CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 5/30/08

Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction:
Stuck's Stuart Gordon

By david michael wharton

Horror director Stuart Gordon brings to screen a fictionalized account of one of the strangest and most tragic news stories of recent years with Stuck, the story of a homeless man whose late-night encounter with a drunken motorist takes "hit and run" to a whole new level.

On October 26, 2001, in Fort Worth, Texas, Chante Jawan Mallard hit a homeless man named Gregory Biggs with her car. The impact embedded Biggs in Mallard's windshield. What followed garnered national news as Mallard, rather than calling 911 or taking Biggs to a hospital, drove home and left Biggs in her garage to die. During the trial, experts testified that if Mallard had taken Biggs to the hospital, he could easily have been saved. Mallard is currently serving a 50-year sentence for her crimes.

Stuck, directed by Stuart Gordon (who also has story credit) and written by John Strysik, recasts this strange-but-true incident as part thriller, part horror movie, and part blacker-than-black comedy. Mallard becomes Brandi (Mena Suvari), a caregiver at a nursing home who collides with newly homeless Tom (Stephen Rea) and panics. While Brandi conspires to try to keep the secret locked in her garage, Tom realizes that if he's to survive, he's going to have to take action. Gordon talked with CS Weekly about writing partners, tweaking reality, and why sometimes when the truth is simply too bleak for the silver screen.

When did you first hear about the case and what attracted you to doing it as a movie?
Well, I was reading about it just like everyone else was. During the trial is when most of the coverage came out. It was one of those things where you just couldn't believe what you were reading. Here was a woman who was a caregiver at a senior citizens' home who hits a homeless guy and he goes through her windshield, and instead of taking him to a hospital, she puts him in her garage. Then she just keeps going back and talking to him to see if he's dead yet. What would make a normal, ordinary woman who specializes in caring for people behave this way? I couldn't get it out of my mind, and I sat down finally with John Strysik, who's a good friend of a mine and a terrific screenwriter, and we hammered out a script.

Did you do any development prior to bringing John in?
No, I just sat down with John and—at first, he was like, "Is there enough material here?" He was a little worried. And I said, I think if you just let it play out, it's an amazingly twisted story, and there's all these other characters who are fascinating as well. Her boyfriend, who she enlists to help her. Her friend at work who, in reality, she ended up telling about it, which is what ended up getting her arrested. The whole thing, the more we talked about it, the more there was.

What was the initial form of the idea? Was there anything you knew you were going to change right away?
We did several versions where we stuck entirely to the story. At some point, I think it was John who said, "What would happen if he was aware she's not going to help him, and he tries to save himself?" And that's where it veered off into "what if," as opposed to what really happened.

Why co-write this instead of writing the script yourself?
I find that it's more fun for me to work with someone else, to have someone to bounce ideas off of. Also, John brought some great ideas to it as well, things that I would never have thought of. I like having a writing partner. I've done a lot of work with Dennis Paoli, who I've written all those Lovecraft stories [with]. I'm just used to working that way, I guess.

What were some of the ideas that John brought to this?
A lot of the ideas toward the end of the movie were John's. Some of the versions we had other characters that we ended up cutting. The victim's wife was looking for him, and in some of the earlier drafts, she was the one that was trying to save him. We realized after a while that this was taking away his ability to save himself, that we really needed him to become a stronger character, not be someone who's passive and waiting to be saved.

How did your collaboration work as far as the writing process?
Initially we did index cards and started writing up each of the little sequences. We ended up reshuffling those cards a few times before any script was written. The actual screenwriting was John's thing. Sometimes I would make suggestions for dialogue, but I would say 90 percent of it was John.

Is that typical for how you work when you're collaborating with other writers?
It's changed over the years. Originally, I used to feel that my strength was in story and less in dialogue. I would be more involved in the structure of the piece. Over the years I've gotten more into doing the dialogue, and now I am doing some scripts entirely on my own, which is sort of a new thing for me.

It sounds like the original conception stuck pretty closely to the actual facts. I believe the actual lady got caught because she was telling the story at a party. Was there ever a version of the story that followed that timeline, since that wouldn't be as contained as this final version is?
We didn't get that far. We got to her burying him in a shallow grave in the park, with the idea that a lot of people knew about it and that eventually she was going to get caught. We never actually had the scene where the friend goes to the police or anything like that. John actually went to Fort Worth and looked at the place where Gregory Biggs was hit, which was mysterious to us, because it's in the middle of nowhere. What was he doing out there is a question I don't think will ever be answered.

Were there any situations as you were developing the story that you two butted heads about?
The idea of cutting these characters. We had shown the script to a few people with the wife. The character of Sam the homeless man, who he meets in the park, he had a few scenes where he helps the wife find her husband. He had much more to do in the story. It's interesting, because there's still a line in the script where he says, "You will see me again." Which he does. Originally, there was a lot more interaction between him and Tom. At first, John was kind of resistant to that idea, because it seemed to be working; we seemed to be getting positive reactions to the script. My feeling was that it would be stronger if we made it a one-on-one battle between the two of them. In the version that we shot, both characters end up becoming stronger as the story goes on.

Were there any other ideas you made at the script stage as far as distancing from the real events?
I don't think we did change that much. A lot of it was just guesses as far as what happened, or just making things up. For example, I don't know if there was a promotion that was being offered to her, but for our purposes it seemed to work. In terms of the character of Tom, in the movie he's newly homeless, we see him becoming homeless. He lives in a hotel and gets thrown out into the street, whereas Gregory Biggs I think had been homeless for some time.

How did you handle the tone of the movie? I was surprised to find as much black humor as I did.
Well, it's just something that came out of the characters. It was not something that we said, "Let's make this funny." The situation is just unbelievable. It's one of those things that, like they say, if you made this up, no one would believe it. There is that absurd quality about it all. Seeing a guy literally sticking out of the front of a car while someone drives him around, there's something about it that's horrific and funny at the same time.

Was there a conscious decision to make this sort of the karmic "it should have happened this way" version of the story?
Part of it went that way, that maybe this is what should have happened, if things worked out the way they should have dramatically. But the reality of the situation, one of the things we realized as we started writing it is, my God, this is such a depressing finish here. We're going to watch this guy bleed to death. I mean, it would be a powerful film, possibly a better one, I don't know. But it would have been a very different one.

Another thing that occurred to me is that this is a story about what happens when people stop having empathy for other people. Was it an intentional desire on your part to comment on the state of the world in general, or was that just inherent in this story?
It just kind of happened. My daughter was the one who pointed out to me after she saw the movie for the first time. She said, "Everybody in this movie just cares about themselves." Everyone's in these little bubbles of self-interest, and I think that's true in terms of the way the world's operating these days. The idea of caring for someone who's less fortunate than you is considered weak. These are real dog-eat-dog times.

How open are you to improv?
I'm very open to it, and I always encourage not just the actors, but the crew, if they've got some ideas, to bring them to my attention. I'm not into this idea that movies are this one-man, one-film thing. I think it's a team sport, and the idea that more people's input is better than just one brain figuring everything out. I did an episode of Masters of Horror, and one of the best ideas came from my assistant director. A good idea's a good idea.

When you're writing for a film you know you're going to direct, do you put more or less on the page?
I try to put it all in the script, because you've got to communicate to the whole crew. Everybody's got to have the same movie in their mind. That's one of the good things about storyboards is that a picture's worth a thousand words, so everybody knows what the shot's gonna be. And I've noticed that you always leave out some crucial piece of information. When you're describing the movie to somebody, you suddenly realize that it's not in the script. That's happened to me on almost every film.

David Michael Wharton is managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting. He grew up near Fort Worth, where the incident on which Stuck is based occurred. As hometown claims to fame go, that one isn't that great.

Stuck courtesy ThinkFilm

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