Bob's Review of "A Crowded Room"

(This review comes to us from good friend and writer, Bob Thielke. The photo above is another shot of the Athens hospital. -MM)

Okay, here are my thoughts on this story. I felt there were three specific stories in this script:

1) a 40-page story to show that Billy Milligan (or one of his personalities) is a serial rapist and gets sentenced to a mental hospital;

2) a story showing how his condition progressed from an abusive childhood;

3) a trial and his subsequent hospitalization into a maximum security facility.

These three stories essentially served as the three acts. However, I thought this was problematic because I never felt that the three separate stories fed off each other properly. I was interested in the first act. Hmm, was Billy really ill or was he faking it? Was he going to gain his freedom?

Then, to me, the second act took me out of the first story completely. I guess I wasn’t concerned about HOW he became mentally ill, but I wanted to see if justice would be served. This story about how Billy got to the point where he raped the three women went to page 124 or so. We finally get to the story you were telling in the first act, in which he was now going to have to go on trial.

Now, if you told the story in terms of Act I- he is committed to the hospital. Act II- Use flashback interspersed with current time to reveal the different personalities and how each one contributes to his crimes. For example, when it’s time to reveal why Billy forced the women to disrobe, reveal the anarchist Kevin. When he raped them show them that it was the sensitive Aldana that was only looking for love. This way, you show twists and turns in the story, showing us which personality was responsible for each twist and turn. Then at the end of Act II, Billy makes the decision that he wants to stand trial for his sanity and pressures Gary or whomever to force the issue on that. This makes Billy a proactive person as well. Then Act III can consist of the trial.

Character- You give us little reason to like Billy at page 40, then you spend 80 pages telling us why we should give the poor guy a break. However, these multiple personalities also cause a problem because only the bad ones are proactive in any way. Arthur and Ragen talk many times about banishing Kevin, but never do it. Billy is completely subrogated to oblivion. And then when he finally comes back at the end, he’s completely passive because he relies on the whims of the doctors and the prosecutors to decide his fate. My understanding is that you want us to have sympathy for Billy and his plight. Then you must show the dominant personalities taking hold in Billy, show how Arthur forced the destructive personalities to go away, show Billy re-emerging and taking control of his own sanity. I like how you used the “Spot” to delineate personalities and to show internal discussion amongst the various sides of Billy. Another issue at play here is defining who or what the antagonistic force is in this script. In the first 40 pages, Billy is the antagonist(or Kevin I guess). Chalmer is an antagonist, but it’s always like we see him through a filter, and in the third act the prosecuters are the antagonist. I’d like to see a more consistent antagonism and I think the most logical choice is to make this a battle between Billy’s good personalities and his bad personalities. He fights from the depths to over come Kevin, and then has the courage to ask Arthur and Ragen to leave, because he’s now strong enough to stand on his own. Then use the trial to seek vindication for his efforts. Have him show some compassion and reconciliation with his victims.

Dialogue- I noticed nothing out of line with the dialogue, although I occasionally felt that things said in the “spot” were said for my benefit and not necessarily organic to the situation at hand.

Structure- I think the three separate stories that essentially serve as the acts do not help this script. I’d personally like to see more continuity. I think his arrest and commitment to Athens should happen fairly quickly together, so that his being committed is the end of act I, then Act II can be his battle to become whole again, then Act III is where Billy redeems himself through the trial. Also I noted a couple places where the scenes went on a long time 5 or 6 minutes.

Thanks for letting me participate in this little exercise.

Notes below as I was reading:

Scene 1- Adequate to create curiosity, the voice over transition to scene 2 is effective.

Scene 2- as Donna is describing her capture, how did he handcuff her to the car? And how was she able to “study” her book if her hands were cuffed? Minor details, but most car doors wouldn’t be amenable to attaching a handcuff. I’m torn on Billy’s statement that the brotherhood will get her if she calls the police. On one hand it seems expositional, on the other hand, if he’s delusional maybe it’s okay.

Scene 2 is six pages long in courier 10 point font. That ‘s 7 ½ pages in 12 point. My concern is that we have this long scene that establishes the fact that 3 women have been raped, and they know his name is William Mulligan. I still don’t know much else after essentially 8 or 9 minutes of the film. I thought the cutting back and forth of victims was well done, but I’m wondering how critical it is to reveal all three victims right now?

Scene 3- Would a policeman really use him as a human shield, not standard police procedures. Also with this scene, the police never confirm that there’s no one else in the apartment. I think that has to happen in this scene to establish the fact that either he’s crazy or his accomplices/friends got away.

Scene 4- Unless he has some kind of supernatural power, I’m finding it difficult to believe that he has the strength to tear a toilet off it’s anchor and heave it at the guards. I do like the reveal about how angry he gets when his art is messed with.

Pg 17- I’m wondering if it is worthwhile to reveal his split personalities so early in the story. I’m at page 17 and now I feel confident that Billy could have done this. Unless there is a big reveal or reversal later on I feel like this is going to be predictable. Also at page 17, I’m not real confident about what the inciting event for this story is.

Pg 23 – Gary’s question about where Billy learned to dislocate his shoulder is a big hint that we’re going to find abuse in Billy’s past?

Pg 27- of course there’s kids in there, Judy. They just told you about the little boy a minute ago.

Pg 29- Once again, unless there is some supernatural things going on, how can a brain that’s never been exposed to serbo-croatian or Swahili become fluent at those languages? I remember that story John Travolta was in which he had that tumor that allowed him to instantly retain anything he was exposed to, but he didn’t know it before he read it or heard it, correct.

Pg 31- It’s dramatically convenient that his parole statute of limitations runs out today! Why should it matter, the key is whether he goes to the hospital or not. This time constraint seems contrived.

Pg 33. I’m sorry, but the zucchini logic just couldn’t work in a court. Of course it’s a gun. A more viable argument would be to argue that they are non-working models.
Pg 35- Would they let him in a day room. I mean he has shown tremendous and unexpected violent urges.

Pg 52- Thinking of the busboy is an unfilmable unless you flash to him quickly.

Pg 72- How does the viewer know Allen has occupied billy if he doesn’t do anything allen-like.

Pg 92- This is the 3rd or 4th time Arthur says they have to reorder yet they do nothing about it.

Pg 96- I’m curious what this England sequence is for.

Pg. 98- You’d have to be careful to identify what age billy is in each scene because you switch freely from the nine year old to the 20 something Billy.

Pg 105- How will the viewer know which personality is in charge? Only the reader knows this.

Pg 131- A long speech from Billy.

Pg 138- hot water would not make his flesh boil away. Skin blistering? Maybe.

Back to James Cameron's A Crowded Room.

Miriam's Review of "A Crowded Room"

(As we continue our discussion this week of James Cameron's A Crowded Room, this review comes to us from Miriam Paschal. By the way, today is her birthday! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MIRIAM!)

Sybil was the original story of MPD and the drama and interest in that made-for-TV movie lay in the discovery of the disorder itself, as well as its cause. Because it was done so well in Sybil, relying on revealing the disease is no longer enough to sustain a sense of drama, and that is what I feel is the weakness of this story. In Identity the drama is generated by setting up the mind and imagination of the MPD as a hotel where the guests are stranded by the rainstorm. The reveal that all of this has been taking place within the mind of the MPD is done near the end of the second act. In A Crowded Room, I think too much time is spent detailing how Billy becomes an MPD and then how the doctors discover it. The story of how the system let him down gets put on the back burner because of it, yet that is where the real drama lies.

I looked up Lima Hospital (pictured above, now a prison) and found the book about Billy Milligan, so I know this is based on real events. However, some of these events play as too melodramatic to be believable by a modern audience. The guards at the jail, the cops who arrest him, and the doctors who treat him at Lima are too evil and too abusive to be seen as real people. My suggestion is to tone it down for the modern audience. The people will seem more evil and the events more frightening if they are subtly presented. As it is now, they seem to come at the audience like a sledgehammer. Perhaps they really did try to exorcise Billy in Lima, but it comes across as unbelievable.

I read "Sybil" the book after I saw the made-for-TV movie. I also read a book called, "When Rabbit Howls," which was written by "The Troops For Trudy Chase." Trudy Chase no longer exists. During therapy her various personalities (over 50 of them) decided not to integrate, but rather to live in harmony. Through therapy, all of them are awake and aware at all times and work together to present a united front to the world. They make committee decisions about how to use the body in which they exist. I've also read a few medical papers I found online. Most experts agree that MPD occurs when the child is exposed to what can only be described as torture during its very early years, usually before age five. The fact that Billy's mind was more fully formed before the period of torture in his life (eight years old instead of the usual six months to three years), makes his MPD break seem less realistic. Until his mother met Chalmer Milligan, Billy had a more "normal" dysfunctional life, not the kind of life that would create an MPD.

But too much time was spent detailing how he became an MPD, and too much was spent detailing how it affected his life after that. The long section that takes up much of the second act should be compressed into short flashbacks. The bulk of the story should focus on the struggle to place Billy in a facility that will treat him rather than re-expose him to more torture (albeit of a different type).

Billy should be both the main character and protagonist, but he emerges as neither. The story starts with the three victims in a rather clever intercut interview and doesn't get to Billy until he is arrested. You should start with Billy and focus on him. Or, if you want an active protagonist, start with Gary Schweickart and make it his story as he discovers the truth about Billy's secret life and battles to see justice done.

I like the imagery of the spotlight that recalls a happier time in his life, but I think you could make more of that if you use it less frequently. As it is, you use it the same way each time. If you use it less often, and expand on it as a symbol by using it differently (very vague, I know, but it's just a feeling), I think it will have more impact.

In Terminator the dramatic impact was the reveal that one of the men chasing Sarah Connor was a machine. But the drama kept building as details were revealed at key points. He's a machine. He's from the future. In the future machines will destroy humans. Your son sent me. I'm in love with you. And finally we discover, almost along with Sarah, that the son sent his own father, knowing that in order to exist he had to sacrifice this man who would give him life. It's this whole Oedipal thing wrapped up in a time travel twist.

In Titanic the dramatic impact was how Jack saved Rose at the cost of his own life. At the beginning nobody loved life more than him, and nobody hated it more than her. By the end he realizes that in order for her to live her life to the fullest, his must end.

So now you must find the dramatic impact of this story. Will it be a tense courtroom fight between rivals as Gary goes toe to toe with Banks? If so, you'll have to set up a history between the two men. Or will it be the human drama of Gary and Judy discovering the life of Billy Milligan and trying to save him? Whatever it is, most of it must take place within the present of Billy's arrest and trial, not in his past, and most of it must focus on what he is now, not how he got that way.

Chalmer's role could be expanded in the present. I didn't make any notes, but I found his speech to the reporters too easy. Break his presence up into shorter moments, and let his evil nature seep slowly into the story as the conversations with Billy slowly reveal what he did. But always keep him and his history with Billy in the background. The larger story is the current fight for justice.

I hope these notes have been helpful. Your work is among some of my favorite. But I'd trade Jack's impassioned speech to Rose for Virgil smacking Lindsey and yelling, "Come on, you bitch. You've never backed down from a fight in your life." It's those short pieces of dialogue that have more dramatic impact.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Mim.

Back to James Cameron's A Crowded Room.

MM’s Review of “A Crowded Room”

As always, let us start with praise.

Did you guys notice how Mr. Cameron connected the opening and closing shots in his script? As I’m sure all of you know, the opening shot of a movie sets up what that movie is about as well as the expectation of what is to come, and in good movies, the first shot and the last are usually connected in some way. Here, we open with an animated “Rotoscope” sequence involving art, which is quite significant in Billy’s life. The sequence highlights very specific images relevant to Billy’s story – the small girl clutching the rag doll (who we will later learn is Christene, one of Billy’s many “selves”); the rag doll later hangs by a noose, symbolizing the death of an innocent childhood; behind her, a male figure with a black moustache cradles her (who we will later learn is Ragen, “The Protector,” another one of Billy’s 23 personalities); there’s the farmhouse, the leafless trees with spiky tentacles, and of course, Billy’s “heart of darkness,” the corn crib. This sequence sets up a lot of what is to come, the almost fragmented, trippy, episodic events of his life that would shape his adulthood.

And then we get a contrast in the animated sequence at the end with Billy in the Lima State Hospital painting on the white walls of his room “a lush, green landscape.” Then we see Billy IN the animation -- “just Billy, enveloped in this peaceful, green Eden -- painting himself out of Hell and into a world of escape.” First, we're given his nightmares and repression and in the end, his desire to escape.

Billy’s a fascinating individual to say the least, and I completely understand why anyone would want to explore his life for a story. When I first read this script a couple of years ago, I remember thinking, “My goodness, that’s an awfully long flashback of Billy’s childhood.” This time around, it occurred to me that this was, in fact, intended to be a flashback structure, a la the Titanic. In this case, we open with the Act II climax, flashback to see all the events that lead up to that climax (thereby coming full circle back to where we started), and then move into the Act III resolution. While this type of structure worked very well for the Titanic and perhaps others like Double Indemnity and Amadeus, I do question its use here.

We are shown in the opening scenes our protagonist raping those poor, innocent girls. The rest of the script is spent giving Billy’s defense, showing us his troubled childhood and young adulthood and all of the major events that led up to those horrible moments. It was all masterfully written, but emotionally, the piece felt oddly cold to me. I felt cold toward Billy from the very beginning because of those rapes. I was slow to warm up to him or sympathize even when I was sitting through his terrible childhood. When Billy was in that jail cell and he ripped the toilet out of the wall and hurled it at the guards, I felt more like an impartial observer than I did an emotionally invested movie-goer. Even toward the end, I kept myself emotionally distanced from Billy because of those rapes.

Am I a cold-hearted bastard or is this perhaps a flaw in the structure?

It’s a very tall order to show your protagonist raping innocent girls in the beginning and then ask the audience to sympathize by showing his life’s story. I think most audiences could be sympathetic toward a troubled character if he was only robbing people or even if he murdered bad people, but will they feel that way after seeing him rape innocent girls? I don’t know. It could be said, too, that to explore how you feel about this character and his problems and what he did is the whole point of the movie. You could also argue that we’re experiencing his story as everyone else experienced Billy Milligan in the ‘70s. True, but I still can’t help but wonder if there might be a better approach.

Would it not be better to tell this kind of story very simply in chronological order beginning with his childhood? We might feel more involved by experiencing his childhood first as if it was taking place NOW as opposed to seeing events that took place IN THE PAST through flashback. And at least Billy would earn some sympathy before we see him raping girls. And we would have a better understanding why that was happening, too. Would it not also be better, when we actually get to the Act II climax, to have the audience saying to themselves, “Don’t do it, Billy. Don’t do it,” as opposed to the shock of seeing him do it in the very beginning without any regret or remorse? To be more straightforward in the narrative might make the tone of those rapes different, perhaps giving it an air of tragedy, as if to say that this is the lowest low in his life, this is the breaking point, this is the inevitable result of his troubled childhood and severe mental illness.

Okay, the ending. I think Mr. Cameron did as well as he could (perhaps even above and beyond) with the material he had. However, I think Billy’s story makes for a problematic narrative because of the rapes and an even more problematic ending because he never fully recovered. We never saw Billy become whole as one individual. With Sybil, at least we were given that emotional scene in the park where she met and embraced for the first time her other selves. You knew her road to recovery would still be long and difficult but you felt emotionally satisfied that she would recover fully. And, indeed, she did. You don’t really get that with Billy in this story. Here, there was TALK about Billy having met his other selves, about his marked improvement, which we never really saw. I never felt he became whole enough that, if I met him on the street, I could trust him. Indeed, in the closing animation sequence, we’re given a picture of him STILL TRYING TO ESCAPE, not a scene that made us feel, as we did with Sybil, that he would eventually become whole.

There was also talk about him starting a Foundation Against Child Abuse, which we never saw, nor did we get the impression he truly cared about helping others. In a story like this, you typically read about how this kind of person devoted his life to helping others (usually motivated by guilt over his past), but you don’t get that with Billy. Now, he owns a small movie company, Stormy Life Productions. In the script, he never apologized nor tried to compensate the poor girls he violated so horribly. And let me be clear. I don't think these are flaws in Cameron's ability to tell a story, but they may be legitimate cracks in BILLY'S STORY that fatally wounds a big screen adaptation.

Billy’s criminal behavior after this story, even as recent as 1996, almost ruins the chance to have a feature film made. It was reported in the Associated Press that Billy was found incompetent to manage his own affairs and that Billy's OWN court-appointed attorney, Gretchen von Helms, said he “allegedly referred to strapping explosives to his chest to get attention” and “talked about banging on a judge's door and robbing a bank.” That's scary, is it not? Why should audiences care if he’s behaving this way 20 years after this story took place?

Billy Milligan is a genuinely fascinating individual, no question about it. I do feel for him. I think this would make for an interesting HBO documentary or even a docu-drama on TV, but a feature film on the big screen distributed around the world? I’d have to pass, I’m so sorry to say. His story’s not over yet. He still needs to recover. And I also think he might find happiness in his life if he just gave away to those who have also been abused the kind of love that he never received.

Back to James Cameron's A Crowded Room.

James Cameron’s “A Crowded Room”

For a couple of weeks, we did something radically different. Screenwriter friends and I spent some time analyzing James Cameron’s A Crowded Room. (The link takes you to the script.)

Based upon the Daniel Keyes book, The Minds of Billy Milligan, this is the true story of Billy Milligan, a man with a Multiple Personality Disorder. Summed up beautifully by Wikipedia, Billy “was the subject of a highly publicised court case in the state of Ohio in the late 1970s. After having committed several felonies including armed robbery, he was arrested for a series of rapes on the Ohio State University campus. In the course of preparing his defense, public defenders determined that Milligan had multiple personality disorder. Examination by psychiatrists suggested that two of Milligan's 24 personalities or "selves" had committed the crimes without the others becoming aware of it. Milligan pleaded an insanity defense, the first multiple to do so. He was sent to a series of state-run mental hospitals, such as the Athens Lunatic Asylum, where, by his report, he received very little help. While he was in these hospitals, Milligan displayed 23 selves.”

The photo above is actually taken from the Athens Lunatic Asylum, now abandoned (and considered haunted). I’ll include more pictures of it with other reviews.

You can read Billy’s widely publicized statement here in which he claims, “I've trained actors to play this role; Johnny Depp, Christian Slater, John Cusack, and Leonardo diCaprio, to enact MP as it really is and not as it is popularly seen.”

You can also see a Japanese video of and about Billy Milligan here.

Listed below are the links to the reviews. Miriam, Bob, Nena, Pat, and Christina - thank you for your time and thoughts. Every review was constructive, insightful, and thoroughly edifying.

-MM

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MM's Review

Miriam Paschal's Review

Bob Thielke's Review

Nena Eskridge's Review

Pat's Review

Christina Ferguson's Review