8
Slings and Arrows
Thus far, screenwriters have illuminated what could broadly be termed the predictable obstacles associated with their profession. Beyond these challenges, however, lie minefields laden with unpredictable obstacles. Some writers will encounter each of these pitfalls during their careers, and some fortunate souls will avoid them all. But every person who attempts a career as a Hollywood writer needs to be aware of how bad things can get; better to learn survival skills and never need them than to need them and never learn them.
The topic of being fired has been discussed previously, but in this chapter scribes reveal the breadth of this unfortunate reality, describing the regularity with which writers are replaced as well as the politics associated with being asked to revise another person’s work. This unflinching survey of life on the Hollywood assembly line leads directly into one of the thorniest subjects in the world of screenwriting: arbitration. Facilitated by the Writers Guild of America, arbitration is the process by which the multiple writers who contributed to a given screenplay contend for screen credit on the resulting film. As David S. Ward notes in his startling remarks about The Mask of Zorro (1998), arbitration matters because the financial and professional stakes involved are quite serious.
Even more serious are the catastrophes that befall unlucky projects, either on the way to the screen or once they reach theaters. Some screenplays aren’t fated to become films, and some films aren’t fated to become successes. Writers including John August and Richard Rush describe projects that spiraled into disappointment, and William Goldman uses the story of Year of the Comet (1992) to underscore that paying audiences are capricious about the stories they embrace. If a writer of Goldman’s experience and stature can get blindsided by an unexpected flop, such a fate can (and probably will) befall any screenwriter at some point in his or her career.
Finally, this chapter explores the harshest obstacle of all, the one that’s virtually impossible to confront head-on because it so often manifests behind closed doors: prejudice. Whether ageism, homophobia, racism, or sexism, the small-minded preconceptions that infect every other aspect of society infect Hollywood as well.
The Assembly Line
JONATHAN LEMKIN: I had a funny experience a few years back, where I got called in for a production polish. The studio had a big director, and they had a spec script written by somebody who was new to the business. Really good idea, no third act. We were on the edge of getting the movie made, and I wasn’t entirely happy with the third act myself.
I called up the original writer. I said, “I’m not hunting credit. All I’m trying to do is polish this so the studio’s gonna give this guy $30 million to make your movie. Here’s what’s going on with the third act. Help us, because it’s gonna be your movie.” He cursed me out for a while—he was gonna buy the movie back, and “How dare I,” and all this. The movie never got made.
I met him about four years later. We kind of avoided each other, and he finally crossed the room. He said, “Look, I’ve never gotten a phone call like that since, and I am so sorry, because I didn’t know it was the course of business, and I didn’t know that what you were doing was actually incredibly respectful. Nobody makes those phone calls! You made that phone call, and I blew it.”
I’ve been the last writer, I’ve been the first writer—it just happens. It doesn’t make you happy, but you can’t fight the process.
JOHN AUGUST: You’re like the architect, but they’re building the building, and sometimes they decide, “You know what? That’s not quite the building we want. We’re gonna bring in somebody else to design the new gazebo.” I’ve replaced writers and I’ve been replaced. The times it’s gone well have been when everyone’s a grown-up about it.
While it was a really bad and frustrating movie, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was a good experience in that process. I reached a point where I just couldn’t keep working on that movie, and the Wibberleys were brought in to rewrite me. Before they took over, we talked through how the whole movie worked. Ultimately, I came back in and rewrote their draft. We talked through the whole thing again.
We never actually met in person until the premiere. They were seated a row behind me, so we finally got to talk face-to-face. We ended up doing the writers’ commentary together on the DVD, which was fun because we could explain why the movie made no sense at many, many points.
DAVID S. WARD: Sleepless in Seattle demonstrates that a movie can be written by more than one person. There were three of us on it: Jeff Arch, who wrote the original screenplay; Nora Ephron, who directed the movie; and myself. Each of us made significant contributions to the movie. Even though we didn’t write together, that was a real collaborative effort to make that movie what it was.
NORA EPHRON: I think when you’re hired to do a rewrite of a script, you don’t really think that much about respect for other writers. You’re just trying to get the script to work for whoever hired you.
JOHN D. BRANCATO: Toward the end of The Game’s process, we were fired. David Fincher hired another writer, who I actually think improved a few things, and came up with a couple of lines we hadn’t. In that case, it was actually additive rather than subtractive.
ANDREW W. MARLOWE: When I’ve been rewritten, oftentimes I’ve been on the project too long. We’ve reinvented the main character a couple of times, and the main character that I’m dealing with now is haunted by the ghosts of the previous main characters, so there’s no clarity in my mind as to what the main character should be doing in a particular scene. As we all know, structure comes out of what your main character wants. When you lose that clarity, there’s not much you can do, except bring in somebody else.
ROBERT MARK KAMEN: Genius in Hollywood equals how much money you make for the studio, so for twenty minutes after The Karate Kid, I was a genius. Several of my friends came to power as senior executives at Warner Bros., and they said to me, “You can write fast, you work really well with directors—we have a great job for you. Come work for us.”
In the eighties and nineties, Warner Bros. put out all these big action movies, so I came to work as the in-house guy. I’m taking other people’s stuff—and they’ve worked really, really hard—and I’m saying, “That sucks. I’m gonna change that.” And because I had the studio mandate, I could change it, kind of like a script assassin. For instance, when I got The Fugitive, the movie started in one place and it went all the way across the country. I said, “No, no, no, the movie shouldn’t be that. The movie should be, like, on a racecar track. It should start out in Chicago, and it should go all the way around and come back to Chicago.” And they said, “Okay.”
So I’m doing all these pictures at Warner, and I was sitting on a plane flying back from L.A. to New York. I sit down, and a guy next to me opens a script to read. I said, “Oh, are you in the movie business?” He said, “Yes, I’m a writer.” I said, “Me, too.” He said, “Oh, my name is so-and-so,” and he puts his hand out. I said, “My name is Robert Kamen.” He pulls back his hand, and I said, “I rewrote you, didn’t I?” He looked at me with venom, and he said, “Twice.” It was a five-hour flight, and he didn’t talk to me for the rest of the flight.
BILLY RAY: When a rewrite is offered to me, I ask myself three questions. The first question is, “Does it inspire me?” Do I wake up thinking about it, which is the simplest litmus test that I can apply? The second question is, “Is it set in a world that I can write about credibly?” Do I have any knowledge about this world, or is it the sort of world that I can do some investigation into, like the FBI or the New Republic magazine? The third question is, “Is this something I can make better?” That, really, is the most important thing.
Sometimes I’m the fourth or fifth guy that’s brought in on a project. If you’re going to take money to jump into that line, you have to be absolutely certain that you’re going to make that movie not just better, but demonstrably better, because other smart people have tried and failed.
Billy Ray
When you come into a room with a bunch of executives on a rewrite, there’s a pretty fair level of panic in that room, because they know that they have no idea what they’re doing—and yet they have to look like they know what they’re doing. So you walk in, and for that one moment you have a little bit of power, because they’re looking at you, saying, “Will you make us okay?” You can say to them, “It’s gonna be okay. Here are your four drafts. Here’s what’s not working about them. Here’s what I think we can do to make them better, and I know how to do it.” And they all relax.
For just one second, you’re the man. It goes away the second you’re actually writing, and they can start doing their usual studio and producer routines. But for that moment, you do have a little bit of power.
JOE STILLMAN: I was brought on to Shrek because of my animation experience. Even though they had been in the process for about a year and a half, or maybe two years, they were still working from an outline, and fundamental things still needed to be done—such as find a way to make an ogre likable, because ogres are inherently pretty disagreeable. So a lot of what I was doing was character work, and trying to find that love story. I definitely see things that I contributed—thematically as well as dialogue—and that makes me feel good, ’cause I like what the movie is trying to get across.
FRANK DARABONT: You can take enormous pride in a film, whether your name winds up onscreen or not. That I felt I’d made a very solid contribution to Saving Private Ryan takes nothing away from Robert Rodat’s work, and it also takes nothing away from Scott Frank’s work—’cause Scott came in after me and targeted a few areas that needed targeting. Private Ryan was one of those experiences where I remember watching it and thinking, “Damn, this is good, and I’m really proud of what I brought to the movie, but I’m just as proud of what the other writers brought to the movie.” Robert brought something very important to the table to begin with. It was a privilege to work on that script. It was a genius idea. It was a beautifully focused, simple, elegant, potent idea. So to help that process along was awesome.
DANIEL PYNE: When I rewrote The Sum of All Fears, part of the assignment was, “We’re gonna get a younger actor to do this movie, so are you interested?” And I thought, “Yeah, this is a way for me to get into it. I can write a character that Tom Clancy hasn’t written before, that the franchise hasn’t written before.” Even though there was a script that preceded me that was pretty good—Paul Attanasio’s script—I could add something to that by creating this new version of Jack Ryan, by going back before the books start, and taking his history and finding a new character that I could own. It’s hard, though. It’s not an easy process. But usually, by asking the right questions in the first meeting or two, you can ascertain what they like about the script that they have and what they don’t like about the script that they have, and you can decide whether that gives you any breathing room.
DAVID HAYTER: On The Scorpion King, which was the prequel to the Mummy movies, Universal called me up about three weeks before they started shooting, and asked me if I would take a look at the script, because they weren’t satisfied. So I did, and I gave them a sort of a two-page proposal. I said, “Look, I would do this and do this and do this.” And so they said, “Okay, great, we want you to do all of that. You can’t change any of the locations or the sets or the characters or the basic course of the story, because that’s all set up and storyboarded. But you can change the dialogue, and you can change the events, as long as they take place in the same locations.” I was like, “Okay, well, that’s great…” And they’re like, “We’re shooting in three weeks. Go.”
Name Value
LARRY COHEN: When you take their money and sell them your material, they have the right to change it if they want to. I hope they won’t. I hope if they do change it that it’ll be a positive change. I’m certainly not saying that no one’s ever improved upon anything that I wrote. Probably 90 percent of the things that I have written, I have gotten sole credit on, so I’m pretty unusual. That doesn’t mean there weren’t changes, but they weren’t significant enough changes for me to have to give up the credit to somebody else. So I’m happy to take credit for somebody else’s work if it turned out to be good. Why not? What am I gonna do, make a disclaimer? “That was a good scene, but I didn’t write it?” So God bless—thank you very much. Of course you have to take the bad with the good.
JOHN AUGUST: Sometimes when there are multiple writers on a project, you go through a process called arbitration. That’s to figure out who deserves the “Written by” credit on a movie. It’s all handled by the Writers Guild, and it’s an incredibly screwed-up system that’s probably the best system that we can manage given all the variables involved. Arbitration is handled by an anonymous, one-time-only panel of three different screenwriters who read all the drafts and figure out who should get credit. I’ve been through arbitration a couple of times where I was trying to get credit, and it’s not Law & Order. It’s not a legal proceeding, but you’re trying to explain in your arbitration statement exactly why you deserve the credit you think you should get, and talk the panel through the logic of why this other writer deserves a different credit.
GERALD DiPEGO: Sometimes the statements are so intense that you know there’s a bloody situation going on. You know there are people who feel outraged.
PAUL SCHRADER: I didn’t arbitrate on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, because Spielberg said to me, “There’s nothing left of your script,” and he was very anxious to get the credit. That was fine with me. I thought, “Well, I’ll be a nice guy. I won’t arbitrate, and he’ll be my friend.” The truth was he resented me all of the time for even saying that I had written the script. So when the next opportunity came, which was The Last Temptation of Christ—Jay Cocks had written for that, and Marty wanted to give Jay a second-position credit—I said, “Marty, thank God for arbitration. We don’t have to have this discussion. We can remain friends. Take it off the table. Let the WGA decide. This is not something we should talk about.” Ultimately, I got the sole credit and Jay didn’t get credit, and my relationship with Marty stayed the same. So I wish I had just arbitrated with Steve. Probably would’ve been cleaner and better.
DAVID S. WARD: On The Mask of Zorro, I rewrote probably 85 percent of the dialogue, and I didn’t get screen credit on it. It was a huge deal with the Writers Guild; it was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. The director, Martin Campbell, was upset about it, and I was upset about it. The guild said, “Dialogue doesn’t count.” And I said, “Wait a minute. If people are saying different things—and in many cases because they’re saying different things, they’re doing different things—why does that not count?”
So to me, it’s a very flawed system. You have no idea, really, the way it works—you just get a letter saying you either got credit or you didn’t.
The thing about arbitration is it’s important to your career. If the movie does well, that credit translates into money—not only residuals from that movie, but other jobs. People say, “He was involved with that movie. We’ve got a movie he’d probably be very good for based on his involvement in that movie.” Most people know that I worked on Zorro, but in pure monetary terms, not getting credit on that movie probably cost me half a million dollars.
DAVID HAYTER: I was very lucky in the arbitration process to get sole credit on X-Men. Amazing, significant writers had worked on it, so I was very fortunate there. I got what I felt was the proper credit on X2 and Scorpion King. I did not get credit on Hulk, which was fine—it wasn’t really my movie at that point, but I did do a lot of work on it. I can’t speak for everybody’s experiences, but arbitration seems to be a pretty effective process. It seems to me that if you really deserve the credit, you’ll get the credit.
JOHN D. BRANCATO: Catwoman was probably the single worst thing we’ve had an opportunity to work on, other than maybe a Roger Corman film long, long ago. Actually, no—those are better than Catwoman. In that case, I think in the final arbitration there were twenty-eight writers, of which we were writers number fifteen and seventeen, because we’d been fired and rehired on the project. Everybody fought for credit in the same old way. You read the script and think, “Oh, well, this is really terrible, and yet a piece of it is mine.” You never knew. I mean, just from the script, maybe it would have worked. There must have been fifteen arbitration letters from the different writers saying, “Oh, please give me a piece, I should have my name on this.” I wrote one of ’em, with my writing partner, and we prevailed and had a shared credit on screenplay and story. Then I saw the movie, I guess the week after I wrote that letter, at some early screening. Wow, that was depressing.
DENNIS PALUMBO: A writer friend of mine once described screenwriters as “egomaniacs with low self-esteem,” and that’s a great description. It was me when I was a screenwriter, certainly—where on the one hand, you have that hubris that Goethe talked about, where you had to believe that what you wrote was so great everyone needed to read it. And at the very same time, the moment a studio executive or director replaces you, you go, “God, I knew I was crap.”
What arbitration does is it kind of forces a writer to confront what he or she has actually done, what the contribution was. Is the person coming along who wrote behind them better than them? And what does “better” mean? In Hollywood, “better” doesn’t mean anything. If Angelina Jolie accepts the screenplay and then brings in a writer she likes to beef up her character, that doesn’t mean the script becomes “better.” It becomes different.
There is no “better,” because the reasons scripts get rewritten and fooled around with have very little to do with the quality of the writing. They have to do with what’s required.
RONALD SHUSETT: When Dan and I created the first Alien movie, we got net points for giving up the right to write all sequels and prequels. We never lost identification with the series, because on every single Alien sequel it always says, “Alien characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett.” This lasted through the present day, with Alien vs. Predator. And I must say, when they first said, “Alien vs. Predator,” we kinda groaned.
What happened was the director turned to several original ideas that we had written for the first Alien. We overwrote the original script, like most young writers do—there were about twenty-two pages that never even got filmed. Paul Anderson, the director, noted that some of those things could be very valuable for Alien vs. Predator. Fox owned those ideas, so the studio didn’t have to pay us more money—but what was at stake was the credit. So that became an arbitration.
Arbitrators read our original script of twenty-five years earlier and read the shooting draft of Alien vs. Predator, and voted us in as story credit. “Story by Anderson, Shusett, and O’Bannon.” It’s a rarity. The credit was entirely arbitration.
ZAK PENN: When it comes to the issue of credits, I think a lot of my attitude was determined by my first experience, which was Last Action Hero. I felt betrayed. I was pretty angry that we lost credit on our own first screenplay to Shane Black. To defend him a bit, I didn’t really know that this was par for the course, that everyone gets rewritten. But I was shocked when people were applying for credit on a movie that we had thought up. It seemed weird to me.
Because of that experience, I think I’ve been much more cognizant of other writers than many of my peers. I always call people when I’m rewriting their scripts, to talk to them before I take the job. I make sure to let them know. A number of times, I’ve turned down credit on movies, because I felt that the original writers were not getting their fair share. I don’t do that because I’m trying to be a martyr. I just think that’s fair. I often feel like, “You know what? I’m getting paid well for what I do, and there’s someone who wrote this original script who’s much more upset than me. What right do I have to cry over not getting credit?”
Do I think the system is a good system? Not particularly. When someone writes a short story, it says “Based on a short story by,” and then “Screenplay by.” So when an original screenplay is rewritten, why wouldn’t it say “Based on an original screenplay by,” and then “Rewritten by”?
But short of that, I’ve got a lot of credits so I don’t worry about it as much. I have the luxury of not sweating it. And there are times when I kinda don’t want to take credit. If I’ve written a script, and then I’ve been fired and it’s been rewritten by eight other people, if I end up getting screenplay credit on that movie, I’m gonna have to answer for that movie. I still have to answer for Last Action Hero.
The Best Laid Plans
WILLIAM GOLDMAN: I love red wine. I drink red wine every night of my life, thank God. I wrote a movie about red wine called Year of the Comet, and it was written out of blind passion. It’s a thriller about a chase after a legendary bottle of red wine. The movie had gone very well in the shooting, and the first sneak we had was out in California. The opening sequence was a wine tasting in London, and people were hopefully funny and phony and spitting and all that stuff. As I’m sitting there, I watch the audience get up to leave. Now this is a sneak preview—they didn’t pay any money—and in the first five minutes, 50 people left out of probably 250 people.
Zac Penn
They hated us.
We changed the movie, got rid of the tasting.
They still hated us.
They didn’t want to be anywhere around a bottle of red wine.
But who knew? I mean, it was written with great passion. The reason it was called Year of the Comet was that the most legendary year in the history of wine in France was 1811, and a comet went over France that year. The most famous wine at that time was Château Lafitte, and I made up a story of a legendary giant bottle. Well, if you could find one, it would be worth millions of dollars. So I thought, “That’s a good idea.”
It wasn’t! It was a horrible idea!
ALLISON ANDERS: With Four Rooms, there were four filmmakers who were friends trying to do something. It was an exercise for us. We didn’t make it the big thing that it was. We’re not the ones who came up with Bruce Willis and all the stars. We were happy to have them, but originally, it was just gonna be a little teeny-tiny movie. What happened was that we didn’t work hard enough on the script, and part of that was the fact that Miramax wanted to do it immediately. It was turned in as a first draft, and it’s a complicated thing to try to put four stories together. I was like, “Really? We got the deal already, and we’ve only written one draft? Aren’t we gonna work a little bit harder on the script?”
JOHN AUGUST: I came on to do an adaptation of Tarzan at Warner Bros., and the one thing I said to everybody before I went in for my first meeting was, “I really wanna do Tarzan, but set in modern-day Africa—so not khaki-and-pith-helmets Africa, but civil-unrest Africa.” And they said, “That sounds really exciting. Why don’t you do that?” And then three drafts in, they said, “You know what? Maybe we could do a period piece.” So it was essentially a year of my life that I wasted trying to do this version that wasn’t ever gonna get made. It’s another reason why you need to get paid enough to make it worthwhile—if you’re gonna be spinning your wheels, at least you’re getting paid for spinning your wheels.
DAVID HAYTER: I had a very solid relationship with Marvel, having worked on a number of films with them, and I was looking for something to write and direct. They brought up Black Widow, and I knew the character very well from the comic book. So I spent about a year working on the script, and I was extremely happy with it.
Essentially, the story is a young Russian girl’s parents are killed, so she’s given to the KGB to be developed into a super spy. In her early teen years, the Soviet Union crumbles, so they decide to kill her. But at that point, she’s too tough to kill, so she escapes and makes her way to America. Then, years later, we catch up with her in present day. She’s a freelance mercenary, and she’s called back to where she was brought up to face her past. What I tried to do was use the backdrop of the splintered Soviet Empire—a lawless insane asylum with four hundred some odd nuclear missile silos. It was all about loose nukes, and I felt it was very timely and very cool.
Unfortunately, as I was coming up on the final draft, a number of female vigilante movies came out. We had Tomb Raider and Kill Bill, which were the ones that worked, but then we had BloodRayne and Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux. Aeon Flux didn’t open well, and three days after it opened, the studio said, “We don’t think it’s the time to do this movie.”
I accepted their logic in terms of the saturation of the marketplace, but it was pretty painful. I had not only invested a lot of time in that movie, but I had also named my daughter, who was born in that time period, Natasha—after the lead character in Black Widow. I named my daughter after a movie character that I wasn’t working on anymore.
RICHARD RUSH: I had run across a project that fascinated me. It was a nonfiction book about Air America. Air America was the biggest airline in the world, owned and operated by the CIA, with more planes and pilots than all the rest of the airlines combined. Their job was fighting the secret war in Laos, dropping goods and supplies to our allies while they bombed the shit out of our enemies. The whole airline was run on the basis of dirty tricks, because it was a CIA invention.
I researched the screenplay for four or five years, and it’s the best screenplay I ever wrote. Better than The Stunt Man, which is saying a lot because I got an Academy Award nomination for The Stunt Man. I got a commitment from Sean Connery, and other actors were dying to do the second role.
I went to Southeast Asia to scout the locations. I came back with a production that was so well put together, the commanding generals of two countries were willing to bomb any other country I wanted so I could get it on film. To my amazement, someone else had taken over as head of production for the company during my absence. He had gone through the back materials that they owned, read the screenplay, and fell in love with it. He decided he wanted it for himself. They announced to me that he was going to take over the screenplay.
Now there are two absolutely vital rules to observe when you take over a project in the industry. The first one is to fire everybody connected to it, because they will turn out to be your enemies. The second is to territorially urinate on it to make it your own. So he had a new screenplay written. It turned out badly, and he couldn’t cast it. They lingered for a year or two trying to cast this screenplay.
What they had done is terminated me and paid me off. It was a handsome payoff, and there was no way I could reject it. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t even take my name off the screenplay, because if you get more than $400,000 for a screenplay, you’re not allowed to take your name off. As soon as I was out of the picture, Sean Connery left, which I thought was classy. Finally, the head of the studio came to me and said, “Will you do the movie with Sean Connery and Patrick Swayze?” And I said, “I told you about that cast two years ago.” He said, “Patrick’s coming in this weekend. He’s interested. I want you guys to meet.”
I guess the new head of production got wind of that and got desperate. That weekend, he offered the movie to the two actors who did it—at twice their regular salary. It was burned and gone, and I had to live with having my name as co-screenwriter on the bad reviews that ensued.
Richard Rush
MICHAEL WOLK: Something that really made me feel like I was suffocating in a glass box was the fact that I sold three screenplays for considerable sums, and nothing ever happened with them. Nothing. The feeling I got from that was really a deathly feeling of suffocation. It’s like, “In Hollywood, no one can hear you scream.” I think that was one of the motivations for my exodus from Hollywood. I couldn’t deal with the fact that you write something, and it may be really good, and it might be very producible, but it just sits there. I mean, writing is communication, right? If you’re communicating to this little mafia of Hollywood people, and beyond that no one ever gets the story, and you have no right to disseminate that story yourself, it can make you feel as if nobody is listening to you. You are a tree falling in the forest.
Small Minds, Big Obstacles
LINDA VOORHEES: For one pitch, I immediately knew that the executive hated me the minute I walked in—because I was a middle-aged woman from Orange County, dressed like I had just come from the country club. I wasn’t edgy, I wasn’t the cool chick, I wasn’t Goth, I wasn’t the sweet young thing just out of college. It was like, “If she’s not fuckable, then what are we doin’ this meeting for?” That was the expression on his face.
I thought, “Well, he hates me already, so I may as well make him really hate me.” I became like a mass of gravity in that room. You could not get me out if you put dynamite under me. I had a ten-minute pitch. I stretched that into maybe about forty-five minutes. And if he stopped me, I would start over again. You know, I was just gonna torture him.
There is a compartmentalized rejection, and it has to do with gender, and it has to do with age, and it has to do with ethnicity. It’s very subtle, and it’s very unintended. Well-meaning people have a bias that they often aren’t aware of, because they won’t permit themselves to be aware of the bias. No one’s ever gonna fess up to it, and I wouldn’t expect them to.
GUINEVERE TURNER: There’s an incredible need to prove yourself if you’re female, and even vaguely attractive, and also my age. I feel like most successful female screenwriters are at least ten years older than I am, and Lord knows what their war stories are. But also there’s a “lesbo” dynamic that goes on. I did this one pitch with this director, where he was like: “Have you always been a lesbian? What was your first experience with a woman?” And I was like: “What the fuck are we talking about here, dude?” The script wasn’t gay. So this prurient need to know about my gayness comes up a lot, which is just lame and boring.
NORA EPHRON: It’s very hard to get a movie made in Hollywood whether you’re a man or a woman, but it’s harder for women. This is just a fact. Someday I hope it will be different. But you can’t pretend that it’s easy for anyone, except maybe Steven Spielberg. As my friend Sean Daniel often says, “This is not a business for sissies.”
NAOMI FONER: According to our film culture, you’d think everybody’s wife was between twenty-two and thirty-five, and they were all incredibly beautiful, and they never struggled with any of the things that people struggle with. And then they disappeared for some reason—they were sent off to some kind of boot camp—and they became perfect grandmothers. This is garbage. I admire terribly my friend Jamie Lee Curtis, who gets on the cover of a magazine naked, showing people that she has cellulite, and that all those touched-up pictures are touched-up pictures, and she just looks just like them. That’s the truth, and women need to know that. Real people need to be in movies, and when they show up, people respond. They respond in droves. But for some reason, the fantasy makers don’t want much of that to happen.
GUINEVERE TURNER: I feel an incredible pressure and obligation and responsibility to create women characters who are not victims—and if they are victims, telling a raw, true story about victimization. It’s something that I come up against all the time. Something I’m working on right now, all they want to know is why—“Why is she so powerful and great? What happened in her childhood that made her this way?” And I say, “What happened to Jack Bauer that made him the hero of 24? Nothin’. He just is.” Male heroes are just badass, and women are always like, “Well, you know, she was beaten and raped, and then she became a superhero.” I’m like, “What if she’s just awesome for no apparent reason?”
JANE ANDERSON: In The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, the main character is a woman. The studio gave me a green light with Julianne Moore to star, and we hadn’t cast the male part yet, which is a great role but secondary. I remember going from star to star to star—every male star said, “Oh, it’s a great project,” but they turned it down because the film wasn’t about them. Female stars will take anything, because there are so few parts to act that have any kind of quality to them.
I knew we were going to be able to cast a really wonderful male actor, and I did eventually with Woody Harrelson. But halfway through the project, the studio pulled the plug because they were afraid I wouldn’t be able to get a big-name male actor. I found that to be just a stunning example of Hollywood sexism, because if you’re trying to get a go for a film that stars a male lead, and you have your male star in place, you can cast the female secondary part the day before you start shooting!
Jane Anderson
ANTWONE FISHER: If they feel like they can make money from what you have to offer, they don’t care about your race. I also think that there have been opportunities that have been afforded to me because I’m African American. If there’s a story that has African-American people in it, they come to me to say, “This is a cultural thing that the original writer doesn’t understand. Can you help us straighten this out?”
KRISS TURNER: I would say that I have made a career out of being a black female writer. You know, if you have a black female in your sitcom, I’m probably gonna get a call to come in for a meeting. Now that there are hardly any of those shows, I’m more aware of the obstacles. I mean, there were so many black shows in the nineties. I can look through my credits: Cosby; Living Single; Sister, Sister; Bernie Mac.
Even in my feature career, it’s like, “Oh, we have this black sorority movie,” or, “We have this black comedian we wanna do something around.” I’m pretty sure that the next spec I write will be color-blind. If they wanna do it black, they can do it black. If they wanna do it white, they can do it white.
I don’t know how much my movie made, but I think it made $14 million. I don’t think I’m gonna get that movie made again. You know, when we went in, we were stoked. We were like, “Look, you haven’t seen this since How Stella Got Her Groove Back, about a professional woman looking for love. It’s been a while, and let’s do it…” Not big box office. That’s the honest-to-God truth, you know? So I don’t think studios are like, “Oh, let’s get another Something New goin’ on.”
JAMES L. WHITE: The big obstacle that you face is that when you humanize your own people—instead of making caricatures, you’re making characters—Hollywood has a tendency to go, “I don’t know if there’s a market for this.” For me, telling the story of black life is like going to see The Godfather. I didn’t know that much about the mafia or about Italian life, but at the end of two hours and fifty-five minutes of sittin’ in that darkness, Michael Corleone kills seven people, and I was very, very happy for Michael, ’cause he had saved the family. So I said, “If they can do that, I can now write a drama explaining black life.” You know, explaining black life—not hittin’ them over the head with “you evil white people,” but inviting them in and allowing them to spend two hours inside the skin of a black man or a woman, to see what that world is about.
Kriss Turner
JOSE RIVERA: Early in my career, part of the problem with being a Latino writer was being stuck in the clichés of what that meant—and that usually meant you’re gonna write about drugs, gangs, crime, prostitution, maids, that kinda stuff. I think it’s gotten a little bit better. What’s happened in the last couple of years has been a huge influx of really fantastic filmmaking—you know, from Amores Perros to Volver, even Pan’s Labyrinth—that explodes the possibilities of what Latino filmmaking can be about. On the other hand, you know, if you go to the Writers Guild and look up the statistics, it’s still abysmal—the number of Latino writers who are show runners, or who are on staff, or who have deals to make movies.
ARI B. RUBIN: The WGA threw an event about a year ago that I was involved with, called “The 101 Best Screenplays.” It was a great event, and I would say about thirty screenwriters got up on the stage to be celebrated. I was there with a couple of people, and one of them is an agent. He said to me, “You know, that’s some great writing talent on that stage. I hate to say it, but I don’t think more than one of them could still get a job in L.A. today.”
How is it that thirty Academy Award–winning screenwriters could not get a job in L.A. today? There are several elements involved, according to this agent. One is they’ve priced themselves out of the market. And two is that they’re just—what’s the word he used?—“stodgy.” They’re not staying current with the tastes of the audience. I think it’s a matter of, “Are these writers still telling original stories, or are they fitting every script they have into their own formula?” You do see breakthroughs in writers who’ve been around—every now and then, a writer who’s gotten caught in a rut comes up with a great idea.
My father’s an interesting example. There were several films he wrote that I thought were so-so. They weren’t produced. He has multiple homes to support, and he very much writes for a living now, less so than pleasure. Then recently, he came onto a project called The Time Traveler’s Wife, and out of the blue he wrote this script in, I would say, three weeks or a month. It was a really good script. Completely reinvigorated, completely different. If you look back at his life recently, he’s been getting out of a rut in his own life, and that was reflected in his writing.
LARRY COHEN: They say ageism exists in Hollywood, but I haven’t experienced it, because I’m eternally youthful. If you’re excited about what you’re doing, if you have fresh ideas, I personally don’t think age matters. If the script’s good, who cares who wrote it? When you go in for assignments, that’s a different story. If they’re gonna do The Fast and the Furious or something, obviously they’re gonna wanna hire some young guy to write it, who they think will have an understanding of those characters and that milieu. But for spec scripts, the material speaks for itself. I’ve had all these young actors—Katie Holmes and Colin Farrell in Phone Booth, Bijou Phillips in the remake of It’s Alive, Elisha Cuthbert in Captivity, Jessica Biel and Chris Evans in Cellular. I’m getting a lot of young people in my scripts, so obviously I’m writin’ stuff that young people can play.
BILLY RAY: When I first started, I was the flavor of the month, and that happened partially because I was twenty-four. I can’t now complain about ageism, since I benefited from it at the beginning of my career. I have no doubt that ageism exists, but I think it’s more complicated than people think. Studios are trying to make movies for fourteen-year-old kids, and so there’s the assumption that a fifty-or a sixty-year-old man is less qualified to write something for fourteen-year-old audiences than a twenty-five-year-old kid is. I don’t think that’s true. I think either you can write or you can’t.
RICHARD RUSH: A couple of years ago, I had a heart transplant, and the heart was from someone who was decades younger than me. So now my legendary sense of the youth market has become virtually infallible. At least that’s what I tell the studios.
The Writers Guild Arbitrator’s Perspective: Jonathan Lemkin
Jonathan Lemkin
When multiple writers compete for credit on a movie, the Writers Guild of America’s arbitration process begins. Jonathan Lemkin has an informed perspective on that process, having prevailed in a complex arbitration and served on numerous arbitration panels. A working Hollywood writer since his early twenties, he spent over a decade writing for television series, including 21 Jump Street , before notching feature credits on The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), and Red Planet (2000). Then he raised his profile considerably by adapting the script for Shooter (2007) from notoriously r difficult source material. Previous writers on the project included such heavyweights as William Goldman, John Lee Hancock, and Nicholas Kazan, but the final movie bore only Lemkin’s name.
Hitting the Target
Shooter transcended at least three regimes at Paramount. It was associated with someone who was no longer there, and everything he had touched was then considered tainted, which happens all the time. You know, a president leaves, and the whole development slate gets trashed. Constantly. You need a buffer zone in the middle, sometimes, for a project to come back to life. When the regime changed again at Paramount, a friend of mine, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, was able to keep the project moving forward. He had a producing deal at Paramount.
Shooter is based on a book by Stephen Hunter called Point of Impact, which had been developed at one point for Robert Redford, another point for Keanu Reeves. And some very prominent writers had worked on the script. You know, people who have gold statues on their mantelpieces.
The book is 550 pages long, and has an A, B, C, D, and E story in it. It’s pretty complicated. I read the previous drafts of the screenplay, and, you know, bless those guys for going down all those blind alleys. I said, “I can’t do any of the sub-stories. I can’t even tell the whole A story in this book, but it’s a great, great story.” Then we had to move the book from a Vietnam setting to current day. And then there’s just stuff I wrote in the middle of the night to amuse myself, which I never thought would end up on the screen—and all that stuff ended up on the screen.
That was one of the things I found most fascinating. The stuff I expected them to cut, there were never any notes on. You know, Mark Wahlberg’s character saying he wanted Bono to step into a negotiation—I thought, “They’ll never let me do this.” Never got a note. The wildest things that we had Michael Peña’s character say never got a note. The notes always tended to be on plot points, and they left the character stuff alone.
One of the things that I do, which I think always surprises the studios, is I demand to go back and redo the primary research. I don’t want to write based on someone else’s research. I got ahold of the guy who trains a lot of the mercenaries—or, excuse me, “contractors”—who are in Iraq, and I said, “I want to learn how to shoot at 700, 800, 900 yards.” Point of Impact is known in that community, and the sniper’s t the good guy, so they were really welcoming.
I went out to Pahrump, Nevada, where there’s a six-hundred-acre course, and I crawled around in the dirt for a couple of days, and shot and shot and shot and shot. I learned how to clean a rifle. I learned a little about how to disarm somebody. I went down to Camp Pendleton, hung out with the Marines. It’s not that the book isn’t well written or the material isn’t there, but unless I experience something, I’d be writing it based on somebody else’s experiences. I think redoing the primary research is key to making something your own.
A Complicated Process
Early on, I arbitrated something without understanding the process, and I’d even gone to the next step beyond that, which is a “process review board.” I lost the arbitration but learned a lot about the rules of the guild. Now I’ve been in arbitration, I’ve been the arbitrator a lot of times, I’ve written arbitration statements, I’ve read arbitration statements. I’ve actually done it enough where I will get phone calls from people and guide them through the process.
I’m a very strong supporter of the union, and so I was flattered to get the call the first time. It’s like, “Wow, I can actually help out here. I can give something back.” I tell everybody I know who’s in the business, and who can be an arbitrator, “Do it.” It’s a lot of work—you may get twelve scripts and a novel. I’ve gotten these FedEx boxes, and it’s like, “Oh my God, this is so much to read.” But if not us, who?
There’s a lot of money attached to this, especially in residuals and in production bonuses. I mean, there’s a certain pool of money that’s set aside for production bonuses, and that gets split among the writers who are credited. There’s no question that your production bonus can be a significant amount of money.
You take it very seriously. You want to do the right thing. You sit down, you read all the rules, you consult with the person at the guild who’s coordinating. The arbitration process is confidential almost all the time. I’m generally judging writer A, B, C, D, and E. You know, on Shooter, I believe I was writer G, and I got full credit, which is not a common occurrence, as you can imagine.
Your job is to ask questions about what are called “essential elements.” And if writer A chose essential elements, writer A’s decisions as the first writer mean a lot, even if there was a book or underlying material. Even if someone did a great job or a great draft—or even if some of their work or a single character remains in the final work—you have to ask yourself, “Are these essential elements or something else?”
The arbitration panels I’ve worked on—90-plus percent went where I would have expected them to go. Very rarely have you seen a truly crazy arbitration. I worked on one where I actually protested to the guild. I was angry about the standard we were being asked to apply. The underlying material predated the guild agreement, and I was really upset that the underlying material wasn’t credited. Because of the weird rules in the guild, I felt someone’s work was being ignored. But it was outside of my control. It wasn’t wrong in the sense that the rules weren’t being followed. I just thought the rules were wrong.
I have certain problems with the way the arbitration system works. My biggest problem is I think it’s not been updated to represent what goes on in the industry today. In the arbitration system, there are two classes of writers: original writers and people who do adaptations. With the original writers, the second writer needs to contribute 50 percent or more to receive credit, and subsequent writers need 33.3 percent or more to receive credit—which is a throwback, I think, to a really early phase in the guild’s history. Because way, way too many projects now are based on underlying material, be it Legos or a video game or a television show. So, really, all writers are equal—except some writers are more equal than others. And that’s a problem. I would like to see that change in the guild. I’d like to see one standard applied across the arbitration process.
I think it’s a difficult, complicated, messed-up process, but it’s the best one we’ve found.