There’ve been a lot of trailers recently for Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” which I’m really excited to see.

HOWEVER

I wrote my own Odyssey Adjacent script roughly ten years ago. Am I saying Christopher Nolan copied me? Well, no. For one, mine is a comedy, and something tells me his is not.

Also, mine isn’t about Odysseus — it’s about Homer.

But seeing all these trailers reminded me about my own screenplay, so I thought it would be fun to read it again and review my own “film.” I feel like, because I review other films and books, it’s only fair to review my own output. So let’s look at it!

So what’s my movie about?

My screenplay is called “Homer,” and was inspired by a simple question: who was Homer? This is such a well known conundrum that it has an official name, “The Homeric Question.”

Today the general consensus is that The Iliad and The Odyssey were composed by different people (possibly separated by decades or centuries), and both probably rely on oral tradition, but were then finalized by a single author (or group of authors).

Some have proposed that “homer” was an eyewitness of the trojan war. Others have proposed that he (or she, or they) lived centuries after the war. Maybe Homer was just two people, or maybe different troupes of epic poets (Rhapsodists).

The point is, no one know who, when, or even how The Odyssey and Iliad were written. And given the infinite possibilities I decided to throw my OWN hat into the ring with my personal theory, based on … well, nothing.

You can see the whole screenplay here (it’s 123 pages long, but there’s a lot of whitespace so, you know …), but I’ll also summarize the plot below.

In my story, Homer is an “epic poet school” (which was a thing, though they didn’t call it that) dropout who decides to make a name for himself by going to the siege of Troy and reporting on what happens there, except it’s a huge disappointment — most of the soldiers are killed in the siege, the Trojan Horse gets lit on fire, the greeks die but in trying to escape the horse they knock it over which sets Troy on fire and everyone dies.

He stows about a ship, gets drunk (my Homer is also an alcoholic), and is thrown overboard naked, only to wash up on Scherie, the home of the Phaecians. There, hungover Homer meets Nausikaa, a princess who, in my story, hates her island life and especially hates fish and will do anything she can to get away from them.

So Nausikaa makes a deal with Homer. If he pretends to be a long-lost king, she’ll pretend to marry him. He can take her away to his people, who are far enough away that she’ll never go home. When they get there she’s free to leave and find a new life and Homer can keep her dowry.

Homer happens to know of a long lost king who definitely won’t be returning home and, thus, can’t cause problems with their plan: Odysseus, who had died inside the Trojan Horse. So he decides he’ll be Odysseus, and he’ll weave a tale of his heroism to explain how he got marooned in Scheria, then he and Nausikaa will return to “his” kingdom and part ways.

And that’s mostly what happens. They convince Nausikaa’s family that Homer is Odysseys through trickery, Homer makes up “The Odyssey” and tells the family, and then the two of them sail away.

And Nausikaa leaves, as she planned! It’s such a common trope to have the male and female leads fall for each other, but I really wanted Nausikaa to have her own plan and stick to it, so she heads inland, away from the ocean, and Homer is left on his own with the dowry when he hears about Penelope, Odysseus’s widow, who has been fending of suitors for years.

Odysseus and Nausikaa’s handmaid (who has developed a relationship with Homer) decide to help out by having Homer pretend to be Odysseus once more to scare of the suitors, stay with Penelope, and make sure Odysseus is remembered as a strategic genius, and not a failure who burned up in his own horse.

What I don’t like

Let’s start with the cons first, and then we’ll end on some pros.

For one of my screenplays I got feedback that everyone sounded alike, so I’ve really worked to change that and give everyone a distinct voice. Unfortunately that was after this screenplay, so I have the same issue — nobody has a particularly distinctive voice. This is double bad because I mix in a lot of contemporary speech, and even some contemporary references, along with some more period appropriate speech (and a handful of quotes from The Odyssey itself). I like the quotes from the Odyssey because they end up working well comedically, but overall I needed more distinct and more consistent dialog.

I also don’t love the “romance” that I put in there. Basically we have Homer, who is in love with Nausikaa (because she is a beautiful, intelligent, assertive princess so who wouldn’t love her), and Nausikaa, who has no romantic interest in Homer (and she’s quite transparent about that, though she does come to care for hime), and Eurykleia, Nausikaa’s handmaiden (or whatever that’s called), who is frequently in the background and comes to have a crush on Homer, and then after Nausikaa leaves Homer he decides to stay with her.

Though I like how things play out between Nausikaa and Homer, I think it would’ve been better to develop the Leia and Homer relationship more (she’s obviously a rebound for him as it’s currently written, which kind of sucks). I thought about cutting it out completely, but I do like how she helps wrap up the ending, though she isn’t completely necessary. Yeah, something there could be improved.

Some of the humor is pretty good, but I don’t like the more contemporary references on another read through. This one in particular stands out as unnatural because I’m just trying to cram a dumb reference in:

I also don’t love how abruptly I end it. We have a kind of “Cleansing of the Shire” situation where the story is over, and then I’m like “But there was one more mission to do!” and I introduce it, and then we flash-forward through it to have a final epilogue, and then an after credits scene … it’s not a huge mess, but I think it’s anticlimactic.

I think what happened was I spent so much time on Scheria that when we got back to Ithaka I just didn’t have enough time to introduce and then really resolve the story. In a screenplay the rule of thumb is that one page is one minute, so a 120 page screenplay will be roughly two hours long — which is just about right for a film (especially a comedy, which tend to be a little shorter).

But our characters don’t reach Ithaka until page 105, which means I have roughly 15 pages (18, in the final count) to have a resolution to Nausikaa’s story, have some kind of romance between Leia and Homer, AND introduce Penelope and her story AND resolve them. It’s just too much.

I think story wise it shows growth for Homer — he is basically forced to help Nausikaa, but he chooses to help Penelope. I really like that part of it, but it needed more. I think if I were to change it I would try to cut out some of the stuff on Schera to give Ithaka more breathing room. I don’t think I actually did that because I like most of what I had there — I couldn’t find anything obvious to cut.

OK, there’s one thing that could, maybe should, be cut. It’s not long enough to make a difference but I had a scene with people competing in “competitive cow birthing” which … I think I was going for kind of gross-out humor but I honestly think I could do better.

What I liked

It’s weird to compliment my own writing, but it’s been long enough that I genuinely surprised myself a few times while reading it. There are some actual good lines in there, as well as a couple of fun running gags.

I do also mix in quite a bit of (hopefully) genuine emotion. Homer is trying to overcome alcoholism and not disappoint the people around him, while Nausikaa is dealing with the death of a beloved brother and trying to find a way to leave home without breaking her parents hearts. I have a soft spot for Arete as well — Nausikaa’s mother who knows something is up, but ultimately wants her daughter to have a happy life, even if it means she’s no longer at home.

I can’t decide if I like the beginning or not. We start with Homer hungover on the beach talking to himself, while the screen is completely dark. I can picture that scene in a theater and think it would be enjoyable, but we also almost immediately have a brief flashback, which I don’t love. Part of me would rather start the movie with the content in the flashback, then have the beach scene. Like I said, I can’t decide.

I also did a ton of research for this one, and it makes for some interesting scenes. The description of Nausikaa’s people comes straight from The Odyssey, but everything is given a different explanation. For example, their ships are supposed to fly above the waves, which was obviously poetic, but I made them users of Trimarans with daggerboards which would lift the boats above the waves under the right conditions, which affects the plot in several ways.

Conclusion

It was fun, but somewhat embarrassing, to read again! There was actually a lot I liked, and a few things that made me want to die. The life of an author.

Hopefully you enjoyed this brief foray into a topic I rarely write about! Let me know if you’d like more screenplays!