CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 10/23/09

Deep Thoughts:
The Canyon's Steve Allrich

BY PETER CLINES

This week's From the Trenches examines a fledgling screenwriter who's working with one of the most well known trenches in the world. Steve Allrich talks about learning a new art, wilderness survival, and where painting and writing overlap.

Calling Steve Allrich an artist is pretty dead-on. After studying art in Chicago, he spent over two decades earning a living as a painter, doing landscapes and other works. As the years went on, though, he discovered the business aspect had begun to overrun so much of his art that painting wasn't as much fun as it had been. He segued into writing, starting with short stories, but his interest in movies drew him to screenplays.

Although Allrich studied art in depth, he struck out on his own to learn screenwriting. "I read every book I could get my hands on," he admits. "I read all the how-to books in the beginning, and then just every screenplay I could find, either online or through Amazon or whatever." In retrospect, he thinks reading screenplays is the best way for a beginning writer to learn the craft. "Just try to find a script from a movie you like and try to break it down," he explains. "Try to figure out how the writer came up with what he came up with. Why it works, what doesn't work, that kind of thing."

His first produced screenplay, The Canyon, came from an idea that was tossed out by his manager, Eric Williams, very early in 2007: what if a honeymooning couple took a burro trip down into the Grand Canyon and things went horribly wrong? Both men agreed it was a simple, solid idea for a spec script, but for Allrich, an avid hiker who'd been studying the outdoors for years, the idea had an irresistible appeal. "One of the thing that's always struck me is how careless people are when they go out in nature," he says. "I used to live up in Colorado and went hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park a lot. At the trail heads they have these big signs that describe the flora and fauna and have all these warnings, 'pack food, pack water,' etc." The sign that always stood out for him, though, was a recurring one with large black letters: The Mountains Don't Care. "I thought that was really great," explains the screenwriter, "because people ascribe all these tendencies to nature, but really, it's not benign and it's not malevolent. It just plain doesn't care. If you can't stay warm and dry and you don't have food and water, you're going to be in serious trouble. Especially a place like the Grand Canyon. It's almost turned into a theme park. They make it seem like a very safe endeavor, and it certainly can be, but you have to be careful and take precautions."

Allrich is an avid outliner, something he discovered after multiple attempts to work with notecards (something his screenwriting books suggested) all failed. Instead, he begins by jotting down notes on scenes, characters, and snippets of dialogue he thinks would be interesting. He makes a point not to worry about any form of structure at this point. As the characters become clearer, he puts them in different situations to see how they react, which helps him flesh out his story. "I find that without an outline it's really easy to paint yourself into a corner," he explains. "You have a lot less invested in an outline than you do in a script. If you reach page 40 in a script you're really invested in everything you have up to that point, but if you're on page three of an outline it's really easy to just go back and change something." Like many pros, Allrich spends as much time on his 15- or 20-page outline as he does on his actual screenplay, and often more.

After spending a few months on his outline for The Canyon, he dove into the script. "I try to pound out a first draft really, really quickly," says Allrich. "Maybe it hearkens back to my painting days, but I've always felt you need to get something down—either on the page or on the canvas—before you know whether it works or not. That's the thing. You have to get the words on paper. I like to get the draft finished, and then I can analyze it and break it down." He muses for a moment. "In a way, writing's a lot like painting—it's all about problem solving. You put something down on the page and it either works or it doesn't. It's either right or wrong. If it's wrong, then you have to make adjustments. If it's right, you keep going."

The Canyon is the story of a blissfully newlywed couple, Nick and Lori (Eion Bailey and Yvonne Strahovski), celebrating their elopement at the Grand Canyon. Nick wants to live out his dream of hiking down into the canyon, but their unplanned honeymoon means they're months late for the necessary permits. Lamenting in a nearby bar, they meet Henry (Will Patton) a grizzled old trail hand who swears he can get the permits and the burros for them. Lori is uneasy, but Nick is eager to go and the next morning sees them descending into the remote recesses of the canyon with Henry. At first it does seem like a beautiful dream, and even Lori gets taken in by the natural beauties around them. Then a rattlesnake encounter scatters their supply mules and leaves Henry poisoned and dying. Before long, Nick and Lori find themselves with no guide and no supplies, painfully aware of the fact they have no clue how to make it back to civilization.

One of the first obstacles Allrich knew he'd need to overcome was the couple's complete lack of survival skills. "I've done my share of careless things when I've been out and about," he admits, "and usually the consequences are minimal." With the very high stakes and the number of bad decisions the Nick and Lori were going to make in the course of the story, however, the screenwriter had to make sure moviegoers stayed on their side. "I've seen so many movies where the characters are just so annoying you can't wait for them to be dead," he laughs. "One of the things I set out to do was to create characters [the audience] hoped would make it out okay. They're in love, they're on their honeymoon, they're head over heels, and Nick has this romantic notion of taking a trip down into the Grand Canyon." While he admits they still make bad and thoughtless mistakes, he also thinks they're believable, consistent mistakes for an unprepared, urban couple who find themselves thrust into this situation.

Another element he needed to wrestle with was the character of Henry, who comes across as a scam artist and potential threat as he walks around, as Lori observes, "with a meat cleaver on his belt." Allrich likes the idea of setting up, and then twisting, certain expectations, and is pleased to note almost none of the online speculation about Henry's role in the story has been correct. "It's indicative of a character you would meet in that situation," he explains. "What do you really know about somebody? Just because they say they are something, are they really that thing? People present themselves in ways that aren't exactly authentic."

The finished script got the attention of director Richard Harrah. Harrah had a few notes on the script, more than a few of which centered on the character of Nick. "Nick is a tough character to like," admits Allrich, "I think, especially in the beginning." A few tweaks were made to the character to make him less pushy and overbearing to his new wife. When actor Bailey signed on, he had a few notes and ideas of his own so he would have certain aspects of the character to explore, but necessity made many of these drop into Nick's backstory.

When the film went into production in April of 2007, they found the location presented several challenges of its own, and Allrich found himself shifting several scenes and moments around, notably the morning on the canyon's rim as the small group prepares to descend. "It's really problematic shooting on the rim," chuckles the screenwriter, "because the wind is 70 miles an hour and you have to do all the dialogue in ADR." The easiest solution was to shift much of the dialogue back to the night before. "So some of what used to take place on the rim of the canyon now takes place in the bar," he explains.

Allrich finished his rewrites and went down to watch the first few days of filming, but realized his involvement on The Canyon was over. "I hung around for a couple of days and it was great to watch, but then it was like, 'Well, I've gotta get back to work,'" he laughs. "So I got to work on my next script."

Peter Clines grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and made his first writing sale at age 17 to a local newspaper. He currently lives somewhere in southern California, and can often be found ranting on his cleverly named blog, Writer on Writing. His first novel, Ex-Heroes, will be released in early 2010.



The Canyon courtesy Magnolia Pictures

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