My (unofficial) PJO season 2 episode 5 script part 4/4 (part 1 | part 2 | part 3)
The last part! Thank you for reading I just couldn't get the vision for this episode out of my mind and had to write it down.
Images of script and copied text (bc I'm lazy and don't want to write out alt text) under the cut, just in case I didn't tag enough spoiler warning or people aren't interested <3
Annabeth Tries to Swim Home
CUT TO: INT. DARK VICTORIAN HOUSE – NIGHT.
Continuation of first scene/flashback. CYCLOPS is grinning at YOUNG ANNABETH menacingly. Behind him, the fire rages, and LUKE, THALIA, and GROVER are tied up in the corner. Annabeth’s attention is taken up by the large monster speaking to her.
CYCLOPS: (in her father’s voice) Annabeth. How nice of you to join us. Now, Annie, don’t you worry.
Annabeth draws her knife. As he speaks, the Cyclops approaches her.
CYCLOPS (CONT): I love you, Annabeth. You can stay here with me. Don’t worry. You can stay forever.
He reaches out for her. Annabeth stabs him in the foot, keeping hold of her knife as he reaches forward and grabs the door in shock. She runs around him towards her friends.
The Cyclops rips the door of its hinges and throws it across the room with a roar.
Annabeth reaches the older kids.
THALIA: Annabeth! Thank the gods you’re okay.
YOUNG ANNABETH: (determined) Hold still.
Annabeth cuts the ropes around Thalia’s arms and legs. Thalia takes up her sword and stands defensively in front of the others.
THALIA: Cut them free, Annabeth. I’ll hold him off.
Annabeth turns to Luke and Grover as the Cyclops roars behind her. She saws at their ropes as Thalia goads and fights the monster.
THALIA (CONT): Come on, ugly! Can’t you take me?
She slices at him with her sword. Now free, Luke can barely stand, Grover supporting him. They all turn to watch Thalia defending them against the monster.
Suddenly, the Cyclops roars, and Thalia’s sword can be seen buried in his eye. As he rears back, she pulls it out, turning to her friends.
THALIA (CONT): Come on. We have to go.
Annabeth leads the way through the house, back the way she came through the servants kitchen into the orangery. They escape through a side door, standing in the storm.
Sirens and howls can be heard, the sounds of the monsters they have been running from closer than before.
THUNDER rumbles as they look around desperately in the dark. Grover sniffs.
GROVER: Come on. This way.
They walk away from the house. The Cyclops roars again from within.
CUT TO: EXT. POLYPHEMUS’ ISLAND – DAY.
SHEEP hooves/underbellies walk across the screen as POLYPHEMUS calls them. Under one of them hangs PERCY.
ANNABETH: (invisible) Just don’t let go!
Polyphemus drags aside the boulder sealing the cave. He addresses each sheep as they pass.
POLYPHEMUS: (patting each sheep) Hasenpfeffer! Einstein! Widget! Widget? Heavier, huh?
WIDGET stops in front of him, Percy clinging to her wool.
POLYPHEMUS (CONT): Soon you will be big enough to eat! Go on, Widget!
WIDGET enters the cave, followed by the rest of the flock.
ANNABETH: (invisible, from outside) Hey, ugly!
POLYPHEMUS: (looking around wildly) Who said that?
ANNABETH: Nobody!
POLYPHEMUS: Nobody! I remember you!
ANNABETH: You’re too stupid to remember. But Nobody remembers you!
Polyphemus throws a boulder, aiming for the invisible Annabeth.
ANNABETH (CONT): Your aim hasn’t improved!
POLYPHEMUS: Come here! Let me kill you!
ANNABETH: You can’t kill Nobody! And you’ll have to come find me!
Polyphemus yells, running down the hill to find Annabeth. Percy drops off Widget, glancing back outside at the island and the Cyclops before moving further into the cave.
CONT: INT. POLYPHEMUS’ CAVE – DAY.
Percy moves through cavernous hallways, turning a corner into a dead-end room of sheep memorabilia. He backs out, going back the other way and turning right instead of left.
He turns corners through a set of “rooms,” something that might be a bedroom, a room full of bones, and another room full of sheep memorabilia. He turns a corner and trips, catching himself against the cave walls with his hands.
Righting himself, Percy looks around, breathing heavily. He looks back and forth, choosing a hallway and running into another room, full of wool and smelling of sheep. He covers his nose as he looks around the room, faced with three separate doorways.
Percy makes a choice, going through the left opening. Down the hallway, he finds a room with a spinning wheel and loom. GROVER and CLARISSE are inside, trying to undo Clarisse’s ropes.
CLARISSE: It’s no good. You’ve been working at it for hours!
They spot Percy.
CLARISSE (CONT): You’re supposed to be blown up!
PERCY: Yeah, good to see you too--
GROVER: (hugging Percy) You came!
PERCY: Yeah, of course, dude. Now, Clarisse, hold still.
Percy takes Riptide out of his pocket and cuts Clarisse’s ropes.
CLARISSE: (rubbing her wrist) Where’s Annabeth?
PERCY: You’re welcome. She’s outside.
CLARISSE: Great, come on.
PERCY: Wait. Was... It was just you in your lifeboat?
CLARISSE: Yeah. Everybody else... I didn’t even know you guys made it.
Percy looks down at his sword.
PERCY: Okay.
GROVER: Come on, guys. We need to go help Annabeth.
They move back through the cave, Grover guiding them. As they come back into the first room Percy ran through, they hear a loud crash.
Annabeth screams.
POLYPHEMUS: I got Nobody!
Percy, Grover, and Clarisse move to the doorway, peeking through to the main room. Polyphemus is standing at the doorway, holding his arm up. He shakes his fist, and ANNABETH’S CAP flutters to the ground, revealing Annabeth, hanging upside down from his hand.
Kurt and Goldie. Lucy and Ricky. Zombies and Hollywood. Some things are meant to be. Hollywood’s love affair with the undead started in 1930 with “The White Zombie” and blossomed into a full blow romance with George A. Romero, who over nine films, spawned a 20th century pop culture phenomenon and made “Barbara…” relevant.
But by the year 2000, the genre was dead. Zombies were old hat, reduced to…
I’ve always thought that Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 would make an awesome movie trilogy or even TV miniseries. So I wrote an adaptation of what I think the first part -- movie or episode or otherwise -- might look like.
He half-ran, half-walked back to his dorm room with the beginnings of the Best Idea He’d Ever Had forming in his brain. It would be a movie unlike any other. None of this Garden State bull shit that got Zach Braff laughed out of town, and it wouldn’t be like that mumbly bumbly Lena Dunham movie either. No, this was going to really strike home for those of his generation, a movie they’d be talking about for ages, something to go in the canon. “See, here,” future film professors would say, “He was only nineteen when he penned his first opus. Just watching the opening scene reminds me of the first time I felt someone really understood what it was like to be a young person at the crux of humanity and adulthood…” Sure, something like that.
It took him a weekend to race through the first draft. No need for significant plotting or outlining, no, he knew what this story would be. His roommate may have come and gone from their room, but he didn’t notice or care. With the strains of alt-pop-folk music thrumming through his head phones, he went from FADE IN to FADE OUT, pleased with what he wrought.
The following week, when his friends asked where he’d been that weekend, how he’d missed Jeremy black out and run through campus naked, he responded that he’d been… busy. He wanted to play coy, not be a dick about it, and only let them know once he’d made it into Sundance. He could see it now….
He’d be up on the stage, sitting in a director’s folding chair as hundreds of unmistakably jealous eyes bored holes into him. He’d share a secret smile with those eyes, “I did something you’ll never do.” But he’d be modest as he answered the moderator — someone like Scorsese or a famous film critic or someone, he hadn’t decided yet — the moderator’s questions.
“I really just wanted to tell the story of a young kid fresh from a small town, eager to make his dreams come true."
“And do his dreams come true?"
Slight smirk. “I guess it’s up to you as the audience to decide.” Uproarus applause.
Every night, he’d go home and tweak his script; it was in really good shape for a first draft, so it didn’t need much noodling. Each line of dialogue sounded like him, like what he wanted to say. And man, that second act speech by the love interest — of course he gave her lines, he wasn’t a caveman — when she tries to convince the main character that only by finishing his novel will he fulfill his destiny. Damn. You can’t make this stuff up. Except he did.
He waited a month to show it to anyone. He’d teased his project to his friends, not so much that they’d get annoyed with him, but enough that they were clamoring to read it. He’d also emailed the head MFA Screenwriting professor and requested a meeting. It was all very legit.
On the day of his meeting, he sent his friends manila envelopes with his script printed and bradded. It cost a small fortune at the dorm printer, but it was worth it. this shit would be sitting in museums one day and his friends would tell their children stories of reading the first draft of what became the Defining Movie of a Generation.
Walking to Professor Burke’s office, he quelled his nerves with thoughts of what Burke would say — “Great Scott!” maybe if he was trying to be cute, or more likely, “Damn, I really haven’t seen work like this from an undergraduate, let alone a freshman! Let’s see what we can do about early admission into the MFA program for you…” Maybe Burke would insist he submit it to contests or festivals. Maybe he’d get an agent! Can you imagine?! Going to meetings with Spielberg and JJ Abrams and Tarantino fighting over his script. And it would all start here, today.
He marched up to Burke’s door, one last manila envelope under his arm. Knocking expectantly, he couldn’t help but hum a little nondescript tune, bouncing on his toes and tapping his fingers. “Come in.”
He sat down across from Burke, eyeing the professor’s office piled high with marked up scripts and books on movies and screenwriting. Posters hung haphazardly behind the bespectacled and crisp older woman, who had yet to look away from her computer screen. Burke’s chair was at a higher angle and it was a struggle to look her in the eye.
“Hi Professor Burke, I’m the student who contacted you a few days ago about meeting?"
“Are you in my class?”
“Well no, but I — see I wrote this script, and I thought with your expertise and experience you could —"
“God dammit. You’re the fifteenth fucking freshman dick flicker I’ve had in my office this semester. Did you print up your script? Christ.” Burke held out her hand. “Let’s see it."
He tentatively passes the manila envelope over, trying to remember what his dad told him about looking tough in the face of the enemy. “It’s a coming-of-age dramedy about a —"
“Shut up.” Burke scanned the first few pages. Flipped to the middle.
“It actually should be read all the way through before skipping around —"
Burke just looked at him. Reading, “Your words are what you have to give the world, Foster. They are what make you you. And to think that you would just take them away from the rest of us like that, well, I don’t want to know the man to do such a disservice to the entirety of humanity forever.” He smiled a little as she read the line. It was good.
Burke took off her glasses as she set the script down. “Kid, I’m gonna give you a valuable piece of advice and I want you to listen because in your lily white life no one has probably ever told you this: You are one of many. Take whatever ‘many’ means to you and multiply it by ten thousand. Every little prick with a keyboard thinks that he’s the guy, and I’ll tell you what, only one of those guys is the guy, and that guy might even be a chick. So toss this out, don’t show it to anyone, and spend a few years realizing how vastly unimportant you are. Then write something, if you still have something to say. But don’t just write shit because you like the sound of your own voice."
They sat there a minute in silence, at an impasse. Burke gestured to the door as she went back to whatever she’d been doing.
Outside, he walked in silence, out the building, across the street, up the hill, in his dorm, up the elevator, down the hall, into his room, to his bed.
Guys I finished my first screenplay tonight! I've had the idea for about a year and a couple weeks ago I decided to channel all my anxiety about money and career bullshit into just fucking writing it and I DID. And honestly I'm so proud of it and I totally fell in love with it and now I want to direct it. And if I don't get one of the two jobs I have interviews for next week, I'm going to start an Indiegogo page and seriously do it. I can't let myself fall TOO much in love with it because I guess I would take the money if I was able to sell it...I've got a meeting next week about doing just that!
IS IT POSSIBLE for things to actually be GOOD? I think it is.
Going over this script I started in April 2013. It's my first screenplay I've ever written. It's good to go back and tweak it with fresh eyes. I think I'll be officially done with it by the end of the month.
Seriously considering writing my first screenplay. Been reading a few of my favorites to get an idea of how they should look and how it translates on film. You have to start somewhere right?
