Good Bad Guys done well

I spent a while avoiding the script because I thought it was a bit shit, but on re-reading it recently I like it once more. There are still problems with the opening but the end is in sight now.

I'm having fun at the moment going through and tweaking each scene to give it 'a moment'. A 'LOL' moment - I've always liked it in films where you think 'why the hell did the film makers do that',those quirky little moments that don't really have much of an impact on the story as a whole but cumulatively give it a unique tone.
I made myself laugh when I added a line which reveals that a largely anonymous masked killer is named 'Baby'.

It works in the script, trust me.


I've been listening to a lot of Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcasts which have been inspiring me. They're very in depth and quite conversational QandA sessions with scriptwriters, mainly of big american movies like Star Trek and Watchmen and the like with a few smaller films thrown in there aswell. They're very informative as to the working pratices and pratical methods of crafting a story.
I in the latest one they were discussing the merits of having a good 'Bad Guy' in relation to the movie 30 Days Of Night.
This got me thinking about 'Jerusalem' which really doesn't have a main antagonist as such. Or rather the closest thing to that, is never a consistent threat in so far as he has no interaction with our heroes until the very end.
I panicked. Shit - there's no baddie in the film. I immediately started to devise ways to develop a viable antagonist - more structural re-writes - damn.

But then it came to me, I have a 'Bad Guy' already, I always have had in the form of my very own 'Overlook Hotel' the block of flats called 'Jerusalem' where the movie is set. All those incidents that get in our character's way are the building's doing. Not in the way that the hotel in the Shining becomes a character in itself, but more to do with social, political, survivalist, economic, architectural factors that it imposes on it's residents, it's practically given birth to them.

I've got a 'Bad Guy'.

Now that I've realised that guess what... more rewrites. I'm going to take advantage of the setting more and include the very structure of the place as as a key element.