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"