[Liz Holliday]

(With apologies for the very late posting – I've been unwell and swamped with domestic trivia.)

What I learned from this exercise: Sometimes, less is more. I had gone through all kinds of permutations of Amy being a climate activist and there being an undercover cop investigating them, but I eventually realised these elements were distracting me from both my interest and the main storyline – Amy’s investigation of Mark against the background of their dysfunctional family and her own prior bad behaviour.

Brief Story Concept: AMY a rebellious teenage girl discovers her stepfather, MARK, is cheating on her mother. But she discovers he’s actually serial killer and must overcome his manipulative behaviour to prove it, putting first her sanity and later her life at risk. Along the way, she comes to think that her mother may actually be the killer.

(NOTE: In the previous lesson Amy was a climate activist, but I decided this was detracting from the main story and ditched it.)

Big Mystery: Is Mark actually a serial killer, or is Amy just jealous of her mother’s affection for him?

Big Intrigue: Mark’s attempts to gaslight and undermine Amy at every turn, while fooling her mother too.

Big Suspense: At first, Amy’s sanity is in danger. Later, her life is at stake.

World: Family life when everyone in it is being manipulated by their mother’s new husband.

Characters

MAIN CHARACTER: Amy, a rebellious 16 year-old.

Character Mystery: Is Amy right? Is Mark a serial killer?

Character Intrigue: Amy is constantly in trouble with the police and at school because of her rebellious behaviour and the way she tells tall tales to cover it, which means no one believes her when she tells them about Mark, leaving her no option but to use the skills she learnt on the streets to investigate him.

Character Suspense: Will Amy end up sectioned (remanded against her will to a psychiatric hospital)? When she avoids this, her life is endangered when Mark goes after her physically.

VILLAIN: Mark, Amy’s stepfather.

Character Mystery: Is Mark actually a serial killer?

Character Intrigue: Mark’s clever manipulation of everyone around him.

Character Suspense: Will Mark succeed in first getting Amy sectioned, and when that fails, killing her?

RED HERRING: Amy’s mother, Janine.

Character Mystery: Could she really be the killer?

Character Intrigue: Does she know Mark is cheating on her? If she does, does she care?

Character Suspense: Will Janine be loyal to Amy or Mark?

• This reply was modified 9 months ago by  Liz Holliday.
• This reply was modified 9 months ago by  Liz Holliday.

[Liz Holliday]

Untitled Movie

Thriller

WHAT I LEARNED FROM DOING THIS ASSIGNMENT: It’s too easy to opt for the first thing that pops into your head – my first version of this had Amy as a teenage tearaway constantly in trouble with the law for things like shoplifting. Also, there was no psychological manipulation/ gaslighting involved. In my view, this idea only came alive when I developed Amy into being an environmental activist and added the gaslighting element in order to fulfil the ‘intrigue’ requirement of the course – a wonderful breakthrough!

LOGLINE

AMY, a sixteen year-old who is frequently in trouble with the police because of her environmental activism, suspects her stepfather, MARK, is cheating on her mother – but eventually discovers he is actually a serial killer. When no one believes her, she sets out to find evidence, and must fight first for her sanity when her stepfather attempts to gaslight her, and then for her life when he finally strikes back.

THRILLER ELEMENTS

UNWITTING BUT RESOURCEFUL HERO: A streetwise teenage environmental activist, whose quick wits and sharp tongue constantly get her into trouble – and then out of it again; she’s athletic, good with social media, and has minor ‘thief’ type skills such as picking locks. She cannot abide bullies, and has sometimes got herself in trouble – either physically or with the police – when she’s attempted to step in and stop it going on.

DANGEROUS VILLAIN: Mark is a manipulative serial killer who goes from relationship to relationship, using them to divert attention from himself as a suspect. He has a firm rule he’s never yet broken: he doesn’t kill his current or previous partners or their families. But he’s forced to break this rule when Amy comes after him.

HIGH STAKES: Amy’s sanity is threatened by Mark’s attempts to gaslight her – she ends up incapable of trusting her own memories and perceptions; later, her life is at stake when that fails and Mark decides to break his own rule and kill her.

LIFE AND DEATH SITUATIONS: Mark’s relentless manipulations threaten Amy’s sanity, and she is eventually sectioned (placed in a residential psychiatric care unit). She escapes but now she can’t go home because her parents will return her to the unit. She turns to her activist friends, but when one of them turns out to be an undercover police officer she has to run again. Now living on the streets, she continues to try to find evidence. Mark almost catches her. Later, she finds his secret stash of kill souvenirs, but by this time she isn’t willing to turn to the police again. Instead, she manipulates them into chasing her, and leads them to the stash – but her timing is off, she arrives too soon and is confronted by Mark, leading to a physical fight.

THIS STORY IS THRILLING BECAUSE: It offers an intense mixture of psychological and physical danger, and leads us from a relatively safe environment (Amy’s home) through environmental activism, to life on the streets of London
M.I.S.

BIG MYSTERY – Is Amy's stepfather actually a serial killer, or just cheating on her mother?

BIG INTRIGUE – Amy's stepfather, Mark, is a master of manipulation and attempts to persuade her – and everyone she might turn to – that she is mistaken about him; he’s so successful that she stops trusting her own memory or perceptions.

BIG SUSPENSE – Mark has one solid rule: no killing in his own back yard. But when his attempts to gaslight his stepdaughter fail and she runs away from the psychiatric hospital where she’s been sectioned (placed against her will, under legal constraints), he breaks this rule and sets out to murder her, culminating in a massive fight.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by  Liz Holliday.
• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by  Liz Holliday.
• This reply was modified 9 months, 1 week ago by  Liz Holliday.

[Liz Holliday]

The Manchurian Candidate (2004)

1) What I learned doing this assignment is –

A) It’s not enough for the antagonists to have an existing plan – it needs to be one that would have fulfilled their needs if the hero had not stepped in. (In the case of The Manchurian Candidate, the villains make great use of the hero – whose mind they have taken over – to achieve their final aim: the assassination of the President of the United States, so that his Vice President – also controlled by them – can take over his place and further their interests. But what wasn’t clear to me was who the assassin would have been if Ben Marco hadn’t stepped in. Would they have sought him out in order to ‘activate’ him anyway? Were they planning to use the subsidiary character Melvin – one of the other soldiers they experimented on – for this purpose?

B) The antagonists’ plan needs to stand up to scrutiny – is it a reasonable and sensible way for them to achieve their underlying goals? If there’s a simpler way to do it – cheaper, less prone to go wrong, less dangerous – why didn’t they do that instead? (It is not clear to me why they needed a ‘controlled’ elite soldier to carry out the assassination attempt – the way the attempt was set up, any decent shot could have done it. It also wasn’t clear to me why they had to kidnap an entire squad (platoon?) of soldiers on foreign soil, given that they have all the equipment in the USA and it can be set up in a hotel room (as we can see when they operate on Shaw, the veteran from the squadron who is now the Vice President). Finally, it’s not clear to me what they would have achieved if their plan had gone off flawlessly. The orders they were able to give the activated soldiers seemed quite basic – go here, open this door, kill that person. When they tried to do anything more complex, the results weren’t convincing – for instance, all the men they experimented on used exactly the same language to describe their fake experience of wandering lost in the desert. I’m sure that if the President of the USA repeated himself word-for-word on multiple occasions people would notice.

C) If at any point, viewers find themselves thinking ‘but why didn’t they just do X’, that’s probably a sign that the antagonist’s plan doesn’t meet the points set out in points 1 and 2. (Sadly, I found myself thinking exactly that at many points during this film.)

D) If the writer sets up a rule that works at all other points, the hero can’t just overcome that rule in order to get the outcome they – or the writer – want. Either the rule has to work all the time or the writer has to explain (or, better, show) how it can be broken and by whom. (In the end, Ben Marco has been activated and sent to kill the President of the USA. But with no real explanation given, he is able to resist his orders, and instead of killing the President he kills the Vice President and the VP’s mother, Ellie – the real villain in all of this. But previous to this, no one is shown being able to resist the orders.)

E) Character development should not just come out of nowhere at the last moment. (Deep in the third act, the dominating and cloying relationship between Ellie – the real villain in all this – and her son (Shaw, the veteran and presumptive VP) turns incestuous. To make it worse, Shaw is under the control of his mother. None of this is foreshadowed.

2) Thriller Conventions

A) Unwitting but resourceful hero: Ben Marco is a tough and determined army veteran with command experience. In addition to physical skills, he is decisive and analytical. These intellectual skills come to the fore as he tries to work out the core of his problem – what really happened to him and his men after they were ambushed during a patrol in Iraq – and make his mental breakdown all the more horrifying.

B) Dangerous villain: The Manchurian Corporation are led – or so it seems at first – by a group of businessmen who want to control the President so they can basically do whatever they want and make billions while they’re doing it. Later, it turns out they are pretty much controlled by Ellie, the mother of Vice President Shaw. However, her motives are slightly less clear – she really seems to think she has the best interests of America at heart. The film would have been more interesting if this aspect of her motivation had been investigated more incisively.

C) High stakes: For the hero, the stakes are his life, sanity and career. But the future of America and its democracy are also in danger, and arguably the fate of the rest of the world as well.

D) Life and Death Situations: Ben Marco’s life and sanity are in danger from the moment he is approached by Melvin, who has worked out that his recurring nightmares are a sign that events in Iraq did not play out in the way the surviving soldiers thought it did. Rebuffed at every turn, Ben loses his army commission and his grip on reality appears to be sliding away. In one of the best sequences in the film, he is on a train when he is unexpectedly approached by the checkout assistant from the supermarket he goes to regularly. Things get very strange when Ben has some kind of breakdown and fantasizes that she’s been shot – that he shot her. This emphasizes the fact that he can no longer be sure of the dividing line between waking and dreaming, delusion and reality. But despite this, the girl – Rosie – offers to help him. The oddness of that is one reason why it’s easy to buy into the belief Ben develops later: that she is working for the villains and is a danger to him. There’s a whiplash moment when she reveals that in fact she’s an FBI agent who has been keeping him under surveillance. She helps him, but she can’t stop him from being activated because all it takes is the correct sequence of words – it’s never made clear whether they have to be spoken by one of the villains or that they would work if anyone said them – which can said to his face or on the phone.

E) This movie is thrilling because: Despite my reservations about some aspects of the plot, I came to care about Ben Marco and the dilemma he finds himself in (arguably this might have been more because of Denzel Washington’s performance than the script). There were plenty of moments of true peril, but for me the most effective sequences were those involving Ben Marco’s disorientation and attempts to discern reality from delusion.

3 MIS

A) Big Mystery: Ben Marco must learn the truth about what happened to him and his men after they were ambushed in Iraq.
B) Big Intrigue: Why were the soldiers kidnapped and experimented on, and how do the villains plan to use them?
C) Big Suspense: Is there anyone Ben Marco can really trust? Can he even trust his own memory and perception of reality? Above all, how can he prevail against the villains when he can so easily be controlled by them?

4) Anything else?
Sadly, I didn’t think this was a great thriller. I thought it was a good one, as long as I was prepared not to think too hard about the underlying issues (which is to say, I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been watching it for the purposes of this exercise!) I really felt that a lot of my problems with it could have been sorted out with a bit more thought and development… or maybe I just missed explanations that were there all along.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by  Liz Holliday.

[Liz Holliday]

Hi everyone! How lovely to meet you all.

I'm Liz Holliday, and I am from London (in England, not Canada!)

I have two finished movie scripts (though I'm about to try to punch one of them up a bit – it needs to be funnier than it is); two TV pilots – one finished and one nearly finished; and a couple of short films, one of which was produced as part of the London Screenwriters' Festival anthology project, The Impact. I have an MA (with Distinction) in Screenwriting from the London College of Communication.

However, I've come to screenwriting from a background in fiction (like Ann, who introduced herself earlier, I mostly write science fiction and fantasy, but with a side-order of crime). I've had quite a lot of short stories published, including one that was adapted for TV and was first runner up for the Crime Writers' Association best short story of the year award (Ian Rankin won. Ian Rankin would), and another that was in an anthology that won the Bram Stoker award for Year's Best Anthology. Back in the day, I wrote 10 official novelisations of British TV shows. I've also written a lot of journalism, for games (missions, background, dialogue etc), and all sorts of other bits and pieces. Basically, if it comes with words I've probably written it, and if I haven't written it yet, I'm probably going to.

What do I want to get out of this course? A better handle on the thriller genre, and – with a huge amount of luck and hard work – a plan for a new, budget-friendly thriller script. (Since I don't have an idea for a thriller movie, that's a big ask. I do have several ideas for TV pilots, but not sure if the course works for those, and the TV business is very different over here anyway.)

Weird or interesting thing about me? I was once in the Guinness Book of Records for playing Dungeons and Dragons for 84 hours straight, no sleep allowed.

• This reply was modified 9 months, 2 weeks ago by  Liz Holliday.

[Liz Holliday]

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