Melanie reviews:
" The following is my mass e-mail review of the screenplay for the current Miramax release, The Battle of Shaker Heights. To refresh, Shaker is the end product of this year¹s current Project Greenlight, the scriptwriting contest sponsored by Miramax, HBO, and Oscar winning actor-writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (who collectively won the Best Original Screenplay award for Miramax¹s 1997 release Good Will Hunting, in which Affleck played second banana to Damon¹s title character). Anyway, Project Greenlight was initiated about two years ago to encourage aspiring (struggling, waiting to be discovered) screenwriters. In its second go-round the contest, in which all entries are submitted and judged online, was expanded to include as of yet untested directors, who were asked to submit micro-short films for consideration. The catch with Project Greenlight is, as anybody who regularly watches HBO already knows, is that besides a guaranteed one shot movie deal (w/ a modest 2 million dollar budget), the winning writers and directors must submit to Big Brother type treatment (via HBO¹s omnipresent cameras) during the production of their debut effort . The idea seems to be that the normal frustations of making a movie, let alone one with such a modest budget and hurried shooting schedule (approximately three weeks) make for mighty entertaining tv viewing when the focus is on the inexperienced talent behind the camera. Whereas the first season of Project Greenlight highlighted the seeming ineptitude of writer-director Pete Jones (whose film was titled Stolen Summer), the ante was upped in the recently concluded season by pitting a pair of directors (the team of Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle) against a single writer, Erica Beeney; the three of them, remember, all newcomers to the wonderful world of feature film production.

It is true I entered my script, Learning Meredith, in last fall¹s PGL competition, but let me be perfectly frank: I never wanted to win. Life is humiliating enough without going on tv and essentially being set-up to look like a jack-ass, or worse. All I wanted, all I expected, from Project Greenlight was constructive, informed criticism from my peers; all scriptwriting participants were required to read and evaluate at least four screenplays and a minimum of two short films (likewise, we were guaranteed our script would be rated by at least four of our peers). I thought some of the comments about my screenplay were well intended, but a lot of the responses were laughable because they were so contradictory (example: none of my peer reviewers could list a single movie my script reminded them of--a question clearly designed to gauge marketability--while my scores for originality were only middling).

Anyway, I do not have HBO so I have not seen a single episode of PGL, round 2, (The Making of The Battle of Shaker Heights) which has been a big summetime hit for the premium cable network; however, I have read plenty about the shennanigans the directors pulled, not to mention the frustrations of veterans Chris Moore, producer, and Richard Nord, the Oscar nominated film editor of 1993¹s The Fugitive. Directors Rankin and Potelle apparently underminded Beeney by writing new scenes without her knowledge. Producer Moore has called the directors a number of names too colorful to repeat, and Nord has said trying to edit the film, which fared poorly with test audiences, is/was like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Hardly a vote of confidence, though, to be fair, not all the blame can be laid on the two directors who, as per the PGL rules, have no control over the final edit. Meanwhile, the tv show is itself assembled to make sure everyone comes across as bad (evil, dense, or both--you name it) as possible. That¹s a given. On the other hand, Rankin and Potelle haven¹t done themselves any favors in the intelligence department, either. In a recent Dallas Observer interview Rankin referred to Emmy winning actress Camryn Manheim (The Practice), who auditioned for a role in Shaker, as Catherine Manheim.

But what about the final result? I was shocked to read that the completed Battle of Shaker Heights runs only a scant 73 minutes, not including credits. Whoa! 73 minutes! That¹s only an hour and thirteen minutes. I went to the PGL website to look at Beeney¹s winning screenplay and found that it was 119 pages long. If you consider the standard one page of screenplay equals one minute of screentime, you have to wonder what the heck happened to Beeney¹s original vision for Shaker Heights. Apparently somewhere along the way to completion 46 minutes of Shaker Heights was discarded, and for a movie that should have been just one minute shy of two hours (a perfectly respectable length), 46 minutes is a significant chunk, easily almost half. With that in mind, I decided to read Beeney¹s script so I could compare it to the actual film at a later date.

The Battle of Shaker Heights tells the story of a high school senior, a smart aleck misft, named Kelly who spends his free-time reenacting famous WWII battles; we¹re also to understand, as per the script, that this young man is more qualified to teach history than his teacher. Our hero has a messy, downscale, home life: his mother, a once promising artist, now employs an assembly line to manufacture pieces for ³starving artist² shows and the like; the boy¹s father is a reformed druggie now devoted to helping others less fortunate than himself. Kelly¹s life changes when, at one of his war events, he meets and befriends a rich kid, a private school type from an affluent, seemingly perfect family (with the possible exception of a dad who¹s just a shade uncaring, or remote). Moreover, the rich kid has an older sister named Tabby (???) upon whom Kelly develops a crush, even though he knows full well she¹s engaged to be married. That¹s the basic set-up, and it¹s a fine one, although in many ways it¹s not too terribly different from last year¹s Stolen Summer. Both movies are boy coming of age stories and, more specifically, both are fueled by the friendship that develops between boys (or, okay, young men) from opposing backgrounds. In the case of Stolen Summer, a Catholic boy befriends the terminally ill son of a rabbi. I didn¹t hate Beeney¹s screenplay for The Battle of Shaker Heights--she clearly has some screenwriting savvy, almost too much at times (I could only take so much of her editorializing about the onscreen action...very much telling, rather than showing). She also has a keen ear for dialogue--and good for her. I will go so far as to say that in many ways, the script was better written than most anything I read during the first round of judging. Some of the scripts, nevermind essentials like basic storytelling and dialogue, were poorly formatted and gramatically suspect. Beeny¹s script has only a few such lapses. Still, in spite of all that is good and right with the script, the story itself is slight--119 pages of generally well-written nothing--and some of the turns of plot seem entirely arbitrary, melodramatic, even, whereas the action should at least seem to flow organically from the characters. Most of time, absolutely nothing seems at stake. The war reeactment stuff forms the basis of a sequence that seems almost premature; after that, the idea goes nowhere. That said, the writer has come up with an interesting lead character; interesting in the abstract, that is; a tad sketchy (inconsistent, all over the map), perhaps, but one with plenty of potential in the hands of the right actor, and by all accounts, Shia LaBeouf, of Disney¹s springtime hit Holes (and the cable series Even Stevens, also from Disney), is well up to the challenge of connecting the dots in Beeny¹s script (so that Kelly seems more a creature of deep, contradictory impulses instead of an assortment of writer¹s whims). Some early reviews have even compared LaBeouf to a young Dustin Hoffman. The character of Kelly¹s mother might also turn out to be interesting in the hands of the capable Kathleen Quinlan (an Oscar nominee for 1995¹s Apollo 13).

Finally, perhaps Beeny¹s biggest selling point, the thing that made her script so attractive to the contest¹s judges, is its relative simplicity--a few basic settings, maybe only a dozen speaking parts, and, again, the war stuff is kept to a minimum, although it¹s a great hook.

Apparently Beeny, who reportedly has signed a deal with Aliens producer Gale Anne Hurd, has waffled all over the place in her estimation of the finished film. I know I¹m definitely curious to see how a 119 page script can be whittled down to a satisfying--coherent--73 minute film. What¹s the point? Stolen Summer made less than a million dollars at the box office last year. Shocking, in light of all that built-in publicity (and a praiseworthy performance by Kevin Pollack as the terminally ill boy's rabbi-dad). Can a movie as seemingly butchered as Shaker Heights be expected to fare better, on its own cinematic terms, that is, and not as an extension of a curious prank?

Mp

More about LaBeouf. Shia LaBeouf, by the way, is of Jewish and French (Cajun?) descent. He has joked that his name, the first part of which reportedly rhymes with ³Hi ya,² actually translates as ³Thank God for the Beef.² Funny boy. Besides Shaker and Holes he has also been seen in some of this past summer¹s biggest duds: Charlie¹s Angels Full Throttle and Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd."