Reaching a Destination

So the Academy Awards are nigh upon us, and it's all American Beauty this and Cider House Rules that. I am sorry to report that, in a Pyrrhic victory for quality cinema, the most recent addition to the canon of American film has been obscured by the Oscar hype: I refer, of course, to New Line Cinema's latest pièce de résistance cinématique, the teen horror thriller Final Destination. Even though the tagline for this movie is "No Accidents... No Coincidences... No Escapes," I am proud to state that I whiled away last summer polishing this movie's script.

Details? Very well: In February of 1999, I landed a June-to-August internship at New Line's New York headquarters. Lo and behold, once the office brass hear I'm an English major at Duke, they shuttle this script down to me-Flight 180, it's called-and invite me to provide a bit of feedback.

I read the screenplay, which details the travails of a pack of kids who deplane a not-long-for-this-world flight and subsequently find themselves stalked by some inexorable, lethal force. (Hate it when that happens.) Clever premise; flat execution. I deduce that New Line wants me for my intelligence. So I pen a treatise on the script's existentialist trappings-you know, equating the teens' mortal conflict with deified cosmic dread, their secular confusion with a spiritualized Barthesian calibration of the Other. "Yes!" I think to myself. "Shrine Auditorium, here I come!"

Detour. New Line doesn't care for my philosophical reading: "We need a young person like you to sex it up," they explain. Hmm. Sexxxy.

I determine to foist the sexiness I surely exude onto Flight 180. Trimmed is a subplot involving the FBI! Slashed is a setpiece staged in a swimming pool! Hello, developed sexual tension between two principal players! And which ending do I prefer-the gotcha, one-more-twist-of-the-knife finale, or a more somber version? I opt for the latter, since, you know, contemplation's sexy, dude.

Well, as it turns out, my revisions went largely unheeded. The FBI business figures prominently in the final version, the ending I liked didn't test well, and so an alternative conclusion was hastily shot two months ago; and, of course, the movie's been retitled. Also, and against my recommendation, the filmmakers reinstated a line about John Denver perishing in an aerial accident-one of his songs recurs throughout the film, you see, and I didn't think we needed to verbally overplay our hand. I had forgotten, naturally, that this is a horror movie, and lines such as "Didn't John Denver die in a plane crash like the rest of our classmates?" are downright subtle.

But, you know, I'm wiser for the experience. Sexier, too. And how many people do you know who can claim to have worked on a film starring screen luminaries Devon Sawa and Ali Larter?

I'll say it again: Shrine Auditorium, here I come!