Genre: Sorta Horror/Teen
Premise: A high school begins to fall apart when its students start spontaneously combusting.
About: This project is based on a recent novel written by Aaron Starmer. It will star Katherine Langford from 13 Reasons Why. Brian Duffield not only adapted the screenplay but is also making his directorial debut. The movie was shot in January of last year so I’m not sure why it hasn’t come out yet. Spontaneous is one of the first films to come from AwesomenessTV, which is one of the biggest channels on Youtube.
Writer: Brian Duffield (based on the novel by Aaron Starmer
Details: 110 pages (First Draft)
I like going into Brian Duffield scripts as naked as possible. Not physically of course. But I don’t want to know anything. One of the great things about Duffield scripts is that crazy things can happen at any moment and I don’t want to spoil them before they happen.
With that said, I heard through the grape vine that this was an adaptation, and that definitely colored my reading experience. Duffield has worked almost exclusively on original material, which has been great because his mind doesn’t work like anyone else’s. So if he’s working off of someone else’s idea, he has to reign in some of that famous creativity.
And as we’re about to find out, that’s not the best way for him to work.
Spontaneous is Thirteen Reasons Why meets John Hughes meets Warm Bodies. 17 year old Mara is sitting in Pre-Calc when the girl in front of her, Katelyn, explodes. At first, everybody assumes it’s a school shooting so they run around the hallways like chickens with their heads cut off. But eventually they learn that Katelyn wasn’t shot. She spontaneously combusted. Or exploded.
While Mara and her best friend, Tess, struggle to make sense of what happened, fellow senior and kinda weirdo, Dylan, crashes the party to say hi. Dylan, it turns out, has been in love with Mara from afar all throughout high school. Lucky for Dylan, Mara’s kind of liked him, too. So the two start dating. Which should be a happy time. Until another senior, a gay football player, spontaneously explodes.
Now it’s an epidemic. Which means the media and the authorities descend on this small town, E.T.’ing it so no one can come in or out. They start doing all these experiments on the kids, until they eventually develop a pill that keeps people from spontaneously exploding. And so it’s BACK TO SCHOOL for everyone, where it seems like everything is normal again. That is until a mass of spontaneous explosions occur (spoiler) including Dylan!
With the love of her life gone, Mara suspects that she’s the curse that killed everyone. I mean, Katelyn was right in front of her when she exploded. Dylan was around her all the time and he exploded. So it must be true. But eventually Mara philosophizes that life sucks no matter what and that all you can do is your best before you die. The end.
Hmmm…
I don’t know who to direct my disappointment towards here. While Duffield wrote the script, everything is based on the book. And, as the saying goes, you’re only as good as your source material.
Look, the good news is that this is an original premise. No zombies. No vampires. No aliens. No monsters. The spontaneous combustion premise is unique.
The problem is, the author didn’t know what to do with that premise. For starters, it’s a terrible premise for building tension. At least when you have zombies, you can create suspenseful situations as those zombies slowly move in on our trapped characters. But with spontaneous combustion, it’s random. There’s no way to build tension with randomness. You’re sitting around for 25 pages of dialogue and then you hear how a new person just blew up. I’m not sure there’s any way to fix that problem.
Nor is the structure here story-friendly. It’s a car ride where nobody tells us where the destination is. So we’re not even the annoying kids in the back screaming, “Are we there yet?” We’re the annoying adults screaming, “Where are we going?”
Theoretically, this sets the stage for what Duffield does best. He can plant two characters in a room and let them dialogue away. Indeed, the dialogue here feels effortless and flowing. The problem is, because there’s no plot, and therefore nobody’s trying to get anywhere in these scenes, they start to get tiring. And repetitive.
And this is why it’s so important to figure out your structure ahead of time. Because if you repeatedly drop characters into scenes where they don’t want anything other than to talk to each other, the story’s never going to feel like it’s advancing.
When you’re writing a story like this, you have two directions you can go in. Direction 1 is to create a mystery behind the problem (spontaneous combustions) that the characters are trying to solve. This gives your heroes a goal and therefore a purposeful journey. “Why are people exploding,” Mara can say. “Let’s investigate.” They don’t do that here. Scientists come in and try to figure things out. But our heroes spend that time sitting around waiting. The other option is to use your story as a metaphor for something. At least that way, we get the feeling that there was a purpose to the experience. If this teaches us a powerful lesson about life, it can work.
But this didn’t do that either (or, at least, this draft didn’t). And I think it’s a source material problem because I went to Amazon afterwards and I was seeing the same complaints in the reviews. The author had his characters talk the whole time while a bunch of people blew up without explanation and in the end, capped it off with, “that’s the randomness of life.” I think I speak for writers everywhere when I say that if your theme is, “randomness of life, bro,” you probably haven’t dug deep enough.
I’ll say it again: you’re only as good as your source material. You’re never going to teach Danny DeVito to be Roger Federer. Then again, it’s important to note that this is a first draft, that Duffield likely added more structure in the subsequent drafts. But for this to have worked, somebody would’ve needed to come up with a radical idea on how to make this concept movie-friendly. I hope that’s what Duffield did. Cause if this movie does well, he’ll get to make some of his own scripts. And that’s what I’d really like to see.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s dangerous to give characters other than your heroes the active storyline. In other words, the goal here is to find out why these spontaneous combustions are happening. But that goal is given to the FBI and scientists while our heroes sit around and wait for them to finish. You want your heroes to be involved in the ultimate goal of the screenplay. 99 times out of 100, that results in a better script.
