The Stand

Rospo Pallenberg: the fat guy to Romero and King's Hot Girls

Genre: Epic (I’d use Sprawling, but I’ve never seen that used as a genre).

About: Legend goes when King met Romero he handed him copy of The Stand with an inscription that read something like “I hope to work with you one day and maybe we can work on this”. To horror fans, this is like Batman and Superman teaming up. Legendary. The duo, of course, made Creepshow, which is not high art but a pretty enjoyable collection of short horror stories. Basically, The Stand proved too daunting too adapt into a single film. If you ask me, this was a futile challenge from the beginning. The Stand is a modern day epic. A modern day Lord of the Rings, and you saw what happened when they tried to adapt that into a single film. The Stand needs to be three films (The Outbreak, The Journey West, and The Stand). So, King couldn’t adapt it. Rospo Pallenberg was hired. (Apparently because of his Excalibur script, which is pretty forgettable. I remember the crucifixion scene from that film and that’s about it.) I don’t know how, but somehow, King and Romero loved Pallenberg’s script. (This is the equivalent of Batman and Superman letting some sissy ass superhero like Luke Cage into their group.) The studio had a falling out (Cause the script sucked? Cause nobody wanted to play these flat characters? Cause they got smart?) and The Stand was never directed by Romero. Instead, Mick Garris directed the miniseries with a script King rewrote from scratch. And while the miniseries is not a great adaptation, it sure beats the snot out of Pallenberg’s crapolific script.

Writer: Rospo Pallenberg….I really wanted to rip him to pieces, but he looks like my old French teacher so I’m going to take it easy on him. His credits include such illustrious films as “The Exorcist 2”, a thirteen year gap of no credits, and three recent films “Memoris of Hadrian”, “Vercingetorix” and “Sibriskiy tsiryulnik” I can only assume are foreign produced films. Now much fanfare has been made over Excalibur, and I think we can safely say it’s the only potentially worthwhile film Pallenberg wrote. But, the thing is, structurally and character wise it’s a piece of crap. It’s way too ambitious, doesn’t create reasonable story archs, and pretty much veers all over the place. And while I normally don’t agree with him, Ebert called the film “maddeningly arbitrary”. What a good way to describe The Stand script! On a positive note, he wrote The Emerald Forest (which Boorman also directed) which is a favorite of mine. But Excalibur and Emerald Forest are both really shoddy adaptations of novels, which entirely miss the point.

Premise: A super-flu with an insanely high communicability rate is released from a government lab and kills over 99.9 percent of the population. The survivors have dreams which cause them either to flock to either devilish Walking Dude in Las Vegas or the saintly Mother Abigail in Boulder, Colorado. Ultimately, there’s a showdown between the forces of good and evil to decide who will control the world: God or Satan.

I know, I know. I blasted Sam Hamm’s script for Watchmen yesterday, and I’m about to do the same. But, The Stand is my favorite work of literature. Ever. And I know that may place me in the group of 40 something women who light incense candles and read Stephen King to their dozen-some cats….but it’s so great. If I had been born a few decades earlier, I may have felt the same way about Tolkein’s stuff. But, this is the film that made me want to be a writer. I remember watching it secretly against my mother’s wishes when I was in third grade (wasn’t allowed to read King until I was fourteen years old). And I was blown away. I remember making a pact with God one night while taking out the trash that all I really wanted was to be a survivor in a Stand-like world. Weird, I know.
How the hell did Rospo Pallenberg get this job? I mean, really? Excalibur is not that great film. Pallenberg didn’t have that many credits. He doesn’t seem to get character development, the point of King’s novel, or even how to structure things with any talent. He’s not nearly as big a hack as Sam Hamm, though. (If Sam Hamm’s crap factor was an 8, Pallenberg’s is a 6) but he’s writing an adaptation of the master of horror for Romero, who directed several of the best horror films ever. This guy is playing in the big league. I mean, if Spielberg can get the best writing talent on the market, it only follows through that these guys can at least can mediocre writers.
I once tried to summarize The Stand to a friend of mine. And I failed massively. This story is so jam packed with details and plot events, it’s impossible to do it justice without writing several thousand words. Furthermore, I’m not quite sure if I should encapsulate Pallenberg’s mess of a story or King’s novel. Also, I don’t want to potentially ruin the novel for anybody who has yet to read the novel. (If you haven’t, let me do you a favor right now….http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Expanded-First-Complete-Signet/dp/0451169530) What I want to talk about instead is places in this script where Pallenberg fails massively. Like stumbles over his own feet fails. How King and Romero loved this script I have no idea (unless they were lying, which I would highly suspect cause this script blows donkey balls).
First off, The Stand is a surreal piece of fiction because it works on this idea that a flu could actually break out and kill off most of the population. This is creepy because he sets it up in a believable way and then goes full tilt boogie as he shows the population dying off. What Rospo Pallenberg does is gloss over the lethalness and the deadliness of this disease. He doesn’t even include scenes with people dying off. Without this, The Stand doesn’t really have an Act One. It has a set up. But it doesn’t make good on it’s promise of showing the entire country wiped out. And resultantly, it’s a whole lot less scary. Now, why couldn’t Pallenberg have included a few haunting scenes like this (from Excalibur):
“Dangling from the branches of a dead tree are a dozen dead knights of the Round Table, crows pecking at the rotting flesh in the chinks of armor. Perceval rides up, cries out in horror, and spurs his horse away.”
He kind of does similar things with the character’s nightmares. (There’s a really creepy scene with Fanny dreaming about the Walking Dude performing an abortion with an iron hanger). But we’d be just as petrified for these characters if he described the surrounding world in such scary terms.
And, how does Pallenberg reveal the super-flu outbreak and what cause it. At the end of the first act, Stu Redman holds a government agent at gun point until the guy through a series of ridiculous exposition tells all about the outbreak and what happened. (In doing this, Pallenberg loses two things….the perfect set up to the story, one sick guy explodes into a whole sick nation, and the tension of the government trying cover up the issue. For that matter, Pallenberg has characters talk and explain backstory through exposition in scenes which obviously would never fly (Redman basically tells Franny she’s a “gift from heaven”, there’s this goofy ass sequence inspired by the novel where Nadie talks about her first contact with the Walking Dude on a Ouija board which culminates in holding a message backwards up to a mirror…really Rospo? Really? Kubrick didn’t even get this right and you think you can?. And, the Walking Dude rambles on about what a bad ass he is which ruins the character’s intrigue ENTIRELY, he’s mysterious and people are always kind of guess these things about him.)
Also, Redman’s entire tension to go west is that he’s late and the group is already starting to move without them. Pallenberg glosses over this completely. For that matter, I don’t really think Pallenberg gets any of the characters. Pallenberg tries to make Larry Underwood both an asshole (which he isn’t at all, he’s just somebody caught up in stuff, his dialogue is excessively strong in the swearing) and has him pour his heart out to his dying mother 30 pages in (this ruins Larry’s entire character development, he NEVER has a chance to say goodbye to people which is what his central pain is as a person). Pallenberg misinterprets Tom Cullen (he’s simple hearted which is the whole reason he makes it as a spy in Las Vegas, see Melville’s The Good Confidence Man Rospo, he wouldn’t be having sexual innuendo laden conversations with Julie Lawry). Nick Andros is entirely skipped over as the Christ-like figure as the group. (So he becomes entirely forgettable, and Rospo gives Leo, the ferile kid Larry picks up, as having Nick’s telepathy gifts…we’re supposed to be condensing a plot not expanding). There’s absolutely no Glen Batemen or Ralph (who are two of my favorite characters in the entire novel) and the trip west….don’t even let me get started. It elevates the whole thing right into terrible. (I may have given it an Atilla rating, but not after the last twenty pages).
On her death bed, naming the people to send west, Mother Abigail includes one of the miscellaneous women, Stu, Larry and Tom Cullen (that’s right Tom Cullen, the mentally retarded guy, and Pallenberg passed on having one of the well developed characters for a bit player….yeah, cause that makes sense). Furthermore, when Stu falls he fights with Larry (who has no problem leaving Stu) and says he’ll kill him which skips over Larry’s character development ENTIRELY and turns Stu (who is supposed to be the central HERO of the group into a dick). Furthermore, Pallenberg explains through Mother Abigail earlier on that so many bad people ended up with the devil in Las Vegas because they weren’t smart enough (this skips over the point of The Stand entirely and what makes it frightening and politically relevant where people end up…..the point is not that people are either, but rather people flocked to whatever was most convenient and didn’t have the ability or wherewithal to see why the Walking Dude was evil….this is the whole brainwashed thing about the Patty Hearst thing and also Nazi Germany (remember all the swastika reminiscent patterns in the miniseries?) that influenced King in the first place. And Lloyd Henreid (whose whole point is he’s loyal to the Walking Dude to the end, which is kind of redeemable in a weird way, ends up speaking out about people being crucified and is punished by Flagg…not sure why Pallenberg needed to blend these characters either). Rospo is not nearly as incompetent as Samm Hamm (who makes me wonder how anybody could pay him money to write in the first place) and he does a decent job of combining characters, but he totally misses a lot of the more sophisticated points to The Stand and resultantly drops the ball with the film. Thank God Romero, or anybody else, didn’t direct a film off of this script because it would have sucked terribly and potentially ruined The Stand for generations to come. Thank God for that.

[ X ] - Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)

Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)

Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)

Hot Rod (Good)

Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: Is it just me, or would Isla do a kick ass Nadine? Certainly not in this script, but if there’s a remake of the Stand in the next decade before Isla gets too old she could knock this role out of the park.

What I Learned: This is something I’m yet to master as a writer, and Rospo only really did well because King is the supreme master of it. Characters should each talk differently. Each with different dialects and euphamisms and manners of speech. I was taken aback by how this was pulled off during The Stand. (Although, Rospo can’t really do dialogue or at least he can’t in this script. When people aren’t exploding with exposition they’re relating to themselves with dialogue that doesn’t really feel nature and seems more like an attempt to ping pong through all the central points of the novel). Good dialogue with a lackbluster plot can be pretty good, good dialogue with a plot like the Stand can be killer. In places, this script approaches cruising level but stumbles after a page or two.

The Watchmen (Sam Hamm)

Is it just me or does Mr. Freeze look like Dr. Manhattan's brother?

Genre: Action-Adventure (It's not nearly as slapstick or black comedy oriented as the comic. In fact it reads like a pretty bland genre piece in places).


About: The Studio wanted to do a Watchmen adaption since the late 80's when Moore's comic was still pretty recent. After Moore declined to risk turning his master work into a film, the studio hired Sam Hamm. (Why, I have no idea, his only credit to that point was Never Cry Wolf, which is entirely not related to this genre at all). Hamm turned in his first draft in 1988, claiming it was too difficult to condense a 338 page, nine panel a page comic into a feature film script (read under 150 pages). So Hamm did what any Hollywood writer does when faced with an umanageable situation, he completed discarded the original story line and all the things that made it wonderful and created his own story. Why not! What did Alan Moore know? He was only one of the best comic creators alive and had worked on pretty much every major DC hero. So Hamm threw in some random stuff about an assassination and a time paradox. Once again, why not? Everybody loves time paradoxes that make absolutely no sense. In one of their finer moves, Fox put the film in turnaround. And so it was, Watchmen entered development hell.


Writer: I assumed some Hollywood Hack had done this. Sam Hamm? Who the hell was that? And then I checked out his wiki page. Monkeybone....yeah that sucked! Tim Burton's original Batman....rip off of Mankiewicz! And then I saw it, one of my all time favorite films....Never Cry Wolf and I was reminded that yes, even talented writers can produce crap.



Premise: I'd been referred to Watchmen while in college when I was attempting to a story within a story, and from that day had great respect for Moore and the comic. This July, thanks again to the Pasadena library, I got a chance to finally the read the comic. And wow. Just wow. It's brilliant. Watchmen is one of the few things I can say I wish I read a decade ago. (I actually would be hard pressed to name anything else. And as anyone can tell you, I'm always reading).



It'd also make a great movie. It would have made a great movie if Gilliam had directed (it may not have been a success, but it would have been a glorious failure if nothing else. And although Gilliam was slated to direct this Hamm script, he hated it and called for many rewrites. Cause Gilliam although wacky is no fool). And the version that eventually made its way into theaters was pretty good, and at least for the most part it was faithful to the book. And then....there's this Sam Hamm crap. If I was Alan Moore, the complete crapiness of this script would have driven me to also not want to have anything to do with Hollywood or its adaptions of my films.



Now let's get down to business....



I don't know about you, but whenever I'm faced with adapting anything that's too long for my number of pages my first instinct is to start creating some random scenes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the main story line. Hamm blows the first 30 pages on a terrorist situation at the State of Liberty. It reads like a generic thriller. Boring dialogue. Little Watchmen personality. And it sets up Captain Metropolis and Veidt (Ozymandias...you may remember him as the guy with the cool looking cat). Dr. Manhattan, ever the eteranl douche bag, fails to stop the destruction of the statue and the media backlash results in the Keene Act, which outlaws superheroes and causes the group to disband.



Remember how Rorschach had voice over which cemented all these miscellaneous events together? It's completely gone. (Now, if it had been underwritten, I may have agreed. Moore does have a tendency to overwriter, but gone completely? That's just retarded. We lose a central narrative)



Alot like the actual film, The Tales of the Black Freighter is entirely absent. Remember the whole Sally Jupiter rape storyline by the Comedian and how Silk Spectre ultimately underwent a transformation? Gone. She's now a pretty static character. Actually, all the back story for Night Owl, Rorshach, and everyone else is gone. Why? Cause Hamm needed time to create a Statue of Liberty showdown and a subplot where Laurie/Silk Spectre gets lung cancer...duh!



Hamm spends the next ten pages on needless exposition....Rorshach learns of Kovac's death and discusses what this will mean with the former Night Owl. He then goes to see Veidt (who is much, much more likeable in this film...actually that's another thing, Hamm created no antagonist in this script. The quintessential superhero story without a killer bad guy...right.) Rorasch then, if you haven't had enough talkign scenes, discusses the matter with Dr. Manhattan Silk Spectre. (I know this scene is similar to what appeared in the actual movie, but it always seemed the weakest and most boring part to me. If I was gonna rewrite Moore with Hamm's recklesness, this is a part I might consider touching.)



Laurie splits with Dr. Manhattan and becomes romantic with Dan, Night Owl (who is hotter in this version and doesn't even suffer from erectile disfunction....too risque for Hollywood?) Laurie discovers she has lung cancer from her time with Dr. Manhattan (which makes his whole I'm leaving cause I don't give a crap about mankind thing even douchier...mankind is pointless, and guess what? You have a cancer. Bye!) The Manhattan TV interview now revolves around these allegations. He flees to Mars and recalls his backstory (which is actually pretty faithful to the comic...good job Sam!)



The middle part of the second act is pretty faithful. It takes it's time, and for the most part works. But then the team arrives at Viedt's Anartic base of operations, and the script goes from kind of bad to a complete disaster.



Turns our Veidt framed Rorshach, murderer Moloch, exiled Dr. Manhattan and killed Blake. He's planning to revise the timeline of history. (Cause obviously Alan Moore's showdown with Veidt dropping an ATOMIC BOMB on MANHATTAN just wasn't suspenseful enough. I mean, seriously. This is like rewriting The Sixth Sense so Haley Joel is a ghost. It makes no sense. It's not the plot. It's not what things are leading up to. Why do it?) Also, remember how Moore made this great point that some people had to die to save the world? Hamm's whole point of the time machine idea is to rewrite history. Was this some Back to the Future inspired frenzy? I liked this much, much better the approximately first five thousand times I saw this plot line used.



Veidt is ultimately vaporized. Dr. Manhattan regains his humanity and sacrifices himself by going back in time to avert the "accident" that turned him into a superhero, and Jon is given the chance to be with Jane/Silk Spectre. Furthermore, America doesn't win Vietnam, Nixon resign, the Cold War never happens, Super Heroes cease to exist.



The ending is particularly nonsensical and kind of ironic (read, stupid). Rosrasch, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are transported to NYC where Watchmen is a popular comic. Crowds flock to see them dressed up like the fictional characters. It's dumb. Actually this whole thing is dumb.



Sam Hamm dropped the ball here. This is a horrendous adaption of a brilliant comic. And to think I love Never Cry Wolf (which as I reflect now is also way different from the published novel) and used to defend Monkeybone as a botched effort. Wow. Bad Sam!



[ X ] - Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)

Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)

Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)

Hot Rod (Good)

Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)



Isla Prospects: The Silk Spectre is hot, and Isla is hot. But in two very different ways. Silk Spectre is sly and seductive and very smooth. Isla is the exact opposite of this. (We all saw her in the Lookout. She can't pull off intelligent/quick if her life depends on it).



What I Learned: The Pallenberg draft of the to-be-directed-by George Romero copy of The Stand falls into very similar loopholes. (I plan on reviewing this script too one day, The Stand is one of my all time favorite pulp novels). If you're dealing with a massive story, don't be afraid to just break off a chunk of it and develop a script around that story. When writers attempt to create versions of Epic Novels, they inevitably try to ping pong their way through the Greatest Hit scenes and the end result is everything feels rushed and there's no breathing room. These scenes worked in stories because the reader could stop and take them in. Not because the screenwriter somehow managed to pack 10 of them within five pages. Stop. Breathe. Plot well. Stories are meant to be savored. Quick plots only serve to annoy and alienate your audience.

Batman (Mankiewicz Draft)

Silver St. Cloud....could Isla pull it off?

Genre: Action-Adventure (Too Conventional for Burton, Too Light in Tone for Nolan, Too Serious for Schumacher)

Premise: Batman's origins are explained. As are Dick Grayson's. Silver St. Cloud (who you'll probably only know if you read the comics) is set up as the love interest. There's a villain arch involving The Joker, but he's really not that threatening so it feels more like a subplot with Batman's character study the main thrust.

Writer: In the late 70's and early 80's Batman's status was waning and several films were attempted (including Batman in Space....awesome!). Tom Mankiewicz (who did uncredited work on many of the Superman films) completed this script in June of 1983. It was announced with a mid 1985 release date with William Holden intended to play Comissioner Gordon and David Niven to play Alfred. The directors considered included Ivan Reitman and Joe Dante (when they were at their peak!) This would've been an amazing film. But the Batman film went into rewrite hell, until eventually Tim Burton pulled them out with a very different script.


I have a confession to make. My name is Joe Christmas, and I used to find Batman boring. I mean, dry. Dull even. That is, until I started going to the Pasadena library and read the Arkham Asylum comic. And if you haven't, please do. Now I love Batman. Love him. I'm quickly exhausting every possible issue at the Pasadena library and they have several dozen.

Batman is fodder for great films. But, alas, y ou find out really quickly there aren't that many original screenplays being written. This idea becomes even less true when you look at already established ideas. This script contains weaker, less developed ideas of all the following Batman films. You'll find material used by all following Batman directors in here.

The draft starts with the ever-reoccuring scene, the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Wayne in front of a movie theater before their young son, Bruce. The killer is later bumped off by his boss, The Joker. Bruce swears to seek revenge and spends the next twenty years becoming a man machine (Here's something I never saw in Batman films: Batman is a bad ass and has done everything. Normally, people go out of their way to make Bruce Wayne not seem like a pretentious jerk, but that's exactly what this guy would be in real life. A man who was smart and rich enough to do whatever he wanted).

Bruce begins to work as the Batman and forms an alliance with Comission Gordon against crime in the city. This guy running for office, Thorne, starts a campaign against Batman. Meanwhile, Bruce falls in love with Thorne's assistant, the smart and sexy Silever St. Cloud. (At times, this opening act felt dark and shady like a Frank Miller version, other times it felt like Mankiewicz was lapsing into another character (Bond maybe, he wrote the scripts for two bond films), and some other times everything was just a little bit too goofy.

But things get worse! The Joker comes to power and recruits the Penguin to help him. (A Burton reference to Batman Forever). Also, for some weird reason the Joker isn't described. At all. I get that this was probably for the sake of leaving it open to the director, but still!

There's a mid second act reveal The Joker has been hired by Thorne to do dirty work and provide a crime wave in the first place. And to deal with that pesky Bat, they turn him into an outlaw. (Nolan eat your heart out.)

So Batman quits. A few random events happens: the murder of the Flying Graysons and Bruce taking Dick Grayson on as his protege/pupil. (This is much better than the Schumacher thing in Batman and Robin, but at the same time Robin isn't really utilized to his top dollar. It's sort of rushed. Actually, this whole thing feels like Mankiewicz was trying to cram in as many Batman characters and ideas as possible).

Also, Silver St. Cloude is kidnapped by the Joker. (Another Burton reference).

The film ends with a showdown in a museum. (Remember the Burton movie? This scene stuck around in a less glorious form. Although, I wish the museum set pieces would've been better utilized).


Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
X-Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)



Isla Prospects: Okay. I'm aware one would need a time machine to pull this office, but Isla could totally nail a superhero love interest role, but it wouldn't be her greatest character or anything. Isla as Silver St. Cloud could be interesting, though, because both play the humor well. I think looks-wise, though, this is a terrible match up.


What I Learned: There are some great ideas here that totally don't work because they aren't brought up in very convenient times during the film. If Robin had been introduced any time for the midpoint of the second act, I would have totally been behind his character. But this was way too much too late. If you have a good idea, don't save it. Use it as soon as possible. Then incorporate it into the script. Otherwise, it'll just look tacked on.

The Far Side

Just what is it that keeps the dog in there?

Genre: Comedy, Animated (I think? I hope?)

Premise: Man evolves. Animals and aliens attack man.

About: Written in the late 80's and almost produced during a change in studio management, Rudolph is a friend of Far Side creator, Gary Larson, and composed the script around a few hundred of the series' panels. (And little else. He didn't even think up much of a plot).

Writer - Alan Rudolph (directed Breakfast of Champions, and was an Altman protege, this leads to the exact type of weird nonlinear script The Far Side is).

When I was a kid, my older sister and mom used to read The Far Sider to one another and snicker. Honestly, I didn't understand them. I was too young? (Eleven-ish). That is, excluding the panel with the fat lady posting the missing dog flyer. That's comic brilliance. I never rediscovered the series. Although, as I read this script I finally found out this stuff is pretty hilarious. And more importantly, it's pretty dark. And dark comedy in my book is the best of its kind.

The story is a highly nonsensical one. Basically, cavemen evolved into regular men. Then, two neighbors, Henderson (Bellow reference? He goes into the jungle) and Murphy (Goes to outerspace). There's also a bad guy who's based on the missing link. Henderson's in trouble, but the missing link saves him. Then Murphy aggravates some aliens during his space travels, and the aliens attack Earth. That's the story. Summarizing it now, I can see a sort of thematic link: man reaches too far (jungle or space exploration) and trouble results. I guess that works?

The story isn't told in real dialogue, for the most part it's a series of juxtaposed snippets from the cartoon. At some point,I found myself stopping and reflecting how lazy and awkward a screenplay this was. For the better of hundred pages, Rudolph describes a Larson panel and then uses the dialogue equivalent to the cartoon's comment.

Now, I may be really wrong. But I just don't get it. Larson's work doesn't need to be adapted to film. This is the equivalent of someone trying to make an animated cartoon out of the Mona Lisa. A great piece of visual art, but best left on its one. And while it would certainly be amazing to see Larson's animated characters, Rudolph adds nothing more to this script. So I was pretty unsatisfied with Rudolph's script. Although there's a lot to laugh about here, I'd rather see the pictures as a carton and not as a film.

Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)

X-Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: None. Maybe she could do voice over for one of the female characters, but it was be entirely unmemorable.

What I Learned: You remember that Lincoln quote about how you can fool some of the people some of the time? You can sometimes get away with no plot in some parts of the film, but a whole film of non sequitor dialogue is a little taxing. Even Borat had a sembelance of a plot, all The Far Side has is some weird thematic thrust. And frankly, that's not enough for a hundred some pages.

Night Skies (Close Encounters II)

Kill it with fire.

Genre: Sci-Fi Horror

Premise: "Straw dogs with aliens". After a series of cattle mutiliations, a group of aliens take over a bunch of country bumpkin's estate and threaten to kill them.

About: The scripts interesting for a bunch of reasons: the puppets and visual effects were pretty far in development, gives an example of the early script drafts Speilberg was circulating at the time, and most importantly provides an interesting idea of Speilberg right before the great disaster that was 1941. Also, Night Skies serves as a sort of prototype of Speilberg's paranormal films from the 1980's (Gremlins, ET, and Poltergeist)

Writer: Legend has it that Columbia Pictures wanted to produce a sequel after the original's success, and Speilberg wanting to jump aboard the gravy train hired virtuoso John Sayles (who had just released the Corman-produced, Dante-directed "Piranha").


Does anybody remember Jaws 2? I do. When I was 12, I made my mom rent this film thinking it'd be every bit as good as the original. The shark was shown right in the beginning. And we realized all then, it was rubber and the story revolved around one singular attack with underdevelop stock characters from a 1970's B-movie (the wheezy nerd, the pumped up jock, and the dumb blonde). This is what Night Skies is to Close Encounters.

And that's a shame because John Sayles is one talented writer.

Sayles allegedly based the script on "Drums Along the Mohawk", one of the classic westerns about a group of settlers attacked by aliens. But doesn't that sound like just a pretentious thing to say? The script starts with cattle mutilations. Allgedly eleven pissed off aliens have landed on an isolated backwoords farm. The family has all sorts of subplots but my favorite is between Buddy, an autistic teenager, and his caretaker sister.

Somewhere in the middle of the second act, the aliens take over the farm and start running a whole new world of chaos. The alien bad guy is named Scar (after the antagonist in the Searchers, and also later the bad guy in Gremlins if I remember right?)

With the help of the good alien, Buddy, who has befriended the autistic kid, the family manages to defend the home from the aliens and win back their home. (There's also a retread of the music theme used to communicate in Close Encounters). I'd just like to stop for a minute, and say could you imagine E.T. with an autistic kid? That'd be like Faulkner meets Ed Wood.

And that's it. It's a pretty traditional monster story arch. Monsters arrive and do bad stuff, nobody has any idea the monsters are causing all the problems, monsters get even worse and do even more bad things, and ultimately it's left to a small group to fight off a horrendous problem.

On Night Skies, though, Sayles seems to be writing out of his range. He doesn't utilize, or attempt to make much meaning out of the script's supernatural genre and ends up writing his usual blue collar western family. When the encounter comes in at the end, I wish he would have remained focused on the family.

Night Skies never got made. Word is the producers thought it was too expensive. This town has a way for masking one excuse for another. This script while not terrible, is definitely not screaming to be taken off the page and translated into a movie, which would explain the endless number of rewrites the material went through....until it morphed, somehow, into ET.


Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)

Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)

X - Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)

Hot Rod (Good)

Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: None. Whatsoever. The female roles are either too young or too old.

What I Learned: Sayles is great at populating a fictional world with characters. What he does in Night Skies that's really awesome is he defines how every character feels in relation to every character (sometimes just in glances, other times in passing words). It isn't enough to have characters dislike or like each other, if you can built up this intricate web of emotions Sayles crafts and then build a high concept story around it you've hit Hollywood gold. Now if only you could also keep these arch running through the story and provide more character development...

Bumped

from the man who brought you Drillbit Taylor

When I was trying to figure out what script I was going to begin Hunting for Isla Fisher with, I ran through a various set of possible methods: the oldest script, the newest, the shortest, the one I hated the most, the one I hated the least. What I ended up choosing was based on none of these reasons. I’ve recently begun writing a script, The Last days of Sonic Steel, a multi protagonist film based on a washed up band (think The Bay City Rollers) who after a botched performance at an art festival all find out about their impending deaths from a mysterious character (based on No. 44 in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger) and realized I could knock out two birds with one stone: review a script and study the genre.

So I selected Bumped, the infamous Breakfast Club remake.

Oh, how I wanted to like this script. I wanted to love it so much I’d even get discouraged writing my own multi character story. By page twenty, though, I’d lost interest and here’s why: no memorable characters and a poor plot structure.

The premise is simple: five twenty something’s (a washed up musician and his overachieving girlfriend, an obscure online celebrity, a doormat of a girl, and an overachieving guy) get bumped from their flights and stuck in an airport shortly before Thanksgiving.

Let’s go past Breakfast Club as a frame of reference, and also use that other great film Saint Elmo’s Fire to give an idea where Bumped fails. The openings of both these scenes manage to introduce each character with a memorable set up different than all the other characters in the script. In first showing each character already in the airport, the writer fails to let the reader differentiate between the characters early on in the script and as a result, it took me the better part of ten pages to get down who was who. Also, the script sort of paired off the higher class characters against the lower ones which isn’t intrinsically bad, but for God’s sake how many people in their 20’s are making $165,000 annually particularly in this recessed job market?

How about, for once, a commercial script featuring both the poor and the rich in a believable way. If you’re going to accept all these characters end up bonding together, you have to accept that all quickly fall into friendships, which remain throughout the rest of the film. There’s not a thing natural about this. So now we have barely memorable characters bonding through overly on the nose dialogue.

This script feels like one of the cheesier pieces we were subjected to in the Freshman Colloquims in NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program. Bumped is not without it’s charms though. The script’s dialogue has got some strong sequences, and they almost make me wish the opening and first half of the second act were better set up so there could be a larger pay off. This is not a terrible script. And it has all the potential to become a mediocre film, but ten years from now, they’re not going to be studying this in Literature classes or making references about it in Family Guy. Now, in true Isla fashion, I’ll introduce my rating scale for all the scripts on this site with each level named after a various self-reflect Isla film.

Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
X - Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: I wouldn't want to see her in any of these roles. But this seems like the type of project she'd get sucked into.

If You Forget Everything Else: You can have the best conclusion I’ve ever seen. Lines that tear right at my heart strings. Terrific visuals. But that won’t save you from a false lead in, or set up. Bumped had great dialogue towards the end of the script, but because I didn’t agree with the methods used to reach these scenes I felt like I was reading some other, much better written script.

Muppet Man

One of the first jobs I ever had was working as an Archival Intern at the Jim Henson Company, where I reported to the company’s principal archivist. The working was unpaid, but frequently fascinating with the principal task being the cataloging of the company’s London Creature Shop into their New Jersey warehouse. I found myself inundated with all elements Henson. So it was no surprise to find myself on any given day sharing the elevator with Jim Henson’s daughter or watching the man who played Barkley the dog bound along the tile floor in a metal harness, which would later be decorated with Muppet fur. But one, particular day, over lunch with the principal archivist, Lisa Henson, and a girl who had studied at the Sorbonne, I had the opportunity to practice my very first pitch session. Still taken by Walk the Line, which caused me to dress in black for the better part of a spring and winter, I proposed a film about Jim Henson’s life. Brilliant I thought. I imagined a young man rising from Kentucky with the strange fascination of sticking his hand up the ass of felt puppets. I’d write it. We’d be set. It is sufficient to say all three women present shot down the idea. Furthermore, they had all kinds of objections: it’d be hard to find someone to play Jim, Jim’s life was too fractured and not dramatic enough for a feature film,

Oh, if only I had written that script four years ago. I could have done it extreme justice. So imagine how surprised and intrigued I was when I found out someone else, Christopher Weekes, had written a biopic of Jim’s life, The Muppet Man. This script pisses the hell out of me, and at the same time I think it’s pretty brilliant.

The story revolves around the last days of Henson’s life as his illness rapidly degenerates from the flu to sepsis. We flash back to capture the highlights of Jim’s rise to fame, and there are several parallel segments revealing a Muppets story. Only it’s not just any Muppets story. The Muppets have grown old. Kermit is graying, Animal’s balding, Scooter had a mid life crisis, Fozzie rides a Rascal, and Miss Piggy is married to Link Hogthrob, star of Pigs in Space.

The major flaw is a character one. Namely, Jim is a character without a core. Needless to say, his actions and thought processes throughout the course of the film are completely deprived of dramatic thrust. He’s not an exciting character. There were plenty of reasons why Jim died, some complete speculations and others more probable. He was a Christian Scientist, and probably had some deep seated stance against seeking medical treatment unless necessary. But there was no major suffering in Henson’s life. In fact, this guy, for someone widely renown as a genius, had one smooth ride. He was discovered when he was still a teenager. Had one long steady relationship with the woman he married. Had no drug or alcohol cover stories. Was never picked up with a transvestite. Hell, the guy even had a good divorce and remained friends with his wife. Where’s the bread and butter then? The pain of his life? Well, Jim’s brother died when he was young. But judging by this script I have exactly no clue howsoever why the brother died. This would be the moment most screenwriters would try to hinge Henson’s death around, but this screenwriter tries to make us feel like Henson’s big dramatic flaw was he was afraid to ask for help. Really? That’s it? Yup.

When this script works, it’s nothing short of breathtaking. The last twenty pages had me shedding tears in an office full of people. By depicting the Muppets as elderly characters, the screenwriter is distorting some pretty heavy archetypes. This is why people went hog wild when Superman died, or why you see such a large turn out for the series finales of TV shows. It’s messing with what we know, and hope is a permanent thing. (On a side note, in a really weird way seeing Muppets depicted as beaten down haggard characters reminded me of Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles, a much less serious attempt on puppets dealing with adult issues). So if for no reason, it’s worth it for this jarring memory of the Muppets.

Mostly, this script is a weak attempt to capture the glory of the Muppets and Jim Henson’s legacy. Yet another gimmicky script attempting to cash in on a novel idea. That is, except for the bit about the Muppets growing old. That’s brilliant in its originality and how it distorts a comfortable concept. Judging by how the archivist (and chairman of the board of the Jim Henson legacy) reacted to my initial idea to make a movie based on Jim, I’d say the likelihood of this film being made is highly unlikely. That’s a good thing because this film doesn’t do Jim justice and makes a lot of unnecessary off the mark drama, but also a bad thing because lately judging by the small crowd pull for the 3D film at Disneyland and poor output of recent films, the Muppets are dwindling away into a sad state of obscurity.


Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
X - Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: She could do the elderly Jane Henson thing in the future and knock it out of the park, but right now the role is too old for her.

If You Forget Everything Else: Biopics, if done correctly, can pack a strong emotional upper cut. But the problem you’re presented with a lot of the time, or at least what I would have found daunting about writing this script is worrying if I captured Henson’s “rhythm” of speaking. This script doesn’t worry about whether its Frank Oz lines, or Jim’s for that matter, read like they’d actually be said by any of the real life figures. But that doesn’t matter, I didn’t care. If you capture the elements and the dynamics of a character’s life strongly enough, I’ll be willing to make small imaginative leaps. Like if the dialogue isn’t spot on reminiscent of what it would have been.

Welcome to Hunting for Isla Fisher!

I saw Wedding Crashers at the only Cineplex in the city of State College, Pennsylvania. I hated the film. I didn’t laugh. There was no gut. And even worse, the thing wasn’t even clever. The best part, or should I say the only redeemable part, was this little redheaded nymphoniac, who pranced down a flight of stairs like creature from Mars. I didn’t know her name, but she made me smile. And when the film was over, I didn’t think about her again for another three years.

Nowadays, I think enough about her to name my non-related blog about her. Lately I read everything I see about Isla Fisher. Not to mention, I’ve seen her in just about every movie, tv episode, and interview in which she‘s appeared. But, what is it about Isla and not a handful of other contemporary actresses, Natalie Portman, Kiera Knightly or Audrie Hepburn in a long gone era?

1) Her hair is exactly the shade of light red, skin just the right tone of white, and body type comprises the perfect makeup of every heroine in every story I’ve ever written.

2) She comes from Perth, Australia, a small coastal town in the barren part of Australia, which if there was ever a place comparable to my own Jackson, Pennsylvania would certainly be the place.

3) She was the loyal girl in Hot Rod, the small town girl waiting for escape in Wedding Daze, the harem leader in Attila, and the whore in Oliver Twist. If there’s a female fantasy I’ve had, Isla has fulfilled it. (Thankfully, I never saw her in Scooby Doo until much later. Rolled right through that one in the slumber of my pre-teen years. Dyed her hair yellow. Not to be confused with Sarah Michelle, I’d think. Had her appearing in bit scenes. Not even a lick of humor. I’m reminded of poor old John Wayne holding the spear in his last film.)

4) She’s had creative input on two scripts, Groupies and The Cookie Queen, and co-wrote two YA novels as a teenager. Mix with that scene in Wedding Daze where she stands on a junk pile with a wedding ring made from scrap metal. It’s clear she’s got, as Eugene O’Neill said, a “touch of the poet.”

5) She represents what New York would have been like had I stayed. I've watched the clip of Isla smoking salt peter less cigarettes outside a convenience store a dozen times. Right now even, I wish I could be back in Manhattan. In an alternate life. Standing outside the Pink Flamingo with Isla as the rain falls down.

Look, I’m not a stalker. I have no desire to meet Isla. I would never show up outside of her house naked except for a dog collar and shot gun. And I most certainly would never try to call her, write her name on the back of my notebook a hundred times, or send her letters with pieces of my clothing. Hell, chances are I wouldn’t like her in person. But my Isla, the one I invented, is a knock out. And I’d like to think one day when I’ve made it as a screenwriter, I can have a coffee with Isla and discuss casting her in my film. So, if there’s any reason why I write (which there isn’t, by the way, I write as unconsciously as others crunch numbers or hear music) it’s because I’m Hunting for Isla Fisher.

Now how do I intend to do that with this blog? Simple. I intend to use this blog as both the memoirs of an up and coming screenwriter/novelist and my way to review recently sold spec scripts, classic comic books, and an occasional film or two if the mood so strikes me (all of which will feature personal anecdotes and more than a fair share of musings on Isla). The hunting comes from the "hunt" to find the perfect script for Isla. Are there any?

So in a further effort to get any false pretenses off the table and to give you an idea of what kind of critical frame I’ll be viewing this artwork by, I’m going to now disclose a small portion of my film canon, and give you just the slightest hint of what I’ve found in these works to make them so masterful.

What follows are my personal top five films. The list changes frequently and depending on what difficulties life has presented my list is always different, but these are all films I’ve found consistently significant…

1. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah) - Watched a dozen times with a dozen bottles of whiskey. It doesn’t get any edgier, more poetic, or better scored than this Peckinpah masterpiece. If I can get this tone in a script then I know I have nailed any tonal problems that will arise. I am most fond of the opening scenes where Kristofferson and Coburn recall the good old days. (“She asked how much it was worth? You said two cents. She said if that was all it was worth she might as well sew the d$%# thing up.”)

2. After Hours (Martin Scorsese) Seen first in bits and pieces. Watched first in entirety at a video terminal in NYU’s Bobst Library. I know this was bitch work for Scorsese but if every script had the speed and inspired lunacy of this masterwork, we’d all have much less difficulty getting people to read our scripts. (The real kicker here is Griffin Dunne running down a Soho street after midnight with an ice cream truck and killer posse closing in behind him.)

3. Angel Baby (Michael Rymer) There is a video store off Saint Marks place called Kim’s. Saw this in a closet of a room on a cold night in November. A little known film out of Australia. It swept up a lot of awards over there, but of all the people I’ve shown it to no one has ever gotten it. A beautiful but bizarre film about schizophrenic lovers who go off their medications and decide to have a baby. A reminder heart and drama need not be traditional.

4. Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton) Watched this so many times as a child the tape broke. The little remembered, but in my opinion crowning jewel of Tim Burton’s oeuvre. A full tilt boogie of clowns, dinosaurs, rodeos, ghosts, monsters, movie studios, and every other high concept subject I’ve tried to include in a script since. (Once, working on a script that was headed nowhere, I ended up trying to recreate Peewee’s chase through the movie studios).

5. True Romance (Quentin Tarantino) Caught the tale end on a static filled TV in my father’s conference room. First poem I ever wrote was based on the scene where Alabama watches Return of the Street Fighter. Forget every Tarantino since (which would be just about everything, right?). This is the one script where Tarantino doesn’t elevate to fake dynamics or overt homage to underground films of the 70’s and the one where the dialogue is not only snappy, it’s near poetic. (The Elvis speech, Gandolfini’s speech about killing people, and of course Dennis Hopper’s Black Italians monologue).

So that’s it, I bring you Hunting for Isla Fisher. If there are any scripts, films, or DVDs you’d like to see reviewed on this site, feel free to email me and I’ll do my best to cover them.