The Business of Screenwriting: Research Trips

“You’re the writer. Why not pick a terrific place for your story setting? Just in case you get the chance to go on a research trip.”

I’m standing knee deep in a river. In the middle of nowhere. I have been equipped by a guide with fly fishing gear and at the moment I’m fighting it out with a rainbow trout. The fish lurches out of the water once… twice… suddenly reverses directions and swims toward me, then between my legs. I do an awkward dance with the fishing pole, stumbling around the opposite direction and that’s when I see…

A grizzly bear. Make that two grizzly bears. One small, one really big. It doesn’t take long to figure out the small one is the baby… and the big one is the mother. How do I determine this fact? Because the big one is hopping up and down on her front legs, growling and huffing — at me.

Still futzing with the fish, I call out to my guide. He sees my predicament. Wanders over. Slowly escorts me away from the bears.

“You pissed her off,” he says. “Got too close to the cub. Don’t do that.”

Now he tells me.

The guide lands the fish for me while I keep an eye on the bears, the mother settling down a bit, but rocking back and forth from side to side, her gaze still locked on me.

The guide hands me the trout, its colors shimmering in the sunlight. Takes a quick photo of me with the fish and the bears in the background. As he releases the fish, he grins up at me.

“Welcome to Alaska.”

Why am I here on the Kulik River, “the epitome of a rainbow trout stream. Its gin clear water, gravel bottom and plentiful food supply provide an ideal habitat for the large population of native rainbow trout”?

Because this is a research trip for a film project. It turns out to be a six day whirlwind junket all across this mammoth state and one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

A bit of background. A few months earlier, we had pitched a story for a family adventure movie to Castle Rock Entertainment. It was about a father who has relocated to Alaska with his adolescent son and daughter, a response to the tragic death of his wife and the children’s mother. We hatched a plot involving the father, now a bush pilot, crashing into a remote mountainside, the kids taking off to find him, and along the way intersecting with a polar bear.

Castle Rock liked the story elements. We wrote the first act on spec. Based on that, they bought the project. Then they attached a director. We had a series of meetings. Even though we had done a lot of research (I had read a bunch of books on the state, polar bears, Inuit culture, bush pilots, and so on), the director convinced Castle Rock we needed to do a research trip to Alaska.

That’s how we found ourselves in a pre-dawn limo with the director taking us to LAX. Then first-class flights to Anchorage. Met there by Bob Crockett, who served as location manager on the movie’s production. The first night we spend at the Talkeetna Lodge with Mt. McKinley looming in the distance.

I won’t go into all the details of the trip, but here are some of the highlights:

• A bush pilot takes us on a flight around Mt. McKinley during which the onboard electronics go out, forcing us to make an emergency lake landing.
• A gun-toting river guide captains his specially outfitted motor boat up a whitewater river, waves slamming us from side to side.
• A military vet who had learned to fly Hueys in the Vietnam War transports us via helicopter over a mammoth glacier bed, even setting us down onto the ice for a walk-around.
• We fly in a jet above the Arctic Circle to the remote coastal village of Kotzebue where the locals treat us like royalty, excited about the possibility of movie production dollars being spent there.
• We have a drink at the Dexter Roadhouse, a shack 10 miles outside of Nome, rumored to have been owned at one time by Wyatt Earp.
• We do a float fishing trip on the Kenai River during prime salmon spawning season, catching dozens and dozens of ginormous fish.

Boats, choppers, bush planes, jets, jeeps, vans, kayaks. Whatever type of conveyance you can think of, we take on this trip. Travel from one end of Alaska to another.

Now it may sound like we were pretty much just… you know… having fun. Well, okay, we were. But in actuality, we did get some actual research done.

For example in Kotzebue during lunch, I talk with a local official who in between complaining about pretty much everything involved in living there, mentions something in passing about what he considers to be another nuisance of life in Alaska: polar bears.

“They like to stand up on their hind legs to look around. And from a distance in the snow, sometimes it’s hard to tell if it’s a bear… or a human. You guess wrong, you’re somebody’s dinner.”

That stuck with me. I picked up a bunch of books on the trip and in doing some more reading discovered the Inuit believed in reincarnation, human spirits coming back after death in animal form. That became a key element to our story.

As a screenwriter, you do a lot of research, most of it online or books. But sometimes, you need to go on the road and check out the actual physical environment of your story world. There are times when you do this on your own dime, for example when you are writing a script on spec.

But then there are those occasions where a studio is involved and financing things. That’s a whole different experience. Hell, there’s reason enough right there to choose exotic, cool settings for your stories. If the project gets set up, you do your best to convince them that in order to achieve a sense of “verisimilitude,” it’s imperative you go on a research trip here:

Here:

Or here:

You’re the writer. Why not pick a terrific place for your story setting? Just in case you get the chance to go on a research trip.

The Business of Screenwriting is a series of Go Into The Story articles based upon my experiences as a complete Hollywood outsider who sold a spec script for a lot of money, parlayed that into a screenwriting career during which time I’ve made some good choices, some okay decisions, and some really stupid ones. Hopefully you’ll be the wiser for what you learn here.

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