Oil Spill Movies

Being that there has been so much news of late about oil spills, due to the big BP one in the gulf which has itself strangely disappeared from the news.    I started to think it might be a good time to write a script about an oil spill.  I began to wonder how many movies there were about oil spills and to my surprise I couldn't think of one...well maybe one.  I vaguely remembered a TV movie about the Exxon Valdez from eons ago. 

I did a keyword search on IMDB and came up with 21 matches, of the 21 most were doccos.  Two were  video games, one  called Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and the other called James Pond: Underwater Agent.  There were two TV episodes, one from Johnny Bravo: Endless Bummer/Jailbird Johnny/Bravo 13 and  Rescue 8 (1958 TV series): The Chasm. 

On the movie side of things there was a French movie called  Le diable probablement whose synopsis didn't say a word about oil and ended with the word suicide.  Charming. There was  Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster  which was that TV movie I vaguely remembered.  There was a DTV The 7 Adventures of Sinbad. Next...

The big features were Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home and On Deadly Ground, the first being an improbable story about a killer whale's friendship with a young boy (but if you ask me Willy's just waiting for his morsel to ripen).  And the second is Steven Seagal's most highly acclaimed work - 'nuff said.

And wait, I also found mention that there was a prophetic oil spill in the film Knowing.

Who would have known?

I was certain there were more. Phantoms, from the Dean Koontz novel of the same name, but that creature is only an oil-like substance, not a spill.  Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster?  I think the smog monster is just sludge and while sludge can be oil I don’t think that was the intention of the movie – nor is there an oil spill in it.

So there is a dearth of oil spill movies that aren't doccos.  It would seem to me that SyFy channel who just released Sharktopus could have a field day with the subject.  Or maybe I shouldn’t be giving them any ideas. 

So, forget SyFy, maybe we should all write a script about oil spills.  The news about them might be dying right now but there's always the next one.

What?  You didn't think there was going to be an next one?

Shiva

Shiva is our latest screenwriting game/exercise. It is turn based, each of the players/authors has a character they hope will last until the finale. Because it’s fun and game-like we are trying to use this technique as a way of creating collaborative scripts. The aim is to create an off the cuff rough-draft script that can be fairly easily turned into a first-draft. We’re finding that it’s difficult to give the script structure but we are working on it.

Our rough draft of Shiva is finished now and we are on the rewrite phase. You can have a look at the rough-draft we came up with but bear in mind that none of it was plotted and that there were 12 active collaborators that’s 12+ active characters and a hefty page count. The dream sequences can get a bit bizarre but they have no bearing on the story so you can pretty much skip them if you like.

The story is basically as follows:

A virulent airborne form of rabies decimates the human population and leaves the animals mad. Some people band together into tribes to try to survive in this strange new world but they are plagued by visions and dreams of a creature both frightening and comforting at the same time. It's calling them to it and they have no choice but to obey the call -- no matter how dangerous the journey may be.

Three tribes start from a different location: New York (New York), Detroit (Michigan) and Ottawa(Canada). They head for a startling climax at Niagara Falls where they meet up with the creature from their dreams: some want to kill it, some want to worship it. Whoever survives the dangers of the journey will write the ending.

We are having a contest to see who can come up with the best rewrite. Anyone is invited to participate. Deadline for the revision is May 15, 2009. Send the revision to me.

And we are planning some new game/exercises in the next couple of months, stay tuned for details.

Sunday Night at the Movies

Last night I was just about to add a post to my blog when I accidentally deleted it. I felt like such an idiot. Here is what I remember from that post along with some extra. Had a bit of a movie night on Sunday.

If you've been following my blog, you know that I needed to watch The Strangers because we are doing the script very soon with the Script Club from Simply Scripts. So I watched it. It was a similar sort of movie as Halloween and even borrowed some imagery from the movie, a masked killer sort of thing. It managed to keep an adequate amount of tension throughout, while trying to deliver a bit more character than usual. This would have worked well, but the acting by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman was pretty average.

I'm not saying I didn't like the movie, but I thought it could have been better than it was. I had a couple of issues with the story itself. First of all they never quite explain why there is so much drama between the young couple at the beginning of the film. They sort of explain what happened to cause the struggle but they never fully explain her reasons. Trying to be oblique and artsy in a movie where that sort of thing clearly does not belong.

The other thing was that I had a believability problem with the killers. Toward the end of the movie they make it pretty clear that they haven't done this killing thing very often - or at least one of them hasn't. Yet for some reason they are able to appear and disappear with such mastery while they terrorise the young couple and they never make a mistake once. Never get seen when they aren't supposed to be seen, never get clumsy, never have any problem at all with their reign of terror. This to me was unrealistic.

Lastly, this movie really didn't scare me much. If I lived in a remote location and was home alone then I probably would have been terrified. But my neighbours are very close and this sort of thing didn't strike me as something that would easily happen here, so it really didn't bother me. I'm sure I'm not the only one that is going to feel that way about it.

Earlier in the evening I watched Fracture. This was a fairly run of the mill but well-written thriller, a courtroom/catch the killer at his game sort of movie. The pacing was good and the story interesting enough. It was recommended to me by the girl at the video rental place because she likes Anthony Hopkins. And she must really like Anthony because his performance, to me, seemed like he was pretty much going through the motions. Whether that really affected the movie all that much is up to how much you like Anthony.

The other performances Ryan Gosling and Billy Burke were quite good. It didn't knock my socks off like The Illusionist did but then again I'm not even sure why I keep comparing the two in my head. They were vastly different movies.

The best part about this was the DVD because it had alternate endings. I watched both. I liked the one they actually used the best.

Anyway, that's it for me. Tomorrow I start a new job and I have lots I want to do before I head off to bed tonight. Will I get it done? Probably not but I give it a try anyway.

Back to work

Today was my first day back to work after the long holiday. I'm feeling surprisingly good after the workday - perhaps it was that afternoon cup of coffee. To be honest it made me shaky when I first drank it, now it seems to have mellowed.

The Script Club at Simply Scripts has almost decided to review The Strangers by Bryan Bertino. It should be interesting once we start - which should be in a few weeks. You should drop by and have a gander at what we say about the script. This time we should mostly have watched the film and should have an entirely different spin on our script review. We should cover what has been dropped from the film and what has been added (if anything). I'll provide a link once we start.

The other thing happening over at Simply scripts is the Shiva game. It's a screenwriters game but we are trying to produce a writable script using the technique. I'm trying to inject a bit more story into the game script. I was trying not to have to write too much of the story beforehand, but it looks like that is not working. The next time we do this we will have to include more of a treatment.

That's about it for tonight. Working on a webpage but I won't talk about that in this blog. In the background Star Trek TOS is playing in the background. The episode where Spock goes Amok. Love that word.