Is “Grizz” as good of a bear movie as “Jaws” was a shark movie?
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A car accident strands a young paramedic in the rugged Pacific Northwest where she is hunted by a ravenous grizzly bear.
About: This was one of the loglines that stood out to me on the Black List. Connor Barry has produced some indie movies but this is his first screenplay recognized by the industry.
Writer: Connor Barry
Details: 101 pages
I’ve used this logline in several recent logline consultations to demonstrate what an effective logline looks like. Let’s take a look at why it works so well.
“A car accident strands a young paramedic in the rugged Pacific Northwest where she is hunted by a ravenous grizzly bear.”
The logline starts with the inciting incident (a car accident). It then introduces us to the main character. Constructing a main character in a logline is difficult because you only get 1-3 words to do so. It basically comes down to a choice between an adjective, a job, or both. Here, we get both. A ‘young paramedic.’ It’s enough to get a sense of who our hero is.
Next we get the setting. The key with setting is to paint a picture in the reader’s mind of what the movie world they’ll be entering looks like. The choice they use here is perfect. We don’t just get “the forest,” or “nature.” We get “the rugged Pacific Northwest.” I know immediately what that looks like so I can imagine the setting. It’s a beautiful but dense endless sea of giant trees that are impossible to navigate.
Finally, we get our antagonist, or the central conflict of the movie – the bear. But if you just put “bear,” that’s boring. A logline is the written version of a billboard. It has to create an image in the reader’s head. So you have to be a little more exciting with your word choices. Hence, we get a “ravenous grizzly bear.” It’s almost a perfect logline.
Now let’s see if the script lives up to it.
Cari is a 30-something paramedic who’s been suspended from her job after assaulting someone. So Cari decides to go on vacation. While driving on the mountainous roads of the Pacific Northwest, her van goes shooting off the road and tumbling into some trees. Cari only barely survives the ordeal and quickly realizes the cliff is too steep to climb back up. She’ll need to find another way out of here.
Her barely functioning phone tells her there’s a highway 8 miles north so that’s where she heads. She doesn’t get very far before she encounters the world’s meanest (and hungriest) grizzly bear. The bear doesn’t even hesitate. It attacks, digging its jaws into her midsection. Cari somehow gets away and hurries back to her van. In one of the best scenes in the script, Cari tries to fend off the bear which squeezes through the windshield and inches its oversized body further and further into the van, pushing Cari further and further back until she has nowhere left to hide.
After stabbing the annoyed bear several times, it retreats. But this is just the beginning for these two. It’s only page 25! After another attack, Cari makes a run for it but doesn’t get far. This thing is FAST. Cari shoots into a tiny cave opening the grizzly can’t penetrate. Or can it!? The bear repeatedly slams the cave opening until it crumbles.
Around this time, two hunters find Cari, thank God. But even though Cari explains to them that this is no ordinary bear, they seem unfazed. They follow Cari back to her van where they subsequently rob her and leave. Less than an hour later, she hears them being attacked by the grizzly, sending one of them right back to her, inspiring the world’s most reluctant team-up.
As their supplies dwindle, Cari realizes that there is no way out of this forest without going through that grizzly bear. It will require all the strength and intelligence she has left to do so. Will she make it? The answer may surprise you.
Many years ago, in one of the most infamous stories to ever come out of Hollywood, producer Art Linson paid famous screenwriter David Mamet a couple million bucks to write a movie for him. He didn’t have a concept. He didn’t even have an idea. He simply wanted one thing – that there be a bear in the movie. That’s how we got the movie, The Edge.
Boy would Linson have loved to have had this script instead of that one. Cause this could be the bear movie that beats all bear movies.
The thing with “Grizz” is that it’s such a simple and clear idea. And simple clear ideas tend to be the scripts that become good movies. The only downside of simple and clear is that they don’t pack a lot of plot into them. So you end up running out of story by page 45. Maybe sooner.
The way to defeat this is to figure out what your major plot beats are ahead of time and space them out accordingly. A major plot beat in Grizz would be that scene I mentioned above of the bear invading the van. Or the bear collapsing the cave. Or the hunters showing up. You would take each of these and chart them out in an outline. This scene will happen on page 20. This scene will happen on page 40. This moment will happen on page 50. When you do that, you’ll always have something to write towards instead of looking at 70 blank pages ahead of you and thinking, “What in the world do I do now??”
Pro Tip: Writer’s block is usually a result of bad planning.
But Grizz goes one step further here in that it does a great job creating this, almost, intimate connection between Cari and the bear. They’re going through this together, even if they’re trying to kill each other. So even without the cool plot beats and set pieces, we’re attracted to this unique relationship and what’s going to come of it.
There are numerous moments in Grizz where Cari and the bear just stare at each other, almost like they’re trying to read each others’ minds. I’m not going to lie – it made me emotional. Barry, the writer, even makes us feel sympathy for the bear. He explains that the bear is starving. That it’s one of the last bears in the lower 48 states because the others all starved to death. So we understand why the bear is doing this. He’s not just doing it because he’s a big old meanie.
That propensity to lean into emotion is what separates Grizz from scripts like this that just want to show a woman running from a badass bear.
From a technical standpoint, if you’re going to write a script with so few characters and so little dialogue, you need to keep the paragraphs to 1-2 lines. Because readers do not like reading non-dialogue scripts with thick paragraphs. They actually become enraged if you do this. Do what Barry did. 1-2 line paragraphs all the way through so that the reader’s eyes move down the page quickly.
Grizz nearly got that ‘impressive.’ It was so close. I think I wanted one more big plot surprise. There’s a minor twist late in the script that was fairly predictable. That twist needed to be better to push the script over the top. With that said, the ending is strong. We get our money’s worth with a few unexpected final bear encounters. Definitely check this out. It’s the best script I’ve read from the 2021 Black List so far.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When things are good, make them bad. When things are bad, make them good. In any script where there’s a pattern, you need to occasionally reverse the polarity of that pattern. This is why, in a script where things are going well for your heroes, you introduce obstacles. Conversely, for scripts like Grizz, where your hero is constantly experiencing bad things, you need to introduce the occasional good. One of the better moments in Grizz occurs when the two hunters find Cari. When they arrive, we’re like, “Thank god. She’s okay now.” It’s not like a bear is going to be able to take down two armed men. Sure, it amounts to a false victory. But before we learn these dudes are bad, we get that ‘thank god she’s safe’ screenwriting dopamine hit that interrupts the pattern. If a pattern is never interrupted, the reader will get bored
