Jeff Fahey and Daniel Baldwin in...'Urban Gauntlet'

It took me three days to write one sentence. One very important sentence. The shortest version of the script I could do. Not a tag line and not really a pitch, just a simple condensing of what the film is about. Boy was it hard.

It's important because it'll be the first thing that any prospective producer/financier is going to experience of the work, so it has to succinctly convey as much as possible about the story and get the reader's attention so that they want to continue reading the script itself.
The big problem i had was that my script when condensed in such as fashion sounds so utterly generic, and you know what it was always intended to be a traditional genre film so no real surprise there. It's always meant to have been about the execution of that traditional concept that set this story apart...not something you can easily get across in a one sentence precis.

This is what i came up with -


'An isolated community resorts to extreme measures to protect itself from people sent to help them.'


Quite simple you might think, but boy were there a lot of discarded one-liners.
To briefly recap the plot, 'Bad Day on Jerusalem Hill' is about our nerdy hero Lewis who is sent to remove graffiti from the notorious Jerusalem Hill housing estate as part of his community service - compulsory unpaid work as it's called. Here he meets up with Jordan who leads him to further criminal activity when they find a weed farm in one of the flats - they end up stealing a lot of cannabis. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the unfortunate death of one of the residents who then seek revenge. The entire community service team are pursued through Jerusalem, trapped and picked off one by one until the remaining survivors are forced to fight back. 'Who will survive and what will be left of them.'

So,let's break it down -

'An isolated community resorts to extreme measures to protect itself from people sent to help them.'

I think you get what this film is about straight away,you've seen this kind of thing before...'Wrong Turn', 'Deliverance', etc... an 'isolated community', cool okay we dig.

But here I've started with the community, not the people sent to clean up the graffiti who are the protagonists. This is to highlight that the script deals as much with the nominal 'bad guys' of the film as we do the heroes, something that is never really done in this kind of film.

Now we move on to 'resorts to extreme measures'. I think we all know what extreme measures implies but the fact that we qualify that with 'resorts' means that there's a definite sense that these people were provoked, perhaps they're not in the wrong.

But now it gets interesting ' from the people sent to help them.' This puts in question everything that's gone before. Is this isolated community justified in their retribution if the people they're after are meant to help them. If this whole scenario is has emerged from a benign beginning what could possibly have happened to make it go wrong. Violence, Intrigue, Community.

I went through dozens of permutations to arrive at that, including such atrocities as this -

A group of community service workers are sent to clean graffiti from the notorious Jerusalem Hill estate where a fatal accident triggers a relentless fight for survival as our heroes are pursued through an urban gauntlet.

'urban gauntlet'... fuck off mate.