July 14, 2022

I read the screenplay for Gone Girl yesterday. So good. It's almost like Gillian Flynn is a good writer or something. I didn't want to put the screenplay down, and that's really unusual. The scene descriptions were good and funny. Sentence by sentence it was impressive. I feel like it almost might have been better than the movie, which I remember dragging a little and feeling long. The screenplay -- while long at 177 pages -- doesn't drag at all. And some of the joy in it is the sentences, the scene descriptions, which of course don't show up in the actual movie. Good for the actors to know, though. I feel like they'd be helpful for the creative team in general. 

Flynn does a good job of walking us through how this woman, Amy, might plausibly be this crazy. I've had a hard time with that in the past -- with Hell House for example. How do you put enough pressure on a person that you make them snap. Flynn pushes Amy up to that edge, so when she falls over it, we believe it. The sheer unlikeliness of the whole thing is forgiven. 

Gone Girl is also very convincingly about this marriage, about a fairly regular marriage. Something relatable. I remember feeling like the movie came across as a bit more Rah Rah Girl Power (could have been my frame of mind), while reading the script it feels more like Amy's not the hero here. Like she's a real nightmare. Of course she's a nightmare -- I guess I'm also saying that she's complicit in the thing she's raging against. We usually are, I guess. 

I read the script because I'm trying to crack a similar concept. The thing is about Amy -- Gone Girl -- but the POV is Nick. Maybe I need a stronger POV character. Maybe not though. Anyways, some of the power in Gone Girl is the fact that domestic violence is so prevalent that Amy's framing is entirely credible. The actual truth of the book is incredible, of course. 

Okay, the other thing I've been thinking about. I play basketball a lot, but I don't think I'm getting better at it at this point. My body aging is part of it probably. I'm also not practicing as hard/smart as I could. I'm just playing for fun. It goes against my theory of putting in the hours being a surefire way to improve. If I weren't playing regularly, I would be worse at it, though. 

Fascinating work, here, Amy.