[…] It’s the difference between being in your car and letting whatever is on the radio drift in and out of …read more […]

Back in the 70's, the original RED: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zoo_Gang

Am I the only one who's fascinated with the "dinner" element? Imagine the location is this beautiful dining hall with candles, gorgeous wood tables and chairs, expensive cutlery, and people are eating these expensive meals while looking at grisly murder pictures on these plasma screens... there's sort of a weird Hannibal Lecter vibe to it, to me. Or a cult. My immediate reaction reading the article was "they're eating the victim" or "they're eating the murderer" (a heads up, a cannibal who solves crimes by tasting the victims has already been done brilliantly in the comic book series "Chew"). Maybe it's all an intricate game, they know the murderer is someone in attendance and the parlour game of the night is figuring out who it is. The Society For Satanic Murder invites you to an evening of dinner and games. Or maybe instead of fancy schamncy, it's a weekend run by a former cop that gets all these regular working folk together for a weekend in the ballroom of a cheap hotel near the airport, feed them catering food and see if anyone comes up with anything, a sort of last ditch think-outside-the-box approach. Get all the people who watch CSI and Law and Order all day who THINK they know detective work to come in and see if they can solve it.

For some reason this made think of The Bone Collector (with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie) and Prisoners. I know Prisoners is a weird stretch, but I'm picturing Jake Gyllenhaal's determined and astute detective character is akin to Angelina's puppet character for a paralyzed Denzel. So there's a bunch of geezer retired detectives working a cold case that somehow connected them since the original clues had them crossing state lines. Now they're all retired and coming back together to try and figure it out and they dangle it like bait for two younger detectives to have them do all the leg work. "DANCE, PUPPETS!" After a few random dead ends, the younger detectives stumble on a clue that leads them back to an original clue that had mysteriously gone missing at the very beginning of the original investigation - something that contained DNA before testing was around. So they go in search of that trail and stumble on a few more very subtle clues that get them into danger (threatening actions at their homes, while driving, etc) with every 'right' step. Someone is trying to compromise their efforts (and lives)... which makes them think they're definitely on the right trail. When they finally get to ground zero of the crime there's a definitive answer as to the suspect - one of the old retired cops who'd been playing them from the start (as well as the other cops). Now all of their lives are in danger as they're about to uncover the true nature of the crime and that he had in fact been responsible for several other cold cases. A homicide detective as a serial killer. Has that been done before? I'm sure it has, but I can't think of anything right now...

The dinner element is interesting, but there's the temptation you (writer/director) fall in love with that and end up with long conversations on that room instead of action. Yes, it would remind me of BBC's Sherlock Holmes reboot (which is great). The TV series "The Blacklist" featured a similar concept recently with a nice twist I think the focus should be on the research, investigating. These guys (and gals) could be sort of an "A-Team" with specialists from different areas to solve those crimes. They would probably be an international unit (like the TV series "Crossling Lines" and could work in a similar way to "Criminal Minds". Are they officially sanctioned? Or like in Mission Impossible "subject to denial in the event of failure, death or capture"? What makes them take a case? There are a lot of unsolved cases. BBC's Sherlock Holmes does a great job at this, screening out minor cases solving them immediately. I mean, do they take any case that is sent to them, is there a waiting queue or very Sherlock - they accept cases they find interesting and amusing. So, we're talking about Hollywood and not so much an indie, right? If it's going to be a team it would help a lot to have clashing personalities. Maybe they can't stand each other but have accepted this job because of some kind of deal. Maybe they work in the exactly opposite way than TV's "Psych". This team apparently does some research and investigation, but they're really psychics that try to establish contact with the souls of the victims so they help with their own murders. But of course, they could lie. How about ages? Young old? A mix? What if this team we are talking about are a family. The great-great-great-grandsons of Sherlock Holmes. The Holmes family. Keeping up the name of their ancestor. A tradition. They are born with certain gifts and train to be detectives. This could be a very shadowy team - nobody knows them. You just post all your files of the case you want solved on an online forum. How do you know your case has been accepted? Well, some weeks or maybe months later they post the solution. You never met them, you never see them. they take the term undercover to a whole new level. It's even undercover to the local authorities. What if there was a single team but it split up, now we have two competing teams - which one will solve the case first? We could mix it up with some sci-fi. They are called to solve cases on other planets. They use fancy technology.

It's not a bad high concept for a contained thriller idea (which we're all supposed to have), but yeah, the action would probably expand, I mean, if you found out that the murderer was IN the hotel with you, you wouldn't stick around the ballroom. Realistically, the whole thing couldn't BE the dinner because that's a lot of food to have on set and for the actors to eat... it'd be a very small part. And then there's going to the bathroom, taking a walk, drinks before dinner, going to their rooms, midnight at the gym... there's lots of opportunities to do stuff. Maybe it's one of those Holiday Inn things on the interstate that's surrounded by a Walmart and a Denny's... a little retail outpost in the middle of nowhere. In my head it's definitely a young-old mix, it's not the A-team but literally the last people you would call: the people who watch procedurals all day, the ones who are versed in every crazy plot twist and insane hack idea of murder stories. It's like after 9/11 they brought in people like M Night Shayamalan and Michael Crichton to concoct crazy schemes for the army to prepare for (it's why we have a plan in case of a Zombie outbreak). This could be the low-rent, low-scale version of that.

"The Bone Collector!" Thank you so much, I had been trying to remember that movie for months now! Oh man, what if you went up a notch with being disabled, did you see the Ridley Scott Hannibal movie, where Gary Oldman was all mangled up, what if it was HIM with Loki as his puppet detective? BTW, insofar as I'm not sure I could ever watch it again, I did enjoy the hell out of Prisoners, I would LOVE to just read another script with that feel, and until we get to that twist, I get the sensation that your movie could feel like that. Maybe I'm projecting, I dunno, but oh man.

How about an updated "Mean Guns"? A large group of warring criminals are invited to a banquet, ostensibly to meet the city's new crime-lord at his estate and negotiate a ceasefire. However, their vengeful host poisoned them all during dinner, as a way for him to restore order and divide up the city's territories. Consequently, they're each given the name of someone present to kill, and 6 hours to do it. Only 3 vials of antidote will be available to those at the end who must both kill their target and survive the ordeal, *except* the means to create the antidote is also hidden in the house and those able to cure themselves will also be set free.

Whoa, Pliny! I reeeeeally like that!

My Dinner with Aliens: On-board the Nostromo. Dinner time, all of the crew *except* Ripley and Bishop. Suddenly, simultaneously, all their stomachs rip open and out pop a bunch of little aliens. However, being aliens, they are in fact highly intelligent and highly civilized, so they band together to find out out how they got inside the crew, onto this ship and what its final destination is. Unfortunately for them, this is not the extreme PTSD suffering Ripley's first BBQ and using the cat Jones as bait, she hunts them down one by one, eating their brains as she whittles down their number, until only a shy, solitary alien we call Clyde remains. Can Clyde control his instinct for destruction and team up with the ship's android, Bishop, to take down the psychotic and genocidal Ripley?

Prisoners stuck with me because of the dark, slow, thriller tempo. I have one in the works that I'm hoping captures that, but it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. Per his interview (that Scott posted a while back) the screenwriter mentions it took him quite a few rewrites to get to that point. I wonder what the concept above would be like if it were made into a comedy and you had Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder working to solve cold cases. LOL!