Genre: Thriller
Premise: A murderous couple in hiding is discovered by the FBI and must take their teenaged son, who has no idea about their past, on the run.
About: Andrew Marlowe has the right idea. Write a few big blockbuster features (Air Force One, End of Days), then, when you realize that surviving the feature world is like trying to survive the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, ditch that nonsense and create a successful TV show (Castle), which turns your bank account into a money printer, then buy a 10 million dollar house in the hills. You won’t live next to Ryan Murphy. But you’ll be doing all right for yourself. Today’s script, In Hiding, was a Marlowe spec from 1998 (a year before End of Days came out) that sold to Arnold Kopelson, the producer of The Fugitive and Seven. It didn’t get made. Let’s find out why.
Writer: Andrew W. Marlowe
Details: 121 pages – 1998 draft
Today we’re talking about premise. (reference: meant to be read in Allen Iverson’s voice)
Specifically the promise you make to your reader with your premise, and delivering something that stays true to that promise.
Okay, parameters set. Scriptshadow machine calculating. Bee-bee-boop-boppppppp, chuckuhchuckuhchuckuh, leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevlop. Real-time plot summary code activated…
A group of mysterious people invade a warehouse, which turns out to be a storage facility for nuclear warheards. A second group of people confronts the first group, a gunfight ensues, and the whole place blows up, with only a handful of people from both sides escaping.
Cut to 14 years later. Jake and Carolyn Brighton are two normal suburban parents. Jake owns a paint shop and Carolyn works in a department store. Everything’s dosey-doe until the FBI charge into Jake’s paint shop. Jake’s on pins and needles until the FBI tells him his employees are running the biggest Drug Ring in the area. That news seems to… calm Jake?
Wait a minute. Who relaxes after they’ve been told their business is a front for a drug ring?? Immediately we know Jake is hiding something. And the lead FBI agent, Irene, senses it. She brings Jake down to the field office for questioning.
In the script’s best scene (seriously – you should all download the script and read it to see what a taut exciting suspenseful thriller scene looks like) Jake contacts his wife to tell her they’re “running his prints.” Based on Carolyn’s reaction, that’s bad. As the prints are running, Irene gets into an argument with her superior about keeping Jake here. He doesn’t think Jake’s done anything wrong and orders her to release him.
She reluctantly does, only to find out when the prints come back that he and his wife are wanted for 7 murders. Cut to Jake and Carolyn, who are racing to pick up their 14 year old son, Travis, from school. With the cops and FBI closing in, they grab Travis and narrowly escape, leaving them with a new problem. Explaining to their son they’ve been lying to him his entire life.
What we learn is that Jake and Carolyn were there that day of the warehouse explosion and were framed by the government to cover up the real reason they had a bunch of warheads stashed there. Due to the nuclear fallout, the government covered the destruction up with concrete. That leads to Jake getting an idea. Some of the military guys that day got buried in the mess. What if they go back and dig them up to prove their innocence! It’s a long shot, but it’s the only shot they’ve got!
Okay!
I want you to imagine something for me. Imagine I tell you I have a movie idea: “The Fugitive… but with a family.” I even do that thing with my hands where I hold them in front of my face then expand them out, for effect. Granted this pitch would’ve worked better 20 years ago, it still ain’t half-bad today. Okay, you’ve heard the premise. Now you ask me to pitch the plot. So I tell you, “It’s about this family who has to go on the run from the FBI which we later reveal is because they murdered 7 people!” You’re nodding your head furiously. “Ooh, I like that,” you say. “Murder is good.”
I continue on: “So what we find out is that our couple was framed for going to this warehouse where it turned out there were secret nuclear weapons and then they were shot at, barely got out, but the government needed to make sure they didn’t give the secret away so they told everyone that they murdered seven people! Now they have to go back there, dig into the wreckage, pull out one of the bodies, and take it to the FBI to prove their innocence!”
RECORD SCRATCH.
“Say what?”
This is my long-winded way of saying that the payoff of this premise doesn’t match up with the promise. The promise is cool. Family on the run from the FBI. The Fugitive with a family. They killed 7 people. Who were those people? Why did they kill them? Great mystery. I’m all in. But warheads? Nuclear fallout? What?? That doesn’t sound anything like what I imagined when you pitched me the movie.
One of your jobs as a writer is to deliver what you promised. I’ll give you a recent example of a failed promise. Book of Henry. You had this kid who was a genius and he’s quirky and smart and then he gets cancer. I’m not saying that’s a good idea, but it’s an idea. What the movie delivers instead is a dark murder revenge flick??? Giving the audience something other than what you promised is one of the quickest ways to piss them off.
There’s no set method for avoiding this mistake. It’s a “feel” thing. For every big choice you make (a major plot development), you need to ask yourself if that choice lines up with the movie you promised or if it makes the script feel like a completely different movie. Some writers will argue that an ‘out there’ choice makes their script unpredictable. And there are a few examples of that working. But I’m telling you as someone who reads all these scripts, 99 times out of 100 it ends up in The Book of Henry.
This speaks to a bigger problem with on-the-run thrillers, which is that while they’re easy to set up, and often have killer first acts (again, read that early scene I told you about), they can easily deteriorate into a series of mindless running around scenes. Inventive set pieces can help spice things up. But how many never-before-seen-set-pieces are you going to think up? Considering you’re competing with tens of thousands of thrillers, not many. The golden solution, like a lot of solutions in screenwriting, is character. It’s why Taken and The Fugitive remain the gold standards for this genre. In both cases, there was a very emotional and personal goal for the hero. Save my daughter. And find out who killed my wife to prove my innocence.
It’s no different from why Black Panther had one of the best villains in the Marvel Universe. His plight was PERSONAL. The current king’s father killed Killmonger’s dad and left Killmonger to rot in the streets of Oakland. It wasn’t like Ultron in Avengers, who nobody knew what the hell he wanted.
So that’s my big lesson. Thrillers are Thinners. They’re inherently thin plots. The best way to thicken them up is to build a storyline around complex characters with personal goals.
May this help Thriller writers everywhere!
Bee-beep-boooooops. Scriptshadow machine powering down….
Script link: In Hiding
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s okay to use age-old cliches in your script, as long as you execute the cliche differently than what’s expected. When Jake is first brought to the station, they put handcuffs on him. While they’re distracted, he sees a paper clip. He slyly reaches over and palms it. AGE-OLD CLICHE ALERT!!! I audibly groaned when I read this. As Irene is chatting with her co-worker about whether to keep Jake there, we’re cross-cutting to Jake fiddling with his cuffs. As the conversation reaches a climax, Irene is told she has to release Jake. Cut to Jake, just as he’s uncuffed himself. As soon as he hears this, he clamps the cuffs closed again. I’d never seen that before. In all the scrips I’ve read, every time someone with cuffs uses a paper clip, they uncuff themselves. It’s a little thing but every time you go against expectation, you impress the reader.
