Aliens, Predators, Snails? oh my! Or: How I got a bad feelin’ about this drop.

I have a little advice for those aspiring screenwriters out there. Interested? Here goes: Pay careful attention to your script’s title page and cover letter before you send it out. If you don’t know what you’re doing –and it’s fine if you don’t at first—, try not to make that too obvious to me. For example, don’t pretend your apartment is a film company called Beercan Films and then list your obviously residential address as the company address, because that will telegraph to me not only that your film company has a silly name, but also that you selected that silly name yourself, because there is no company, really, and you’re trying unsuccessfully to pull off the old, Spielberg, name on the janitor closet trick.

Also, don’t put a lot of crazy fonts, graphics and subheadings on the title page. That sort of thing is cute, but we’re running a business here. You’re supposed to be sending me the blueprint for a film, not an English comp notebook with doodles of dragons around the name of your garage band. We all have high, dreamy hopes for what we write, but your hopes should in fact be so high that you imagine what you’re writing as a real screenplay that will really get made. As such, your script, merely a means to that lofty end, should have a utilitarian title page. Casablanca did. Chinatown did. And the next sensational feature from Beercan Films should, too.

Less common yet even more of an indication to me that it’s amateur hour is to write in your cover letter that your script (or your client’s script) is a new and/or better version of Alien(s) and/or Predator. Not in the vein of. Not an homage to. The new Alien. The successor to Predator.

Listen, fellows, I am not religious. I never went to church as a girl or repeated prayers or hymns over and over again. My sacred texts are Alien, Aliens, Predator, The Terminator, and Total Recall. Yes, films like Lawrence of Arabia and the wonderful-if-mundanely-title-paged Chinatown became beloved later in adolescence. But I have a brother who dressed up as a colonial marine smartgun operator for Halloween, using a wooden replica of the movie weapon which he made in our garage. I’m mentioning this to embarrass him and to give you some indication of how much he and I watched Aliens and our other sacred texts between ages 10-14, when our brains were at their most absorptive. In other words, I know that shit by heart, yo.

But even if I’d only seen them once I’d recognize a “new version” of Alien(s) and/or Predator without having to be told what it was in a cover letter. Why? Because every sci-fi action script since those movies has been attempting to be the “new version” of those movies. And each time I hope they will be, because that would be awesome. But usually within ten or twenty pages my hopes are dashed, because all they’ve done is take the concept, plot, characters and major action sequences of Alien(s) and/or Predator and dropped in some new nouns, adjectives and character names, reducing my Nicene Creed to little more than a Madlib that reads a lot like this one (NOTE: choose from or supply the words described inside the brackets below):

Deep in the [name an uninhabited jungle or galaxy] in an abandoned [name an additionally isolated location such as an oil rig or a logging station], a crack team of [name a division of the U.S. army] special ops is sent to rescue a missing detachment of [name a group of innocent civilians (ie nuns, orphans, the blind, blind orphan nuns, etc)], only to come up against a force that is [sub/super] human. After brutally murdering [Brick Wall/Slate/2×4], the tough [black/latino] member of the team, and maiming [Hard Drive/Motherboard/microChip], the group’s geeky operations strategist, the entity shows itself to be a terrifying [alien/science experiment] shaped like a huge, grotesque version of a [name a species of reptile, crustacean or mollusk] with a [name a sharp and/or slimy noun]-like mouth. The team’s fearless leader, [Wolf/Bear/Panther], quickly realizes that if he doesn’t stop the creature, no one will, and that perhaps this battle, in addition to saving the human race, will help him [atone for/work through some of lingering emotional issues from] his recent [divorce/wife’s death/brother’s drug overdose].

Clearly, a few elements have been added to this Madlib over years and years of rehashing, but basically, whether it’s on a space station, in the arctic north, in a nuclear silo in Russia, at a sciencey lab at the bottom of the ocean, on a submarine, deep in the Bin Laden-filled caves of Afghanistan, in a mythical, Atlantis-like city, in a cabin way out in the woods, in a prison cell-block that’s been taken over during a riot, or in your grocer’s freezer, I have read this Madlib over and over again and it has always sounded almost EXACTLY like Predator or Alien(s) to me, only not as good. Kind of like when bugs bunny puts on a dress but doesn’t disguise his voice and it makes you uncomfortable.

Before you say it, I know this isn’t anything new or even unacceptable in the world of moviemaking, especially genre moviemaking. Sci-fi is old and action is even older. Everything about the group dynamics in Aliens or Predator is descended from The Dirty Dozen. Everything in The Dirty Dozen is descended from World War II combat films like Bataan and They Were Expendable, and on and on back to Homer. As Claude Levi-Strauss and his fellow development executives like to say, there are no new stories.

Here’s the difference: with the movies I just mentioned, the later versions updated and innovated on the earlier ones. Maybe there are no new stories, but, as you know if you saw The Dark Knight over the weekend, there are new ways of telling stories. And so I read these Alien(s) and/or Predator Madlibs all the way through, hoping they’ll do something amazing by the end. But mostly they’re just a lazy, formulaic attempts to hustle me into thinking they’re new…the Three Card Monty of screenwriting, in which I can always spot the ace because the hustler is staring right at it, and, what’s more, has told me he would be staring at it in his cover letter.

This blog is kind of long when all I’m really saying is that while they may not seem like Citizen Kane, commercial genres and their canonical films deserve a little respect, too. And that it never hurt anyone to underpromise (modest title page and cover letter) and overdeliver (a little innovation, even if in a variation on an old theme). And that huge, alien-snails are not that scary. Stop putting them in scripts, please.