Scary tale has a scarier subtext

Woman-in-jeopardy thrillers have long been a popular staple of cinema. The terror the audience experiences while watching a vulnerable woman suffer through a horrible situation -- “Wait Until Dark,” “Alien,” “High Tension,” Emma Thompson in “Junior” -- provides just the kind of visceral (and often perverse) pleasure we want from the movies.

Since these suspenseful films are almost uniformly written by men, though, the scenarios tend to play out as fantasies of either the malicious male subconscious or a romanticized version of a besieged woman’s fortitude under extreme duress. Screenwriter Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson hopes to challenge this convention with her recent addition to the genre, “Curve.” Her script doesn’t veer from the genre’s essential plot elements but lurches through a stripped-down narrative invested with both a specifically feminine mind-set and a harrowing, if unintended, subtext.

“Curve” follows a young woman on a solo cross-country trip who accepts the help of a male hitchhiker when she develops car trouble. While he revives her car, they strike up a rapport that throws minor sparks, so, with her guard down, she offers the Good Samaritan a ride.

Bad idea.

Before long, Mr. Nice Guy has revealed himself to be a twisted psychopath, and in a sequence that hinges on a psychological dilemma familiar to many women, the protagonist is forced to make a fateful decision. “There are horrific moments in the script, but to me stuff that could be real is always more scary,” says Johnson. “The slow realization, ‘Oh my God, what have I done? And what am I going to do to get out of it?’ ”

With echoes of “Red Eye” and the upcoming remake of “The Hitcher,” “Curve’s” premise springs at least partially from an old “Oprah” show that always stuck in Johnson’s mind in which an expert advised women who are being threatened against allowing themselves to be taken to a “second location.” So Johnson’s heroine instead speeds off an embankment, and the rest of the script details her efforts to survive the terror of being trapped upside down in the car with her assailant on the loose.

Metaphorically, it’s a scenario that Johnson can relate to since life, well, threw her a curve.

Three years ago, the 32-year-old Downey native was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a blood cancer that affects the lymph nodes. It’s a type of disease that’s highly treatable if discovered early, so Johnson spent a year undergoing radiation therapy unable to write or do much else but concentrate on getting better while suffering through dispiriting hair loss, nausea and exhaustion. A few months after treatment ended, the “Curve” script suddenly poured out.

“It was definitely inspired by my experience being sick,” says Johnson, who’s recently achieved a full recovery. “It hit me that I was writing about how I felt through the past year. Being sick is a lot like being trapped.”

“Curve” became Johnson’s first sale in October 2005 after having written 10 scripts since she graduated from USC film school eight years ago with screenwriter classmate Jamie Vanderbilt (“Basic,” the upcoming “Zodiac”), who has become attached to make his directorial debut with her taut thriller. This past summer they tweaked the screenplay together while he began looking to cast the difficult lead role (Johnson admits projecting an Evangeline Lilly-in-”Lost” vibe onto the character).

“I feel like it took me in a whole different direction,” she says of writing “Curve,” adding that since that breakthrough she’s often been asked whether she would go through the cancer struggle again knowing that it may have brought a greater depth to the script and informed her recent success. “The obvious answer is, ‘No, I wouldn’t want to put myself through torture like that again,’ ” Johnson says. “But then again, the best stuff that you do comes from whatever amount of pain and emotion you’ve experienced.”

Auteurism and authorship

The ways in which screenwriters are degraded in this business are legion, but it’s not just industry insiders and other artists who collude to come up with fun and creative ways to marginalize them. The entertainment media, and in particular film critics, seem stubbornly invested in perpetuating the writer’s second-class status as well.

Even a cursory inspection of reviews by major critics reveals that screenwriters are often excluded, or at best their involvement in the film is glossed over in such a fly-by fashion that only their mothers or stalkers would catch it. Now, could you imagine reading a film review that left out the director or the actors?

Screenwriter Stephen Schiff (“Lolita,” “The Deep End of the Ocean”) has made a bit of a personal crusade out of rectifying this imbalance. A few years ago, Schiff formed an informal task force with WGA board member Phil Alden Robinson (“Field of Dreams,” “Sneakers”) whose mission was to meet with editors at publications like Premiere, EW, Time and this newspaper to press for more equal recognition of the work of screenwriters.

Schiff objects to the “shorthand” critics and other film writers often use to credit the director implicitly or explicitly as the “author” of the film. “They’ve gone through a process of self-indoctrination whereby they say, ‘Yeah, but this is a visual medium.... ‘ [But] there is a person or persons out there who create the story, create the characters, create the setting, create many of the costumes and the camera moves, create all the dialogue -- where else would you not call that person the author?”

Schiff traces this form of “knee-jerk auteurism” in American film criticism back to two of the most powerful critics of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker and Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice. (Sarris in particular drew directly on Francois Truffaut’s seminal 1954 essay in Cahiers du Cinema in which he conceived what Sarris later termed the “auteur theory” -- or the idea that the director who applies a distinctive vision to a film is its true author.) Though they certainly made film criticism more entertaining than it had been, both critics, in very different ways, skewed the authorship mantle toward the director, a status quo that has only become more ingrained in modern reviewing. (The WGA says that in television, the situation is reversed, with directors complaining that the writer gets all the credit.)

“We live in a moment where, for some reason, interpretive artists are given a lot more credit than creative artists,” Schiff says. “So we know the name of the singer but we don’t know the name of the songwriter.” Schiff contends that one could just as easily formulate a screenwriter auteur theory, citing writers like Paul Schrader, Eric Roth and Charlie Kaufman, whose filmographies encompass the same authorial consistency of theme and style for which auteur directors are credited.

Schiff knows this terrain from both sides. Before he became a screenwriter, he wrote film criticism and other movie features for the Atlantic Monthly, Glamour, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, NPR and the Boston Phoenix, where he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in criticism. But he admits that he was no better about screenwriter attribution.

“I was so thunderstruck by how mistaken I was when I finally got on the other side of the business, because [as a critic] I was a knee-jerk auteurist like anyone else,” Schiff says. “I turned a deaf ear because it was just too inconvenient.” When I reached out to a handful of top critics to discuss the issue, I received a similar response -- all but one either ignored me or claimed they had nothing to say.

Joe Morgenstern, longtime film arbiter at the Wall Street Journal, doesn’t subscribe to the auteur theory. But he does acknowledge that since reviewers only have the film itself to go on and almost none of the development background or on-set knowledge, leaving out some contributors is a built-in limitation of the form. “I do try to be careful in giving credit to the major collaborators in a production,” says Morgenstern, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2005. “I don’t pretend to the kind of omniscience that would allow you to say, ‘The writer did this, the director did that, and the actor did that.’ There are so many things we outsiders don’t know about a production unless you’ve been on the inside of it.”

Of course, one popular conspiracy theory holds that when a movie is admired the director is praised, and when it falters suddenly the writer is blamed.

For his part, Schiff later “felt deeply chagrined” and took opportunities to apologize to screenwriters he felt he had maligned in his critic role. In one such encounter, Schiff was introduced to Michael Tolkin at an industry party years after writing a Vanity Fair piece on “The Player” in which he emphasized the authorial input of director Robert Altman while dismissing the work of Tolkin, who had written the screenplay and the novel on which the script was based.

“He responded in a lovely way,” Schiff remembers, “which is to say he took it well, and he also let me know that he considered it a long time coming.”

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Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. For tips and comments, e-mail fernandez_[email protected].