For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our Black List Tales interview with Nicole Ramberg about writing Craigshaven from Backstory Magazine’s issue 49 – now available to read! If you want to read the accompanying script, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Nicole Ramberg wins accolades with her first feature screenplay that recalls the blockbuster Amblin films of the 1980’s
By Danny Munso
For a time, Nicole Ramberg had a writing venue that would be the envy of most screenwriters: the Universal Studios backlot. After graduating from Northwestern University, Ramberg was hired for the NBC/Universal Page Program in 2016 and subsequently brought on full-time by the studio after the program ended a year later. Her next few years were spent as an assistant in development, first for the studio itself and then for a two-and-a-half-year stint at Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment whose offices were on the studio lot. “I would always bring my notebook to work, and on my lunch break I would just walk around the backlot and go by the Jaws set or on the New York streets and through osmosis try and absorb that movie magic and get inspired,” she says. “I would sit on a bench somewhere and scribble ideas, scenes, characters, settings.” For someone who has the Universal Studios fanfare as her ringtone—a fact she finds “embarrassing,” though we would beg to differ—it was a surreal setting. It’s also where she got the germ of the idea that would launch her screenwriting career.
Ramberg hails from just outside Chicago and had frequently spent family trips on Lake Michigan. One day at Universal, she saw a news article from back home about the lake being so clear one day you could see hundreds of shipwrecks from shore. “It just sparked something and planted a seed in my brain,” she notes. “It’s kind of cool and kind of spooky and very midwestern, which are all things I love. I love the lake. It’s very much ingrained in my bones. I had been out in L.A. for about a year and was feeling extremely homesick, and I started thinking about this idea. I was missing the people and the places I loved, so I wanted to write something that allowed me to live in that space for a little bit.” The resulting script, Craigshaven, is set in 1993 Wisconsin and follows grieving teenager Riley Halbeck as she seeks to unravel the mystery surrounding her mother’s disappearance three years prior.
What follows is an adventure story that leads Riley and her friends Ash and Wyatt on a chase to find a ghost ship—Le Griffon—that, according to legend, haunts Lake Michigan and has been possibly responsible for multiple women going missing in the coastal town’s waters, which are known as Death’s Door. It’s also the story of Riley’s family—younger sister Emma, aunt Annie and estranged father Fred—who have suffered a major loss and are letting it poison their relationships with one another. That isn’t helped when Riley uncovers evidence that her mother, too, was obsessed with finding the truth behind Le Griffon, which may be why she went missing in the first place. Though Craigshaven is a fictional town, it is very much based in reality and on places that are incredibly meaningful to its writer. “While the town is something I made up, Door County Peninsula (where the town is located) is a real place,” she says. “Death’s Door is a real place on a map. My grandparents vacationed there. That was their special place, and when my grandfather passed away my mom started taking my grandma and I, and it’s just this very magical place. We’re always there in the fall, and Lake Michigan looks like an ocean. It’s beautiful and feels like a little pocket out of time.” Even Le Griffon is a real ship, though the script’s specific details surrounding its mythology are all invented. “It’s a real boat no one has ever been able to find. It’s considered the holy grail of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes—people have been searching for it forever.”
One of the first things that stands out about Craigshaven is its brilliant writing—in both plot and tone—is a throwback to the popular Amblin films of the 1980s, such as E.T. and The Goonies, the latter of which gets namechecked on multiple occasions by characters in the script. They’re the type of films children of the ’80s and ’90s grew up on that get referenced often by filmmakers as their inspiration. Yet with few exceptions, they’re also the type of films that, despite their beloved status, have largely been abandoned by Hollywood in recent years. “Amblin is very near and dear to my heart,” Ramberg says. “It was very much by design a film the industry doesn’t really make anymore.” And yet the script is more than a nostalgic replica of a long-lost genre. It carves out its own territory by managing to mine deeper emotional depths than a lot of those films ever attempted, becoming a deep rumination on grief that is both heartfelt and heartbreaking.
That depth is best expressed in the film’s climactic moment. After Riley and her friends finally track down Le Griffon, they are taken aboard and discover the missing women they’ve been searching for. Because Craigshaven harkens back to a certain type of film, readers can assume they know how this will go: This is the scene where the daughter reunites with her thought-to-be-lost-forever mother. Instead, the scene transforms into a gut punch, as Riley slowly realizes her mother is not there and she truly must have drowned while searching for the ship. This was the unflinching conclusion Ramberg always envisioned. “It was always the ending, and it was something I never wanted to compromise on,” she says. “Thankfully, no one asked me. You think it’s a story of a girl going to save her mom, but it’s really a story of her dealing with grief and learning to let go of the anger and frustration she feels to come to terms with what happened. As much as I love the coming-of-age adventure movies, those are the kind of movies where you find the parent at the end and everything is perfect and tied up in a neat little bow. I wanted to write that kind of story but for the kids whose parents weren’t going to come home.”
Ramberg’s desire to have her script dive so deeply into how grief can affect us didn’t extend just to Riley and her family. The entire mystery surrounding Le Griffon is about that as well, with the ship’s captain stuck in his own never-ending loop of grief, as he has been searching for his lost love this entire time. That is how these women end up getting taken aboard when the ship appears. Though the writer didn’t lose her own mother, she has seen how grief can affect a family and wanted this script to express that. “He’s stuck in this loop where he’s kind of reliving these last moments of his life over and over,” she says. “He can’t get out of the storm, so he’s always looking for her, and to me, grief feels like a loop. So that was very much the inspiration for how the mechanics of that part of the story would all work.”
While the ending remained throughout the writing process, what did shift was how Ramberg came to that conclusion. She puts a lot of that on the fact that she didn’t outline Craigshaven before starting—something she wouldn’t do now that she’s a more seasoned writer. “I’m very disciplined now that I’m older and wiser. But for this script I started writing it when I was 25, and I was 30 when it got on the Black List. So I just kind of dove in. I knew how it ended and knew how I wanted it to start, but then there’s the dreaded Act 2. So I wrote a first draft, and I knew it wasn’t right. The second act just did not feel right to me. It nagged at me for months.” The film’s middle consists of Riley and her friends piecing together the film’s deepening mystery, though in the first draft, the action wasn’t escalating the way Ramberg wanted. “The middle felt episodic. It’s a mystery so there are clues our heroes have to solve, but it didn’t feel integrated. It didn’t feel like each clue pushed us into this scene, and then the next scene reveals another clue. I racked my brain over it for weeks and couldn’t figure it out.”
The answer came—as it so often does—in the form of a Nintendo 64. “I went home for the holidays and pulled out my Nintendo 64 and said I’m finally going to beat Star Fox 64,” she says. “I was halfway through my Star Fox 64 run when it hit me, and I knew how I could fix the script.” The revelation wasn’t a simple fix but rather an edict to better integrate the script’s character beats with those that relate to the film’s overall mystery. This is exemplified in one of Act 2’s last scenes, set as Riley and Ash play in their high school’s championship soccer game. The scene was in the early drafts as one where Riley—having just come off a major fight with Annie—takes her rising anger out on the other team and helps cost her team the game. Ramberg kept the events but integrated two important plot points that keep the momentum of the mystery going: Before the game, the girls realize one of their teammates has suddenly gone missing, and during the match Riley notices a blue light coming from the local lighthouse that disappears a second later. That leads to her and her friends investigating the venue, where a big part of the mystery will be solved. “I very much loved writing the scene where it’s the big game and Riley’s having a little bit of a meltdown. She’s at her breaking point and frustrated and feeling the doubt from everyone else. It was supposed to be a character scene, but I went back and said Ok, how can we use this scene to also progress the mystery and give Riley stuff to think about for later on?”
Successive rewrites also deepened the script’s core relationship, between Riley and Annie. The two have a tricky dynamic to navigate as their scenes crackle more with what is unsaid between the pair than what is actually in the dialogue. This could have led to a hiccup in the writing, as both Riley and Annie contain big puzzle pieces of the script’s overall mystery and the audience is let in on that much earlier than the two characters. But the writer crafts the pair in such a way that while readers may be screaming for the two simply to sit down and talk openly, it makes complete sense that they don’t until very late in the script. “In early drafts, Annie wasn’t in it as much as she is in the final version,” Ramberg says. “It was a very hard line to walk, especially when you’re writing teenagers, because teenagers can be insolent and rude for no reason. It’s a very easy trap to fall into of just writing a bratty teenage character, and I didn’t see Riley as bratty. I saw her as a good kid who had something awful happen to her. Finding the right balance of their relationship was something that came along in the rewrites, and once I shifted those scenes, you understand this building tension between them and why they’re kind of dancing around each other and the frustration and at times resentment [that stirs up], at least on Riley’s part.”
After incorporating all of the changes, Ramberg submitted her latest draft to the ScreenCraft Action & Adventure Competition in 2020—and she won. That led to her signing with manager Kate Sharp of Bellevue Productions, and she credits her for helping further refine the story and characters. The script’s final version was sent out to companies in 2022, and it made the revered Black List that December, five years after she started writing it. She left Amblin that year as well and is currently a showrunner’s assistant with Netflix while she continues working on new scripts, the latest an adventure story in the vein of Indiana Jones and The Mummy. Though Craigshaven hasn’t sold—yet—Ramberg hopes change is afoot in the industry which just might lead to a place where a story like hers goes from the kind of film Hollywood no longer makes to an actual reality. “I hope in my heart of hearts that we are approaching a swing back into seeing medium-size movies in theaters again,” she says. “It feels like we’re at an inflection point in the industry, you have the WGA strike, you have streamers reevaluating what kind of content they want to make. I’m just hoping that when the dust settles from this turbulent period, people will realize there is an audience for these movies. Whether it’s theatrical or whether it’s streaming, I think people love these kinds of films. I wrote this because I miss them. That was the whole crux behind it. They say write the kind of movie you want to see. Well, this is the movie I would like to see.”
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