Genre: Art Heist/Thriller
Premise: An art thief who takes priceless objects from museums and private collections and redistributes them to their original countries of ownership is tracked by a dogged FBI Agent across the globe.
About: This script finished top 30 on last year’s Black List. Writer Ola Shokumbi recently adapted a book for the upcoming animated movie, “Onyeka and the Academy of the Sun,” that will appear on Netflix. Will Smith is producing. She also wrote one episode of the show, “The Fix.”
Writer: Ola Shokunbi
Details: 109 pages
Can today’s script reinstate confidence in the Black List?
If not, can we at least find a new writer with a fresh voice? Someone to get excited about?
I’m always down for a cool art heist script but these are tricky. The genre is well-traveled and, therefore, difficult to be original in.
Let’s see if today’s writer has come up with something cool.
The art thief known as “Ghost” steals art from random museums across the world. But unlike these greedy bastards who sell their stolen art to the highest bidder, Ghost sends the art right back to its country of origin. I’m not clear on how she makes enough money to, you know, fund this expensive hobby. But maybe she gets paid in moral superiority.
Halfway across the world, at an FBI office in America, is Ghost’s rival, Pire. Well, she doesn’t know he’s her rival yet. But she’s about to. You see, Pire has been tracking Ghost’s European museum escapades and he’s come up with a theory. She’s coming to America! Or *he* is coming to America. Nobody yet knows that Ghost is female. They merely assume she’s male cause of their internal patriarchal biases.
Long story short, Pire blows catching her, and Ghost, who we’re now told has instituted a name change (you can call her “Indigo”), flies a plane to France because I guess in between late night museum robbings, she learned how to become a pilot. Once back in Europe, her true plan is revealed. She’s trying to find a mythical lamp that is said to have the power to “raise an army.”
Her mark is a man named Walter, a sort of “sinister Indiana Jones” type, who is said to have the lamp. But Ghost – I mean Indigo – falls in BFF love with Walter’s assistant, Nooria. Nooria, you see, is Walter’s operations manager. She makes it so Walter can easily rob all these caves around the world.
Indigo points out to Nooria that she’s a prisoner, much like how art is a prisoner when it is inside the museums of a country where it did not originate. From here, “Indigo” turns into a full-on globetrotting action movie with vespa chases through the streets of Milan. We will find out, when this is all over, that Indigo played everyone like a fiddle, executing the most intricate plan in the history of the world, which should set her up for 20+ years of additional adventures.
One thing I can never forgive, no matter how hard I try, is when the concept itself is faulty. Work through this with me because I’m struggling to understand it. Let’s say you steal a painting from an American museum that originally came from an Italian painter from the 1700s. So you then “give it back” to Italy.
Who, in Italy, takes responsibility for this painting that was stolen and then “returned” to them? The Italian president? The Commissioner of Art? And what do they do with it when they get it? Do they send an “lol” tweet to the US government then put the painting up in one of their own museums?
We are operating under reality here, are we not? If so, doesn’t that mean the painting will have been the property of that museum? In which case lawyers are going to get involved and eventually litigate that painting back to the United States. That’s assuming Italy didn’t just send the painting right back to the museum in the first place. No government is going to publicly accept a stolen piece of art.
This is why in all the art-theft movies preceding this one, it’s a criminal stealing the art. Or a thief stealing art for a crime lord type. Because that avoids the problem “Indigo” has. If you’re a criminal, you can hide your act of crime. There isn’t a scenario where a government is going to have to publicly accept a stolen museum piece unless we’re talking two countries that specifically hate each other, which wasn’t the case with this movie.
It sounds pretty when you say it – a thief who steals art from museums and returns it to their country of origin – but it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Strangely, just as you’re wrapping your head around that and deciding if you can buy into it enough to mentally commit to the screenplay, the movie changes gears and becomes James Bond. None of it is bad. I could imagine this movie looking pretty good if someone spent 150 million dollars on it.
But my criteria for any action movie is: Are you giving me things I haven’t seen before? Because when you’re writing a movie that costs this much money, you are placing your film in one of the most high-stakes competitive spaces in all of art – the blockbuster film. To stand out in that arena, you have to show us stuff we haven’t seen before.
For example, there’s a scene where Indigo is on a moving train and the cops are closing in on her and she heads up to the top of the train, activates a parachute on her back, that then extends backwards due to the wind, lifting her up into the air to safety. I don’t know if I’ve seen that exact scene before. But I’ve seen a thousand moments that are achingly similar to it.
I will cut action films some slack in this area if they give me a great hero. Like I always say, you should be spending tons of time on creating a great protagonist because they’re going to be in every scene. Therefore, if we like them, we’re going to like every scene. But I found Indigo to be arrogant and too cool for school. She was always 15 steps ahead of everyone so she never sweat. Therefore we were never worried for her.
Go through that opening scene in Indiana Jones and tell me that Indiana didn’t sweat. Literally every single obstacles nearly killed him. Yet Indigo could’ve touched up her make-half the times she was pursued. That’s how little danger she was in.
The Black List needs to be careful. When you hear those words – The Black List – you now associate them with “competent” rather than the word you used to use, which was “good.” It’s not the worst thing in the world to be competent. Competency is still hard to achieve in screenwriting. But a list’s job should be to get you excited about the items that are on that list. And The Black List isn’t doing that at the moment.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Dramatic irony is when the audience has more information than at least one of the characters on screen. Usually, that information will imply a negative outcome for that character. There are two common ways you can use this. You can use it so that we have more information than OUR HERO. Or you can use it so that we have more information than OUR BAD GUY. Dramatic irony will always be more effective when the audience has more information than OUR HERO. Because it puts us in a state where we want to help our hero, want to scream to them to watch out, that there’s a bad guy around the corner, or that the person they’re talking to is dangerous. Early on in Indigo, Pire goes to a museum that was recently robbed by Ghost and meets with the curator, who we find out is Ghost in disguise. It’s a fairly decent dramatic irony scene, but because the scene is set up so that we have more information than OUR BAD GUY (Pire) as opposed to more information than OUR HERO (Ghost), it never gets to that next level of dramatic irony that grabs the audience by the neck. Compare it to the dramatic irony scene in Die Hard where John meets Hans on the roof, as Hans is pretending to be a hostage. In that case, we have more information than OUR HERO and that’s why the scene is more riveting. We want to scream to John, “THAT’S THE BAD GUY!” That’s why this version is always the more effective dramatic irony.
What I learned 2: I keep telling people – UPDATE THIS GENRE. Any movie idea that could’ve been written 100 years ago is going up against too much competition. It’s too hard to come up with fresh ideas in that space. Art heist movies should now be focusing on NFTs. I’ve given you your concept prompt. Now run with it!
