CHRIS'S FREE BRAIN MOVIE
The Griff
Hi kids. The Authorguy here, and keeping with the time honored
tradition of piling one's useless crap on the web for all to see, I've decided
to give you all a chance to read a movie script that I recently co-authored,
called THE GRIFF.
About a year and a half ago I was reading a story by my friend
Catherine Ryan Hyde, about a kid who has a nightmare being chased by a giant
bird of prey. The description was so vivid, and so frightening, that I started
thinking about a story where giant creatures came out of the sky to hunt
humans. I ended up all night outlining the better part of a story that was ,
was too much material for a short story, and not quite right for a novel,
especially one of my novels. If it was going to breath, it definitely needed to
be a movie.
Meanwhile, another friend, Ian Corson, who is a director and who had
written a script for Coyote Blue, visited for a weekend so we could put a comic
polish on the Coyote script. (Which as of now, June 2002, is available, for all
those of you who would love to make a movie of Coyote Blue.) Anyway, I told him
the idea for The Griff. A movie about giant dragon-like things who drop out of
outer space for no particular reason and attack the Earth. He thought, as I
did, that it would never get made and would cost 200 million to make if it ever
did, but it would be fun to write.
Summer of 2001, Ian calls me and says, "Hey, let's write The Griff.
Of course it will never get made, but you could use it to avoid working on your
book." Well, I was sold. Over the next few months we worked by e-mail and the
phone and came up with the movie script that follows, which you can download
and read for free (or which you can buy for a movie for a million dollars, but
that includes two rewrites, so it's almost free. Just the same, I recommend you
just read it.)
Anyway, we finished the script sometime in the fall, when
Ian heard from a friend of his who works at Stan Winston's creature factory,
that Mathew McConnahey (sp?) and Jude Law were starring in a movie about flying
dragons taking over the world (Reign of Fire). What the hell were the odds?
Anyway, we pretty much decided that there wasn't room in the world for two giant
flying dragons taking over the world movies, so here, for your reading
pleasure, is the script of our movie, The Griff.
Be forewarned, if you've never read
a script before, it's customary to leave all of the writing out, so those of
you who are looking for a the voice you find in my novels, well, it's just not
there. Maybe if you're interested, we can talk about which of us (Ian or me)
came up with which character, and how we went about the different scenes, on
the discussion board. But for now, just assume that anything you like, I wrote,
and anything you don't like, Ian wrote. Scripts aren't written to be read,
they're written to be filmed. But it's free, and it's going to be some time
before my next book comes out, so have some fun. If nothing else, I think this
thing is fun.
You'll
need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read this. There's a link where you can download
it free if you don't have it.
Click here to Download "The Griff"