Genre: Crime/Mob Drama
Premise: (from Black List) A gritty, contemporary retelling of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO set in the underworld of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish mob.
About: This script finished with 4 votes on the 2008 Black List. It was later purchased by Phoenix Pictures, which has made Black Swan and Shutter Island. The idea is to make an underground crime/mob film in the style of Heat. It’s unclear where the project is now in the development process. The writing team of McGreevey and Shipman have since moved into television, creating and working on the series “Hemlock Grove” on Netflix.
Writers: Brian McGreevey & Lee Shipman
Details: 125 pages
While this script wasn’t for me, I fully admit that if you put Denzel Washington in it, it’ll be an instant hit!
Oh man. I always get sucked in by the “Monte Cristo” angle. “Oh yeah, sure. Monte Cristo storyline? I’ll read it!” Dingbat. How come I keep making that mistake?? Hindsight is 20/30 but I didn’t even need glasses to know that this genre wasn’t my thing. Never has been. The names. Ahhh, the names! They’re all the same! Jimmy and Jerry and Eddie and Jackie. Who’s who? Who knows! Every time, it happens. I don’t know if it’s because these scripts aren’t my thing or if these stories just don’t translate on the page. But I feel like I should’ve known better.
And I wanted today to be a happy review day! With Thanksgiving coming up, I’m going to be gone until Monday. So I wanted to leave a spec rainbow behind me. I had this vision of thousands of screenwriters being inspired then racing to their computers to finish their scripts this weekend. The whole reason I pluck these old scripts out of Forgottenville is in the hopes of finding that shiny overlooked gem. “Once Upon A Time” was essentially in the same spot on the Black List as Chris Terrio’s “The Ends of The Earth.” So I figured, we have a shot here. Oh, giblet sauce!
Anyway, so here’s the story. Finn Morgan and Eddie Donovan are best friends. One of them’s a good guy who’s going to be a lawyer (Eddie). The other is the next in line to control the city’s mob (Finn). Since their friendship wouldn’t be complete without a woman, we’ve got Molly, who’s with Eddie, but who Finn is clearly in love with. I think we know where this is going.
Finn kills a really important dude in town and frames Eddie for the murder, all in a not-so-subtle attempt to make Molly his own. When Eddie is then murdered in prison, Finn’s home free with his plan-o-love, and Molly reluctantly hops aboard the Finn Express.
Too bad the train stops at Eddie-is-still-alive Station! Yup, Eddie befriends some old guy in prison who helps him dig a hole out of the place and escape. It’s a little confusing why Eddie was mistaken to be dead in the first place, but a lot of that had to do with the fact that there’s so many people and so many things going on in the script, it’s hard to keep up.
One of those things is that we’re jumping back and forth between two different timelines, one set in the present, when Eddie comes back from prison, and one set 15 years ago, where we see Eddie betrayed and sent to prison. Tons of characters and lots of intricate storylines are hard to make clear on their own. Add intercutting time lines and we’re talking a whoopee cushion of confusion. Not to mention we’re also flashing back WITHIN the present time period, adding yet another timeframe to keep track of. Ouch. My head hurts!
Eventually, after we see all this stuff take place over about 90 pages, it becomes a revenge tale, with Eddie wanting to get payback for being framed by his supposed buddy (and losing his girl!). I kept waiting for the big Monte Cristo hook to happen, where Eddie got rich and powerful, but it never happened (sad face emoticon). Instead, the Monte Cristo thing was limited to an old man helping Eddie escape prison.
This script was a bit like Thanksgiving Dinner. You’re excited at first. You get to see all your family and how everyone’s doing and enjoy a nice meal. But it soon turns into a confusing mess where parents are asking you what you’re doing with your life and pointing out all of your mistakes and telling you to save money, leaving you feeling confused and frustrated. Okay, so it’s not exactly like a Thanksgiving Dinner. But I’m trying to tie in the holiday dammit.
Or wait. Maybe it’s more like Black Friday. You show up at 4 a.m., wait in line. Everyone is excited about all the great discounts they’re going to get so you all become best friends. Then the doors open and everyone becomes animals, out for themselves. Pretty soon you don’t know where you are or why you even came in the first place. The day ends up with you sitting in the video game section covered in discount games screaming “Why!! WHYYYYY????!!!.” Hmmm. Don’t know if that was much better.
Okay, outside of the obvious, that this script was so freaking hard to keep up with (I don’t feel like the writers had ever read a script before – if they had, they’d have known how difficult this was to read), it simply didn’t move fast enough. The big plot moment – when Finn frames Eddie – doesn’t come until page 57. FIFTY-SEVEN! The movie’s halfway over by that point. That moment should’ve happened on page 17.
And the reason it didn’t is because the writers committed to this dual time-frame approach, which I’m thinking was a mistake. Essentially, for 56 pages, we’re given backstory on how these guys are friends. Backstory is story that stands still. Present story is story that moves forward. There are examples of backstory being interesting (Lost did this well) but it’s almost always a fool’s game. Audiences are interested in the here and now. And even more interested in what comes next.
I would’ve gotten to the betrayal quicker, shown Eddie adapting to life in prison, shown the breakout, then shown him rise up the ranks in the gang, possibly as a different person, then kill Finn. Although I guess that’s sort of like Gangs of New York, so maybe you play with it more. The point is, do something where the story is always pushing forward instead of always jumping back.
Which brings us back (ironically) to dual timelines. This approach is notoriously harder to pull off because a) it’s more complex and b) because you’re covering two stories, it takes you twice as long to get to everything. A few weeks ago we covered a dual-timeline script that worked – Fathers & Daughters – and a big reason for that was that it was a simple story. Just two characters. So jumping around didn’t confuse anything. Here, there’s so much going on that when you added the jumping back and forth, it became too much to bear. I think you need to think long and hard about using the dual-timeline approach. What is your reason for doing it? If it’s stylistic or “different to be different,” drop it. But if you think it’s absolutely positively essential to telling your story (no other way will work better), that’s when you do the dual-timeline.
Somewhere, buried inside this script, is a good story. But right now it’s more complicated than it needs to be. I’m sure there have been some rewrites since. Hopefully they addressed these issues.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Read scripts. By reading scripts, you understand where readers get tripped up and you’re able to avoid those pitfalls. Writers who don’t read scripts tend to overpopulate their stories, over-complicate their plotlines and write vaguely. That’s how “Once Upon A Time” read to me. If you don’t have access to scripts, ask some of the folks here in the comments section for help. They can get you some of the scripts that are floating around out there.
