Juno … an alumnus of the Black List of unproduced screenplays
The past year has been a good one for phantom films, those unfinished or never-quite-started projects that conformation a tantalising shadow history of cinema – be a witness of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, the capacious research for which has finally reached daylight in the form of a dogmatical Taschen tome, or Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, the subject of a modern documentary. BBC4’s Christmas Welles season, through its focus on the decade or two rear Citizen Kane, couldn’t help but appear to be a catalogue of what-ifs and near-misses.
But shadow cinema is not restricted to the archives. Every December, Franklin Leonard of the William Morris agency in Los Angeles releases his Black List, a rundown of the best unproduced screenplays currently doing the rounds in Hollywood. Compiled by the agency of collating the opinions of greater quantity than 300 industry insiders, the rundown supposedly showcases first copy and accomplished work that potency not otherwise have a snowball in hell’s chance of production. Scripts mentioned over the list’s five-year history have included Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, The Road and This Side of the Truth (later renamed The Invention of Lying). So the unveiling of a new tally at year’s end is seen in the industry to the degree that a chance to get up to speed by what’s bubbling under.
The top pick of 2008 – Kyle Killen’s The Beaver, about a man seeking emotional fulfilment through the exercise of a beaver glove image – demonstrated both the list’s simple blemish for leftfield stories and its currency: the picture was marksman this year starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, with Foster directing. Other titles from the list reportedly on the way to screens include oncology comedy (oncom?) I’m With Cancer and the neo-western thriller Big Hole.
So the kind of does this year’s fillet have to offer? Well, it’s a rum old bunch, that’s for sure, but not without rhyme or reason. Neo-westerns remain popular, thanks perhaps to the success of No Country for Old Men. That picture’s tone seems to permeate both The Gunslinger, about a sharpshooter out with a view to revenge following the death of his Texas ranger brother, and the period-set By Way of Helena, in which a border town’s dark secrets are revealed. Like No Country, both seem interested in blurring moral categories season maintaining expansive force.
The problems through violence and vengeance seem to be of changeless interest. It’s hard not to think “war-on-terror simile alert!” when you read about Prisoners, a thriller about a Christian survivalist who responds to the disappearance of his daughter with a campaign of kidnap and torture, only to meet with that he might be barking up the wrong tree. The Voices, meanwhile, offers a macabre comic twist on schizophrenic homicide, with a deranged bathtub-factory worker taking instructions from his talking pets posterior killing a co-worker, with whose severed head he enjoys chitchat. And in LA Rex, rookie-and-vet LAPD partners are pitched against a gang warfare and their own pasts.
The list’s two comedies spotlight long-delayed adolescences from both sides of the gender divide, which suggests that the influence of the Apatow secure and such newcomers as The Hangover remains strong. Cedar Rapids is about a middle-aged insurance executive finally kickstarting his life at a business convention, while Desperados focuses on a marriage-hungry lawyer and her friends making a anchorage trip in the name of true love and the avoidance of excruciating humiliation.
There’s also significant interest in contemporaneous reality, by spots for scripts about the ascend of Facebook and the death of Alexander Litvinenko. The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin, sets the hasty days of Mark Zuckerberg’s online startup done against recent accusations from former colleagues that he stole their idea. David Scarpa’s Londongrad opts for a similar structure, interpolating the former Soviet spy’s last days with his time in KGB training, run-ins with the Russian mafia and arguments by his bosses.
But the top spot goes to another true story, albeit a warmer, fuzzier one: Jim Henson biopic The Muppet Man, which apparently features “surreal” appearances from Kermit, Miss Piggy et al. A hatchet job is unpromising to be on the cards given that the project is already set up at the Jim Henson Company. Indeed, all the titles on the limit are in some form of active development, with a few well into production, which suggests that the list’sitting definition of “unproduced” is fairly generous. The Black List’session projects are leftfield by major studio standards but not, from the looks of it, actually radical. (The other title on the list, The Days Before, looks preference a standard SF blockbuster.) Insiders’ outsiders, for this reason, but therefore all the in addition intriguing as intimations of Hollywood-to-come.
