First thing’s first.  If you want to complain about the new look of the site, I’ve created a forum for you!  A lot of people have said to just go back to the old look but unfortunately that’s one thing I can assure you isn’t happening.  I’ve always despised the look of the site and while I’m clearly not an esteemed member of the design club, I’ll keep tweaking it until it’s acceptable.  If you’re a graphic design master and want to shoot me some tips, feel free to!  

You’ll also notice there are now ads on the site.  People have called me a moron for not monetizing the blog earlier and I guess you can say I finally came to my senses.  My adsenses.  Heh heh.  If you’ve spent countless hours here and always wished you could help out somehow, support the site when you see something that interests you. :)  It will definitely be appreciated.  

This week Roger starts us off with a Western.  I then review scripts for two movies that played over at Toronto, both of which are getting some early Oscar buzz (Oscar buzz?  In September??).  I’ll also review an enormous super-thriller that’s been kicking around development for awhile. And for those freaking out because I didn’t do Amateur Friday last week, fear not as I am doing one this Friday.  In my world, Friday is September 31st.  Now, here’s Roger with a review of a Richard Donner project.  Enjoy!  

The style of the blog will be changing periodically throughout the week until I figure out what I want it to look like.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  At least we’ll still be updating!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A suicide jumper is secretly orchestrating a jewel heist in order to clear himself of a crime he didn’t commit.
About: It should be noted that this isn’t the draft that got the movie moving. Hot scribes Erich and Jon Hoeber, who wrote the upcoming Geek-tasmogoric “Red,” starring Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, have done a rewrite, and that rewrite is what secured Sam Worthington, Amy Adams, Jamie Bell, and Elizabeth Banks. Pablo Fenjves, the original writer, has just taken a huge step forward in his career. Up until this point, he’s written movies only for TV. Chris Gorak, who did revisions, is still listed as director on one of my favorite scripts, the crab-fisherman thriller, “Dead Loss.”
Writer: Pablo Fenjves (revisions by Chris Gorak)
Details: 115 pages – May 16, 2009 draft (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).

Is there such thing as the purity of the viewing experience anymore? I ask this because nobody in this day and age goes into a movie without already knowing what’s going to happen. At the very least, they know the hook, and the hook occurs one-fourth of the way into the movie, which means the first 30 minutes might as well have been watched at home. In a sense, marketing has become the first 30 minutes of every film, in many cases extending to the first 60 minutes, and even 90. That’s why I love reading scripts. It’s the last form of entertainment where I can have no idea what’s going to happen next. But I’ve managed to destroy this purity, as my reading options are many and my time is little, requiring me to know as much as possible about each script ahead of time so I can pick something I’ll have a reasonably good chance of liking. What I find fascinating, however, is how different a script reads when you truly know nothing about it, not even a logline, because the script doesn’t have the advantage of knowing that you know what it’s about. If Man On A Ledge is any indication, first acts become way more boring, because writers have come to depend on the the drama in the act depending on your anticipation of the story’s hook, and I didn’t know the hook to Man on A Ledge. So for a good 40 pages I was going, “What the hell is this movie about?”

What is this movie about? Well, 30 year old Nick Cassidy is a broken down man who’s serving time for something we’ll find out later he didn’t do. Luckily Nick’s father dies because prison law states that a man is allowed to attend his father’s funeral. So Nick goes to the funeral where he runs into his younger brother, Joey. The two clearly don’t get along, and after some pushing and shoving, things escalate into a full blown smackdown. Now if I were working this job and I saw a prisoner get into a fight with his brother, I’d probably check the prisoner afterwards. But these guards don’t subscribe to that theory and of course pay the price for it. The fight was a ruse, Joey slipped Nick a knife, Nick slips out of his cuffs and drives away to freedom.

A few weeks (months?) later, Nick walks out on a ledge 21 stories above Manhattan and threatens to jump. For reasons that remain unclear Nick has a very specific jumper psychologist he wants handling his attempted suicide – Lydia Anderson. Lydia is famous for NOT being able to talk down some kid on the Brooklyn Bridge a few weeks ago. Her failure was caught on Youtube and so she’s become a bit of an internet anti-celebrity .

While Nick’s on the ledge, Joey (his brother) and his girlfriend break into a jeweler’s shop. Eventually we learn that that shop is in the building across the street, and that Nick is secretly communicating with Joey. Ahh, this is all a setup! But a setup for what? Well, Nick used to be a policeman, and was tasked with escorting a man with a very expensive diamond from one place to another. The diamond later went missing, and the man, billionaire David Englander, blamed Nick for stealing it, so Nick was sent to jail for 30 years!

Nick is staging this faux-suicide so his brother can nab the diamond Nick supposedly stole and show it to the millions of cameras and policeman who are standing by, thus clearing his name in the court of public opinion, and we assume, the real court as well.

Once all the gears of this giant piece of machinery start grinding, the story comes alive. However I assume I’m not the only one who thinks there are too many gears grinding and that too many of these gears are grinding unnecessarily. For example, it’s entertaining that Joey’s stealing the diamond at the exact same time Nick’s pretending to be suicidal, but is it realistic? Wouldn’t it make way more sense to get the diamond on a Sunday night when no one’s around? I mean I suppose doing it right now “proves” that they weren’t holding the diamond all along, but who’s to say they weren’t holding it all along? Who’s to say Joey didn’t just “pretend” to break in and steal it right now? I don’t know. All the theatrics seemed more in tune with making an exciting movie that they did real-world logic.

Another thing that bothered me was the plethora of uninspired and/or lazy choices in the script. We’ve seen the fake fight stuff in order to pass weapons off in plenty of prison movies before. We have mirrors placed in rooms to trick security cameras and characters looping those images so they can walk around freely. We’ve, of course, seen that dozens of times before. We even have a car chase where one car is trying to ditch another…. by beating a train across the tracks!!! With a little more effort, each one of these moments could’ve been infinitely more inventive, but for some reason only the most obvious option was used.

Man On A Ledge hits a sweet spot around page 60 where we’re jumping back and forth between the ledge and the jewelry store. Lydia is starting to suspect something with Nick and cops are on the heels of Joey and his girlfriend and it feels like it’s all going to go to hell in one disastrous yet delicious finale. At this moment, the story feels most like the film it’s obviously inspired by, Dog Day Afternoon. But that glow dims quickly and there isn’t much left to grab onto.

I’d be interested to see what the brothers Hoeber changed to make this so appealing to everyone involved. In this draft, it’s a bunch of ideas stuffed together searching for the sharp complex thriller it wants to be.

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

What I learned: The outrunning the train scene really bothered me. Look, everything’s been done before. I know that. It’s impossible to be 100% original. But when you come across conventions, at least try to put a new spin on them, even if it’s a minor one. Let me go on record as saying Date Night is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. But in it, there’s a big car chase sequence. How many car chases have we seen? 100,000? 200,000? It would be really easy then to throw together yet another forgettable chase, right? Well instead, the writers have two cars locked onto each others’ front bumpers, so the drivers in each car are facing each other, with our heroes having to escape a third car. Now the cars have to cooperate, in a sense, in order to escape that third car. That’s what I mean by giving a convention a new spin. If Date Night, of all movies, can come up with something new in a 100 year old medium, so can you.

Why Worthington attached himself: This role is pretty complex. Worthington gets to play a suicidal man. A deep and emotional challenge for any actor. But in actuality he’s playing a man who’s pretending to be suicidal, which actually makes it even more challenging. He also spends the majority of the movie in one spot (on a ledge), so everything is a series of close-ups for the actor to do what actors like to do best: ACT! On top of all this, he’s secretly orchestrating a plan to prove his innocence. So it’s a part that obviously has a lot going on and obviously allows an actor to stretch his muscles. Not surprised at all that Worthington chose to do the movie.

Genre: Biopic
Premise: A look at the years leading up to John Wilkes’ Booth assassination of President Lincoln.
About: Booth is one of those scripts that’s been bouncing around Hollywood for a long time. Although all we have to go on is rumor here, it’s said that many who have read it loved it, and that the only reason it hasn’t been made is because it’s a hard sell. Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the script with Dylan Kussman, has talked openly about his screenwriting career and about how winning an Oscar on only his second movie with “The Usual Suspects” put an enormous amount of pressure on him. He’s spoken about how freeing it was to write the script when he knew nothing about “the rules of screenwriting,” and how that allowed him to make choices he never would have made today. He talks about the subsequent decade long process of being stuck in development rewrite hell on numerous projects, which is why he seemed to disappear after Suspects, and he’s talked about wanting to quit the screenwriting business because of how difficult it is to get movies made (even for an Oscar winner!). Lucky for McQuarrie and us, Tom Cruise called him up one day and wanted to do a movie about Hitler, which has given his career a resurgence. McQuarrie’s favorite movies include, “Deliverance”, “The Verdict”, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “The Taking of Pelham 123”, “Die Hard”, “Electraglide in Blue”, “Lone Star”, “The Big Country” and “The Lives of Others.” Kussman is primarily an actor, appearing in such films as Leatherheads and X-Men 2.
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie & Dylan Kussman
Details: March 18, 2004 draft – 121 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 don’t know if Booth has hit “cult” status in the screenplay world yet but it is one of those screenplays that people say you have to read. I’ve been meaning to read it myself until hearing McQuarrie talk about it. I don’t know what it was but there was just this sense of…frustration when he discussed it. Maybe it was not being able to get it made but it sounded more like he knew the script had problems. I lost interest after that but finally decided to give it a read.

One of the things that drew McQuarrie to Booth was that he wasn’t your average mentally unstable weirdo stalker who thought killing a famous person would bring him closer to a higher power. He was actually a pretty levelheaded guy. In fact, he was quite popular, one of the more famous stage actors of the time. Booth toured from city to city, directing and acting in his own hit plays, charming any man or woman who stepped in his path. He was also frighteningly handsome, although if this picture below is anything to go by, there probably weren’t too many good looking people back in the 1800s.

We meet Booth on that infamous day, as he’s shooting Lincoln and jumping off the rafters, shouting those immortalized words, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” which is probably why we’ve always assumed he was a nut. Killing people and shouting out phrases in an ancient language usually means “crazy town.”

We then jump back five years to Richmond, Virginia before it all started. This portion of the story is somewhat Wikipediaish. Booth has a big family. He doesn’t have the best relationship with them. In particular he and his brother Edwin, also an actor, don’t see eye to eye. This conflict stems from their father’s passing, who apparently drank himself to death, which (I think) Booth believes Edwin is responsible for.

Around this time, the Civil War is gearing up, and after seeing a Union soldier hanged for freeing slaves, Booth has an epiphany and rededicates himself to becoming a great actor (I’m not sure what seeing someone’s death has to do with acting either. Though Tom Cruise has taught us inspiration comes from the strangest of places).

Eventually Booth meets up with his childhood friends Sam and Michael, who are off to the war. Booth promises to join them but then makes a second promise to his mother that he’ll never become a soldier. This leaves Sam and Michael pissed and is a critical turning point in Booth’s life, as he will never get over the guilt of abandoning his friends.

However, Booth gets another chance to help out the cause when the Confederacy comes to him and asks if he’ll secretly deliver medicine to the Confederate army on his tour stops. Delighted to be of use, he accepts, and this is probably the most dramatically compelling portion of the screenplay. There’s a great scene where some officers stop him and ask to check his suitcase for weapons, the very suitcase the medication is in. Watching him try and squirm out of it is fun stuff.

As Booth’s star rises, his side falls. It’s looking more and more like the Union is going to win the war, and for that reason, people are coming up with desperate ideas. Booth is no exception. He starts concocting a plan whereby he kidnaps the president in order to bargain for many of the captured Confederate soldiers.

This is actually what was supposed to happen all along until a few days before the kidnapping, when Booth’s conspirators changed the plan to killing Lincoln instead, something Booth was never totally on board with. And while he went through with the killing, his conspirators left him out in the cold. They were supposed to kill the entire presidential body, including the vice president and secretary of state, but they all choked and didn’t go through with it. Which kinda sucked for them, since they ended up getting hanged anyway. And that, my friends, is the story of Booth.

Whoa.

This was a tough read. There’s so much information packed into this novel-esque screenplay that every page you read feels like you’re reading four. Indeed, the student inside me wanted to highlight all the necessary passages for the test I would surely have to take tomorrow. When I do my whining on this site, it’s usually for biopics that make me feel like I’m back in school in the middle of a boring history course, and unfortunately, that’s how I felt here.

My big problem with Booth was that there wasn’t enough drama. There wasn’t enough conflict. In Valkyrie, Quarrie’s last film, there were so many scenes where people were clashing up against each other. You could feel the tension in each of the scenes. Here, it was just a person’s life unfolding before us, and that wasn’t enough for me. That’s why I loved the medicine-luggage scene so much. It was the only time where Booth’s journey was difficult – where his world was challenged and where something bad had the potential to happen.

The central conflict in Booth is internal – specifically his troubled relationship with his dead father. The problem is that the source of that conflict and the reasoning behind it are all very confusing. It’s somehow related to his brother and he’s mad at his brother for not stopping his father from drinking himself to death, so he blames his brother for killing his father but his brother also blames him for it I think and then he’s also trying to live up to his father’s name (who was also an actor) and I think somehow we’re supposed to make the connection between his unresolved relationship with his father and him killing Lincoln but I just didn’t see it. It was way too complicated.

I also found it a strange choice to put the assassination at the beginning. On the one hand, it makes sense. We all know what happens anyway. Why not start the movie off with a bang? The problem with this is, the rest of the story is so slow (and I think deliberately so), that we need something to look forward to. We need that exciting finale to pay off the huge investment we’re putting into this. But since we’ve already experienced the finale, we’re not sure what it is we’re driving towards, why we want to get to the end.

My question is, is Booth’s story worth telling in the first place? As far as I can tell, the bullet points of his motivation are, “He sympathized with the south, felt bad for not joining his buddies in the war, and eventually that guilt caught up with him which resulted in him killing Lincoln.” It’s almost as if what’s interesting about Booth as an assassin, the fact that he was pretty normal, is what makes his story so uninteresting. There’s no deep-set shocking reasoning for his actions. He was a normal guy and decided to do something stupid. I don’t know if that’s enough for a movie.

I think McQuarrie’s a great writer but this subject matter didn’t interest me.

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

What I learned: Now I know that some of you disagree with me on this but I believe, and will continue to believe, that telling a story where the audience already knows what’s going to happen severely handicaps one of your biggest advantages as a writer – the element of surprise. To me, when your audience is 30-40 pages ahead of you (or in this case, 100 pages), you have to work twice as hard to keep them entertained. Sure, if you have super-compelling characters, unlimited obstacles, and every scene is dripping with conflict, you can keep our focus so in the now that we don’t care that we already know what will happen (For example, we loved Apollo 13 even though we knew how it ended) but why make it so hard on yourself? I remember watching Toy Story 3 this year, probably my favorite film of 2010, when the toys are heading towards that incinerator (spoiler), and for the briefest of moments thought, “Oh my God. They’re really going to do this. They’re going to end these toys’ lives.” I was riveted in that moment, on the edge of my seat. Imagine if the opening scene of that movie was a flashforward showing us that those toys had made it out okay. How that would’ve eliminated every drop of mystery from the movie. How it would’ve stolen one of the best scenes of the year. Writing a good story is hard enough. Why handicap yourself?

Genre: Spy Thriller/Sci-fi
Premise: A female convict is implanted with the memories of a CIA spy who died under mysterious circumstances.
About: Bold Films acquired this spec a little while ago. The script comes from high concept kings Douglas Cook and David Weisberg, who wrote everybody’s favorite, The Rock, as well as the Ashley Judd – Tommy Lee Jones hit, Double Jeopardy. The two have Will Smith attached to one of their other scripts, Greenbacks, about an American ex-pat in Morocco who stumbles upon a plot to disrupt the world’s economy by counterfeiting U.S. currency.
Writer: Douglas Cook and David Weisberg
Details: 106 pages – undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

All right all you spy freaks, I got one for you. Are you ready for CIA agents, double-crosses and a googleplex of chase sequences? Do you go to sleep dreaming of a handheld Matt Damon leaping over speeding trains? If so, Blank Slate is definitely for you. This script is the happy love child of Salt, Safe House, The Bourne Identity and……Robocop? Yes, it takes the familiar spy-chase element and adds a sci-fi twist. Does it work? Let’s find out.

Devon Pope is a CIA agent. But we don’t know that yet. All we know is that she’s been beaten and tortured and shot and now the poor girl is running from somebody. A group of men to be specific. Mustering all the strength she has, she stumbles out onto a street in a last ditch attempt to escape them, only to get PLOWED INTO by a car. She doesn’t explode into a mass of gobbledy-gook like that guy in Robocop but she’s definitely dead. Or is she?

Devon is transferred to a medical facility where Dr. Michael Franks, a neurologist, is waiting. Devon knew something about someone before she died and the CIA is willing to do anything to get that information. But how do you get information out of a corpse? Easy. You transfer their memories into another person. All you need is to find the right person.

Enter Kenzie Stuart, a half-wit murderer taking up permanent residence at the female Shawshank. Kenzie’s here because she popped a few caps into a Walmart shopper in front of her kids. Why she did this is beyond me. All you have to do to kill a Walmart shopper is wait for ten minutes until they have a coronary in their motorized scooter. Then again, that’s why she’s a half-wit, and that’s why she’s the perfect candidate to pull the memory transfer.

A few beeps and a couple of boops later, Kenzie has officially taken on Devon’s memory. Well, parts of it anyway. The technology is a bit like Windows Vista. Some things work and some don’t. One of the problems here is that Devon’s life only comes to Kenzie in flashes. But one thing that comes back nice and clear is her CIA training. So she Angelina Jolies her way out of confinement and all of a sudden the CIA has a 50 million dollar experiment running around with the physical capabilities of Bruce Lee.

Immediately afterward, Kenzie remembers, via Devon, that she left a stash of money in a book at a library. Kenzie likes money so it’s time to renew that library card. The CIA tries to pursue her but it’s not easy anticipating someone’s movements who’s literally of two minds.

The bad guys (or good guys) chasing her are split into two groups. First there’s her boss, the endearing George Onesti. Onesti was one of Devon’s best friends and he wants nothing more than to see Kenzie/Devon back safe and sound. The other is Admiral Jerrold Lance, who is so ruthless in his pursuit to terminate Kenzie, that you gotta wonder if he has some ulterior motives.

The library money doesn’t work out, unfortunately, but that’s okay because Kenzie gets a memory flash that tells her where Devon lived. Surely there will be something to steal there so away she goes. She’s surprised, however, to find Devon’s husband and daughter at the house. Kenzie ties them up and takes what she needs, but then realizes that her pursuers are going to find her sooner or later, and if she wants to survive, she’s going to need to find out who Devon Pope is, and what information she stumbled upon that fateful night.

Blank Slate is a tough script to get a handle on. It’s fast-paced and intense, like every action-spy flick should be, but there’s something missing here. It starts with the premise. I didn’t feel there was enough of a juxtaposition between Kenzie and Devon. Kenzie is a badass who can kick the shit out of anyone. Devon is a badass who can kick the shit out of anyone. Devon, with her training, just does it more gracefully. This mutes the hook to a certain degree, since if you’re going to get the most out an idea where one person’s mind is transferred into another, you want those minds (and those people) to be as different as possible. If they’re both the same (or close to the same), what’s the point?

Now obviously their intelligence levels are miles apart. Kenzie is dumb as a rock. Devon is the smartest person in the room. So that difference had potential. But any effort to bring attention to this was limited to Kenzie opining about how weird it was to feel smart. We don’t ever get to *see* the benefits of her being smart because Devon’s memories are the driving force behind all of Kenzie’s actions, not Devon’s intelligence.

The narrative also feels clumsy because each of Kenzie’s actions is conveniently dictated by a Devon memory right when she needs it. So as soon as the library sequence is over, Kenzie remembers where Devon lives. As soon as she leaves Devon’s house, Kenzie remembers where she worked out. I thought this should’ve been messier, more difficult to discern what to do or where to go next, as it would’ve forced Kenzie to make some choices, in turn making the story less predictable and the narrative less convenient.

The script must also overcome a protagonist who’s difficult to root for. Kenzie is ruthless and unpleasant in most of her interactions with others so I found it hard to get behind her. Part of this is that we know so little about Kenzie and what we do know is pretty horrific. She killed a mom in front of her kids. She ties up Devon’s husband and daughter. I don’t mind anti-heroes or unconventional protagonists but I wanted at least one reason to care about and root for her.

To me, the best moments of the script were the character moments. When Kenzie starts remembering Devon’s life and realizing its messy imperfections. When Devon’s husband asks Kenzie about things he never knew about his wife and Kenzie must decide whether to offer that information or protect it – all in the spirit of what Devon would’ve wanted. When Kenzie gets more insight into her friendship with her old boss, Onesti. These were the moments where I felt closest to the character, and the moments that truly explored this potentially fascinating concept – the idea of being injected with another person’s memories.

Also, from a technical standpoint, the story is well-constructed. The central question – what happened to Devon – is a question we want answers to and will turn the pages until we get them. And by keeping our antagonists right behind Kenzie the whole time, the read is very quick, which, as you all know, is the key to any good spec script.

In the end, I think there’s a movie here. But we’re going to need to know more about Kenzie to make it work. She seems like she’d have a fascinating backstory and if we knew her better, it would elevate every other aspect of the script. I’ll be interested to see where this goes after it’s developed, but couldn’t get into it in this current draft.

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

What I learned: Remember, whenever you write a protagonist who’s abrasive or mean or contains any anti-hero like elements, you need to consider how you’re going to make your audience root for them. In both Cool Hand Luke and Pitch Black, two of the more popular anti-hero movies, both of those characters were selfish in their own ways, but they were also charming and funny, which made us forget about what assholes they were being. I don’t think a charming Kenzie is right for this particular story, but there are other things you can do. Speaking of the Bourne films, Matt Damon is a pretty abrasive, selfish, at-times-assholish, character in Good Will Hunting. But we see a) how much he loves his friends and b) what a miserable childhood he had, and that helps us sympathize with him. There wasn’t a single characteristic in Kenzie that made me identify with or care for her.