Genre: Drama
Premise: A socially deprived teen, unable to feel pain, lives vicariously through a dominatrix named Agony on the night of his 18th birthday.
About: Today’s script is an amateur script that was highly recommended to me by a trusted source. Hoping to find that great unknown script, I cleared my Wednesday slot and made it today’s script review.
Writer: Michael Kospiah
Details: 93 pages
Freddie Highmore for Early?
It’s rare that I get an e-mail from someone saying “You have to read this right away,” when that person is not…
a) the writer
b) the writer’s mother
…so when it does happen, I always take it seriously. I sent the script out in my newsletter this week and I’ve already been getting a lot of responses from it. Some have been good, some have been bad. But the most important thing is that all of them have been passionate. That tells me the writer is striking a chord with readers. So I knew there was something here. However, I don’t think I was properly prepared for what I was about to read.
4 year old Early has not had an easy life. In fact, in one of the most intense opening scenes I’ve ever read, the boy is tossed into the lake to drown by his father, who raises a gun to his own head and blows his brains out. Uhhhhh… I think you now have my full attention, Morphine script.
We later find out that his father did this because Early’s mother died during childbirth. So he blames Early for that. This means Early has no parents, which leads to him getting adopted. As Early grows up, he encounters another curve ball to his unique life: he can’t feel pain. So he’ll often just bang his head as hard as he can on doors and tables just to try and feel something. Understandably, people around him are a little freaked out.
Eventually, after Early grows up, he meets Agony, a dominatrix whose full-time job is distributing pain. While at first he wants to hire her, he instead becomes friends with her and follows her to a few of her jobs. He’s quickly fascinated by both Agony and her unique career.
Meanwhile, we meet a guy named Winston, who saved Early the day his father tried to drown him. Winston has since hit on some hard times, and he seems to think it’s all because he saved Early that day – that he tempted fate. So he’s got himself a gun and is now out there searching for Early, supposedly to kill him and even fate’s score.
Someone else might beat him to it, though. Agony’s exponentially fucked-up brother comes out of nowhere and starts attacking her, forcing Agony and Early on the run. It appears that Agony has had a childhood that makes Early’s look like he grew up with the Cleavers. To put it simply, she has a kid, and the father of her kid is either her own father or brother.
They eventually get caught, ending up in a motel with Agony’s dad furiously demanding to know where his daughter (and granddaughter) is. If she doesn’t bleed out, Early will need to find a way to get her out of this mess, a path that’s looking less and less likely as the night goes on.
Morphine.
Man, this script was a mixed bag for me. I think the writing is really strong at times, but really raw at others. It feels to me like a young writer with a big voice who hasn’t quite mastered the craft yet. The first clue is that there are a lot of emotional moments that are way over-the-top, bordering on cliché. I mean we even have Early stumbling into the night, looking up to the sky, and screaming as loud as he possibly can. That particular situation and shot have been done so many times in movies that they parody it more than they shoot it these days.
And then there was just a lot of crying, a lot of screaming, a lot of overly intense moments. At a certain point, we were parked squarely in the middle of Melodrama Lane, and we hadn’t even hit the 30 page mark yet. So I was worried.
However, the script sort of reinvents itself when Early meets Agony. It latches onto some kind of direction, and it really saved the story in my opinion. A few people who e-mailed me about their Morphine read noted that their big problem with it was that no story emerged, forcing them to give up before the halfway point. I agree with that, thus I wouldn’t mind if we got to the love story a lot sooner.
Another issue Morphine runs into is that it depends a little too heavily on shock-value. The father shooting himself while his son is drowning, a little boy banging his head repeatedly against the table until it bleeds, a dominatrix screaming at her client to “shit on the newspaper!”, a father who fucks his daughter, tazers to people’s genitals. I learned a few years into my own writing that shock value works like a drug. The audience gets really high off of it, but also comes down really fast. To satisfy them then, you then need to give them another hit. But they come down off that next hit even faster, so they need another one. And on and on, with each hit offering diminishing returns. At a certain point, you don’t have any shocks left to offer.
Now, Morphine wasn’t purely shock-driven. We do find out WHY, for instance, Early’s father tries to drown him then blows his brains out (Early was born premature – that’s why he’s named “Early” – and his mother died during childbirth. Early’s father blames Early for that). So there’s some depth and reasoning behind some of these shocks. But I still got the feeling that Michael was more concerned with shocking me than telling me a story.
On the character front, I’m not sure I ever felt that the Winston character was necessary. This idea that he interrupted fate and now he’s gotta reverse it (by killing Early) didn’t quite work for me. I was way more interested in Early’s relationship with Agony. I think that’s the selling point of this script and if Winston isn’t involved, we could’ve spent more time with that (and got to that storyline sooner – which is what a lot of people complained about).
Now I don’t want to make a blanket statement here, but I’ve found that, on the whole, over-emphasis on fate as a theme tends to indicate a younger less-experienced writer. It’s an easy theme to play with and allows for a lot of wiggle-room. You just have a lot of characters pontificating “Is fate real? Is it not real?” and it gives the illusion that the script is really deep, when in fact it’s only pretending to be.
I say this not from a place of judgment but from experience. I remember being obsessed with that theme myself when I first started writing. But looking back on those scripts, they all feel thin and “wanna-be-taken-seriously.” And it’s not that fate can’t be explored on a more serious level, but I don’t know if that should be the focus here. You have an interesting ironic setup between a man who can’t feel pain and a woman who administers it. You then have her fucked-up family coming after her. I think there’s enough meat there for a story. I don’t think you need to worry about if fate intervened on that day Early was drowning. Maybe he simply dog-paddled to the pier and was able to survive. But I was never able to connect that moment with his “inability to feel” problem. Maybe if his inability to feel was the result of that moment? Like the lack of oxygen from drowning is what destroyed the part of his brain that registers pain? Then the connection is there. Otherwise, it feels like two different subject matters.
Now despite it seeming like I’m not a fan of Morphine, I’m glad I read the script. I think what we have here is a script that we’re going to look back on and say, “Hey, that’s the first script Michael Kospiah wrote. You can see the potential dripping off the page.” But the potential isn’t fully realized yet. I think a little more emphasis needs to be put on story as opposed to shock-value. I think the story itself needs to start sooner. I think certain subplots could be sacrificed in order to spend more time with our main characters. And I would’ve liked to have seen more scenes where Early used his unique “power” to get out of situations. If your main character can’t feel pain, you need to exploit that to its fullest, and I don’t think Michael’s done that yet. But I do think big things are ahead for Michael. He has a unique voice and that’s one of the most important skills a writer can possess. This is probably the highest “wasn’t for me” I can give, but the story itself didn’t quite get there for me.
Script link: Morphine
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful about depending too much on shock scenarios! Ultimately, they’re fool’s gold unless you can naturally embed them into the story.
