When Roger Avary received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction he probably ran into that annoying interviewer on his way out of the Shrine Auditorium. “Hey Roger! You just won the Academy Award. Where are you going now??” Well, Roger’s appropriate answer should have been from the nineties theme park ad campaign, “I’m going to Disneyland!” But that’s not Roger. In my imagination he said, “You know, I’m going home to start writing an epic, kickass, hyperviolent, balls-to-the-wall sequel to Phantasm for my friend Don Coscarelli to direct!”
With Hollywood at his feet after his Oscar win, Roger Avary had his choice of working on multiple big-money studio projects. He was the new kid in town and everybody wanted him to work on their projects. Instead, right after the awards, Roger invited me out for a Mexican lunch in Manhattan Beach and humbly and graciously asked if I would allow him to write the next Phantasm for me to direct. I tried to talk him out of it. I told him that our most recent Phantasm III had been tossed to the videocassette junk heap by Universal Pictures, and there was just no known business model for making a studio sequel after the previous sequel was sent direct-to-video. Roger was not to be deterred. He told me about how a decade previously, in the Survival Quest editing room, I had once told him and Scott Magill an idea for a Phantasm sequel in which Reggie set out into a wasteland decimated by the Tall Man, looking for his friend Mike. He wanted to take that idea and go crazy with it.
Roger had this incredible notion of an alien virus unleashed by the Tall Man that was 100 percent fatal. The Tall Man would be ensconced underneath Utah’s Great Salt Lake, mining the Mormon Mausoleum—where every Mormon going all the way back to Joseph Smith was interred—for corpses. Millions of them! Salt Lake City would be ground zero of the “plague zone” and the intrepid Reggie would enter in search of Mike. He would drive an armored “Battlecuda” and be accompanied by his loyal sidekick, a squirrel monkey named Titi. On a parallel track, one badass military strike team commando, Colonel Heckleman, has received orders with his “S-Company” (S = Suicide) to enter the plague zone, find the Tall Man’s lair, and cross into his dimension and detonate something called “the Quantum Phase Device.” In the plague zone, S-Company gets in deep trouble and Reggie bails them out and they team up. Massive mayhem ensues.
It took Roger just three months to craft his epic script and I had a blast visiting at his house and encouraging him as he worked. His ability with creating dialog scenes just amazed me. He even gave the Tall Man his own inscrutable language, which he cheekily described in the script as sounding like Vietnamese spoken backwards. In reading his brilliant final script, I found it true to the original films while being original, epic, and violent in its own right.
In our minds we believed only one company had a real shot at getting Phantasm 1999 funded. The first person Roger sent the script to was Bob Weinstein at Miramax. When Miramax dismissively passed on Phantasm 1999, I know Roger was shocked and dismayed. Roger had just won an Academy Award for cowriting their breakout hit Pulp Fiction, and he expected more loyalty and respect from them. Miramax had a reputation for being ruthless and unscrupulous; their actions in this regard spoke volumes.
We had one other realistic shot at getting the film made. A scrappy independent company expressed serious interest from the get-go. It was strongly suggested that if Roger and I came to that year’s Cannes Film Festival in France, we could seal the deal right there on the Croisette. We paid our own travel costs and in many ways it was a terrific trip. We were able to hang out with Roger’s longtime pal from his video store days, John Langley, who was the co-creator of one of the most-watched TV documentary series of all time in Cops. Roger also introduced me to his star from his great film Killing Zoe, French film actress and director Julie Delpy, and that was a genuine delight.
On a sunny afternoon in a quiet café in Cannes, we made a deal with the big boss of the company and shook hands on it. He told us we would reconvene on the phone in one week and firm up the terms of the deal. Roger and I were elated. Our trip had been worth it, mission accomplished!
One week to the day later, back in Los Angeles, I opened the Hollywood Reporter to read a story featuring the big boss, in which he stated that he had just closed a lucrative deal to sell his company for an astronomical price and he and his entire executive staff would be resigning immediately. It took awhile for the shock to wear off and the news to sink in, but something became immediately clear. These guys shook our hands and looked us right in the eye and told us they would be making Phantasm 1999 and yet they had no intention to do so. I never did figure out why they would summon us across the world to do this, but in any case it pretty much was the death knell for Phantasm 1999.