From “In the Deep” to in “The Shallows”

What was lost and what was gained from spec script to final cut.

Films are good - even bad ones. Even a bad film represents the best efforts of scores or hundreds of people, and we can learn from bad films what works and what doesn’t. What kicks in a script won’t necessarily on the screen.

If you’ve never read a screenplay, it’s time. Notice how hard it is to read anything on the web anymore? You want to read a 200 word piece on a news event but, you end up waiting until the video buffers so some talking head can tell you what it was you wanted to read.

This wouldn’t be happening if we didn’t want it to. Most of us must want to watch, not read — everything. Video is replacing the printed word. No matter what kind of writing to which you aspire, it’s time to learn about video so you can participate in the future. Read this spec scrip, watch the film and you’ll see some of the differences between printed stories and those we watch.

The Shallows isn’t bad but, neither is it good. Instead of big budget special effects it uses mid-level special effects. The film depends on story and, that’s where it fails — story. It started out as a trim, 81 page spec called “In the Deep”, written by Tony Jaswinski. You’ll find it here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u47j1w363jaww1k/IN%20THE%20DEEP_Tony%20Jaswinski%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0.

Read it. It’s easy. It reads well because he made it read well, with some surfer lingo to give it flavor but, not too much, so you don’t need to know the lingo to know what’s happening. However, it wouldn’t have played well on the screen which, after all, is where Jaswinski hoped it would end up. So, why did he write it that way?

Lesson One: Write your spec for the script reader. Worry about what works on film later.

It ended up as an almost as trim 86 minute feature, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Collet-Serra had Jaswinski do more than add 5 minutes of fill. He had him add and remove enough to substantially change the film — but, not substantially enough.

The spec is, in some places almost literary. The film removed the literature and added spectacle. It obeys basic film making rules the spec broke, with good reason, the spec cost nothing but, the film cost $17 million. Collet-Serra couldn’t afford to break rules and alienate his audience unnecessarily.

The spec drips with flashbacks and imaginary scenes that let us into our hero’s head. In them we meet Nancy’s cancer-stricken mother before she became the imaginary ghost of Nancy’s dead mother. When Jaswinski needed to motivate or bring Nancy (and ourselves) down, he’d flash us back to her childhood or to her dying mother.

It worked in the script because we could imagine it. It could have worked in the film too but, would have been much more difficult. You can’t film the inside of a character’s head.

We’d have ended up filming flashbacks in multiple locations and juggling two worlds, Nancy’s problematic immediate life-threatening world and her problematic, inner psychological world — since her mother’s death she’s lost her will to succeed and connect.

Juggling two worlds is harder than juggling one and, psychological stories are harder to film than are thrillers so, unlike novels, which revel in complexity, unless both worlds are intrinsic to the story, in films one of them will be left on the revision room floor. That’s what Collet-Serra did, had Jaswinski cut the flashbacks and imaginary scenes, blowing off the psychological world and focusing on the immediate one.

He could have included the psychological story yet remained solidly in one world by letting Nancy talk to herself. She spent most of the film trapped either on a small reef or a small buoy being circled by the world’s biggest shark. Not only would I have been talking to myself, I’d have been emoting like hell.

Lively does neither, she fails to pull us into what should have been her despair, knowing the next high tide would turn her (and us) into fish food. This is an acting and a story failure. Instead of having Nancy tell us what’s happening, Collet-Serra inserts a countdown to high tide that pulls us out of the story.

They remind us we’re watching a film that, because of the clock, feels like a documentary. Instead of feeling Nancy’s pain and hopeless despair, we’re waiting to see how the writer and director will get her out of her mess.

The shooting script kept us out of Nancy’s head and Lively never let the hopelessness or panic show. Even her last words to her seagull buddy “at least you’ve got a chance” don’t convince us she doesn’t have a chance.

The spec let us know why we couldn’t hang out on the buoy until help arrived because, gangrene would sooner rather than later have killed us. The film dropped the ball, never explaining the implications of Nancy’s continuously darkening purple veins, and instead of gradually sinking into physical distress, at each escalating crisis Lively came up with the escalating energy she needed to get out of one hopeless fix and into the next. We never saw her decline and so, never felt her end was nigh.

The tidal clock was ticking but, her physical clock wasn’t. To outward appearances, she could have gone on outsmarting and outswimming the shark as long as she had to.

The film did, however improve on one of the spec’s subplots. What became of Nancy’s spec father we don’t know (Maybe that’s the late Millennial cultural soupe du jour, families don’t have fathers.) and, the spec relationship with her brother and niece is far less effective than her film relationships. The film hands her a worried father and spunky little sister. We didn’t care much about her spec brother and niece but, we like her film sister and the fact that Nancy is her little sister’s hero. We want them to see each other again, in one piece.

Whether writing a novel, a short story or a screenplay, if you want to make us root for your protagonist, give him or her an adoring younger sibling.

Collet-Serra also got right the (spoiler alert) essential prohibition against mutilating your protagonist. Steven King’s “Misery” character Annie cut off Paul’s feet. Had Rob Reiner and Jospeh Campbell let Kathy Bates cut off James Caan’s feet they’d have cut off part of their audience. Goldman’s film Annie smashes film Paul’s ankles, allowing us to imagine James Caan walking again, maybe with a cane but, with two feet.

You may give your hero some scars but, you must not mutilate him or her beyond socially acceptable norms.

Remember Jonah Hex, a character so badly maimed he lost all audience appeal? Maybe not. He was so unappealing the film didn’t succeed. But, The Joker, you say? Anybody find Heath Ledger or Jared Leto unappealing? Batshit Harley Quinn stinks of insanity but, how much more appealing could she be? See what I mean? Scars but — stay inside the lines.

You won’t lose millions of dollars printing a comic book about a maimed hero but, you’ll lose your shirt making a movie about him.

George Miller ignored the same principle in Fury Road, when he spent $150 million cutting off Charlize Theron’s arm and a goodly part of his audience. As much as we wished she could have, we knew Furiosa wasn’t going to grow a new arm. The film’s domestic box office failed to cover its production costs. People didn’t see Fury Road 4 or 5 times, once was enough.

To most viewers, Furiosa was too badly maimed to be an appealing hero. Max was crazy and Furiosa was maimed. We had no one to love.

Melville knew heroes must be whole so — Ahab lost his leg. In the New England of Melville’s day, masters of whaling ships were heroes and heroic. They wielded godlike power and, if they were good, enriched their employers and crews and gained fame and fortune.

Had Ahab been whole, he’d have been our hero but instead, he’s our villain!

Ahab, stumping about on his wooden leg, keeping the crew awake with his pacing, scaring them with his fixation on Moby Dick, sailing halfway around the world, to wreak his revenge on a whale, became our antagonist. We’re glad Ishmael lived to tell the tale but, by the end of the story we were cheering for the whale as he rid the world of Ahab’s inhumane human monster.

Peck was heroic with the white streak in his hair but, the leg called up our species’ prejudice against the less than attractive, less than strong, less than healthy, less than survivable, the individual who weakens the herd.

Ever see a mother cat or dog reject an imperfect kitten or pup? It’s natural. We’re repelled by the weak and imperfect. You can reject this in the name of social justice and get away with it in a short film or novel but, since script readers toss 99% of scripts on first read, if you want your film to be made, you mustn’t fight human nature, you must use it.

You must keep your hero acceptably intact.

What you have just read is a Melvillian metanote, a departure from the task at hand to deliver an interesting but tangential lesson. He did it several times in Moby Dick, writing what some call the Great American Novel but, confounding his readers who just wanted to know what the hell happened. Back to our film.

Spec Nancy loses her leg but, film Nancy escapes with a socially acceptable scar because, maiming his protagonist would have cost him his audience and his financial success and, since Collet-Serra’s not Spielberg, he couldn’t ignore human nature or audience numbers.

Other’s of Melville’s lessons didn’t take with either writer or director. Both spec and film used the artifice of oil draining from the carcass of a dead whale to aid Nancy in her escape, forgetting Melville’s literary rendering of the physical rendering of whales, the fires and pots in which the blubber must be boiled on firetrap wooden ships, to reduce it to liquid to be poured into casks.

If blubber liquified at room temperature whales would slosh around like giant water balloons and whalers could drain them like wine flasks.

If the fire in the story were necessary, Jaswinski and Collet-Serra might have had Nancy (another spoiler alert) fire her flare gun into the exposed blubber and set the thing alight. That’s almost plausible and would have added spectacle to the spectacle. After all, this is a thriller and we’re after spectacle and, the piddly little traces of fire Collet-Serra gives us on the water amount to a sad disappointment in terms of today’s expectations but…

…set a 15 ton whale ablaze, with acrid smoke and bursting organs— a cinematic first. Now that’s spectacle! Sadly, Jaswinski and Collet-Serra missed the chance to plow new ground in the world of cinematic delights.

Jaswinski’s spec killed the shark by lighting a fire atop the water and telling the shark to leap up into and thrash around in the flames until well done. His shark appears to have defied gravity.

Imagine, for a moment, you’re playing the shark, trying to work out your motivation: “I could swim menacingly through the water, as I’ve been doing for 40 years or, I could thrash about impossibly on surface, exposing myself to painful flames like the script says, even if I can’t get more than my head out of the water and then, only for a few seconds, due to my lack of buoyancy. Why am I performing this physically impossible feat? This isn’t just another completely implausible plot device, is it?”

In fact…it is.

Jaswinski’s climax reminds me of the space whale in “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, a large animal that can only live in the water ends up dying because it gets itself out of the water in a physically impossible or incredibly improbable (nodding to “The Guide”) way.

Collet-Serra’s climax isn’t much better, the shark slams its open mouth into some extraneous iron on the buoy’s anchor. It’s not at all obvious why the extraneous iron is there, nor is it a satisfying way to kill the monster which, is suddenly, undeniably, absolutely, verifiably, and certifiably — dead.

Instead of writhing in pain, struggling to free itself from an ingenious trap set by our hero, the monster is simply, instantly dead. Big, big anticlimax.

Nancy had the means to set a trap, a large anchor, a large chain and the old hook stuck in the side of the shark’s mouth. Too bad her writers didn’t use that means, killing the monster in minutes of insane, uncertain struggle instead of in the blink of an eye, so abruptly we almost missed it.

Jaswinski left us hanging, did she live, a one legged surfer or, did she die, a one legged corpse?

Collet-Serra lets us know and keeps us happy. He gets the denouement right. After she’s rescued and heals, Nancy goes to the beach with her father and spunky little sister and we get to see her socially acceptable scar. She even goes surfing again because, as every film shark survivor knows, there are only so many monsters out there and having survived hers, she’s immune.

And because sequels must be bigger and better, I’m betting next time it’s Sedona Legge trapped on the buoy, calling her big sister to come and kill a rogue Orca that’s broken her sailboat in two!