MODERN FAMILY
Modern Family somehow took a premise that was getting tired fast – the mockumentary sitcom – and made it fresh again, by having the cameras document a family. To be honest, I thought this season’s premiere episode kinda sucked.  It felt like the cast was trying too hard to live up to last season’s buzz. The second episode (The Kiss) was much better, as the actors seemed to find their characters again. This week’s episode, The Earthquake, had Phil locking his wife in the bathroom after an earthquake dislodged a book cabinet that came inches from killing their son. This particular cabinet is a cabinet Phil promised his wife he had fastened to the wall months ago in the off chance that an earthquake should dislodge it and it nearly kill one of their children.  So Phil goes to work securing the cabinet, hopefully before Claire finds her way out of the bathroom.  I would argue that Ty Burrell is the funniest character on TV right now.  I love this show.

THE EVENT
Okay, yes, The Event IS a Lost ripoff.  Impossible to argue that.  But let me say something if I may. This is the best Lost ripoff to hit television since Lost debuted six years ago. There are many reasons why I should hate this show, the biggest being the unoriginal random time bouncing that keeps happening. But here’s the thing that always saves it.  Once we get into the actual scene we’ve time-jumped to, it’s always good.  Every scene in The Event is packed with suspense, mystery, and action, and it’s all non-stop.  Jason Ritter, who should have been an indication to avoid the show, is pretty freaking amazing as the lead character. There hasn’t been a second in the first three episodes where I didn’t believe him.  And that just doesn’t happen to me anymore.  I have to admit also that I’m genuinely interested in who these mysterious visitors are and what their purpose is. I don’t know if this is going to crash and burn a la Heroes or has some Lost-level mythological depth, but I am officially a fan of the show.

OPEN WATER 2
Okay, you’re not allowed to ask me under what circumstances I found myself watching this sequel to the 2003 surprise hit, Open Water. Just know that as soon as I realized the watching was on, I was committed to trashing it for the entirety of its running time.  Indeed, the way this thing starts, with a bunch of douchebag friends going out for a nostalgic booze cruise, I wanted to claw my eyeballs out.  But to my complete surprise, the unique and shockingly simple premise made me reevaluate everything.  Basically these guys head out to the middle of the ocean, jump out to go swimming, and then realize they forgot to place a ladder on the side of the boat!  So they can’t – get – back – up. And the best part? There’s a baby on the boat! I mean come on. You gotta love it. This is cheesy as hell. Silly as hell. Stupid as hell.  The ending is so melodramatic even the titles are rolling their eyes.  But hell if it’s not a fun ride. A great backup plan flick.   

PRESSURE COOKER
If you know me, you know one of my pet peeves is critics’ infatuation with documenteries. You could make a documentary about upholstery and it would get at least an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. Documentaries are fine.  I have no problem with them.  But putting the word “documentary” on your poster shouldn’t ensure a four-star rating.  Unless that documentary is Pressure Cooker.  This totally surprising doc is about a group of inner city kids who take a culinary arts class in hopes of getting a college cooking scholarship. Although the focus is on the tough-as-nails guidance of teacher Wilma Stephensen (who, behind the scenes, terminated the documentary several times for being too intrusive on her class), the breakout star for me was the socially awkward Fatoumata, a recent immigrant from Africa who used to walk 30 miles to and from school every day, and who takes advantage of every oppotuntiy America gives her, foregoing activites such as hanging out with friends and her senior prom so she can perfect her culinary skills, all in hopes of landing that 100 thousand dollar scholarship.  If you’re feeling down and just want to smile, watch this documentary now.  It’s really good.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE
I’m about 150 pages into this right now and let’s just say I’m f’ing disappointed. (spoilers) The second Lisbeth Salander is introduced as having a boob job, a little piece of my dragon tattoo died. There are no circumstnaces under which this character would ever or should ever get a boob job, yet these kind of strange choices are commonplace in this Dragon Tattoo sequel.  Mix in a hurricane (?) a few pointless Salander relationships that go nowhere, and a story that pretends like Salander and Blomqvist never even met each other, and I’m borderline pissed. The only reason I’m still reading is because Dragon Tattoo took 200 pages to start getting good. So I ask you dragon tattoo experts. Is it worth it to keep reading? Or should I move on to another book? The first book is so amazing, I don’t want to spoil it with all this random stupidness.

 Hey guys. I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s “News From Around The Web” posts, because after a week of doing them, I realize there’s no way I can keep them up. They’re waaaay more time consuming than you’d think. But fear not, I’m not eliminating them altogether. I’m going back to the old format and posting one all-encompassing Friday version. This should help weed out a lot of the less important news and still give you guys your fix.

MORE BABEL FOR ARONOFSKY?
Screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who’s hit us with such non-conformist fare as Babel and one of my favorite foreign films, Amores Perros, has written an adaptation of John Valiant’s The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. The story sounds a little like one of this year’s favorite Scriptshadow discoveries, The Grey, as it follows a tiger fed up by the recent human advancement on its territory, and so starts killing at will. A game warden is brought in to hunt down and kill the tiger. The project is making headlines as Darren Aronofsky is considering making it his next project. Brad Pitt may also be starring. More can be found at Slash-Film.

THE TRADE
I’ve been keeping my eye on this script ever since it appeared on last year’s Black List. The Trade is based on the real life story of two Yankees pitchers in the 70s who swapped their wives. Hey man, it was the 70s. Be free and share.  Like, totally.  The project is being sheparded by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.  One important note I find interesting that no one seems to be talking about, is that Damon and Affleck are die hard Red Sox fans. Which leads me to believe that their approach won’t be exactly…objective.   David Mandel, one of the writers on Seinfeld, wrote the first draft. Now Ben and his brother Casey are doing a draft. If all the stars align, the plan is for Matt Damon to direct, which I believe would make it his first directing job.

GIMME SOME FRIEDKIN LOVE
Whenever you’re stuck in Hollywood, go back to the well. Friedkin hasn’t had the easiest time getting scripts to the screen these days, and I’m still a little disappointed that he left Scriptshadow fave Sunflower in the dust. But he’s been using the publicity of his next film, Killer Joe, to mention the possibility of working with writer William Peter Blatty again, who of course wrote The Exorcist. Blatty’s new book is titled “Dimiter,” and unfortunately doesn’t have that logline-friendly of a premise. The title refers to the lead character’s name, who’s a notorious American agent in the 60s and 70s. The story follows his exploits as he jumps from country to country running into a wide array of strange characters. It’s said to be a supernatural thriller. I think it needs a supernatural hook. More at Slash Film.

JUNO FUNO
Whenever Diablo Cody does her dishes it’s news in the writing world so I’m happy to report that her next project, “Young Adult,” with Jason Reitman again directing, has found a home at Paramount. If you remember my review, I liked it quite a bit, and think that whoever plays the lead role (right now it’s Charlize Theron I guess), will have a shot at some Oscar buzz. It really is a unique role for a female lead. Will this news bring out the Cody haters? I’ll be checking the comments to find out.

Genre: Fairy-tale Mash-up
Premise: Snow White teams up with a local hunter to take down her evil step-mother, Ravenna.
About: This is the spec script that sold for 1.5 million last week. Evan Daugherty was working as an intern a couple of years ago. He won the Script Pimp contest in 2008 with his script, “Shrapnel,” which John McTiernan later committed to direct. Something tells me that one’s going to be in development for at least another year. Shrapnel led to him doing a rewrite on He-Man, which eventually led to this huge sale. If there is such a thing as the moment every screenwriter dreams of, this would be it. 
Writer: Evan Daugherty (inspired by the Brothers Grimm’s “Little Snow White.”)
Details: 110 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).

When this sale happened, my first thought was, “I couldn’t write a script like that in a million years.” This subject matter is so far out of my field of expertise (whatever that is) I felt a little like a member of the Cannes jury having just been told the plot to Star Wars Episode 1, The Phantom Menace. i.e. Confused.

So there’s…Snow White? And she…teams up with a huntsman? But isn’t Snow White dead? Doesn’t she live with dwarves? I was definitely the grandma someone was trying to explain the internet to.

Yet these reimagining fairy tale/historical mash-ups are plugging their way through the Hollywood pipeline and everyone’s banking on them becoming the next big thing (costing no money for rights cause they’re in the public domain certainly doesn’t hurt).

Snow White and The Huntsman follows Miss White’s life as a princess, which for all intents and purposes is pretty sweet. She’s got a strapping young prince doting over her. She loves her family. And paparazzi won’t be invented for another 300 years.

But then her mother, the queen, dies, and because pops can’t keep it in his pants, he marries some hot young trophy wife, the evil Ravenna. Ravenna’s got all sorts of issues, but her biggest one is her desperate desire to look prettier than everyone else in the land.

So obsessed is she with this desire that she hires a local huntsman to seek out the hottest women he can find, capture them, and bring them back to her. She then puts them through the hot girl juicer, a machine that sucks the youth out of these poor women, turning it into juice, which Ravenna then drinks so she can stay young and hot.

Well word on the street is that Snow White is eerily close to becoming the fairest woman in the land, so it’s time for that bitch to get juiced too. But Snow White doesn’t wanna get juiced, and runs into the forest, where she eventually teams up with The Hunstman, who reluctantly helps her escape to freedom.

Of course, in a nod to films like Romancing The Stone and The Princess Bride, these two simply don’t like each other, so there’s a lot of arguing, a lot of not understanding the other’s way, and a lot of repressed desiring.

Eventually Snow White realizes that if she’s going to survive in the wild, she’ll need the particular skillset of the huntsman, and so she forces Hunty to teach her the way of the land. Now I know the question all of you are dying to have me answer so I’ll confirm it right here: YES, our seven dwarfs make an appearance.  In fact, our seven dwarfs are pretty badass, and become a key component later in defeating the queen.  

I’m always amazed by the imagination of these worlds. First of all, let’s face it, fairy tales are fucked up to begin with. Who thinks up a story where a dead woman sleeps in a coffin with a bunch of gnomes?  Since when do wolves have super-human blowing powers and blow down houses…with PIGS in them???  And isn’t there a fairy tale where a bunch of people live in a giant shoe?  They must have smoked a lot of dope back in the 1600s, I’ll tell you that.  So to then take an already freaky premise and further freak it into something weirder has to be considered a unique talent.  So I give credit to Daugherty there.

From a structural perspective, I was also impressed. Snow White having to escape off into the woods was a solid first act break. But more importantly, Daugherty knows how to build through that second act, realizing that if he just gave us Snow White and The Huntsman arguing for 60 pages we’d be bored out of our minds. So he adds plenty of complications (the seven dwarves, an old boyfriend, some bounty hunters, Ravenna’s impending second marriage) to keep us on our toes. It all builds to a solid third act, where the forces of good and evil engage in a final smackdown, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it definitely works.

Now I’ve been reading quite a few of these mash-up scripts on the amateur front and the reason Snow White is better is that everything’s been thought through here. The amateur scripts always feel like a bunch of wacky ideas haphazardly spilled onto the page. It’s like the writers just want credit for being weird and different.  Form, structure, character, really aren’t that important to them.

But this script pays attention to the details.  Take the character of The Huntsman for example. This isn’t just a wise-cracking rogue who’s winking at the audience. His wife was killed years ago by a wolf, and he’s been hunting that wolf ever since. There’s a sadness to this man, a void in him that gives his character weight, that makes him a real person.

I really felt like all the edges of this house were inspected before they put it on the market.  I can’t say the same for the amateur scripts I read, where 60-75% effort is the norm.

I guess the big question I have about Snow White and The Huntsman is, who is it being marketed to? Snow White is very much a little girl’s fairy tale, so that’s your built in demographic right there. Yet this is an edgy grown-up reimagining of the character. So who goes to see it? Will 14 year old boy’s flock to see a Snow White film? I don’t know. And what about adults? Isn’t this too kiddie for them? It’s one of those weird films that seems to be targeted to everyone and yet to no one. Okay, I’m starting to sound like Matrix Reloaded dialogue now, so I’ll move on.

This was a hard script to judge. As a piece of screenwriting, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. But if I’m being honest there isn’t a single aspect of this subject matter that interests me. I felt like I was reading two stories, the one I was admiring as a screenplay and the one about a fairy tale I could care less about. In the end, there’s too much good here not to recommend, but you definitely won’t be catching me at the premiere.

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

What I learned: If I were a studio executive and this landed on my desk, I would’ve passed. My response? “Wasn’t my thing.” Does that mean it didn’t deserve to be bought? Of course not. One of the sucky things about this business is that many times when someone passes on a script of yours, you have no idea why. Talking with managers and agents and producers, one of the things I’ve realized is that sometimes people pass simply because it “wasn’t their thing.” It could be expertly written. It could be a great concept. It could have a killer main character. But that particular producer has no interest in that kind of movie. This can actually empower you when you think about it. If someone passes on your script, don’t let it get you down. Simply assume that it wasn’t their thing and move on to the next guy. Cause that next guy might end up paying you 1.5 million dollars for it.

GET YOUR THRILLER ON
Scribe Dana Stevens will write the thriller, “The Au Pair,” for Ghost House Pictures. It’s about a woman who takes a nanny job in the Hamptons only to have some bad shit start happening. The script will be adapted from the book, “The Sitter,” by R.L. Stine. Ghost House is Sam Raimi’s company. Stevens scripted City of Angels and Life or Something Like it.

BIGELOW
Kathryn Bigelow, the director of The Hurt Locker, is finally getting her next movie with Locker scripter Mark Boal ready to roll. The super serious premise, centering around crime in the border zone between Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, is attracting some big name stars who want to work with the new Oscar queen, according to Deadline Hollywood. Yes, Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp may be playing the leads. This is critical, as one of the main reasons Locker only made 20 million bucks was because it didn’t have any big names. If Bigelow can pull this off, her next film won’t suffer the same fate.

GRAVITY
It sounds like poor Alfonso Cuarón is getting desperate to find a lead for what I’m hoping will be one of the most amazing technical feats ever put on film, his story about a female astronaut who gets trapped up in space after an explosion.  Jolie said no. Portman’s decided to pass. Now they’re going to Sandra Bullock. Bullock will get the movie made, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Cuaron would not be happy using her.

YUCATAN
I was reading over at Slash-Film about this secret movie idea Steve McQueen had before he died called, “Yucatan,” an epic treasure hunter heist film. I guess McQueen had written over 1700 pages worth of notes before he died. Warner Brothers has been trying to put it together ever since and they’ve finally hired writer Anthony Peckham, who wrote the first Sherlock Holmes, to write it as a vehicle for Robert Downey Jr.

TIME MACHINE
Always nice to see writers make the hop from their laptops to the sound stage, and the writers of Hot Tub Time Machine have done just that. Sean Anders and John Morris will direct the script “We’re The Millers.” Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, who wrote Wedding Crashers wrote the original script. Millers does have a funny premise. It involves a pot dealer creating a fake family to transfer a large amount of pot across the Mexican border.

RAY
Risky Business reports that perennial script doctor Billy Ray, who took a pass at Source Code , is stepping into the director’s chair for his third film, a remake of the Argentinian thriller, “The Secret in Their Eyes” for Warner Bros. (Warner Brothers again!). The film won the foreign language Oscar in March, and is about a retired criminal investigator haunted by an unresolved rape from 30 years ago.

HIGH RISE CHAOS
Richard Stanley is taking a crack at the script for director Vincenzo Natalie’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, High Rise. Vincenzo is the director of cult favorite “Cube,” as well as “Splice.” Reading the book’s synopsis kind of makes my head hurt but as best I can tell, the story is about the residents of a high rise who engage in some sort of multi-story war, I guess Lord Of The Flies with adults in a building? Collider has more on the story.

I’ve been hearing from a few of you that you made the quarterfinals so congrats!  To see the full list, head on over to Jim’s blog.  I also spoke with Jim.  If you want to take his class and mention Scriptshadow, you get $100 off.  Go there.  Be merry.  Enjoy!