Genre: Period/True Story
Premise: The true story of the murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 and the low-level American diplomat who teamed with his most dangerous informant to smoke out their killers. Based on Raymond Bonner’s work for The Atlantic.
About: This script finished on the Black List. One of the writers has written several Christmas movies. The other is writing an upcoming action film with Mila Jovovich titled, “Hummingbird.”
Writers: John Tyler McClain & Michael Nourse
Details: 121 pages
This feels like a Sebastian Stan starrer to me.
I think these writers got the memo from studios that with Stranger Things and Cobra Kai and Top Gun Maverick that: “Everything 80s is selling right now. We want more 80s!” I can see the pitch meeting now…
Writers: “You want more 80s? We’re got just the story for you. It’s set in 1980 in El Salvador! It’s about how 80% of the El Salvadorians don’t have a say in their government and then this innocent woman gets killed and then we follow the political machinations of the U.S. Embassy and how they ultimately solve the murder. It’s gonna blow everyone away.”
Today’s Studio Execs: “Uh, that’s not quite what we meant when we said everything in the 80s is selling.”
Writers: “Should we take that as a yes?”
Hey, I mean, it made the Black List, right?
Sister Dorothy Kazel is an American missionary in El Salvador in 1980. Not long after we meet this very cool motorcycle riding nun, we learn that her and three other nuns were raped and murdered.
This brings the American consulate into it, represented by a young man named Carl, who’s the only one at the American Embassy who seems to speak Spanish. He teams up with an angry Israeli agent named Idan to figure out what happened.
Betting odds are on a kill team led by an evil dude named D’Aubuisson. D’Aubuisson is going through the country randomly killing civilians for reasons that I’m not entirely clear about.
D’Aubuisson is obsessed with a group of pirate radio people known as “Radio Vencéremos,” who are warning everyone in the country where the Death Squad is. If you want to piss off a Death Squad leader, any preventative measure that will lessen his deathing is sure to rile him up.
Carl and his current bedroom buddy, Molly, slither around the El Salvadorian mainland asking a lot of questions. Their best bet is a guy without a name (“Killer”) who used to work in the Death Squad but hates it. To find D’Aubuisson, they’ll need to trust this dude. But is he leading them into a trap? Only time – and an obsessive amount of paying attention – will tell.
You know, I used to get upset with how many World War 2 scripts there were. The pile was endless. Don’t we have anything else to write about? I then read something like today’s script and it’s like, ‘Ohhhhhhh, this is why.’ Cause in Central American civil wars of the 1980s, everything is gray and unclear and random and we’re in El Salvador and we don’t really know why or what this has to do with anything on the world stage.
When you read a World War 2 script, it doesn’t matter if it’s about the U.S., Germany, Japan, Russia, France, Poland, or Great Britain, you immediately understand who’s good and who’s bad and can, therefore, participate in the story.
In a script like this, where the burden of investment is higher than One World Trade Center, you’re spending 80% of the time just trying to keep up with the exposition. There’s this Death Squad and maybe they’re working for the El Salvadorian army, or maybe they left because they *don’t like* the El Salvadorian army, and there’s a religious issue and also the Death Squad kills people to make statements, although it’s not clear what those statements are.
I know vociferous cinephiles say they love the grey area. But the grey only works when we understand each shade of grey. If each shade of grey is, itself, many shades of grey, we’re clueless as to what’s going on.
I mean this is some high brow grey-scale stuff here. We get exchanges like, “It’s not socialism, it’s communism. We know the Soviets are here. Dominoes of these backwards countries could topple straight up to Texas!” “That was our excuse in Korea – and Vietnam. But Communism evolves into facsimiles of Stalin; it’s a place marker for tyranny and eating its young. Socialism is different.”
I actually majored in world politics in college and I can only quasi decipher that exchange.
I suppose the counter-argument to this is, we live in an entertainment vacuum of Thor penis jokes and UFOs that turn into giant pieces of origami. You have to open up some slots for sophisticated adult fare somewhere. Which, I suppose, is a fair argument. But that’s the dilemma I was going through while reading this. Was the script too sophisticated for my taste, or is the subject matter uninteresting? Is the storytelling confusing?
Cause what often happens when you’re reading a script that you’re not enjoying is your mind starts wandering. And you dislike the script enough that, when you realize your mind is wandering, you don’t do the proper thing and backtrack to the spot before your mind started wandering. You instead keep reading despite not properly downloading what just happened during those two pages where you weren’t paying attention.
So is your confusion the writer’s fault or is it your own fault? Is it not the writer’s job, in the first place, to keep you entertained enough that that doesn’t happen? Or even if you dislike what you’re reading, do you still owe it to the writer to make sure you read and understand every single page? I’m curious what you guys think so feel free to give your opinion in the comments.
Another small thing I noticed in the script was this new trend of writers overwriting. Here’s an example from this script: “As he walks off, Dorothy looks back to the MOB being vomited from the church, to Diego, an 8yo boy, clinging to her motorcycle like it’s the only sanity left.”
There’s no need for “like it’s the only sanity left.” It’s a try-hard addition to the sentence that doesn’t need to be included. You *can* include it, of course. There are no rules in writing. I’m just telling you, whenever I read stuff like that, I roll my eyes a little. It feels desperate, like a writer trying to prove to the world that he’s a Writer, with a capital, “W.” More on that in the What I Learned section.
One of the most important questions anyone should ask before writing a story is, “Why would they care?” Why would an audience care about this story you want to write? If it’s a fictional story, is it unique and entertaining enough? If it’s a true story, what is it about this true event that makes it big/important enough that it must be told?
Now, of course, the answer to that question is subjective. But it’s still a question that needs to be asked because the ultimate goal here is that a large amount of people want to see your movie.
Every time I go through the variables here. El Salvador, 1980, 4 random women are murdered, I find myself shrugging. Of course, murder is bad. But there are literally hundreds of millions of murders that have occurred throughout history. I guess I’m having a hard time convincing myself that these particular murders are movie-worthy.
Maybe if there was some giant twist at the end, and it was the American government that killed them to validate an invasion or something, that might have convinced me. But there’s nothing that big here.
To the writers’ credit, they do have some fun with the dialogue, particularly between Carl, Molly, and Idan. But it’s not enough to offset a concept that I think is lacking enough punch to be a movie.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Going back to that earlier line – “As he walks off, Dorothy looks back to the MOB being vomited from the church, to Diego, an 8yo boy, clinging to her motorcycle like it’s the only sanity left.” Movie writing is about the VISUAL. Not the figurative. So if you’re going to make an analogy or use a metaphor, make it visual. For example, you might say, “As he walks off, Dorothy looks back to the MOB being vomited from the church, to Diego, an 8yo boy, clinging to her motorcycle as if it were a life raft.” It’s not a great line but at least the metaphor is focused on an IMAGE and not a state of mind, such as “sanity.”
