TITLE: Mr. Zoyd FORMAT: Feature/89 pages
WRITTEN BY: Harry Chaskin GENRE: Psychological thriller, Drama
SETTING: Newark, NJ 1989 STORY: Consider WRITER: Consider LOGLINE An 18-year-old paranoid schizophrenic holds a group of customers hostage in a local pizza shop after deluding about a conspiracy the franchise has to spy on him. SUMMARY The script opens on a VHS-style commercial with an 80’s jingle showing a pizza delivery car with a sign on top that says, “Lucky Dice Pizza.” A teenage delivery driver inside drives the car as the jingle repeats the words “avoid Mr. Zoyd.” Introduced is MR. ZOYD, a maniacal 6-inch-tall clay animated character dressed in a bright purple jumpsuit, high top sneakers, and long devil horns. On his jumpsuit is a large “anti pizza” emblem, a slice of pizza with a red circle and line through it. He is described as an extremely creepy, twitching, giggling figure with a high-pitched laugh. Mr. Zoyd tries to prevent the driver from making his route with things such as a giant cartoon anvil, an oil gun, and a missile but doesn’t succeed. Instead, the missile comes straight for him and blows up his lair as the driver continues merrily and delivers a delicious slice of pizza to a customer. Text states that the following is based on a true story…sort of. What follows is a montage of the city of Newark waking up in 1989. There are blue-collar workers, ladies drinking wine from paper bags, a schizophrenic man talking to himself, and a ONE-ARMED MAN throwing bread at pigeons. In a rundown apartment in the Baxter Terrace Projects, an elaborate miniature city made of cardboard scraps and fast food containers sits on the windowsill. A pajama-clad 18year-old, MATTHEW, wakes up in this room and walks down the hallway to the trash chute, where he sifts through the garbage for a plastic lid from a fast food cup. He imagines a Lucky Dice pizza box on the floor, and the box’s cartoon character, Mr. Zoyd, comes to life and smiles at him. A new section of the city is introduced, and a clean bedroom is shown, belonging to 50year-old REGGIE and ALICE HOPKINS. Reggie is going off to work and kissing his wife goodbye. Back at the Projects, Matthew adds the plastic lid as the finishing touch to his miniature city project. He gets in the shower, bathes in rusty brown water, and draws a happy face in the condensation of the mirror, lining his face up to the features and telling himself that it’s going to be a good day. We’re told this is a ritual he performs daily. Meanwhile, Reggie takes a steamy hot shower and enters his car to go to work. He fidgets with a 10-year AA chip. Matthew passes by his 40-year-old mother, LUCILLE, who is passed out on her bed with a bottle of booze. A travel ad tropical island getaway blares the song “Hot Hot Hot” on the TV. Matt removes the bottle from his mother’s hands and tucks her in. He turns the TV up to muffle out the sounds of neighbors arguing loudly. He sees Mr. Zoyd again on his way out, this time giving him the middle finger. In a therapist’s office, 50-year-old DETECTIVE BRENDA GUTIERREZ
refuses to talk to her therapist and picks buttons off her jacket instead. At the border between the suburbs and the projects lies the corner store of Lucky Dice Pizza. Across from it sits a pharmacy named Abbot Drugs, and a new appliance store with dozens of TVs in the window front next to it. Reggie enters through the back where 26-year-old KIMMIE pulls a pizza out of the oven and boxes it. The customers are sixty-year-old DEB, 40-year-old construction worker CHARLIE, 22-year-old COREY, and 30-year-old CLARE MILLER. Clare is waiting on a large order of pizzas for her 8-year-old’s birthday party back home, where her husband is dressed up in a clown suit. The other customers appear to be regulars. Suddenly, Matthew walks into the store and asks Clare if the cartoon picture of Mr. Zoyd can hear them. She expresses confusion as he pulls a .357 Magnum from his pocket and shoots it, sending the store into chaos. Matthew demands to speak to the head of the Lucky Dice corporation. Matthew fires the gun again as one hostage escapes and demands that the other customers go into a corner. Corey soils his work apron out of fear. Matthew repeatedly asks if anyone is listening in the back as he holds the gun on Reggie. He asks Reggie if he is the head of the Lucky Dice Corporation, to which he responds he is only the manager of this location. At a payphone down the street, Charlie watches as three squad cars approach the Lucky Dice. Matthew demands that the doors be locked. From his perspective, the Mr. Zoyd cartoon on the wall becomes three-dimensional, the bullet hole in his head oozing real blood. The phone rings and Reggie picks up. He states that he is the manager, and everyone’s all right for now. Detective Gutierrez is on the other line from the drugstore across the street, asking to speak with Matthew. He sees a figure out the window and says, “Willie?” aloud, making the detective think it’s his name. He then hangs up. We’re told Gutierrez is no professional negotiator and that we are meant to sympathize with her. She projects confidence to her unit as they discuss the details and gather blueprints of the building. Meanwhile, Kimmie crawls from the kitchen to the back office and locks the door behind her. On the store’s telephone line, the 40-year-old clown-dressed husband from the birthday party, MR. MILLER, is calling to check on his order and ask for his wife. When Matthew puts her on, she seems distressed, causing Mr. Miller to leave the party to save her. Matthew hears Mr. Zoyd’s cackling voice and acts like his head is going to burst. Back on the phone with Gutierrez, Matthew says again that he only wants to speak with the head of Lucky Dice, Ed Carnahan, who is probably already listening. Gutierrez begins building a profile of Matthew, jotting down “paranoid schizophrenic?” in a notepad. She tells Matthew that she must see that the hostages are okay and that she’s going to come outside to meet him and talk. Matthew won’t leave without a hostage and chooses the pee-stained Corey to come with him. Some sympathy within him sends Matthew into an abusive flashback from his childhood where he’d soiled himself, and his mother throws a whiskey bottle at him and brands him with a cigarette, calling him “piss baby.” Matthew then hallucinates Mr. Zoyd branding his brain with a giant cigarette as he screams. Back in reality, Matthew tells Corey to get some extra clothes and clean himself up. Reggie stands up and offers himself as a replacement hostage. In the background, hostages Deb and Claire ironically discuss a past-due thriller novel about a bank robbery where all the hostages die. Outside, Matthew uses Reggie as a shield.
Gutierrez asks what it is Matthew wants, to which he says he’d like Ed Carnahan to admit what he’s doing. The televisions across the street are all live broadcasting the event as it unfolds on the news. The detective finally learns his real name, Matthew Alexander Zoyd, who says to call back when they have Carnahan for him. The cops run his name through the system to find out that he has had one juvey prior for property damage two years before, and that his mom wanted to have him committed. The cops point out that the Zoyds reside in Baxter Terrace, and that Matthew must’ve been failed by the system. The news anchors make light of the connection between Matthew’s last name and the famous commercial’s cartoon character. Reggie tries to talk Matthew down as he cries in the middle of the floor. He tells Matthew to let the other hostages go and that he will stay with him until he gets what he wants, and also asks who Willie is. The police finally get through to the Lucky Dice headquarters in Minnesota but hear that Carnahan is “out to lunch indefinitely.” Kimmie finds a revolver and loads it. A delivery guy shows up to deliver a pizza after Matthew suggests the hostages might be hungry. When Gutierrez informs Matthew that his mother on the way, he grows terrified and says he’ll give up a hostage if she promises not to “let mama near him.” Corey is set free, and the crowd outside cheers. The pressure of the situation has found an absurd release in a scene where the hostages and Matthew pause to eat pizza. Matthew begins talking to Reggie about the pizza missions he’d go on with Willie as he plays with the plastic pizza savers and imagines feeding a rat and action figure. Cut to a flashback of young Matthew doing the same thing, but now we see WILLIE, who is really a shadow/mirror image of Matthew. The one-armed man from the beginning staggers backward, crushing Matthew’s pizza playset as Lucille follows him out of the bedroom with a baseball bat. Lucille threatens to do what she did to the one-armed man if she ever catches Matthew feeding the rats again and makes fun of his crooked teeth. Back at the hostage scene, Lucille arrives in a pink bathrobe and curlers. She shows no concern whatsoever about the situation, saying, “Where were you when I needed help? No wonder kids gotta pull a gun to get attention.” She also tells Gutierrez that Matthew was always stupid, how “retards” always have bad teeth, and that Matthew has had this imaginary friend named Willie since he was a kid. She says that she locked him in the dark, the logical thing to do to prevent a shadow, but that something worse took Willie’s place. When the detective reminds Lucille that he is 18 and can be charged as an adult, she laughs it off and says that she’d forgotten his birthday, and he is the police’s problem now. Reggie tells Matthew he has a son his age, and they talk until Mr. Zoyd tells Matthew he only has 30 minutes before he must kill a hostage if Carnahan isn’t on the phone. The police dig up some basic history on Carnahan and the company and have an officer impersonate him on the phone to pacify Matthew. At first, the plan works until Matthew asks for a new life, money, and a getaway car and is sent off on a psychotic break. He deludes that he has “passed the test” and imagines the tropical paradise from the “Hot Hot Hot” commercial on the TV from earlier. Soon enough, the FBI gets involved and bring snipers into the mix. Gutierrez begs them to let her talk to Matthew one more time before they make a move. Kimmie goes to shoot Matthew when Reggie diffuses the situation, and Gutierrez holds back tears. As the cops talk, we learn that Gutierrez previously shot a psycho named Ken Dooley after talking with him for 18 hours straight and has been recovering from the trauma ever since. Reggie explains to Matthew that Lucky Dice has nothing to do with
any of this, there is no conspiracy, and that no one is spying on him. Zoyd tells Matthew to eat his gun on live television. Reggie opens up to Matthew and tells him details about his family, and alcohol problems from the past: He had been drunk driving, causing him to break his collar bone and land his wife in a wheelchair, and said that his son never forgave him. He offers a trade – he will give Matthew his most valued possession, the AA chip, in return for the gun. After many more delusions, he accepts the deal as Mr. Zoyd shoots himself. Matthew is brought by two officers into a squad car while Gutierrez watches with a smile. Back at Gutierrez’s apartment, she picks up the phone and calls her therapist. Reggie locks up and runs home to embrace his wife. A year or so later, in a psychiatric facility, Reggie visits Matthew with a box of pizza and greets him with “Happy Birthday.” They share the pizza and a meaningful moment as Mr. Zoyd appears, cutting Reggie’s AA chip until Reggie directs Matthew’s eyes off the delusion and back to real life. COMMENTS The script turns a simple everyday hostage situation into an incredibly inventive and entertaining thrill ride that sheds light on mental illness. The target audience spans from teenagers to adults in its quite gory depictions of Mr. Zoyd and the hallucinations come with him. There are several elements to the story and a focus on the lives of multiple different characters that balance out the script as a whole. Almost every character holds a struggle either from their past or due to some problem related to mental health or alcoholism. Gutierrez struggles from the trauma of her last hostage crisis, where she had to shoot the perpetrator. Reggie holds onto his past as an alcoholic and regrets a ruined relationship with his son. Lucille clearly suffers from several problems and was failed by the system as well. Aside from the story’s themes of trauma, regret, and psychological illness, the script shows a contrast between the suburbs and the Projects of a city like Newark, NJ, and how its residents come together to help one another out, regardless of their differences. The customers are from all walks of life, and each have a benefit to offer in their dialogue. The mundane jokes and ironic moments between the hostages and police officers create a lighter environment in a script with such a dark premise. It is also worth noting that Reggie appealed to Matthew through the sharing of his own personal struggles. This is a well-done script that proves an important point about the diffusing of violent situations and offers a creative display of how early psychological intervention is necessary. It is well-paced, professionally structured, and holds the attention of the audience throughout. The use of animation and vivid descriptions of Matthew’s delusions are a creative way to show hallucinatory episodes and help the audience get inside his brain. The only thing I’d change is in making the ending a touch more satisfying and meaningful, and possibly connecting all the characters somehow. This script’s strong writer, imaginative sequences, and well thought out characters make it a definitive consider.