Premise: A teenage comic book artist begins to suspect that his beautiful next door neighbor is an alien, and that she's the first wave of a possible invasion.
About: The Greys sold to Dimension a couple of months back for an undisclosed amount of dough. I’m not sure what Adam Cohen’s done in the past but I think this is his first spec sale. F. Javier Gutierrez (BEFORE THE FALL – about a serial killer who stalks a family days before a meteor is to hit the earth) is set to direct the film.
Writer: Adam Cohen
Details: 112 pages, March 13, 2011 (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
The Greys is a weird little script that. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at first. Is this another I Am Number 4 (I hope not, as that was the worst movie of the year). Is this another Eagle Eye (no, because they don’t go on the run. They pretty much stay localized)? Is it a viral extension of NBC’s canceled The Event (boy, it sure seemed like it at times). Or is this the sci-fi version of Disturbia (Please no, I’m having Shia overload)? The answer is it’s a little bit of all these things, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but let’s cover the basics.
17 year old Nathan Fletcher is a graphic novel artist with a strict military Air Force father in the vein of Ricky Fitts’ dad in American Beauty. He wants his son to have bigger balls. Wants him to stop pussy-footing around and do, like, man things. We’re talking real life shit. Not drawing a bunch of pansy-wansy creatures. As you probably guessed, Nathan has a wild best friend who helps to take his mind off his asshole dad and all his other problems, mainly by making the kind of inappropriate jokes only a wild best friend can make.
Nathan’s world is turned upside-down when this super hot ohmygod this can’t really be happening princess of a girl moves across the street from him named Kyra. Kyra, taking a page out of all the hot girls who move across the street from young protagonists in movies, thinks all the cool kids at her new school are lame and that our overly dorky average-looking hero is the shit. So the two start hanging out and Nathan is on the express elevator to heaven, bypassing that famous stairway Led Zepplin always talks about.
Around this same time, Nathan starts seeing suspicious looking planes flying around his tiny Colorado town - definitely not the kind of planes you or I are used to. When he starts overhearing his father's hush-hush conversations with other military personnel, he begins to suspect that something big is going down. Could this be the beginning of… an invasion?
Strap yourself in Nate-buddy cause this is about to get a lot more complicated. The more time Nathan spends with Kyra, the stranger she starts to act, at one point interrupting their kiss to open up his mouth as far as it can go so she can peer down into it. He’s not sure if that’s supposed to be really sexy or really creepy. But at some point he kind of gets the hint that if something is too good to be true, it probably is, and Kyra likely has ulterior motives for making him her new best kissing friend. Could Kyra really be an alien? Could she be the ground force recon team that’s prepping for an upcoming invasion? And if so, why the hell is she so interested in him? Would could Nathan possibly have to offer?
About halfway through The Greys, I was having a tough time figuring out why it sold. It seemed to be your typical Shia Labeouf “meet the hot girl next door then the shit hits the fan” vehicle, with nothing else to hang its alien tentacles on. None of it was bad. And I guess a nice mystery had been set up - Is this an invasion? But there was a tremendous feeling of, “This subject matter has been mined to death. There’s nothing new here.”
And then I got to page 70 and there’s a huuuuuuuuuuuuge twist (which I’m not going to spoil here) and I was like, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” And all of a sudden it made sense. THAT’S why this script sold. You know it’s a good twist when you’ve read everything and you still weren’t able to predict it.
Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to say about The Greys outside of the twist. There’s interesting little thematic undertones about sleeper cells and terrorists among us that hadn’t been fully fleshed out but was still sort of neat. Anything you can add to your story that adds another layer of depth is a good thing. So that was cool.
I also like the localized setting of the bigger picture idea (or the “Signs” approach). Going by the title alone, I thought this was going to be another alien invasion movie. And the problem with these movies, and where their scripts run into trouble, is that the idea is too big for the film. You have to cover too many places and too many characters to leave us enough time to care about any one person.
When you localize a big concept, you’re able to deal with it on a more human level. And that means a better chance of connecting with the characters. Even in a movie like Battle L.A., which was limited to one city, they spent so much time jumping around to all these characters that I didn’t care about any of them. Of course, Battle L.A. had tens of thousands of other script problems as well (I thought they did a page 1 rewrite on that script. Somehow they managed to write the exact same movie, but make it worse). But the point is, making that decision between a big picture approach to the idea and a small picture approach to the idea is a crucial one, and should be weighed carefully. The big picture gets you the big summer money shots and the higher overall marketability, but the small approach gets you a story that’s always more interesting, since it’s character driven, as well as a manageable budget, which is what allowed this to sell (Dimension would never have bought this if it were a 100 million dollar actioneer).
In the end, my impression of The Greys is that it takes a big gamble by resting the entire story on the twist. It does get kind of interesting afterwards because you’re so gobsmacked by the surprise, you’re drawn to the repercussions by default, but you have to endure 70 pages of standard story in order to get there, which is why I always say, if you’re going to write a big twist into your story, don’t make it the only thing worthy of being in the script. Try to make the rest of the script even better than the twist, so the twist supplements the story instead of defines it. That being said, I thought this was more sophisticated and more interesting than the other recent contained sci-fi thriller sale, The Watching Hour. So there’s that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Each character should have a story goal (to drive the story) and a life goal (also known as their dream). In Back To The Future, Marty’s story goal is to get his parents together so he can get home. His bigger “life goal” is to become a rock star. In The Greys, Nathan’s story goal is to find out what’s going on with this possible invasion. His life goal is to become a graphic novel artist. You can learn a LOT about a character through their dream. So it's worth including one.
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