Genre: Drama
Premise: When a retired criminal gets back in the drug game, he starts taking out the organization’s dead weight, having no idea that one of his targets is his son.
About: Bill Kennedy has been steadily moving up the ladder, having recently penned the weird but kinda-funny Haley Joel Osmet comedy, Sex Ed. He’s also one of the bigger writers on the series, House of Cards (he’s written 8 episodes), and recently adapted “Cyber Storm” for Fox. That project is about a massive snow storm that cuts New York off from the rest of the world (and, of course, chaos ensues). This script, The Fixer, finished with 7 votes on the latest Black List.
Writer: Bill Kennedy
Details: 115 pages (4/9/13 draft)
Cranston for Joe?
Anybody here hear of Charles Bukowski? He’s a semi-famous American writer who wrote some pretty great books in the 60s and 70s. He was also strongly opinionated. He thought a whole lot of other writers sucked. In fact, it was rare that Bukowski came across anything that he liked.
Now you have to remember, Bukowski lived back in a time before Amazon and Goodreads. Outside of recommendations from the New York Times, the only way to find out if a book was any good was to actually read it. The insanity, right? So Bukowski used to sit in the library and open book after book, reading as many pages as he could muster, before throwing them down and moving on to the next one. “Why doesn’t anybody SAY something?” he would ask. “Why doesn’t anybody SCREAM OUT?” he wanted to know.
He hated so many of the books he opened, he started to wonder if there was any good writing anymore. Then he came across a book called “Ask The Dust” by John Fante. “The lines flowed easily across the page,” he said. “Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humor and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.”
Wow! Talk about an endorsement. Isn’t this what we all hope for? To pick something up and be so taken away that the very foundation of our being is shaken?
I bet you’re wondering right now, is The Fixer the next great script? The next Desperate Hours or Nightcrawler? Had I found something with the kind of passion and power to make me stand on the metaphoric mountain tops and demand the world read it, like had happened with Bukowski and Ask the Dust?
In a word, no.
But, I will say this. I read the first five pages of seven professional scripts before I read The Fixer and The Fixer was the only one that attempted to grab me. It was the only script that seemed to WANT me to read it – reminding me of Bukowski’s experience. The first scene finishes with this voice over line: “I’d kill the cockfuck if I could. But I can’t, and I need money to run away, to start over. So I’m going to have to kill these guys, who happen to be friends of mine.” A few pages later, a criminal is so mad that McDonald’s won’t serve his son a Happy Meal because it’s before 10:30 AM, he puts a gun to the checker’s head and tells him, “Get me a motherfucking happy meal.”
This is a script that wants to be read.
I’ve said this before. While not every story is meant to be told this way, most scripts need an edge to stand out. This script had a big ole heaping of edge. BUT. Grabbing someone’s attention and keeping someone’s attention are two different things. The Fixer grabbed me. I prayed it wouldn’t let me go.
50-something Joe is a Fixer. I must admit, I’m not clear on what that is. But according to the few clues we get, it means Joe matches business people together, and then takes a cut of their business. Joe has been out of the game for awhile but he’s going stir-crazy at home. His wife is battling severe depression and rarely leaves the bedroom. Joe wants back in the game.
A friend sets him up with a local drug dealer, Terrance (the guy I mentioned earlier who demanded a Happy Meal), and Joe starts helping him get rid of the dead weight in his business. Joe finds out pretty quickly when he looks into the books that someone is shorting Terrance, and the two start trying to figure out who it is.
Meanwhile, we meet Nick. Nick is Joe’s son, a perennial screw-up. Nick’s harboring a secret from his father – that he’s gay, which keeps him from telling his dad anything that’s going on in his life. Nick gets a job offer to start selling drugs. This is his chance to finally make some money, to show his father that he’s worth something, so he takes it. The problem is, his deadbeat boyfriend, Mark, keeps injecting just as much as he’s selling. Naturally, this leaves him short come pay-up time.
As you might have guessed, Nick is working for Terrance, which means Nick is unknowingly working for his father. And when his father unknowingly pinpoints him as the dealer who’s shorting Terrance, Nick is given less than a week to find the money or die. Will Joe figure out he ordered his own son’s killing before the trigger is pulled? Gosh-darnit I hope so.
The Fixer has a pretty nice premise. You have some nice irony here. A man who unknowingly orders a hit on his son. And Kennedy’s put a lot of work into the character stuff in general. This is what good screenwriters do – every single character has something going on. They’re not paper characters. They’re real people with real problems.
Joe’s wife has severe depression and stays home all day, slowly sucking all of Joe’s life away in the process. Nick is secretly gay and terrified to tell his father. Terrance is still in love with his son’s mother, but she won’t give him the time of day. He’s running this business so he can woo her back with a good life.
Despite this, there were other parts of Joe’s character that were bothering me. Although he clearly starts as our main character, he kind of gets moved to the background. He only seemed to pop up to keep Terrance in check every so often. When you introduce someone as the captain of your ship, we expect to see them at the wheel. Joe wasn’t at the wheel very much.
I started to wonder why Kennedy was doing this. And then I realized, Joe is the only character here who doesn’t have anything at stake. Nick is 5 figures in the hole and needs to find the money to save his life. Terrance needs this business to get the love of his life back. But why did Joe need this? If this all falls apart, he goes right back to his previous life and, presumably, could go ahead and hook up with another drug dealer and start over again.
Also, Kennedy didn’t make it clear enough what a “Fixer” was. We’re told, in Joe’s own words, that a Fixer is someone who brings two business people together and gets a cut of their business. But then Joe goes and leads a drug operation. Does this also fall under the definition of “Fixer” as well? Or is he doing this independent of his old job?
A writer can never forget that while something may be obvious to them, they are not the audience for their scripts. Most of the audience won’t know the details of their world. Therefore, it’s up to the writer to explain them and make them clear. I didn’t get that here.
Finally, I didn’t get the sense that Kennedy really knew this world. He knew more than most. But as far as the specifics of how a drug operation was run, a lot of stuff felt muddy. Here’s something to remember. When you’re writing any kind of criminal movie, your bar has to be Scorsese. One of the reasons his movies are so successful is because he leaves no doubt that he knows this world inside out. We get details on top of details on top of details about how the drug trade works, the casino trade works, the financial trade works. That’s the kind of specificity you have to bring to the table because if you don’t, the script always feels lacking in a way the audience can’t quite put their finger on.
How do you achieve this kind of realism? You may not be able to physically go into the drug trade to do research (although I’d be impressed by any writer so dedicated as to do this). But you can still watch documentaries, read nonfiction books, go to message boards that have real people who do this kind of shit to talk to. I just always feel a little cheated when the subject matter I’m reading about feels fudged.
The Fixer started off with a bang, and was pretty good in places. But in the end, it didn’t quite keep my attention.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: To understand if your character has the appropriate level of stakes attached to his character, you simply ask, “If this character fails, what do they lose?” For Joe, if this drug operation fails, he goes right back to where he was at the beginning, where the worst problem he was dealing with was that he was bored. I don’t think those stakes are high enough. (I suppose you can make the argument that the stakes are his son’s life, but not only does that development come late in the script, but those stakes feel indirect, since he has no clue that his son’s life is even in danger. – This brings up an interesting question – does one need to be aware of one’s stakes for them to work?)
