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.

Evenin' All.

Hopefully this will be a blog detailing the journey of a script from computer screen to silver screen (or a least straight to Daily Mail dvd free give-away).

Or indeed absolutely nowhere at all.

The name's Paul Huxley, hence the Depraved New World, I've been writing little bits of script here and there, short stories and intermittently make music videos and visuals and all kinds of audio visual nonsense more of which you can find here:

medlo.net

But let's not stray from the subject in hand.

I've wanted to make movies since a documentary called ' Good taste made Bad Taste' chronicling the production of Peter Jackson's ultra-low budget home made action/horror spectacular 'Bad Taste' was screened along side the film in question, many years ago on BBC 2.

If he can make a movie that good (and it is an amazing feat) on such a small budget, surely anyone can, right?
Well clearly not. It's hard even writing a script. That's the one thing you hear from all sceenwriters, good and bad - writing movies is difficult. A chore even. But it has to be done.

So here we are ten years later and I've just finished the first draft of my feature length script entitled for now: Bad Day On Jerusalem Hill.

I say first draft, it's gone through so many changes it feels like version twenty already and even when I get round to giving it to someone else to read, it will have changed even more - and I'll call that one the first draft too.

So, what's it about?

A group of people, in this case Compulsory Unpaid Workers (community service to you and I), come to clean the graffiti from a much overlooked block of flats called Jerusalem Hill. Initial reaction to these 'intruders' is not that welcoming but tolerant. Things go wrong when one of the residents is killed, almost accidentally, by one of the cleaners. This sparks of a series of reprisals from the dwellers of this superbly rundown estate and our bunch of heroes are hunted down through the angular concrete labyrinth.

That's it in it's most basic form. Yes it's Southern Comfort or even Deliverance but in an urban environment.

So why make something so obvious?

Many reasons and I'll try and explain a few:

1. It's easy.

Well that's what I thought when I started.

I'd been juggling with an ambitious hard sci-fi idea for a few years and found the actual writing of it a task I wasn't up to at that moment in time. It was just too 'out there' and convoluted and gimmicky and rapidly becoming the most expensive film ever concieved.Basically it had a form of time travel in it which is never easy to pull off. Considering that I'd planned it to be set in just one room, things got out of hand.
So I decided to make a traditional genre picture, something modern and straight forward with a formula that was easy to follow.
I'd never seen a 'Hills have eyes' style movie set in an urban environment before and living in Sheffield, England, I had a perfect location right infront of me. An isolated(ish) huge block of flats called Park Hill. So I opted for that survival horror hick sub-genre and 'Park Hill has Eyes' was born.

Obviously this was quite a naive thing to assume. Writing anything is difficult. If you want to make it good, then it's harder still.

2. It's Commercial

No way I'm going to sell my crazy M. Night Shyamalanesque tale of time traveling ghosts (ahem). Just not going to happen.

Some thing like 'Park Hill has Eyes' is an easier pitch and seeing as I'm going to actually want to make a film at some point in my life I felt it wise to go with an idea that people can sell.

Car chase? check
Boobs? check
Violence? check
A funny bit with a dog? check.

Here's your money Mr. Huxley.

3. I actually like those kinds of film.

I'm a big fan of ponderously slow movies scored by a single sustained note where the heroine must overcome her fear of the memory of her father in order to fully commit to her new husband.

I also like a massive horde of people relentlessly hunt down our fleeing hero through the night in order to murder him. So modern version of Southern Comfort in an urban setting? I'm in.

So there we go. The first entry of this blog. With any luck I'll keep it going on a weekly if not daily basis. I'll try and cover all subjects pertaining to script writing and then production (if we get that far) in this blog, and share with you my thoughts on the process and also what I've learned from my incalculably huge number of mistakes. Wouldn't it be great if if in a couple of years time that I could include a link on the DVD of 'Bad Day On Jerusalem Hill' to this blog. Here's hoping.

See you next time.

Long live the new flesh.

Hux.