CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 04/07/06

Building Original Stories

One Brick at a Time

By jeff goldsmith

Finally, something original is coming to a screen near you. Brick packs the tenets of film noir and independent filmmaking into a tightly bound script that's fired right at you, full of hard-boiled dialogue that plays as naturally as ever in the unlikely setting of a contemporary high school.

Brick

Rian Johnson (also directed)

After his ex-girlfriend (Emile de Ravine) goes missing, quiet but glib high school student Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) relentlessly investigates the mystery behind her disappearance. As an outsider, Brendan infiltrates every high school social clique until winding up in the closely guarded and dangerous circle of The Pin (Lukas Haas). Here, Brendan is out of his league and maneuvers to remain one step ahead of The Pin's dangerous drug-dealing crew in hopes of uncovering the secret behind Emily's disappearance before the truth behind Brendan's motives surface and blow his cover with The Pin.

At the 2005 Sundance Festival, audiences were floored by first-time writer/director Rian Johnson's Brick, which won a special grand jury prize for Originality of Vision. Brick's greatest strength is its unique story, which deposits high school students into a setting right out of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest rather than the usual O.C. doldrums. Such an original and creative concept was risky to pull off on the big screen and was entirely execution-dependent in that Johnson's tale called for a serious tone. With the wrong direction, Brick could have become a parody of itself. For that reason, first-timer Johnson raised the money for his budget himself after Hollywood passed on the script. Johnson made Brick for less than $500,000 and then sold it to Focus Features for over $2 million at Sundance.

The reason why Brick works rather than becoming a parody of Alan Parker's 1976 Scott Baio starrer, Bugsy Malone, is that Johnson never winks at his audience. The writer has crafted strong characters imbued with a spirit in the vein of the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing. Brendan Frye is an everyman and outsider to his school's social circles, which allows us to journey with him into these new terrains. Also, rather than just being a knockoff of Sam Spade, Johnson told Creative Screenwriting Magazine that Frye is instead a send-up of Hammett's other popular character, the hard-boiled detective known only as the Continental Op. Thus, Frye was drafted as a "man on a mission" whose character depth lies in his goal of finding out what happened to his ex-girlfriend, Emily. And as we learn via flashbacks, Emily is possibly the only thing in the world that Frye was ever connected to, and her loss severs Frye's emotional connection from our world as he begins his journey to find out what happened and punish everyone involved.

Johnson's story is also driven by his interesting characters and original dialogue. The characters are a roster of film noir archetypes: The Pin represents the traditional crime boss antagonist; Tugger (Noah Fleiss) is the muscle; The Principal (Richard Roundtree) stands in for the police chief; Nora (Laura Dannon) is the femme fatale; and The Brain (Matt O'Leary) is Frye's sole ally. Johnson converted these noir archetypes into high school characters successfully because teenagers can easily and believably mirror their noir counterparts when it comes to being cruel, cavalier, and secretive.

Possibly one of the riskiest elements of the film is that Johnson developed a slang for his characters that is partly noir-speak and partly the writer's own invention. Such a move is bound to alienate some viewers who find themselves lost in the jargon, but for those who are paying attention, even the made-up words make sense in context. The move of not spoon-feeding the audience is a bold one, but one that pays off.

Brick is one of the most original screenplays to hit screens so far in 2006 and is worth catching for any screenwriter who enjoys a good mystery and wants to see the noir genre twisted into a completely entertaining and digestible pretzel of a flick.

Brick
Focus Features
Rated R; 110 min.

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Jeff Goldsmith is Senior Editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine and serves as the Los Angeles Events Coordinator in charge of the Creative Screenwriting screening series.

Brick courtesy Focus Features

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