Genre: Thriller
Premise: (from Hit List) During an enormous wildfire, a fireman wrecked with guilt after the death of a colleague, searches for evacuees who have failed to leave their homes. But when he stumbles upon an isolated cabin, he makes a horrifying dis- covery — a young woman is being held captive inside – and he must now fight to get them both out of there alive before it’s too late.
About: Today’s writer used to be a sports journalist until he decided to place his head inside the guillotine known as screenwriting. Since then, he’s steadily moved his way up the ladder. He finished in the semi-finals of the Nicholl, got into writers room on the show “Helix,” and became a story editor on NBC’s “Manifest.” This script finished on last year’s Hit List with 16 votes
Writer: Bobak Esfarjani
Details: 91 pages
Fire scripts are all the rage these days! First Pyros and now this! Can somebody say “Fire Universe?” A forest fire pic. An in-depth true life adaptation of the Chicago Fire. A horror flick based on the Fyre Festival. A Firestarter sequel. A biopic on the first person to say, “Liar liar pants on fire” (I think that would be Jacob “Matches” Jones). Hey, we gotta find some way to compete with Marvel. Fight fire with fire. If this thing works out, you can move to water, air, ice – you name it.
I’ve always liked the idea of concepts set within the ticking time bomb that is a worsening fire. Yet nobody’s figured out how to do it right. There was that blink-and-you-miss-it Sam Jackson movie, Lakeview Terrace. But not much else. I can’t believe nobody’s written a recent movie on The Chicago Fire. I guess cows aren’t the most marketable villains. Anyway, grab your oven mitts and your smoke detectors. We’re about to find out if this latest fire flick burns down the house.
Firefighter Kyle is dealing with some massive PTSD. He believes it was his fault that his friend was killed in a recent fire. Kyle’s so distraught that even the biggest forest fire in California’s history can’t get him back up on the big red machine. When his small-town division is called in to help, Kyle stays back and cooks meals for his team’s return.
But when the fire takes an unexpected turn, people living up in the nearby hills will die unless Kyle helps evacuate them. So he drives around from home to home, yelling at people to evacuate. Kyle eventually stumbles upon a secluded cabin in the forest and knocks on the door. This is the home of Richard and Mary, two rednecks who have no desire to mingle with society. Oh, and they also have a secret. They’re keeping a 19 year old girl named Emily prisoner in a concrete room.
Kyle begins to get suspicious when Richard and Mary refuse to leave. Something doesn’t seem right. Then he hears a girl screaming. He charges into the house and finds the room, with a haggard Emily chained to the wall. Perhaps Kyle should’ve thought this plan through because pretty soon he’s whacked upside the head and wakes up in the room with Emily.
Meanwhile, Mary tells Richard they have to kill Kyle. But Richard thinks it’ll be too easy to trace Kyle here and they’ll get caught. Richard wants to kill Emily and get out of Dodge. But Mary has some strange obsession with Emily and refuses that option. This results in a stalemate and the two just stay in the house and do nothing – all while that raging fire gets closer. Back in the room, Kyle and Emily plan their escape. But bit by bit, he learns things about Emily that don’t add up, calling into question who the most dangerous person in this house really is.
A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed a contained thriller and preached the importance of evolving the plot. When you’re limited by geography, you have to have an “unlimited” plotting mindset. The story needs to twist and turn because we’re more likely to get bored when we’re in a stationary location.
Ashes starts out (spoilers) with our hero realizing that this family is keeping a girl prisoner. The first beat, then, is him trying to save her. This then evolves to him being stuck in the room with her. This leads to them scheming to escape. This evolves to them getting out into the house. This then evolves to ANOTHER firefighter arriving and helping them escape. This then evolves to Emily killing that firefighter, revealing the twist that she’s possessed. They were imprisoning her so she wouldn’t go into the world and kill people. This then evolves to Mary and Kyle working together to find her inside the fire-filled mountains.
I give Esfarjani a lot of credit. There wasn’t a single plotline that overstayed its welcome. We were always moving to the next stage.
But the big talking point with this script is obviously going to be the possession twist. Here’s the way I look at it. You get a maximum of two hooks per movie. The biggest forest fire in history forces a man to save a nearby family. That’s one hook. One of the houses he visits happens to have a couple who’s imprisoned a girl. That’s two hooks. The girl being a demon? That’s three hooks. Three hooks is where you get yourself in trouble.
It’s not that you can’t pull off three hooks. But it starts to look a little desperate from a reader’s perspective. You couldn’t keep us entertained with just two giant things going on, so you had to bring in one more? This can work IF the third hook is thematically connected to the story. But if it comes out of nowhere, you’re asking a lot of the audience. It would be like if in the third act of Godzilla, a superhero showed up. You’d be like, “Wait, so this is a superhero movie now?”
Having said that, screenwriting is an imperfect science. There’s no exact method for what an audience is willing to accept. Had you pitched me a movie about a guy realizing he was living inside a computer simulation and that once he freed their mind, he would fight everybody with kung-fu, I would’ve told you, “Thanks, but no thanks.” And Esfarjani leaves us enough breadcrumbs working up to the twist, that the possession makes sense. Which makes me think that maybe, just maybe, this could work.
The one big mistake Esfarjani makes is he doesn’t stay on top of the fire ticking time bomb. That’s the whole engine of the story, is that our hero is chained up in this room and a giant fire is coming. But nobody tells us how long it will be. At one point, I think two full days pass. It’s ridiculous. When you have a ticking time bomb – especially one as good as this – you need to keep updating your reader. The two captors need to have conversations like, “How long do we have?” “I don’t know. Maybe five hours?” Or heck, ask Kyle! He’s the expert on this stuff. Since I was never clear on when the fire would get here, I didn’t feel as much tension as I should’ve.
But this was a breezy read. It was a very good representation of what a spec script should be. 90 pages. Simple concept. Just a few characters. It’s easy for the reader to grasp what’s going on. I see so many specs die within ten pages because an overly complicated plot has been set up. Save those overly complicated plots for when you become a known writer. In the meantime, write for exhausted grouchy readers who don’t want to read another lame amateur script. Big simple concepts are your best bet at roping them in.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t expect your ticking time bomb to do the work for you. If the time allotted on your “bomb” isn’t clear, it will be up to you to periodically tell your audience how much time is left. How am I suppose to know how much time there was before this fire reached their house? One of the oldest screenwriting rules is apropos here – “We don’t know what you don’t tell us.”
