Today’s script is what would happen if Christopher Nolan wrote a script like Time Crimes. Or Primer.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A man wakes up trapped in a mysterious hotel room. All alone in a mind-bending prison, his only chance for escape is through teamwork… with himself.
About: Michael Shanks and his script finished Top 20 on the most recent Black List. The script seems to be the result of him once getting stuck in a hotel room for 19 hours straight during a layover. Classic screenwriting lesson: Use real life to inspire your ideas!
Writer: Michael Shanks
Details: 102 pages
In many ways, the contained mystery thriller set in a single room is the holy grail of ideas. The mystery along with the contained location provides you with the hook you need to get reads. And the single room means you can shoot it for an insanely low amount of money. I mean what does a hotel room cost these days? 50 bucks a night? Talk about a cheap set.
For that very reason, I read a lot of these scripts, some from really good writers. And they typically suffer the same fate. There’s only so much you can do in one room. Only so much mystery you can unspool, people your character can call on the phone, only so much sinister laughing you can hear from just outside the door. Only so much talking to yourself.
It’s a reminder that one must start strong and never let go. The second you forget that the reader is capable of becoming bored within a matter of seconds, is the second you get lazy and let your guard down. That’s when scripts fall apart. Always respect the reader. Always!
Middle-aged Ben wakes up in a hotel room with a bag over his head and his hands tied behind his back. This means he has to bite through the bag to breathe. Once he does that, he unties himself and tries to figure out what’s happened. He quickly transitions into “get the hell out of here” mode but neither the door or window will oblige. This place is a prison.
Ben passes out and wakes up the next day. After more exploring, he bangs a hole in the side of his hotel room where he sees an adjacent hotel room. This one with ANOTHER BEN INSIDE. And this Ben is going through the exact same motions he was going through yesterday. Hmmm…. When Ben breaks through the wall and tries to team up with Ben-1, he realizes Ben-1 can’t see him. Double hmmm…
The next day, Ben breaks through the wall again to see that Ben-1 has broken through the wall of his own room where he’s now realizing what Ben already realized. That there’s yet another Ben. His Ben-1. But our Ben-2. Getting confused? Oh, we’re just getting started.
Ben eventually realizes that, by himself, there is nothing he can accomplish. But with the help of the other Bens, there are potential opportunities for escape, even though he can’t communicate with the other Bens. For example, on day 1, Ben tried to bash the room door open but wasn’t strong enough. Therefore, on day 2, when Ben-1 is trying to bash the door just like he did yesterday, Ben can help him, using double-the-Ben.
This tactic eventually gets him outside into the hallway, where Ben heads to the hotel lobby. Figuring he’s free, he heads out the front door only to walk into the exact same lobby. And when he tries this again, he walks into a third hotel lobby. It’s starting to look like Ben – like ALL the Bens – are trapped here for good.
That is until Ben notices a trap door all the way up the side of the wall in the lobby. There’s no way to get up there, though. Unless! Unless he uses the help of the other Bens. So Ben stands by the wall and positions himself as if he’s holding someone else up for 30 minutes. The next day, he comes back, where Ben-1 is now positioned like he was a day ago, which means Ben can climb on top of him and create the second rung of a human ladder. The next day he has three Ben-rungs. Then four. Ben figures it will take 15 Bens to get him into that doorway and out of his nightmare forever. That’s assuming, of course, that nothing else unexpected happens in this weirdo hotel fantasyland…
Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel is one of the trippiest scripts I’ve ever read. About midway through, I had to stop, regroup, get my brain centered again, before going back into the story. The rules here are so extensive that brain naps are a requirement.
But I learned something today. Which is that the reader will go with an extensive rule-set if your world is cool. Usually I roll my eyes at too many rules and chastise the writer for being too complicated. But, in the case of Hotel Hotel Hotel Hotel, the rules were like this grandiose puzzle that was fun to solve.
There are a lot of genius moments here, such as the human ladder sequence. I always say that your set pieces need to be direct expressions of your unique concept. Or else they’re scenes that can be in any movie.
I can’t think of a set piece in recent memory that’s more a representation of its concept than the Ben human ladder. It’s a glorious extension of this weird idea. Even the details of the idea are fun. We remember that the original Ben stood in that first position for 30 minutes, in order to ensure that all 15 future Bens would have time to stand on top of him. As we’re getting to days 13, 14, and 15, though, we’re realizing that that might not be enough time. So it adds an urgency element to the set piece in a unique way.
I also liked the problems that Shanks came up with. You need to add problems in your screenplay because problems need to be solved. Problems needing to be solved require action. And action moves the plot forward. Shanks’s first problem for Ben is a simple one – starvation. There is no food anywhere in the hotel. So as Ben gets into that third, fourth, and fifth day, he’s starving to death. If he doesn’t find food soon, he’ll be a goner.
He eventually realizes that he can cut flesh off of the other versions of himself and they won’t notice. That’s when I said to myself, “Okay, this writer is a step above most writers who write these movies.” Because that’s just trippy stuff there. In order to survive, you have to eat yourself. That’s not a plot line you usually come across in a screenplay.
The script also does some interesting stuff with dialogue. For example, Ben tries to figure out how he got to this place. So he’s talking out loud about what he does for a living (structural engineer), the mistakes he made that put him in debt, and how that might have led to someone placing him here. It’s a big long monologue. The next day, Ben-1 goes through the same monologue and, as Ben listens to him, he sometimes interjects. So Ben-1 will say, “Mum always insisted, I had to get a degree even though we couldn’t afford it.” And before Ben-1 says the next line, Ben points out, “Maybe she saw it as the best chance to break the chain of bastards you come from…”
I always like when writers find interesting ways to do dialogue and I’m not sure I’ve ever come across this exact type of dialogue exchange. Where you’re having a conversation with your past self despite the fact that only one of you could hear the other. It was stuff like that that set this script apart.
If the script has a weakness, it would be that it gets very heady towards the end. When all of Ben’s plans fail, he has to go back through 30-plus Ben days and look for little clues of how the rules work in an attempt to find the secret to escaping. And I’m not going to lie. I was not always able to follow the logic. But here’s where I say something that I rarely say in these instances: I believe it was my fault that I couldn’t follow along. Not the writer’s. If there’s one thing I know here, it’s that Shanks understands his world. He writes with a level of confidence where you can tell he’s thought everything through, left and right, back and forth, a million different ways, to make sure this all make sense. It’s just one of those Christopher Nolan type scripts where it’s impossible to get everything the first time through. You gotta read it a few times. If that sounds like your jam, you’ll like this a lot.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This script taught me that it may be impossible to write a movie these days that only takes place in one room. Even Shanks realized, at a certain point, that he wasn’t going to be able to keep our attention if this whole movie only took place in a hotel room. I know adding rooms ups the budget considerably, but if you’re these scripts, you’re probably going to have to bring the outside world in at some point.
