So today we have a review of S. Craig Zahler’s script, “Incident at Sans Asylum.” Zahler is the writer of the number three script on my Top 25 list, the Western, “The Brigands Of Rattleborge.” That script is a town favorite, yet everyone’s terrified to make it. I have no idea why. Show this thing to one A-List actor and they’d die to play the part of Abraham, a character that has the potential to be one of the greatest movie characters of all time. We’re talking Hannibal Lecter territory here. But hey, you guys don’t want an Oscar? That’s cool with me. Anyway , this is one of Zahler’s earliest scripts, written in 1998 while he was still in college. He wrote the script as a directing vehicle and was actually going to shoot the movie for 75,000. I’m leaving the review in the trusted hands of Roger Balfour, a young man whose unique perspective on writing digs all the way to the bone of Zahler’s work. So take it away, Roger.

Genre: Nihilistic Horror
Premise: A group of struggling musicians who work as cooks in an asylum for the criminally insane get locked in with the inmates during a massive thunderstorm. Chaos ensues as the musicians/cooks struggle to escape and stay alive.
About: S. Craig Zahler, writer of the 2006 Black List screenplay, “The Brigands of Rattleborge”, wrote this script which has been developed by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures in conjunction with Vertigo Entertainment. Helmed by Spanish director, Daniel Calparsoro. To be released, one presumes…
Writer: S. Craig Zahler

Caveat lector: Forgive me. I’m going to season this review with references to other horror movies and writers of the genre in order to properly convey what this script accomplishes to do. We’re going to explore the coin of this sub-genre a little and look at the ideas that are reflected on both sides of the coin.

Confession.

I’m one of those struggling screenwriters outside of LA that worships at the stone altar of “The Brigands of Rattleborge”. I live in the Bible Belt. I don’t just surround myself with books that can be categorized as Southern Gothic, I live in the environment. I’m exposed to the Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy flavor grotesquerie every day. It’s part of the atmosphere here.

It’s the temperature.

And I only read it a few weeks ago. But when I finished, I wanted to hold the screenplay up in the air like the baby Simba and shout its ultraviolent majestic grandeur from the precipice.

“Look, some dude wrote a screenplay and he used the word ‘agglutinated’ in one of the prose passages when describing dried blood and brain matter! Fuck studio readers!”

“Rattleborge” was a bizarre and compelling morality play that explored a cycle of bloodshed and violence and bloodlust. It was about revenge. It was about what revenge does to a man’s soul. It was about the consequences of revenge. It was Shakespearean. It was Greek tragedy. It was Grand Guignol. It was Southern Gothic. It was “Unforgiven” if written by Cormac McCarthy. And I loved every fuckin’ word of it.

So, I was foaming at the mouth to read another Zahler screenplay. Here’s a guy who is obviously both a bibliophile and a cinephile. He knows his literature as well as his movies. And the motherfucker can write. So when I found “Incident” in my inbox, I burned through it immediately like a junkie jonesin’ for the rock.

And if the screenplay wasn’t a PDF file on my computer, I would have hurled it against the wall in frustration and disappointment. But, it was a PDF file on my computer and I need my netbook. It’s not very useful to me if it’s in pieces.

Did you expect to be disappointed?

No. I was supposed to be shaken, thrilled. I was supposed to be aroused viscerally and cerebrally. But instead…I was puzzled. I felt like I was attacked by an angry mob of natives on some alien continent where people don’t possess souls, and they tried to cut my limbs off and fuck me in the eye-sockets. And after the initial shock of that faded…I felt empty. Hollow.

But…

But something had slipped under my skin, kept nagging me throughout the day. I kept turning the story over in my head like a rock in a lapidary, trying to find its meaning. Surely, what I just read had to mean something, right?

Zahler is a writer that seems to be interested in eliciting dread. Which I think is an admirable pursuit in the world of Story. Dread is a useful ingredient, a powerful emotion that burrows past a person’s mental walls and pierces the heart like a stiletto fashioned out of ice. The sensation is like being impregnated with a seed of panic and as it grows and blooms and does war against your conscious and subconscious, the war that fights against this revelation can be best described as a paralyzing sensation, a numbness that tries to protect you from the horror that elicited the dread.

Dread pairs especially well with exhilaration.

Horror movies like “Alien” or “The Descent” are good examples of this. Both stories that are more Lovecraftian in nature than most of the intentional adaptations of his work out there.

They manage to explore the concept of Lovecraftian existentialist and nihilistic horror. The realization that man is an infinitesimally small speck in the order of the universe. Or: man is insignificant in the face of the alien, the other. H.P. Lovecraft, a master at eliciting dread, was an atheist who wasn’t scared by the concept of God and the Devil; Angels or Demons. So he created a pantheon of the other, whose very existence, when exposed to man, was capable of driving the individual mad.

Of course, the stories in “Alien” and “The Descent” have different outcomes…

Sure. Ripley is the light that pierces the darkness of the other. She blows it out of the airlock and wins. In “The Descent”, Sarah’s ordeal and exposure to the other drives her mad with a hallucination of freedom, but her dramatic need to be reborn in order to overcome her family’s death is a still-birth attempt at best. She doesn’t make it out of the cave. She’s left trapped in the caves with the other, wrapped in a bundle of raw nerves and reduced to a gibbering psychological state.

But I would argue that both movies are exhilarating. Cathartic even. We faced the abyss, we ran from the abyss, we fought the abyss. When all was said and done, we walked away from the theater and were entertained. No biggie. Just a fun roller-coaster ride of a story. Go on with our lives, rejuvenated for a while by our escapist encounter with the abyss.

So what’s the moral?

Distribute some darkness and dread with that creator’s wand, and pit it against light and hope, toggle in some thrills, and you have a heady potion of adventure. Adjust the contrast knobs if you want the tone to be dark fare, or lighter fare. If done right, manage to thrill an audience both viscerally and cerebrally.

But what happens when dread is the ultimate victor? What happens when dread is your only ingredient?

“Incident at Sans Asylum” happens.

It is not a ride.

It is not escapism.

It is a cold, serrated knife in the gut.

It’s watching a layer of torn skin be flayed from the bone with a potato peeler, and feeling every moment of it.

These characters are not heroes.

They are victims.

And we suffer with them.

So what’s the story?

George is a musician in his mid-twenties who moonlights as a chef at the local asylum. Seems to be a new job for him. His band-mate Max is his second-in-command and they spend a lot of time together, working in the kitchen preparing cafeteria-style meals for the populace of the institution. When we first meet them they’re pissed at a younger, undisciplined drummer of the band, Ricky. Why? Ricky was a no-show for a studio session that they all saved up hard-earned money for because of his questionable taste in women. Ricky also works with them in the asylum as a cook, and most of the humor in the script (which is kept to a minimum) is derived from George and Max making fun of Ricky and his dubious taste in the female gender. We’re also introduced to William, a likable Hispanic employee who works diligently for George as a kitchen grunt and is a bit ostracized by the other guys, especially Max, because he’s not a member of the band.

There’s a simple, naturalistic feel to the scenes and the dialogue. Spare, with the highlights of these scenes being the detail applied to George’s job as a chef. Zahler captures the weird, limanel state-of-being of the struggling artist: George and his band have a gig at a venue where they have to cover an extra set because a scheduled band dropped out at the last minute. Which means their gig is going to run to 2 am. Good news for the band, but George also has to be back at the asylum at 5 am to oversee a shipment of product that is set to arrive.

The details are right. The lack of sleep. The tedium and mundanity that accompanies chopping vegetables or cleaning up blood because the plastic bag that contains meat product ripped and it made a mess everywhere. Pretty ordinary stuff that chef’s deal with everyday, but the fact that they are mentioned in the script gives the scenes and characters a sense of verisimilitude.

This sense of simply being and living and working is shattered when a thunderstorm blows out the generators and fries up all of the electrical wiring in the building.

This means two things: (1) No more lights, and (2) The electronic security doors leading to the outside world no longer operate, and there is no way to open them.

J.B., the main security dude/orderly, needs the cooks to help him escort the inmates back to their cells from the cafeteria before things start heading south. Already, some of these mentally fragile inmates are starting to panic because the thunderstorm interrupted their mealtime and habitual sense of institutionalized routine, and more importantly, there is no fucking light anymore.

So the cooks argue about what they should do, some opting to barricade themselves in the kitchen, while George and Max decide to help J.B.

And of course, things go horribly wrong.

As violence erupts within the darkened walls of the asylum, we get the sensation that some of the alpha’s of this insane-convicted-felon populace have taken over and they have some plans for these cooks who have been preparing meals for them for the past few days.

What about the structure? Does Zahler do his own thing again?

Kind of. Zahler does eschew the traditional, time-tested 3-Act screenplay structure and does his own thing. But I get the sense that he turned to classic stories of the horror genre found in literature and studied what made them work. How they were put together. Hell, they were good enough in that medium, why try to interface it with the Hollywood way?

This is essentially a tale told in 2 Acts. With Act 1 being a 40-page setup; Act 2 plays out like a brutal and tragic 50 page survival mode.

Most comparable movie in structure, theme and style I can think of is “Wolf Creek”.

Let’s get to it already. Was it scary?

It’s pretty fuckin’ terrifying, dudes. Think about it. You’re a kitchen grunt who works in the cafeteria of an asylum for the criminally insane. A dark storm hits and transforms the asylum into a haunted house with no exits and no lights. Several of these inmates are roaming the haunted house. They raid the kitchen, find sharp objects, and begin attacking all the institution employees they can find.

As the characters look for asylum within the *cough* asylum, there’s even shades of zombie horror. Kind of like a dreadful game of hide and seek. They catch glimpses of the pale, naked flesh of the lunatics as they roam the halls. Some are harmless, some attack on whim, others have some kind of fucked up plans for our characters. Except, you know, these ain’t zombies. These are people. There’s nothing supernatural about them.

And that’s the idea. The only monsters in this story are the ones within ourselves. There’s probably nothing more revolting than the depravity and sickness a broken mind is capable of.

The realism and brutality and chiaroscuro murk gives the story a distinctive 70’s cinema vibe.

It sounds pretty good. Why didn’t you like it?

A few reasons which could be chalked up to a matter of taste. I’m not a fan of the genre. I don’t like Nihilistic Horror when it’s followed to its logical conclusion: I don’t like watching violence as it’s committed against a protagonist for the sole purpose of taking away any and all motivation for the protagonist to merely stay alive.

Here’s the deal. George isn’t a hero. He’s a victim. He exists to be broken down and ground into dust.

There’s a key scene that brought to mind Gregg Araki’s “The Doom Generation”. If you’ve seen it you probably already know what I’m talking about. Except this castration is performed with poultry shears instead of pruning shears.

The most disturbing part of the flick is that this is a horror movie where the final coup de grace is the protagonist offing himself. Sure, there’s a character in “The Exorcist” who kills himself. Father Karras kills himself, but he does so because he’s trying to kill the Devil. Even if he was driven mad by the Devil and opted to kill himself, it would be an act that would be seen as a man who was driven mad by a demon and was looking for respite.

George kills himself because he’s been emasculated, both literally and spiritually, by his fellow man. He’s a victim of the violent volition of sick minds, which any human being is capable of, and he refuses to recover after his ordeal because he feels like he has nothing to live for. Even though he survived, he comes to the conclusion that his life is over. George loses the will to live because his sense of peace has been irrevocably violated. There is no more sanctuary for George. His sense of asylum has been stripped away, stolen.

The only escape from the horror and dread is death.

And I don’t like that.

What did you like?

The details and the foreshadowing: The Shakespearean technique of evoking and harnessing storms and weather to parallel the emotions, moods and future of the characters.

I liked that the exposure to the inmates is limited to mealtimes, where cooks are separated from the rest of the institution by a plexi-glass window. At first, we never see any of the inmates. We only hear them being directed through the line by an officer.

In fact, whenever they hear ghastly screams coming from the bowels of the asylum, the cooks are so accustomed to it’s just white noise.

The symbology. Zahler knows what he’s doing. Some interesting stuff going on with violence and images. Particularly an image involving a calf’s head and a decapitated body.

There’s a brazen climatic scene of suggested violence and horror that involves an oven. If the director is capable, this sequence will become part of cult-cinema history.

I like that someone is writing dark, cerebral genre fare other than the Nolan brothers. Stuff that feels like it’d be as much at home in literature as it would be on screen. I’d like to see Zahler take a stab at “Blood Meridian” for Ridley Scott, or maybe even adapt Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” trilogy into an HBO miniseries.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I Learned: Theme, theme, theme. Your choice of theme can either invigorate an audience, or alienate an audience. Nihilistic themes always seem to come out of a dark place, and when followed to their logical conclusion, descend into an even darker place. As storytellers, we have a responsibility when it comes to deciding what kind of story we want to tell. Again, this is a matter of taste, but I like to think that stories of hope are more palatable than stories of despair.

Also – I was reminded of a quote concerning the distinction between horror and terror. Anne Radcliffe wrote, “I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil.“

Boris Karloff put it in simpler terms. Terror is anticipating the monster behind the door. Horror is the sense of shock and revulsion upon seeing the monster. Zahler seems to be a master of both, and uses both techniques impressively. This is an apt distinction for anyone who wants to know the secret to creating suspense.

No link.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: An expectant dad (along with an unlikely travel companion) races cross-country in hopes of making it home for the birth of his first child.
About: Todd Phillips, who made in excess of 35 million dollars by foregoing his salary for profit participation in The Hangover, has made Due Date his next film, to co-star Zach Galifianakis and be released next summer. The following summer (2011), he’ll release The Hangover 2, which I am looking for an early draft of (so if you have anything on the project, send it my way!).
Writers: Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland (March 6, 2009 draft)

Nikki Finke had a huge write-up on her site about who was responsible for the success of The Hangover. Obviously, she’s got it all wrong. I was responsible for the success of The Hangover. Did I not have it here in my Top 15? I mean, duh. But seriously, the people responsible for The Hangover’s success are the writers who came up with the idea. It’s one of the few concepts I’ve heard that could’ve been interpreted a bunch of different ways and still been funny. It was just a great concept and a good reminder to all of you that a strong hook goes a long way.

So last week Todd Phillips announced that instead of going directly into The Hangover 2, he’d make this little road trip film, Due Date, first. It’s actually a smart idea. You snag Galifianakis so you got the familiarity factor, and you capitalize on the success of The Hangover without having to burn a Hangover sequel. Word is that Phillips is taking the script by Cohen and Freedland and Phillipsizing it. Which means we can expect the roadtrip version of a few tigers, Mike Tyson, and a breast-feeding Heather Graham. What else can we expect? Read the review to find out bra.

Peter, a worrywart of a man with a mega-pregnant wife, has just been offered the chance of a lifetime: To sign Croatia’s biggest action movie/basketball star to his company’s Red Bull like drink, Bull Rush. To a man who doesn’t answer a question without consulting his ten-year plan, this could bring him the kind of financial security that every family dreams of. Oh, but there’s a small problem. Peter has to meet the Vlad Squad all the way across the country, only days before his wife is scheduled to have their baby (via a structurally convenient C-Section). This is cutting things mighty close but these kinds of opportunities don’t come along in life very often.

So Peter hops on a plane, flies to the east coast, and has a wonderful meeting with the Croation Sensation. It’s on his way back where the problems begin. At the airport he gets his bag mixed up with man-child Ethan (Galifianakis). Ethan’s bag is packed with all sorts of drug paraphernalia and other weird things. It’s enough to get Peter pulled into a back room and questioned. Peter barely makes his plane where he’s conveniently seated next to – who else but – Ethan. In a tired shtick we’ve seen a million times before, the two start arguing, sarcastically boasting that they have bombs in their bags, and wouldn’t you know it, get kicked off the plane.

Peter’s thrown on the No-Fly List and no rent-a-car List and No Everything Else list. But guess who is driving back to California??? That’s right. Ethan! The scruffy, lazy, farting, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants nimrod invites poor Peter along and since beggars can’t be choosers, Peter accepts the invitation.

After that, classic roadtrip hilarity ensues.

It doesn’t take long for Due Date to hit some bumps in the road. The biggest bump is that there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. Add to that that Due Date is more concerned with hijinx than story and you’re looking at one grumpy Carson. As I may have mentioned before, I like a story in my screenplays. Look, I’m all about the lol if you can pull it off. But rooming with your easily insulted sister-in-law isn’t exactly Grade-A material. And crashing a college party doesn’t ring very high on the original-o-meter. These problems only serve to exaggerate the lack of story. And while there’s a decent subplot involving Peter’s absent dad, the main storyline of Peter’s baby being born isn’t threatened until very late in the script.

It’s page 80 to be exact. That’s the first moment where Cohen and Freedland take a chance and the first time the script actually surprised me. Peter and Ethan pay a visit to Peter’s old college buddy, Jim. Jim is a black man who used to date Peter’s wife. As Peter and Jim get to talking, Jim seems to know a little too much about Peter’s life and casually mentions some e-mail exchanges with Peter’s wife – none of which Peter knew about. As Peter takes a look around the house, he notices quite a few pictures up of Jim and his wife from their relationship days. A little later, he finds a “not so old” picture of the two at a restaurant. While Peter defends this discovery, Ethan insists that Jim is “fucking your wife.” This of course adds a whole new dimension to the birth of Peter’s child. Will it be his child? Or might his wife have been having an affair behind his back?

The mystery is exactly the kind of jolt the screenplay needed and for the last 30 pages of Due Date, I was right there wanting to know what happened. That’s more than I can say for the first 80. But for whatever reason – maybe they didn’t have confidence in the storyline or maybe they hadn’t fully fleshed it out – the mystery of whose baby it is is forgotten. I don’t think Cohen and Freedland are aware of what they have here. Due Date would gain tremendously from moving the Jim/Peter meeting up to the middle of the script, heightening our curiosity about his wife’s fidelity and increasing the mystery of the baby’s father for a lengthier stretch of the story. This also puts Peter in direct conflict with his character flaw – the idea that you can plan for everything – and overall just makes the story more interesting.

But the one thing that I kept coming back to during this read is how amazingly similar Due Date was to a script off of last year’s Black List, the hilarious The Most Annoying Man In The World. Of the two screenplays, “Annoying” has a better hook and is funnier overall. Who knows? Maybe Phillips shares this opinion but couldn’t get his hands on it.

Anyway, how a script ends has a huge effect on me and Due Date definitely saves face in the final act, tapping into an emotional component that simply wasn’t there for the earlier part of the script. And I think that Ethan is going to be a fun character onscreen. For that reason, I’ll recommend this, but only by a sliver.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: There’s usually a moment in every screenplay where your main character has to talk about a dramatic moment that happened earlier in his life (i.e. “My mother died when I was ten.” ” My wife left me for another man.”). Since most characters in movies have troubled pasts, these admissions almost always feel cliche. A character going into a monologue about how they came home from school one day and saw the ambulance is about as close to screenplay suicide as you can get. For that reason, there are little tricks to make these moments less schmaltzy. One, which Cohen and Freedland use, is to have your supporting character ask your main character about his past, and then have your main character resist answering. This takes the focus off the actual reveal and puts it more on his resistance. We’re more likely to buy into the story if we sense the character isn’t comfortable talking about it. Here’s the example from Due Date.

[scrippet]

ETHAN
So, is your dad still alive?

PETER
Yes.

ETHAN
What’s his deal, what’s he do?

PETER
I don’t know.

ETHAN
You don’t know? How do you not know?

PETER
I’ll tell you about it some other time. Good night.

ETHAN
C’mon, we’re having a conversation. We’re bonding.

PETER
(sighs)
He walked out on us when I was twelve. I don’t speak to him. I don’t even think about him.

ETHAN
I don’t believe that. Every guy thinks about his Dad. I think about mine all the time.

A beat.

PETER
We really should get to sleep.

ETHAN
Yeah. Alright.
[/scrippet]

You see how that reveals a traumatic experience for Peter but doesn’t draw attention to itself? How much better is that than this?
[scrippet]
Peter and Ethan are almost asleep. But Peter looks like he has something on his mind. He turns to Ethan.

PETER
You know my dad left me? He walked out on us when I was twelve. He doesn’t speak to me. I don’t even think he thinks about me. It’s really hard for me to wake up in the morning sometimes.”
[/scrippet]

LAAAAAAAME. Yet you’d be surprised at how many times I see this in scripts.

Genre: Drama
Premise: A professional who specializes in “career transition counseling” is on the verge of accumulating 5 million frequent flier miles.
About: Based on the novel by Walter Kirn, this was adpated and is being directed by Jason Reitman (Juno) for a release later this year. It will star George Clooney, Jason Bateman, and Vera Farmiga. The script was a hot property last year when Leonardo DiCaprio got attached and it later landed on the Black List. Because Reitman is both the writer and director, there’s a good chance this draft stayed relatively intact.
Writer: Jason Reitman (originally adapted by Sheldon Turner)

I put this one off because I’m the anti-frequent flier. I fly once or twice a year and I hate every second of it. I’m kinda fascinated by these people who spend their entire lives on airplanes, in rented cars, in hotel rooms, because I always ask myself: What are they running from? Clearly, if they liked their lives, they’d be home more, right? That seems to be the inspiration behind the character of Ryan, played by George Clooney.

Ryan is a man so appalled by the notion of “home”, he couldn’t tell you his address if you spotted him the first three numbers. Ryan’s priority is and always has been his work. Companies hire him to come in and do their housecleaning. And Ryan, who has the process down to a science, can fire 30 people in a day and not bat an eye. It’s not that he’s cruel. He genuinely cares about these people and their futures. But he loves the wonderful lifestyle this always-on-the-move job provides him. Ryan is perpetually 33,000 feet above you, me, and everyone else.

Recently, Ryan’s found himself approaching the 5,000,000 mile frequent flier mark. Only 7 people in history have ever achieved it at the airline and Ryan’s about to become the 8th. Reaching this point gets you ridiculous perks like your name on a plane and the kind of celebrity treatment reserved only for – well, for celebrities. Ryan purchases nothing or does nothing unless it increases this ever-escalating total of miles.

Unfortunately, Ryan’s high flying lifestyle is about to make a ditch landing in the Hudson River. A brash attractive 23 year old Ivy-League grad named Natalie is hired by the company to do some cost-cutting. And Natalie comes up with a doozie. Instead of *going* to these companies to fire people, what if they could do it over video chat? Ryan is outraged by even the mention of such a practice, but his boss likes Natalie’s out-of-the-box thinking and before Ryan knows it, he’s scheduled Natalie to follow Ryan around the country for a few weeks so she can learn firsthand how to fire people. Ryan’s perfect “on-the-move” lifestyle and 5,000,000 mile achievement is about to be crushed by some ignorant 23 year old Ivy League ditz.

In the coming weeks Ryan and Natalie try their best to work together but they’re the exact opposite in every way. She hates being away from home and is eagerly anticipating her marriage. He hates being *at* home and is eagerly anticipating the day she’s not around. And no, this isn’t a Hollywood romantic comedy so you can forget about the two hooking up. Instead, the story focuses on the unlikely friendship that forms between them. They find that they do actually have one thing in common – they’re both lost souls. And no matter how much sense their current philosophies on life seem to make for them, they’re both afraid that they’re missing out on something else.

One of the better subplots of the script is Alex, the female version of Ryan, who meets up with him all over the country for layover bootie-calls. The two know very little about each other other than that they love the thrill of being on the move. Whereas Ryan and Natalie rarely agree on anything, Ryan and Alex agree on pretty much everything. It’s the ultimate no-attachments relationship.

When a family wedding starts pulling Ryan back to that ugly cloud of attachent he’s worked so hard to avoid in life, and Natalie’s words start to give him a new perspective on settling down, Ryan finally sees what everybody has known about him forever: That the 20 years he’s spent running around the country were less about embracing life and more about avoiding it. He finally understands what he’s missing and to prove it, he jumps on a plane and flies to Alex’s hometown to surprise her. He wants that commitment. But when he gets there and she opens the door, let’s just say he experiences some turbulence. And that’s what I liked most about “Up In The Air.” There’s no flight plan. And you’re never quite sure what city you’re going to land in.

I’ll be honest. I expected to hate thing thing. Who cares if someone gets 5,000,000 frequent flier miles?? Thankfully, that whole schtick is more of a story hook than something that actually plays into the plot. The script is more about drifting and our obsession with distraction. It’s about growing up, the power of denial, is the grass really greener on the other side? It’s about selfishness and family and never knowing if you’re making the right choice.

Up In the Air really won me over in the end. It’s not perfect. It drifts a little. But in a weird way, the drifting mirrors Ryan’s life, so it kind of works. It reminded me of a more serious Jerry McGuire – and I think Cruise would’ve been a better fit than both DiCaprio or Clooney. But if Clooney can pull this off, he may be up for some awards come Oscar time (it shouldn’t be hard. How many nominations do they have now? 30?) This is the film that “The Terminal” wanted to be and one of my most anticipated flicks of the winter.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Is 110 the new 120? – Up In The Air may clock in at 124 pages but that’s because Jason Reitman only has to impress himself. I have been seeing so many 100-110 page spec scripts lately. It’s so rare that one of the chunkier ones sneaks through that you begin to wonder if 120 is becoming the screenplay equivalent of standard definition. Of course, thrillers and comedies are naturally shorter. If you’re writing a drama, you can eek into 110+ territory. But I’d still look to keep it under 110. Readers are just used to it. And after being yelled at and ridiculed for 9 hours, these poor souls have to go home and read 3 professional scripts before they reach yours – the unknown writer – the one script they’ve been dreading and the one they know if they don’t like by page 20, they’re getting some shuteye. So don’t give them a reason to tune out before they’ve tuned in.

Genre: Thriller/Film Noir
Premise: A gunman returns to the crime-ridden city of Fiasco Heights and teams with a degenerate gambler/private eye on the run from a syndicate to look for a beautiful femme fatale.
About: Kyle Ward, all of 27 years old, sold Fiasco Heights to Universal back in 2007. He was an assistant at Dreamworks at the time. The script made the 2008 Black List, landed him at CAA, and got Ward all sorts of high-profile jobs like “Kane and Lynch” and “Hitman 2”. If it does get made, Michael Bay is producing.
Writer: Kyle Ward

What do you get when you mix Sin City, Dick Tracy, and Grand Theft Auto? Fiasco Heights. When Guy Ritchie, Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriquez dream of the perfect script, what do they dream of? Fiasco Heights. If you spend the majority of your time debating what your next tattoo will be, dripping sweat from your nearly naked body at the local rave, or dropping acid, what should your next screenplay read be? Fiasco Heights. I never get jealous of other writers, no matter how great they are. I am very jealous of Kyle Ward though. He’s clearly insane, yet possesses the innate ability to capture that insanity and transfer it down onto paper. There is not a single thing about Fiasco Heights that I should like. My 300 and Sin City experiences were the equivalent of being thrown into a dryer for six hours without fabric softener. The only reason I even gave this script a chance was because I had rented Grand Theft Auto a week earlier and had played it so much I’d started confusing the real world with the Grand Theft Auto world. My brain felt like spaghetti and pepto bismol as I stumbled around my neighborhood wondering if I should carjack the Accura or the Audi. Ward’s modern film-noir seemed like a natural extension of this mindset so I gave the Xbox a much-needed rest and dialed up Acrobat. I’m not sure I’d ever go back and relive that week, but Fiasco Heights stands as the defacto bookend to the closest I’ve ever come to committing a felony.

For those of you wondering, Fiasco Heights is a city. Sticking with film-noir tradition, it’s seedy, dirty, rainy, and unpleasant. Atlantic City meets Gotham. Here we join Nick The Saint, a professional killer who hasn’t been to this shithole in years. In fact, everybody thought Nicky was dead. A ghost. But he so wasn’t dead. Now he’s back to find a girl named Hope who’s gotten herself into a bad situation. Across town we meet Lucky – no relation – a former P.I. with a serious gambling addiction. The local bookie (his priest) lets him ride his debt on that evening’s fight and suffice it to say, Lucky’s account gets K.O.’d. Lucky splits and the priest sends out his own personal hitman brigade to take him down. Lucky’s no Carl Lewis so they catch him pretty easily and take him to their own version of confession: If he doesn’t come up with the money, he’s dead.

Lucky for Lucky he spots some men manhandling Hope, the girl Nick’s looking for, and as a result becomes Nick’s only link to finding her. The sleazy Lucky (I don’t know why, but I picture the guy as the real-life equivalent of Leisure Suit Larry) parlays this information into securing the world’s best bodyguard. He’ll help Nick find Hope if Nick helps protect him from the priest. Nick’s not taking to this low-life but it’s not like he’s got a lot of options. Hence, a pairing is born. The thing that Lucky doesn’t realize, is that just about everyone in this town wants Nick dead. Which means this coupling’s annihilation has become the number one priority for every dirty rotten crook in town. Needless to say, trouble ensues.

From then on, every minute of Fiasco Heights is filled with somebody dying, somebody killing, or a bunch of people dying and killing during an incredibly elaborate car chase. In fact, the central chase scene is one of my favorite moments in the script. Here’s the end of it, just to give you a taste of how insane Ward is…

[scrippet]
EXT. TRANSPORTABLE HOME – GARAGE – CONTINUOUS

A vertical garage door lifts, revealing a PINK CADILLAC parked inside (the kind your mom drives after selling Mary Kay for ten years). Lucky wires the engine and REVERSES THE CADILLAC OUT OF THE TIPPING HOME BACK ONTO THE FREEWAY.

The house topples to the asphalt, and rolls in direct path of the SEWAGE TANKER. Tanker collides and sputters into a 90 degree skid. As it cuts perpendicular to the other lanes, THE
CONSTRUCTION CARRIER has no choice but to carom into the tanker at full speed…

AN ERUPTION OF PISS & SHIT GOES SKY HIGH!!

WATCH OUT! THE CONSTRUCTION CARRIER hydroplanes across the piss slicked asphalt -and- slams into the median, sending all 6 concrete cylinders toppling onto the highway.

LUCKY
Ah hell!

Lucky weaves as the cylinders roll across the lanes. He’s dodging perfectly, until of course the final cylinder rolls directly in front of us!

PINK CADILLAC CHUTES STRAIGHT INTO THE CYLINDER GOING 90… TURNS UPSIDE DOWN AS IT ROLLS LEFT AND GETS SPIT OUT ON ALL FOURS ONE LANE OVER.

DELI
HOOOOOOLY SHIT!

NICK
HOLY SHIIIIIIT!

Nick signs the cross. Lucky tries too, but fucks the rotation.

And the Cadillac speeds into the clear….
[/scrippet]
If I need something described from this point on, I’m going to Ward to describe it. I could picture every bullet flying, every body crashing, every color glowing. So much so that I see no point in making the movie. Just read the script a second time. It’ll probably be a more enjoyable experience. If they were going to make this movie though, they should split it up into four pieces and give it to four different directors. Tarantino, Spike Jonez, Tarsem, and Guy Ritchie. Don’t let any of them know what the others are doing. It would be genius! If you’re going to take a shot at this weird creature, why not go all the way?

Is it all buttercups and belgium waffles? No. Buried inside this circus is a pretty ordinary plot. I guess it has to be that way to keep this story from floating off into the stratosphere. But I’m very much a “story” guy and not having something to sink my teeth into kept me from enjoying this as much as I’d hoped. Watching Ward weave words together is fun. And I was never quite sure what was coming around the corner. But I wanted a little more meat on this bone and not even the most lavish description of a bullet entering a man’s body can make up for that. For that reason, Fiasco just misses an impressive. It does, however, get my new favorite rating: the double-star “worth the read”. :)

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I think this script is a good reminder to really evaluate your action description. Make it fun and entertaining to read. A lot of writers are content with just getting it down. Tell us what’s happening in an interesting way. Readers get bored with mundane description.

Hope everyone had a Happy Fourth. I’ll be taking the day off today as my cohort Tarson Meads makes his return reviewing a Vampire script. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing that mysterious high-profile project (which I will warn you in advance – there will be no script link for). If you’re just dying to know what it is, I just started the Scriptshadow Fadebook Fan Page. There are some hints on there :) So stop fooling around and join up! Here’s Tarson…

Genre: Action/Horror
Premise: Two US mercenaries become involved in a brazen plot to kidnap a beautiful and seductive socialite. However, they soon realize the girl they’ve snatched is an ancient Vampire queen, and her legion is out to get her back.
About: A vampire spec penned by upcoming writer/director Michael Stokes. His indie film “The Beacon” won first prize in a series of horror festivals and comps. Nightfall is currently in development with legendary horror producer Frank Mancuso Jr.
Writer: Michael Stokes

Nightfall has been on my Top 10 for a while now, but I never had the chance to review it, so here you go.

They say don’t ever write a Vampire spec, right? Thankfully, Stokes ignored that advice and wrote one of the most enjoyable Vampire scripts I’ve read in years. I had a lot of fun with Nightfall, there’s a ton of stuff to compliment here, but the real highlight was Stokes’ writing style. I loved it. It’s the kind of style I try to emulate. Snappy dialogue, vivid action, words that pack a punch. The way a great action spec should be.

Stokes doesn’t waste any time at getting to the meat of the concept either. The story begins with the intro of our two protags – Rainford and Denton, two bad- ass, mercs for hire. Rainford is actually on a job to kill Denton when we first meet them inside an Albanian tavern. Rainford’s job has been set up by a couple of local mobsters. The pay is good, but at the last minute, Rainford decides against killing Denton, and all hell breaks loose. This opening grabbed me from page one with strong visuals, and some really cool action sequences.

After the opening bang, the two men decide to work together and soon become involved in a shady scheme to kidnap an exotic socialite from a packed nightclub. They don’t know much about the target – except her name is Aurora, she’s drop dead gorgeous, and their employer is a very rich man by the name of Peter Foxe. Unfortunately his hot-headed and inexperienced son is leading the gig. Apart from our two heroes, there’s a crew of freelance mercs tagging along, who seem to know a lot more about the job than they’re letting on. Things are not adding up. Sparks soon begin to fly. There also seems to be an awful lot of heavy handed hardware and tech in place, just for one woman. Hmmm. You see where this is headed, don’t you.

Another highlight for Nightfall was Stokes’ clever usage of Vampire mythology, as well as his own unique touches that he skilfully adds, here and there. The action is top-notch, and when the shit hits the fan, its balls-to-the-wall mayhem. It’s just a great combination of action and horror, with lots of twists and turns. Overall this was just a really fun read, highly recommended for any scribes who are into this kind of thing.

[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I Learned: Don’t be so concerned with market trends. Sure, you need a solid understanding of what’s selling and what’s not, but chasing the market isn’t the best course to a success. Writing what you feel passionate about is. But make sure you know what the hell you’re doing. There’s no formula when it comes to what sells. Genre wise, anything can sell, but it has to be unique and commercially viable at the same time. With so many Vampire and Zombie scripts clogging up the spec market, most people in Hollywood yawn at the sight of them, knowing all too well, the majority of them, suck (heh.) But despite this, audiences still crave these types of movies, and despite what you hear, they are still popular with some studios and production companies. They just need to be good. Really fucking good.