Genre: Period/Drama/Comedy?
Premise: A group of Allied men is tasked with going into Europe during World War 2 and saving all the culturally important pieces of art before they’re stolen by the Nazis.
About: George Clooney co-wrote and directed this film. The film stars himself, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, and Cate Blanchett. It was originally supposed to be released in 2013, but Clooney couldn’t finish it in time, so it’ll be released February 7th. This is Clooney’s 4th writing effort (2 features and one TV movie). Co-writer Grant Heslov is Clooney’s co-writer in crime, working with him on two of those movies, but is probably better known as an actor who’s appeared in over 60 TV shows and films.
Writers: George Clooney & Grant Heslov (based on the book, “The Monuments Men” by Robert M. Edsel).
Details: 4th draft – June 15, 2012
The Monuments Men feels like that odd-duck of a movie writer-director George Clooney is trying to make more of in an increasingly derivative Hollywood that caters too heavily to 13 and 14 year olds. You gotta love Clooney for taking on the likes of billionaire Daniel Loeb recently, who tried to trash the studio he invested in (Sony) for making so many duds, which Clooney said was “dangerous to our industry” for someone who didn’t know jack about filmmaking to say. Indeed, the more you push studios to only go with the super safe bets, the less originality we’re going to get. Clooney believes in taking chances, in making adult movies like The Monuments Men. And I’m all in with him. We need to celebrate when our biggest and brightest stars create diversity in the market. If all I’m going to get is Transformers movies for the rest of my life, I’m walking off the stage without finishing my speech (Miss SS: “That’s the first time I thought Michael Bay might be an android that someone forgot to charge all the way.”)
So I bet you’re thinking, “Wow, Carson must’ve really loved the script for The Monuments Men with that kind of introduction,” right? Oh how wrong you’d be! You see, I want diversity just like the Cloonester. But I want diversity with GOOD WRITING, not the wandering unclear narrative that The Monuments Men turned out to be.
So it’s 1942, and Professor Frank Stokes brings it to the president’s attention that while, yes, millions of people are dying in that little war over in Europe, the bad guys are stealing all the great art and bringing it back to Hitler, which is pretty bad too. Not only that, but guys with grenades and tanks don’t pay much mind to the 900 year old paintings that are inside local churches. If someone in the know were there, those paintings could be protected, even saved!
He proposes getting a group of men together, stodgy old art-scholar types, men who know the difference between Picasso and Park LaBrea, head directly into the war, and start saving all that art. The prez agrees and off they go, but not before a trailer-perfect basic training montage of all these out-of-shape men trying to climb over a wall.
Of the men we have Granger, a painter, Garfield, a sculptor, Savitz, the president of the Harvard Society For Contemporary Art, Campbell, an architect, and Jean-Claude, director of design at a well-known university.
Once they get to Europe, the men decide to split up, with some going to Normandy, some going to Belgium, etc. etc. From that point on, things get a little unclear. I want to be as nice as possible, but it was hard to keep track of who was where and why. For the most part, these pairs were in the forest, following one lead after another, trying to find any Nazi-stolen paintings they could and getting them back.
As they collect clues, the end of the war nears, and they get closer to the front line of Germans who are stealing this art, eventually figuring out where they’re going to be before they’re there, and trying to head them off at the pass. They’re able to get there, but with the Germans still lingering, and the Russians coming in to claim their share of the loot, it won’t be easy to get all those paintings back.
Sheesh, at 145 pages, this script was a World War in itself. I felt like I was storming the beaches of Boremandy. So what is a reader’s biggest fear when he opens a script this big? Why do they always complain when they see a page number this huge? Because 999 times out of 1000, it means the script is UNFOCUSED. It means the writers lost themselves somewhere along the way, following multiple threads and multiple characters into unchartered wars, and couldn’t find their way back to shore.
So guess what The Monuments Men’s biggest problem is. Any takers? Shouldn’t be that difficult.
I’m not sure how many drafts Clooney and Heslov wrote after this (this is the 4th). So maybe they fixed this issue. But boy is this script all over the place. One of the biggest problems is that the monuments men SPLIT UP. They go in pairs to different countries. So instead of getting to see all these personalities work together in a cohesive format, they’re sent off to do their own thing. That seemed like a really odd choice to me. Wouldn’t it have been so much better to see these guys tackle this thing as a group?
And that brings me to THE biggest problem. The goal here is too vague. It’s not clear exactly what everyone has to do. When you give your protagonist a goal, it’s best for them and the audience if it’s specific (Indiana Jones goes after THE ARK, not a bunch of different religious artifacts). Here, everyone’s going after “art.” Not any specific piece of art. Just as much or whatever art they come across.
I couldn’t help but think this script would’ve been a thousand times better if they were going after one very important piece of art, not unlike how they structured Saving Private Ryan. Can you imagine a funnier version of Saving Private Ryan (which is kind of how they’re marketing this anyway) with these old guys searching for a particular painting in a giant war fought by 20 year olds? It may have even been cooler if a really rich criminal hired 7 guys to go into the middle of World War 2 and steal him one of the most important paintings in the world under the cover of all this chaos (hmmm, future heist film?). Or, if they wanted to stick closer to the real story, then at least have them going after a particular group of paintings (that were all being transported together), anything that made the goal singular, as opposed to randomly spread all over the place. Because it was the “randomly spread all over the place” characters that made this thing feel so damn unfocused.
In fact, the likely reason they’re having so much trouble editing this is because they don’t have that clearly laid out goal that EVERYONE is going after. It’s all so spread out and unclear, that likely everyone in the editing room is unclear about who they should be following and who they should give the most time too.
That was another issue. Who was the protagonist? I’m not sure. I’m sure the writers would tell me, “Fuck you. Who says you only need one protagonist?” And I’d say, “Okay, fair point.” But if you don’t have a clear protagonist leading the story, you need to have clarity in the other parts of your story to offset that, and this did not.
Likewise, a ticking time bomb would’ve really helped here. There doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. Characters sit around and talk about the war and we’re unclear where they’re going or how long this is all going to last. Again, this comes back to the goal, that they must “get art,” and not a specific piece of art. How can you create a ticking time bomb on getting something if there’s no clear piece of art (or grouping of art) to get?
Probably the biggest thing that surprised me, though, was how similar all the characters were. Clooney, being an actor, knows how important characters are. But nobody really stuck out here. There was no big personality, no one who popped off the page. Often times I’d be reading and have no idea who was talking. Then I’d look at the character names and realize I didn’t remember who was who. That’s a real killer for a script, especially an ensemble, when you’re writing a bunch of characters and you want those characters to stand out from each other.
This was an ambitious idea, and something that had the potential to be cool. Despite the 1 billion stories that have been told about World War 2, I’d never heard of this one before, so, yeah, why not make a movie out of it?
But the story feels uneven on the page, and I suspect that’s the same thing that’s happening in the editing room. I know Clooney is about trying new things and not always catering to the Hollywood machine, but this script could’ve been so much better had it followed some basic storytelling devices like having a concrete goal and more urgency. The biggest problem with it, though, is that it spread itself too thin. Too many characters in too many places with not enough meat/drama packed in those places to keep us interested. Should be interesting, though, to see what the final cut comes out like.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When reading a two person scene, it’s usually easy to tell who’s who, even if you’re not looking at the character names. But in a scene with multiple characters, it’s harder, because a lot of people are talking. These scenes are the true test for screenwriters, then, to see if they’re good with dialogue. If the reader is able to tell who’s who in these scenes without looking at the character names, you have done an amazing job differentiating your characters and dialogue. If not, it means all your characters sound the same, and you must put more effort into making them sound different (i.e. one always swears, one stutters, one barely speaks, one can’t stop talking, one’s a wise-ass, one’s a know-it-all, one’s a tough guy, one always sees the worst in everything, one’s religious and always bringing up God). So go into one of your scripts and pick a scene where all of your characters are talking. Without looking at the names, are you easily able to pick out who said what? If so, good job! If not, fix it!
