The Batman director, Matt Reeves’, big secret Netflix project.
Genre: Short Story (Science Fiction)
Premise: Set in the near future where, instead of criminals going to prison, their memories are wiped and they’re allowed back into society, a family man with no memory of the horrible crime he committed must learn to reintegrate back into his old life.
About: BIG bidding war on this one. Last year Matt Baker had a string of big short story sales. One of those went to Noah Hawley. This one went to Matt Reeves. All the studios plus all the streamers bid on this project with Netflix and Apple duking it out in the finals. Of course Netflix always wins when they want something bad enough, snagging the adaptation rights for 7 figures. Although Matt Reeves hasn’t officially been announced as director, you’d think the bidding war had a lot to do with him saying he’d likely direct it. You can read the short story yourself here.
Writer: Matt Baker
Details: 10,000 words (your average screenplay is about 25,000 words)
We’re going BIG CONCEPT again today, baby!
It’s like we’re back in the spec boom where every project was high concept.
You may have to go into the short story universe to find some of today’s high concepts but they’re still out there.
My biggest question today is, what made everybody so crazy about this? It’s rare, these days, that you get this many entities bidding on something. With such a big premise and so much interest, I’m expecting to get knocked out of the park here. Join me so we can get knocked out together.
Washington, or “Wash,” arrives at his home for the first time in a year. There, he’s reacquainted with his wife, Mia, his 14 year old daughter, Sophie, and his third grade son, Jaden.
The thing is, Wash doesn’t know these people. They know him. But Wash’s memories of them and everything else have been wiped. His episodic memories, at least. Not his semantic memories. That’s when you know what a restaurant is but you can’t remember ever eating at one.
The reason Washington’s memory has been wiped is because he did something that warranted life in prison. And in the future, they’re able to use tax payer dollars to wipe away the parts of your life that led you to do your crime. The more serious the crime, the more memories they erase. Wash’s crime was as bad as it gets. So everything was erased.
He’s occasionally visited by a Reintroduction Supervisor, who explains all this to him. But it doesn’t help much. He’s still sleeping next to a woman he doesn’t know. He’s still eating dinner with children he has no memory of. They say they’re his family but it sure doesn’t feel like it.
However, Washington gradually works through the frustration. He gets a job washing dishes at a diner. He celebrates his anniversary with Mia. He takes the kids bow-hunting. And while there are aspects of his family that remain alien to him, he learns to love them again, even if it’s different from the way it used to be.
One day, while watching Jaylen play baseball, a fellow memory-wiped felon comes up to him for a chat. The conversation leads to the obvious. What did Wash do? Wash says he doesn’t know. They don’t have a computer at their house (Carson note: ????). The felon says they have computers at the library. He can go there.
Once his year-long reintroduction period is over, Wash’s curiosity gets the best of him. He goes to the library, rents a computer, and looks his name up. It’s what we’ve been waiting for for the last 9500 words. We’re finally going to find out what this story is about! What did Wash do!!!??? Well, I hope you’re not someone who likes answers. Because after searching, Wash decides not to click on any of the links. He walks away, content with living in the future instead of the past.
The End.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boy.
If you witnessed any steam coming out of your computer just now, that would be originating from my ears. Because that’s how furious I am with the ending of this so-called short story.
Okay. Calm down, Carson. Calllllllm. Stay calm. Don’t freak out.
Grrrrrrrrr.
All right. I’m going to try and analyze this with an open mind.
Whenever you come up with a big idea, there’s a major step that follows that. That step is: WHAT’S YOUR ANGLE? What’s the angle you’re going to tell your story from.
For example, if you came up with a serial killer concept, you could tell that story from the angle of the person investigating the killer. Or you could tell the story from the serial killer’s perspective. You can keep the investigation inside the FBI. Or you can include a notorious second serial killer to help with the investigation.
The angle is just as important as the concept. This could’ve been about a criminal murderer whose memory was wiped who then gets brought back into a life of crime by his old crew.
Instead, the angle taken here is straight drama. And when I say straight drama. I mean STRAIGHT DRAMA. There isn’t a single cool sci-fi element in this story. It is 100% about a guy trying to reintegrate back into a family.
If you’re judging it strictly on that, I’d probably give it a C. Maybe a B-. Because even the family stuff here isn’t explored that well. I have little to no feel for his wife at all. And the kids even less so. It’s just a circular series of Wash thinking to himself, “I don’t know these people as well as they seem to know me.” And if the whole point of your story is to explore the family dynamic, shouldn’t I know all the characters intimately when I’m finished?
The only thing driving my interest was, what did Wash do? That’s all I care about. Admittedly, it’s a strong reason to keep reading. I was willing to push through all this family stuff to find out what he did. So when we get to that last line only to receive a Sophomore year in college Creative Writing exercise ending of “The End” right before we get our answer, I nearly had a seizure.
THAT’S THE ONLY REASON I READ TO THE END! AND YOU CAN’T EVEN GIVE ME THAT???
If you want to pull off one of these ambiguous endings – which are REALLY hard to do – the rest of your story has to be flawless. And this isn’t. In fact, very little of what happens makes sense. For example, why wouldn’t his family tell him what he did? They haven’t been instructed not to. He’s clearly curious, especially early on. Why aren’t they telling him?
I’ll answer that for you. IT’S BECAUSE THE WRITER DIDN’T WANT TO TELL YOU. Not because the characters didn’t. It’s because it worked better for the writer’s story if he kept that a mystery. So screw real world logic in order to keep us reading to the end. That’s a cheat.
Next, what kind of world are we living in where people don’t own computers? This is supposedly set at least 20 years in the future. There isn’t a smart phone mentioned in this story. Why? Because a smart phone would allow Wash to check what he did and we needed to keep that a mystery til the end. So we’ll just… create a false future where we have the power to erase specific memories in our heads but nobody carries around a smart phone. Sure, cause that makes sense.
I have a sneaking suspicion this is a really old short story this writer wrote way back when the internet started. Cause that’s how it reads. Nobody here acts like they know what the internet is.
Sorry, I’m going crazy trying to wrap my head around how this sold.
Here’s my guess. I have three potential scenarios.
The first is the most unlikely but I concede it’s a possibility. Maybe it’s the very fact that the writer explored this concept as an emotional drama that attracted everyone – that the writer didn’t take the concept down an obvious route. Not to mention, like we were talking about yesterday, this version of the idea is the cheapest version you can shoot.
Option 2 is that Matt Reeves liked the story and everyone was bidding on Matt Reeves, not the story itself. I believe this sold not long after Reeves got The Batman gig, which means he was really hot at the time and everyone was looking to get in bed with him. They simply trusted what Reeves was going to do with the material. He could’ve pitched them a movie about a man repairing a lawnmower and they would’ve begged to be involved.
The final possibility is that Matt Reeves liked THE CONCEPT of this short story but not the execution, which he plans to change. This actually happens a lot with adaptations. I haven’t read The Godfather novel but everybody says that it’s horrible and nothing like the movie. Ditto, Die Hard. So he may well be taking this concept down a more exciting road.
I sure hope he does because if you adapt what the story is now – which is a guy moping around for 90 minutes about his boring life and then going to see who he murdered but changing his mind at the last second? If you give us that movie, there are going to be whatever the Netflix equivalent is of riots in the streets.
I’m kinda baffled here, guys. I was hoping for so much more when I read this.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Memory is a fun thing to play with in storytelling. Amnesia in Bourne Identity. Rolling memory loss in Memento. Digital memories inserted in Total Recall. If you can craft an idea that plays with memory in a creative way, chances are you’ve got a good screenplay on your hands.
