Genre: Drama
Premise: Two boys get shipwrecked on the remote Alaskan coast and must learn to survive on their own.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer has no produced credits yet.
Writer: Paul Barry
Details: 102 pages
Adam Project’s Walker Scobell for Chris?
Generally speaking, if characters are stuck on an island alone, I’m all in.
There are so many possibilities to play with in the ‘stranded on an island’ sub-genre that you can’t really screw it up. Even without any bells and whistles, you’ve got the survival element, which we’ve learned is incredibly powerful, via Tom Hanks’ Castaway.
So I was looking forward to Skeleton Tree. Hopefully I won’t have to S.O.S. my way out of it.
It’s 2011 (I think) and 11 year old Chris, who’s obsessed with tsunamis, has just lost his father. A year after the funeral, he’s still trying to process the loss when his Uncle Jack calls and says he wants to take Chris on a boat trip with another boy down the coast of Alaska. Chris is thrilled and, after a contentious chat with his mother, off he goes.
After meeting up with Uncle Jack and getting on the boat, Chris meets 14 year old Frank, an angry kid who doesn’t talk much. While heading down the coast, they hit something, sink, and only Chris and Frank are able to get away on the lifeboat.
They wake up on a beach which gives way to an endless forest, which they start exploring. They find a “skeleton tree,” which is a tree with a bunch of coffins hanging from it, presumably from an old tribe that used to live here. They also find a cabin, which gives them shelter.
Their survival journey basically revolves around Frank getting mad at Chris all the time for no reason, and Chris befriending a crow who he names, “Thursday.” Not long after they arrive, Frank injures himself leaving him with a big gash that slowly puts him out of commission. If they’re to get out of here, it will be up to Chris. So off Chris goes to the top of a nearby mountain in the hopes of spotting nearby civilization.
One of the benefits of reading so many screenplays is that you identify patterns in the scripts that work and patterns in the ones that don’t, and you can identify these patterns fairly quickly.
Skeleton Tree starts out in Coastal Japan in 2011. Not because there’s a character we’re going to meet from Japan in 2011. Just to show the infamous 2011 Japan tsunami. Why are we showing a tsunami? Not because this movie has anything to do with tsunamis, or natural disasters for that matter. Because… well, we’ll have a few minor payoffs to the tsunami later in the story.
The very next scene offers us this slugline: INT. VANCOUVER CHURCH (FUNERAL) – DAY (FLASHBACK).
Flashback from when? 2011? When the tsunami happened? Or a flashback from the present day, 2022? We endure the boy’s father’s funeral in this scene then immediately jump to Vancouver Canada, “One Year Later,” in what we’re told is the “Present.” So I think that means it’s 2022, right? That the father died last year, and that our main character is obsessed with looking at old tsunami videos from 2011 for some reason? Or maybe it’s now 2012 and that’s what we’re treating as the “present,” even though it’s 10 years behind yours and my “present,” which I presume is right now.
Let me ask you a question. Weren’t there 10,000 easier ways to open this story? Why not just start in the present, see that our hero has a mother but no father, then reference the fact that his dad is dead via dialogue? Why do I have to do mental jumping jacks on top of tsunamis in order to figure out what year it is?
The counter-argument to this is, the writer is taking artistic liberties to open his script in an interesting visual way. Sure, the tsunami may not be that relevant to the story but it gives us some insight into what interests our main character, which means we’re learning about him. Also, seeing a kid at his father’s funeral is much more impactful than hearing about it. So that’s a fair argument as to why to show that. And movies jump between different years all the time. It may not be the easiest to follow on the page. But in a movie theater, we wouldn’t question these edits.
These are all fair arguments. I’m only telling you that when I see these things, and they’re not executed as clearly as they could be, it usually implies that more confusion is coming. Not always. But usually. Clarity is paramount to a screenplay. If that’s not there in the first few pages, it’s indicative of a larger problem.
On page six, Abby, the mother in the story, gets a call from her son’s uncle, Jack. Uncle Jack wants to take Chris, our hero, on an Alaskan boat trip. After she gets off the phone with Jack, she turns to Chris and says, that was your Uncle Jack. He wants to take you on a boat trip and you’re going to get to do all these things and it will be the adventure of a lifetime.
After Chris excitedly receives the news, the mom then, out of nowhere, says, I don’t think you should go. And she makes the case why she’s not ready to allow her son to go on this rip.
Much like the opening sequence, the scene develops clumsily. A mother excitedly tells her child about the adventure of a lifetime only to then tell him he can’t go. What happened here?
I suspect what happened is this: The writer needed to introduce a plot point – the Uncle wanting to take his nephew on this trip. So he had the Uncle call the mom, and the mom explain this plot information to the son. The writer also wanted the mom to not support this idea. Which is why she did a 180 in the time it takes to snap your fingers. The writer, in this instance, is thinking of the two things he needs to happen in order to make his story work AND NOT how this scenario would actually unfold in real life.
In real life, a parent wouldn’t say, “Guess what! Your grandpa wants to take you for ice cream.” “Yay! When can we leave??” “You can’t. I don’t want you going.”
A simple fix would have been to have the mother busy, the phone ring, the kid answer, the Uncle tell him about the trip, the kid tell his mom about the trip, and the mom say no. That’s a much more logical progression and you don’t have to have the weird moment where the mom switches from excited to resistant.
Obviously, you should write however you want to write. But, at some point, you need to read your script through the eyes of a reader. You need to see it through the lens of someone who doesn’t have all the extra information you have in your head. Is the sequence of events clear? Do the scenes pass the “I could see this happening in real life” test? If that critical eye never does a pass on your script, you’re sending something out that’s going to feel like the screenplay version of a Los Angeles side street – aka, riddled with speed bumps.
Wow, Carson. You just spent this entire review on the first six pages. But how was the actual script?? Well, I’m predisposed to liking any sort of “shipwrecked on an island” story, which is why I wanted to read the script in the first place. And there are a few cool elements spread about, such as the titular “skeleton tree.” There’s also a sort of Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn adventure angle to the proceedings that, at times, was charming.
The problem was, the central relationship didn’t work for me. I could never figure out why Frank hated Chris other than the writer wanted him to. I could never get a feel for their dynamic and, as a result, I wasn’t as invested in their story as I wanted to be. On top of that, the plot needed more creativity. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot more planned than dropping these kids in a forest and seeing what happened. I would’ve liked more of a progression to the events that unfolded, to feel like we were moving towards something. There was nothing excessively egregious here but I actively kept thinking: WHEN IS SOMETHING GOING TO HAPPEN? There’s a gear or two missing from this story.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Unless you are directing your own screenplay or being paid to write a script by producers, be careful about opening your script with an overly cinematic sequence (i.e. something out of a Terrance Malick movie). While cinematic sequences (visual, kinetic, dissociative, voice-overs, plays with time in unique ways, jumps around a lot, montage-driven) can work amazing on-screen, they have far less impact on the page, and can often be confusing unless they’re impeccably described. I wouldn’t say that they’re impossible to pull off. But I see these attempts fail far more than I see them succeed. And if they’re confusing enough, you risk the reader closing your script before they’ve even gotten out of the first scene. The reader wants the read to be easy. They don’t want to have to do work. In fact, the second a script starts to feel like work, the reader is out.
What I learned 2: It’s often confusing for readers when scripts are set in the near past for no obvious reason. Like, if you wrote a script set in 2015, most readers are going to wonder why the script isn’t just set now, in 2022. I understand that there are remnants from the 2011 tsunami that wash up on the Alaskan shore during this script, which is why it’s not set in present day. But that isn’t immediately apparent in the story. And the tsunami has no obvious effect on the plot. I was just never convinced that this needed to be set in 2011. If you really wanted the tsunami stuff in there, you could’ve still had an old Japanese tsunami boat shipwreck, and made it 10 years old instead of 1 year.
