Is today’s short story the next Eternal Sunshine meets Memento meets Primer?
Genre: Science-Fiction
Premise: In the future, where time-jumping is common, a married couple suspects that an old friend is trying to erase their pasts so that they never meet.
About: The short story sale strikes again! This time, writer John Ridley, who won an Oscar for the screenplay, “12 Years A Slave,” is venturing outside his comfort zone. The socially-conscious creator of American Crime will be taking a crack at his first full-blown sci-fi project, and directing it as well. The short story he’s adapting was written by Robert Silverberg, who’s won both Hugo and Nebula awards for his science-fiction work. Needle in a Timestack was written in 1966, where it first appeared in Playboy (cue busting those old Playboys out of the basement and looking for the next short story to adapt!). Or maybe I’ll do it for you.
Writer: Robert Silverberg
Details: about 25 pages
Here’s the dirty little secret about getting short fiction noticed in Hollywood…
The story doesn’t have to be perfect.
All you need is a clever marketable hook.
That’s because short stories aren’t beloved novels. They don’t have a Twitter army waiting to decry every character and plot change. Screenwriters and directors know that they can do whatever they want with a short story and nobody will make a fuss. After reading the Arrival screenplay, I went back and read Ted Chiang’s original short story the script was based on. It was borderline incomprehensible. I’m talking alarmingly bad. But it had a cool premise at the heart of it: A linguist has a limited amount of time to figure out how to communicate with a recently arrived alien species. And that’s all that mattered. Eric Heisserer did the rest.
But this is why I’m so underwhelmed by a lot of the short stories that get bought in town, such as the last big one, We Have Always Lived on Mars. Marketable premise. But bad bad story. Today is hopefully different in that the person who discovered this story is an Oscar-winning screenwriter. Usually, when a real writer likes another piece of writing, there’s something to it. So I’m going into this optimistically. Let’s check it out…
The year is 2026 and time traveling has become a common thing. They call the act of going back in time “phasing.” And while it’s relatively harmless, there are people who phase in order to change the present in their favor.
That’s what Tommy Hambleton’s been doing. You see, Tommy married the love of his life, Janine, only to have her divorce him months later, and move on to Tommy’s good friend, Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen has now been married to Janine for a decade and lives in constant fear of getting phased.
It’s happened three times already – Tommy phasing them. Each time the ultimate goal of breaking them up (so that Tommy can be with Janine again) has failed. But still, parts of their past have changed. This last one delayed their marriage by a full 6 months.
You know you’ve been phased when the taste of cotton enters your mouth, a twist on waking up hungover. Also, like waking up from a dream, you only have a couple of hours before the memories of your previous life disappear forever, and this new present becomes your unquestioned reality.
Mikkelsen now knows that it’s only a matter of time before Tommy succeeds, but before he can stop him, another phase happens. Mikkelsen wakes up in a bachelor pad. He’s never been married. He immediately Facetimes Janine, who has a dwindling memory of their marriage. When he suggests finding each other, she confesses that it’s pointless. She’s been married to Tommy for a decade. He’s her whole life now. Besides, in a few hours, they’ll never know the other existed.
Mikkelsen realizes there’s only one thing left to do. He has to go back in time, to before he and Janine met, and convince Tommy to never meet her in the first place. Is it possible? Only time will tell.
This was great.
It has some problems, like every time-travel premise. If time-travel is as easy as buying groceries, the timeline’s going to be way more screwed up than having the color of your car change, which is what they’re saying the average time jump results in here. And time travel never works when the bad guys have an unlimited number of redos when their plan keeps failing. See: All Terminator sequels.
But the basic premise is fascinating.
What if you were married to the love of your life, yet you lived in fear that at any second, that life could be taken away from you… and you wouldn’t even know it.
You’re so happy and yet two seconds later, you’re miserable.
I can see why a screenwriter would fall for this idea. There are a lot of ways you could adapt it. You could go with the most obvious version. This version would eliminate time-phasing as a recreational activity. There would be no knowledge of time travel and the setting would be modern day or the near future.
Mikkelson would wake up or experience a strange JOLT and realize that something was very wrong. His wife of ten years, his kids, they’re all gone. He tells friends about this, maybe the police. They think he’s crazy. But he knows he’s not. And he has to get his wife back. With his memory fading, he tracks down information that leads to the discovery of phasing, and then he goes back in time to fix his timeline.
That would be the most “movie” version of this idea.
But there’s something to be said about living in fear of a time phase. There’s so much suspense built into that setup. So even though that route is more complicated (setting up the rules of world-wide time travel would be a plot-hole filled nightmare), it’s also more original. Ridley would probably have the first act sit in that suspense, then the first act turn would be him waking up without his wife.
Then again, he could make this really cerebral and eliminate the “going back in time” part altogether. We stay in the present the whole movie, where we’re constantly being time-phased. Things keep changing and he has to try and remember the past to fix it, sort of like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Regardless of the direction he takes, Ridley’s in for a rude awakening. As long time Scriptshadow readers know, time-travel is a nightmare to write. And this one has some unique challenges. I like the “you have 2 hours before you forget everything” rule but this isn’t 1966 anymore, when Silverberg wrote the story. Everybody has a personal video camera wherever they go. You can tape yourself saying everything you remember about your previous reality so that it never fades away. I guess the feelings would still fade away, but I don’t know man, it sounds like it’s going to be complicated to figure out.
I wish him luck, though. Everyone keeps complaining about getting the same old stuff in the theater. This is different.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re writing or adapting short stories, the thing you want to look for is an EMOTIONAL CORE. This is the magic ingredient that elevates something from average to great. Needle in a Timestack isn’t some big dumb time-travel idea. It’s a story about two people who love each other and then that love gets ripped away. As an audience, we are going to connect on a deeper level with that loss than had this been a couple of robots fighting each other, which is what most sci-fi movies amount to these days.
