Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: When a malicious cyber attack against U.S. Space Command forces the President-Elect and the outgoing President into the Situation Room hours before the Inauguration ceremony, the rival Presidents and their National Security teams work with and against each other to determine who is responsible for the attack and how to respond before it’s too late.
About: Writer Patrick McConville originally worked as an assistant at CAA in TV talent. He would go on to work as an executive for director Marcus Nispel. He’s been toiling away at screenwriting ever since, Inauguration Day being the culmination of a six-year journey from his last well-received script, Tom Sawyer’s Island. Inauguration Day finished with 8 votes on last year’s Hit List, a yearly list of the best spec scripts.
Writer: Patrick McConville
Details: 116 pages
It sucks that these high-concept specs have been relegated to low-vote status on the Hit List (not even making the Black List anymore). There was a time where a big concept like this would’ve garnered a million dollar sale. However, when you look closer, you realize this isn’t your average high concept. It’s actually a genius update. McConville takes a giant idea and relegates it to a single location, pasting what used to be a Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich special into the Contained Thriller genre. That’s how you position high concept in today’s market. Let’s see how the script turned out.
46 year old President Juliet Garcia is spending her last day in the Oval Office with her children, preparing to leave behind what many consider to be an embarrassing tenure, highlighted by a massive terrorist attack in Wrigleyville, Chicago, during a Cubs game. Not only did the terrorists kill over 2000 people, they were able to escape to Syria, where Russia has helped shield them from American justice.
Meanwhile, 57 year old president-elect Owen Everett is getting ready for his inauguration. Ironically, it was Everett, the former Speaker of the House, who prevented Garcia from making an executive order to invade Syria to grab the terrorists. The non-confrontational Everett not only won that game, but won the match since the event pegged Garcia as a president who couldn’t get the job done.
In short, there’s history between these two.
An hour and a half before Everett’s sworn in, a U.S. satellite goes down. We quickly learn this satellite is part of an array of satellites that run the U.S.’s GPS system. When a second satellite goes black, our presidents realize this is a matter of national security, and head to the Situation Room to figure out what’s going on. The operating theory is that Russia infected the U.S. satellite array with a virus, taking them down one by one, so that our military GPS will be eliminated. The question then becomes, what do they plan to do next?
Garcia sees this as an opportunity to make up for the Wrigleyville disaster, advocating for a pre-emptive military strike on the Russians. Everett, meanwhile, wants to take some time and figure out what’s going on here. The two are buttressed by their teams, who stand loyally in each contender’s corner, and a 90 minute battle of wills ensues that will not only determine the fate of this problem, but the fate of the world.
I’m not sure I was ready for what McConville wanted to do here.
I was expecting (and wanted) the beach read version of this premise. Instead I got what might happen if Walter Isaacson wrote a screenplay. There was a TON of information to get through. A lot of characters. A lot of policy and politics and below-the-water chunks of an iceberg. This was researched and then re-researched so that everybody is representative of their real-life titles. Some hardcore burden of investment is required to even BEGIN to understand what’s going on. And that was easily my biggest issue with the script.
Which sucks because this is a great idea. Put the president and the president-elect in a room together where they need to solve an impending catastrophe. It’s one of those, “Why didn’t I think of that?” ideas. But, oh boy, do we have to go through a lot to get to the fun.
For starters, we have a ton of voice over from news anchors giving us backstory on the two presidents. We’re then meeting an endless cast of characters. There’s all of Garcia’s staff and then there’s all of Everett’s staff. I don’t think enough writers realize that if you cram 8-10 character introductions – especially big important people like the characters in this script – into a 5 page section, you’ll be lucky if the reader remembers three of those characters.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for writers to understand that readers aren’t computers. We don’t automatically remember everything you throw at us. Often times it’s the opposite. We’re being given a ton of information early on, and we have to parse out what we think is important and unimportant. Inevitably we turn out to be wrong, which means lots of characters and story points become casualties, never to be entirely remembered or understood.
This is why I always say to screenwriters: Only introduce characters if you have to. If someone’s not going to play that big of a part in the story, see if you can get rid of them or combine them with another character. You’re not only consolidating your story, but you’re making it easier for your reader to keep up.
It’s not surprising that this factors into my next biggest complaint in the script – which is that I wanted this to be Garcia vs. Everett. I wanted them arguing. I wanted them having to figure things out together. When there were problems, I wanted the problems to be between them. Instead, there’s ALLLLL these characters shouldering the weight of the story, with Garcia and Everett popping in whenever they’re needed.
It’s only once we get past the mid-point that our presidents really take center stage and dominate the conversation. Not surprisingly, that’s when the script really picked up. It’s crazy. I was convinced this was a “wasn’t for me” through the first 70 pages. But once it became Garcia vs. Everett, I was pulled back in. Which begs the question, why wasn’t it always about them? The answer is probably that McConville wanted to keep this authentic. If this situation were to really go down, all these extra players he included would probably be there. And I can respect that. I preach about authenticity all the time. I just think he went a bit overboard. In screenwriting, you want to avoid anything that takes precedence over the coolest thing about your script. And the coolest thing about this script was always Garcia vs. Everett.
To McConville’s credit, the script came together in the end. While at first I was ho-hum about a GPS terror plot, I loved how the story evolved into this rising battle with Russia, led by two competing philosophies – Garcia representing the shoot-first-ask-questions-later side, and Everett representing the let’s-think-this-through side, even if that got him labeled a “pussy” by everyone in the room.
I only wish there was more of that president-vs-president stuff in the beginning of the script. That’s the sandbox that sold me so that’s the sandbox I wanted to play in!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Unless you’re writing a script that contains a handful of characters, you can probably benefit from getting rid of 20% of the characters in your screenplay. Remember that less characters means it’s easier for the reader to keep up and you get to spend more time developing the characters that matter.
What I learned 2: Dressed-Up Contained Thrillers. Everyone is trying to come up with contained thriller concepts because they’re cheap to make and easy to market. But there are two levels of Contained Thrillers. The first is the standard type. This is what most people go with because it costs nothing. I’m talking about stories that take place in a basement, a diner, a tunnel, a coffin, a house. Inauguration Day is a level up from that, what’s known as a “dressed up” contained thriller. These actually require a set to be built. Yes, these films will cost more money than your standard contained thrillers, but they’ll feel bigger, allowing them to compete with much bigger films. If you’re trying to make a movie yourself, go with a standard contained thriller. If you’re trying to sell a script, a dressed-up contained thriller is a better option.
