Genre: Comedy
Premise: Actor Nicolas Cage, spiraling and trapped in debt, makes an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire. While there, he learns that the billionaire runs a drug cartel, and the CIA recruits Cage for intelligence.
About: Not only did this script finish Top 6 in the 2019 Black List, but it got Cage onboard! The movie will be made by Lionsgate. The writers created the TV series, Ghosted, which was a comedic take on The X-Files.
Writers: Kevin Etten & Tom Gormican
Details: 117 pages (but pretty much all dialogue so it reads fast)
I’ve always marveled at these famous actors who did great GREAT movies now doing a dozen sixth rate micro-indies a year. Take Bruce Willis, for example. Bruce Willis has all the money in the world. Maybe more than all of it. Yet he makes these awful 2 million dollar B-movies that nobody sees. It doesn’t make sense.
But you know what does make sense? Nicholas Cage doing a dozen sixth rate micro indies a year. Cage was a notoriously wild spender at his peak and supposedly had some big issues with the IRS at one point. You get the sense that Cage isn’t doing these movies for fun. At least not all of them. He’s doing them to pay off all the debt he’s accrued.
And the unfortunate thing about Hollywood is that when big stars start chasing these low-level movies to pay the bills, they start becoming associated with low-level movies. And it’s very hard to dig your way out from that. I don’t think any former star has dug themselves a deeper hole than Nicholas Cage.
Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Cage really does love making these movies. He’s just one of those actors that always needs to be on a set. I get the feeling this script is going to shed some light on this aspect of the eccentric actor’s career. Let’s take a look.
Nicholas Cage is having dinner with Quentin Tarantino, who’s really close to giving him the starring role in his latest film. But then word comes back from Cage’s agent. Tarantino is going with someone else. Devastated and broke, Cage doubts when his next big chance is going to come, so much so that he considers QUITTING ACTING.
But then his agent calls. There’s a Nicholas Cage superfan in Mexico who’s willing to pay Cage 1 million dollars to come to his birthday party. Cage hems and haws before ultimately going and is surprised when the 45 year old man who invited him, Javi, is a cool dude. In actuality, Javi is a closet screenwriter and he’s hoping to get Cage to read his stuff.
But then Cage is approached by a mysterious man who tells him he’s working for the United States government and that Javi is responsible for 30 billion dollars worth of drug trade and that he’s killed thousands of people. They need Cage to do his best acting job yet – convince Javi that he’s interested in his screenplay, work on it together, and, in the meantime, gather intel on Javi.
Cage doesn’t know what’s going on but at this point, he doesn’t really have a choice, so both Cage and Javi start putting a script together, with both of them in starring roles. Funnily enough, Cage starts to like the script and feels like it might be his best character piece yet. So they keep working on it but run into the same problem all screenwriters run into. They don’t have an ending!
Cage’s CIA connection tells Cage to use the screenwriting suggestion of having Cage’s character’s family kidnapped in order to figure out where Javi is hiding his latest kidnapped subject. But Javi gets so into the idea of bringing a family relationship into the plot that, unbeknownst to Nick, he flies Nick’s ex-wife and daughter down to Mexico for inspiration. Of course, not long after, Javi realizes Nick is working for the government, and therefore really does kidnap Nick’s ex-wife and daughter. Nick finds himself REALLY IN one of his movies. Does he have what it takes to get out alive? We’ll find out.
I came into this one skeptical.
Nicholas Cage is one of those actors who’s been made fun of so much by this point that he may have passed his sell by date. And that’s the vibe I was getting early on in the script. Cage would have these conversations with his younger cooler self about Cage’s plummeting career and Young Cage keeps pushing him to get back on top. The scenes were okay and will definitely play better onscreen than on the page. But they felt predictable. You guys know me. Whenever I read choices that feel like a lot of different writers could’ve come up with the same thing, I lose faith in the writer.
But then the invitation to Mexico shows up (our inciting incident). Going into this, I had not read the logline so I didn’t know that was coming. I thought I was going to get some boring “Nicholas Cage tries to get back on top in Hollywood” plot. It shows you the power of a hook. You’re immediately thinking – some weirdo inviting a struggling movie star to his birthday in another country – there’s a lot of comedy to mine from that. So that kept me reading.
Then Gormican and Etten surprise me again when it turns out Javi is a normal guy. Actually, we get some scenes of Javi talking to his business partners away from Nic Cage that paint him as this normal everyday person. So I’m thinking to myself – hmmmm, he’s not going to be some weirdo freak? Where is this going? I’m intrigued.
Then they hit us with the second big hook, which is that Javi is a drug kingpin. I feel a little stupid that I didn’t see that coming but, again, I hadn’t read the logline and the writers did a good job making him look like a normal guy. I thought maybe he’d brought Cage here to convince him to be in his movie. This new plot point, however, was much juicier. Now we’re putting Cage in a bunch of dramatic irony scenes – we know he’s trying to incriminate Javi but Javi doesn’t.
But probably the best thing about this script is that it’s about a broken family. Pretty much the entire first act sets up Cage’s problems with his ex-wife and his 16 year old daughter. It’s rare that writers do this these days. Most people think there’s no need to “waste” pages on character development in the first act of a comedy or an action film because people go to those movies to laugh and see things get blown up.
But it’s a smart move because it pays dividends in the third act. I still contend a big reason Taken worked was because its entire first act was character development. People don’t care about a daughter being taken from your hero when you’ve only known her for two minutes. They needed to be around that relationship between the father and the daughter to care about it. Same thing here.
And it wasn’t just that. The writers did this really cleverly. Javi had kidnapped a big rival’s daughter. The CIA wanted to know where he was hiding her. So they told Cage to add a kidnapping plot to the script Cage and Javi were working on and then innocently ask Javi, “Where would we keep the daughter character if the bad guy kidnapped her?” This then led to Javi flying the ex-wife and daughter in for inspiration, and now you have a way to really kidnap these two without it seeming forced.
That’s the problem with every script where the bad guy kidnaps the girl in distress. It’s added in a blunt and cliche manner. This script, however, used its unique setup to bring them in organically. For me, that’s what made this script more than a garden variety “worth the read.” It’s a fun script but it’s also cleverly plotted. Props to the writing team!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the best places to find comedy ideas is “Ripped from the headlines” articles that aren’t comedic. This concept was clearly inspired by the Sean Penn – El Chapo incident. The writers then asked, “What actor could we put in Penn’s role that would make it hilarious?” And they wisely came up with Nicholas Cage.
