Warning: This is a rare “flu-written” Scriptshadow entry. There are only a few of these in existence. Which means they’ll be worth a lot of money someday. Save yours in expensive laminated paper please. Thank you.
Genre: Cop/Found Footage
Premise: Two cops (and best friends) begin taping their daily exploits, which include numerous busts and adventures.
About: David Ayers (Training Day, The Fast And The Furious) wrote and directed this. It starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena.
I did a script review over a year ago and kind of hated it, expecting it to be a huge box office dud. But the movie ended up doing okay (41 mil) and getting a lot of love from critics (85% on Rotten Tomatoes). Hmm, I thought, now I have to watch the movie and figure out how he saved that dreadful script. It was time for some Scriptsahdow script-to-screen analysis!
Writer: David Ayers
Details: Script was 97 pages
I had this grand idea of how I was going to tackle my End Of Watch script-to-screen review. There were going to be charts. There were going to be witnesses. There was going to be a celebrity guest and possibly a spin-off reality show. Something like Storage Wars.
But the thing with the flu is that it doesn’t allow you to think until you restrain it with a large bottle of Nyquil. I call this practice, “Quilling,” and it brings whatever you’re working on into Hubble-like focus. Behold. Beware. Be afraid. What I write below may not be used against me in a court of law.
When Larry David was pitching his “show about nothing” (Seinfeld) to a group of studio execs, the execs focused excessively on the dynamics of the friendships. “Well we need them to not like each other,” they said. “Why?” an annoyed Larry David asked. “Because you need conflict,” the execs said. “You need drama, and drama comes from conflict. If there’s no conflict within the group, then the conversations between everyone are going to be boring.” Furious that the execs were all hung up on this detail, Larry stared them down and said, “Why the hell would you be friends with someone you didn’t like?” The execs stammered about, looked at one another for an answer, but nobody had one. So Larry got his way. There’d be no “conflict” between his core group of characters.
I bring this up because conflict IS a necessary component of drama. We do need it in some capacity in order to make our stories interesting. However, there’s an antithesis to conflict that can actually be worse than having no conflict at all. MANUFACTURED CONFLICT. This is when the writer goes into a movie proclaiming “I’M GOING TO ADD CONFLICT!” Two cops who hate each other for no reason. Two romantic leads who hate each other for no reason. A mother and daughter who hate each other for no reason. No reason, that is, other than that the writer wants to ADD CONFLICT!
Is having no conflict better than that? Probably. But you’re picking between two worst-case-scenarios. Which leaves you severely limited in the storytelling department – the department of “actually keeping people entertained.” These two cops looooooved each other. They’d take a bullet for each other. They pat each other on the back whenever the other makes progress in his love life. They give each other man-hugs and nose-to-nose Whale Rider kisses.
True, you’ve stripped down all the artificial bullshit. There’s nobility in that. I mean in real life, a lot of partners probably love each other. So it’s real. Raw. True. I admire Ayers trying to get to the core of this. But when your Subway fresh take puts you at a dramatic disadvantage in the storytelling department, you better be able to pay up at the end of the line. Those five-dollar footlongs don’t include the meatball sub.
Which is a nice way of saying, “What else ya got here?” And End of Watch didn’t really have anything. I mean, the whole reason I wanted to do a script-to-screen breakdown of the project was that I hated the script and heard the movie was great. I was hoping to see a great movie so I could see what changes they made to save the film or just see how a strong directing vision can save a bad screenplay. I got neither.
In fact, I found the movie to be even more boring than the script. Let’s start with the plot. Oh yeah, there isn’t one. I think I understand the motivation behind this. We’re going for “real.” We’re staying away from common cop-movie tropes. If you add a plot, it all starts feeling manufactured, manipulative. There’s no story in real life because real life is random! Therefore we can add no plot!
Again, I applaud the fresh take. But you’ve already given me two cops who spend three-quarters of the movie telling each other they love each other. So there’s no conflict – and now – NO PLOT! I mean what’s next? Are you going to shoot this as a silent film? Are you going to shoot the whole thing in one take? I mean how many handicaps do you want to give yourself?
Lots of talking and laughing in this one. Lots.
I’m DYING to figure out what people saw in this movie. Cause I missed the cruise ship. Is it cool because it felt “real?” I might be able to buy this argument but the acting was so fake-y. There wasn’t a moment in this movie where the actors weren’t doing the “faux-reality” thing. Those wacky off-screen moments we never see in cop films? Like the noogies cops give each other? We get those here! And they feel like they’re trying soooo hard to be spontaneous home video captured moments. It may be that found footage and famous actors aren’t meant for each other. I mean a big reason the found footage format works – and this dates back to Cloverfield – is that you’ve never seen the actors in it before. They were all new faces. So it really did feel like real people.
Speaking of found footage, I’m not sure Ayers ever decided if this was a found footage movie or not. It was found footage in the script (we’re told at the beginning of the script the footage was “found”), but in the movie, it was vague, something like, “These are the lives of two LA PD cops caught on camera.” It still starts, however (like the script), with Jake Gylenhall carrying a camera around the station, claiming he’s taking filmmaking as an elective at night school (one of the lamest motivations for found footage I’ve ever read – there was NOTHING about Jake’s character that made you think he’d be interested in filmmaking). The partners then add pin-cameras to their uniforms and now we have our basis for why this footage was captured.
Except a quarter of the way through the film, we start getting random third-party shots of the character. For example – Jake doing a work-out on the roof, shot from about 100 feet away. Was this another “real person” who just happened to be taping Jake working out and the police later happened upon this footage (Guy comes into police station: “Hey guys. You know that cop here who was in the papers? I taped him working out on the roof the other day! Wanna see the footage?” Errr, noo-oooo.
Look, it’s not a huge deal. I don’t want to present myself as (super nerdy voice) “Every shot must be motivated and make sense” Guy. But it speaks to a larger suspicion, which is that Ayers didn’t really know what he was doing here. He didn’t know what movie he wanted to make. By the third act, we’re seeing almost as many “third-party” shots as we are “found footage” shots. And it just seemed lazy. Like he stopped trying to figure out how to make it found footage, because he realized it would take too much effort.
(MAJOR SPOILER) There was also a major change from the script to the film. In the script, both characters die at the end. In the script, only Jake’s partner dies. Jake holds on and lives. This was about the only positive change I could find about the script to screen transformation. By leaving Jake alive, we have someone to grieve, someone to feel the loss. If they’re both dead, it’s kinda pointless. Neither of them know the other’s dead. Who cares? You needed one of them to grieve so we could grieve with them.
But that wasn’t enough to save this. I was rubbing my eyes 15 minutes in knowing that everything I’d read was pretty much kept intact. And it kept going and going and going. And not in that fun Energizer Hominid way. I need fans of this film to explain it to me. Why did you like this? What in the world was good about it? I was bored to tears!
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the ticket
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Manufactured conflict is your evil enemy. Avoid it at all costs! Say you want to add conflict between two characters. There’s Joe, a Central Park birdwatcher, and Frank, his bird-watching pal of 30 years. Manufactured conflict would manifest itself like this for our hack writer: “These two hate each other just because.” You figure that will lead to all sorts of awesome dialogue because they hate each other! And hate is conflict and conflict is good say screenwriting teacher! No, it will feel false and we’ll see through it. Instead, dig into Joe and Frank’s relationship more. Maybe they’ve been friends for 30 years, but just recently Joe spotted a rare never-before-seen Flying Spotted Nested Canary at the park and he’s become a bit of a celebrity because of it. He’s had a few articles written about his discovery. He was given the “New York Bird Watcher Of The Month” award by the city as well. And guess what? It’s gone to his head a little. So now he speaks from a place of superiority (as opposed to equals) around Frank, inadvertently giving him tips on how to spot rare birds, and overall just becoming annoying. This has gotten to Frank, who’s holding his tongue every time the two get into a conversation, as he just wants to scream out at Joe to SHUT THE HELL UP! You see how this conflict emerged from a natural backstory between the two characters? Therefore it makes sense! As opposed to just being slapped on there. Big difference!
