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Genre: Period Piece/Biopic
Premise: An inside look at the unique relationship between John Wayne and John Ford, who collaborated on one of the greatest movies of all time, THE SEARCHERS.
About: This script made it on the 2019 Black List. Screenwriter MacMillan Hedges sold another script a couple of years ago about a time travel heist that I reviewed. He also worked as a writer’s assistant on the short-lived Robert Kirkman (Walking Dead) show, “Outcast.”
Writer: MacMillan Hedges
Details: 99 pages
I’ve tried to watch The Searchers a couple of times now but I haven’t been able to get past the first 30 minutes. And that’s because the first 30 minutes all take place in one room! Or, at least, that’s what I remember.
The problem with these older movies is they were operating along the same lines as the previous storytelling medium – plays. In plays, there’s only one stage. So you can’t have a bunch of locations. Movies took on that same approach and only, over time, moved away from it.
With that said, it’s still on my list of movies to finish. And if one of you can convince me why it’s worth finishing, I’ll watch it as soon as this week! But, in the meantime, I’m approaching today’s script only as a disconnected piece of storytelling through which I don’t understand all the variables. Take that for what it’s worth!
A young journalist named Peter Bogdanovich sets out to write a book about John Ford and The Searchers, his favorite movie. Ford is notoriously prickly about discussing his movies, especially that one, but he reluctantly gives Bogdanovich permission to write it.
This sends Peter off to get John Wayne’s take on the production. Wayne is doing something insane, which is self-financing a movie about the Alamo in which he’s both directing and starring. Once there, we begin cutting back and forth between Wayne and Ford’s recollection of their dysfunctional creative partnership.
What we mostly learn is that John Ford is a really really really really really bad person. He’s manipulative, mean, aggressive, a bully. Apparently, John Ford loved dressing down a crew member in front of everyone more than he did actually framing a shot. Mostly, Ford seems bored by his profession. I suppose it’s so mundane to him that he doesn’t see his work the magical way everyone else does.
As the characters recall the lead-up to The Searchers, we learn that Wayne was a nobody before Ford found him and Ford loved having that power. He loved that Wayne did badly whenever he didn’t do a movie with Ford. Ford would toy with him whenever Wayne’s career was in the toilet, dangling starring roles in front of him, creating doubt, only to, at the last second, offer him the role.
This dysfunctional whatever you’d call it relationship plays out through their entire careers. Even, at the end, Wayne struggles to reconcile who Ford was to him. He also must decide if protecting Ford’s biggest secret is worth what it costs him.
John Ford
I think I learned something new today.
I like two-hander biopics!
It spices up a genre that is so vanilla, it borders on tasteless.
One of my big problems with biopics is they’re annoyingly predictable. But once you introduce the two-hander, that goes away. The very fact that you’re cutting back and forth between two people provides the script with a natural unpredictability.
The two-hander also infuses the biopic with conflict. At least if you do it right. Since, as a two-hander, you want to look for two characters who are at odds with each other rather than content. If you pick the right pair, it’s like a “versus” battle.
With that said, John Ford seems to be his own personal tornado of conflict. I didn’t know anything about the guy but he seems like a grade-A a$$hole to the millionth degree. Holy schnikees was he a jerk. I’m not one who supports cancel culture but I would not have minded seeing Ford go through the online mob wringer. This guy wouldn’t have made it past his first movie if he’d directed it today!
Granted, that’s what makes the script work. Ford is a total jerkface and Wayne is his forever punching bag. Watching their creative partnership play out is highly difficult at times. At one point, Ford cancels an entire day of shooting to force Wayne to learn how to walk like a man in front of the crew. This is the kind of terrifying dictator we’re dealing with.
This is also where the script runs into some trouble – and this is something I see periodically with two-handers. You have to be careful that the more dominant lead doesn’t overshadow the second lead. You’re always going to have a “bigger” character in a pairing. In this case, that’s Ford. He’s the big angry bully. But you still need to give your other character some weighty moments or else the script quickly becomes unbalanced.
Wayne spends the majority of this movie brow-beaten, like a little puppy who’s constantly being yelled at. Just because a character is quieter, like Wayne, does not mean that you can’t give them moments. Andy Dufrense, in The Shawshank Redemption, is a quiet character. But he still has big moments. Like when he locks himself inside the music room and plays Opera for the entire prison, despite knowing that he’ll spend a month in isolation for it.
The script also doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Its title promises an exploration of The Searchers. But that’s not what it is at all. At one point we zag into the 1940s Hollywood Blacklist saga and I was sitting there wondering, “Where is this going?” I suppose you could argue that the title is a metaphor for these two searching for meaning or something. No offense, but eff off. Moviegoers hate when they’re promised one thing and are given something else. That’s one rule you do not want to violate.
Luckily, there’s enough interesting stuff here, especially if you’re ignorant about these two like me, to make this worth reading. The relationship itself between the two lives up to the hype, especially the stuff about Ford hating Wayne for never joining the war.
And I also think the script asks a question that all artists must ask themselves again and again throughout their career, which is, how uncomfortable are you willing to be for success? Because, usually, you have to sacrifice a high degree of comfort to be successful.
That’s the footnote of Wane’s relationship with Ford. Ford was the only one who got great performances out of Wayne. That’s why Wayne kept going back to him even though it made him miserable. Because he knew that every movie he’d make with Ford would be good.
Kudos to Wayne for that because that’s not easy to do. Who wants to be miserable for a whole year? We only get like 80 of them.
It’s an imperfect script but the two-hander biopic angle and all the interesting history you learn about this relationship, as well as a nifty little surprise ending, makes the script worth the effort.
Script link: The Searchers
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The one major ingredient that could’ve really helped this script was stakes. There were none. Why does this book need to be written? What is gained if it is? What is lost if it isn’t? That’s the “stakes” question you want to ask of every character objective in your screenplays. What is gained if it’s attained and what is lost if it’s not? If the answers to those two questions are, “Not much” and “Not much,” you need to come up with some stakes, brother.
