Genre: Family/Sci-Fi
Premise: After moving to Maine and befriending an enigmatic hermit, twelve-year-old Henrietta Thorne begins to wonder if he holds the key to solving a mystery that has eluded our planet for more than a decade.
About: Today’s writers have been at the screenwriting craft for over ten years. They wrote and directed the 2008 dramedy, Humboldt County, starring Fairuza Balk, and the 2014 comedy, Growing Up and Other Lies, starring Amber Tamblyn. Moving out of their comfort zone, their latest script is a sci-fi family flick, which I’d describe as “E.T. meets DEVS.” The screenplay was popular enough to land on last year’s Black List with 7 votes.
Writers: Darren Grodsky & Danny Jacobs
Details: 111 pages
Writing a good kids movie is one of the toughest challenges a screenwriter will face.
That’s because when you’re writing a movie for kids – your E.T.’s, your Charlie and the Chocolate Factorys, your Home Alones – there’s an understanding that your key demographic is not as discerning as your average mature moviegoer. Much of what your audience will see on screen will be the first time they see it.
This creates a “perfect storm” scenario where the writer can throw in way more cliches and tired choices than they normally would, knowing that the kids won’t care.
However, you still have an extremely discerning series of adult gatekeepers you must impress. Therefore, you have to bring a legitimate level of quality to the script to get them on board. Which brings us right back to where we are with movies for adults, which is that the writing bar is high.
This puts writers in a weird purgatory where they’re trying to please two opposing masters.
If you want my opinion on what makes for a strong family script, it’s concept. An exciting concept gets kids in theaters so producers will overlook weaknesses in your script – more so than in “adult” genres – because it’s hard to find a home run kids idea. If a producer spots one, he’ll hire however many rewrites he needs to get the script in shape.
The Man In The Woods is a tough call as a concept. The subject matter is quite heady. So I don’t know how it’s going to play to children.
Henrietta Thorne, 12 years old, has just moved to a small town in Maine with her single mom and younger deaf brother. Science-obsessed Henrietta is excited about the move because she’s close to the “Rip.” The “Rip” is a giant hole that appeared in the sky 13 years ago that science can’t explain.
As Henrietta starts to make friends, which include a boy named Dustin who wants to be an obituary writer, she learns of the Millinocket Hermit, a strange man who lives deep in the Maine forest. One day, while out exploring, she falls down a hill, injures herself, and the Hermit finds her and nurses her back to health.
Henrietta can tell that this man is different because he’s able to float above the ground. Henrietta learns that the man used a strange wrist device to fix her and takes the device home. When her brother, Ben, gets sick, she gives him the device, and not only does it save him, but it repairs his hearing!
Meanwhile, the Hermit is dying, presumably because he needs that wrist device back. So Henrietta must sneak into the hospital and retrieve it (the doctors took it off her brother). She’s able to get it back, then deliver it to the Hermit so he survives.
(Spoilers)
Once reunited, the man reveals he came from the Rip and that he’s from the future. He lives in the wild because, if he interacts with the world, the Rip grows stronger and becomes more dangerous, unleashing things like hurricanes and mass locust storms. There’s one more secret the man is keeping from Henrietta. But that one he cannot tell her, or else he risks the entire world imploding.
The theme of this review was going to be: How to write child characters. But when I started to form the basis for the article, I realized this topic is way too expansive to fit in a single review. So I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes.
Most writers make the mistake of creating precocious kids who are just like adults. And I understand the appeal. It’s easier for an adult to write a child if the child acts like an adult. But if you look back at some of the most famous movies with children, you don’t see this as often.
When you write children, it’s best to key in on themes that are important to children. Friendship is a common one. E.T. is about a kid who needs a friend. So the alien isn’t so much an alien as it is a friend just when your child hero needed him.
Another popular theme is being good. That’s one of the driving principles of being a child – learning right from wrong and making good decisions. This is packaged in constant reminders to “Be good.” And “Don’t be bad.” That’s what Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory is all about. The reason Charlie “wins” at the end is because unlike the other kids, he was given the choice to hand over the everlasting gobstobber to Willy’s candy nemesis for money, but he didn’t. He gave it back instead.
To Grodsky & Jacobs’s credit, they do explore a somewhat popular children’s theme of moving somewhere new where you don’t know anyone. It’s a nightmare for a lot of children. You have to leave all your friends behind and start over. It’s scary.
But that choice was negated by making Henrietta an – you guessed it – overly precocious smarter-than-your average-adult 12 year old girl. We’re going right back to that problem again. It feels lazy when child characters are written this way. Charlie isn’t written this way in Willy Wonka. Elliot isn’t written this way in E.T. The reason that matters is because those characters feel more like KIDS. And kids (the ones who go to the movie) can relate better to kids.
I don’t know about you. But I never liked the kids who acted liked adults when I was young. I wanted to hang out with other kids!
That’s not to say there aren’t stories where the precocious character type won’t work. And I didn’t dislike Henrietta. But I guess the issue I always run up against when I encounter these characters is that they *feel written*. Instead of just *being*, you can feel the writer’s hand crafting every clever line, crafting every adult-like move. It doesn’t feel organic.
Getting back to the script, it was mostly entertaining. I like what the writers were trying to do. They leaned into the emotional component of the story. The climax is not about the science-fiction stuff. It’s about the characters. A lot of writers make that mistake where they get too wrapped up in the plot stuff when what the viewers really want is some sort of emotional catharsis from the characters.
But the execution never popped for me. It was one of those scripts where you admire the professionalism, you can appreciate what they were going for, you can see why the script got attention. But it was missing that “extra” piece that gets readers excited.
I suspect that the concept was the reason for that. It’s fun. But it’s a shade too soft to build a movie around. It needed something else.
I’m interested to hear what all of you think makes for good kid character writing. We all agree that the precocious stuff is overused. But what DOES work? What do you consider to be good kid character writing? Use movie examples if you can!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Because children don’t have as much life experience as adults, their flaws will be SIMPLER. They might be SELFISH. They might be SHY. They might be IMPATIENT. Don’t overthink flaws with kids. Keep it simple. Keep it stupid.
