Genre: True Story/Satire
Premise: A satirical take on the unbelievable but true story of how the NRA changed overnight from an apolitical gun safety and marksmanship club into the most powerful and unhinged lobbying group in Washington, DC.
About: This script finished low on last year’s Black List. It comes from Jake Disch, who is about to have his first produced movie, Saturday at the Starlight, come out, which is about a night at a skating rink in the 1990s. Disch graduated from Northwestern with an MFA in Writing for Screen and Stage. He is originally from Wisconsin.
Writers: Jake Disch
Details: 116 pages
Typically, I stay away from politically charged scripts because the “bash the political side that isn’t yours” avenue never deals with the subject matter in a balanced way. But since part of my job is to inform you what Hollywood is looking for, I’d be remiss not to remind you that the Black List loves liberal-leaning subject matter.
There were over 20 scripts on last year’s list that fit that description and I expect that number to double in 2019. For those of you who want to make the Black List, mid-September to mid-December is the best time to release your script. Voters are much more likely to remember your script now than they are those March and April scripts. So bust open Final Draft!
Even if I dislike a logline, I’ll give a script a couple of pages because you never know. And Gunfight opened in this fun breezy manner that told me this was going to be an enjoyable read regardless of which side of the issue you were on.
In particular, our narrator, 80 year old Tanya K. Metaksa, is telling us a story about guns, whereby in 1963 we see a guy named Alek J. Hidell order a gun through the mail. The story twists and turns until we finally see the man shoot and kill President Kennedy. Alex J. Hidell’s real name, it turns out, was Lee Harvey Oswald. Right then I was hooked. There are a lot of ways you could’ve told this story, the most obvious of which would be to show Lee Harvey Oswald go through the whole process of ordering the gun and shooting the president. But waiting until the end to throw the twist at us was not only clever, but it ended the story with a bang.
It also led us into the setup. You see, that event resulted in the government eliminating the ability to purchase guns through the mail, along with eliminating several other gun rights. This was called the Gun Control Act of 1968 and it’s what made our characters so mad.
It’s now 1976 and Harlon Carter, gun-freak extraordinaire and head of the ILA, the NRA’s eensy-teensy lobbying arm, has just learned that NRA head Maxwell Rich is gutting the ILA. You see, back then, the NRA wasn’t interested in lobbying. They just wanted a good clean image in the public’s eye. This meant that Carter’s dream of making the Second Amendment the Constitutions’s most prominent amendment just died.
Until he gets an idea to team with another gun nut, Neal Knox, and steal the NRA presidency from Rich. They would then use 100% of the union’s bank account to lobby the government for more gun access. Specifically, they wanted to reverse that Gun Control Act of 1968. Despite not trusting each other, the two set up an emergency NRA election ballot in Cincinnati to get rid of Rich. Their message? “The government is coming for your guns and Rich is going to give them to them!”
Through the help of Tanya Metaksa’s constant narration, we learn that the two frightened the entire NRA membership into showing up, voting them into the presidency, and then immediately using their money to get Ronald Reagan elected president, who then endorsed the NRA, instantly anointing them into the position of the most powerful lobbying arm in the United States. So now guns could be everywhere! Yay!
Okay. We’ve got lots to talk about here. Some classic screenwriting problems that all writers deal with, especially if they’re writing non-fiction material.
Your main goal when writing a script is to ENTERTAIN. You can entertain in a lot of ways. You can be funny. You can be suspenseful. You can create mystery. You can create conflict. You can create anticipation. All of these things allow you to DRAMATIZE events. And if you dramatize well, the reader will want to turn the page.
The problem with Gunfight is that there’s too much information to get across, and it suffocates any story bits that are trying to swim to the surface. It’s a tricky thing when you have a narrator. Because a narrator’s job is to convey information to keep the viewer abreast of what’s going on. Often, you’ll get heavy narration in the beginning and then, as the plot and characters become clear, the narration will phase out.
If you still have your narrator pumping out info the reader needs to understand on page 78, something’s wrong. Either you’ve chosen a story that needs too much explanation to enjoy. Or you haven’t found the best way to tell your story. Here’s Metaksa helping us out on this Cincinnati election on page 82: “Alright. Listen, I know parliamentary procedure isn’t thrilling stuff. It’s boring as hell and — y’know what, screw it. I’m just gonna let Aquilino handle it. Take it away, John.” The writer is trying to make a joke out of just how much we need to be told here, but joke or not, at a certain point, it’s too much. And that describes this script.
Even the setup is frustrating. We have the NRA and then we have a branch of the NRA, called the IRL. And the IRL is going to go to war against the NRA, but under a different name, and then they’re going to take the NRA back and run it the way they want to, and the two leaders at the IRL don’t like each other but they’re going to work together anyway, and they’re going to propose a vote at some election thing that will allow them to take over the NRA.
I mean… seriously?
One of the most important jobs of a screenwriter is that once he picks his subject matter, to find the best story to tell within that subject matter. This is the NRA we’re talking about, one of the most notorious lobbying groups in America. There’s gotta be a better story about them than trying to win an inner-union election. Look at an idea like “an alien predator comes down to earth to stalk human prey.” In one writer’s iteration, that movie centered around a predator stalking a bunch of super-tough soldiers in the jungle. In another, it centered around an alien predator stalking a group of escaped prisoners and a little boy in a suburb. That’s how crucial it is to get this part right.
And I think the most crucial mistake the writer made was thinking he could out-joke the exposition. That if we keep the characters funny enough, the audience won’t get bored by the endless exposition. And I’ll give it to Disch – he’s funny. Here’s an exchange when a concerned IRL member points out that eliminating The Gun Control Act would mean putting the infamous “Saturday Night Special” guns back on the street, which made it so every criminal in the city could own a gun.
AQUILINO: I dunno, we put those guns back on the street and they’re just gonna be used to kill decent folk again.
CARTER: That’s the price of freedom, John.
But the script was packed with exposition choke-points that killed any momentum a scene might have. We could barely make it two pages before Metaksa or another character had to explain something to us. Are you writing a history book or are you writing a movie? Cause they’re two different things. And I’m not sure the writer knew that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I love when a character name sounds like the person described. They’re the easiest characters to remember: “BOB KUKLA (42), all thin, greasy hair and oversized bifocals.” How could someone named Bob Kukla NOT have greasy hair and oversized bifocals?” Or how bout Harlon? “The office door BURSTS open and in strides HARLON BRONSON CARTER (64), a big, broad bulldog of a man.” Harlon Bronson. Of COURSE he’s a big, broad bulldog of a man.
