Sabrina Dhawan isn’t the only Columbia student to turn a class project into a produced feature. It was 1988 when Scott B. Smith, then twenty-five years old, found himself confronting a due date for screenwriting class. Unfortunately, he didn’t get registered in time for the beginning of the term, so the class had already started and he had some catching up to do. “I needed something immediately, and I wanted a dramatic opening,” he remembers. He quickly conjured up a scene involving a small-town sheriff who commits some murders to cover up his own guilt in a small crime.
A decade later, that scene from Smith’s first assignment in his first and only screenwriting class had evolved into a bestselling novel, a lucrative screenwriting deal, and a major studio film: A Simple Plan.
The film opened some six years after Smith’s manuscript became a hot Hollywood property. Two studios, several stars, and a parade of directors came and went, but somehow Smith hung on, becoming the only writer ever credited on the project, from book to screen credit. Along the way, A Simple Plan evolved from a gruesome thriller of a novel into a film that turned out to be something closer to tragedy, quite different from the book.
In the bargain, Smith also got a crash course in screenwriting. Other than his Columbia class, he began the development process with no screenwriting experience. By the time he was finished, he was able to hang in with accomplished directors and actors, defending the script. Yet the film that resulted was a puzzle: It got generally good reviews and earned Oscar nominations for Smith and Billy Bob Thornton, but never found an audience, grossing less than $17 million at the box office.
The story’s evolution was slow; Smith was working from his own novel—which had become a bestseller—and his early screenplay drafts showed it. One draft, from October 1994, follows the book quite closely. It begins with a voice-over narration by Hank Mitchell, who recounts his childhood on an Ohio farm as the younger of two brothers, his years at college, his accounting degree, and his marriage to his college sweetheart, Sarah. Hank’s elder brother, Jacob, was planning to take over the family farm, we learn, but debts piled up, their parents died in a car accident, and the farm was sold. As the story opens, Jacob is making a living doing odd jobs; Hank keeps the books at the local feed mill, Sarah works at the town library, and they have a baby on the way.
One New Year’s Eve, Hank and Jacob make their annual trip to their parents’ grave, along with Jacob’s friend Lou, the town drunk. On their way home, a fox darts in front of Jacob’s truck on a farm road, causing an accident. The men follow the fox into the woods and discover a small plane. The pilot is dead, but there is a duffel bag in the back—and inside the bag is $4.4 million in hundred-dollar bills. At first Hank wants to return the money, but Lou talks him into keeping it. They agree that Hank will hold the money, and if nobody comes looking for it by spring, they’ll split it three ways and leave town.
Yet the brothers’ plan starts to unravel almost immediately. The local sheriff, Carl Jenkins, happens by as they’re still near the woods, and as Hank nervously explains why they’re stopped, Jacob wanders over and asks, “Did you tell him about the plane?” Hank splutters that they’d heard a plane with engine trouble in the distance, and after Carl leaves, Hank chews out Lou and Jacob for being so stupid.
When Hank tells Sarah about the money, she warns him to return a half million dollars to the plane, so that when the plane is found, the site will appear undisturbed. Hank brings Jacob with him back to the farm road, but while Hank is at the plane, a farmer comes by on a snowmobile, hunting fox. Jacob panics and hits the farmer with a tire iron. Hank thinks the farmer is dead, so he decides to make his death look like a snowmobile accident. Hank carries the body off—but the farmer regains consciousness, so Hank decides to smother him rather than admit what’s happened and risk jail. Jacob wants to turn himself in but agrees to keep silent when Hank explains that he, not Jacob, really killed the man.
Then Sarah happens upon a news item at the library about a pair of brothers who kidnapped a girl and received $4.4 million in ransom. Sarah is thrilled, because the clipping says the ransom was paid in unmarked bills. Then Lou comes to Hank’s door in the middle of the night, demanding some of the money. Hank refuses, insisting they stick to their plan, but Lou threatens to tell the sheriff who killed the farmer (by now Jacob has told him what really happened). Hank is cornered—and in the middle of the confrontation Sarah goes into labor.
In the recovery room, after giving birth to a baby girl, Sarah tells Hank to trick Lou into “confessing” the murder, and to tape the conversation so that Lou won’t be able to blackmail Hank. Hank gets Jacob to agree to help, on the condition that Hank will let him use the money to buy their parents’ old farm. Hank knows they’ll be caught if Jacob ever goes back to the farm, but agrees anyway.
Hank tells Lou he’s decided they should split the money now, and the three go to Lou’s house to celebrate. Jacob helps Hank tape Lou. Hank plays the tape for Lou, warning him that if it came to Hank’s word against Lou’s, nobody would believe Lou. Furious, Lou threatens Hank with a shotgun. Jacob kills Lou with his hunting rifle. Lou’s wife runs to the bedroom, grabs a pistol, and shoots at Hank, and Hank has to kill her with Lou’s shotgun. Panicked, Hank calls Sarah, who tells him to lure their next-door neighbor up to the bedroom, shoot him, and make it look like Lou caught Nancy in bed with the neighbor. Hank follows the scheme and kills the neighbor in cold blood. Jacob wants to turn himself in, and with the police on the way, Hank shoots Jacob with the shotgun.
With Jacob dead, Hank seems to be home free—until Carl, the sheriff, asks him to come and meet an FBI agent who is searching for a lost plane. The agent claims that the plane was carrying money from an armored truck robbery, but Sarah becomes suspicious that he’s actually the surviving kidnapper, looking for his brother and the ransom. Sarah confirms the worst, but too late; Hank’s already committed to go with Carl and the FBI agent to search for the plane. Hank sneaks one of Carl’s guns and goes with them to the farm road. When Carl finds the plane, Hank tries to warn him that the agent is a killer, but the agent kills Carl. Hank survives by killing the agent.
Again, it seems like Hank is home free, until he learns that the real FBI agents on the case have recorded the serial numbers of the hundred-dollar bills—the money is marked after all. Then Sarah tells him that she just spent one of the bills to buy champagne. Hank goes to the convenience store to steal the bill. When the clerk resists, Hank fights the man and hacks him to death with a hatchet. An old woman happens by, and he has to slaughter her, too. He returns home and burns the money. Hank and Sarah return to their lives, trying to pretend they’re like everyone else, living with the knowledge of all they did—and that it was for nothing.
With its violent story set within a wholesome American neighborhood, it’s easy to look at A Simple Plan as a morality play with political overtones. Smith, however, says he had no such thing in mind. “Everyone always talks about the book and the movie being about greed and money, but for me it was always about not getting caught. Having done something that initially seemed like a small transgression—compared to what he ends up doing—[Hank’s actions play out] almost like a Watergate scenario, where you do worse and worse crimes to cover up the initial crime.”
In fact, Smith calls his original thriller a “potboiler.” After finishing his MFA at Columbia, he’d moved to New Orleans to write, and when he needed to make some money, he went back to his old screenwriting assignment. The scene he’d written for class, he recalled, was the scene where Lou, his wife, the neighbor, and Jacob are all killed. At first he thought of the scene as the opening of a screenplay, but at that point he didn’t know what the story was. “I needed something immediate, and I wanted a dramatic opening, and that’s what it was,” he said. But he did know that he wanted the story to feel inevitable, even tragic, with each step leading inexorably to the next. “I definitely wanted that feeling, from the beginning, with the fox running in front of the truck. It’s that weird combination of chance and fate, which I found very intriguing, and I wanted that to come across in the film…. [That sense of] things clicking into place, carrying the story forward—I definitely wanted [that] to come across.”
The Ohio winters of his own childhood gave him a key to the story’s atmosphere, “this kind of low, gray sky, this flatness and this grayness that I wanted to permeate the whole book.”
Smith spent a year and a half weaving a story about the events before and after that original murder scene. At that stage, he was thinking only of a book, not even dreaming of a movie. In 1992, he landed a book deal with publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, but A Simple Plan wasn’t a hot property in the publishing world—at least not yet.
“Actually, the success of the book was very much powered by Hollywood’s interest,” said Smith. “My deal with Knopf for the hardcover was a very modest first-novel advance. Then, when Mike Nichols showed an interest in it, suddenly the sales for the foreign rights were so much larger than what I’d gotten for my domestic advance.”
Nichols optioned the book in the fall of 1992, a full year before it was scheduled for publication, in a deal worth $1.1 million. Nichols was so enthusiastic that he put up $250,000 of his own money, with Savoy Pictures committed to the rest. Smith would get $150,000 against $350,000 to adapt the story.
Smith had pulled off the rare writer’s hat trick—selling the book, selling the screen rights, and securing a deal to write the screenplay—far beyond the then-twenty-seven-year-old’s expectations. “I was happy with the modest book deal,” he remembers. “I didn’t envision what happened in any way at all. It was all just good fortune.”
By the time the book became a bestseller, Smith’s onetime school project had become one of the most sought-after properties in Hollywood, with actors and directors lining up to get involved. Smith began a new career as a screenwriter, though not without some trepidation.
“The funny thing is, I’m kind of a solitary person, and when I first decided to write the screenplay I was horrified by the idea of doing anything like collaboration. It just seemed like a horrible experience, but I really ended up enjoying it.”
By his own account, though, his first draft for Nichols was “just horrible.” He recalled Nichols telling him to “transfer the book to screenplay form. I really had no idea what I was doing, and I think he took one look at [the result] and decided it would be best if he wasn’t involved with the project.”
Smith recounted all this with self-deprecating humor, but in fact no one would walk away from such a property simply because of a first draft by a novelist and first-time screenwriter, no matter how bad it was. Agents often hold out for the triple-dip of a book deal/rights deal/screenwriting deal, and if the property is in great enough demand, a studio and producer will pony up for all three pieces, even if they expect that first draft to be horrible. Jerry Bruckheimer Films, for example, gave Mark Bowden a shot at adapting his Black Hawk Down, almost certainly expecting to “burn off” that obligation and put another writer on it. It’s just another cost of doing business. If the script turns out good, all the better.
In fact, Nichols’s departure from A Simple Plan prompted a bitter lawsuit from Savoy. Nichols wanted to direct another novel adaptation, All the Pretty Horses, though he was willing to remain on A Simple Plan as a producer. Savoy wanted Nichols to do A Simple Plan first. Happily for Smith, though, the next director in line was Ben Stiller.
“Ben really taught me how to write a script,” said Smith. “I don’t know if he ever explicitly said it, but by imagining the script as a verbal description of a movie, the movie that I wanted the book to be. That’s very simple, but it really was the key to everything for me—just imagining what was on the page. I was shortchanging the visual in my script, concentrating on dialogue, which I imagine is a very common first-time screenwriter’s mistake, and to suddenly just do it visually opened up everything for me.”
The drafts Smith wrote for Stiller basically followed the same thriller plotline as the book. Then, once again, the project fell apart. Stiller wanted Ethan Hawke to play Hank, but Savoy signed Nicolas Cage to a $4 million pay-or-play deal. Frustrated at the casting and budget problems, Stiller dropped out.
Savoy was determined to push ahead with the project quickly, though. Various directors were approached, including Sam Raimi, but John Dahl got the nod. Dahl was to do his own minimal rewrite, Cage would star as Hank, and there was talk of Patricia Arquette playing Sarah, but that, too, came to naught. Eventually, Savoy Pictures itself was dissolved and its assets, including A Simple Plan, were sold off. Paramount bought the rights in the fall of 1995. Somehow, though, Smith was never replaced as the writer.
“I was very lucky, absurdly lucky really, given how many times the script changed hands. I kept waiting for someone to wake up and realize that maybe I was the problem, get rid of me,” he laughed.
As time went on, though, Smith’s long-term involvement proved an advantage. “I was the one link from the beginning. I was the one person who knew all the drafts, and when [a new idea] came up—“Why don’t we do that?”—I’d been there three times already and I could say why not.”
The years of development gave Smith time to hone his screenwriting skills, too, following Stiller’s think-visually advice. In the original story, for example, Hank and Jacob’s boyhood home had been demolished, and their visit to the site is a trip to an empty field. Smith liked the blankness of the image, but he also explained that “in the book, you’re inside the character’s head and you can see what was there. The idea of this erasure of their whole childhood, for me, was more moving than that house that’s slowly falling down. But when you just see the characters you don’t have all that past, unless they’re talking about it.” In the later draft and the film the farmhouse still stands and becomes one of the film’s most important images.
In early drafts, Smith even tried turning Hank’s thoughts into fantasy sequences, where the audience would see Hank’s imagined idea of what would happen next. Then the story would jump back in time and we would see what really happened. “It was an attempt to get Hank’s subjective experience onto the screen. It also just seemed fun to me, probably naively. It’s a kind of film-school ‘Wow, look what we can do’ idea. But I don’t know if it really would have worked.”
When Paramount acquired the rights, Scott Rudin came aboard as the producer. Rudin, known for being as brilliant as he is difficult, began to pressure Smith to find more depth in his story. “At the time I probably didn’t recognize it,” remembers Smith, “but he’s very rewarding to work with, because he’s very pushy, and pushy in a way that I think my story needed to go. He wanted more emotion. I can visualize his note in the margin—‘more emotion’—in the scene out at the farmhouse. So I was constantly trying to find ways that would twist things up another notch between Hank and Jacob.”
Rudin pushed Smith to make even small details more dramatic. The discovery of the plane, for example, is simple in the book and the early draft, but in the later draft, and in the film, the plane is covered with snow, and as Lou and Hank walk through the snow the simmering tensions between them lead to a half-bantering argument. Lou throws a snowball—which knocks loose a thin sheet of snow and reveals the plane. Not only is this a more dramatic scene, it fits perfectly with Smith’s original idea of small, inevitable steps leading to tragedy.
Most important, Rudin focused on changing the placement and manner of Jacob’s death. For a time, Rudin thought that Jacob should kill himself. He was concerned that the audience would reject Hank if he killed his brother, Smith recalled. “There was a lot of pressure to make Hank seem like a nicer guy.” (Score another notch for “relatable.”) It was a question that would dog the production until Sam Raimi returned years later. “I told Paramount that we would understand him at every step of the way,” explained Raimi. “I’m trying never to create a situation in the film where he leaves us behind and we look at him objectively, saying, ‘Why the hell did he do that?’” Raimi relished the challenge of getting the audience to bond with Hank, so that “they know exactly what he’s thinking at every moment and they can sin with him. They can take the money with him. They’ll make the decision with him to commit that sin. They’ll say, ‘Come on, take the money, you idiot.’ And then he’ll take the money. And then they’ll be guilty, and their fate is bound up with his from that moment on.”
Eventually, though, Rudin and Smith solved the problem of Jacob’s murder with a new ending: Hank would still kill Jacob, but only reluctantly, and not until Hank returns to the plane with Carl and the FBI agent. This proved a crucial change, forcing Smith to move the focus away from the Hank/Sarah relationship and toward the two brothers.
Smith had always seen Hank as being pulled in two directions, torn between the ruthless, intelligent Sarah and Jacob’s simple morality. As the story evolved, Sarah became less of a Lady Macbeth figure, guiding Hank’s murders; more and more, Hank came to drive the action, coming up with most of his ideas on his own. As a result, one of the film’s strengths is that Hank’s illusions are stripped away as he plunges deeper into darkness, and he learns a series of terrible truths, most of them from Jacob.
With Rudin urging him on, Smith added a twist to the brothers’ visit to their old farm: Jacob reveals that their father lost the farm because of Hank’s college debts. In effect, Jacob’s future was sacrificed for Hank’s. In another, later scene, which Smith and Raimi had to fight to keep in the film, Jacob also reveals that their father killed himself, making it look like an accident so they could collect his life insurance. The college-educated Hank may think of himself as the smart one, explained Smith, “but Jacob’s the one who really knows what’s going on. Jacob’s much closer to the parents, he knows all the family secrets.”
Smith and Raimi eventually had to argue to keep the scene in the film. For Raimi, it was a crucial moment, because for him the film was the story of “two brothers discovering the love they have for each other.” He credited longtime Paramount Studios chief Sherry Lansing for supporting his decision to preserve the scene.
Of course, Hank is morally oblivious, too; Jacob, who seems like a loser, has more moral sense than anyone in the story. This leads to one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, when after Lou’s murder, a depressed, drunken Jacob asks Hank: “Do you ever feel evil?”
Smith had struggled for a long time to find a way to show the weight of Jacob’s guilt. “We went through a lot of bad ways to do it, like showing Jacob in church. This was the good way. Hank is anxious and fearful about the possibility again of getting caught, but he isn’t thinking about the implications. He’s thinking of his body rather than his soul, I guess you could say.”
The shooting script followed that with a scene that didn’t make it onto the screen—one of Smith’s few regrets about the finished film. In the scene, Sarah tells Hank they should have Jacob over more often. It seems like a warm moment until she adds, “If he’s gotta drink, I’d rather he did it here than somewhere else.”
“She’s thinking very coldly,” said Smith. “There’s that push again, where Hank is torn between his loyalties to his wife and his brother. I just like that feeling of Hank being pulled in two different directions.”
Even with the weight of these scenes and others added onto their relationship, Hank is eventually forced to kill Jacob—but the scene has a further twist that makes the killing heartbreaking, and the hatchet murders that were the story’s original climax were cut.
While Rudin was working with Smith, he was also lining up his stars: Bill Paxton to play Hank, Billy Bob Thornton as Jacob, and Bridget Fonda as Sarah. John Boorman was slated to direct, and the film was nearing production when Paramount stopped it over a budget dispute. Boorman left the project.
Then, finally, Sam Raimi signed on to direct—and Smith’s new story nearly went out the window. “When [Raimi] first signed on,” Smith recalled, “he wanted to go back to the earlier draft of the script. He wanted to make a real thriller. I think that’s what excited him about the script. And Billy Bob Thornton was already attached, and his part is so much more interesting in the later draft that he had really no interest in going back. So for a while we went back and forth, trying to make a hybrid of the two, and it didn’t work at all, so he resigned himself to doing the later draft.”
By Raimi’s own account, he was able to “push it in a few places where I felt I needed the suspense, back to what I liked about the script and the book,” but the film is some of Raimi’s best and subtlest work. Smith, for one, wasn’t surprised by the outcome. “I knew immediately from talking to him that he got the story and he wanted to tell the story in a way that was appropriate. I think when people heard Sam Raimi they thought [there’d be] a lot of fancy camera movement or something, which is more appropriate for horror movies. He didn’t do that at all. He was very interested in telling it simply and straightforwardly.”
Remembering the book and the early draft he had read, Raimi tried at first to restore the original ending, with its convenience-store hatchet murders. But he soon came to side with Smith against it, even in the face of pressure from the studio to put it back in.
“After you’ve made that change so that it’s about the brothers,” said Smith, “and he’s killed his brother, I really felt strongly that the movie was over then…To have him go off and do that very elaborate scene, a very violent scene, in the liquor store, [would] lose people.”
Jacob’s new importance came at the expense of Sarah’s role, but she still has one gem of a scene, a devastating monologue where she lays out her dissatisfaction with the life they’re living. This, too, was a shift from Smith’s original characters. “In the book, it was Hank showing much more self-awareness, thinking to himself that they’re talking about how they can always burn the money, but it isn’t really true, because once they’ve started envisioning their lives in a new way, their old lives, which they were formerly content with, suddenly seemed unlivable.”
In the film, someone had to actually say as much, not just think it. The scene fell to Sarah—“It was a way of giving Sarah a moment, [when] she was fast losing all her other moments”—but it also gave Hank yet another terrible truth to discover.
Despite the years and many drafts it took for Smith’s story to reach the screen, the film wound up retaining the same tragic sense of inevitability and bleak atmosphere Smith had wanted from the beginning. Smith found the film “a little slower” than the novel, “but it has more emotional depth.” For a first-time writer, the process of adapting his own story was an extraordinary experience for Smith, complete with on-the-job training in screenwriting from an array of major Hollywood talents: Mike Nichols, Ben Stiller, Scott Rudin, John Boorman, and Sam Raimi, not to mention Billy Bob Thornton. Smith found them “amazing people to collaborate with. No ego involvement, an interest in really telling the story in the best possible fashion, throwing out ideas, and if the ideas don’t work, they don’t clutch at them because they’re their ideas, and that allowed me to be the same way.”
Raimi had fond words for Smith. “He’s a gentleman, he’s a man of great endurance and patience, and we wouldn’t have a movie without him. So many different people tried to push and pull it in so many different directions, but he stuck with his vision, and that’s really what we have on film here.”
As it happened, a decade would pass before Smith published another book. His novel The Ruins appeared in 2006, earning Smith a scolding in print from Stephen King for his long absence and reviews less rapturous than those for A Simple Plan. The Ruins was more of a fantasy-horror story than A Simple Plan. But once again, Smith seemed to be on the road to a major feature: Two years before, his old friend Ben Stiller had made a preemptive deal for the rights. And Smith was assigned to adapt the script.
Welcome back to Hollywood.
The Hours
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY Stephen Daldry
SCREENPLAY BY David Hare
NOVEL BY Michael Cunningham
PRODUCERS: Robert Fox and Scott Rudin
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Mark Huffam
PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Paramount Pictures, Miramax Films, and Scott Rudin Productions
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY Philip Glass
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY Seamus McGarvey
FILM EDITING BY Peter Boyle
CASTING BY Patsy Pollock and Daniel Swee
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY Maria Djurkovic
ART DIRECTION BY Nick Palmer
SET DECORATION BY Philippa Hart
COSTUME DESIGN BY Ann Roth
MAJOR AWARDS
ACADEMY AWARDS: Nicole Kidman—Actress
GOLDEN GLOBES: Best Picture (Drama); Nicole Kidman—Actress
BAFTA AWARDS: Nicole Kidman—Actress; Philip Glass—Film Music
WGA AWARDS: David Hare—Adapted Screenplay
CAST
Meryl Streep…CLARISSA VAUGHAN
Julianne Moore…LAURA BROWN
Nicole Kidman…VIRGINIA WOOLF
Ed Harris…RICHARD BROWN
Toni Collette…KITTY
Claire Danes…JULIA VAUGHAN
Jeff Daniels…LOUIS WATERS
Stephen Dillane…LEONARD WOOLF
Allison Janney…SALLY LESTER
John C. Reilly…DAN BROWN
Miranda Richardson…VANESSA BELL
Eileen Atkins…BARBARA IN THE FLOWER SHOP
Margo Martindale…MRS. LATCH
Linda Bassett…NELLY BOXALL
Jack Rovello…RICHIE BROWN
Michael Culkin…DOCTOR
Colin Stinton…HOTEL CLERK
George Loftus…QUENTIN BELL
Charley Ramm…JULIAN BELL
Sophie Wyburd…ANGELICA BELL
Carmen De Lavallade…CLARISSA’S NEIGHBOR
Christian Coulson…RALPH PARTRIDGE
Daniel Brocklebank…RODNEY
Lyndsay Marshal…LOTTIE HOPE
BUSINESS DATA
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $25 million
RELEASE DATE: December 18, 2002
U.S. GROSS: $41.6 million
FOREIGN GROSS: $66 million
REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
“The Hours is exquisitely written, graced with a gift for elusive emotions and an effortless ability to delineate lives…. A splendid film.”
—KENNETH TURAN, LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Richly layered, deliberately paced, dealing with difficult emotions and life decisions, it feels like a moody wintry afternoon…. A powerful adaptation of a complex work of fiction.”
—CLAUDIA PUIG, USA TODAY
“Bathe—soak, more like—in the voluptuous sadnesses of Mss. Woolf, Brown, and Vaughan, delineated with such refinement by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep…”
—LISA SCHWARZBAUM, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY