type='html'>Genre: Dark Thriller
Premise: Often told through the point of view of the killer himself, Psycho Killer is about a serial killer who believes he must kill as many people as possible in order to receive preferred status in Hell.
About: Andrew Kevin Walker is, of course, spec sale royalty, as his script "Seven" was one of the most popular spec scripts in Hollywood history.  It eventually went on to be directed by David Fincher, starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Kevin Spacey.  Walker would struggle a bit after that sale, eventually writing and selling another script, 8mm, for 1.25 million dollars.   Unfortunately, the studio deemed that work too dark and encouraged director Joel Schumacher to sanitize it.  The results were so bad that Walker disowned the movie and has refused to watch it since, even to this day.  Psycho Killer is a script he penned four years ago.  Not sure where it stands at this moment.
Writer: Andrew Kevin Walker
Details: 113 pages.  July 4, 2008. This is a SECOND DRAFT.  So take that into consideration.

Another famed serial killer.

While Andrew Kevin Walker remains spec sale royalty due to his screenplay masterpiece, Seven, lighting up Hollywood back in the 90s, it still remains unclear how the script sold.  I could've sworn  the script was found in a production slush pile.  But people also say Walker gave the script to A-list screenwriter David Koepp, who he reportedly had a friendship with.  Koepp then passed the script on to New Line, who purchased it.  If anyone can clear this up for me, that would be great.  Because hey, the story's definitely more inspiring to the average writer if the the script was discovered on talent alone, and not through an A-list Hollywood contact.

There's this sort of unofficial age-old debate that has gone on about which sick dark fucked up movie is better, Seven or Silence Of The Lambs.  Personally, I've always been a Lambs guy.  I just thought the character work in that script was a lot better.  Seven wins on atmosphere for sure.  But I just didn't find the characters as compelling as I did in Lambs.  Of course, that could've been due in part to Pitt's acting. :) Anyway, that's a nice segue way into today's script, because what keeps this script from connecting with the reader is a somewhat distant character dynamic.

Psycho Killer has a freaking awesome opening.  Imagine a...um...well Psycho Killer popping out of his car on a highway, walking over to a man who's changing his tire, bashing his head into smithereens with a sledgehammer, chasing his wife down the highway, seeing a semi baring down on them, hurling the sledgehammer at the truck with all his might.  The sledgehammer goes through the windshield.  The incapacitated driver loses control of his truck, which jackknifes, turning the fleeing woman into road gravy, before finally coming to a stop.  All in a day's work for our Psycho Killer, who's in the middle of an 8 state killing spree.

What sets Psycho Killer apart right away is that we take the POV of the killer himself.  So we're the bad guy for the entire first act.  I thought we were going to be the bad guy for the entire movie, but when Psycho Killer (yes, his name is actually "Psycho Killer") kills a cop in front of his fellow cop wife (Jane), the POV turns to a traditional third person narrative and we follow Jane as she tries to avenge her hubby's death.

To me, this was when the script sort of lost its appeal.  Although it was disturbing, what made it unique was watching a killer through a killer's eyes.  Once it became a straightforward procedural, it didn't hold up because I didn't feel anything for the characters.  I guess I should've felt something since Jane watched her husband die, but there was just something standard and unexciting about her character.  I don't know.  She just felt too...normal.

But we do occasionally cut back to Psycho Killer's life, which seems to be consumed by these nightmares of hell.  Psycho Killer is convinced that he has some higher purpose and will be rewarded in hell, as long as he keeps killing people.  This leads him on a search for a secret group of fellow satan worshippers, who he eventually finds after putting a code message in the New York Times (huh?).

The story finishes with a rather strange choice, sending Psycho Killer on a much larger mission to kill way more people than the inefficient one at a time he kills every day.  I'm not going to spoil it, but I'll just say the movie turns from a serial killer movie into, basically, a terrorist movie, and that didn't feel right.

I'll give Psycho Killer this - it *is* a little bit different.  Just putting us inside the body of a serial killer was creepy enough and made for some great dramatic irony moments.  Remember, dramatic irony is when we know something one of the characters in a scene does not.  So in this case, we knew Psycho Killer was about to kill some poor unsuspecting soul, and that we couldn't warn that soul.  So that made for some tension-filled scenes, if not some majorly fucked up ones!

And ya gotta love how Walker decided to name his character PSYCHO KILLER.  Lol.  I mean how great is that?

But the rest of the script - and obviously this has something to do with this still being a second draft - feels exploratory.  We have these random dream sequences where Psycho Killer imagines himself in Hell surrounded by demons.  They feel like kick ass scenes for a director to play with but, storywise, they're glorified film school writing, where every tenth page is yet another "trippy" dream sequence.

I suppose it comes together later when Psycho Killer joins up with some satanists and they talk about Hell taking over earth and all that jazz.  But that was a concert I wasn't interested in going to, and to be honest, it all felt a might confused, again probably due to the exploratory nature of the second draft.

What bothers me is that I couldn't figure out why I didn't care for Jane at all.  Just the other day, with Desperate Hours, I was talking about how effectively loss creates sympathy for a character.  The reason we're on board with Frank Sullivan right away is because we feel his pain in losing his family to the Spanish flu.  So then why don't I feel a thing when Jane loses her husband to Psycho Killer?

I can't figure it out but I suppose part of it is that she just seemed so mechanical.  Her personality was non-specific, basic, and just boring.  It almost felt like she wanted to find Psycho Killer not because she was deeply affected by losing her husband, but because the script needed her to want to find him.  And that's when a story falls off the rails, when things are happening because the writer needs them to and not because the characters need them to.  I don't know.  Am I the only one who thought this?

Since I'm obviously not going to root for a Psycho Killer, that meant I had no one to cheer on.  If you don't have any characters to attach yourself to in a movie, then the movie's dead to you.  Doesn't matter how clever the plot or the twists are, I'm not emotionally invested and therefore not interested in the story.

That's a shame.  I still think Walker is a great screenwriter but I would've loved to have had someone to root for here.  I hope Walker's since fixed this problem.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

[x] wasn't for me

[ ] worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What i learned - This scene ALWAYS WORKS.  Put your character in a car with something he's hiding, then have a cop stop him.  It is virtually impossible to screw this scene up.  We see it here when Psycho Killer gets stopped.  We see it in Fargo when the cop stops Carl and Gaear.  Just make sure you milk the suspense.  The audience loves wondering what's going to happen, so feel free to draw it out as long as you'd like.

type='html'>Taking a break from Amateur Week because it's HALLLOOOOWEEEEEEN and that means Scriptshadow must be spoooooooooky for 24 hours and that means a horror script review but since I don't have any good horror scripts, I'm reviewing a script that is ABOUT a horror film.  Sound fun?  I hope so cause I ain't giving you another choice here.

Genre: Biopic'ish
Premise: The struggles behind the making of Psycho, the project that would become director Alfred Hitchcock's most famous film.
About:  Anthony Hopkins will star as Alfred Hitchcock.  Helen Mirren will star as his wife, Alma.  Scarlett Johansen will star as Janet Leigh.  Sacha Gervachi will direct.  I believe this is Sacha's first feature film as a director (he's made a documentary).  He's best known as the writer of Steven Spielberg's wackadoozy film, "The Terminal."  John J. McLaughlin adapted the book into a screenplay.  You probably recognize him as the writer of Black Swan.
Writer: John J. McLaughlin (based on the book "Alfred Hitchcock and The Making Of Psycho" by Stephen Rebello.
Details: 104 pages, fourth revision, Oct. 19, 2011 draft

First of all, WTF!!!???

Disney bought Lucasfilm yesterday.  Disney just BOUGHT Lucas.  Lucas doesn't get bought.  He buys other people!  And now we're getting another Star Wars trilogy.  And you know what I say to that?  WOOOO-HOOOO!  I love it.  I've been dying to get Star Wars into real writers' hands forever now, and it's finally going to happen!

How does this tie into today?  Well, George Lucas was a bit of a pudgy filmmaker.  And so was Alfred Hitchock!  Actually, to be serious, I was not looking forward to this script.  I don't like when entities try and mine a famous event when there isn't a story there.  Like, oooh, it's Psycho!  Let's make a movie about the making of it!  Err, but the making of the movie wasn't any different from the making of any other  movie.  So what, let's do it anyway!

I hoped I was wrong.  That there was some fascinating story behind the making of Psycho that I'd never heard about.  But something told me this wasn't the making of Citizen Kane.

So here's the story.  Hitchcock is coming off of North By Northwest, which is a monster hit.  But he's bored.  Everyone wants him to make another North By Northwest but Hitchcock, like his movies, wants to do the unexpected.  Something unlike anything he's done before.  And when he reads Pyscho, he knows that's it.  That's his next movie.

But this is a strange move.  Hitchcock doesn't do horror.  Only schlocky talentless directors do horror in 1960.  On top of that, it's not something the studios are interested in.  They think this flick is dead before the end of opening weekend.  But Hitchcock has plans to do something a little different with it. He particularly sets his sights on a shower scene, which he believes he can immortalize.  You see, there wasn't much nudity in films those days, and definitely not from movie stars.  Yet Hitchock had a plan to imply a ton of nudity without actually showing any.  It was going to be unprecedented.

If only the studios agreed.  They tell Hitchcock there's a reason everyone in town passed on Psycho and they're not funding it.  I have to admit, I was a little unclear about this.  Hitchcock makes mega-hit North By Northwest and the studio won't fund his next movie, which he's doing for 800,000 bucks?  But whatever.  The movie business was different back then so I'm probably missing something.  Anyway, Hitchcock pulls a Passion Of The Christ and funds the movie himself.

In the meantime, Hitchcock starts fighting all sorts of battles.  He's the master of suspense, but he's 60 years old, and the establishment wants to know when he's going to retire.  Hitch doesn't like getting old, and he feels that this movie is going to make him young again.  Then there's his weight problem.  The dude cannot stop eating.  And he hates himself for it.  He sees a monster whenever he looks in the mirror, and that kills him.  But the biggest battle of all is his wife, who becomes the almost-star of the movie.

Alma was Hitch's right-hand woman throughout his career and, if you believe this script, someone he wouldn't have been nearly as successful without.  But Alma's getting sick of Hitch's lack of attention so starts paying attention to a dashing but not very talented writer named Whitfield Cook.  They start writing a script together while Hitchcock films Psycho and it starts to weigh on Hitch, who realizes that if he doesn't rekindle his relationship with Alma, she might run off with the hack and Psycho will turn out a disaster.

So what do I think about "Alfred Hitchcock and The Making Of Psycho?"  Well, it's a good enough script.  It includes some interesting tidbits about the making of.  But after I read it, I found myself asking, "Why did this movie need to be made?"  "What new does it bring to the table?"  I suppose the story of Alma is entertaining, but the script chooses to focus on Hitchcock as the main character even though her story is probably more interesting (mainly because it's less known).

At times, the writer seems just as unsure as we are about the point of the story.  I mean, we start with two tightly focused scenes regarding Hitchcock's age.  So naturally, Hitchcock's inner conflict will be his inability to accept getting older.  However, after those scenes, the age thing is never brought up again.

Instead, we seem to focus on Hitchcock's food obsession (in particular his foie gras craving), which is unfortunately quite thin.  When things don't go right, he eats.  There's really nothing deeper to it than that.

Finally, we move to Hitchcock's issues with his wife.  He rarely pays attention to her, despite all she's done for him.  This is what leads her on this quasi emotional affair (one which she never physically acts on) and while I guess it's kind of interesting, it's also kinda not.  Nothing really scandalous happens.  It's just a bunch of stares and devilish thoughts, leaving the storyline without a satisfying climax.  And that summarizes my feelings about the script.  It just kind of stands there with little to say.

What saves it are the few behind-the-scenes looks at Psycho's famous scenes and stars.  A heavy emphasis is put on the shower scene, which had never been done before in Hollywood.  The most interesting thing about that storyline was the Censors Board.  I guess before you even shot your movie back then, you had to go to a "Censors Board" and get approval from this dreadful stickler who decided whether everything was okay to shoot or not.  For example, toilets weren't shot back then. So you couldn't shoot a toilet!  Wtf???

And with the shower scene, every freaking angle had to be approved of.  And it wasn't.  They wanted Hitch to shoot Janet Leigh from the neck up.  How boring would that have been?  So Hitchcock ignores the censors and shoots the scene the way he wants it, because he knew that scene was going to be the one everyone talked about.

I have to admit, there is something cool about being behind the scenes of one of the most famous films of all time, and it is enough for me to give this script a pass.  But I'm left with the very same question I had at the beginning of this review.  Is there a compelling enough story here to build a movie around?    I'd probably say no.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

[ ] wasn't for me

[x] barely worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: This is mentioned in the script as one of Hitchcocks' staples and a scene that always works - A character needs to get someplace but is held up by someone who wants to chat (Marion Crane just wants to buy that car but the salesman keeps talking to her).  Write this scene into your script.  It always works!