Genre: Mystery/Horror/Sci-Fi
Premise: Deep in the middle of Europe is a mysterious gorge that has been guarded since World War 2. An American Sniper is sent to the gorge by the US military for the latest watch. What he finds there shocks him.
About: The great thing about selling a script is that when you’ve got another one, there’s a good chance that same company will buy that too. That’s what’s happened here. Skydance, which just made Zach Dean’s “The Tomorrow War,” bought this Dean script as well. The Gorge is being sold as a weird love story but hold the train on that description. It’s more of an original sci-fi horror idea. Dean is one of the few writers out there at the moment selling cool spec scripts. If you’re a “I want to sell a spec” guy, you want to pay attention to Dean’s career.
Writer: Zach Dean
Details: 109 pages
Long-time Black List participant, Zach Dean, is one of the more dependable screenwriters in town. I’ve liked every one of his scripts. More recently, he’s gone from Black List darling to A-List Hollywood screenwriter, penning Chris Pratt’s new movie, The Tomorrow War (which recently signed a deal with Amazon). But Dean has yet to write his Magnus opus, his screenplay that truly shows he’s a master of the craft. This one sounded different so I figured, if there’s a script that’s finally going to get him there, it’d be this one. Let’s take a look-see at…… THE GORGE!
Levi is a special operations sniper. You send him out in the middle of nowhere to take out a drug kingpin from a mile away, then fly him back home. But Levi’s next mission will be unlike anything he’s experienced before. It’s so unique, in fact, that nobody tells him what it is. They simply tell him it’ll take a year.
After a long flight, Levi is dropped over an endless forest with a map. He follows the map and comes across an enormous gorge. The gorge is so deep that it is constantly filled with fog. Levi spots a watchtower where an Australian sniper, JD, greets him. JD has been on this beat for the past year. And boy is it a doozy.
JD explains that Levi’s only job for the next year will be to make sure nothing gets out of that gorge. There are these things, nicknamed “hollowmen,” that try to crawl out of there sometimes. Your job is to shoot them. Oh yeah, you’re in charge of the west side of the gorge. And if you look over there, there’s another watchtower where someone is in charge of the east side.
JD leaves with one last tidbit. There’s a rumor that after you complete your service at the gorge, they kill you. Nice. Something to look forward to. After a couple of nights in the watchtower, Levi hears celebrating across the gorge. Levi picks up his sniper scope to look across the way and sees that his co-guard, Drasa, is partying it up. When she realizes Levi is looking at her, she starts writing messages for him to see. It turns out it’s her birthday. She’s celebrating.
Over the course of the next few weeks, they write messages to each other until, finally, Levi shoots a cable over to the other side of the gorge and ziplines across it! The two spend the night of all nights together and, the next day, when Levi ziplines back, the zipline BREAKS! Which means, that’s right, Levi falls into the gorge!
The bottom of the gorge is a bunch of trees, a stream, and a never-ending supply of a weird-smelling fog. Drasa jumps down into the gorge to save Levi and they’re immediately attacked by Hallowmen (basically, zombies). They begin to put the pieces together. This was some strategic base for World War 2 before something went wrong and it needed to be abandoned. And when Levi runs into his old buddy JD, now 20 years aged, he realizes just how wrong things got.
I have to give it to Zach Dean. He knows how to come up with a high concept. More importantly, he knows how to keep surprising the reader.
When you come up with an idea like The Gorge, you have two ways you can go. You can keep everything on the surface – focus on the two watchtower guards and their ongoing attempts to keep the hollowmen from escaping the gorge. Or you can do what Dean did. You can go into the gorge and fully embrace your concept.
Both options have pros and cons. The first option creates a situation based on mystery. We, the audience, are wondering what’s going on in the gorge. And we fill in the blanks with our own imagination. Usually, the reader’s imagination of what’s happening is better than anything the writer can come up with. So it’s fun to play in this sandbox.
However, your story ends up being a lot simpler. I actually thought this is the route Dean was going to take and he would focus more on the love story. So falling into the gorge was quite the surprise.
The second option gives you more of a movie. You get to visit hell instead of just talk about it. The problem is explaining everything. You have to come up with an entire mythology about the Gorge that’s unique and intereting. Most writers aren’t able to do that. The “hollowmen” the average writer comes up with ends up being generic and the more you explore that world, the dumber it gets. That’s what I experience in the majority of similar scripts I read.
Dean gave me a little more than that. But I wished he would’ve pushed further. We ultimately find out that the hollowmen are former watchtower guards who have been thrown down here after their watch, and that this World War 2 experimental site is turning them into creatures.
Dean did a good job setting up the World War 2 connection early in the script so all of this felt like an organic payoff. But, like a lot of mystery scripts, the more you thought about it, the less it made sense. After each watch, the guards are dropped down here, where they become hollowmen, that the new guards must keep from getting out. But wouldn’t it be easier to just kill everyone after their watch? Instead of adding to the Hallowmen population?
I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to think that much.
It was a fun script regardless and it did keep me guessing. For those reasons, this is worth a read. But I’m sad that Dean still hasn’t executed his perfect script yet. He’s got the talent. He just needs to push himself more.
Actually, that’s a lesson we could all remind ourselves to follow. Push beyond what you think you’re capable of. That’s where the best writing lies.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of my favorite moments in this script is when JD, before he passes the torch to Levi, says to him, “There’s one more thing I have to tell you. There’s a rumor that after you finish your watch, they kill you.” The reason I like this is because it subconsciously introduces a reason to keep reading. If I stop reading, I never find out what happens after the watch. I never find out if it’s true that they kill you. Any little trick you can use to convince your reader to keep reading, use it. Nothing is off-limits. If you can get someone to read your entire script, you’ve done more than most amateur writers. Most people bail on scripts long before that. Take a page out of Zach Dean’s book and introduce something in the future that your reader has to find out if it’s true.
