John Wickan?
Genre: Action/Supernatural
Premise: When an elite assassin is sent to the haunted Harz Mountains in Germany on an extraction job she intends to be her last, she quickly learns that the local legends about witchcraft are true and must face a sinister supernatural threat.
About: Colin Bannon is quickly climbing the Hollywood literary ladder, unleashing tons of big idea scripts into the machine, which is gladly snatching them up. He already sold that Squid Game-inspired spec about a secret Russian marathon where only the best runners are invited, and then killed off over the course of the race. Will John Wickan be his next sale?
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 112 pages
Peacemaker’s Jennifer Holland for Six?
You gotta give it to Colin Bannon. The guy is a high concept generating machine. We already looked at one super high concept 2021 Black List entry of his. This is the other one.
While I love Bannon’s infatuation with big ideas, I think he gets a little too crazy as his scripts go on. They feel like chaos. And it becomes harder and harder to see through that chaos to find the story.
There’s something to be said there about writer blind spots. Every writer has them and I used to think that if you told a writer over and over again that Issue X was a blind spot of theirs, they’d eventually fix it.
But an argument can be made that every writer *is* their blind spot. Has Christopher Nolan ever shored up his excessive exposition? Is Joss Whedon capable of not writing quippy dialogue? Is it possible for Judd Apatow to write a movie that stops at 3 acts?
I remember one of my giant weaknesses that never seemed to go away was when I got a man and a woman in a scene — didn’t matter the genre — it would always end up reading like romantic comedy banter. Even though I *knew* it shouldn’t read like that, it still read like that. The price of growing up in the Romantic Comedy Golden Era I suppose.
While these weaknesses tend to be a part of our “voice,” I do think that, as an artist, you should always be trying to improve, and one of the best ways to improve is addressing recurrent criticism.
With that in mind, let’s check out The Devil Herself.
Six is an assassin in her 30s who lives in the middle of nowhere for reasons we’ll find out have to do with her former organization wanting to kill her. But Six is tired of living a life of seclusion and wants to move to “The Island,” a place where “Numbers” go to retire (and subsequently, can’t be assassinated).
So she catches up with an old friend, Two, who tells her that he can get her to the Island, but she’ll have to do something for him first. A 7 year old girl has been kidnapped by some creepy people who are currently holding her in a church on the highest mountain in Germany. Go get her, return her to her mom, and you can go to the Island.
Six zips up the mountain, charges into the church, and finds some crazy Pagan ritual going on, the center of which is the young girl, Petra. Six starts firing away like Rambo, scattering the witches, which include the freaky High Priestess, grabs Petra, and drives her back to her mother.
Just two minutes into the reunion, there’s a knock on the door. They answer and and see Aunt Alice. Except Aunt Alice looks a lot like the High Priestess. Six scans her up and down. Is it the High Priestess?? It’s hard to say without all the blood and robes she had on before. But Six wants to get to that island so she heads out.
She doesn’t get a mile before slamming on the breaks, turning around, and burning rubber back to the house. By that time, the entire family is dead or near-dead, and “Aunt Alice” and Petra are gone. Six hurries after her, shooting Aunt Alice’s van off the mountain with a sniper rifle, then going to retrieve Petra from the wreckage (yes, you read that right).
Once she has Petra again, she realizes that those crafty witches were able to put a demon in her. This means Six will have to transport Petra to a White Magic expert who can exorcise the demon from the girl. Complicating matters is that Six’s old boss, One, has found out where she is and sent every assassin in the area to kill her. Talk about a rough day at work!
Last week I lamented the creative choice to build a show around a man who strangled a goose. This week says hold my beer, and also my shot of tequila, and also this liquor store I just happen to be carrying in my backpack, and proceeds to start with a woman shooting dead a baby deer.
Why do I get the feeling Bannon will not be called in for Disney’s inevitable live-action remake of Bambi?
Bannon: “Okay, so hear me out. We start on Bambi right? And she’s sipping water from the lake. It’s serene. There’s not a cloud in the sky. And then BAM!!! An alligator bursts out of the water and decapitates Bambi with one chomp of his mouth. What do you think? Cause it doesn’t have to be an alligator. Maybe Bambi just falls into the lake and drowns? That could be good?”
Okay, so Six shot the fawn by mistake but still. Not sure you want to start your movie on your hero killing a baby deer.
What follows is, what I’ve come to now know, as “The Bannon Factor.” The Bannon Factor is when you take whatever would normally happen and multiply it by 100. For example, every day in her little shack, Six works out. And she’s got a picture of the Island on her wall. This is what’s written in the scene: “She’s doing sit-ups now. There’s only one decoration pinned to the wall — A lone photograph of a TROPICAL ISLAND. With every rep, she glances at the photo.”
Does she have to look at the picture *EVERY* rep? Can’t she just look at it a few times and get back to focusing on her form? It’s a little on-the-nose to have her look at her island picture for 200 sit-ups in a row… EVERY DAY.
This excessiveness bleeds into his overall style of writing as well. And it’s there on every single page. You don’t get any breaks. Here’s a typical page from The Devil Herself:
The act of reading is not unlike the act of living. People like variety. They like to work out intensely for an hour, then veg out in front of their TV for a little bit. They like to party with friends at night. They like to go on serene hikes in the mountains during the day. If you do the same thing every day all day, with zero variety, you eventually go insane!
And I realize there may be some confusion here because spec scripts are supposed to move fast. But “fast” doesn’t mean non-stop action. I can read a script with two characters falling in love that’s mostly dialogue that reads “fast.”
Yes, you want to move your plot along. But unless you add some variety to your scenes, everything starts to look the same. Predictability is a script-killer. It really is. The second the reader knows where things are going to be 10 pages from now, and 10 pages after that, and 10 pages after that, that’s when they check out. Because what’s the reason to keep reading if you already know what’s going to happen?
Now are there “all-action” movies that work? Yeah, sure. Mad Max Fury Road comes to mind. But just because a handful of movies have pulled off the impossible over the last 75 years doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to do it.
With that said, I do like strange genre combinations. I don’t know many action movies that include witchcraft. And I actually think it’s pretty cool to mix those two things. Bannon could’ve even gone further, in my opinion, and made Six a witch. A witch assassin would be awesome. But whether she’s a witch or not, it doesn’t fix Bannon’s blind spot, which is that the script is all chaos all the time. We need some cool down periods and we need more variety. Until that happens, I will always be in conflict with Bannon’s scripts.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I love it when writers use time-tested movie moments, then take the piss out of them. How many times have we seen, for example, a character about to kill another character, that character freeze before they can kill them, then fall over dead to reveal another character behind them who’s just killed them? If you’re going to put those moments in your script, look for ways to either have fun with them or do something a little different. Here, Bannon tackles a very familiar moment we’ve seen in a lot of movies, and adds an unexpected funny twist to it…
