The Baytown Disco

Posted on March 15, 2010 | by admin

Guys. Get those script lists ready! Wednesday is the official 2010 cast your votes for your favorite scripts so we can update the Reader Favorites list day. This week will have a couple of odd script reviews, one which I thought was really good, yet reminded me a little too much of something else on my Top 25 list, and another for a movie that’s being released this weekend. Don’t forget to get here early in case the links go down. Right now, here’s Roger with a Black List script review.

Genre: Crime, Thriller
Premise: Three redneck brothers get in over their heads when they agree to help a woman kidnap her son back from his seemingly evil father.
About: The actors-turned-writers met in 2004 when they were cast in a project together. In 2006 they made and starred in a short film called Mr. Extion, which screened at over 40 festivals and went on to win 14 awards. In 2008 they were invited to the Delray Beach Film Festival’s Script-to-Reel Challenge where they won the competition with The Baytown Disco. They are represented by Elevate Entertainment and the Agency for the Performing Arts.
Writers: Barry Battles & Griffin Hood
Details: October 24, 2008 draft

I was scrolling through the 2009 Black List, looking for something crime-flavored when I saw the logline to The Baytown Disco. There were three words that hooked me: redneck, kidnap, and evil. Yep, sometimes that’s all it takes to hook Roger Balfour.

As a Georgia boy, I was delighted to discover that this was a tale about Southern antiheroes, a trio of fellas as mean as rattlesnakes who agree to kidnap a child only to find themselves contending with all manner of bounty hunter and assassin available between El Paso, Texas and Montgomery, Alabama.
Imagine a movie where The Brothers Tremor from Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces are the heroes, and you’ve got the gist.
But Rog, what sets these antiheroes apart from The Tremor Brothers and The Boondock Saints?
Folks, meet The Oodie Brothers.
The progeny of Jonathan Warren Oodie, or Johnny Boy for short. Johnny Boy is a figure out of a Prohibition folktale, a mountain man who comes from one of the biggest shine running families east of the Mississippi. Johnny Boy is notorious for taking control of his local Klan chapter while he was still in his twenties, eventually going out in a blaze of glory during a federal drug raid, leaving behind his three boys.
There’s Brick, the leader of the bunch, a dude who wears a tanktop fashioned out of a Confederate flag and leather pants. He openly wears a holster that contains a sawed-off scatter gun like he’s some kind of hillbilly Mad Max.
There’s McQueen, the baby of the brood, who was approached by a modeling agent once. It turns out McQueen ain’t above almost beating another human being to death, even if it’s a woman. Even if the woman was the modeling agent who complimented him. See, McQueen ain’t that smart. He thought she was thinking “he was a fag”.
Then, there’s Lincoln. The Mohawked mute. Standing at 6’5″ and weighing in at 250 pounds, Lincoln wears a Speak-n-Spell (such a great character detail!) around his neck. For, you know, whenever he needs to say something. Which isn’t much, as he’s the impregnable muscle of our outlaw triumvirate.
When we meet them, they’re stepping out of their 1976 Ford Maverick, which might as well be a character itself. Finding themselves in the projects of Montgomery, McQueen exclaims, “Hot as hell down here in ole Mexico.” Of course, the Hispanic men nearby take offense, but quickly walk the other way when Lincoln climbs out of the car.
The brothers, in true scorched earth-fashion, shoot their way into a den of gangbangers, killing everyone in their way. They even flush some of them out of a kitchen using a dummy grenade. To a man bleeding to death on the floor, Brick says, “I figure since you can’t speak my language you can’t hear my language none either, but just so you know, the Latin Kings paid us to come make all this mess.”
When Brick finally shoots the man in the face, silencing him, McQueen strolls in with a piece of mail, exclaiming, “You ain’t gonna believe this. We got the wrong house.”
No matter.
Back in the car, Lincoln does a line of coke off his Speak-n-Spell and makes it say, “This yayo is good sheet.” Appropriately coked out of their minds, the Oodies make their way to an Irish pub called O’Houlihan’s. To them, this Irish bar is an odd architectural anomaly in the middle of God’s Country, and they dutifully begin to insult its patrons by telling racist jokes.
“What’s two miles long and has an IQ of forty?”
“A Saint Patty’s Day parade.”
“What happened when the Irish woman bought a vibrator?”
“She smashed all her teeth out.”
Then we’re treated to a good ol’fashioned bar brawl.
Sure, bar brawls are fun to write and fun to watch, but how do they move the story along? How do they reveal character?
Don’t worry, ol’Balfour here found a subtext. The bar brawl scene reminded me of something out of The Boondock Saints. But in this case, it was truly entertaining. Written with an intelligence and Southern charm that kept me interested with a minimal rolling of eyes. It’s like the writers took note of everything I don’t like about Quentin Tarantino fan-fiction and were eager to prove that they were the real deal.
It’s a helluva gesture, like the writers are bitchslapping Troy Duffy and his antihero creations. If, as an audience, I’m to understand that there exists a pissing contest between The Baytown Disco and The Boondock Saints, then I guess I’m here to report that this Black List script wins by a pungent deluge.
The difference?
Battles and Hood are better writers.
So what’s the plot?
It’s that classic crime genre staple: A simple snatch and grab job gone awry.
You see, a gorgeous little chica named Celeste Martin has been following our men. She approaches the Oodies with a proposition, “I want to hire you and your brothers to kidnap my son back from my ex-husband.” That ain’t exactly what these guys do, but when she offers to pay them fifty thousand dollars, we soon find our guys in El Paso.
Of course, they take a detour along the way to see some sights, such as a visit to the football stadium used in Friday Night Lights at the behest of fanboy McQueen.
“You think all the cool stuff in movies is really just boring in real life?”
“I bet if an asteroid crashed into your damn home, or Chuck Norris kicked your door in you wouldn’t be too bored.”
Amen, brothers Oodie.
It’s these quirky little character gestures that make these white-trash, socially hell-bent characters likeable.
Anyways, it’s not long before our countrified trinity arrive in El Paso, kill another household full of unsavory characters, and not so unsavory (they kill a maid), and whisk off their kidnap victim.
Rob has cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair, which shocks our guys, but it’s not long before McQueen is being berated by Brick for suggesting that Rob is a retard.
Of course, Lincoln sort of imprints with Rob and it’s kinda nice to see such a murderous brute tote the little boy around on his shoulders, as if the authors are referencing the young adult classic, Freak the Mighty.
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
The raid incites the ire of Carlos, Celeste’s husband, who is not a very nice guy. When we meet him, he’s literally butchering a victim while he’s lamenting about how fast a movie can go from theater to DVD, “Now days if you don’t go see something immediately, it’s gone from the theaters.”
Now this is where the movie kicks in.
Carlos contacts some interesting people to go on a hunting expedition to retrieve the child back. In effect, he’s unleashing the hounds of hell or the four horsemen of the apocalypse to kill our antiheroes.
Who are the hunters?
There’s Eve, the madam of a brothel of whore assassins, a female biker gang called the Flamebangers.
If that’s not enough, there’s the Hood Pirates, a gang of Road Warrior-esque villains who control a treacherous state of highway with a flatbed truck that’s been modified to look like a sailing vessel called The Nubian Princess. It even has gun ports and eleven-foot tall crow’s nest.
That particular sequence is pretty fucking awesome. It’s just so goddamn comical and tense. The policemen in a cop car who witness the mayhem bicker on whether they should get involved or not, “Now I don’t know about you, but my pension plan don’t cover shit like that.”
There’s The Nation, a band of Mississippi Choctaw Indians that kill with tomahawks.
And of course, there are the killers arriving from the North, sent by the crime syndicate that may or may not have something to do with Rob’s true identity.
Sounds fun. How does it all play out?
There’s some fun double-crossing and twists which involve Carlos and Celeste, and the two Alabama detectives tracking the Oodie’s breadcrumb trail of chaos across the highways and bi-ways of the American South.
And although this script is written with a mature gravitas, there’s one particular novice glitch involving the introduction of some key characters late in the game that lends to a finale that’s a tad deus ex.
There’s also some character elements that require a better structure and planting to make the payoffs smoother.
But you know, that’s all stuff easily fixed in a rewrite and polish.
There’s a lawlessness to the The Baytown Disco that reminds me of Robert Rodriguez’ Mariachi trilogy, the work of Walter Hill, and (I mean this in the best way possible) that crazy cult classic, the legendary Road House. Just men bypassing the normal avenues of social control to resolve their conflicts the Western way, which is through violence.
Hell, man, someone give Battles and Hood a chance. Let ’em smooth out some of the structural issues, fine-tune the characters, and you’ll have a script that the next Robert Rodriguez can direct on the cheap and on the fly. It’s Christopher McQuarrie’s The Way of the Gun meets George Miller’s The Road Warrior. Seriously.

Who wouldn’t want to see that?

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

What I learned: One of the strengths of this script is the dialogue, and I wasn’t surprised when I learned that both Barry Battles and Griffin Hood are actors that hail from Birmingham. There’s a twang to the vulgar vernacular that ratchets between gruff good ol’ boy charm to the buzzsaw of angry Alabama cicadas. You wanna talk about voice? This script has a Tennessee Williams by way of Joe R. Lansdale feel to it that I just love.
But, how do you that? How do you write good dialogue? I think you’ve either got the ear or you don’t, but one thing you can do is read the dialogue aloud. How does it sound? Are you tripping over words? Are the sentences too long? Is the dialogue saying what you want it to say? Are you using it to obscure or reveal character? Is it witty? Is it exposition heavy? Have other people read it. Are they entertained and charmed? Or is it lacking a spark? Polish it up, make the exchanges flow. Know when to cut to the next scene. Sometimes the worst thing you can do to the flow of a script is let a scene run too long, thus burying an effective exchange and obscuring what it was supposed to do in the first place.
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Weekly Rundown

Posted on March 12, 2010 | by admin

Wahoooo! Jessica Hall is back with another Weekly Rundown. In addition to her great round-up, I’m also hearing that John Hughes’ “The Grigsbys Go Broke” could end up getting made.

DreamWorks picked up film rights to Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel “The Help.” Tate Taylor will write and direct the project, which explores the complicated relationships between the matrons of the South in 1962 and the maids and housekeepers who take care of their kids and homes. (http://www.bit.ly/d4XoRh).

Producers Daniel Sladek and Chris Taaffe have acquired rights to the novel “Night of the Howling Dogs,” written by Graham Salisbury. Young adult novel is about the quest for survival that Boy Scout Troop 77 of Hilo, Hawaii experienced while camping in the wilderness during the 1972 earthquake in Halape and the subsequent tsunami that followed. (http://www.bit.ly/ay7hy9)

Matthew Greenberg (1408) will adapt another Stephen King project, boarding PET SEMETARY for Paramount. King’s 1983 novel was previously brought to the screen by Paramount in 1989. Previous drafts were written by Mike Werb, Michael Colleary and Dave Kajganich. (http://www.bit.ly/bS2Irr)

New Line is reviving POLICE ACADEMY, hoping for a new franchise. No writer or director has been attached. (http://www.bit.ly/brW3Ip)

2009 Black List writers Cole-Kelly & Pitman (DIVERSIFICATION OF NOAH MILLER) sold a comedy pitch to Fox for Chernin to produce. PREMATURE MATURATION revolves around a group of middle-school kids who find themselves transformed into adults. (http://www.bit.ly/d8oHLq)

TV veteran Alexa Junge (“United States of Tara”) is set to rewrite AU PAIRS. R.J. Cutler (SEPTEMBER ISSUE) previously boarded as director. The Warner Bros. project follows three teenage girls learning how the other half lives by talking summer jobs with a wealthy family in the Hamptons. Previous draft was written by Liz Garcia (1% MORE HUMID). (http://www.bit.ly/9213BO)

“Sopranos” creator David Chase finally announced details on the project he’s set to write and direct for Paramount. Project was announced nearly two years ago. Chase’s directorial debut will be a music-driven coming-of-age story set in the 1960s. (http://www.bit.ly/cZ0y0J)

John Hodge (TRANSPOTTING) will write Guy Ritchie’s (SHERLOCK HOLMES) project, KING ARTHUR, Warner Brothers’ re-imagining of the 6th century legend of King Arthur. Project is not to be confused with WB’s EXCALIBUR to be directed by Bryan Singer from Epstein & Moore’s 2009 spec about a suburban dad who pulls the legendary sword from the stone at a Medieval Times Renaissance Fair. (http://www.bit.ly/9bFu6N)

Kevin MacDonald (STATE OF PLAY) will direct MURDER MYSTERY from Jamie Vanderbilt’s (ZODIAC) script. Project was picked up by Tower Hill in turnaround from Disney. “Murder Mystery” revolves around an American couple honeymooning in Europe who are implicated when they witness a murder and wind up embroiled in international intrigue. (http://www.bit.ly/bgfvO4)

Last week we told you about Dustin Lance Black’s (MILK) HOOVER BIOPIC. Now, Clint Eastwood (INVICTUS) has signed on to direct. We mentioned that the project was set up at Universal due to Imagine Entertainment’s involvement, but Variety says the project, which is still without a studio home, is like to go to WB because of Malpaso’s deal. (http://www.bit.ly/asbuLs)

Warner Bros. is planning an action pic based on Leonardo Da Vinci, picking up a treatment from producer Adrian Askarieh titled “Leonardo da Vinci and the Soldiers of Forever.” No writer or director has been announced. (http://www.bit.ly/9wANED)

Cooper Layne’s (THE CORE) crime thriller spec RUTHLESS was picked up by Indie banner Double Nickel Prods. Story centers on an ex-con who shows up in a small Louisiana town and disrupts the lives of the inhabitants by exposing their secrets. (http://www.bit.ly/aX6La0)

Mark Bomback (UNSTOPPABLE) will rewrite PROTECTION for Gary Fleder (EXPRESS) to direct. Fox project centers on a college professor who investigates the disappearance of his wife and daughter and who must confront authorities at the Witness Protection Program to find them. Original spec was by Allan Loeb (WALL STREET 2). (http://www.bit.ly/aQdqug)

Phillip Noyce (SALT) will direct 2009 black list script WENCESLAS SQUARE. Script was penned by Markus & McFeely (NARNIA). Story chronicles the lives of two spies who fall in love while on separate missions in Prague during the 1980s. (http://www.bit.ly/cQhh2l)

Chris Gorak (RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR) will write and direct DARKEST HOUR for Summit and New Regency. Thriller is about a group of kids struggling to survive after an alien invasion. Previous drafts were written by Jon Spaihts (PASSENGERS) and Les Bohem (REAL STEAL). (http://www.bit.ly/b0YgdT)

CG film FOUNTAIN CITY, based on a pitch from director Andrew Adamson (SHREK) and writer Joby Harold (ARMY OF THE DEAD) was picked up by L.A.-based Lightstream Pictures. Project info is being kept under wraps, but it’s planned as a big budget live action/CGI hybrid fantasy adventure epic. (http://www.bit.ly/dkuRUy)

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Hall Pass

Posted on March 10, 2010 | by admin

Genre: Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) A married man is granted the opportunity to have an affair by his wife. Joined in the fun by his best pal, things get a little out of control when both wives start engaging in extramarital activities as well.
About: Sold all the way back in 2005 for a high six-figure sum to Fox, this spec was subsequently put into turnaround and snatched up by New Line. Owen Wilson, Alyssa Milano, Jenna Fischer, and Christina Applegate will star in this new Farrelly Brothers comedy (filming now). Probably the most interesting aspect about this project though, is that it was written by Pete Jones! My fellow Chicagoan is best known as the writer-director on the first season of Affleck and Damon’s “Project Greenlight” reality series – a series where they set out to prove that Hollywood was doing it wrong and, in the process, proved that Hollywood was…umm…not doing it wrong. But kudos to Mr. Jones for staying the course.
Writer: Pete Jones (revisions by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, Kevin Barnett, and Pete Jones)
Details: 123 pages (Sept 18, 2009 draft)

Goofball extraordinaires Bob and Peter Farrelly

Do the Farrelly Brothers still have it?? These guys directed two of my favorite comedies of all time, “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary.” When they get it right they reallllyyyy get it right. But sometimes I wonder if this duo has lost their drive. I get the feeling that they’re trying, but they’re not putting in the same “our careers depend on it” passion they used to when they were younger. That may change when they take on what potentially could be the most difficult adaptation of the decade – their interpretation of “The Three Stooges.” I know you’re probably a lot more interested in that project than this one, but for whatever reason, I can’t bring myself to read it. It just sounds so…impossible to turn into a film. So we’ll stick with Hall Pass for today.

Hall Pass follows Fred Searing and Rick Miles, two guys in their early 40s who are smack dab in the middle of life. They have kids. They have wives who don’t give a shit how they look anymore. And of course they don’t get nearly as much sex as they want. This results in a daily routine of going out and admiring much younger much sexier women and thinking about how it “used to be.” Oh if they were on the prowl again. What damage they could do.


In the meantime, Grace and Maggie, the wives, aren’t exactly living the high life either. Taking care of the kids and keeping the family above water on a daily basis has taken its toll, and it’s clear that their marriages need something, some spark, to reinvigorate them. And it’s during a therapy session that Maggie gets the answer. Her therapist suggests giving her husband a “hall pass,” a free pass away from the marriage to do anything he wants, cheat, lie, steal, whatever. Maggie’s horrified by the idea but the therapist assures her that what most men realize when they get the opportunity to do whatever they want, is that they never really wanted to do it in the first place. Maggie discusses it with Grace, and the two reluctantly hand their husbands that most coveted of all treasures – FREEDOM!

In the meantime, the two gals will go hang out up at the summer home, allowing the men to have the lay of the land without interference. Fred and Rick can’t believe their luck. And the news spreads like wildfire. Soon, all of their friends are rushing over, wanting to witness the magical event firsthand. How many girls can they have sex with in a week? Ten? Twenty??

Well, as you can imagine, things don’t go exactly as planned. The structure of the script turns into a day by day breakdown of their attempts, superimposing a “Day X” at the beginning of each morning. Rick and Fred realize that, hey wait a minute, picking up women is hard. And now that there’s actually pressure to *do* something instead of just *saying* they’re going to do something, it’s like, really hard. Not to mention they don’t exactly have the stomachs and the hair that they used to. Each day of “picking up women,” therefore, ends in pathetic failure, making them feel even worse than if they’d never gotten a hall pass in the first place.


To make matters worse, their wives realize, hey, if the guys aren’t officially married to *them* anymore, then they must not be married either, which means they can experience a little Desperate Housewives action of their own. So they head over to Maggie’s father’s minor league baseball team and start swooning over the hot young baseball studs, which leads to all sorts of temptation. Will they cave? Will the guys cave? Does anyone really want to cheat?

The question with Hall Pass is bigger than the movie itself. Does this concept work? I read essentially the same script in the spec sale “Permission” as well as another similar concept that sold (which I’m blanking on). The main problem is, because it’s a comedy, there’s only so far you can go with the cheating. At the end of the movie, your characters have to get back together. Therefore they can’t have 48 hour monkey orgy sex before casually sliding back into their marriages. So there’s a certain limit to the hijinx one can experience, and as a result, the concept always feels neutered. That said, the characters in Hall Pass went a lot further than I thought they would, which makes this script a little edgier than its counterparts.


One thing I kinda dug about Hall Pass though was the restraint the Farrelly’s showed. These guys would cover two people in grape jelly and throw them off the Empire State Building if they thought it would get a laugh. But here they seem to be interested in a more realistic tone. Does that mean, gasp, they’re finally growing up? I don’t know if I’d go that far, but you can definitely feel that in this particular story, they’re drawing more from their own lives than they have any movie they’ve made before. And that’s always the best way to go as a writer – explore things that personally intrigue you. It always adds a level of authenticity you wouldn’t get otherwise. So that was kind of neat to see the Farrelly’s do.

Having said that, I wish they would’ve exploited their concept more. The second act becomes a victim of something we’re all guilty of at some point or another: redundancy. The guys try to pick up girls and they fail. So they try to pick up more girls and they fail. So they try and pick up MORE girls and they fail. After awhile it just feels like we’re stalling while we wait for the third act. I know the Farrelly’s purposefully write their scripts long so they can film as much crazy shit as possible, allowing them to get as many laughs as they can into the flick. But as a read, everything was way too spread out, and the lack of laughs really killed the momentum. It’s a great reminder that for our purposes, as spec script writers, we aren’t afforded that luxury, and need to keep our second acts lean, packing as much story and action as we can into the same space.

I’ll wait til the movie comes out before passing final judgment. But the script wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: Here’s a great screenwriting tip for beginners. If you introduce a bunch of characters all at once, count on us forgetting at least half of them. For example, we’re quickly introduced to four of Rick and Fred’s friends during a poker game. But I couldn’t tell you anything about them five pages later. Why? Because it’s hard to remember everyone in a screenplay. Yet beginner writers think they can throw down 20 names in 20 pages and we’ll have everyone sorted out down to their hair color. It doesn’t work like that. Now there are situations (like a poker game for example) where introducing characters in bulk is necessary. But my advice is to not introduce any key characters during these moments. If it’s a recurring or important character, introduce them away from the group if possible. It’ll give us a much better chance of remembering them.

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They Fall By Night

Posted on March 10, 2010 | by admin

Genre: Period/Detective/Drama
Premise: A morally corrupt detective is assigned to the kidnapping of a prominent socialite’s son in 1988 New York City.
About: Received 13 votes on the 2009 Black List. This is Baylin’s first script. He previously worked in the art department on numerous low-budget films.
Writer: Zachary Baylin
Details: 126 pages (2009 draft)

Is “They Fall By Night” in Citizen Kane’s league?

They Fall By Night has some lofty ambitions. Very lofty. The script is clearly inspired by three of the most famous movies in Hollywood history, “Citizen Kane,” “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential.” I don’t know how long Baylin’s been writing but you can’t help but love his ambition. His attitude seems to be, if you’re gonna swim, why not swim with the best?

But does that ambition translate into a good screenplay? That’s hard to say. There are moments of brilliance here, just as there are moments of a wet-behind-the-ears writer trying to find his way. They Fall By Night wants to do so much, aspires to be so much, that it occasionally collapses under its own weight. But as a first script, it’s pretty damn impressive.

It’s 1988. Arthur Cody, a modern day Charles Foster Kane, has built his Xanadu right here on Manhattan island. But the tortured mogul has experienced a lifetime of hurt. Not one, but two of his wives have died horrible deaths. Unable to face the pain the world has thrown at him, he puts a gun to his head. He leaves behind his daughter, screen legend Vivian Lake, a woman almost as tortured as her father, but determined not to end up like him, and his grandson, the infant Charles.

Vivian, her husband and Charles inherit the Cody dynasty amidst a changing New York, a city that Commissioner Ray Denihan has vowed to clean up. Not only will the criminals be swept off the street, but the kickbacks and the bribes and the dirty cops will be identified and weeded out. The future is hope, and the morally corrupt don’t fit into the equation.

It’s appropriate then, that we meet our anti-hero, Detective Ryan Halas, a man as morally corrupt as they come. Halas has been on the take since the take was born. Amidst this changing ideal, where dirty cops will be handed over to Internal Affairs like slaughtered pigs, Halas has only one choice: Run away. If he stays, there’s a good chance he’ll end up in jail for the rest of his life.

But Halas catches a lucky break. Turns out Vivian Lake did something bad. Real bad. And she heard that Halas is the cop you call when you need a mess cleaned up. The “mess” is a 15 year old girl, a prostitute/drifter who got in over her head and tried to blackmail the wrong family. The job is easy. Take the girl to the docks and put a bullet in her head.

But that’s the old Halas. The new Halas can’t kill a 15 year old girl. So against his better judgment, he lets her run, and lies to Vivian, telling her he took care of it. As a reward, Vivian makes some calls and Halas receives a clean slate. Finally, he can be the cop he’s always wanted to be.

Then wouldn’t you know it, just when it looked like Halas was going to get his happy ending, Charles Lake, Vivian Lake’s son, is kidnapped, and a huge ransom is set (hey, why not a little Godfather 3 as well: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”) Because of their previous working relationship, Vivian calls in Halas to work the case. As you can imagine, this is no ordinary kidnapping. A ransom isn’t the only thing going on. There are secrets here, deep family secrets that need to stay hidden. And Vivian needs Halas to make sure they never come out. Unfortunately, that seemingly insignificant girl he let go of that evening may be the reason all this happened, a truth he’ll have to answer to at some point.

They Fall By Night is dripping with depth, like a shirt you’ve been wearing through the worst storm of the year. You get a feel for this dark gritty pre-Guliani New York the way you do when Christopher Nolan puts you on the streets of Gotham. Every little pimp, every little crook, every little everybody burrows under your skin. Money is the only thing that matters in this cesspool, and people will do anything for it. Doesn’t matter what your profession is. Every character here evolves from this underworld, and it’s what, ironically, makes them so lively, makes them so memorable.

But the script still contains the signs of a first-time writer. For example, the first act turn (when the son gets kidnapped) doesn’t happen until page 48. So much information and so much backstory is packed into that first act, it’s like it can’t help itself. And yet it somehow manages to work. This reclusive billionaire angle is naturally intriguing, and much like Citizen Kane, we’re willing to hang out in Exposition Alley a little longer than usual, as long as it’s peppered with the eccentricities of this private but sleazy secret world.

Where the script falters, unfortunately, is in trying to do too much. Baylin is trying to tell an epic tale here, and I’m not sure he has all the tools to do it yet. Outside of the kidnapping plot, we’re also experiencing the major transformation of the city, we’re following a commissioner who’s trying to become governor, we’re keeping track of mysteries that date back to multiple characters and multiple generations, and we’re doing this amidst tons of lesser characters who Halas meets on his investigation. It’s a ton to keep track of and I was confused just as much as I was riveted. Even after reading the ending twice, I wasn’t sure what happened, and in a tale where a major mystery drives the story, and we don’t get a clear answer to that mystery, that simply can’t happen.

Still, there’s enough here to keep you turning the pages, and I couldn’t put it down. This is the kind of epic story that after some targeted rewrites could draw the attention of directors like Scorcese or Curtis Hanson. Will be interesting to see where this ends up.

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

What I learned: Let’s say you want a character to really stand out, to have weight. One way to do this is to build them up before we see them. Have other characters talk about them – allude to their eccentricities, their persona, their gravitas. It’s no different than when you meet someone in real life who you’ve heard a lot about. That person – when you meet them – appears to you as someone with a past, someone three-dimensional, someone with “weight.” Contrast that with when you meet some random guy you don’t know from Adam. That person, at least in that initial moment, is nobody to you. Vivian Lake is highlighted in newspaper articles, on TV, and by other characters, so by the time we meet her, we truly feel the importance of her character. This is often done in films with the bad guy. You’ll hear characters speak about how terrifying the villain is, or stories of horrible things they did. So when they show up, we’re just as intimidated and scared of them as our hero. But you can use this tool to build up any character, good or bad.

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Green Zone

Posted on March 9, 2010 | by admin

Genre: War (what is it good for)
Premise: A commander of a special military unit goes seeking WMDs in 2003 Iraq.
About: The new collaboration between Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, Green Zone will co-star Amy Ryan and Greg Kinnear. The film opens this Friday. This draft is NOT the shooting script, but rather one of Greengrass’ earlier drafts. Brian Helgeland supposedly came in and did a rewrite, potentially cleaning up a lot of the issues I had with the script. While both drafts focus on the search for WMDs, the book, I’m told, is more about the overall incompetence of the U.S. when they showed up in Iraq after the war. In order for Congress to approve the budget for the rebuilding of the nation, infrastructure “experts” who had little to no knowledge of Iraq, were brought in to set up a temporary government. They did silly things like institute Maryland’s driving code and set up a new tax structure – items that were pretty low on the priority list to a country that was essentially still at war.
Writer: Paul Greengrass (based on “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone” by Rajiv Chandrasekaren)
Details: 111 pages


Every once in awhile one of these war movies sneaks through and makes some money, but for the most part, nobody wants to see modern war films. They get war on CNN. They get war on the internet. They get war at the water cooler, Twitter, and their cell phones. And after that sustained 24 hour reminder of death, destruction, and mayhem, we’re asked to pay 10 bucks and subject ourselves to the same thing in a movie theater? No thank you. Even Hurt Locker, which is probably the best modern war movie in the last 5 years, and has had a constant Oscar-coverage marketing push for the last 3 months, has barely made 20 million bucks here in the U.S. But I suppose when you have Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass agreeing to reteam for a film, you let them do whatever they want, and work out the marketing kinks later (the advertising campaign does have a certain “If Jason Bourne decided to be in the army instead of becoming a secret agent” feel to it, which is all the more amusing knowing how hard the two probably worked to ensure that it didn’t feel that way).

I just have to say…WMDs? Really? Do we really want to make a movie based on something that’s become a running joke…THREE YEARS AGO? It’s like basing a movie off the joke “NOT!” I can see an SNL skit. But an entire movie?

Humph.

It’s 2003 and Chief Warrant Officer Miller has been deployed to Iraq after the initial invasion to search out and find WMDs. Miller takes pride in his job and takes his mission very seriously. He’ll do anything it takes to find these weapons of mass destruction. Problem is, not everyone else feels the same way. And that makes doing his job awfully difficult. For example, an initial tip leads him to a likely weapons spot, but when he gets there the building is already being looted by marines. Another tip leads him to some apartments but those have already been cleared by special forces. Miller naively assumed, because finding these weapons was supposedly the whole point to being here, that his team would get some kind of priority. But that isn’t the case. Not by a long shot.


But Miller’s a quick thinker, and he figures if there’s no order, why not make up his own rules? So within hours he’s already disobeying his superiors and following his own leads. Eventually this gets him to a secret meeting with some potentially high-ranking Iraqi officials. He and his men storm the building, and while they aren’t able to get everyone, Miller does get his hands on a very official looking notebook that’s written in some kind of code. He suspects that when decoded, this notebook will be exactly what the U.S. government was looking for – a specific breakdown of where all the WMDs are.

As you can probably guess, it’s not as simple as Miller turning in the book and collecting a medal. There are men in the government just as keen for us not to find these WMDs as there are men who are. Although I was never clear on why, the implication is that there are some sinister figures in our government, so I guess that reasoning will have to suffice. Either way, Miller is faced with a difficult choice: Does he follow orders and give the book up, knowing it will lead to nothing? Or does he go out and try to solve the case himself?

I think we know which one he chooses.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on in this script that’s very hard to keep up with. The exiled Ahmed Zubaidi, who was kicked out of Iraq decades ago for wanting the country to be free-enterprise, is brought back under the U.S.’s insistence as a way to institute a free-enterprise system behind the face of a man Iraq can identify with. But it’s not clear which team Zubaidi is playing for, as some Americans love him, and others think he’s a fraud. While I suppose this could’ve been interesting, the character felt like a remnant from the book, a half-willed attempt to jam more plot into the story, when in reality, all he did was detract from Miller’s mission.


Then there’s Dayne, a female reporter who was clearly added at the studio’s request (need a female!) and whose every uninspired scene exists only to remind us of this fact. Poor Amy Ryan is playing the part and I’m sure she’ll do the best she can. But the character’s big moment is basically saying she wants to fuck Matt Damon’s character within 3 seconds of meeting him. So much for the chase. Then again, my dislike of her may have to do with the fact that – YET AGAIN (Ticking Man review) – we have the female character who exists only to “get the story at all costs.” Yawn.

Green Zone, in a lot of ways, is like the way Greengrass shoots his films: raw, gritty, and all over the place. Unfortunately that’s not the most inviting way to present a written story. I’m always telling new writers to do the work for the readers. Don’t make them do the work for you. If the reader is constantly trying to keep up with all the information. If he’s checking back to see who the characters are and trying to keep 8 different plotlines sorted out in his head, he’s going to be miserable. You’re asking too much – which is exactly what Greengrass does here. We get characters who come and go with no indication if they’re one-and-dones or recurring, forcing us to remember every single person who hits the page. Since they’re all essentially a vague generalization of “army guy” or “Iraqi dude,” differentiating between them becomes almost impossible. Which means we’re going back and re-checking names. Which means we’re going back and re-checking plot points. Don’t ever try this as a beginning writer. It’s just plain sloppy.

I think there’s some interesting stuff here, but most of it comes towards the beginning of the script, when Miller lands in Iraq. I wouldn’t call Miller an idealist, but watching him slowly realize that whatever they told him Iraq was going to be like is not at all how it is, was fun to read. I thought it gave a good indication of what any war room or war effort must be like: over-the-top chaos. Nobody on the ground really knows what they’re doing. And they’re taking orders from people who probably don’t know what they’re doing either. Because we only do this kind of stuff once every 10-20 years, it’s no different than any business who only gets to practice once during that amount of time – 10 million things are going to go wrong. It certainly ain’t like it used to be, where you lined up on each side of a field and took turns shooting at each other, that’s for sure. Whatever the case, the interesting stuff was short-lived, as once we got into the meat of the story, the plot was pretty plain (find WMDs) and definitely hampered by the issue that we already know if Miller succeeds or not (assuming we were alive a few years ago and read the papers).

Watching the trailer below, the “Magellan” stuff seems to be Helgeland’s doing, and is probably an extension of the “notebook” Miller gets his hands on. Other than that, not too much seems to be different. I’m sure Greengrass’s kinetic camerawork and quick editing will add some energy to this story, but just as a screenplay, it wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: Although the love interest (Amy Ryan’s character, “Dayne”) plays only a tiny part in the story, her motivation is all wrong. Within seconds of meeting Miller, she throws herself at him. I don’t care what genre you’re writing, always make it tough for the guy to get the girl. Scripts are about making it difficult for your character to achieve whatever it is he/she’s trying to achieve. And that rule extends onto the love interest. If your love interest just shows up and says, “I’m yours,” where do you go with the relationship? The journey’s already over. Our protag has the girl. If you want drama and conflict in your love story, always make it tough for the guy to get the girl.

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