Snakes on a Plane--The Bay Script

Adding to our Bay Blog archive, sexy Galley Reader Peter sends in the lost Michael Bay scrip for SoaP, reproduced below in its entirety.

Peter, by the way, needs to email me pronto so that I can hook him up with some cool swag and learn the secret to his internet skills.

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Snakes on a Plane: Platinum Dunes Pitch

Me and the guys at Platinum Dunes were working over Snakes on a Plane for New Line, but they passed it to David Ellis (genius of stunts, dude trained under the MASTER Hal Needham), which we were cool with, but now they’re courting Sam Jackson and they’ve gone and changed the f*cking title to f*cking Flight 121. I’m so f*cking annoyed, we’re totally not giving them our rewrites. I mean I’m not as annoyed as I was with Jessica Alba for refusing to eat Brooke Burke’s asshole out, but pretty annoyed. We put in some serious work into our treatment and notes, and they’re going in a completely different direction. Kozy (aka Scott Kozar) did a pass, but it was me and Jerry Stahl who worked out a great treatment that could easily be turned into an outline. sh*t was genius. We even had a couple of taglines ("Coffee? Tea? VENOM?" "They have all the leg room they need!” “Death on no legs!" “No legs. No mercy. No escape” "The lavatory is occupied . . . with snakes!" “You''ve never seen TERROR on this SCALE before!“) But if this work is going to waste, I figured I’d share it before FLIGHT 121 hits. Then you can decide which is the better movie (ours).

So anyway, here was our outline:

Voice over during credits:
"Flight 121 this is tower, what seems to be the problem?"

"There are snakes. On our plane. Over."

Fade in: Nick Steele is working as an undercover cop, who's working a drug bust. Chasing some Haitians, he and his partner get caught and tied up and tortured. With snakes. Steele passes out and they kill his partner first, but just then backup arrives and shoots the snake and the Haitians. Nick’s nickname? Mongoose.

After this stress he plans to go on vacation to see his mom. And he’s got a flight from LA to Hawaii. He’s a little unsure of himself, and he hates both snakes and planes because he was the son of a respected Air Force General, and his father died getting bitten by a snake while piloting a stealth bomber

Unfortunately, he’s on a plane under terrorist attacks. The snakes on the plane . . . They're super-smart snakes controlled by Arabs. Remote controlled. Brain implants. Terrorist snakes. They can also communicate with Morse code. There are fifteen snakes, and one is a good Snake, which was from a circus and was trained to fly a plane, while the other has a menacing red stripe down his back. All are poisonous, but only the two lead snakes can almost make human words, due to genetic mutations (again, that’d be part of the bitchin’ credit sequence, where you’d see coils of snakes wrapping around the credits and asphyxiating them).

On the flight are some random people (and a lot of Japanese tourists, cause they’re going to Hawaii and because I think it would be creepy to have them scream Hebi! often), but the main characters are Sally, the lead stewardess, to be played by Jessica Alba or Rachel Bilson (if Adam Brody’s cool with their “open relationship”), the bimbette stewardess (played by whomever I’m f*cking that month), the Selfish guy (played by Wayne Knight), and the betrayer Winston. There’s also a horny couple, a cheating husband, and the pilots, aka snake snacks. There’s also a wisecracking black guy who hates flying. The plane takes off under ominous conditions, and the characters are introduced as the plane settles into take off. Then we see the snakes breaking out of their suitcases. The passengers are oblivious at first, one thinks it’s the kid in front of him brushing his leg, but the snakes know to go to the front, though one stops off in the toilet, just as our horny young couple lock themselves in the bathroom:

"Don''t you want to join the mile high club?"

"Okay."

He unzips, she reaches in:

"Man that''s a big one."

"Really, I mean . . . yeah of course. Why don't you, you know, kiss it."

Then Girl goes down on her knees for a SNAKE ATTACK, and both die as the stewardess, who knew the two were going in there, figure the couple is copulating, when in fact they’re both dying. The snakes then make their way to the cockpit. Fade out

Fade in on a secondary stewardess going into the c*ck pit, and pushing the Captain. . . . But he’s dead! Then she pushes the copilot and he’s dead too, and when she attempts to give him mouth to mouth, a snake jumps out of the dudes throat and kills her!

She hits the controls, and the plane encounters serious turbulence and instead of the oxygen masks dropping down, SNAKES DROP DOWN! (in this sequence a snake slips in between some chick’s massive cleavage). Nick rushes to the front and grabs two snakes by their tails and whips them against the cockpit and hits the autopilot button, and grabs the speaker to let the passengers know of their fate. There’s a snake POV shot, and Nick’s about to get bit, when the hero snake kills the other snake for him. Hero snake and Nick have a moment, and then hero snake slithers off as the evil snake kills the comedic black dude and heads for the cockpit. For you see, these snakes know how to fly planes.

One selfish guy grabs the plane's lone parachute from a woman about to give birth and given a way out of the horror he goes to the cargo area and jumps out of the plane ("See ya, suckers!") and gets to the point where it's time to pull the cord. Can you guess what is wrapped up in the chute and lands on his head, biting him furiously?

Everyone notes that the snakes have all gone to the front of the plane, so they cram into coach. Nick takes control but Winston bucks at his lead. Winston’s a c*cksure Wall Street guy whose father runs a Fortune 500 company. While arguing Nick hears Morse code. The hero snake tells him about the plan of the evil snakes. They’re going to pilot this jet into the Oscar ceremony, which coincidentally starts in 45 minutes! Winston disappears, and goes to the cockpit, and as he knows Morse code too, makes a deal with the evil leader snake, but we don’t know for what. He comes back saying he was using the bathroom.

Nick and Sally begin fashioning weapons, he then tells her why he hates snakes and flying, cause his dad died piloting the stealth, and that he used to be a top gun, but couldn’t fly any more after his dad died. The passengers create crude weapons out of wheeled luggage ("Let''s roll!"). It’s here where Nick grabs a minute with the hero snake, and names him Ace. Ace says he can talk a little and says,

"You---Me. Sssssssssssssame."

He also finds out these snakes can breed like crazy and in the cargo area there are already hundreds of snakes waiting for the call!

But as the boys are gearing up, they hear some tapping, and it’s Winston who’s signaling the snakes. Nick knows what the guy’s saying, and belts him one.

"I thought it was only the snakes who were cold blooded, but I guess I was wrong."

Nick is about to kill him, but decides,

"You're not even worth it."

Which allows Winston a chance to swing at Nick with the baseball bat he found in a carryon bag, but right as he's about to, he trips into the cargo area and is stuck in A PIT OF SNAKES THAT EAT HIM ALIVE! Now everyone knows that they're between the cockpit of doom and the cargohold of death.

But there’s an older businessman and he tells of how he cheated on his wife, and how he cheated on his taxes.

“I want something I haven’t had in thirty years . . . Dignity.”

So he heads downstairs and opens the tail thing and sacrifices himself to kill all the snakes below. He succeeds.

There’s only ten snakes left at the front of the plane, but they’ve circled around the c*ck pit. With Mongoose and Ace coming up front, it’s a deadly game of cat and mouse in the first class section (where there should be the trappings of wealth juxtaposed against the snakes… it’d be meaningful that way), and the boys and the rest of the surviving passengers kill them off, but Ace knows something… He can’t find the evil snake. Nick’s not worried about this, and he and Sally moves the pilots out and sweep the room for snakes while he and Ace pilot up. Suddenly they seem to be losing gas, and there’s something wrong. Because the auto pilot no longer works Nick is stuck in the pilot seat, while Ace goes down and finds that he has to have a duel off against the evil snake! I won’t spoil it, but the fight sequence would have been awesome!

So the snakes are gone (save for our hero snake) but Ace is forced to hold parts together with his body! ("Just a little longer, Ace. Just a little longer!") But he''ll die, and yet his massive coils are the only thing that can hold the plane together! Fortunately, he does what needs to be done, because that's what hero snakes with hearts of gold do! Finally Nick lands safely! But the snake is dead! Nick eulogizes Ace ("He was just trying to get home, just like the rest of us. Maybe we ain''t so different after all.") Sally offers to buy him a Mai Tai, even though they’re still in LA, but it sounds like they’re gonna do it soon.

You think that’s it, but wait . . . Final sequence of the movie, a rescue team finds the mervous guy’s body, and they take him on their helicopter. Though dead, there's movement on his body, and the film ends as his stomach explodes as it was full of snakes! Thus paving the way for SNAKES ON A HELICOPTER.