Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: A dark comedy about the Hindenburg Disaster; or, the mostly true story about one of the biggest f—kups in history, the a—holes who tried to cover it up, and the female gossip reporter who made some Nazis very angry.
About: This is a Black List script from last year. The writer, Gillian Weeks, appears to have a few projects in development. She’s still looking for her first produced credit.
Writer: Gillian Weeks
Details: 118 pages
You gotta figure Fassbender is going to be in this, right? German lineage. Maybe he’ll play Gertrud.
One of the simpler ways to get noticed as a screenwriter is to write a “Hey I’ve heard of that” script.
You just pick something relatively well-known from history (recent or long ago) – preferably something that has a little bit of spark to it – that people have heard of. That way, when they read your logline, they say, “Hey, I know about the Hindenburg crash,” and that becomes enough for them to give your script a try.
It’s typically a better bet than going out with a script that has nothing that anybody has ever heard of.
Half this game is coming up with an idea that people hear and go, “Yeah, I’ll give that a shot.” Any little trick you can use to trigger that reaction, use it!
Oh The Humanity begins at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey where a bunch of rich people are impatiently waiting for the Hindenburg zeppelin to arrive so they can get to Germany. However, as Commander Charles Rosendahl sends the passengers off to the loading station to wait for the aircraft, it burns up during its landing, killing many of the people on it.
Hugo Eckner, the man who built the Hindenburg, is called into famous Nazi, Goebbels’, office and is told that he must go to America and convince the Americans that this was an act of sabotage – and that transportation via zeppelin is still totally safe. If he can’t find an act of sabotage, he must create an act of sabotage.
Meanwhile, German gossip columnist Gertrud Adelt, who was on the zeppelin that crashed, is dealing with her injured husband, who barely survived the zeppelin fire and is on life support. Gertrud is forced into covering the story for Germany due to her intimate perspective. However, with the rise of Naziism in her country, she knows that telling the truth isn’t an option. So, any story will have to paint Germany in the best light possible.
Much attention is placed on passenger Ben Dova, a stage actor who moved from Germany to become an American citizen. Dova absolutely hated the Nazis, going so far as to lead a chant during the flight of, “Heil Shitler.” If there’s anyone Hugo can pin this crash on, it’s Dova. And he’ll get his chance, as the second half of the story transitions to the Hindenburg Trials, where the Americans will attempt to figure out, once and for all, how the Hindenburg crashed.
You have a choice every time you write a script.
You can make things easy on yourself or you can make things hard on yourself.
The most basic example of this is the main character. You can make them likable, in which case you’re making things easy on yourself. Or you can make them unlikable. In which case, you can still write a strong character and a good script. But it’s definitely going to be harder. Cause you’ll have to find ways to counteract that lack of likability.
Good writers can navigate a couple of make-things-hard-on-yourself choices. They know the tricks to counter them.
But even the best writers are going to have trouble countering five or six make-things-hard-on-yourself choices.
Which is the category I’d put today’s script in.
First of all, there’s no clear main character in Oh The Humanity. Right then and there, that’s a hard script condition to overcome. But it can be done! Avatar 2 didn’t have a clear main character and last time I checked it did okay at the box office.
But Oh the Humanity also decides that it’s not going to have stakes. What are the stakes here? Germany doesn’t get to make zeppelins anymore? So what? How does this affect history in any measurable way? A lack of stakes is one of the bigger make-things-hard-on-yourself writing choices you can incorporate into a script.
Next we have comedy mixed with tons of history. It’s very hard to write a comedy where you’re asking the reader to do a lot of work. If I have to know 15 different characters intimately to understand what’s going on, that’s a major problem in a comedy.
For comedies, readers and viewers don’t want to have to do work. They just want to have fun. And with Oh The Humanity, I was having to take meticulous notes to keep up with what was going on. Even then, I had trouble keeping up with the plot.
Just to be clear. I’m not saying that if you do these things, it’s impossible to write a good script. I’m only saying that you make things a lot harder on yourself.
Let’s take the first issue and look at it a little deeper. There was no clear main character throughout the first act. And then it kind of became Hugo’s story. He’s the one with the primary goal in the movie – which is to pin this crash on an act of sabotage. Which means we’re being asked to root for a character who’s trying to pull one over on America so that the Nazis get away Scott-free.
That just made things even more difficult on yourself. Who wants to root for a Nazi?
If the answer to this is, you’re not supposed to root for them, you’re supposed to laugh at their incompetance, I don’t know if you want to build an entire story around us rooting against and laughing at the main character. It’s an incredibly tricky tightrope act to pull off.
Most of my time reading Oh The Humanity was spent trying to figure out what kind of movie this was. It starts off as a really goofy comedy. Then we get this tragedy. Then it’s a Chinatown like investigation into the cause of the crash. Then we get the Hindenburg Trials and it’s a courtroom drama.
I wouldn’t say this was the most frustrating script I’ve read all year. But it was up there. There was a ton going on and I was always playing catch-up, trying to figure out the tone, trying to figure out the type of movie, trying to remember who was who and what they wanted. Trying to figure out who the heck the main character was. I just re-read the logline and it mentions Gertrud as the main character. That would not have been my bet. But even if it was, I’m not totally sure what Gertrud’s goal is. I guess she’s trying to expose Germany but that would’ve been way clearer if we would’ve spent 80% of the first act with her, as opposed to 20%.
I think, in the best possible version of this movie, it’s Babylon meets Triangle of Sadness meets The Death of Stalin. But it’s so much messier than that that it’s hard to categorize. I just know that it wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Whenever describing something physically unique that’s a central part of your story, especially something big, give us a reference point using the size of something else we understand. For example, if you’re describing the Titanic’s size, how would you do so? Here, Weeks uses one of the most reliable reference points for large objects available: “We now reveal…THE HINDENBURG. A majestic silver dirigible the length of three Boeing 747s.” And BOOM, just like that, we know exactly how big this thing is. Which is important. Cause if you leave that up to each individual reader, they’re going to have different ideas of the size. And their idea of size may not be even close to the actual size. Now they’re imagining a different movie than the one you intended. This happens ALL THE TIME by the way. If you have spaceships or alien cities or castles or even houses, use this tool to let us know how big these things are.
What I learned 2: Vague “connect-the-dots” stakes never work. You can’t hope, as a writer, that we’re going to be highly invested in the zeppelin’s crash because it’s a German aircraft and because it’s 1937 and because the zeppelin is associated with Naziism, and because Hitler likes zeppelins and because we know Hitler will start a war in a year, therefore, getting to the bottom of this zeppelin crash is important. That’s not how audiences think. They like direct stakes. They like clarity in stakes. My advice when it comes to stakes is to be as big and direct as possible. I had to wade through way too much sludge to locate the stakes of this movie.
