are, they go to a Red Sox game, and the Red Sox hit a game winning home run, which is heading right towards Charlie and Sam. And Charlie holds Sam up to CATCH THE GAME WINNING HOME RUN. I’m not kidding. It doesn’t stop there though. Later, after Sam dies, we get Charlie falling to the ground accompanied by the ubiquitous anguished cry into the sky, “WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME!?” I’m hoping some smart editor burned that film. But yeah, there’s enough cheese here to feed half of Wisconsin.

The Charlie and Tess stuff is okay, I guess, but introducing a girl who wants to sail across the world felt like a completely different movie. I suppose inside a 400 page book where you have time to segue and explore different things, it may have flowed naturally. But in the tight constraints of a screenplay, it was like, ‘I thought we were telling a story about a guy who sees his dead brother. Now it’s about a girl who sails across the world?’ It felt clumsy.

But the biggest problem with the script was that outside of the Tess sailing thing, any seasoned moviegoer was 40 pages ahead of the story the whole time. We knew the brother was dying. We knew the girl was dead. We knew exactly how the relationship would unravel. It was hard to enjoy because there just weren’t any surprises.

However, I will admit, things did change in the final 40 pages. I thought for sure they were going to find out Tess was dead, which meant they wouldn’t be able to be together, but then, probably, in a final twist, Charlie would either kill himself or find out he was dead too. Instead, we find out Tess is still alive and from that moment on, you’re genuinely wondering what’s going to happen.

This was highlighted by incorporating “The Choice,” – the moment near the finale where your main character makes a choice between staying the same or changing. For Charlie, that means holding onto the past or moving into the future. If you do a good job setting this up, it can be the most emotionally satisfying moment in the script and the cornerstone of the climax. In a movie like “L.A. Confidential,” for example, Ed Exley (Guy Pearce’s character), has a choice at the end to either continue to “follow the rules” or become “dirty.” He chooses to be “dirty” and shoots the captain in the back. The choice cuts to the very core of what he’s been battling with the whole time, so it resonates. I’m not saying Charlie St. Cloud is on that same level, but I thought the choice itself was well-constructed.

Unfortunately, the first act was way too cheesy and melodramatic, and the love story was only so-so. This shouldn’t bother Zac Efron’s younger female audience base as much, but it did bother me.

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

What I learned: If you’re building up to a shocking tragedy in your first act, try not to overdo the “everything’s perfect” scenario that precedes it. I mean the love between the brothers here is so over the top that we knew without question Sam was a goner. Audiences are so savvy these days. They know something’s off when a character in a movie has it too good because movies aren’t about people who have it good. Movies are about people who run into problems. So if you want that tragedy to truly shock us, be a little more subtle with the character’s good fortune.

Welcome to another week of Scriptshadow. This weekend my faith in movies was reinstated with the addition of the best movie I’ve seen all year, Toy Story 3. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: Every studio should follow the development process of Pixar. They know how to get their scripts in shape. Even when I don’t like their movies, the scripts themselves are solid. I mean the last 30 minutes of that movie – wow! So great. Anyway, tomorrow I’ll be reviewing a flick hitting theaters in July. It’s a bit of a touchy feely story so prepare yourselves. Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be looking at some much talked about recent specs. Then Friday, as promised, I’ll be reviewing an amateur script. For those not around for that post, I’ve vowed to review a reader script on the last Friday of every month. If you want to submit a script of yours, send the script, your logline, and your pitch (give me your sob stories, give me your frustration!) to Carsonreeves3@gmail. Just know that I will post your script and I will be honest in the review. So if you can’t take criticism, do not submit. You can check out Amateur Week so you know what to expect here. Now, let’s hand it over to Roger for his review of…Pandora.

Genre: Drama, Crime, Thriller
Premise: The residents of a small Texas town are shocked when 7 local residents are killed in a bank robbery gone wrong. Although the culprits are immediately captured, they are kidnapped from the local jail and held for ransom –- the town now has to buy back their killers –- and this is when things really start to go awry.
About: “Pandora” was on the 2007 Black List with 2 votes (Seriously, guys, that’s all? Seriously?) Gajdusek was the Story Editor for the awesome Dead Like Me and wrote Trespass, which Joel Schumacher is directing with Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman attached to star. A seasoned playwright, he’s also a member of New York’s New Dramatists.
Writer: Karl Gajdusek

Why the fuck is this not a movie?

Seriously. Is there someone to blame for this? Because it seems like a tragedy to me that this doesn’t have a home. If I’m wrong, and it does, then good. But, why is taking so long?

Watch Scriptshadow on Sundays for book reviews by contributors Michael Stark and Matt Bird. We try to find books that haven’t been purchased or developed yet that producers might be interested in. We won’t be able to get one up every Sunday, but hopefully most Sundays. Here’s Michael Stark with his review of “Shout, Sister Shout.”

Genre: Music Bio
About: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the unsung, trailblazing, line-crossing woman musician who might’ve just possibly invented Rock ‘n’ Roll back in the 40’s.
Writer: Gayle F. Wald, an English teacher at George Washington University.
Status: I believe it’s available. But, you better snap the rights up quick!

“Say man, there’s a woman who can sing some rock and roll.” I mean, she’s singing religious music, but she is singing rock and roll. She’s … shakin’ man … She jumps it. She’s hitting that guitar, playing that guitar, and she is singing. I said, “Whoooo. Sister Rosetta Tharpe.” —Jerry Lee Lewis

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends — Scriptshadow’s Sunday review of books, where we mush, gush and geek out about the books we soooo desperately wanna see turned into movies.

One of the few of my favorite things is a good rock ‘n’ roll flick. Maybe I’m the bastard love child of Lester Bangs and Pauline Kael, cause there’s nothing I love more then watching movies and listening to records. You put those two great things that taste great together and I’m in Nirvana, baby.

I was weaned watching A Hard Day’s Night, The Buddy Holly Story and La Bamba. Picked up the bass after catching Cotton Candy, Ron Howard’s cheesy, battle of the bands drama on the tube. Hell, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School is up there on my top ten list of all-time favorite movies!

(Damn, Clint Howard is in two of the flicks on my list!!! How the hell did Clint Howard usurp John Cazale? Is he a great, unsung hero too?)

Now, I know music bios don’t always do boffo at the box-office. The Runaways was exactly no Ray. But, I doubt, even with Hollywood’s recent penny pinching, they’ll never completely stop making ‘em.

I’m still wishing and hoping for The Chet Baker Story to eventually hit the big screen. If not with DiCaprio, I’d settle for Josh Hartnett. And, of course there has to one day be an adaptation of Nick Tosche’s Unsung Heroes Of Rock ‘n‘ Roll. And, please, can someone please film Legs McNeil’s Please Kill me: The uncensored Oral History of Punk? I’d pay good money to see Elijah Wood as Iggy, damn it!

Okay, let’s dig out the real scratchy vinyl and get obsessively more obscure.

One of the greatest untold stories of rock is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a gospel star who dared to crossover to what some considered a mighty ungodly road. I believe she’s the one that invented rock ‘n’ roll.

Never heard of her??? Stop reading right now and watch this link. If her guitar solo doesn’t send shivers down your spine, I suggest you get an adjustment from your chiropractor pronto.

It’s a sin that she’s been so forgotten. Without Sister Tharpe, there would be no Elvis, no Little Richard, no Jerry Lee Lewis, no Johnny Cash, no Etta James and no Bonny Raitt. Their way was graciously paved — more like bulldozed and steamrolled — by the good Sister.

Gayle Wald’s biography, Shout, Sister, Shout, pretty much provides the perfect blueprint for a great music biopic. What makes Tharpe’s story so compelling is that there wasn’t a barrier this woman didn’t have to cross. Her life boldly transcended the not-so-invisible lines of race, class, gender and religion.

Tharpe captivated both black and white audiences, spiritual and secular, in the North and in the South, in the US and abroad. Her trailblazing music crossed all boundaries. She graced many radically different stages, including The Grand Ole Opry, The Cotton Club, the integrated Café Society, Carnegie Hall and the Newport Folk Festival (in a definitely unfolky mink coat).

If Dylan shocked the Folk Festival in 1965 by going “electric”, one must wonder how the small town, southern churches reacted when Rosetta did the same thing thirty years prior. She not only breached standards of holiness and respectability by singing blues and jazz in Sunday services (accompanying herself on a very loud, rocking Gibson) but also proudly shared her faith, singing hymns and spirituals in nightclubs and dance halls.

Sister Tharpe was ambitious, flamboyant and something of a diva. She lived just as loud and shocking as she played. She staged her third wedding as a stadium concert with 20,000 fans in attendance. It was one of the greatest publicity stunts ever staged as Rosetta signed the venue’s contract before even looking for a husband!

She was born dirt poor in Cotton Plant, Arkansas to an evangelizing Pentecostal (and perhaps never quite legally married) mother. Rosetta began performing at the age of four, billed as the “Singing and Guitar Playing Miracle”. Her mom used her little blessing to quickly move out of the tiny town and head for Chicago. The missionary opportunities would be far greater for her there. Just think how many sinners the big city had to offer!

Like most musicians raised in the church, it wasn’t an easy choice for Rosetta to pursue a worldly, musical path. It meant rejection from the very spiritual communities that nurtured her.

Everything about Tharpe was ahead of her time. Not just her music (how many women guitar players were there back then?), but in her personal life too. She spent most of her life on the road, made and lost fortunes, withstood failed marriages, wore pants before they were the norm, swore like a sailor and experimented in a little bisexuality from time to time.

She lived like a rock star years before the term even got coined!

If the characteristics of a good story are characters, goals, conflicts and obstacles, then come prepared, cause her career had a long laundry list of hurdles to overcome.

Her first marriage was to a preacher who ministered a little too intimately to the female members of his flock. His deceit would disintegrate her faith a bit, perhaps preparing her for a more secular career.

Her first hit, “Strange Things Happen Every Day” poked fun at church hypocrisy with a hip shaking, boogie woogie beat. It would go on to make the Billboard Top Ten. Many critics agree that “Strange Things” was the first rock ‘n’ roll recording, beating Roy brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by three years. Both Elvis and Jerry lee Lewis were huge fans.

When the famed Cotton Club offered her five hundred dollars a week to perform, she couldn’t resist the temptation to divorce the cheating preacher and take a bite out of the Big Apple. The club’s notorious segregated door policy, however, infuriated her. A necessary evil in launching her career.

In the late 40s, Rosetta would take on a little sister singing partner, Marie Knight, and tour the gospel circuit to sell out crowds. The superstar partnership, even under the watchful eye of Tharpe’s critical mother, would eventually turn romantic. It was a dirty, little secret that would have ended their careers right then and there.

Tharpe’s life story included a lot of fascinating co-stars: Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Dorothy Dandridge, John Hammond and Muddy Waters. I love that Savoy Records, the leading label in the gospel field, was run by a nice Jewish fella from Newark, New Jersey.

Someone needs to finally pay respect to this musical pioneer and make this into movie! Queen Latfiah, do you have a production company???

What I learned: Hitchcock once said “What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.” When writing a biopic, one can’t focus on the subject’s entire damned lifespan. What are the defining moments? Which boring bits need to be left out? I’m always amazed by the masters of the biopic, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. They usually focus on one incredible incident to frame their stories. Luckily, with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, there are many incredible moments to choose from and a shocking deficiency of boring bits.

Read more from Michael Stark at his blog: http://www.michaelbstark.blogspot.com/

Genre: Indy Coming-Of-AgePremise: (from IMDB) – A bookstore clerk living in Manhattan discovers a museum run by a strange old man that exists solely for the purpose of studying his life.
About: Written by the Fonz’s son, ayyyyye, Max Winkler, and his writing partner, Matt Spicer, this script landed on the 2007 Black List and also sits as #13 on my Top 25 list. Winkler is currently directing his first feature, Ceremony, about a young man who crashes the wedding of a woman he’s in love with. Spicer and Winkler also wrote one of last year’s biggest spec sales, the million dollar “Adventurer’s Handbook,” with Jonah Hill. The duo of Spicer and Winkler met in a screenwriting class at USC.
Writer: Matt Spicer & Max Winkler
Details: 121 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Hey Wes, you wouldn’t mind directing this movie, would you?

Been meaning to get around to this forever. As you can see, it’s number 13 over there on my Top 25 list. I’m not going to get too into it, but basically this is smack dab in the middle of my happiness zone. I like coming-of-age stories when they’re done well. I love when a slight mystical element is added (Field of Dreams anyone?). I love when a weird idea is fully explored (the writers don’t back down). I love when the comedy complements instead of dominates the story. Before I even opened this script, it had a good shot with me. And even with that advantage, it exceeded my expectations.

Henry Munn is a 33 year old New Yorker who works in a used book store that’s located in the same building as his apartment. He stumbles out of bed every day, heads into the tiny store, listens to his boss drone on about his newest sci-fi manuscript, waits for the clock to tick away, then goes back to his apartment, goes to bed, and starts the whole cycle over again the next morning. What a life!

But today is different. It’s Henry’s birthday. And he’s looking forward to a rare dinner with his older and much more successful brother, Paul (who happens to be a publisher). But when Paul calls and cancels because he has more pressing work issues to deal with, Henry finds himself alone again.

Just when things are looking their worst, Edith Finch shows up. Henry doesn’t know what to make of her at first. She’s got a weird accent, huge glasses, and “appears to have raided her dead grandmother’s wardrobe for her outfit.” Edith is desperately looking for a rare book about birds and this is the last used bookstore in town. Intrigued by the woman and therefore a little out of sorts, Henry does some searching on the laptop and finds the only one left collecting dust in the London equivalent of his own store. He puts a rush on it and eagerly accepts Edith’s number so he can call her when it gets in.

The day gets even stranger though, when a sparrow (speaking of birds) flies through the window with a purple envelope attached to its back addressed to Henry. Henry opens the envelope to find an invitation – an invitation to the grand opening of something called The Museum Of The Ornate Anatomy of Living Things. Totally weirded out, Henry brushes it off. But after a few ill-fated attempts to forget it, he can’t deny that he’s a little curious.

So he heads to the address on the envelope and ducks inside a deceptively large building. The first thing he notices is that George Clooney is narrating the museum’s history over the speaker system. Henry catches a few sound bites about a traveling museum that’s been in existence since the 1800s which shows rare exhibits, such as never-before-categorized insects and “the tiniest airplane ever built” (which requires a microscope to see). In short, the place is Weird Central.

And the further Henry goes into the museum, the weirder it gets. He begins to see Halloween costumes on exhibit and familiar looking black and white pictures. This is when Henry formally meets Clifford Ashby, an older but charming British chap who claims to be the owner of the museum. He hits Henry with a bombshell. Ashby reveals that this place is a museum dedicated exclusively to Henry’s life! And he built it! Those Halloween costumes were the ones he wore as a kid. There are viles filled with germs taken from when Henry had chicken pox. There’s even a full-size replica of his childhood bedroom!

Naturally, Henry is freaked out and gets the hell out of there. And that should be the last of it, except when Henry starts courting Edith, she makes it clear that he’s probably the most uninteresting person she’s ever met. If he can’t give her something interesting to latch onto, there’s no way they can be together. Taking a shot in the dark, Henry reveals that he has a museum dedicated to his life, and Edith is instantly fascinated by it – so much so that she actually starts falling for Henry, which of course forces him to go back and face the museum. The question is, what’s the real reason Clifford built this place? And is it the key to Henry finally finding happiness?

The reason I loved this script so much is because I haven’t read anything quite like it. I mean, who makes their main love interest a South African woman who dresses like a grandma and reads bird books? In fact, I loved all the character work here. The eccentric but always optimistic Clifford Ashby was hilarious. The selfish and heartless older brother, Paul, added emotional depth to the story. Even Henry as the straight man detached from life, a role that’s hard to make interesting, had an affable charm about him, brought about by his choice to steal Edith’s bird book and read it himself before giving it up (passages from the book play in voice over throughout the story).

I’ve heard some knocks on the script, calling it “Kaufman-lite,” and I’m not exactly going to argue against that. The script doesn’t hit the dark areas as ruthlessly as Kaufman but that’s what I liked about it. Kaufman always went a little too far out for my tastes, and I always wished he’d dialed it down. I mean, the seventh and a half floor frserves om Being John Malkovich was kinda cool, but in the end what the hell was the point of it? Winkler and Spicer dial down the darkness here and focus more on the humor, and I think that the story well.

The page Nazis are going to have their day with me though because this is 120 pages, a full 10 pages higher than my ideal 110 page script. It’s hard to tell if cutting those pages would’ve helped or not. It’s such a strange layered world Winkler and Spicer have created that if they took out some of the more eccentric stuff (the voice over reading of the bird book for instance) I’m afraid the story would have lost some of its mood. So in the end, I’m okay with the length.

I know Wes Anderson only directs his own material (cept for that fox movie), but if there was ever a perfect marriage between director and script, this is it. And I think Anderson needs something like this, where he’s not so attached to the writing and he can approach his vision with a more objective/ruthless eye. I mean, he would go effing crazy in that Museum. The giant organ exhibit alone would be like a dream set for him. So if you work for Wes, please pass him this script. I promise he’ll like it.

This is one of my faves. Unique, weird and fun.

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

What I learned: Sometimes you have to make your characters do things that they wouldn’t do. The most obvious example is in scary movies when it would make SO much more sense if the character RAN THE FUCK OUT OF THE HOUSE as opposed to searching through 8 killer-infested dark rooms one by one. While it’s tempting to have your characters do irrational things, readers hate it because it illicits that timeless reaction: “That’s so fake. He’d never do that!” With a little bit of effort, you can address this issue. Take Henry for instance. When he realizes the museum is about him, he freaks out and wants to leave. However, the writers still need to show us other parts of the museum which help set up the story. So they need a way for Henry to stay. They do this by having Clifford Ashby (the old man) explain to Henry that he’ll show him out, but that the fastest way out of the museum is forward. This allows Henry to continue through the museum, see what the writers need him/us to see, and there’s still a level of believability to it. It really irks me when characters do things they’d never do, so try to avoid that in your own script!