Our long time contributor Michael Vaal is back but this time looking at a spec script called Forvermore based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Unlike his past script reviews such as The Mummy III and DÉJÀ VU, he actually likes this one.

I have been sitting on this script for a liitle while and I did enjoy the read but since I am not the biggest authority on Edgar Allan Poe I figured that I should send it over to Mr. Vaal for his expert advice.

From what I have heard this script has had very favorable reads over at a couple agencies and I hear that it has made it to Johnny Depp's office. So is Johnny finally going to play Poe? It would be great but who knows. He has shown interest in the past and has even mentioned that Poe is one if his favorite authors. So only time will tell. So without any further delay, here is Forevermore.

NEVER SAY “NEVERMORE”

A script review of FOREVERMORE

by Michael Vaal

Okay, I know my column “Plot Holes” is as irregularly appearing as it is generally negative in tone.  But can you blame me?  Look at the CRAP we’ve been subjected to at theaters recently.  Oiy!  Don’t get me started.

So, after I had torn the DÉJÀ VU script a new one in my previous column (btw, if you’ve seen the movie, did I lie?!  I can’t bring myself to see if it sucked more or sucked less than the script), Robert Sanchez wanted me to take a look at “something special” – a “spec” script starting to make the rounds in Hollywood.  From Wikipedia  one sees that “spec” is short for speculative, meaning the writer has written the piece on their own time, not as a work for hire for a studio or production company.  The goal is then to sell to (or set the project up with) a studio or production company.  Some specs are meant purely to sell, while others are intended to be directed by the writer, and finally, some specs are designed to become writing samples (designed to get paying work) or they become so if they’ve made the rounds in Hollywood and have been passed on.

This intrigued me, as I had half expected to be handed the next big comic book movie, RED LONGJOHNS or SOUL STRIPPER (they’re really scraping the bottom of the DC/Marvel barrel these days for characters to license, aren’t they?).   But now it was clear that he wouldn’t be asking me to take a look at a spec if he didn’t have a good reason.

So the screenplay he handed me is called FOREVERMORE by an apparently new screenwriter, Grant Boucher.  Robert pointed me to his website www.grantboucher.com and he appears to be a visual effects guy who’s turned to screenwriting as a path towards possibly directing.  He’s also written some Star Wars stuff and movie reviews for IESB.net (but let me say for the record that I think CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY sucked compared to the original), hence the connection to Robert and now to me.  Fair enough.  But this information immediately geared my expectations towards a “big effects extravaganza”, heavily weighted towards style over substance.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In short, FOREVERMORE is a most worthy effort and surprisingly unique.

And no, I’m not being facetious (don’t get used to it!).  Read along and I’ll tell ya why I dig.

THE HISTORY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE ON THE SILVER SCREEN

One of America’s first and foremost writers, Mr. Poe died some 150 years ago.  A man to whom Edgar had given a negative review stole the rights to Edgar’s work and life and wrote some truly terrible lies about the man in order to besmirch his memory as an act of posthumous revenge.  Unfortunately, those lies become legendary and the legends and myths about Edgar Allan Poe soon outstripped the facts about him…ironically guaranteeing the writer’s immortality.  Ever since then, teen and adult readers have discovered and been moved by Edgar’s usually first person examinations of the darker sides of human nature as well as some of the most beautiful and yet haunting poetry every written.  For more on Edgar’s life and works, here is the Wikipedia entry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_allan_poe.

Since the advent of moving pictures there have been many attempts to bring his work to the silver screen.  Usually this involves the “Stephen King” (a disciple of Edgar’s) approach, wherein a single short story is padded out into a two hour film with additional characters and subplots.  The original “classics” were made by UK low budget horror schlockhouse Hammer Films decades ago.  Their only redeeming value came from the presence of a master thespian named Vincent Price – a man who was one of the only actors to ever really “get” Poe.  Listening to Price, one is sure that you’re hearing a true rendition of Edgar’s inner monologue.  But I digress.

Since then, from time to time, another bad Poe movie or TV episode surfaces (i.e. Masters of Horror keeps mining these waters, never even rising to the level of mediocrity), with only The Simpsons Halloween episode (with James Earl Jones reading The Raven) standing out amidst the continuous drizzle of Poe dreck. 

This is most likely because Hollywood has tended to focus exclusively on the horror aspects of Poe’s work in the never-ending pursuit of quick and easy profits.  As a side note, this is why there are so many horror films and yet the number of truly standout ones can be counted on one or two hands (depending on your tolerance for watching garbage).  It’s also why I wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan of horror, even though I count ALIEN, SE7EN, and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS as some of my all-time favorite films.

Because of the nature of the material (and the fact that the rights to Edgar’s works long ago passed into the public domain), there are ALWAYS Poe scripts circulating throughout Hollywood’s development circles.  And while I have not read them myself, reliable reports are that each they range from weak to abysmal. 

For example, Sylvester Stallone has a script he’s written (to direct) which he’d like Robert Downey Jr. to star in.  While this is a great choice of actor (and reportedly Downey Jr. is married to a distant relative of Edgar’s), unfortunately Sly’s script is reportedly one of those weak efforts.  This is disappointing because Stallone can be a VERY good writer.  Not many people realize he *wrote* ROCKY and FIRST BLOOD – two exceptionally good films from stem to stern.  Yet, though his love and empathy for Edgar’s story is admirable, rendering the life and works of a visual and psychological master like Poe requires a level of creative writing and dramatic visualization that goes beyond anything that’s been done before. 

So, in short, POE has become a recurring theme in Hollywood, usually described alongside words such as “low budget” and “bad horror”.  Yet so many amazing people have been moved by Edgar’s life and works in so many ways, it’s ironic to realize that no one has even come close to capturing the real “essence” of America’s preeminent master of the macabre…

…until now.

FOREVERMORE

Poe often opened his stories with a quote from a contemporary or other influential author.  This screenwriter, having done his homework, does likewise.  I doubt I am violating any copyright by including this publically available quote here (formatted per the screenplay).

FADE IN:

SUPERIMPOSE -

The only people for me are the mad ones,

the ones who are mad to live,

mad to talk,

mad to be saved,

desirous of everything at the same time,

the ones who never yawn

or say a commonplace thing,

but burn, burn, burn

like fabulous yellow roman candles

exploding like spiders across the stars.

                        - Jack Kerouac

FADE OUT:

Jack Kerouac?!  JACK friggin KEROUAC?!  How cool is that?!  The writer opens a story about 19^th century Poe with a quote from the modern day On the Road author, drunkard, and beatnik burnout?!  So yeah, it made me want to read on.

Right from the outset we learn that Edgar is dying on the streets of Baltimore, in the ubiquitous gutter scene.  But what I didn’t realize until I read the Wikipedia entry to fact check the next beat, is that Edgar doesn’t die in that gutter.  He dies five days later in a drunk tank hospital bed, detoxing from whatever poisons are in his system. 

Normally, biographies take one of two conceits.  One is to choose a key week (or moment) in the life of the subject and examine it for significance to the overall main character.  For example, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME follows this idea, with flashbacks sprinkled throughout the big game. 

The other is to try and find a way to present all of the key moments in the subject’s life, in the hopes of gaining an appreciation of the whole.  Good examples of this would be AMADEUS, RAY, and WALK THE LINE.

Surprisingly, FOREVERMORE successfully blends BOTH conceits.  And it is this ingenious but risky decision that sets this life story apart.

As Edgar lies dying in his hospital bed, his life flashes before his eyes.  For FIVE DAYS he is dying.  And during this week of Hell, he’s not only reliving his real life memories, but his dreams, nightmares, poems, and stories, all blended together in a special place the writer has christened “Dreamland”.

Therefore, the movie goes back and forth between the present day scenes (re: Edgar on his deathbed) and his Dreamland travels.  Both stories are distinct and linear until they violently converge during the third act. 

Throughout the story, Edgar’s present day waking moments have a transformative affect on the rather crass nurse Madeline who is taking care of Edgar, the “celebrity patient”.  As a character, she represents the members of the audience who know nothing of Edgar or his work but what they’ve read in the papers, etc.  Countering her is the self-righteous Doctor Moran, a firm advocate of the temperance movement of the day (an early form of prohibition).  Remarkably, he too is transformed by those five days, as is his relationship with his staff.

Meanwhile, Edgar is due to be married in a week’s time, though there is one thing (in addition to his detoxification) standing in his way.

And this is where a very solid biopic becomes a truly great film.  Very early on, we are introduced to Edgar’s nemesis, enigmatically named The Shadow.  The nature of their rivalry is the guiding thread of the story and is analogous to the way the envious Salieri’s murder confession drives the ruin of Mozart (and the plot) in AMADEUS.

Who or what is The Shadow and what it means to Edgar and the audience/reader is at the very core of FOREVERMORE.  And I won’t spoil it for you here. :)

What I will say is that as far as Edgar is concerned, The Shadow is responsible for the death of everyone he has ever loved, and Edgar now fears that The Shadow is stalking his current betrothed.

Further complicating matters for Edgar is the fact that his new bride, Sarah, was his first true love as a teen.  When he lost her to another man due to the machinations of her father, Edgar’s work turned from light and happy to dark and despondent.  It was then that he met his soul mate, Virginia, who echoes Edgar’s love of the macabre and occult.  Together, they love during the period when Edgar writes his best known works.  The Raven, for example, is interwoven with Virginia’s ultimate fate in a way that is absolutely devastating.  Since this is the piece the world remembers him, I will never think of The Raven the same way again after reading it within the pages of FOREVERMORE.

And now, without revealing too much more of the story, this thought makes a nice transition to my Kudos and Criticisms of FOREVERMORE.

KUDOS, WELCOME TO DREAMLAND

I mentioned the “use of The Raven” before.  The miraculous thing about FOREVERMORE is that the screenwriter has mined Edgar’s own words and characters throughout the story.  There are entire scenes comprised of dialogue that comes directly from poems written by Edgar.  And not just one story, mind you.  It seems like the screenwriter has incorporated ALL of Edgar’s stories herein (or at least all the ones I can remember).  The characters (real or imagined), settings, triumphs, and tribulations weave in and amongst each other in a literary and visual symphony. 

This works in large part because Edgar was such a diverse and exceptionally prolific writer.  In fact, ALL of the character dialog in Dreamland is written in rhyming couplets – yes, poetry. 

Okay, okay, no I’m not going soft in the head.  It’s not THAT flowery.  This is POE after all.  Rhyming about decaying corpses turns out to be kind of cool.  Like THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS without the singing…and claymation. 

This POEtic license sets the present day Hospital reality scenes apart from the fantastic painterly Dreamland sequences – think WHAT DREAMS MAY COME without all the New Age Cuban Gooding Jr. hooey. 

Format note:  The screenwriter has courteously boldfaced the word “Dreamland” in the Scene Headings where appropriate.  While I am normally a HUGE stickler on proper screenplay formatting, this allowed me to always tell the real world from the fantasy world at a glance.  Nice touch. 

Now, since I could not find a lot of these dialogue lines by searching Google for Poe’s works, I can only assume that the screenwriter has complimented Poe’s words with his own throughout the screenplay.  As such, the whole reads like one long unpublished Poe story, and I can honestly say I can’t tell where one writer begins and the other ends. 

Even as a work of literary adaptation FOREVERMORE is remarkable – combining the life and works of a single author into one cohesive whole.  But as a screenplay?  I’ve never seen (or even heard of) anything like it.  It uses more of the Poe’s own words and characters than does SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, for example, yet its language is much more accessible than any modern Shakespeare film treatment. 

FOREVERMORE is a live action narrative poem in screenplay form.  Yet it works.

Yeah yeah, you want to know “How is the STORY!!?”

Edgar lived one Hell of a difficult life and it’s all in here.  Besides the expected horror, death, triumph, and tragedy, there exists a rather unique love triangle, SEX (two very hot scenes I might add), romance, action, and adventure, all wrapped up in a visually stunning mélange of reality and fantasy. 

And let me remind you again, this is about the life of a quirky, dark American poet…a POET for crying out loud!   Even without the whole “this is a true story” aspect of FOREVERMORE, this is a great exploration of what drove Edgar Allan Poe to the edge of the abyss and back again. 

And FOREVERMORE even ends on a dark but “up” note.  Bravo!

CAVEATS, PLOT “PIN PRICKS”

This wouldn’t be a column of mine if I didn’t poke plot holes in this.  While it’s pretty goddamn hard to nitpick FOREVERMORE, I’m not above trying.  :)

Love story.  While I do buy the “soul mates” aspect of Edgar and Virginia’s relationship, I wanted to see more of them falling in love.  However, this would have added to the page count during the second act (which is ALL Virginia and Edgar) so I can see why it’s been kept so tight.  After reading it, however, I don’t care about page count with this script anymore.  I’d gladly read a 400+ page novel written like this over and over again.  So, more Virginia and Edgar please.

Language.  Bringing the life and works of a writer to the big screen has heretofore been less than successful (FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS comes to mind as close but no cigar), since film is primarily a visual medium.  And yet we fall in love with most writers (Edgar in particular) due to their words – the turn of a phrase makes all the difference.  And while the English language of Edgar’s time is not nearly as archaic as that of Shakespeare, there are still a few times when I had to turn to a dictionary to be sure I understood the nuances of a given word.  Fortunately, those are few and far between and the actions of the characters still drive the story regardless.

Voice over.  Along these same lines, there is some voice over in the opening act, when Edgar is young, but it goes away once he reaches the age of (presumably) whatever actor would play the part.  The voice-over comes from the spiritual character of POE, who takes a kind of SUNSET BOULEVARD approach to introducing us to Edgar’s inner “demonologue”.  As a rule of thumb, voice over is to be avoided since film is about “showing it rather than saying it”, but given that this is the story of a WRITER, there is surprisingly very little voice over in toto.  I’d guess that there’s less than half of that found in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, for example, and all of it is MUCH better written than the redundant drivel found in MILLION DOLLAR BABY.  Importantly, the voice over is all but gone by the end of the first act, and I can’t see replacing this elements with anything other than a “ghost” character of some kind.  And THAT’S a worse device in my opinion, so it seems a “damned if you do or damned if you don’t” decision.  So I’m going to give my vote to keeping the voice over as is, since they are in Edgar’s own words after all.

Length.  This script is very tight and very dense.  I had to read it twice to see everything clearly, but then again I wanted to.  I haven’t done that since AMERICAN BEAUTY crossed my desk.  And while its page count comes in just over 120 pages, I have no doubt the actual film will be longer than 120 minutes.  Since the masterpiece BRAVEHEART script was 142 pages long (for three hours of runtime) I don’t think this is a problem for something as good as FOREVERMORE.  But some readers/agents won’t look at anything over 120 pages…period.  In my humble opinion, that’s their loss.

Threads.  In today’s MEMENTO driven editing environment, there might be a take on this material that is more non-linear, but I doubt it would be as easy to read as this is.  Too complicated stories (i.e. SYRIANA, MEMENTO, and THE FOUNTAIN) have sometimes turned off large portions of the general audience – leaving them to be only truly appreciated by the Hollywood filmmaking community.  Whereas movies with some limited back and forth (i.e. BABEL, AMADEUS, and AMERICAN BEAUTY) seem to work across a broader audience (and the voting Academy members).  I don’t think I want to read the MEMENTO take on this, but it might be worth watching if this gets made.

Finally, and most importantly, despite my minor criticisms above, FOREVERMORE is clearly an ingenious screenplay.  Call me cynical (me?! Nah never), but I suspect that this means it’s going to fly right past a lot of Hollywood intern readers and never make it high enough up the ladder to have a chance of getting read by the kind of people who would see this as Academy Award fare.  Sigh.

Now, of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong…but I'm not.   :)

ADDENDUM:  WHERE IS FOREVERMORE TODAY?

Once I had this review done, I asked Robert Sanchez what was up with this as a project.  Expecting a Hollywood horror story, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that apparently a handful of people in Hollywood have given it excellent coverage.  Maybe my cynicism about Hollywood is unfounded?  Well, at least until the MUMMY III gets made.  :)

Significantly, Robert mentioned that FOREVERMORE was written with Johnny Depp (!) in mind.  Before reading this, I would have thought that was an odd (nay insane?) choice, given all I knew about Edgar from High School lit classes…which looks like it was all wrong. 

But upon reading FOREVERMORE, I get it.  There is horror, sex, action, tragedy, romance, and adventure here.  And yet, it’s a sort-of reimagining of the “mad artist” character into something more relevant to a modern audience.  The script shows BOTH sides of Edgar, leaving the audience to choose from the facts AND the legends. 

And in this light, with this kind of story, with these visuals and story, this would be a dream project for ANY actor.  It runs the gamut of human emotions through the true story of one of America’s finest and most misunderstood writers.  That’s the sort of story that the Academy traditionally loves to accolade. 

According to Robert, FOREVERMORE is “with Depp’s people” now, so if Johnny doesn’t go ape for this, I’d be VERY surprised.  Given his past roles and major influences, it does seem painfully up his alley.  ;)

Finally, I’d like to thank Robert for giving me the chance to read, and write about, something really good for a change.  For better or worse, this has inspired me to get back to work on my novel.  Heaven help us all.  :)

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