Oops, She Did It First

I’ve been a little worried about the originality of the action script I’m working on. It involves a hit man and a deal gone bad -– not the most groundbreaking motifs for an action film, admittedly. In fact I just read that two of the buzz movies at Sundance had to do with hit men.

I haven’t seen a whole lot of hit man movies, so I loaded my Netflix queue with them, so I can make sure I don’t accidentally go where a bunch of people have already gone. The most frustrating kind of plagiarism is the accidental kind.

This was not a worry I had with The D Line. In that script, the driving dramatic moment that makes everything turn to shit is when a girl commits suicide by stepping in front of a train. The conductor later connects with the girl’s mother and they both struggle to make sense of all this. There’s more to it of course -– but the image of the girl’s suicide is what started me thinking about the story in the first place.

A couple years ago I was listening to a report on NPR about how long it takes to stop a train -– which, it’s no surprise, is a long time -– and I started thinking about what it must be like for a conductor to see that he’s about to hit something, from a long way off, and there’s nothing at all that he can do. Like if someone steps on the tracks and waits to be hit and killed. I just thought that was a great, powerful image that I’d never seen dealt with in a movie.

Then, last night, I started leafing through the January/February issue of Creative Screenwriting.

And I saw I’m not as much of a vanguard as I thought.

And I said, “Fuck.”

There’s a brief article about a screenwriter named Micky Levy and her first produced screenplay, Rails and Ties.

From the article:

“Around that time, Levy became fascinated by the American railroad system… attempted an action movie in which the climax involved a huge fight to gain control of the locomotive… she grew frustrated… a conductor agreed to meet her… he began talking about rail-related suicides… even when they see the victims, conductors often can’t stop the trains in time… she had found a better story… about a train tracks suicide and the effect it has on a conductor who forms a bond with the victim’s child.”

It’s directed by Allison Eastwood and stars Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden. Check it out:



Fuck, man.

I mean, like I said, there’s a lot of stuff in my script that’s not in this -– and a lot in this that’s not in my script… but is some agent gonna be like, “Oh shit, not another train suicide movie!”

Just goes to show you what we all know -– there are no original ideas.

So it’s all in the execution.

Let’s hope mine is as good as hers, ‘cause she got it made.

Micky Levy actually seems kinda cool, and is now working on a nonfiction film with Amy Berg. You go girl~~