The Big Stone Grid may be the closest thing we’ll ever get to the next Seven.
Genre: Crime Thriller
Premise: A New York cop investigates a series of torture-centric murders that lead to a strange underground blackmail scheme that’s growing bigger by the day.
About: This one comes from the writer of one of my TOP FIVE favorite scripts, S. Craig Zahler, who wrote The Brigands of Rattleborge (why hasn’t this been made yet???). Making the Black List in 2011, The Big Stone Grid has been a victim of development hell. It got Michael Mann attached after its appearance on the Black List. But he left the project to make Blackhat instead (definitely made the right call there #sarcasm) and now Pierre Morel is making the film, who’s best known for directing Taken.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 137 pages – First Draft
Once you become a big screenwriting hotshot and all the studios are throwing money at you, you’ll realize that you have a new problem – a problem that is infinitely tougher than the one you faced trying to break in. You are now attempting to find the magic formula to GET YOUR MOVIE MADE.
There are many theories on the best way to do this, but it usually comes down to getting a director attached who’s seriously committed to your movie. If you can get a director attached (and by “director,” I don’t mean your friend Bob down the street who made that killer 3 minute short about zombie cats), a studio or film fund will eventually pony up the dough because established directors are the primary ingredient to getting films made.
With that in mind, here’s the thing you have to remember: EVERYONE IN HOLLYWOOD IS STUPID.
And I include myself AND you guys on that list. We are all only capable of seeing people for what they’ve last done. For example, you don’t take a Western to M. Night. You don’t take a musical to Michael Bay. You don’t take Paul Blart 3 to Paul Thomas Anderson.
And this extends to actors as well. When you have to cast the Joker, you don’t call Zak Efron. When you have to cast a bullied loser, you don’t cast Channing Tatum. We only see these actors, directors, writers, as capable of whatever we’ve last seen them do.
Everybody is afraid to take the pigeon out of the pigeon hole. BUT. If you’re smart? That could be your ticket to getting your movie made.
If you want to make The Big Stone Grid, sure, you can go to guys like Michael Mann and David Fincher. Here’s the problem though. These guys have already done this movie, or some version of it. Artists want to challenge themselves. They want to prove they can do something different. So the better option – IF you want your movie made as quickly as possible – would be to find a marketable director who hasn’t done something like this.
Big Stone Grid is slow, thick, heavy, and grimy. Who would love to direct that movie? The guy who’s been pigeonholed as the fast brainless thriller director, that’s who. This is the kind of director that would FLIP over this script. Now of course, it’s a gamble. You don’t know if he can pull it off because he hasn’t shown that yet. But would you rather play director roulette for the next dozen years or get your movie made?
Something to think about for the future.
Okay, onto The Big Stone Grid.
In classic Zahler style, we start off with a torture scene. No one does torture like this man. And while the scene isn’t as memorable as say, the famous “split-in-half” scene in Bone Tomahawk or the hamster scene in Rattleborge (a personal fave), it’s DIFFERENT. And this is why Zahler has sold so many scripts. He writes scenes that are DIFFERENT from the way other writers would write them.
Cut to Garret Winter, a Manhattan detective who’s in a bad mood, seeing as his wife just left him for some loser. Winter and his partner, Benjamin Williams, are checking out a routine suicide where an older man put a bullet in his head, but there’s something off about the crime scene.
Winter looks into it and finds that the man used to be happy until his 14 year-old niece was murdered a few years ago. He never saw life the same after that. When Winter looks deeper, he finds that a lot of mysterious murders and suicides have been happening around town, and that they all may be connected.
Meanwhile, we’re cutting to some psychopath with a burned face come to people’s houses and demand their “payment,” and when that payment can’t be paid, their friends and families are summarily butchered, usually in really horrifying ways.
But things really get fucked when Winter notices a few cops from another precinct at one of his crime scenes. There’s no reason for them to be here, and all it takes is a quick follow-up to find that lots of cops are involved in this – whatever “this” is.
(spoiler) Winter eventually learns that a complex and wide-ranging blackmail scheme is going on around the city, one that utilizes hundreds of people and all sorts of strange checks and balances so that nobody knows who else is involved. It doesn’t take the bad guys long to figure out Winter is onto them. And that his own family is now in a lot of trouble.
I always learn something new when I read Zahler, and I learned something new right away here. Winter’s introductory scene is in a stripper bar. One of the strippers comes over, butters him up, tries to give him a dance. Through their conversation, we learn that Winter is married. In fact, he takes off his wedding ring and hands it to the dancer, tells her to do what she wants with it, and leaves.
Right away, we’re not sure about this guy. He’s giving his wedding ring away to a stripper?? Not exactly winning the husband of the year award with that move. But then, a few scenes later, Winter tells his partner that his wife is leaving him for another man. Now we understand the stripper scene better.
The lesson here is that you don’t have to start with the obvious. Don’t start with the scene where the hero says, “My wife just left me.” You can start with the opposite, where it looks like HE’S the dick. And then switch it. It’s a more playful and therefore entertaining way to get to the same information.
As the script goes on, I had mixed feelings about the execution. Zahler’s scripts are more like “scrovels.” They’re a script-novel hybrid. This guy is not afraid to drop a dozen-liner on you every few pages.
And that got me thinking about this contradiction screenwriters are forced to navigate. The less you write, the easier your script is to read. However, the more information you offer, the more immersed in your world we become.
So which path do you choose?
I think there are a couple of factors to keep in mind. First, you have to be a good writer. If clarity and description comes really easy to you (not just in your mind – but people consistently tell you you’re good at it), then more detailed paragraphs are okay.
But also, you need to be legitimately interested in the details of the world you’re writing about. If you’re describing something to be descriptive, that doesn’t work. If you’re describing something because it fascinates you and you want to share that with the reader – not to mention, it adds context to the story – then that, combined with good writing, will result in readers who will be okay reading through dozen-line paragraphs.
And that’s why Zahler can get away with his verbose style. He’s good at these two things. If you’re not good at these two things, I would adopt a sparse and less ambitious style.
Anyway, back to the story. The developments in The Big Stone Grid were always cool. And I liked that it was reminiscent of Seven without being Seven. Cause that’s what a lot of writers will do when they love a movie. They’ll take a movie like Seven, move the setting to Los Angeles, change one of the detectives to a woman, then write the same movie.
Big Stone Grid was a serial killer movie without the serial killer. It was more about this mysterious blackmailing plot and trying to figure that out. That slight shift helped Big Stone Grid stand on its own.
My only issue with the script, besides it being 10% too slow, was that the ending didn’t come together in that clever “Holy shit” way you were hoping for. The mystery was unique. But when you have a unique mystery you have to come up with a unique conclusion. And that was the one choice that didn’t stand out for me.
Still, Zahler is a fun writer to study because he does a lot of things differently. You never read a Zahler script and go, “Man, that was just like the last 30 scripts I read.”
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be inspired IN TONE and IN FEEL with your favorite films when you write your versions of them. Don’t be inspired by plot or character or you’ll write something too reminiscent of them, and I GUARANTEE YOU readers will pick up on it. They’ll know the exact movie you’re copying and they’ll call you on it. So focus on what those films made you feel and the specific tone they used, then write something that allows you to explore those same elements.
