Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: A man wakes up in a hospital, no memory of who he is, with a bullet lodged in his head. Over the next 48 hours, he learns of his ties to a nefarious pharmaceutical company and the billionaire owner who wants him dead.
About: This is an older spec script that sold for $300k against $700k to Universal. It was purchased through Davis Entertainment, which is the same outfit that made the Predator movies (more recently, Davis has produced Game Night and Jungle Cruise). Half the writing team, Phoebe Dorin, has carved out a very successful acting career.
Writers: Christian Stoianovich & Phoebe Dorin
Details: 1994 draft
Will Poulter for Decker?
No Taylor Swift jabs today, I promise.
Instead, we’re going back to a time when Swiftie fans didn’t exist. It was a darker time. It was a grungier time. But if you were a screenwriter, it was a wonderful time. Cause Hollywood was buying everything with a brad attached. You may not know this. But screenwriter Lachlan Perry once sold a napkin with the words “Fade In” on the front, and three words inside, “Under Water Lion,” for 2.5 million dollars.
I totally made that up. But the fact that you almost believed me shows just how crazy those 90s were. Now let’s find out if “Bulletproof” warranted a sale.
We meet a mystery man as he’s running down a subway tunnel, chased by two men with guns. Our poor mystery man gets shot in the forehead. Normally, this is a death sentence. But, for some reason, our runner only passes out.
He wakes up 8 days later in the hospital, where he’s told that the bullet lodged in his head nearly killed him. In fact, if it had hit just a millimeter more in either direction, he’d be a goner. So he should feel lucky that he only has amnesia.
A cute doctor who specializes in amnesia, Kelly Chapman, comes to check him out. She gives him the typical “movie amnesia” spiel (“Memory is weird. Sometimes it comes back right away. Other times it takes a while) and informs him he should stay at the hospital as long as possible.
But the doctors let our mystery man go and that’s when he runs into Yuri Volkov, who tries to snuff him out in the elevator. Our bullet maestro somehow gets away and runs into Chapman in the parking lot. He unofficially takes her hostage, forcing her to drive him to safety.
After following a few leads, Bullet Man learns his name – Sam Decker. Decker realizes that he’s a scientist who worked for a gigantic pharmaceutical company called “Biotek.” It was there where he created the first ever medical male contraceptive. Aka, GOLDMINE.
For reasons we don’t know yet, he’d tried to sneak his research out of the lab, which is why everyone wants him dead. Did Decker know that his research was faulty and would kill millions? My guess is yes. But there’s one last twist to Decker’s research. It’s a twist that would make every act of sex an act of murder.
Something I often run into is flowery prose. What you have to understand about flowery prose is that when you start off as a writer, you think it’s more important than it actually is. So you put a lot of emphasis on. I’ll give you an example. Here’s a paragraph from early in the script.
Shadows scar the cobblestone driveway to the dilapidated hospital. White helmeted SOLDIERS, in a convoy of Jeeps roar past, belching black oily plumes of exhaust. A mongrel DOG pants in the doorway next to walnut-faced MEN playing dominoes. A legless MAN on a cart wheels past.
There’s a difference between trying to prove you’re a good writer and using your description to paint a picture. The line is thin but if you’re on the wrong side of it, readers will write you off.
It’s admittedly confusing because you do want your writing to appear strong. You don’t want to just write nouns, verbs and five-word sentences. But if your sole purpose for writing a sentence is to impress the reader, you’ve already got one foot in the proverbial grave. You should be writing paragraphs that do one thing and one thing only: serve your story.
And the point of description is to mimic, as best as you can, what the viewer is going to see onscreen.
Now, with this except above, you get a little bit of both so let’s go through it. “Shadows scar the cobblestone driveway to the dilapidated hospital.” This is a try-hard line. It’s the exact type of prose you don’t want to use. The more like poetry your lines sound, the less you want to use them. If you want to write poetry, go write poetry. This is a completely different medium.
“White helmeted SOLDIERS, in a convoy of Jeeps roar past, belching black oily plumes of exhaust.” This sentence is what you want in the first half and what you don’t want in the second. “White helmeted SOLDIERS” puts a relevant image in my head, as does a convoy of Jeeps roaring past. I feel like I’m watching a movie now.
But “black oily plumes of exhaust” is a try-hard description. I’m not going to stop reading if I see this. But if the writer has purple prosing me on every page and then I get another line of purple prose like this, I’m officially annoyed.
The description that really frustrates me, though, is “in the doorway next to walnut-faced MEN.” I don’t know what this means. A walnut-faced man? I’m literally imagining men with walnuts for heads. Is that what you want me, as a writer, to imagine? I would hope not.
You’re overthinking things. Use your description to describe, not to impress. Cause any time you’re *trying* to impress – I’m talking about in life, not just in writing – you’re usually doing the opposite.
Here’s an excerpt from the screenplay, “Seven,” by Andrew Kevin Walker. It takes place early in the story, with Somerset riding a train back to the city.
The train is almost full, moving slower. Somerset has his suitcase on the aisle seat beside him. He holds a hardcover book unopened on his lap. He still stares out the window, but his face is tense. The train is passing an ugly, swampy field. The sun has gone under.
Though it seems impossible it ever could have gotten there, a car’s burnt-out skeleton sits rusting in the bracken. A little further on, two dogs are fighting, circling, attacking, their coats matted with blood.
Note the clear imagery in the description. An almost full train. Moving slowly. His suitcase on an aisle seat. Hardcover book on his lap. A tense look on his face. An ugly swampy field. The sun has gone down. A burnt-out skeleton of a car in a field. Two dogs fighting nearby.
These are all things that we can clearly visualize. And if we’re visualizing them, it simulates the act of watching the movie in the theater. The only line I have a problem with is, “The sun has gone under.” We sometimes do this as screenwriters – write lines that are too sparse. But you probably needed one extra detail for this sentence: “The sun has descended below the horizon.”
Okay, onto the story itself. Was it any good?
Funny you ask. Something occurred to me as I was reading this script. It was sold in 1994. Around 1992-3 is when the industry had its biggest push towards formulaic writing. If you followed the beats you were supposed to follow and you had three acts and you wrote the plot reversal at the right time and your characters were likable and you had the requisite love story, then you could sell a script, even if you didn’t have a lot of talent.
Over the next couple of years, that belief grew. All you had to do was follow a formula and you’d win the script lottery. 1994 was the ‘culmination year’ of this belief. And you can see that on display here in Bulletproof. This thing feels like it was written by Syd Field.
That’s not necessarily the worst thing. I’ve read too many scripts with no adherence to formula and 99% of them are awful. But if you stick too close to formula, then nothing about your screenplay is going to stand out. Bulletproof unapologetically embraces Hollywood screenwriting.
Starting with the amnesia concept. It was one of the most popular concepts at the time. The set pieces here are all very cliche (escape the hospital, subway chase, chase by foot through city). A love story for no other reason than Hollywood required them at the time. The two even have sex just because you did that in scripts back then, regardless of if it made sense. Biotech companies were all the rage at the time. Heck, it even has one of the most cliche lines you can add to a script: “Who are you to play God!!”
There’s another way to look at this, of course. That the writers were smart. They saw what the industry wanted and they gave them EXACTLY THAT. Lots of writers who visit this site could do well following that advice. What is the industry looking for right now? It’s no secret. Look at what movies Hollywood gives all the promotional dollars to. That’s what they want. So, if you want to make money, that’s one avenue to do it.
But as a script, there’s nothing new here. It feels way way waaaaaaaaaay too familiar. One of the things I hate most about my job is that I’m always so far ahead of the writer. Writers rarely keep me guessing. I wanted this to keep me guessing just a little.
This is yet another reminder to take risks in your screenplays. Don’t do what you’re seeing every other writer do in their movies. When they zig, you zag.
Script link: Bulletproof
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you are doing an amnesia or memory-loss screenplay, YOU MUST KNOW THE RULES of your character’s amnesia and stick by throughout the script. You can’t just say, “Memory’s a funny thing. It could come back all at once. Or not at all.” If you don’t know how the rules of your movie’s memory loss works, you’ll take advantage of the ambiguity and have your character forget or remember things whenever it’s most convenient for you and your plot. Readers hate that. If you follow an established rule-set, however, the reader will trust you.
