Genre: Biopic
Premise: The true story of how a CIA agent used his contacts he made in the agency to sell explosives to Libya after he was fired.
About: This script made the 2013 Black List and got Matthew McConaughey attached half a year later. Unfortunately, the project became a casualty of McConaughey’s busy schedule. This is one of the curses of getting a hot actor attached to your project. On the one hand, you become one of the most buzz-worthy projects in town. On the other, these hot actors are always over-booked and end up dropping out of a lot of projects. You risk becoming one of those projects. Once that happens, you’ll never regain that initial buzz again, so there’s a chance that no A-list actor signs on to your movie. Was it really that great to bring that actor on then? To avoid this mistake, you have to depend on your agents and producers. Ask them, “Is he really going to do it?” If that actor is signed on to 7 other movies, you might want to think twice about making the leap.
Details: 137 pages of boring
Sometimes you have to admit to yourself that you don’t have a movie.
You can rearrange the cards in your hand as many times as you want. But if it’s shitty hand, you’re not going to win it. I suppose you can try and bluff, which is what The Company Man attempts to do. But it’s hard to fool seasoned producers who are all too aware that one shitty movie can bankrupt their company.
And I’m not bashing the writer here, believe it or not. The writing is actually quite energetic. But where’s the story man? This isn’t a story.
Allow me to explain.
Edwin P. Wilson was a nobody farmer’s son who grew up wanting better things for himself. He fought in the end of the Korean War, then afterwards stumbled into a position at the CIA. Wilson’s job there was lame. He was, essentially, an errand boy.
Then one day the CIA director sent him to Libya, where he amassed a large network of political friends. To achieve this, he needed to operate a pretend company and do business with these politicians. However, one day, the government discovered that the CIA were torture-happy lunatics and cleaned house. Wilson got swept out with everyone else.
At this time, Libya was under extreme sanctions, and Wilson realized that even though he was no longer in the CIA, he could use his old contacts to make money. So he started selling weapons to Libya, specifically C-4. Lots of C-4.
After becoming very rich off these deals, two guys in a completely unrelated country are killed by a car bomb. The CIA believe that Wilson is responsible for this even though, it turns out, he isn’t. So the rest of the story is the US government relentlessly pursuing Wilson to link him to this murder.
I have read some all-timer boring scripts in my years. But this is up there.
The script spends the first half of its running time showing us how Wilson became an underground arms dealer to Libya. Why do I care about this? What makes selling arms to a backwater 3rd world nation that has little-to-no influence on the world stage a relevant story to follow? Why should I care that this is happening? The script never explains that. There are zero stakes to what’s going on.
Let me explain that further so aspiring screenwriters don’t make the same mistake themselves. If Wilson was selling nuclear weapons to Cuba in the 60s, during the height of the Cold War, that is a world-stage high-stakes event that is worthy of a story. He would’ve been putting the U.S. in direct danger of being blown to smithereens. But instead he’s selling C-4 to Libya so that they have a few extra explosives in their archives. Who cares?
The second half of the script focuses on how Wilson gets blamed for a car bomb killing that he had nothing to do with. So let me get this straight. The engine driving this story is whether our main character is going to be put in prison for an insignificant pair of deaths in another country that he has nothing to do with and that, even if he did, has zero global implications?
Where the fuck are the stakes?
You may answer that with: the stakes are high for Wilson, Carson. If he gets caught, he goes to prison. Yeah, but you’ve established that this story takes place on a global level. The stakes can’t just be our hero. They have to be bigger than that.
So how did this script gain traction?
Through the actor loophole.
The actor loophole is when you write a part that an actor will want to play and then who the hell cares what the plot is. The goal is to get the big actor. You get the big actor, you don’t need a plot. You’ve got a greenlit movie. And this is a showy character that I can see actors wanting to play. Wilson is cocky. He’s got a shaky moral compass. He’s got a lot of those cool Scorsese voice over lines that actors love.
But this is what drives me nuts about biopics. The writers are so focused on the main character that they don’t pay attention to the story. And there’s no story here. Waiting to see if a guy goes to prison because of some random bombing he had nothing to do with isn’t a story.
Also, I don’t think anyone wants to see these international weapons sales movies. You had that Nicholas Cage “Lord of War” movie that nobody liked. You had the more recent “War Dogs” with Jonah Hill. I get the idea behind these concepts. Ooh, it’s ironic, cuz, like, we’re selling weapons to our enemies! But that’s just a thought. It’s something you literally think about for 3 seconds, then go, “Yeah, that’s kind of interesting,” and then you’re done with it. There’s zero reason to spend 2 hours expanding that thought.
Like I said earlier, you have to be honest with yourself about if your idea is worthy of a feature treatment. The Company Man is half-worthy. It’s got the character. But it never figured out the story.
Will this ever get made? I don’t know. The actor catnip is strong with this one. That’s always a wild card. But it needs to restructure its story so there are some actual stakes. Everything here feels intensely insignificant, to the point where after finishing each page, you ask, “What’s the point of all this?”
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: I love italicizing voice overs, particularly if you have a character who’s going to be talking in voice over a lot, such as Wilson. It’s a big flashy visual aid, so you know you’re reading voice over every time it starts. And it’s great for scripts like this because there will be times where Wilson speaks out loud then speaks in voice over right away. It’s great to have that visual aid that allows us to make that mental switch so we understand why the character is speaking twice in a row.
