This script was my first attempt at an original movie. I wrote it mostly while at work at the Borders warehouse on Airport Road from about 1994 to 1996. I was working the evening shift from 3-10 pm, and got into enough of a pattern with my work that I was able to do it while thinking about other things. So I began to write about a Native American hitwoman named Amelia Airheart, whose husband had just run off with her latest potential victim. I didn't really have a story until two other ideas collided with mine and seemed to make something new.
The first was the music of Tom Waits. I had been listening to him for a year or two and was working my way through his back catalog, and had arrived at his 1992 album Bone Machine. I was struck by the nightmarish imagery in his lyrics, especially those of the first track, “Earth Died Screaming”. The song is basically a list of apocalyptic portents… things such as “There was thunder, there was lightning, then the stars went out, and the moon fell from the sky . . . Crows as big as airplanes... The locusts take the sky... And the Earth died screaming while I lay dreaming of you”. I wanted to somehow work each of his word images into the script, turning my script into a bizarre kind of quest story, with the end of the world occurring when the hunter and the hunted both reached the ocean. I had an image of Amelia slowly walking into the sea while it roiled, and a storm with impossible colors sliding over the land like a black ceiling that broke the sky in two. Amelia’s Judgment Day (how she acts when finally able to choose whether or not she is going to kill her quarry) and the Earth’s Judgment Day would arrive at the exact same moment. Maybe a little too ambitious . . . but a lot of the character names are based on Waits' music in one way or another.
The second bit of inspiration came from an attempted short story called "Wreck", about a man who has a terrible near-death accident and becomes gifted with a new kind of sight, seeing the world as a twisted, haunted place. These images became Raven’s past, as well as part of the nightmare she has halfway through the script. Starting from the middle (The Lamplighter scenes) and then inching my way forward and back at the same time, I worked on the script off and on for years, knowing that it had inherent problems in it but still interested in the characters and the story. Over Thanksgiving vacation in 1999, I sat down on a few quiet evenings in Alabama, after everyone had gone to bed, and tried to figure out once and for all what this story really was about. I decided that it really was about the personal redemption of the hitwoman (whose name had changed to Raven Airheart in keeping with the aerial theme) and the force she was fighting against that was something more than human… something like chaos itself coming to get her. The ideas of Chaos and Order became the character of Moloch and the syzygys, respectively. The result is a seemingly typical hit-man story that takes a Lynchian turn into the really bizarre.
I submitted the script into the first Project Greenlight contest for screenwriters in late 2000, which gave me the impetus to "finish" it and register it with both the Copyright Office and the Writer’s Guild. I didn’t get past the first round of cuts, but I got positive reviews from about half the fellow screenwriters who judged it. It's my first really big finished work, and I feel proud of it.
I would assume that, if it were to be produced, the resulting film would have an R rating, for violence and language.
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