Thoughts on the awesomest film of 2009: Zombieland

So Zombieland was as awesome as I always dreamed it would be. My one complaint is that the voice over needed to be drawn back a bit. Some of it was telling us what we could already see, almost as if the filmmakers didn't trust us to get the point.

But if you can look past it, that film was the awesomest thing to come out since Hot Fuzz.

This is good for me because I have a zombie action script. Mine's not comedy, but it is big budget and it is badass. If Zombieland had tanked, my shit would have been dead (ooh look! A pun!) but if I'm lucky, the film will continue to make lots of money and maybe somebody will want something like it but different enough to be original. At any rate, it can't hurt.

There are just so many brilliant touches in this film. I loved the screenplay already and they kept most of it intact, but the changes they made were for the better. The screenplay ends with the group headed off to Disneyland, but that seems a waste of an opportunity, doesn't it? Zombies in a theme park? So they shifted some things around and instead included the theme park. Smart decision.

And even though I knew the celebrity cameo was coming because I read it in the script and I saw the cast list on IMDB, they changed the way the scene played out so I was still pleasantly surprised.

This is just a fun movie. Fun fun fun. It's always nice when you can take cannibals and a post-apocalyptic world and laugh about it.

If you have not seen Zombieland and you enjoyed Shaun of the Dead even a little, this is the movie for you. And as an added bonus, if you pay to see it you can help me sell my screenplay.

ZOMBIELAND HOLY SHIT OMG

Right now, unless something has gone horribly, horribly wrong, I am about to watch Zombieland at the Arclight in Sherman Oaks with my friends after a lovely meal at some place I've never heard of.

If I don't return, it's most likely because my heart simply could not handle the excitement and I died of joy.

Remember me as a lover of zombies. And pandas. Know what nobody's ever made a movie about? Zombie pandas.

I am so goddamn excited right now I'm like a five year old with a laser gun.

Why I worry about Zombieland

If you haven't yet seen the trailer for Zombieland, watch it. It's both funny and explodey, just like the screenplay. It looks like they've changed a few things but for once it looks like most of the greatest bits of the screenplay made it to the screen.

I'll be there opening night because this is right up my alley. A little too much up my alley, unfortunately.

The more I think about this movie, the more nervous I get. One of the reasons I switched from TV to film was because I was tired of constantly having to create new material when two weeks after I wrote a spec it became outdated. A film script never goes out of style, right?

Yeah. Well when I first wrote Not Dead Yet nobody had really embraced action over horror in a zombie flick. Even Resident Evil and 28 Days Later are still by and large horror films. Well maybe not that last Resident Evil movie. I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to be.

But even though zombies are obviously nothing new, I was at least taking it to a place nobody had really thoroughly explored. It was about a post apocalyptic zombie world where people had to learn to survive because this is how it is, not more humans anywhere. And then one group of humans finds another group of humans in California.

I thought I was going to have to worry about being a copy cat of World War Z, but that appears to be mired in preproduction.

Instead, it was Zombieland that may render me impotent. A story about a couple of guys in a post-apocalyptic zombie world who find another pair of survivors as hijinks ensue. And more importantly, it's straight action, barely any horror at all.

This one's a comedy. Nobody would ever call mine a comedy, but no matter what I do it will look like I'm a shadow of Zombieland. If I had a lower budget, I could sell my script as a knockoff to one of those companies that likes riding the trends. That is, if Zombieland is successful. If it's not successful, nobody will want to touch my screenplay because clearly zombie action flicks are a bad investment.

But I have a huge budget so I can't even sell my script as a cheap copy. I could try to offer it as a sequel, but it's not nearly funny enough so I'd have to rewrite it big time, and that's unlikely to matter anyway because that's dependent on a ton of factors out of my control.

In other words, I have until October. When Zombieland hits, I think I may be out of opportunities with Not Dead Yet. It's still a good work sample, which was its original purpose anyway, but with all the zombie scripts on the market these days, I'm worried about getting thrown aside by a zombie-fatigued reader.

The Beefcake says I worry too much. About everything, not just this, which I find interesting since I am a consummate optimist. I am an oxymoron.

Anyhow, it's just another reminder of why I need to get off my ass and finish my next project. I wrote a screenplay since Not Dead Yet but I don't like it, so I need this one to be good.

I guess I should stop writing here and go write over there.

Thoughts on the script: Zombieland

Gentle reader Tavis said people are probably wondering what I think of the screenplay for Zombieland. I guess it's because I love zombies so much and I talk about them all the time. The odd thing about that is I hadn't seen that many zombie movies until I thought up the plot for Not Dead Yet.

It was only after I thought up a zombie story that I learned anything about zombies, but once I did I researched obsessively and that's how I discovered how much fun zombies are. You can stab them in the throat repeatedly and you can set them on fire and they just keep on coming.

So at first people did keep asking me if I read Zombieland and I would get out the screenplay and then get distracted and forget I was supposed to read it. But a couple of months ago I finally got to it.

MINOR SPOILER WARNING

I imagine they've changed quite a bit since the spec went around because Patrick Swayze is nowhere in the cast list. I'm wondering if they replaced his character with Bill Murray.

Let me explain. Zombieland is clever. Like really clever. Maybe too clever. It wanders back and forth between being action and comedy, which I love for my own selfish reasons. My script is a lot of action and hardly any horror, and this script is a lot of action and not really any horror. But where Zombieland replaced the horror with comedy, I replaced it with a storyline so depressing you might not want to go outside for a while.

The story follows this guy in a post zombie-apocalyptic world who is kind of a wimp but hooks up with this badass redneck type. They get into some hijinks with a vicious mother/daughter conman team and end up at Zombie Patrick Swayze's house where they make like eight hundred thousand references to Dirty Dancing and Roadhouse. You can kind of tell at that point that writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were just enjoying themselves immensely by imagining all the fun they could have if they broke into Patrick Swayze's house found his zombie corpse wandering around.

That's really what this screenplay is - loads of fun. I laughed, I shouted, I pumped my fist. It's just a terrific combination of badass mixed with dry humor. And I loved the way it ended. This is a limp off into the sunset kind of story. It just sort of stops, which I actually adore. I'm not overly fond of movies that tie up all the ends in a neat little bow.

There's this one scene where the two guys have to break into a grocery store to get a Twinkie - let me tell you, the great Twinkie quest is just awesome - and it's just one big zombie free for all. There are a zillion zombies all over the place and only two guys with guns just shooting the shit out of everything. It's pretty much my version of heaven.

It's an imperfect script, of course. The Patrick Swayze thing is a little too cutesy for its own good and it's a little insulting to the man. I found myself wondering how they ever thought he would do it. Maybe they didn't. Maybe that's why they got Bill Murray.

My only worry is that it doesn't make my screenplay quite as original. I wrote the first draft before I ever heard of Zombieland, but now my screenplay may look a little derivative. At the time, I thought I was very clever with this zombie script that was more action than horror, and I thought my only competition was World War Z. But now, here's a post-apocalyptic zombie comedy action movie with some really cool action scenes and a movie star. I don't have a movie star.

But I do have a flame thrower, and that's something they ain't got.