Big spec sale from last week!
Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: After her father’s death, a young alcoholic woman ventures into the Everglades to get clean, only to find herself trapped in the deadly coils of a giant python, forcing her to fight for her life.
About: This script sold to 20th Century Fox for almost a million bucks. Writer John Fisher, a producer at Temple Hill, wrote the script in secret, afraid of how friends in the industry would react. He went the anonymous route, writing under a pseudonym and posting the script on the Black List site. It gained a ton of traction there, which led to the bidding war that ended with the big sale. This blows out of the water writers’ theories that “you have to know someone” to get a script sold. This person literally knew everyone, and he sold the screenplay as a nobody.
Writer: John Fischer (written as J.W. Archer)
Details: 90 pages
Aimee Lou Wood for Grace?
Contained thrillers will always be one of the smartest genres for a spec screenwriter to write in. The “thrill” component automatically makes it marketable. And the “contained” part of it makes it cheap to produce.
But “Crush” is not that. “Crush” is a sub-genre within the contained genre. That sub-genre is the ULTRA CONTAINED THRILLER. A contained thriller needs to be at least as big as a room. But ultra-contained thrillers are limited to a tiny amount of space. A coffin in “Buried.” A ski-lift chair in “Frozen.” The top of a tower in “Fall.” And with “Crush,” inside the grasp of a snake.
You’re playing in a different league when you write one of these because the containment is so severe, you have far fewer variables to draw upon for drama. This requires a higher skillset to pull off. The irony is, the best screenwriters never write ultra-contained scripts. They’re usually written by relative newbies. Which makes it rare for one to turn out great.
Here’s to hoping that “Crush” is the exception to the rule.
27-year-old Grace is an alcoholic. When we meet her, she’s barely waking up in her dirty apartment, the kind of place you’d expect a wayward soul with no direction to inhabit. We get the sense, through missed phone calls and text messages, that she may have hightailed it out of her most recent rehab stay.
Through some other visual cues in the apartment, we learn that her father may have recently passed away. So, long story short, Grace isn’t having her best moment in life. Which is why she decides, on a whim, to grab up all her old camping gear and head out to the Everglades. If she’s out in the middle of nowhere, it will be impossible to drink.
And that’s where she goes. She doesn’t just traipse along the outskirts of the Everglades. She marches two long days into the heart of it, to make sure the nearest convenience store might as well be in Egypt.
Funny enough, despite the isolation, she runs into some Instagram influencers who make silly videos about getting bit by things in the Everglades. The group wishes her luck and continues on. That next day hiking is when Grace slips, bumps her head on a rock, and wakes up with a giant python wrapped around her leg.
Before she can get her bearings, it starts dragging her into the forest. Grace is able to grab onto some roots and slow it down, eventually creating a stand-off. The snake seems to be waiting for something. But what? Grace finds out when she’s able to call the National Park Service, which informs her that it’s “scoping you out.” Whatever she does, do not let the snake coil around her chest!
Well that’s just jolly, Grace thinks. But at least now she has the Parks people looking for her. She just has to hold this thing off until they come. But when the snake does, indeed, make its way around her chest, Grace will have to get extra-crafty to stay alive. And when it starts to look like the rescue team ain’t coming tonight, Grace might have to defeat the snake all on her own.
Fischer had a big decision to make as he faced down this screenplay.
It’s a decision that every writer who’s writing a contained thriller faces. Which is: Do I fully commit to the emotional storyline or not?
Why is this question so important with contained thrillers? Because writers know that the big advantage of writing a contained thriller is that the read is going to be fast. Which means readers love reading these scripts. They know they’ll be able to whip through them in less than an hour. Conversely, reading something like One Battle After Another could take up to 4 hours, a reader’s worst nightmare.
But if you not only add an emotional storyline, but you truly COMMIT to that emotional storyline, you’re going to slow your story down. So you’re working against the very thing that’s supposed to be your script’s main advantage.
The solution most writers will use in these cases is to provide lip-service emotional storylines. The storyline will check the boxes of “character-driven” and “emotion,” but will do so in name only. They keep that aspect of the story so lean that the emotion never gets off the page. It’s just there so they can say they did it.
But here’s what Crush taught me. It taught me that you have to risk losing readers if you want to sell your contained thriller. Because a real emotional storyline is the thing that’s going to make a contained thriller stick with a reader.
So, as much as it kills you, and as much as it’s counterintuitive, you have to slow down your script. Which is exactly what Fischer did. The first 30 pages is all set up. Normally you’d get your hero into the grips of the python by page 15. But here we linger on how hard it is just for our hero to get out of bed. We linger on all the unresponded to text messages from concerned family and friends. When Grace is getting ready to leave, we linger on the things she sees that bring back difficult memories, like her father dying.
When a group of friends stumbles upon Grace’s campsite and they share some time around the fire, Grace confides in them, explaining that she’s out here detoxing. When her sister unexpectedly calls while she’s wrapped up by the python, they discuss her addiction. They discuss their father’s passing.
But here’s the key to all of this. THE WRITER COMMITTED TO IT. There’s a HUUUUUGE difference between a writer who commits to an emotional storyline and one who just does it to check boxes. Honestly, if you’re just adding an emotional storyline to check a box, I’d recommend getting rid of that emotional storyline altogether. It’s not worth it if you’re not committed to it.
By “committed,” I mean that I have to smell and taste that the writer is working through some real life shit. That they’re bringing into this story stuff that they have had to work through in the past or that they are working through right now. That creates an authenticity that, all of a sudden, turns a straightforward story into something that moves the reader on some level.
And I get it if you’re afraid to do this. I’m afraid too! I was told when I stumbled into this screenwriting thing: GET INTO THE STORY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. So every page you’re not yet into your story feels like you’re sabotaging yourself.
To be honest, if you’re struggling with this decision, here’s how I would approach it. If you are a newbie, don’t bother with the emotional storyline. Because it will probably be surface-level. That’s the stuff that takes the longest to learn in screenwriting, in my opinion. But if you are more advanced, definitely take your time and use that time to build up the emotional side of the storyline.
It means everything later on. Think about it. The degree to which this screenplay works is the degree to which you are hoping the main character survives. With a surface level treatment of this concept, I’m probably hoping Grace makes it at a 6.5 or 7 out of 10. But with the emotional version, it’s closer to 9 out of 10, or 10 out of 10. So it makes a big difference.
Beyond that, the script is quite clever. I thought Grace was just going to get wrapped up by this thing and spend 90 minutes trying to poke her arm out of one of the slits between the coils and grabbing something to use as a weapon. Which didn’t sound appealing to me.
But there was some real thought put into this and I think the best part was that Fischer researched how the snake operates and built that into the story, which created a progression of attack that allowed the story to play out over a longer period of time.
For example, it just grabs her leg at first. We learn later, from a phone call to the National Parks, that it’s “assessing” her. They even tell her how to get out of the coil. They also tell her, whatever you do, don’t let it coil around your chest.
It was moments like this that mined the potential of the concept. That opened up this entirely new line of suspense where we’re desperately hoping that the snake doesn’t coil around her chest. And it also created that progression.
And if you want to get into the advanced side of screenwriting, let’s talk about goals and obstacles. Typically in a movie, the hero must go after the goal and then, along the way, they encounter a lot of obstacles. Those obstacles, and whether our hero can overcome them, become the drama that keeps us entertained.
But here, the reverse is happening. The snake is the one with the goal. It wants dinner. Therefore, it is up to Grace to create the obstacles. Which she does. She comes up with little ways to leverage herself away from the snake, sometimes by just a couple of inches, to keep it from delivering its final squeezing blow. And it’s all very effective. I was riveted as the snake progressed its way up Grace, making her chances of survival smaller and smaller.
This allowed relatively basic plot beats, such as Grace calling 9-1-1 and asking for help, to become supercharged. Every minute here is precious. So when 9-1-1 says they have to forward her call to the Parks Department, when there’s only one connection bar on the phone, we’re on pins and needles hoping the call doesn’t drop.
There were other really smart decisions as well. I loved the Parks call where they took Grace through the “rules” of a snake attack. A lot of writers would not have done this. When you don’t do it, the reader is flailing in the dark about what’s going on. Sure, we feel the fear of Grace’s situation. But it also feels untethered and random. And without a set of rules to guide us, we’re just basically hoping she squirms away.
Instead, by having the Parks lay out the rules, it creates structure. They explain what the snake is doing (coiling). They explain how to get out of the coil (take it by the head and slowly twist opposite the direction of the coil) and they explain not to make any sudden movements and not to let it coil around her chest.
Now we have a set of rules to work with! We have structure. We understand what needs to happen. So we can now PLAY WITH THAT. Let’s say there is no “rules phone call” in this script. And you’re a reader like me. You don’t know anything about python attacks or how they work. Well, if the snake starts coiling around her chest, there’s not any suspense. Or at least, there’s not a ton of suspense. Because I don’t know that it’s game over if it wraps around her chest. But with the call, since I now know that, then any inching towards the chest creates a sense of panic and suspense. I’m gripped. I want her to stop it from moving in that direction. That’s what laying out the rules does.
Beyond all this, in addition to Grace having this compelling emotional backstory, she’s a fighter. And we LOVE fighters. Readers LOVE fighters. If you just make your hero a fighter and nothing else, I guarantee the reader will, at the very least, root for your hero. And there’s a good chance they’ll love them. Just as I loved this script!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In a script like this, which is mostly physical and visual, you want to look for ways to throw in the occasional dialogue scene. The reader is craving it. Because it’s tough to read through a ton of description. Also, stories can get monotonous so you should always look for ways to break up that monotony. I thought that Fischer did a great job of that. It felt like every 20 pages, he’d give us a dialogue scene. The Instagram crew who meets her by her camp site. The National Parks guy on the phone. Her sister on her phone. They were placed at just the right times in the story that we needed in order to recharge for the amount of consecutive description we were about to endure next.
