In The Tall Grass: from book to film with ONE essential new character

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Books, Ending, Films, Horror, Midpoint, Netflix, screenplay, Screenwriting, Stephen King, Writing

This may be a very niche post.

a) Like most posts on the all-new PK’s Writing Blog, it’s aimed at writers or those interested in writing and how it does or doesn’t work. You don’t need to be a writer – just willing to tinker under the bonnet/hood (UK/US term for the front bit on a car).

b) You need to either have seen In The Tall Grass on Netflix as I just have… and/or read the Stephen King/Joe Hill novella it’s based on… OR …not mind reading about spoilerific plot points in either, if you’re planning to see/read it.

I was intrigued to see that this slim trim horror story – with a pretty lean cast to begin with – had to add one crucial character to graduate from page to screen. And that in turn is quite telling about an essential part of telling a satisfying story. Which we’ll get to. But first, what you need to know about In The Tall Grass. SPOILERS below…

It’s a horror film based on one neat idea – what if you got lost in a field of grass that was just too tall to see over? Watch the trailer, you’ll get a feel for the whole movie. So it’s a maze: at times repetitive and annoying, at times scary, at (rare) times hopeful, and at times the same characters bump into each other…

Needs a mow.

Those characters are: our hero the pregnant Becky… her ill-motived brother Cal… a stereotypically cute/scary boy called Tobin who incites their incident (his lost cries lure them into the field of corn – I mean grass)… Tobin’s twisted dad Ross (don’t trust him)… and Tobin’s mum Natalie (the subbest of sub-characters, so you know she’s there just to show you how nasty Ross becomes.

Oh and a dog. Of course there’s a dog. Should they follow the dog? No they should not follow the dog.

But going back to Natalie, her hideous demise comes bang-on exactly halfway through the film. Almost to the minute.

The midpoint. That elusive screenwriting moment that’s a major plot point to shake things up. A realisation of what’s at stake. A false resolution, or an awareness of how bad things have become. In Se7en, it’s when Detectives Mills and Somerset discover John Doe’s lair. In Jurassic Park, almost exactly halfway to the minute, we first see the T-Rex and realise its threat. In Jaws, almost exactly halfway to the minute, the shark’s in . In each case, it’s horrific awareness. In Schindler’s List (Spielberg clearly loves his midpoints), almost to the second, halfway through the film Oskar Schindler goes from self-absorbed egotist to benevolent life-saver. We’ll zoom in on that example in a future blog post – it’s such an effective turnabout.

So that’s the midpoint – time and time again, giving our characters a fuller understanding of the horror show they’re in. It’s like they’ve spent the first half of the film climbing a mountain. Halfway through they’ve climbed the peak, and they can see not only far they’ve come, but the sheer scale of how far they have to go. But at least they can climb down the other side with skills learned and knowledge gained from the first half.

How do we get out of this movie? We’ve been stuck in production here for years…

The end of In The Tall Grass novella and film differ. Why? Mainly because of the audience. Stephen King and Joe Hill write to shock their readers. The number of Stephen King short stories with downer endings… Me oh my. But films? With very rare exceptions, even horror film audiences seek some kind of happy ending. Tie up the loose ends. Let our hero win the day. They’ve suffered enough! You can still have an epilogue gut-punch if you really want, but most of the time, we won’t be satisfied with a downer ending.

Proper spoilers now: the novella ends with Becky, Cal and Tobin all a bit mad, hugging n evil rock, destined never to leave the grass, but this won’t do for the film. Simply put, they need saving.

How do you save a character? With sacrifice. And no, not Children of the Corn type sacrifice on that rock – but with self-sacrifice. We could get spiritual and religious here but I’ll park that for now. Suffice to say, an outsider coming in to sacrifice himself so that others might live sounds a bit familiar.

So this is where our extra character comes in. Not in the book, but entering the film stage left is Becky’s estranged boyf and father of the baby, Travis. For the first half of the movie, it’s not entirely clear if he’s good or bad, but again, at around that midpoint, all becomes clear. The brother is bad – the boyfriend is good. From the midpoint on, we’re just playing out what’s been set up.

Travis’ entire role in the film is to save the day – but the rules mean that doesn’t come easily. He has to sacrifice himself (the only way out of the grass maze is to touch the rock, to gain knowledge – again the biblical metaphors are there, with Eden-based apple-eating and knowledge consumption). Armed with the knowledge of how to escape, but cursed with never being able to leave himself, Travis can save the boy Tobin, who can then save Becky and Cal.

(One bugbear of mine? By saving Becky and Cal, Becky is destined to a life with her twisted brother Cal, but hey, maybe she’ll realise his motives another day, off-screen…)

So there you have it. A cast list of 5 grows to a cast list of 6 from page to screen. Interestingly too, the grass in the book can only alter space, while the grass in the film can alter space and time. By making it 2D, they’ve added a dimension… and a sacrificial saviour, to give us a ‘happy’, if still somewhat unpleasant, ending.

GoT Finale: 5 thoughts from the screenplay now online

Tags

Game of Thrones, screenplay, Writing

GOT FINALE SPOILERS BELOW, BEWARE…

On a previous blog post here (in fact the first of this new era of PK’s Writing Blog – I’m sure we all have that date in our mental diary since it marked a new dawn for civilisation), I threw some thoughts down on the Game of Thrones finale. Well the script of that final episode has just landed online.

(You COULD read it here on the Emmys’ homepage – though it’s currently down, so that may bring you to an e-pit of despair. It might go up again. Or might stay down. It’s either because demand has crashed it, or because criticism has been levelled against it. The other Emmy-nominated scripts are readable here.)

Various haters have used the script’s recent appearance to pull it apart even more – including how (SPOILER!) Drogon the dragon didn’t burn the Iron Throne deliberately – it was just “a dumb bystander”, as it’s described in the screenplay. Others have mocked their stage directions of Sansa and Jon Snow’s reaction to being asked what’s west of Westeros. “Jon and Sansa look at each other. They both failed geography.”

We’ll have none of that here. They say a screenplay isn’t a work of art – it’s a blueprint, an invitation to collaborate on making a work of art. They can use whatever scene descriptions they want to get the point across to the crew. So I shan’t pile in on that. Benioff and Weiss ended the show how they wanted (presuming with some sign-off from ol’ motorbike himself, George “Rrrrrrrr” Martin).

As I said in the earlier blog post, epics are hard to end when you’re telling a story of good vs evil, because everyone has to pick a lane by the end, and we end up with the goodest of the good and the baddest of the bad, and no shades of grey in the middle. The shades of grey, it turns out, was the fun part in the middle of the show, when characters betrayed each other, were redeemed, etc. The only way they could have upended expectation was to have Tyrion open a door and appear in present-day New York or something. But then that was done already by Amy Adams in Enchanted, so even that’s been done before…

Fantasy character appears in present-day New York: possibly the only way to have ended Game of Thrones.

Instead of pulling it apart, I want to draw some positive general writing pointers from a quick skim of the script. What can we learn from that script? Granted, now it’s offline again, you may not be able to read it. But I’ve had a skim, and here are some immediate takeaways (if the script reappears online, you can check the page numbers then)…

 

1. Epics look the same as everything else on the page

This script is still just 44 pages long, and adheres to all the usual screenplay layout formatting. The first thing that struck me about this script, is it looked surprisingly normal – just like my paltry attempts. From afar…

It’s also then still got all the same dilemmas re character choice and story beats as any other script. It’s also got jokes – and the moments of comedy leap off the page: see Bronn’s brothel comment on p.40, or Samwell’s laughable attempt at democracy on p.25. Two bits of comedy in a 44-page drama script seems about right I guess, when you’ve started off by referencing a camera shot from Son of Saul.

 

2. Epic doesn’t mean epic scene descriptions

Brevity is the soul of wit, so said Oscar Wilde (or he could have shortened it to ‘Brevity’s soul’s wit’ – even briefer). The scene descriptions may take up half a page or more, but they’re full of just the right amount of information to make the show. No fat on it. Regardless what you thought of the episode, this is how professional TV (and the biggest show on professional TV) is made. Give the crew what they need.

Look at that second line on the first page:

“King’s Landing is a smoldering wreck of a city.”

That’s all they need to say. We know from the previous episode that the city’s been decimated by dragonfire. Buildings are on fire. Flaming timber fills the streets. There’s a house there still falling down – another over there that’s now ash – another over there that’s… doesn’t matter. Let the production team make all that happen. Just get in the bare bones of what we need to know for the story.

 

3. The writers know when to let the visuals tell the story…

Page 4 is dialogue-free. So’s page 15, pp.20-21, pp.41-42… This doesn’t just apply to the very visual genre we’re in here. Many newer screenwriters (especially if they’re come from stageplay or radio) fill the script with dialogue and forget those moments when as viewers we just want to view. When the spoken words have given us enough to think on for now, we sometimes need the breather to take it all in. Again, those visual descriptions don’t direct, but give the director just enough to go on.

See p.20: “In a beautiful, terrifying tableaux, he [the dragon] roars to the sky, the embodiment of rage.”

…Let someone else work out what that looks like.

 

4. …and when to speak and speak and speak

Another rookie error is writing long speeches. Most speeches in most scripts last between one and four lines down the page. Yet us writers often earnestly think we need to have each character blurt out their life story, or exactly what they’re thinking down to their thoughts on what lovely weather it is for the time of year. Don’t need it.

That said, in epic fantasy, some characters are prone to a bit more Wizardy-Dickens kind of speech. All “forsooth, a goblin” and “thou shalt verily fight me at dawn’s break”. Tyrion’s speech at the top of p.13 isn’t too Wizardy-Dickens, but it is seven lines then five lines (making twelve lines, maths fans), as he espouses on how “Sometimes duty is the death of love.” He’s got some big thoughts to convey before show’s end, and he’s always been a talker.

Edmure: The Boris Johnson of Game of Thrones (if only).

See also Edmure’s speech at the top of p.25. Nine lines, and these are the first words he’s said in about four seasons – because this is the moment where he thinks he’s being grand and claiming the non-existent throne, but then is comedically cut off by Sansa and put back in his place. He overspeaks, because it’s funny, because he’s rubbish.

I wouldn’t expect Greyworm or Bronn to waffle on quite so much. But in this finale of finales, this episode of episodes, sure, sometimes the writers need to let the characters have their last speeches and set the seven kingdoms to rights. Most of the time though, us writers (me included – this blog is aimed at teaching myself, ultimately), need to know when to shut (our characters) up.

 

5. Some bits still don’t quite make sense

pp.26-27 – Bran is chosen as the new ruler. I’ve seen it and read it and I still don’t buy it. Tyrion asks “Who has a better story than Bran the Broken?” I’d suggest: most of them. People didn’t tune in each week for Bran’s story. They tuned in for Tyrion’s. Jon Snow’s. Arya’s. Bran’s too, but he was never our favourite.

Then a few lines on: “Bran doesn’t look shocked. Simply uninterested.”

Says it all.

BUT it’s not up to me – it’s up to the writers – and fair play to ’em for writing this as they wished. I wouldn’t have written it that way. But then I wouldn’t have got to write any of this stuff…

…Because I’m still learning. And thanks to reading scripts like this (if it’s ever reposted), we get to learn from the pros.

“END OF SEASON 8

END OF GAME OF THRONES”

(END OF GAME OF THRONES BLOG POSTS FROM ME)