Hollywood’s Homeless Screenplays

Buried Treasures: Hollywood's Homeless Screenplays

by Paul Gachet | Published April 10, 1999

Shakespeare In Love almost never was. The original story was hatched in 1989 and was set to go in 1993 with Ed Zwick directing, Julia Roberts in the lead, and Universal behind them until the project was mysteriously aborted. Suffice to say, it wasn't until 1996 when Zwick sent the script to Harvey Weinstein that Shakespeare started shaking once again. Why do great scripts go unproduced, and what's lying around today that stands to be rescued?

A note for all you indie producers and agent's assistants out there: this is not a pre-selected list of need-a-leg-up screenplays ready to be hyped into post-haste production. Although such lists have been published, they have tended to generate more biased whispers than genuine interest. Instead, the aim here is to cross industry trolleytracks, picking up tales and tips from storytellers to decision-makers, from studio to "indie-land" as to why great scripts fall through the cracks.

"There is the stink," UTA literary agent David Kanter says, referring to the reception that dredging up an old title causes on his turf. "Many of these old scripts take on the aroma of trouble." Nevertheless, being in the business of trouble, Kanter admits that "some of the best films are made after years and years of inactivity."

As proof that screenplays can (and should?) be rescued from dusty vaults there is George Hickenlooper's adaptation of the Orson Welles' political passion-play The Big Brass Ring. Welles completed a rough version of the script in 1981 and spent a year trying to cast the lead role of Pellerin, a Clintonesque presidential candidate around whom scandal breeds like fleas in a dog pound. Jack Nicholson, though interested, wouldn't cut his fee in half. Warren Beatty wanted final cut. Robert De Niro was willing to negotiate, but Welles didn't think he was right for the part. Eventually, a despondent Welles shelved the project and moved on to sell wine.

Hickenlooper, co-director of the documentary Hearts of Darkness and director of the short, Some Folks Call it a Slingblade, came across a rare copy of the script in 1988. "There was such a timelessness about these characters," says Hickenlooper. "I wanted to adapt the material, as I would never presume to try and make this as Welles envisioned it." After four or five attempts at an adaptation, Hickenlooper chanced upon film critic EX. Feeney, who had his own version of The Big Brass Ring in the works. The two eventually collaborated, bringing their wildly different takes on the source material together.

Hickenlooper shot the film last year with William Hurt as Pellerin and Nigel Hawthorne as Menniger, the candidate's dubious mentor. Advance word on the fihn is favorable. "The film boldly goes into political and moral territory that Primary Colors wouldn't touch," says one festival programmer. With a Showtime window in place, Hickenlooper says he "has high hopes for a theatrical release," as he enters the festival circuit

Unlike Shakespeare in Love, or The Big Brass Ring, not every project can return from the dead smelling like a rose. "Many of the so-called great unproduced scripts are a pleasure to read but don't make great movies," commented Vogue film critic John Powers. "Sadly, the best writing is easily misinterpreted-all those vivid descriptions and unforgettable lines sometimes just fall flat when put on screen," he added.

Wesley Strick, one of Hollywood's top screenwriters (Cape Fear, Arachmphobia) agrees with Powers and is quick to point to his own script, Final Analysis, as an example. The original script was widely praised as groundbreaking in story and psychological detail, and it opened doors for the young screenwriter all over Hollywood. Nine years later and countless drafts down the line, Strick was heartily nonplussed by the version that was eventually realized, adding him to the ranks of screenwriters who, in creative hindsight, might rather have seen their work go unproduced.

On the subject of homeless screenplays Strick recalls "a certain kind of material that attracts the finest directors and actors, but alienates studio executives. Because there's talent attached, this type of project gets set up somewhere and seems to be on the road to production, until inevitably someone high up at the studio actually reads the script and says, `what the hell is this?' and pulls the plug:' This reccurring phenomenon may explain as many as half the studio development roster at any given time. (On a side note, Strick was recently approached by RKO to revive another Welles project that never came to be, called "The Mexico Project," aka "The Way to The Santiago." Strick passed, though he is still a fan of the story which remains in the RKO vault.)

The Spec Screenplay Sales Directory is as thick as an LA phone book, and its publisher Howard Meibach seems to have its contents memorized (wwwhollywoodlitsales.com). Meibach, a leading authority on the sale and marketing of spec screenplays, has seen more than his share of outstanding scripts miss the boat. In his opinion, the single largest killer of quality screenplays happens "when one studio head goes out and a new one comes in. They always want to wipe the slate clean." As an adjunct, he adds, "and of course lots of great material is lost when a company goes under." But it's not just the execs who pull plugs. "If you are lucky enough to work with a top actor or director, look out," cautions Meibach, because "they can easily jump ship and go to another project. No one sues when this happens because, of course, they hope to work with that person in the future. The only payoff is that the movie they drop out to make usually stinks." Another tactic Meibach has witnessed seems born straight from the Cold War era. "I've seen a studio go out and buy a script just because it's close in subject matter to something they've got underway. They don't want another studio to get it. A recent example has to do with a film about hockey that Disney was working on. Another hockey script was out there getting some recognition, so they ran out and bought it for $800K, just to get rid of it:"

After shepherding hundreds of scripts over the years, what sticks out in Meibach's memory as a lost gem? "There's a script called "Icarus" that I can't figure out why it hasn't been made." When contacted, writer Bob Stitzel remained confident that his 21-yearold script would see the screen in the new millennium.

"It's a character driven, high-action piece about a soon-to-be-retired fighter pilot ace who decides to make off with an F-15. The action is held together by the relationship between the pilot and his friend on the ground who tries to talk him down before the plane runs out of fuel"The film was set to go in the early '80s until an ornery general put the kabosh on using his planes. In 1995 Patrick Duncan brought the script to Paramount for a rewrite, and soon after brought on Bruce Willis to star and produce. Since then, Willis has committed to other projects, and "Icarus" simmers on a back burner. Stitzel blames "studio politics" for the ongoing delays.

Clearly, as formulas and effects take their hold on moviemaking, storytelling has officially become cinema's number one endangered species. At the studio level, risk taking is not high on the agenda, so in turn, ambitious and original scripts go unmade. To paraphrase James Brooks speaking at a recent AFI event, "Half of the great movies that get made, get made because a star or a director or a producer bullies them through:" Certainly the ratio of great scripts to bullies is lopsided at best.

"We are in the business of moving away from the cold and into the heat," says UTA's David Kanter, describing Hollywood's frenetic search for hits. "Necessarily, one result of this equation is the sacrifice of brilliant material that is rendered irrelevant by a fickle marketplace:" Kanter is up front about the quirks of the business, but also insists that movie audiences share the blame for "less than landmark" films that do get made."Audiences are used to pre-digested info-quickly cut, a lot of music, a lot of light, but not a lot of classical story-building elements." Without getting into which came first, the mediocre movie or the audiences for them, Kanter's candor reveals both industry awareness and nonchalance towards the loss of top quality screenplays.

Kanter's pick for a first-rate unproduced script is Jon Kamps' "Now or Never." Described as an American Like Water for Chocolate, it is the story of a lonely woman who over the course of regressive therapy slips into another life-the life of Elvis Presley's cook, the very woman who lovingly made the food that would sustain him through his career while destroying his looks and his health at the same time. "It's funny and extremely touching-striking material," says Kanter. "People have been afraid to touch it because it appears too soft on one hand and too original on the other:" Rene Zellweger has expressed interest, Richard Pierce would like to direct, still not a banana has been fried.

Crossing the tracks from studio fare into the independent world conjures up less Armani, more risk-taking, and a very nearly impenetrable series of obstacles. Here, even the finest scripts sit like eager grasshoppers springloaded at the base of the Himalayas.

"Getting any independent script off the ground is nothing short of a miracle" says indie producer Peter Glatzer,who has produced two films with the Pate Brothers and just finished producing first time director/writer James Rowe's "Blue Ridge Fall," with Peter Facinelli and Tom Arnold. "You've got no one throwing money toward the project in the early stages, plus there's typically only one or two people railing against the whole system: 'With minimal human and financial resources the effort to simultaneously spin, cast, finance and ultimately sell a cohesive package is messy work, fraught with near misses. Glatzer recalls a project, "Drowning Creek," which he tried to make several times with josh Pate (who penned it), and later with others. "Out of 12 projects that got into the Sundance screenwriting program in 1994, "Drowning Creek" was the unlucky 13th finalist." As with so many indie scripts there were flurries of interest, and countless strategy meetings. "There's really no mystery to itwhen the things that don't happen finally outweigh those that do, great projects are lost," says Glatzer.

Michelle Satter, director of the feature film program at the Sundance Institute confirms it requires obsessive behavior to get from script to screen. "A great writer isn't necessarily a great salesperson. And while a strong producer or literary agent is critical to the life of a screenplay, beware-financiers or a production company may not want to work with the attached producer, director, or any other built-in elements."

Satter is fortunate to regularly encounter savvy writers with distinct and marketable voices. Still, she runs into many scripts that don't take into account the marketplace, scripts that simply write themselves out of ever being made. "I really wish more people realized just how few companies out there can finance a script that will cost $4 million to make, as opposed to $1.5 million."The moral of the story, if you want your independent script to see the light of day sooner rather than later, is to think lean. That said, there is certainly less pain in shelving a script yourself and waiting for the right moment to shop it around than knowing it is forever stuck in development hell. Saner believes "there is a writer's zeitgeist that is not in sync with the marketplace. Sometimes the best thing a writer can do is shelve a project for a year and let the rest of the world catch up."

Alas, there are some projects that the world may never be ready for. One of the presiding historians of homeless screenplays is Chris Gore, founder of Film Threat magazine, as well as author of the upcoming book The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made. His knowledge is thorough, though typically somewhat skewed toward the obscure and the outrageous. Because Gore has spent the last 10 years researching this topic, he is able to rattle off titles, log lines, and writers' bios as if they were old drinking buddies.

Notable among many is Stanley Kubrick's "Napoleon," which was slated to star up-and-comer Jack Nicholson. The project had been in development for years, and finally, in1968, right on the heels of the tremendously successful 2001, Kubrick was ready to, roll. "He fascinates me. His life has been described as an epic poem of action," said Kubrick of his protagonist. There were actually plans underway to hire 75,000 soldiers from the Romanian army to recreate battle scenes. Needless to say, after years of planning the film never got made. While cost was an obvious factor, one might guess that in 1968 a young experimentally inclined Nicholson might have been busy expanding his own consciousness. "Can you imagine having A Clockwork Orange as your safety back-up project?" laughs Gore.

Moving from would-be epics to the utterly genre-less, Gore brings up Good Night Irene by Carol Lay. The script is based on her popular series of underground comix, "Good Girls;" which parodied romance comic books and novels of the 1960s. "It's hilarious," says Gore, "but it's also unbelievably touching-something like Edward Scissorhands meets You've Got Mail. I'm guessing the script was just too weird for Hollywood."

The obviously vast backlog of unmade movies suggests a thriving Land of Misfit Scripts exists; a ghostly parallel universe where wild and wonderful stories lounge in there might-have-been-ness. One wonders if maybe that world might ultimately be more entertaining. MM

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