Hollywood Hack Job

by Nathan Allen

  The 1980s was an especially fertile period that had been mined over and over. Remakes of films from this era were often aimed at millennials, whose limited knowledge of the world outside their own made them ignorant of anything pre-2000, and largely unaware they were watching reheated entertainment.

  However, the biggest market for these remakes was actually their Generation X parents, who were part of an aging demographic stubbornly resistant to new experiences. The nostalgia boom had reached supernova levels in recent years to the point where had now morphed into a genre in itself. Few could have predicted that an entire generation of eighties-reared children would grow up to lead such empty and unfulfilling lives that it would create this unprecedented collective yearning for simpler times. Life had become an endless series of disappointments for many who came of age during the Reagan era, and as adults they desperately clung to their warm childhood memories rather than taking the risk of seeking out something new or different.

  Less common in the subgenre of horror remakes, but with several notable successes, was the English-language adaptation of foreign titles. These films were often reshaped and remolded to be made palatable for Western audiences, giving them a quick coat of Hollywood gloss and removing elements that Americans may find objectionable – subtitles, restraint, pacing, and provocative or confronting themes – and adding a cast of recognizable stars. The remade films often had plots that were less confusing, as the American director and screenwriters would spell out any ambiguous story points or resolutions that may have previously been left open to interpretation. In the case of Asian remakes, white audiences had less trouble following the story now that the characters no longer looked alike.

  Chapter 16

  A look of demented pleasure was plastered across the killer’s abscess- and wart-ravaged face as he taunted the terrified cheerleader with the red hot poker. He grinned a toothless smile, amused by her futile attempts to free herself. He knew she wasn’t going anywhere. The rusty spikes driven through her hands would see to that.

  “Please ...” she begged, tiny rivers of mascara running down her cheeks. “Please let me go ... I promise I won’t tell anyone ...”

  The killer paid no attention to the cheerleader’s desperate pleas. He let out a laugh of pure evil as he forced the glowing poker into her eye socket.

  Cameron felt his stomach contract at the moment of impact. His nerves were in ribbons. He had to physically force himself to not look away as the camera zoomed in on the blood and puréed eyeball gushing down the cheerleader’s face.

  He glanced across to Eric, sitting beside him on the sofa, clutching a cushion the way a toddler might hug a favorite blanket. He looked in even worse shape, with the pallid complexion of someone who had involuntarily swallowed a gallon of curdled milk.

  “Are you okay?” Cameron said. “You don’t look too good.”

  “Do people actually enjoy watching this stuff?” Eric said.

  “These kind of films make money, apparently. This one made almost two hundred million off a three million dollar budget, so I guess that means they have enough viewers.”

  Eric swallowed, forcing down the bile pushing at the back of his throat. “I’m not sure I have the constitution to handle this level of gore,” he said. “I honestly have no idea how anyone could derive pleasure from something like this.”

  “Maybe it’s not meant to be enjoyed. Maybe it’s more like an endurance test. See if you can make it through to the end without vomiting or passing out.”

  They watched in silence a little while longer. Cameron absentmindedly tapped his pen against his notepad. So far he had “IDEAS” written at the top of the page, underlined twice. Beneath that was blank, save for some doodling scrawled in the margins. Attempting to write anything would have been pointless anyway, due to the debilitating tremor that had taken over his hands ten minutes into the movie.

  Following on from their disastrous meeting at Platinum Dunes, Cameron and Eric realized they would have to do some extensive research into the genre they were meant to be writing about before attempting the next draft. Their first task was to go through the Netflix library and review as many horror titles as they could, one by one. They began with the slashers of the seventies and eighties; mostly trashy exploitation flicks with amateurish production values and plots so interchangeable they may as well have been the same movie with different titles tacked on. Next up was the post-modernism and arch irony of nineties horror, where it became acceptable to laugh at innocent people being brutally slaughtered if the characters occasionally winked at the camera and made reference to how the events surrounding them resembled that of a horror film.

  Found footage films, the turn of the millennium fad that proved to be a goldmine for studios, came next. This gimmick allowed films to be produced and released into cinemas without having to worry about budgets, proper scripts, professional equipment, cinematography, high production values or competent actors.

  They then reached the genre’s nadir with the early twenty-first century subgenre known as “torture porn”. If nothing else, the label was accurate – sitting through one of these cinematic abominations was about as much fun as being waterboarded, and, as with actual pornography, the filmmakers left very little to the imagination.

  The past few weeks had been nothing short of brutal for the two writers. Along with rewatching all seven Wrong Turn’s, they had suffered through three Hostel’s, eight Saw’s, five I Spit On Your Grave’s, three Human Centipede’s, three The Hills Have Eyes’s, and countless other Halloween’s, Friday the 13th’s and Nightmare On Elm Street’s. At one point they decided to broaden their palette and sample some Japanese horror. They figured that Asian directors might offer something a little more nuanced and less grotesque than what they’d subjected themselves to up until then. They were wrong. The Japanese, they soon discovered, were every bit as deranged as their Western counterparts. And that was before they stumbled across the collective works of a certified psychotic by the name of Takashi Miike. After viewing several of Mr. Miike’s films, Cameron and Eric decided that filmmaking in Japan may actually be a form of therapy for deeply disturbed mental patients.

  The emotional toll of all this murder and mutilation was starting to show. Both were having trouble sleeping at night, and they worried what effect these films were having on their sanity. Watching such extreme violence for entertainment purposes was surely detrimental to their mental health. They could only imagine what was going through the minds of these writers as they dreamed up all this depravity.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This was not what they wanted to be doing with their lives. They had journeyed to Hollywood with plans on shaking up the industry. They had seen what passed for writing in modern cinema and decided they had the talent to blow everyone else out of the water. Most movies these days appeared to have been penned by barely-literate hacks who couldn’t tell the difference between a predicate and a preposition.

  Their plan was simple but ambitious. They would spend five years whoring themselves out to the major studios, churning out a few formulaic scripts and making a couple of easy million, then leave while they were still on top. The money would allow them to spend the next decade or so doing what they really loved, which was writing their epic literary novels. Eric dreamed of following in the footsteps of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Stein by writing in Paris. Cameron planned on making Moscow his muse.

  But it wasn’t long before the harsh realities of life as a Hollywood screenwriter set in. Countless hours were invested into their spec scripts, and although everyone who read them agreed their writing showed flashes of brilliance, they were unable to convince any studios to take a chance on them. They kept hearing the same excuses over and over – they lacked the experience, the spec market had all but dried up, anything not based on a comic book or preexisting brand was a hard sell. They were unemployed, their trust funds were shrinking, and they were eventually forced to consider the unthinkable – working for
Michael Bay.

  They rejected the idea outright when their agent first raised it. Michael Bay was one of those populist directors they had always sneered at, despite neither one having seen any of his films (they took a similar attitude to the writing of Dan Brown and the music of Nickleback). It was only when they were reminded that they had yet to receive any paid work in the three years since arriving in Hollywood that they reluctantly agreed to take a meeting.

  Much to their surprise, they found Michael easy to like. He was friendly, his enthusiasm for cinema was contagious, and he flattered them endlessly by praising their talents as writers. Even though they considered it beneath them, they eventually agreed to take on the job of writing Wrong Turn. The money was decent, and they figured it couldn’t be that hard to crank out a generic slasher script in the space of a couple of months. They only needed one hit to springboard their careers, that one produced film with their name on the credits, and the rest of the plan would fall into place.

  Only now were they discovering that writing the script was not quite as simple as they initially imagined.

  On the TV, the killer dragged the cheerleader’s now headless corpse into the basement. He placed her alongside his other victims, then disrobed in preparation for the necrophilic orgy.

  “Do you think this is doing us any good?” Eric wondered aloud.

  “I feel like it’s helping,” Cameron said. “We just have to give it some time.”

  “It feels to me like an exercise in extreme masochism.”

  “Well sometimes Eric, if you want to succeed, you have to do things you don’t necessarily want to do,” Cameron said, shifting his position on the sofa. “Step out of your comfort zone once in a while. Push yourself further than what you thought you were capable of.”

  Eric reviewed the list that he and Cameron had compiled during their month-long movie binge. It ran to seven pages, and included the following:

  Cell phones with dead/dying batteries and/or poor reception.

  Vehicles with engines that refuse to start at the worst possible moment.

  The killer making a sudden appearance in the mirror.

  Unhelpful and/or incompetent police officers.

  Loud noises when trying to escape or avoid the killer (e.g. creaking floorboards, accidentally knocking something over).

  A death scene that turns out to be a bad dream.

  Falling over when trying to outrun the killer.

  Jump scares every eight pages.

  Female nudity every twelve pages.

  A killer who refuses to die, no matter how much punishment (s)he takes.

  A last-ditch, long-shot plan that the protagonist only just manages to pull off.

  A false ending that sets up for a sequel.

  The revelation that the killer is actually a manifestation of the protagonist’s dissociative identity disorder.

  The full document contained all the necessary elements for a commercial horror screenplay. This wasn’t how they usually worked, and they preferred not to write with such narrow constraints placed upon them. But they felt this would be the best way to produce the kind of film that fans of the genre, as well as Michael Bay, would approve of.

  They’d suffered through enough simulated gore to last several lifetimes. The time had come to put everything they’d learned into practice.

  Eric opened his laptop and created a new Final Draft document. “Okay, where should we begin?” he said

  Cameron peered over his shoulder. “I think ‘Fade In’ is usually a good starting point.”

  Eric cracked his knuckles, then began to peck away at the keys.

  FADE IN:

  EXT. WOODS -- DAY

  We open on WILDERNESS. Miles and miles from the nearest town. The camera glides from above until we hit a DIRT ROAD, leading to a SMALL CLEARING among the thick terrain.

  A group of five COLLEGE-AGED CAMPERS unload their gear from a silver SUV. SCOTT, 21, ruggedly handsome and the only one in the group who appears to know what he’s doing, HAMMERS tent pegs into the hard grou

  They were two minutes into the writing session when a deep thumping sound broke their concentration. Cameron and Eric both let out quiet groans. This was their new neighbor – some frustrated rock star who had moved in a couple of weeks earlier. In the short time he had been living there he had quickly become the neighborhood’s number one irritant. When he wasn’t inducing migraines and raising blood pressure levels by bashing away on his drum kit at all hours of the day and night, he was keeping the whole street awake by hosting wild parties that would rage for days on end.

  Cameron got up and pulled all the windows closed. This did nothing to block out the noise. He stood at the window and looked out over the fence with his hands on his hips.

  “What do you think we should do?” he said.

  Eric tapped his fingers against the table. “Maybe it’ll only be a short session this time.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  A few more minutes went by with no further words committed to the page. Eric rose from his seat and walked to the door.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “I’m going over there.”

  “Eric, don’t bother,” Cameron said. “You know it won’t do anything.”

  “We have to make a start on the script, and we can’t concentrate with all that going on in the background.”

  “Just leave it. He’s usually done after about an hour, anyway.”

  “If we put it off for another hour, something else will come up and we’ll never get any work done.” Eric pulled on his blazer and slid his feet into his Hudson Pierre loafers. “We’re working to a deadline, and we’re already falling behind. We have to stop making excuses and get this done.”

  “Do you really think he’ll stop playing just because you ask him to?”

  “I don’t know, but he definitely won’t stop if we just sit here and complain about it. Maybe if I ask nicely he’ll see to reason.”

  “Sure, and maybe you’ll get the door slammed in your face.”

  Eric shrugged. “We’ll never know unless one of us goes over there and finds out, will we?”

  The neighbor’s front lawn was a mess, strewn with soggy pizza boxes, fast food wrappers, beer bottles, discarded items of clothing, and other assorted detritus. This was the remnants of last weekend’s party, the epic three-day rager that prevented anyone within a two mile radius from enjoying more than a few hours’ sleep per night. The one where the guests thought it would be a good idea to rev up a chainsaw at three o’clock on a Monday morning and cut open a beer keg.

  Eric stepped through the gate and came to the front door. After a moment of hesitation, he rang the doorbell and waited.

  There was no answer. The thump-thump-thump from inside continued. He tried again, and had the same result.

  He pressed his finger to the doorbell and held it down. After two minutes of constant ringing, the drumming finally stopped and the door flew open.

  “What?” the neighbor screamed.

  The first thing Eric noticed about his neighbor was that he was about ten or fifteen years older that what he initially assumed. Up until now he had only ever seen him from a distance, and it was difficult to estimate his exact age. Now he saw that he was at least forty, maybe even older – although he appeared to be doing everything in his power to hide this fact. He still dressed like a twenty year old, with black drainpipe jeans and a tight tank top that showed off his heavily-inked arms and the beginnings of a middle-age paunch. Large black gauges stretched out both his ear lobes, and a red bandana covered what Eric suspected was a receding hairline. The smooth, pinched skin around the edges of his slightly puffy face suggested a fondness for Botox injections.

  Eric thought he could guess this guy’s life story with a fair degree of accuracy. Here was someone who had come to LA years ago to make it as a rocker. He played in bands that enjoyed some fleeting success, gigging up and down Sunset Strip coupled with the occasional West Coast tour,
but his career never really progressed beyond local legend status. Some of the other bands and musicians he supported would have gone on to bigger and better things, but ultimate success had always eluded him. Any money he made likely disappeared via his nostrils. Twenty years then flew by, and he was still plugging away in the vain hope that his big break was just around the corner. Desperation was slowly creeping in as his opportunities diminished, along with the growing realization that he was completely unqualified to do anything else with his life except play the drums.

  “Are you gonna say anything?” the neighbor sneered. “Or are you just gonna stare into space like you’re the world’s ugliest Ryan Gosling impersonator?”

  “I-I was just wondering ... if it’s not too much trouble ...” An unexpected stammer had infected Eric’s voice. He didn’t know what it was about this guy that made him so nervous. Maybe it was the clenched fists and bug-eyed stare, affectations he seemed to have adopted to make it look like he was ready to fight at the slightest provocation. “If you w-wouldn’t mind keeping the noise down ...?”

  The neighbor looked at Eric like he had just asked to borrow a large sum of money.

  “It’s just that I’m a writer ... we’re both writers actually, my roommate and I, and, well, we have this big deadline coming up ... the noise, even though it sounds terrific, really tight and all that ... it, it kind of interferes with our creative process ...”

  The neighbor displayed no reaction. Eric felt his face burn up. He pressed on.