Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A federal agent is sent to a crazed woman’s remote home when it’s discovered that she’s built a nuclear reactor to make contact with aliens.
About: The master of the 2016 spec sale is back at it. After a couple of 7 figure sales, Max Landis is back with the second script in his thematic trilogy. The first one was “Deeper.” This one is “Higher.” The third one will be… I’ll let you guys take some guesses in the comments.
Writer: Max Landis
Details: 90 pages – 3/29/16
Regardless of how you feel about Max Landis scripts, as a reader, they’re freaking golden. You know you’re going to be done in an hour at most.
I don’t know if Landis does this on purpose – understanding that the average person in Hollywood values a free hour more than they do their second child – or the famously prolific scribe gets an idea for another script midway through the first and finishes the script as fast as possible so he can write it. Either way, the reader benefits.
Another thing that happens during a Landis script is that it’s impossible to separate the script from the personality. No matter what you do, you can’t NOT have an image of Max Landis with one of his crazy hairdos (the one in my brain is the rainbow one) typing away on his computer in your head. And as a person who believes that a good screenplay should make you forget that someone’s written it, this isn’t preferable.
With that said, there’s always something to talk about after a Landis script, so let’s see what the viral video maven’s latest script has in store for us.
We meet Flynn, an FBI agent, in the midst of a very difficult moment. We don’t know why it’s so difficult. We just know he has to do something that he doesn’t want to do.
Then again, he’s in the middle of America, farmland as far as the eye can see. What could possibly be so terrible out here?
The target is a seemingly mundane barn. But when Flynn walks in, we see that the barn’s been retrofitted into some low-tech lab. There are jerry-rigged planks and walkways everywhere housing ancient computers that spit and sputter as if they’re on their last calculation.
That’s when we meet Polly, a 40-something woman who is the physical embodiment of that barn. She’s a mess. But a smart mess. There’s no denying that it took brains to come up with… whatever’s going on in here.
But Polly’s also lost it. She’s kind of built… well, she’s built a nuclear reactor. And she’s babbling on about aliens. It’s around this time that we learn Flynn isn’t just an agent. He’s Polly’s ex-husband. And he’s been sent here alone to try and talk Polly down, get her out of here so they can contain the reactor.
While Polly and Flynn verbally duke it out, we learn about their complicated past, we learn about why Polly believes aliens are coming to kill us, we learn about Polly’s disease (schizophrenia), and the FBI comes in to contain the situation.
Is Polly right about the aliens? If the Feds take her away, will it open our planet up to destruction? Only myself and Max Landis currently know. Locate Higher to find out for yourself!
Like I said in my previous Landis review, the guy writes scripts for the millennial. His stories move so fast, you feel like you should be reading them in an Uber while streaming Yeezy’s latest album on Tidal.
And while that may annoy some people, I remember when all those crusty Hollywood types bemoaned the influence of MTV and its “fast-cutting” culture when it came around, proclaiming it would ruin storytelling. Where are those guys now?
Might we be today’s crusty types by proclaiming the same thing? I mean you have Hell or High Water (formally “Comancheria”), a slow-as-molasses great script and great movie… that nobody has seen. If you guys want less Max Landis-y like scripts, why aren’t you going out to support Hell or High Water?
It’s the kind of hypocrisy that’s always been there with this argument. Audiences complain about the big cliche Hollywood movies but they don’t show up for the smaller smarter ones. Every ticket is a vote, guys. You tell the studios what you want with that vote. That’s how it’s always worked. So when you’re in line for Batman vs. Robin or whatever the hell DC has in store for us next, keep that in mind.
Anyway, back to Higher. Besides moving the story along quickly, Landis made another solid choice. He focused on the emotion. Once it’s revealed that Flynn is Polly’s ex-husband, the story becomes more than a “Is this woman nuts or not” story.
It’s about a man realizing how far his ex-wife has succumbed to her disease and knowing that the woman he fell in love with will never be back. It’s about reliving the pain of her breakdown, how it broke apart their family, and how it permanently broke Flynn.
That’s exactly what I tell you guys to do. If you want to know what separates amateur from pro, it’s when you start exploring characters on a deeper level. The best way to do that is through relationships. While it’s possible to only explore a character’s inner conflict, it’s always more interesting when there’s another player across the table.
Our fears and flaws are magnified best when there’s someone else to bring them out. There’s a moment in Higher where Flynn explains that the reason they found Polly was because her meth-head boyfriend ratted her out. “He’s not my boyfriend,” Polly says. “He’s just some guy I fuck.”
The way that hits Flynn – to see that this is how far the woman he loved has fallen – that she’s now fucking random meth-heads – that creates sympathy for the character. That creates context and complexity to the relationship we’re now watching. It turns a plot-centric script into a character-centric script.
But let me remind you that character exploration is NOTHING if it’s not contained within an entertaining story. If ALL you’re doing is exploring characters, that’s just as boring as ONLY constructing a plot. Entertaining the audience should always be paramount.
So we’ve established that Higher does some good things. But is it good?
This is the question I kept asking myself. And just the fact that I was asking myself is a bad sign. When you’re reading something you love, you don’t ask anything. You’re too busy enjoying the story.
The problem is, I’ve read so many “are they crazy or not” scripts at this point that they don’t do it for me anymore. Even as far back as Shutter Island I was getting tired of this setup. I don’t know if it’s because of the binary nature of the question. There’s only two answers, which feels simplistic. Or maybe I just don’t care if they’re crazy. Once you don’t care about the question, it doesn’t matter what the answer is. And that’s where I found myself on Higher. I didn’t care if there were aliens or she was nuts.
That’s too bad. Because Higher isn’t a bad script. It just [x] wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Evolving information – the process by which information evolves over the course of the story. If it’s page 80 and we still only know what we knew on page 30, you’re not doing it right. So here, we start out only knowing that this barn has been retrofitted to conduct some sort of experiment. Then we find out it has a nuclear reactor. Then we find out the nuclear reactor is for a spaceship. Same on the character side. First, Flynn’s just some agent. Then it turns out he’s her husband. Then it turns out he left her because she has schizophrenia. Try to advance information once on the plot side and once on the character side every 10-15 pages.
