Fall is a nerve-shredding, knuckle-whitening, vertigo-inducing action thriller. Scott Mann and Johnathan Frank wrote the script about the terrifying tale of climbers Becky, played by Grace Caroline Currey, and Hunter, played by Virginia Gardner.
They ascend the abandoned 2,000-ft B67 TV Tower in the California desert as a means of moving on from the death of Becky’s husband Dan, played by Mason Gooding, in a climbing accident a year earlier.
But when the tower’s external ladder gives way, these best friends find themselves stuck on a platform at the top. Too high to use their cell phones to ring for help, the pair must find a way down — or die trying.
Fall began life as a short film idea hatched by Mann and Fran in response to a production company’s call for experiential shorts. “They were looking at experiential shorts, action thrillers, and we pitched this,” recalls Mann. “We got so excited about the idea of the fear of falling and the horror of heights, that it almost wrote itself for 25-30 pages. They wanted to make it, but then the whole thing shut down.”
The short film series ended up canceled, so Mann and Frank decided to expand their idea into a feature, and see if they could get it set up somewhere else. “We’ve written specs before, but this was the most fun to write because the two of us kind of lived it and acted it out as we went on, trying to think what we would do in the situation that the girls find themselves in,” continues Mann who built a paper version of the platform at the top of the tower so he and Frank could perch on it, “to figure out what to do and really play on the horror and tension. We wanted it to be the ultimate fear-of-height movie, so we looked at previous films and wrote the script accordingly.”
Mann ended up directing the thriller, which has a unique location, the very real 2,000-foot-high B67 TV tower, the fourth highest structure in the U.S. “What we found was there were a lot of internet videos of daredevils doing crazy stuff, but they were usually climbing things like cranes,” explains Mann. “So, we said, let’s find somewhere that would be the ultimate place to get stuck, and we came across this tower in California. When you’re at the bottom looking up, the tower seems to go out into infinity, into the clouds. It is a marvel of architecture. And being in the desert, made for a very barren, difficult place to survive in the first instance, let alone 2,000 feet up.”