Berocca a treatment by
Clay Weiner
Dear Fizzy Overachievers, I absolutely love your minds. I enjoy the occasional dalliance with an alien babe or three as much as the next guy. But what I’m really excited about is the opportunity to create six gorgeously crafted pieces of cinema that manage such big, brilliant humor in a short time frame. These scripts connect with me as a film lover. And I know they’ll do the same for our audience. I won’t let us downplay the production value just because we’re going for comedy. We want a premium, big studio elegance (for the era) look no matter the story. Crafting these genres with absolute cinematic perfection will lure people in, make them love
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these worlds and characters, and never telegraph the punch line. SOLO looks like the season finale of STAR TREK back in the day before CGI allowed truly scary things to happen, when Sci-Fy instead relied on great characters and writing set in bizarre and beautiful locations. And WEREWOLF looks like an ultra modern Hollywood horror flick with a rich and stylized look and fluid camera moves. Each spot is the genre in question. It’s visually arresting, immediately transporting, captivating. The audience is on board from the first second of the ident and laughing out loud before it’s over.
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authenticity + sincerity Our job first and foremost is creating each of these worlds as beautifully and authentically as possible. And then, and only then, do we get to the comedy. When I say these are big jokes I don’t mean this is broad at all. Because your writing here is far from that - it’s clever, culturally literate, restrained, and insightful. We start wholly in the world of a recognizable genre of film making and come in at just the right place with a comedic ending that’s punchy and viscerally funny and surprising in a way that only a 10 second spot could be. A great writer once said that nothing breaks your heart like a period (full stop for you gents) in the right place. Well, in comedy, nothing leaves you laughing like a perfectly timed ending.
When I saw these, the first thing I thought is that it’s almost like we’re making short films for the Oscars. They’re observant of genre. They’re quintessentially American. They’re funny. They’re premium. No matter how much money is on the table, these are million dollar concepts. We film them at that level. Period. Full stop. Now, let’s talk about how to go from start to finish to red carpet to after party swimming in Berocca and champagne. o
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guys. looks like I’m staying awhile. SOLO is hands down special. It’s the subtext of every Star Trek episode. It’s the difference between watching Star Trek as a kid and as an adult. Trekkies will love us forever for this. We can probably expect to be signing autographs at Comicon with Captain Kirk wearing polyester. Our audience knows the world of Star Trek inside out so let’s respect their intelligence. We’re creating satire in the truest sense of the word. Not Parody. We are not making fun of the genre, we are ‘steeped’ in it. In the same way that Captain Kirk overbakes every performance like a forgetful pastry chef. I want these to be grounded in their narrative genius. Each ident telling an economical story with characters that feel absolutely fresh even if we are living in the past. Stories like SOLO that make the most unexpected turns and are observant of our audience’s wit. 4
Our three characters consist of a Captain Kirk and two subordinates. Kirk obviously thinks of himself as a macho sort of guy. He gets to wear a blue or red galactic star force suit whereas the other guys wear brown or beige/mustard uniforms more befitting guys on a ship with titles like Data Commander. Another thing I loved about the old Star Trek was that Kirk’s uniform didn’t fit him super well. You could tell he had a bit of a gut from bouts of drinking and cafeteria food and other ways one occupies oneself during space travel. We don’t go so far with this that we’re making fun of him but it’s a nice observation. And if our viewers get to relate to this guy a bit and feel like he’s just one of the guys and deserves this moment, then the pay off at the end is so much better. Maybe it’s me, but there is something about a man in a mock turtleneck…
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The setting is straight out of Star Trek, and that’s what grabs our audience from the get go. I like the idea of setting this on the sandy beach of a distant planet. If we shoot somewhere foreign that has no beaches I promise we find somewhere equally beguiling. Whatever seems most exotic, most alien. For example, a Malibu vista. A gothic lake with an otherworldly castle looming. A bath house shot to look like the pools of Atlantis. Just like Star Trek filmed planet earth as if it was an unfamiliar alien world, so will we. Cuing the fact that this is an alien landscape is a matter of framing, an old school 2:39 aspect ratio might be called for, and absolute Technicolor hues. Lets create a beautiful, almost eerie Star Trek palette. We find three gorgeous Amazonian women, the kind you would encounter in Homeric verse. This is the species of female that almost wrecked Odysseus’s ship. With breasts that could capsize an ocean 6
liner. We paint them an alien green or blue in that drop dead sexy Star Trek way, and enhance their eyes with contacts so they have this otherworldly gorgeousness to them. We cut from a big wide of the alien landscape to a tight shot of their iridescently beautiful eyes as they approach the men. They have the bodies of classic babes in the mold of Sophia Loren or modern versions of same like Keely Hazell and Kate Upton. Basically, this is a hotter, greener, Planet Kardashian. Every sensible man would like to visit planet Kardashian. But woe to he who tries to live there. As the alien women approach, the three men interact with each other in that stilted Star Trek quality, in which every situation is incredibly grave.
The Captain shouts in distress, “Set your lasers to stun. They’re trying to mate.”
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His men obey. And then the captain suddenly turns and stuns each of them on the neck. They could collapse to the ground. But I also think it’s hysterically funny if the two of them are frozen in place still standing and we can still see their eyes moving, having realized what is going on. From there, Kirk could walk off with the women. Or we could just cut away with the two of them frozen there, leaving the implication that they have no choice but to stand there as Kirk gets it on with the Amazonian Kardashi-babes.
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wolf ? where ? As mentioned, WEREWOLF should have the feel of an ultra-modern American horror film, stylized and clean and quick and moody. We cue this look from the first frame with a grand wide shot of a dense, picturesque woods at night. A girl around 24 years old is hurrying through them. She’s thin, vulnerable, beautiful: an Emma Stone. We cut from the wide for a quick beat to follow her with a Steadicam through the woods. She’s picking up pace. And, as is the case with all good horror films, we up the tension with great sound design as breaths are taken and tree limbs snap and shoes hurry across soft earth. Suddenly we see what she’s running from. Often the scariest things are the ones you can’t see all that well. We catch glimpses of the werewolf, but keep him a bit of a mystery visually. It’s more that we hear him, and see the girl’s panic.
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She continues to pick up speed. And then we cut back to a wide as she trips and falls to the dirt. We then see the stick lying on the ground from her POV. It’s like the shot in a war movie of the POV of a dying soldier. We’re terrified for her.
She’s about to get mauled and eaten. As her hand reaches out we cut back to the wide to show her hurling the stick. We stay in the wide as the werewolf bounds after it. Then cut in close to see her emotion, her triumphant relief. 10
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She’s about to get mauled and eaten. As her hand reaches out we cut back to the wide to show her hurling the stick. We stay in the wide as the werewolf bounds after it. Then cut in close to see her emotion, her triumphant relief. 11
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I need my beauty sleep We have two directions we could take VAMPIRE. One is to take the script as you’ve written it and give it a Rosemary’s Baby aesthetic from that ultra creepy period when cinematic realism entered the horror genre. Let’s go through that version first, and afterwards I’ll discuss a modern alternative à la True Blood.
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We open on a beautiful woman looking small and vulnerable in her bed with high ceilings towering over her. There’s ornate molding and other bits of intricate detail. This place screams vampire. A bad place to spend the night. Especially as restful a night as she seems to be having. We can see the strap of her pink negligee over her shoulder as she lies under the covers. The room as a whole has soft pastel feminine hues. We art direct this so exactingly that we feel like we know everything about this character. And there’s the added intimacy of watching her sleep. Great horror movies prey upon things we fear on a deep psychological level and chief among those is the vulnerability brought on by sleep. She’s almost childlike, and her neck is exposed like one might see on the vampire version of a fast food billboard. 13
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The vampire is dark, handsome, and cold, with the stealth and blank features of a serial killer. We boom over the woman as the vampire gets closer. And then suddenly he’s right there over her. We see her open her eyes. We know more than she knows in this moment, and that’s why we’re terrified for her. But suddenly her eyes flash with recognition. We go in tight to her hand as it grabs the remote, her equivalent of a wooden stake. We see the mechanisms opening the shades start to churn and cut to the vampire’s eyes as he realizes he’s screwed. Then we cut wide as the curtains open and a Rembrandt-like light floods into the room. We watch as the vampire blows apart into the kind of messy ashes I hate cleaning out of my fireplace. We do this practically by making a form of a person out of ash and then hitting it with a strong burst from a huge fan. There’s no vampire death like in-camera vampire death. OK, so that’s the as written version. Now on to True Blood. We open on a very similar scene to the previous version, with a woman looking small and vulnerable in her bed. It still has the intimidatingly high ceilings, but the décor is more modern and urban. It screams sexy HBO vampire.
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An incredibly good looking young vampire enters the room, sinewy and chin dimpled, with that undead and sexually amoral look the ladies love these days. He moves across the room toward her neck. When he gets close enough, he sees that there are already bite marks on her neck. Then her eyes open and she pulls back the covers a bit to reveal that another sexy young True Blood vampire is already in bed with her. The vampire who entered the room puts his head down in disappointment and stalks out of the room. I like this version because its completely different from the joke we’ve told in other spots while still very much fitting the concept. And it’s a funny observation about the fact that women seem to want to be bitten by vampires these days. I love them both, just wanted to pitch you a thought I had. Most of all we want our tagline to really resonate and make modern women smile. Either of these directions will be as memorable as a good hickey.
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tick. tick. tick. tick. For BOMB we get to use a badass American cop duo like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. (Do you think those guys still hang out?) Perhaps one of our characters has an amazing 1992 Mel Gibson mullet. It’s seriously impressive and could probably fight crime without a human attached to it. The Danny Glover cop has a no nonsense mustache. He’s the practical one with a wife, kids, and five payments left on his fishing boat. Both are utterly American early 90s.
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I think the warehouse setting you have here could be replaced with a higher stakes setting like a busy office complex that it would be near impossible to evacuate. We show the office complex in an exterior and then move to a desolate floor inside the building (not unlike your idea of an unused warehouse) where our two 90s super cops are working to diffuse the bomb. I would push the camera work to feel more Bourne Identity as I want to make sure to steer clear of MacGyver parodyland.
I want to play with the dynamic between these characters. In 90s cop movie tradition, they rely on each other, but also kibitz and get on each others nerves and have completely opposite opinions about how things should be done. They’re both about to be killed and they’re freaked out and panicked and each looking to the other for ideas, yet wary of each other’s ideas. We get in close with a shot reverse shot as they look at the ticking bomb and then back at each other, sweat dripping from their brows. Finally, the Mel Gibson character puts a finger out, stops the minute hand, and winds it back an hour. It’s a success and the Mel Gibson character looks at Danny Glover smugly. And the Danny Glover character looks back with a face best described with the iconic line, “I’m getting too old for this s***.” But we cut out before we hear the end of the line. 17
In an alternate version, we take a page out of Colin Farrell’s phonebook (no one’s returning his calls these days anyway) and put our guys in a phone booth. I love this setting because it’s so absurdist and yet so completely true to the genre of 90s/ early 2000s action movie. We start with the camera close in with them in the phone booth. The Danny Glover character is on the line with the Mel Gibson character leaning in to hear. There’s a deep, angry voice on the phone telling them that there’s a bomb in the phone booth and if they leave the booth the bomb will detonate. Mel Gibson reacts by angrily pounding the side of the glass, then turning around to run his fingers through his mullet in frustration.
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Suddenly, a look of Berocca inspired realization comes over Danny Glover’s face. He says calmly into the phone, “You win.
We’ll stay.” The Mel Gibson character looks at him in surprise. Danny Glover pulls out his cell phone (while still holding the payphone to his ear) and hands it to Gibson. Hardcut to them having a pizza delivered. Alternatively, Danny Glover waves to someone outside the phone booth. We cut wide and reveal their phone booth is adjacent a beautiful beach and a waitress is bringing them Mai Tai’s. We could also simplify this phone booth idea by having one Colin Farrell-esque character trapped in the phone booth. But if we do that we need to really focus on making sure the performance captures the suspense and embodies the movie rather than parody it.
careful where you air B&B Our palette is gloomy browns and dark shadows, and our camera moves with the looming intensity that Peckinpah’s does. Stephen King movies also have this look. It’s instantly recognizable as suspense/ horror, and allows us to focus on the protagonists and the action. The man in the couple is a young Dustin Hoffman, handsome and quietly confident. His lady friend is a young Jessica Lange. This is three quarters of the way through the movie, and all of their other friends they were vacationing with are dead.
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We cut close in to their faces as they react. Jessica Lange has already seen too many friends die gruesome deaths and doesn’t want to be next. Young Dustin Hoffman looks over her. He’s just as scared as she is. But then he has an epiphany: this house, like every other house ever built, has windows. He picks up a chair and hurls it through. Then nods to her and casually walks toward the window. Jessica Lange follows, her panic slowly receding. It’s very funny. Particularly if the performance from our lead happens in that way that a smart audience member at a horror movie is always begging for. The kind of audience member who talks to the screen, “throw a damn chair through the window!” That kind of guy. It has to come with that degree of irreverence otherwise it’s not enough of a heroic turn. One alternate idea to him throwing the chair: The doors to the house 20
lock and Dustin Hoffman looks over at Jessica Lange’s panicked face, then over at a cozy living room with plush coaches and a backgammon set on the coffee table, then back at her panicked face. We hear a strange sound. Then cut to see that it’s him shaking the dice for backgammon. He looks up at her, “They have backgammon.” Jessica Lange completely changes moods and excitedly rushes over, cozies up to him, and sits down to play. A ghost lights up the fireplace and coats the room in a romantic glow. When we find the right fragile, but gorgeous Jessica Lange- I don’t know about you-but I want to be that guy.
who is that masked man ? Apologies that I didn’t get a chance to bring it up during our rushed conference call, but I was a bit confused by the fact that Zorro and a showgirl were hanging out on a beach together. I love Zorro and I love showgirls, but I’ve never seen them in the same genre before. So, pending further explanation, I thought I’d pitch you a possible alternative for this. The simplest alternative is to shoot your script here as written, but replace the showgirl with a beautiful woman in a red Spanish dress more befitting the era. More elaborately, we could punch it up with some good old-fashioned swordplay.
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We open in the middle of an impressive Zorro sword fight, shot in the Technicolor palette of the era. He’s taking on three villains at once, and behind him are high stone cliffs falling into the ocean: an epic natural setting. We hear the water against the cliffs but it’s a bit muffled like sound design from that era. Watching Zorro, just behind him with her back to the cliffs, is a beautiful woman in a long Spanish dress. She’s watching the fight nervously. Mustering all the machismo allowed to heroes in that era, Zorro looks back to reassure her without breaking the pace of the fight. Still, it’s obvious this fight has been going on for a while. And it’s a hot day. Zorro is sweating. The villains are sweating. The damsel in distress is sweating. 22
Zorro, mid fight looks at her again, with a look that says, you are beautiful, but something here could make this better. As he continues to fend off the villains with expert swordsmanship he turns to the woman and gallantly cuts her a bikini. She’s now in this stunningly sexy outfit and it’s as if he’s liberated the entire film from the constraints of the past and brought sexual freedom to the people of this small, impoverished Spanish village. Then maybe they hold hands and run like kids down the cliffs toward the beach. Or he just goes back to sword fighting the villain knowing that later, this Penelope Cruz will be his.
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dynamic trio It’s taken me until this point to realize it, but what you’ve done here combines two of the things I love most in the world: film and comedy. I get to work with both all the time, of course, but never in a way that’s so directly observant of the two. And certainly not with scripts this good. And do you have any idea how many gorgeous women I Googled name spellings for while writing this? It’s been quite a day, and I take it as a good sign of what’s to come. Carpe Diem, Clay