UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Two Terrific Films and Two Not-So-Terrific Films: ‘Tuner,’ ‘Pressure,’ ‘Disclosure Day,’ and ‘I Love Boosters’

1000 Per Cent Fresh.

Tuner (2025.  Written by Daniel Roher & Robert Ramsey. 147 minutes)

The film opens on two guys, Niki, who is younger, and Harry, who is older. They are talking, not like any other characters you have seen or heard in movies. Their first scenes establish that this is one of the freshest films in years.  There is virtually nothing in the opening scenes that is like anything we have seen before.  Boy, does that put us in a good mood. Well, it did for me. Sometimes you like to see familiar stuff; sometimes you want to see unfamiliar stuff.

So who are these guys?  Look at how long it takes for the film to tell us that they are not related.  By then we want to know.  Roher (a director of documentaries making his fiction film debut) & Ramsey (a writer with a long list of various credits who can see here on IMDb) follow the classic advice that you should not tell the audience something until they need to know it.

For the record we learn right away that they are piano tuners.  Harry is the old pro and Niki is his younger partner.   Harry is played by Dustin Hoffman at his energetic best.  Niki is played by Leo Woodall, whom you may remember from the Italian season of The White Lotus.  I did not remember him from that show; he makes much more of an impact here, even working with Hoffman.

They are taking a break at a diner and a beautiful girl, Ruthie, walks by and Harry pushes Leo to offer to carry Ruthie’s books.  He is shy and reluctant, but agrees.  Not one of the great meet-cutes in the history of film, but it does the job.  Ruthie is a music student who is composing for…the piano.

Ruthie is played by Havana Rose Lui.  She was fourth billed in Bottoms (2023), but as you can tell from my review of the film here, she did not make enough of an impression on me to mention her in my review.  Here she is spectacular.  The boys have written a great part for her, with enough detail that Roher lets her run with.  More like gallops.

So what we have here is a nice romance between a composer/pianist and a young piano tuner.

Guess again.  While Niki is doing a job one evening in a mansion, he hears noises. (His incredible hearing comes from a medical condition I will not go into here.)  He searches for the sound and finds…a gang of thieves trying to break into a safe.  A tense scene as the thieves learn about his hearing capabilities and get him to crack the safe.  Uri, the leader of the gang, seems like a nice guy.  He is quiet, polite, non-threatening, and makes Niki an offer he does not refuse.  The writers keep him nice for so long you think he might really be that nice.  Just when you are convinced, Uri shows his son of a bitch side.  But we learn later…

Roher’s previous films have been documentaries, which is perhaps why he realizes what great visual material both the piano tuning and the safecracking gives him.  And how they connect visually.  We have seen safecrackers at work, but we have not seen piano tuners at work, but Roher makes us see the similarities.

And what happens in the end?  I am deliberately not going to tell you to make you see the film and see how the writers (and the director) and the actors bring it off. Pay attention and you will learn a lot.

OK, to give you a little help.  Notice how important the line “Where did you get the watch?” becomes.

The Grandson of The Longest Day.

Pressure (2026.  Screenplay by David Haig & Anthony Maras, based on the stage play by David Haig. 100 minutes)

In 1962 Darryl F. Zanuck, one of the great studio heads and producers in the history of movies, made his last great film.  The Longest Day was based on the bestselling book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan.  You can read my review of the film here to get some idea of the hassles Zanuck went through to get a workable script. 

One of Zanuck’s great skills was helping writers develop scripts.  Zanuck’s emphasis in films was on telling a story.  With The Longest Day he had masses of material, which he and the writers had to cut and shape.  I have never read Ryan’s book, but Zanuck’s version of the Allies dealing the weather up to and including the landings on D-Day June 6^th, 1944, at Normandy on the coast of France, is handled in two ways. 

The first is that it is raining in England most of the first half hour of the film and everybody talks about the weather.  The second is made up of two short scenes involving British meteorologist James Stagg.  We meet Stagg in his offices.  Somebody hands him a report that says the weather may be clearing up.  Stagg looks at a tickertape, then another sheet of paper and walks out of the room.  The next time we see him he is at Southwick House, the headquarters of the Allied staff.  He is giving a report to the senior military officials, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American general in overall command of the Normandy invasion.  Stagg lays out how the weather may be improving, but conditions will be subpar.  Some of the senior officers speak.  Then Ike makes the final call: they will go on the Sixth.

Eisenhower does not have much to do in this scene.  He is played by a non-actor, Henry Grace, whose credits as a set decorator go back to the 1930s.  Zanuck had a tendency to cast people whom he thought looked like their characters.  Grace was a dead ringer for Ike, but only barely adequate as an actor.

In 2014 David Haig, a playwright and actor, wrote the stage play of Pressure.  Haig himself played James Stagg in the first productions.  Haig started writing the screenplay while the play was still on the stage. In the early twenties, Anthony Maras, who co-wrote the screenplay and directed the film, came on the project.  Because they were doing a feature, they could expand on what Zanuck and his writers had done.  Not in the play but in the film we have, early on, scenes from the training exercises called Exercise Tiger.  They were done off the coast of England and were a disaster.  700 people were killed.  Ike and everybody had the memory of that in mind, and because we see those scenes, we do too.

Haig had not included scenes with Stagg and his wife in the play, but he puts two into the film.  The first one is when Stagg is leaving to go to Southwark House.  Maras, as director, focuses on Stagg’s wife’s face not only because he knows reaction shots are the lifeblood of movies, but in this case they want to establish that Stagg is a nice guy because this beautiful woman loves him.  That is essential, because Stagg is a rather crusty character who rubs everybody the wrong way, and we still need to root for him.  The second is at the end.

The invasion was originally planned for June 5^th,  but ended up being postponed.  Eisenhower had his own meteorologist named Irving P. Krick, who had been very successful in predicting the weather in the North African campaign in 1942.  I have no idea if he is mentioned in Ryan’s book, but Zanuck did not include Krick in his movie. 

Here Krick and Stagg dislike each other from the getgo.  Krick assumes his predictions will be right as always.  His methods depend on historical analysis of past weather patterns, assuming if the sun was shining on this day in history, it will be shining on this day this year.  As Stagg points out, that may work in certain geographical areas, like North Africa, but not in the areas around England and France.  You can see why Zanuck left him out of his film; they just needed the discussion of the weather with Stagg to keep the story moving.  Krick provides some solid dramatic elements that help this film.

Eisenhower is not a minor player in Pressure.  He and Stagg are consistently at odds.   Ike is played beautifully by Brendan Fraser.  He does not look as much like Ike as Henry Grace did, but he can do a lot more, which the writers and director take advantage of.  Fraser lets you feel all, and I mean all, the pressure Ike was under.

Stagg is played by Andrew Scott in what I think is his best performance yet.  He captures the intensity and sensitivity of Stagg.

When we finally get down to the invasion, the production uses a lot of archival footage.  Maras had seen Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary on World War I, which colorized footage for that war.  He decided they could do the same with archival footage from WWII.  They found a lot of footage, and as far as I can tell, none of it is from The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan.  The team working with the footage found they were overwhelmed by how much there was.  They tried to find people who might help.  One of the people who showed up was James Stagg, the grandson of the James Stagg in the movie.

No, Steven, Return to E.T., Not Close Encounters.

Disclosure Day (2026. Screenplay by David Koepp. Story by Steven Spielberg. 145 minutes)

In my 1982 book Screenwriting I said that Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) was “two hours of exposition.”  That was a more formal way of saying what I told people: that it was two hours of foreplay.  It was all about what happened before the humans meet the aliens.  I mentioned that B movie writers of the Fifties knew that the most interesting stories were what happened after the aliens were here, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

When Spielberg made E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), I thought he had learned his lesson.  We get to know E.T. very well as he acts and reacts with the kids.

Unfortunately, Spielberg is back with two more hours of foreplay.  The new film starts off rather well, with the kind of writing David Koepp does really well.   Last year he did a terrific, smaller scale film Black Bag.  You can read my review here, which includes not only details about that film, but a mention of his other films, such as Jurassic Park, some of the Mission Impossible films, and an Indiana Jones film.  Here Daniel Kellner is carrying a backpack with some stuff in it and escaping from guys in black. 

What is in the backpack?  The Maguffin, of course.

For those of you who have never heard of the Maguffin, it is what Hitchcock said what the running around in a movie was all about, but was not very interesting in itself.  In North by Northwest (1959) what are they chasing?  A statue with a roll of microfilm inside.  We never discover what is on the microfilm, and we do not care. 

Koepp is smart enough here to get us involved with the chase for the first twenty minutes or so before we learn a little about what’s in the backpack.  It is, alas, supposed evidence of extra-terrestrials who have landed.  As the film goes on, we get more and more details about the aliens, but as we do, the film gets less and less interesting.   And less and less believable.  I have mentioned before that my late wife was a scientist and was highly critical of movies about science.  She would have had a field day with this one.

For example, Noah Scanlon, the head of Wardex (the company, not a branch of the government), has a magic crystal that seems to let him move through time and space.  A little, no, very convenient.  I know it is sci-fi, but by focusing here on the "fi" part, Koepp and Spielberg seem to undercut their own story.  When he did Close Encounters, Spielberg once said that he hoped that film would convince people that aliens were real.  Sorry Steve, but a fictional film is not going to convince anyone that the fiction is real.  It was a problem then and it is a problem now.

The longer the film went on, the sillier I thought it was.  While I admired the performances of Josh O’Connor and especially Emily Blunt, I could not help but notice that in several of the two-shots, both of them seem about to burst out laughing at what they are having to say.

If you think that does not happen, the next time you watch the 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still, notice that Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal do not look at each other in the cab scene.  This take was finally captured after they kept breaking up when he was trying to tell her how to talk to the robot.

The ending of Disclosure would make a great second act curtain.  Daniel and Margaret (Blunt) have managed to have the thumb drives broadcast over national television, and we get a lot of shots of people reacting in awe.  The TV announcer is played by Courtney Grace, a former television reporter, in a terrific cameo.  But we would really like to see how the reactions of awe, a Spielberg specialty, changed into the variety of responses people would eventually have.

How about religious leaders claiming it is all a fraud, or a shot of the White House with a voice artist doing Trump complaining it is fake news and all a Democratic plot? 

Sorry Boots, But Meryl Got There Before You Did.

I Love Boosters (2026.  Written Boots Riley.  113 minutes)

Unfortunately for Boots Riley, who also directed I Love Boosters, The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrived in theatres about a month before Boosters.  Both have a lot of satire about high fashion, but both Prada movies are much sharper than Riley’s.  The high fashion in Boosters is simply not as funny, ridiculous, or stupid as the real thing in Prada 2. 

I liked the first half of Riley’s first film Sorry to Bother You (2018) which was very sharp in its satire of phone telemarketers.  Then it turned into a conventional horror film, which simply not as interesting as the first part.  That first part was at least good enough that I wrote in my review, which you can read here, “I’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for his next ones.”

Boosters is at least structurally better than Sorry.  The tone is consistent all the way through.  We meet a trio of Black women who “boost,” i.e. steal, high fashion clothes, which they then turn around and sell on the street.  Watching them in action in high fashion stores is fun.  It is very good physical comedy.  Eventually we also get a connection to the sweatshops in China where the clothes are made, which introduces us to a teleporter.  It is a device the Chinese have invented so they can teleport the clothes they make to America and not have to pay the shipping costs.  Think of it as the flux capacitor of this movie.  It gets involved in a lot of the physical action in the latter part of the movie, and it is consistence with the freewheeling action of the first half of the movie.

The grandma of the fashion is the designer Christie Smith , the Miranda Priestly of this movie.  She is not as sharply written as Priestly is in both Prada movies.  She is fairly well played by Demi Moore, but Moore runs into a problem with the script that nearly everybody else does.   Riley has loaded up the dialogue with a lot of four letter words.   A whole lot.   The actors tend to punch those words so much that the rest of the dialogue gets lost.  I suspect Riley realized the problem, but too late.  If you stay through the end of the credits, you will notice there is a long, long list of people credited for ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement).  But ADR is limited if we can visually read the intensity of the original actors speaking.  I don’t mind a few well-chosen four letter words, but Riley has let too many in.

On the other hand, there is a scene near the end when one of the boosters is breaking it off with a guy, who is also a demon, for an interesting reason. There are no standard four letter words in the scene, but with just more or less regular dialogue it is funny, moving, and really sexy.

Yes, I am certainly going to keep an eye out for Riley’s next films.