Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: When an armored car transporting a captured drug lord is ambushed on the Sepulveda Pass, an off-duty CHP officer driving her junkie son to rehab must defend the gridlocked freeway against a ruthless cartel hit-squad.
About: This script finished NUMBER 9 in The Last Great Screenwriting Contest, which had a little over 2000 entries.
Writer: George H. Stroud
Details: 113 pages
Let me get straight into why this script made the Top 10.
I want to make a Die Hard’ish movie about a dilemma on a traffic-jammed highway. Imagine the famous Armored Car Heist in Heat… spread out over 90 minutes! That’s a freaking movie right there, baby!
I was actually helping another writer put one of these together a while back that had an even juicier setup. But that script was too far away from being “movie-ready.”
So when this showed up in my contest, I was like, “Yes!” Not only did it fit the “idea criteria” I was looking for. But it was set on a stretch of highway that I, myself, spent two years driving to work on. So I knew this highway section like the back of my hand.
That’s something to keep in mind about producing. Producers are just like writers. They have certain movies they want to make. For some of them, their criteria is broad (any “home invasion” idea may be fine) and others, it’s more specific (a Die Hard like movie that takes place on a traffic-jammed highway). They’re then trying to find these scripts. Which is why you should never feel bad when your script is rejected. It may be because that producer was never interested in making that kind of movie in the first place.
That’s not to say producers can’t be won over by a great script outside of their comfort zone. As I’ll get into with the #6 script on Friday, I struggled about whether to put that in the Top 5 for this very reason. The writer was insanely talented. But I didn’t see a clear path to getting it made. Nor did I believe, if it did get made, that it would make any money. But I’ll save that discussion for Friday.
In the meantime, let’s check out Sepulveda Pass, which was one of my favorite titles of the contest!
Single mother and cop, Olivia Moreno (38), definitely loves her 17 year old junkie son, Max. But Olivia’s own addiction – work – has contributed to the growing riff in their relationship.
So when she gets home after a particularly rough day and sees Max getting high with his buddies, that’s the final straw. She tells him he’s going to rehab. The two jump in their car and head up north, which takes them through the Sepulveda Pass, a hilly section of highway that bridges Los Angeles with the Vally, and that happens to be the single most congested stretch of highway in the United States.
Unbeknownst to Olivia, up ahead, two vans release a ton of nails and barbed wire onto the road, which causes multiple accidents that bring the highway to a standstill. Back behind Olivia, five motorcycles weave their way through the stopped cars and up to an armored truck, which they then begin trying to shoot their way into.
When Olivia realizes what’s going on, she hops out of her car and goes back to help the marshals. In a lucky maneuver, Olivia is able to charge the truck just as the baddies get it open and leap in, closing it. Once inside, she sees that she’s stuck with who the truck was transporting – a man wearing a bag over his head.
The leader of the baddies, 35 year old Joaquin (who has a skull tattooed all the way around his head) organizes his team, of which there are only two left (three in total), to get inside that truck and get bag-head dude. But Olivia is a step ahead of him and escorts the prisoner, who we now know to be, “El Cazador,” head of the Sinaloa cartel and America’s sixth most wanted man, out the front of the truck and up the highway, using the cars as cover.
Joaquin, who it turns out is El Cazador’s nephew, begins immediately pulling hostages out of cars to hold off LAPD and get Olivia to do what he wants. While Olivia is, initially, able to ignore these demands, everything changes when Joaquin locates Max then realizes it’s her son. Now in the driver’s seat, he attempts to perform a trade. But everything changes again when we realize that El Cazador is secretly working with the Americans, not his cartel.
Sepulveda Pass is a movie.
I know that.
I can see the movie when I close my eyes.
That’s the difference when you’re reading as a producer as opposed to as a reader. It isn’t just about ‘does the script work?’ But, ‘is this a movie?’ Something that people would pay to make? And then something people would pay to watch?
There’s this early image of the motorcycles snaking through the five lanes of stopped cars that’s one of those perfect movie images you could put in a trailer that sells the entire movie.
And there’s just something fun about this cat and mouse high stakes game taking place on a scalding hot stretch of traffic-jammed highway. It’s like the movie writes itself!
But no matter how much I want to make something, my screenwriting analysis roots always kick in. And there were a few things keeping this from the top 5. The good news is, they can all be fixed. But some of them are harder fixes than others and would take time.
First off, there aren’t enough bad guys. After the initial shootout with the armored car, there are only 3 bad guys. The reason that’s important is because, geographically, escape seems easy when you only have 3 bad guys on one end of the highway to outrun. I was constantly wondering why Olivia didn’t simply walk north with El Cazador until she got to the front of the traffic jam.
I know her son is still in traffic but this was before El Cazador had found him. So that was confusing.
And then, inexplicably, one of the bad guys just gets up and quits. It was bizarre. You’re already struggling to present your villain as a true threat, and now it goes from three of them to two of them. At that point, I wasn’t afraid at all of Joaquin.
Luckily, this is an easy fix. Add more bad guys. Put 5 of them on the north end. 5 of them on the south end. And now you’ve trapped Olivia and the cartel boss. I can even imagine a great scene where they decide to squeeze her out. Each side begins marching inward until there’s nowhere left for Olivia to hide.
Secondly, there isn’t a single great set piece. It’s all standard shoot-and-duck or “I’m going to shoot a hostage!” type scenes. This script needs 4-5 great set pieces that are direct extensions of the unique scenario that they’re in. I’m talking like an overpass needs to get completely blown up. I’ve already given you one, with the squeeze move. Now you need to create four more.
Third, the plotting could be more creative. Holding characters hostage and threatening to shoot them is EVERY ONE OF THESE MOVIES EVER. It’s not specific to this unique circumstance. Don’t rest on cliches. Come up with cool new stuff. It’s a challenge but this is the difference between a run-of-the-mill action script and a kick-ass action script.
Finally, the main two characters – Olivia and Max – are good but not great. The reason this matters is because we’re mildly interested in “good” characters escaping. But we’re on the edge of our seats watching “great” characters try to escape.
Max, in particular, needs an upgrade. He’s an addict without the authenticity of addiction. I know from watching that show Intervention that when you threaten to take a drug addict to rehab, they will become VIOLENT if they need to in order to escape. Rehab is worse than death to an addict. Yet Max shrugs his shoulders and asks what time he should be ready.
But look. This is standard stuff that you see on any professional script that’s moving towards production. They need better set pieces. There are alway characters who need to be improved. So it’s up to you, the writer, to show that you can take these challenges on.
The setup for this script is so solid that I have no doubt George can address these issues and get this up to my requirement to consider something production-worthy which is, at least, a [xx] worth the read. Or maybe I should now say, [xx] worth turning into a movie.
George was not comfortable posting his script online so if you want to read the script, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I will connect you with George.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If a character doesn’t feel authentic, we won’t care as much when they’re in danger. That’s because we don’t care as much when we realize that a character is fictional. The idea is to make the character so authentic that they are indistinguishable from a real person. If we believe they’re real, their life being on the line feels to us like a real person’s life is on the line.
