Genre: Drama/Sci-fi
Premise: After a small plane crashes, three survivors start to experience weird sensations along with heightened awareness. When the government comes in to investigate what happened, the survivors get the feeling that there’s more to their crash than they’ve been told.
About: This is one of the new pilots (no pun intended) over at AMC. It was written by Blake Masters, who created the show “Brotherhood” on Showtime, about the Irish mob. Masters was actually one of those blessed/cursed writers who spent a long time in Hollywood selling scripts and TV projects, yet getting none of them made. “Brotherhood” started out as a movie before his agents asked if he could turn it into a TV show. He did, and Showtime loved it so much they snatched it up immediately. His career has since taken off (he also wrote last year’s “2 Guns” starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg) and is only getting better. If that doesn’t get you excited, Jonathan Demme, who directed Silence of the Lambs, is directing the pilot episode!
Writer: Blake Masters
Details: 62 pages – 3/15/13 draft
David Morrissey, who played The Governor on “The Walking Dead” will play the series lead, Lewis.
Uhh, if you’re writing about plane crashes and science fiction, COUNT ME IN! Why am I 30% convinced every time I step on a plane that it’s going to go down? Besides of the fact that it’s a TUBE OF STEEL and that TUBES OF STEEL shouldn’t be able to fly! There are too many physics variables working against it. Too many things that have to go right in Newton’s Laws of gravity. Seriously, airplanes can’t even land in the right airport anymore! How are they supposed to stay in the sky?
For that reason, I LOVE reading scripts ABOUT plane crashes because – and yes, I’m aware of how warped this sounds – I enjoy watching others suffer in a plane crash. Because it gives me joy that I’m not one of those people. That in some strange way, despite it being fiction, I survived!
Now when you combine these plane crashes with sci-fi, I mean, come on. You’re talking about a mix of ingredients so powerful that they can do no wrong. Do I need to mention a certain couple of star-crossed lovers? Two island-soaked friends torn by their inability to give to one another but who were secretly and always in love except that that PESKY SAWYER had to keep messing it all up by being so darn charming and rogueish? Yes, I’m talking about Jack and Kate! I’m talking about Lost. Plane Crash + Sci-Fi = greatest show ever. Every time. Always. That equation ALWAYS works. Except for The Event. And Fringe. Otherwise, history proves that this combination is failsafe.
Line of Sight follows Lewis Bernt, who’s all bernt out when he realizes his wife’s been cheating on him – doing the whole sleazy hotel meet up thing to really hammer home the sliminess. But Lewis, a NTSB plane accident investigator, is going on a hunting trip with his friends this weekend and the last thing he wants is to get in some big fight with his wife before he leaves.
Oh, but get this. Juicy gossip warning. The guy she’s cheating on him with? His friend Walker? He’s PILOTING the plane that’s taking them on the hunting trip! Scandalous right? Yeah, them and four other friends are taking a small plane out into the wilderness. And when Lewis arrives, he lets Walker know that he now knows the secret.
Along for the ride are Lewis’s good friends Tony, unambitious to a fault, David, a “cerebral goofball,” and two other hunting dude types. Well, the plane gets ready to leave but before it does we cut to black, and the next thing Lewis knows, he’s woken up in a plane crash. He’s alive, as are Dave and Tony, but everyone else is dead. Except for Walker, who’s missing. Nobody remembers what happened. Especially the dead guys.
A rescue team helicopters in to, literally, pick them up, and as Lewis is being pulled up, he sees the wreckage. It’s all wrong. It’s presented as a horizontal crash, but there are no skid marks consistent with a horizontal crash. This simply can’t be. It’s impossible. But before he can take anything else in, he’s flown to the hospital.
While in his hospital bed, Lewis starts seeing a lot of suspicious people milling about. Mostly government types. Lewis’s job is crash inspection, and he knows that these people shouldn’t be here. When they do get around to him for questioning, it’s clear that they’re intrigued by he and Walker’s issues, and that that may be where they’re starting their investigation.
Oh, but that’s not even close to the real issue. The real issue is that the three survivors start experiencing messed up shit. Tony just stares off into nothingness for hours at a time. Dave has become a super-genius with the ability to do “how do you like them apples” type math equations. And Lewis is feeling all this heightened shit happening around him. He can hear things in the wind, see patterns in mundane things. Life’s gettin’ all trippy for these three.
Eventually, Lewis starts looking into his crash, and finds odd facts associated with it, like that there are 4 times as many plane crashes on the date of his crash than any other day. And that there’s a pattern in the frequencies of those crashes. The reality is, these three survivors are changing. Into what? It’s not clear. Nor is it clear why the government is so intrigued by the accident. I suppose the real question is, what is the government keeping from Lewis about the crash? What are they keeping from all of them?
Writer Blake Masters
Here we have a show clearly inspired by the likes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the plane crash film, Fearless. Which I say as a compliment. You have three men, divinely affected by this experience, who are trying to find meaning after it happens. I think that’s a good setup for a TV show. So does it work?
For awhile.
I loved the setup here. I loved the spooky mystery behind Lewis waking up in a crashed plane with three days of his life vanished. I love that we don’t know what happened that caused the crash, whether it was supernatural or logical (did he get in a fight with Walker and that caused the plane to go down?). I was really into all the questions for about 30 pages.
But I’m going to be honest, as we entered that second half, I began to get frustrated. Tons of things were happening, questions were being brought up, seemingly by the second, and nothing was being answered. I know people say Lost did this every episode, but Lost was more deliberate about each question. The questions in Line of Sight seemed to be thrown out at us willy-nilly, almost off-the cuff.
Dave leaves a screwdriver at the table while screwing something. It continues to stand up. Lewis stares at and obsesses over strawberries for no reason. We have crazy dudes going on and on about “frequencies.” They then get hit by a car. Everyone hears music in the wind. A crossword that was completed with letters mysteriously turns to all numbers. People are able to walk across highways without looking or stopping and not get hit. People get stopped for doing 135 miles per hour and the officer lets them go for no reason. Everyone has itchy hands. People are writing down random equations on paper. People are building machines worth half a billion dollars. The FBI and other government agencies are watching our survivors.
It just felt like TOO MUCH. I think laying out mysteries is great. But if you start throwing one down every other page, sooner or later you’ve spread yourself too thin and we’ve lost interest. How is Mystery 13 compelling if I know in 5 pages it will be usurped by Mystery 19? I think this script just needed to SLOW DOWN. If you try to cram too much crazy shit into your story, it starts to feel desperate, like the kid with the skateboard doing trick after trick in front of the new girl at school saying “Look at this! Look at this!” Desperation is never attractive.
With that said, there were some good things to talk about here. I loved that we started right away with a problem, and not necessarily the kind of problem you’d associate with this kind of show. I believe writers feel pressure to go big with their teaser, especially if they’re writing in the supernatural or sci-fi genre. But sometimes the best open is just to create a good old-fashioned (but intriguing) character problem.
In “Line of Sight,” we start with Lewis going to grab his wife’s phone out of her purse and finding a hotel card instead, a hotel card that clearly implies she’s been cheating on him. Lewis doesn’t confront his wife right away (why do that? You’d destroy all the suspense!) and instead gets ready for his hunting trip. When he gets on the plane, he heads up front where his friend Walker is, and promptly tells him that he knows he’s fucking his wife. End of teaser!
Not a single sci-fi element to be found, and yet you can bet your ass we’re staying around until after the commercial. So never underestimate using the HUMAN COMPONENT with your opening. You can create something just as intriguing by exploring two people as you can exploring a bank heist or a plane crash or a car chase.
I also loved some of Masters’ descriptions. He’d come out with one every few pages that I’d never seen before that perfectly encapsulated that character. For example, here’s a character named Edgar’s entrance: “Jensen spots a THICK SET MAN (let’s call him EDGAR) standing beside a town car. His tie flaps in the wind but the rest of him is rooted deep in the earth, solid and unmovable.”
I mean how awesome is that? I love how Masters doesn’t necessary tell you about the man himself to describe him. He talks about the stuff surrounding him (his tie, the earth). I thought that was really clever.
But you wanna know the moment I turned on the script? It’s when the crazy character came up to Lewis babbling about “the frequencies,” then he steps backwards and gets RAMMED INTO and killed by a car. I’ve seen that type of scene so many times in these movies/shows, that I lost confidence in the script right there. When I see moments that have been used so many times before in a genre, it’s almost always an indication that the writer didn’t work hard enough to differentiate his script from the pack. If we get that scene we’ve already seen before, we’re bound to see plenty of other scenes we’ve already seen before as well.
Line of Sight had the feeling of a dying campfire, with everyone desperately rushing around to throw twigs and newspaper onto it in the hopes of keeping it going. But everyone knows it’s a only a matter of time before it dies out. It’s not badly written. It has some nice moments. But it packs way too many questions into its 62 page flickering flame. Space out those questions in future episodes, and maybe we can keep this fire going.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Start a scene out on something other than your characters. This is more of a directing move, but you can use it in your script as well. Remember, just cause you have 2 (or 3, or 4) characters in a scene, it doesn’t mean you have to start on them. Find something else in the room, something relevant to the scene or interesting, and start on that instead. Masters does this early on, in the previously mentioned “Lewis looks in his wife’s purse” scene. Instead of starting on Lewis and his wife, Masters starts on the purse, and we only HEAR Lewis and his wife talk in voice over. Eventually, Lewis’s hands enter the screen and start looking through the purse. It’s a slightly more interesting way to write the scene that gives it a visual edge over the straightforward “master shot” we usually envision when we come into a room.
