Charlie loved the desert at night. The sky was filled with clustered stars, dotting the blackness in pinpricks of light. Sitting with his coffee, Charlie began to name the constellations — Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and the three sharp points of Orion’s Belt. If he listened closely to the silence, he could almost hear his father, the astronomer, dismissing his grandfather’s work. “Long after the planet has disappeared into the sun,” Charlie’s father liked to say, “the stars will continue to exist. Of what importance will earthquakes be then?” In a way, Charlie knew, he was right, but there had always been a coldness to the heavens that could not compete with the warmth of the world, the way a stone kept its heat long after the sun had set. The stars were distant, beautiful like diamonds, but unfeeling, abstract. Thinking about it, Charlie realized his father was much the same way, which, he suddenly understood, explained a lot.
Charlie removed a sample tray from his rucksack and slipped down into the fault. As he scraped some dirt from the bottom of the fissure, the earthquake struck. At first, there was a low rumbling, like the sound of an oncoming train, then the ground started twisting in a side-to-side motion, and the walls of the San Andreas shook like something from a bad horror film. Charlie tried to stand, but was thrown to his knees. Reflexively, he put his hands out, one on either edge of the fault. The vibrations moved from the earth through his palms, and up his arms to his heart.
When the temblor was over, Charlie lay in the fault fissure and drew a deep breath. His whole body rang from the shaking; his legs were weak and spent. He tried to catalog what had happened. Intense as it seemed, this had been a small earthquake, probably no larger than a 4.5. The jolt couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds, but from where Charlie sat, the world felt upside down. I just rode out a quake from the center of the San Andreas, he thought, but his mind wouldn’t grasp the particulars, and it was all he could do to scramble up the side of the ridge. Although it didn’t look like there’d been any substantial slippage, he scooped up some additional soil samples to bring to CES.
Back at the car, Charlie retrieved his laptop and ran the simulation program, extending the parameters to see what might happen next. The San Andreas was becoming increasingly active — he’d known that since Indio — but without the exact epicenter of this event, it was impossible to tell what anything meant. He needed more information, to see what the numbers looked like now. Charlie loaded up his rucksack and started on the long ride home.
RECOMMENDATION: PASS DRIPPING PICTURES
Title: Ear to the Ground
Writer: Ian Marcus
Recommendation: Pass
Writer: Maybe
Log Line: A journalist, unable to sleep for fear of earthquakes, finds out the Big One is coming to Los Angeles and that seismologists know about it. What they don’t know is how to alert the city without plunging the populace into turmoil.
Comment Summary: This story alternates between gentle earnestness and biting sarcasm. Earthquake meets Network. There’s more science than there needs to be, and I’m not sure audiences will buy the paranoid theory behind it.
Synopsis: BILL MARTIN is a razor-stubbled reporter at the Los Angeles Sun. He’s frequently at odds with his editor, GERARD CONSINO, a small, wiry man with little vision. Bill can’t sleep nights, what with recurring nightmares of the earth opening up and swallowing his Silver Lake apartment building whole. At an editorial meeting one morning, he proposes the idea that earthquakes can be predicted, but the techies are holding out. “Another one of your conspiracy theories?” Gerard asks him.
This angers Bill. He imagines his colleagues talking behind his back and begins to worry that the slightest vibration — a refrigerator’s hum or the passing of a bus — is an earthquake. His bad dreams become more frequent, and one night he is compelled to walk through the streets of Los Angeles. He has never done this before, and he finds the sensation thrilling. At 3 a.m., he lies down in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard and puts his ear to the ground. Underneath him is a fault line, and he hears a rumbling from the center of the earth, which he understands like a language. (Doctor Doolittle?) The cops pick him up and keep him briefly under observation.
A few nights later, while roaming the Hollywood Hills, Bill encounters two seismologists discussing a field experiment they’re conducting in a canyon. One of them keeps saying, “My God, I don’t believe it.” The other says, “Relax.” They’ve predicted the Big One.
The seismologists find it uncanny that Bill understands the ins and outs of earthquake prediction. They tell him about their experiments, describing how their soil samples yielded an abnormally high alkaline content, and how it was possible to predict patterns once they considered all the factors involved. (Science gets a little thin here.)
Bill becomes the seismologists’ shadow, following their experiments as best he can. Eventually, the data points in one direction: In exactly five months and five days, at five minutes after five in the morning, an earthquake of between 8.9 and 9.1 will hit near San Bernardino.
Bill writes up the story and turns in a preliminary draft, stressing that it shouldn’t be printed until an agreement can be reached about how best to inform the public. But Gerard publishes the story immediately.
Los Angeles is understandably shocked. People talk (seriously) about leaving. The real estate market bottoms out. Religious fanatics take their prayers to the street corners. Each day, dogs bark more loudly.
The Sun is catapulted to fame, and Bill is nominated for a Pulitzer. But his work suffers. He stops bathing and becomes uninterested in sex. When he begins to live like an animal, his girl friend leaves him. He goes into the hills, burrowing with the coyotes and living off nuts and berries.
As droves of Angelenos leave the city, the mayor announces that the whole thing is a hoax. The populace is divided between believers and skeptics. Earthquake drills become commonplace in schools. The Dodgers move back to Brooklyn.
The clock is ticking. When summer passes into fall, and winter’s rains begin, Bill decides to lead the remaining citizens away from L.A. Like Christ, or the Pied Piper, he summons them on the eve of the earthquake, and they follow him north. Riding in his car is SHEILA, the beautiful wife of one of the original seismologists — although her husband has stayed behind to observe the quake.
Right on schedule, the earth shakes. Buildings tumble. Hollywood is completely destroyed. Burbank is busted, and Venice goes up in flames. Century Park East collapses onto Avenue of the Stars.
In San Luis Obispo, Bill takes the news hard. Half the remaining populace is thought to be dead. Bill and his group make their way south to do what they can, but with the freeways destroyed, travel is slow. Eventually, they arrive on foot and contribute to the rescue effort.
While ABC looks for Bill, hoping to put him on Nightline, he is off with Sheila, searching for her husband. They find him just as he utters his dying words: “Take good care of my wife.”
Bill and Sheila bury the seismologist by the beach and walk quietly as the waves lap at their feet. They kiss.
Comments: This kind of sensationalist trash preys on human fear and paranoia. As such, it could become a blockbuster. Still, the writing is uneven; the writer unproven. I’d make the protagonist a seismologist, not a journalist. The reporter should be the corrupt one. Johnny Depp passed, as did directors Andrew Davis, James Cameron, and Wolfgang Petersen.