What is The Naked Ape about?
Alex (Josh Wise) is a insecure teenager whose only friends are James (Sean Shanks), a charismatic liar, and Eric (Tony LaThanh), a skater punk with a shoplifting streak. The three unlikely friends embark on a summer road trip before returning for their senior year, but Alex has other plans that don’t include returning to St. Louis. While traveling through New Mexico, they meet Susie (Chelse Swain) and Kristie (Amanda MacDonald), two unlikely friends looking to escape the boredom of small town life. Kristie decides that joining the guys on their trip would provide a convenient escape from her abusive father, and Susie finds herself manipulated into coming along. Back on the road, the euphoria of freedom is short lived when bus tickets Alex bought for his friends to get home are discovered and Eric’s casual shoplifting catches up with him. Tempers flare and Alex and Susie find themselves thrown together, alone and lost in the Utah desert.

The Naked Ape is a bittersweet dramatic comedy about friendships, insecurities, rites of passage and the death of idealism. Corbin Bernsen (L.A. Law) is featured as Alex’s father, forced to drop everything to come bail the kids out of trouble and Michael Jackson (Newsradio 1070 AM) provides a documentary-style narration drawn from the Desmond Morris book by the same name. The Naked Ape is coming-of-age tale about trying to run away from your problems and learning that the real change has to take place within yourself.

What is this "Big Things" I keep seeing?
Big Things was the working title of the film and remained the title until very late into post production. As a result, all of the scripts below have the Big Things title. It's also worth noting that the most recent script was the shooting script and therefore doesn't reflect what was actually shot and differs quite a bit from the final cut of the movie. Most of the scenes cut from the movie were cut for time though we were sorry to see many of them go. Still, if you're interested in seeing what the original intentions were for the story, you'll find these back scripts an interesting archive of script evolution.
Script Versions for Downloading...
Here are copies of the script for those that are interested. The "Draft" scripts are based on since the beginning of Preproduction. At the bottom you'll find a link for the gluttons of punishment: links to all the versions (no matter how minor the changes) that came before things got into motion. All of these are in Final Draft format (.fdr) except for the most recent, which is in both .fdr and .pdf format. (If you click on a link and you get a page of garbage, go back and right click or control click and select download link to disk, or the equivlant.)




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