Warning! This article contains possible plot spoilers!

I had a chance to watch Ghost Town with Ricky Gervais over the weekend. The DVD had a nice selection of extras that gave some insight into how the story was developed and made into a movie. Check it out if you like Ricky's previous work or like a romantic comedy.

In this movie Ricky's trying to reach crowds beyond fans of the Office and the Extras. The movie is pretty good with an IMDB rating of 7.0. Its actually most popular among people under 18 who give it a higher score, which is a bit surprising. The movie is after all a three person love story about getting closure and finding happines. Only this time, one of them is a ghost!

I guess is somehow missed its intended adult audience since the movie has made only 22 million USD at the box office world-wide compared to a 20 million USD production budget. The studio might make a profit with DVD sales and rentals of course.

What I found interesting in the making of the movie was how the ghost characters were developed and used. The director and co-writed David Koepp explained how ghost are quite established in modern cinema and storytelling. We all have a preconception of how they behave and what they can do. So when they were making the movie, they had to research how ghosts have been used before.

Commenly ghosts are forced to stay in our world because there is something left undone. Previous stories have focused on something the ghost wasn't able to do during his or her lifetime. In this movie they turn it all around in the end. The reason why ghosts exist is that people who remember them have not for some reason let go. It might be because of something they wanted to say to the deceased person or something that they didn't have time to do while the person was alive.

This is interesting from a script development point of view. Koepp and his co-author John Kamps first had only a vision of the main character, a narcicist dentist played by Ricky. Then they developed the love story, where the main character gets into a lot of (hilarious) troubles because of his narcicism and fear of being with people. He always thought that people made him unhappy, but it was actually he himself who made himself unhappy by not connecting with people. Finally the story culminates in portraying ghosts in a way that hasn't been done before in cinema. It is their own small contribution to entertainment and storytelling.

I think whatching the movie and the making of documentary is a nice practical example for aspring screenwriters.

- Erik Pöntiskoski