99 Home Analysis

Presented by Broad Green Pictures and Hyde Park Entertainment, 99 homes was an independent production with an estimated budget of 4million dollars. With 14 distributors, the film was only featured in a few selected theatres around the world, after its release and win at the Venice film festival in 2014.
To analyse and understand the screenplay of 99 Homes it’s important to establish a clear place for the text in its context.
The context in which 99 Homes was built was the most important part of the scriptwriting process. The entire fictional story was built around the true events in America in mid-2000’s.
This context established the writer’s path to the fictional story. By focusing on the character’s journey and story, he uses the social
What he called “on the ground research”. He went to the places more affected by house crisis – Florida was one of them and where he decided to base his script - and spent a lot of time with real estate brokers were he came to understand that every single real estate broker carried a gun because they never knew who was going to be on the other side of the door- A detail that was included in the script, in the supporting character, Rick Carver, and displayed early on to evoke a sense of danger, helping establish the genre of the text quite rapidly.
Bahrain, recalls experiences in foreclosure courts where people lost their homes in less than a minute. This experience is in the screenplay as the first plot point in the first act. Dennis Nash, the main character, loses his house in a matter of seconds.
Bahraini told in an interview: “People were losing cases left and right (…) there’s culpability everywhere with this issue. I like to say that the villain is not just one person.” (Business Insider,
This choice of casting not-actors was extremely important for social and realist feeling behind the scripting process that later made its way into the film. Bahraini wrote the script with the knowledge and intention that some of his words would be changed by the actors. He added “the actors (…) understood the characters one level deeper than we (referring to his co-writer Amir Naderi) ever did as writers, because they started to live and breathe in a different way.” (Interview Magazine, 2015)
Bahrain, as a writer/ director, had the creative control to decide not only what to write but how to put those words on paper and later on the screen, making this project with his vision, and being the creative force behind this text – the author. However, Bahrain states that he depended on his production team and actors to make his vision possible, and that the final text is a rewrite of the screenplay that changed and was built with and around a team.
The word author in a film industry context often bring up debates and