Genre: True Crime – Murder
Premise: Based on the New Yorker article by Nathan Heller. A true-crime thriller based on the story of two brilliant college lovers convicted of a brutal slaying. An obsessed detective investigates the true motives that led to a double homicide, and the decades of repercussions that follow.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Aaron Katz, is also directing. The project has already cast its leads, with Sabrina The Teenage Witch actress Kiernan Shipka playing Lizzy. Former Disney boy and rising star, Cole Sprouse (Five Feet Apart), will play Jens. Katz directed the 2017 film, Gemini, starring Zoe Kravitz.
Writer: Aaron Katz
Details: 122 pages
I’ve never understood giving real life murder stories the movie treatment. They’re always so much better in documentary form. I think if you’re going to do true life murder stuff, you should use the stories as inspiration then make up what you want to make up. That’s how Thomas Harris created Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter. He found real life murderers who did weird shit and molded them so they fit into his fictional narrative.
Unless you can find a truly crazy murder story. But even then you might still want to use the characters as inspiration. Isn’t that what Tarantino did with the Helter Skelter crew in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood?
Anyway, on to today’s true crime murder story, which I’d never heard of before.
It’s 1985.
College kids Lizzy Haysom and Jens Soering meet at a movie theater. Afterwards, Lizzy tells Jens that she loves to make men fall in love with her and then fuck them over. But that she’s not going to do that to Jens because he’s “different.” “You’re not included. You don’t feel like a man,” she says. “I mean that in a good way. You feel like you. You’re not a man or a woman or anything.”
Um, okay.
Lizzy introduces Jens to her parents and, a week later, after they’ve gone back to school, we learn that her parents were brutally murdered, stabbed dozens of times each. 30-something cop Reese Rezek is assigned to the case. Right away, she suspects that there’s something fishy going on with Lizzy so she brings the couple in, one at a time, to chat. When certain parts of their stories don’t match up, she knows she has the killers.
Except before she can throw them in the slammer, they run. And they run far. All the way to France. And then Italy. Back in 1985, when someone ran, you couldn’t really do much about it. To make things worse, Reese is re-assigned to work in the DEA. So she spends a year busting people for drugs. But she never stops thinking about Lizzy and Jens!
Lucky for her, she finds her way back into homicide and convinces her outfit to let her track down the murderous couple in Europe. Off she goes with her partner and actually FINDS THEM dancing at an Italian club. They see they’ve been spotted and run, resulting in a race across town, and the couple literally jump into a train car to escape. So close and yet so far, Reese must cut her losses and go BACK to the US.
Eventually, however, they get picked up for cashing bad checks and Lizzy confesses that, yes, she killed her parents. Jens decides to take his chances in court but loses and both of them get 100 year sentences. But this doesn’t satisfy Reese, who starts having doubts! She becomes convinced that this other guy, Doyle, is the one who committed the murders. Our final act is about nailing Doyle to that metaphorical cross but Doyle proves, without a reasonable doubt, that he wasn’t there that day. I guess Reese was right the first time. The End.
Whenever I read a true murder story and I’m assessing if it’s “movie worthy” or not, the first question I ask is, “What’s fresh here?” Which is a question any good reader/producer/executive/director is going to ask when they read any script. What’s fresh here? Which means that’s a question YOU need to ask about your own concepts BEFORE YOU WRITE THEM. Because BELIEVE YOU ME, someone’s going to ask that question down the line and you better have an answer for them.
And it’s a question I was asking all the way through, “Blood Ties.”
You’re already starting from a place of weakness with the murder victims in Blood Ties. There’s a reason you don’t see, “Elderly Man/Woman Stabbed To Death” on the front page of CNN ever. Murder stories don’t gain national attention unless it’s a young woman or a child. Say what you will about how f*cked up the human mind is for thinking that way but it’s a reality. And it’s something you definitely want to consider when you’re assessing whether a true murder story is worth turning into a movie.
The reason it’s a big deal is because you need as much anger and demand for justice from your reader as possible in these stories. The less anger they have about the murders and the less demand for justice they have, the less they’re going to care whether your protagonists catch the killers or not. And that’s the whole name of the game. You want us to want the heroes to catch the killers.
There are caveats to this. If you spend a good amount of time with the elderly people who eventually get murdered and really make us like them, you can create enough motivation for us to want to see their murder avenged. But Blood Ties doesn’t do this. In our one scene with the parents, we barely learn anything about them. And I feel bad for saying this but, the truth is, I didn’t feel anything when they were murdered.
So you have elderly victims who I didn’t feel anything for. Not a great way to start off a murder script.
I guess if I’m arguing the writer’s point of view, I’m banking on the reader being interested in this weird couple, specifically Lizzy. I’m hoping that you’ll find her so odd that it’ll pique your curiosity enough that you’ll want to keep reading.
But if that’s what you’re hoping is going to drive the reader’s interest, ‘sorta weird’ isn’t going to cut it. The characters have to be flat-out bizarre. They have to say really weird shit and do even weirder shit. That’s why the Mansons captivated the world. Meanwhile, Lizzy and Jens topped out at “mildly odd.” I kept waiting for them to be “movie worthy” but they repeatedly failed to deliver.
The script also has a little bit of Fincher’s “Zodiac” thrown in. The story follows Reese as she becomes obsessed with finding Lizzy and Jens. That leads to us learning a lot about her character – such as the fact that both her parents died when she was young – that her dad was supposedly a great cop. But just knowing more about the protagonist’s life doesn’t mean that the reader will care about them.
That’s a common misconception. You can tell me a million things about your hero and I still not give a shit what they do. It’s how you package their backstory with their fatal flaw and their relationships and their personality – it’s the way you mix all those ingredients into a meal that determines if we like the character or not. I felt like I knew a lot about Reese. But there was very little done to make me root for her.
Elderly victims + didn’t feel anything for the victims + mildly odd murderers + a protagonist who I don’t care enough about. It’s nearly impossible to salvage this equation.
The one time I saw it done was Spotlight. TERRIBLE SCRIPT that had similar problems to Blood Ties. But the story in Spotlight was so good and so powerful that it somehow was able to override all of its weaknesses. Unfortunately, Blood Ties doesn’t have that “Helter Skelter” story centerpiece to make up for its averageness in all the other categories. And, for that reason, it didn’t work for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When your movie has already resolved its primary conflict and you try to tack on a follow-up mystery to your story, you’re fighting a losing battle man. The audience has already checked out. It’s really hard to blow up the balloon for the entire movie, burst it, and then try to blow up a second balloon for the last 30 minutes. I think that’s successfully been done like 3 times in cinema history. That’d be like Indiana Jones surviving the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Act 2 and then he decides to go look for the Needle of Enlightenment in Act 3.
