People who get past the scratching-and-clawing stage to succeed in the film business too often find that success has its own pitfalls. Typecasting, for one. No small number of actors have found their ambitions frustrated when they became too identified with a single role.
The same can happen to writers. One writer I know wrote a romantic comedy solely because he needed some money, sold it, and found himself inundated with offers to write romantic comedies. When he complained to his agent that he didn’t really want to write romantic comedies, he was told, “This is Hollywood. People want you to do the same thing over and over again and pay you more for it each time.”
Writers, though, do have more leeway to reinvent themselves. Where actors have to be cast, writers can simply write something different and let the work speak for itself. Still, such tactics demand a willingness to leave the comfort zone and risk failure, with all that implies for ego, reputation, and financial security.
For writers just getting started, like Ken Nolan and David Benioff, and for auteurs like Sofia Coppola, it’s not an issue. The former are happy just to be working, while the latter can take on different genres as long as they continue to satisfy their backers. On the other hand, for someone like David Franzoni, who’s succeeding making the projects he wants to make, there’s no urgent reason to change.
For a writer in midcareer, such as Leslie Dixon, satisfication can be harder to come by. Dixon was a successful writer of female-oriented comedies, with credits including Outrageous Fortune and Mrs. Doubtfire. She was prospering, she was respected, and she could easily have carried on down that road for years without breaking stride.
“But I wasn’t on anybody’s A-list,” she said. “The only things I ever got offered were comedies. They weren’t even the prime ones. I didn’t like the quality of the work I was doing. And I didn’t know what was wrong, exactly.”
The feeling was only aggravated when a friend gave her a copy of the PBS documentary Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey. Salt was a screenwriter from the 1930s through the ’70s who generated countless Hollywood studio pictures—until an epiphany changed his course. “At some time during the early sixties,” Dixon says, Salt “had a blinding vision that he was going to try to achieve some kind of greatness, and work in a whole other way and challenge himself, beat the shit out of himself and not speak to anybody. And out of that came Midnight Cowboy and other things. You would never know it’s the same guy who wrote those other pictures.”
As Dixon notes, Salt’s story “speaks to all of us. At the moment you’ve been doing this for a few years, are you going to be a lazy hack or are you going to go to another level? It’s very inspiring, but it’s also chilling. Because you [think], Could I do that? Could I write Midnight Cowboy if I really beat the shit out of myself? That’s a sobering question.”
Dixon’s efforts to answer that question would lead her to leave the world of comedy for more dramatic fare. In time, it also landed her one of the most unlikely writing assignments she could have ever received: Pay It Forward.
It was an peculiar pairing of story and writer: The preachy, earnest story of Pay It Forward bore a greater resemblance to Touched by an Angel than to anything Dixon had written or wanted to write.
“I’m such a cynical bitch,” she said. “My actual taste in movies is quite dark.” So how did she end up on Pay It Forward?
Dixon’s efforts to drive herself away from disposable comedy and into something more ambitious began with a spec adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel. “It wrote itself in six weeks,” she remembers. “I’d never had anything like that happen before. And even though it hasn’t been made yet, it sold immediately.” The Wharton experience taught her that she had a hidden talent for literary adaptations. “I was good at compressing and juggling and adding and yet somehow not violating the spirit of the book itself.”
Her Wharton spec also turned out to be the writing sample that led to her writing the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, John McTiernan’s big-ticket caper romance with Rene Russo and Pierce Brosnan. While other writers handled the film’s tech/caper sequences, Dixon wrote the film’s all-important relationship scenes—and, in the process, learned a whole new way of thinking and writing.
“One of the things that slapped me across the face a little bit was working with John McTiernan” on the film, she said. “Comedy is not a very visual form of filmmaking. In fact, too many camera tricks get in the way. And so a lot of it is just about behavior and dialogue. Then you’re working with a director who makes pictures on a big canvas, and makes dynamic films and wants me to add a sailplane sequence and a catamaran wreck.
“He was good to me, by the way. He wasn’t mean about it. But he made me realize that I wanted to be a part of film movies, as opposed to turn-on-the-camera, shoot-the-joke movies.” She also came to feel she’d been depending too much on one trick in her writer’s bag. “I just realized that taking refuge in dialogue was a trick I had down for a long time. But it was only that. It was just a trick.”
After Thomas Crown, she landed Pay It Forward, a treacly modern-day Christ parable based on a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde. She discovered Pay It Forward while reading five novels that were available as open writing assignments, then asked her agent to get her a meeting with the producer.
The book is naively indifferent to dramatic structure or even its own storytelling. It seems more interested in starting a real-life “pay it forward” do-good movement than telling a good story. “Paying it forward is not what attracted me to the material. I was really afraid of the premise,” Dixon recalled. “I was terrified of the potential bad-Capra aspects of this piece.”
Bad Capra? “Well, there are Capra people and Billy Wilder people, and I’m a Billy Wilder person. I think that was part of what drew me to this project, me walking into the heart of darkness of potential corniness. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m more likely to channel Bette Davis than Jimmy Stewart.”
As Dixon concedes, “I was not a logical choice to adapt this material. I had done nothing but comedies for ten years. But I had adapted a drama. So I went and I swallowed my pride, because I do get offers, and I went and auditioned for this job.”
As it turned out, Dixon’s edginess was what won her the job. “[Producer] Steve Reuther actually said, ‘I want to hire a cynical writer, rather than a sweet writer. I don’t want to hire a sweet writer because it will just get sweeter.’”
Dixon had reasons of her own for tackling the story. “I had just spent a lot of time inside the heads of these two pieces of work from Thomas Crown, these two amoral, predatory, wealthy sharks mating, and I didn’t want to live there anymore. I wanted to live inside the head of people who really needed something in their lives. That may be as corny as I get….
“My heart went out to these people. I felt sorry for them. I wanted to do the job because of the people. I did it almost in spite of the premise.”
Still, she confessed to a basic uneasiness with the story and its characters. “I have nothing in common with any of these people. I am not like a single person in this movie. I have much more in common with the women on Sex and the City than I do with any of these people.”
Dixon’s adaptation is still sweet by Hollywood standards, but it’s edgier than the novel. The screenplay begins with a jaded Los Angeles reporter seeing his car wrecked, only to have a total stranger hand him the keys to a Porsche and tell him to take it. There’s only one condition: The reporter must “pay it forward”—that is, do three favors for other people who need them. The reporter soon discovers that other people are following the philosophy and begins tracing the favors back to find the beginning of the “pay it forward” movement.
Meanwhile, in flashback, we follow the story of a terribly scarred social studies teacher, Eugene Simonet (Kevin Spacey), an alcoholic single mother named Arlene (Helen Hunt), and her son, Trevor (Haley Joel Osment). Eugene is a cynical man who works hard to keep people at arm’s length. Arlene’s drunken husband has abandoned her, but she continues to cling to the hope of his return. She is nearly broke, barely making ends meet as a waitress, and still drinking despite having entered Alcoholics Anonymous.
On his first day of school in Las Vegas, Gene gives his class an assignment: “Think of an idea for world change, then put it into action.” Most of the class does “perfunctory” work on the assignment, but Trevor comes up with the idea of “pay it forward.” In “pay it forward,” a person finds three people in need of help and gives them the help they need. There are no strings attached, except to tell the person who’s received the help to do the same for three other people. The class ridicules Trevor, but Gene tells them that he’s the only one who has taken the assignment seriously.
Trevor begins his own pay-it-forward plan by helping a down-and-out bum get back on his feet. Trevor’s efforts seem to fail, but he turns his attention to his own mother and Gene, deciding that they should get together as a couple. This is the real heart of the story, as these two damaged people, both wounded by life, edge painfully toward love and intimacy.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, Trevor’s pay-it-forward idea is beginning to seep out into the world. People are doing those favors for each other—sometimes for the wrong reasons, sometimes long after they’ve been helped themselves, but the idea is spreading. Lives are being touched, even saved. As people move around, it catches on in other cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The story of Gene, Arlene, and Trevor is intercut with the story of the reporter’s quest for the origins of “pay it forward.” Eventually, the reporter traces the story back to Trevor and Gene, who is amazed to learn that his social studies assignment has had such an effect on the world. Even as Trevor, Gene, and “pay it forward” stand on the edge of fame, however, Trevor’s third favor leads to tragic consequences.
Hyde’s novel, which Dixon read in galleys, provided plenty of challenges for any adaptor. It uses multiple narrators, including the reporter, and some of the narration comes in the form of letters and diaries. In fact, structuring the story was the biggest single challenge for Dixon—beginning with the problem of the reporter, who does not appear until halfway through the book.
“I discovered that you can’t introduce a character halfway through the film,” she remembers. “No one gives a shit. They don’t want to be with that guy, they want to be with the leads. So I got halfway through on my first draft and I went, ‘Uh-oh.’ I was goddammed if I was going to go to narration. That’s the lazy writer’s out. I could not figure out how to do it. And I was stuck for two weeks. I almost gave the money back. That had never happened to me before.”
Then, as Dixon was lying in bed one day, she lit upon a potential solution. “I realized, What if we start with him and do the investigation backward? Introduced first by the people who are the forwards, and then [have them] join up later in the book?” That structure made the more mundane story of Gene, Arlene, and Trevor more dramatic, because the audience would know that it would lead to something bigger.
So effective was the solution that, after talking with Dixon, Hyde decided to change her book before publication to follow the screenplay’s structure. “That was the first time I know that the screenwriter had affected something in the novel,” said Dixon. “Everything else went in the other direction, of course. We talked about it later and we laughed.”
After years of writing specs, Dixon is always excited to have a starting point. She said that it took years for her to learn what she calls the most depressing thing about writing for the stage and screen. “At the end of the day, the idea of the scene, and what occurs in it, is more important than the dialogue. And that is such a bitch to find out. But it’s true.
“I call it heavy construction. Breaking the ground. Figuring out who the people are, how they feel about each other, what the dynamic in every scene is. Telling the story, what occurs in each scene, any writer who’s been around will tell you, [that’s] the bitch of it all. And dialogue is frosting. I didn’t understand that for a long time. And I took refuge in dialogue.”
As she faced the heavy construction of Pay It Forward, she had to find the movie inside Hyde’s novel—a process she likens to archaeology.
“Once in a while a novel is just lying around that’s a movie waiting to happen, like Gone with the Wind. A movie screaming to get out. Then there are movies that have to be excavated screaming and kicking from the material. This one was somewhere in between. It was tough.”
Dixon’s screenplay has around thirty-five significant speaking roles. That’s a large number for a “small” movie, but the book had more. “I knew that a larger tapestry of people had to be preserved in order to get some sense of this idea that this child had leaked out into the world.”
There was another, more basic problem: “There were not a lot of scenes,” she explained. Much of the book took the form of diary entries, letters, and inner monologues. “There were references to the fact that [Gene and Arlene] had a couple of dates, but no scenes. There were references to how cool Trevor thought the teacher was, but no scenes with the teacher and the child. So many, many of these ideas come from the book, but I had to invent the scenes. Sometimes I had to bring to life what would just go by in a fleeting line of description.”
Dixon compressed the book’s timeline and took out some later sections where Trevor becomes famous and even meets the president. She also had to replace the book’s final scene, where people give speeches praising Trevor and his efforts. Her earliest drafts even included a similar scene, with Gene giving a speech about Trevor, but once Kevin Spacey was on board he politely told her, “I can’t see myself saying these things.”
“I laughed,” she said. “He was so right. I said, ‘I can’t either.’” The scene was replaced with a more visual tribute to Trevor.
Spacey was the first actor approached for the role of Gene. When he took the part, the rest of the cast fell into place, including Helen Hunt as Arlene. For Dixon, that meant having to address the needs of two powerful stars who weren’t interested in keeping the material as edgy as Dixon wanted it to be. Spacey wanted to make Gene less cynical and more of an inspirational teacher.
“I don’t know whether I was right about this,” said Dixon. “[In the early drafts] Gene was a more cynical burnout teacher who didn’t really connect with kids all that well. It was unusual that Trevor saw something in him and saw something in this rote assignment he gave every year, and touched off something in the story. I always liked that. Now he’s just an inspirational teacher from the very first scene, although some of the bitterness and cynicism and some of [his] emotional removal from other people is all still exactly the same. It was really [only] the first scene that changed. Maybe he made a better emotional connection with the audience right away.”
For her part, Hunt wanted the story to explore Arlene’s alcoholism more deeply. In the book, Arlene is mostly sober and has one slip. In the film, Arlene is still drinking and struggling to stop. Hunt wanted “to go into the depths” of her character’s addiction, said Dixon.
“The alcohol issue was just one of many things that the mother had to struggle with. I didn’t have time to delve into her awful financial situation, how Trevor’s father had left her. There was equal weight on a lot of problems. This became the forefront problem of the script.”
Dixon had also originally “child-proofed” the script by focusing on the love story, keeping Trevor in the background. “The problem with child actors is two-shots, because they have to hold up their end in the same shot as the lead. You’ll notice when you see kids on-screen, it’s generally single shots of them, because the editor is picking and choosing the moments the kid actually pulls off. So you start writing short lines, writing punch lines. I even started constructing scenes where the kid has his back to the parents through the whole thing, in case you have to loop it later.”
Then she saw Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense and realized there was an actor the perfect age for Trevor who could handle the challenges of the role.
“I not only knew that he could, I knew in my gut that he would. I got excited. I just felt in my gut that it would happen.” After Osment signed, she recalls, “I started to give Trevor more weight, more meat, more screen time. It was okay to write a paragraph of dialogue, because I knew he’d be able to get through it in one take. It was okay to write big emotional moments.
“And then at the end, and when I found that Haley was really a light little spirit, and not a sad, morose kid like the kid in The Sixth Sense, I added a lot of humor. I think I had made a mistake by making the script too grim, just to really show people ‘I’m really not a comedy writer, goddammit! I’m a serious pretentious drama writer now.’ So I went back through the whole script and put in a lot of little moments. I’m so glad I put those in, because I think they mitigate that seriousness a lot.”
Dixon herself has a dry sense of humor and a sharp wit. She is a slight woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, and physically she’s quite unimposing. But she has some admitted “eccentricities” that have helped her as a screenwriter.
“Utter lack of shyness,” she mused. “Flamboyance…an obnoxious degree of literacy, which is inappropriate when you’re a groveling subordinate…firm opinions…an almost European sense of wanting to go through life and have a good time…and very occasional histrionics.” The histrionics, she said, “have been a decreasing factor with age and wisdom. I can’t remember the last time they’ve come.” Still, they have apparently served her well. “I mean, if you’re just a bend-over writer, you’re probably not as good as you can be. A bend-over writer is a writer who’ll do anything they’re told—[who’s] so anxious not to get fired that the idea of whether it’s good or not has long since receded from the picture. And there are many people with mortgages and ex-wives and ex-children who have to be that way. But you also don’t want to be a difficult, arrogant asshole who digs in your heels intractably and may be wrong.”
Dixon has had to learn to compromise at home, too. Having a husband and a child requires her to surrender her preferred writing schedule, which involves working late at night. “There’s no way a word is going to go on paper before ten thirty in the morning,” she said flatly. “I can talk, I can try to make phone calls, but no inspiration is going to come. The later in the day, or the later in the night, the better for me. I would actually like to move to Manhattan at some point just to live in a city that’s as alive as I am at one A.M.”
Dixon works at an “ugly computer stand” next to a giant rolltop desk that belonged to her great-uncle. She loves having everything she needs close at hand, in the desk’s many cubbyholes, but generally likes a boring physical environment. She can’t listen to music as she writes; as a musician herself, she gets too distracted by the details of the music.
“I did some pretty serious time as a guitar player’s girlfriend. In fact, everything in my life went right once I stopped hanging out with musicians. And in the process of the various boyfriends, I learned to play pretty solid backup guitar for just about anything.”
She doesn’t play much guitar anymore, but she said that being musical has helped her writing. “I think a lot of dialogue is rhythm. Particularly humor. Any guy from the Catskills will tell you it’s about pointing the rhythm of what you’re saying. Mel Brooks can make [the] mundane into something extremely funny—[like] the 2000-Year-Old Man—just by the snap of his delivery. I discovered, too, that [if] you point up your sentences in a certain way, where they’re going to end with a certain rhythm, it’s going to have a lot more [dramatic] impact.”
Even so, she says, polishing the dialogue this way is still “frosting the cake with high-class buttercream. You still have to bake the cake.”
Dixon measures her workdays by the number of “quality pages” she completes. Once she’s finished the “heavy construction” phase, she can do as many as ten to twelve quality pages a day. Without the structure in place, however, it’s a different story: “Starting from nothing—that’s a lot slower. You can spend a lot of days not writing at all, because you’re outlining and plotting and figuring out what happens next. Once you do that, I think the actual writing is rather short.” Earlier in her career, she outlined every script in its entirety before writing. “I think you almost have to work that way to learn to be a screenwriter,” she says. “But I’m beginning to be more of a high-wire act now. I’m beginning to sort of tap into my unconscious and find things.”
Dixon sees this change in approach as part of her growth as a writer—a shift in priorities that began before she began work on Thomas Crown. “I [had] developed a boring competence at structure and at character arcs. Frankly, that’s something a lot of screenwriters are never able to achieve, but I always knew how to do a beginning, a middle, and an end, a plot. And ultimately, so what? Are those the kind of movies I want to pay eight-fifty or nine dollars to go see? Would I get in my car, drive to the theater, park, pay the babysitter, pay nine bucks to see this? I just decided I wouldn’t do anything where that wasn’t the case.”
Writing predictable films, she says, “was frighteningly limiting. [So] I just made this emotionally crushing decision to try five times as hard and to care ten times as much. Which will probably lead to me not being a screenwriter anymore. I’ll probably end up being a director or a novelist.”
What inspired such a radical change in perspective? “I really think it’s for venal reasons,” Dixon claims. “It’s just ambition and competitiveness. I just wanted to be better. I just wasn’t good enough. I’m still not. I can still get better at this.
“I’m not proud enough of anything I’ve done. There’s nothing I’ve worked on that I can say, ‘That’s up there with Godfather II or L.A. Confidential.’ It’s extremely pretentious to say for a minute that you could do something like that, but I’d feel a lot better about spending millions and millions of studio dollars in negative costs for films if I thought there was a chance.”
In the fall of 2000, Dixon was determined that Pay It Forward not start a trend. There would be no “sensitive, squishy, female-appeal films” in the future for her, she said. “This was the left-turn anomaly of all time for me.” She was looking forward to working on “the sickest, most twisted kind of black comedy. Something with impalings and decapitations.” But things didn’t work entirely as she’d planned.
Pay It Forward wasn’t a critical or box office success; many found it too sweet after all. The offers that followed were for what she calls “vagina movies,” but her interest in writing earnest dramas had long since disappeared. Three years would pass before her name appeared on another film, and that was Disney’s Freaky Friday—hardly an edgy project, though Mark Waters’s take on the family chestnut garnered good reviews. Two years later, she shared credit on Just Like Heaven, a melodrama about a man who falls in love with the spirit of a woman in a coma, then discovers that her family is about to take her off life support. (The movie suffered from comparisons with the real-life Terri Schiavo case, a political lightning rod at the time.)
But her next effort brought many of her talents together: an adaptation of Hairspray, the hit stage musical—which, in turn, was adapted from the film by John Waters.
Yes, it’s a comedy, and yes, it’s based on a family-friendly musical, but it has a decidedly edgy undertone to its family comedy. It may not be exactly what Dixon set out to do, but it’s a nearly perfect combination of her personality and proven talents.
No, it’s not Midnight Cowboy. But there’s always that next script.
Getting Down to Basics
LESLIE DIXON ON “DO THEY WANT TO TURN THE PAGE?”
I write scripts completely differently from the way I did three years ago. And I think it’s good as a writer to try to write different ways. Write with a partner you’ve never written with before. Adapt a novel and don’t use an outline. When you’ve done this for a while, you can begin to break rules and take chances, so these are all completely new to me. My criterion now is, do I want to flip the goddamn page to the next page to see what’s going to happen? That is the only rule.
I’m here to tell you, if the reader does not want to flip the page to the next page, the audience is not going to want to keep their butt in the seat to the next scene. It’s a total correlation. You’re telling the story. If there’s a bunch of thirteen-year-old kids sitting around a campfire, and you’re telling a story, and their eyes start to glaze over, you’re not doing it right. You’re not keeping butts in seats. You see all these movies that break conventional screenwriting rules, like Pulp Fiction, which jumps all over in time and kills off one of its heroes two-thirds of the way through. But do you want to know what’s going to happen next every minute in that movie? Yes. And that’s the only rule.
Somebody gave me a copy of Robert McKee’s Story. I said, “This is like trying to understand a human being by looking at DNA.” Maybe we could put the McKee book on the shelf, and right next to it could be the Leslie Dixon book, which would be a flyer saying “Do they want to turn the page?” That would be my screenwriting manual, and we could put his four-hundred-page tome next to it.
Erin Brockovich
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY Steven Soderbergh
SCREENPLAY BY Susannah Grant
PRODUCERS: Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, and Stacey Sher
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Jersey Films
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY Thomas Newman
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY Edward Lachman
FILM EDITING BY Anne V. Coates
CASTING BY Margery Simkin
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY Philip Messina
ART DIRECTION BY Christa Munro
SET DECORATION BY Kristen Toscano Messina
COSTUME DESIGN BY Jeffrey Kurland
MAJOR AWARDS
ACADEMY AWARDS: Julia Roberts—Actress
GOLDEN GLOBES: Julia Roberts—Actress
BAFTA AWARDS: Julia Roberts—Actress
SAG AWARDS: Julia Roberts—Actress; Albert Finney—Supporting Actor
CAST
Julia Roberts…ERIN BROCKOVICH
Albert Finney…ED MASRY
Aaron Eckhart…GEORGE
Marg Helgenberger…DONNA JENSEN
Peter Coyote…KURT POTTER
Cherry Jones…PAMELA DUNCAN
Jamie Harrold…SCOTT
Mimi Kennedy…LAURA AMBROSINO
Tracey Walter…CHARLES EMBRY
Veanne Cox…THERESA DALLAVALE
Gina Gallego…MS. SANCHEZ
Conchata Ferrell…BRENDA
Erin Brockovich-Ellis…JULIA THE WAITRESS
BUSINESS DATA
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $51 million
RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2000
U.S. GROSS: $125.6 million
FOREIGN GROSS: $132.3 million
REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
“Director Steven Soderbergh has blown a great opportunity to make the movie that the real Erin Brockovich calls for. Susannah Grant’s by-the-numbers screenplay sees the characters as markers on a storyboard rather than flesh-and-blood humans.”
—ROGER EBERT, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
“Writer Susannah Grant and director Steven Soderbergh, while recognizing the Cinderella aspects of the true tale they are telling—there’s even a love scene in which this ex-beauty-queen-turned-activist gets to wear her crown—also manage to keep valid the everyday aspect of the story without getting bogged down in earnestness or resorting to shrill preaching.”
—BRIDGET BRYNE, BOX OFFICE
“On paper, the story of Erin Brockovich might seem smugly pat—knee-jerk anti-corporate. But the director, Steven Soderbergh, keeps the menace vague, the horror intangible.”
—DAVID EDELSTEIN, SLATE
“An exhilarating tale…. Well done…Erin Brockovich is everything that ‘inspirational’ true-life stories should be and rarely are.”
—TODD McCARTHY, VARIETY