It’s the Back to Back Battle of the Airplane Scripts! Who will win? One of the most successful authors ever or a first time Black List writer?
Genre: Mystery
Premise: During a Chinese flight that experiences massive turbulence, three people die. A young investigator for the company that built the plane has less than a week to figure out what went wrong.
About: The deal Michael Crichton made for the film rights to this book were, at the time, the most expensive ever, at 10 million dollars. You’d think if someone paid that much, the movie would’ve gotten made, right? I guess Crichton kept vetoing the scripts, which he had the power to do. This version of the script was written by Frank Pierson, who wrote and directed the 1976 version of A Star Is Born. That was a very big time in Pierson’s life as, just a year earlier, he’d written Dog Day Afternoon (“ATTTTTTIIICAAAAAA!!!”). Alas, Crichton seems to have been unimpressed. Will we be?
Writer: Frank Pierson (based on the book by Michael Crichton)
Details: Sept 21, 1998, 127 pages
I asked you for plane crashes, you gave me plane crashes!
Thanks to everyone who e-mailed, sending me scripts, loglines, and articles to all the plane crashes. Still have to get through all of them. You see, I stopped when resident 90s script expert, Scott Crawford, sent me Airframe.
I’d never even heard of Airframe. And I’m someone who was once a Michael Crichton aficionado. I was even one of 14 people who read that book of his about nanobots! For those of you young’uns, there was a time when Crichton was the biggest idea-man in Hollywood. We’re talking about the brain behind Jurassic Park. Everything he wrote turned to diamonds.
Crichton and an airplane disaster sound like the perfect marriage. Let’s find out if the two lived happily ever after.
Casey Singleton gets a call that a plane heading from Hong Kong to the U.S. made an emergency landing in Los Angeles after experiencing thunderous turbulence. The turbulence was so bad, in fact, that 3 people died and dozens more were injured. Although this was a Chinese airline, TransPacific Air, it was an American built plane from Norton. Casey is the head of the investigation team at Norton.
As soon as the plane is cleared, Casey brings her team on to see the destruction inside. Seats have been flattened as if a giant stepped on them. There’s blood everywhere. The main cabin is a disaster area. There’s even a body that went halfway through the ceiling that’s still lodged up there (wear your seatbelts everybody!).
The investigation quickly centers on a design flaw that may have made the wing’s flaps deploy mid-flight, which would’ve sent the plane tumbling around in the air like a drunk uncle. The reason this flap issue is so important is because the president of Norton, a guy named Jon Edgarton, has a deal with the Chinese to send 50 more of these planes to them next week! So not only do they have to figure out what went wrong. They have to convince the Chinese it was a freak accident.
Meanwhile, a video tape from INSIDE THE PLANE somehow starts getting circulated around town and the rumor is that whatever’s on that video is gnarly. If that tape somehow makes its way to the news, the company is doomed. When Casey finally sees the tape, she’s horrified. It shows in graphic detail all the chaos that went on while the turbulence was happening. When CNN gets a hold of it as well, Casey will have to use all of her persuasion powers to convince them not to show that tape. Will they?
Sometimes you come up with an idea where the idea itself is the angle. M. Night’s new movie where people age 1 year every hour on a beach is a concept where the angle has been decided as soon as the concept was decided.
Other times, writers are interested in subject matter – say, a plane incident – but don’t yet know what angle they’re going to tackle the story from. The decision you make on that angle will determine whether you’ve got a good idea or a bad one (or something in between).
Crichton, like me, wanted to write a plane story. He just didn’t know what the angle to that plane story would be. He ultimately decided on an investigation angle that dove deeply into the minutiae of an aviation malfunction.
Instead of a big flashy plane crash, this movie is about the little flashing lights in a cockpit that the pilots don’t understand. And the purpose of slats on a wing. And the pounds of force on the human body when a plane is dropping 500 feet per second. And the subcontracting details of allowing China to manufacture the fuselage.
I love specificity in storytelling. One of the biggest mistakes I see amateurs make is telling generalized stories without enough detail. The detail – the specifics of the world you’re exploring – are what sell the story. Airframe is the most convincing fictional story about a plane incident that I’ve ever read. The specificity is exceptional.
But the angle Crichton chose severely limited the concept’s wow-factor. Not everything has to be Jurassic Park. But I’m not sure why Crichton thought 3 people dying from turbulence was a big enough story. Hell, there’s even a moment in the script where a news producer is told about what happened but chooses not to put the story on the air. “Defective parts? I don’t want a defective parts story. I want a death trap in the sky, a flying coffin story.” When your own characters seem to know more about what an audience wants than you, you may be in trouble.
Now *I* thought the story was interesting but, I like I told you yesterday, that’s because I love the minutiae of plane accidents. But I don’t think non plane enthusiasts would give two shits about this angle.
A question you want to be asking yourself with whatever you’re writing is, “Why does this matter?” Why does 3 people dying in a plane matter? Because that’s where the audience’s mind will be. Maybe not consciously. But subconsciously. And when the answer is, “It doesn’t matter all that much,” the audience loses interest. They get bored. They tune out.
It’s a pretty surprising oversight by Crichton, who knows what a big idea is better than anyone.
It’s too bad because this script has some cool stuff going for it. First of all, it’s shockingly timely. The plot is about offloading work to China and China using shady practices that don’t prioritize the safety of their planes. It also has a strong female protagonist, which wasn’t exactly a common thing back in 1998.
They also did something really clever with Casey. Typically, the person investigating the mystery in a movie like this is trying to bring the company down. They’re a journalist trying to expose the truth. What Airframe does is it makes Casey an investigator for Norton, the company that built the plane. So her job isn’t just to investigate the incident. It’s to hide her findings. To protect the company instead of expose it. So everything she finds, she’s trying to keep it from getting out, which is a slightly different, and more dynamic, investigative process than we usually get.
Airframe is even more inside-baseball than yesterday’s plane script. And yesterday’s plane script was about something that really happened! It just goes to show how important research was to Crichton. You got the feeling that this guy knew how many millimeters the bolts were that held the fuselage together. Unfortunately, the script can’t overcome its weak premise. It should be a reminder to everyone that you can write some of your best stuff. But if you’re doing so with a weak concept, it won’t matter.
Script link: Airframe
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A “What the hell are you talking about” character. Whenever you have a subject matter this technical or that requires a ton of exposition, it doesn’t make sense to have characters WHO ALREADY KNOW ALL THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS THEY’RE ASKING to talk about this stuff. So a trick to use is to add a “What the hell are you talking about” character. His main job is to be the brain of the audience and ask, “What the hell are you talking about?” This character in Airframe comes in the form of Bob Richman, a low-level assistant to Jon Edgarton. Edgarton hands Richman over to Casey so that he always has eyes on the investigation. Richman, who’s clueless about planes, is constantly asking Casey questions like, “Why is it bad for the flaps to deploy mid-flight?” so that the audience can keep up with the technical aspects of the story.
