HOLLYWOODSCRIPT.COM NEWSLETTER
Welcome to the latest edition of the Hollywoodscript.com Newsletter, which is published by script consultants Craig Kellem, Judy Kellem
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The purpose of this newsletter is to share information, ideas etc. concerning the fascinating (and elusive) world of screenwriting.
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NEED AN AGENT? WANNA GET OPTIONED? OUR LATEST CONTEST WINNER, STEVE ALLRICH HAS BOTH NOW!
In his own words-
"OK, there's good news and there's better news.
The good news is that if you hang in there, and write your ass off, it IS possible to get an agent, and to have your script read by legitimate producers.
The better news is that Craig Kellem at Hollywoodscript.com can help you get there. Craig gives tirelessly of his time, energy, enthusiasm and considerable know-how, with the solitary goal of getting your script ready to be read by Hollywood.
Craig has worked with me in such a fashion on two scripts. My first script won his contest; was a Nicholl semi-finalist; a Chesterfield finalist; landed me an agent and got me read. My second script just won his contest again, and got me 19 REQUESTS from producers who want to read it.
And as of yesterday, the news got even better: I received a very enthusiastic e-mail from a producer who wants to take an option on this latest script! He's produced a couple of terrific independent films, and has worked on several other high-profile projects. Needless to say, I'm psyched!
There's no question in my mind that without Craig's expertise, my scripts wouldn't be getting the attention they're getting. Craig likes writers (go figure) and enjoys working with them. Best of all, he knows what it takes to get your script in fighting shape, and he'll go above and beyond the call of duty to help you get it there."
Steve Allrich
steveallrich@yahoo.com
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A RECENT CONTEST WINNING SCRIPT, "TWO MINUTE HEIST," HAS JUST COMPLETED PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY (we're happy to be associated with this fine script and filmmaking group)
We are in Post Production. Our Editor Scott Brock of Cappas Productions (Marty baby--oops I mean Mr. Scorcese's company) is freelance editor and we have seen half the movie in rough cut.
Last night we had the Wrap Party and showed blooper reel and "IL Corazon Caliente" Telemondo soap opera take off. We were on the floor laughing so hard. we have been swamped with music CD's and have one album that is terrific. Two agents for distribution and one distributor have contacted us for a "look" at it. (winning your contest helped in this regard). We have generated through contacts 3 introductions to major distributors that we will persue when we have the final cut. That is where we are now.
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REMEMBER OUR MONTHLY CONTEST IS FREE TO CONSULTATION CLIENTS and since there are only two of us here, your chance of seriously contending is increased since we only have a small pool of material from which to choose.
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THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES
Recently, my wife and I had dinner with our good friends Geoffrey Douglas and Landon Hall. Geoffrey teaches English at UMass and is a freelance writer. He's had three books published, one of which, The Game of Their Lives, has been optioned and re-optioned for years as a motion picture project. He's become a veteran of the maze-like experience most "players" find when they deal in our elusive industry. At the time of our dinner, he was feeling hopeful about his project going to film but was also extremely cautious in his optimism because he had been down this road many times before. As it turns out, this story has a very happy ending! He's one of the lucky ones and, we who strive to succeed against great odds, need to hear these kinds of gratifying stories once in a while.
The Game of Their Lives is the story of an improbable victory, an almost miraculous victory in fact, of eleven young American immigrant men, truck drivers, grave diggers, postal workers--Haitians, Yugoslavians, Italians, and Irish, (about half the team was based in St Louis) who were thrown together in 1950 to form the U.S. World Cup soccer team who then went down to Brazil and beat England in the World Cup which, which at the time and maybe still today, was the most extraordinary upset in the history of American sports. A true story of overcoming the impossible.
HSC: You found out about this story from an article in the paper?
GD: Yes, it was '94, and in '94 the World Cup was venued in the U.S., and one of the host stadiums was Foxboro in Boston, and at that time I was living right outside of Boston. I read the Globe on a Sunday, right before the first game, and of course they always do these retrospectives. And there was this story about the last time the U.S. kicked any ass in the World Cup, and it was this incredible story about these 11 unlikely guys, and I read it and I thought it would be a terrific book. The names of the players were listed in the story and five of them were still alive, and I called information and I reached one of them and I talked to him on the phone. And that did it, I mean that really did it for me. I started writing the proposal that day.
HSC: Now how did the movie option happen?
GD: It was initially optioned by an independent producer by the name of Peter Newman, who now runs Peter Newman Productions in New York. The book came out in February or March of '96 and it was optioned in November. He paid $5,000 a year. He was very hopeful that he could make a movie out of it, and we went through several incarnations in this pursuit. He had at least two different teams of screenwriters/directors. One was a British team, the other was American. But he couldn't raise the money to make the movie, but he wouldn't give up, and I got my $5,000 check every year for six years. And then a year and a half ago he sold his option to Crusader Entertainment. The company is owned by a guy named Philip Anschutz, who is one of the richest men in the U.S.
HSC: Tell us about the process of torment and the doubt you experienced leading up to your victory.
GD: Well, there wasn't much doubt really. After about two or three years I just STOPPED thinking it was ever going to be a movie and just thought it was nice to get a check every November. I mean, I never expected it to happen. After all, Peter had been so ecstatically optimistic in the beginning when he first contacted me. And I'd gone out to St. Louis and met with guys from the the first screenwriter/director team. And also the players (of the five men who were still alive, four of them had also met the team. These guys still live in St. Louis). So there was this huge fanfare and show of optimism, and then the screenplay was written (which I didn't like very much, but then again I think maybe that's because I don't know how to read screenplays). But Peter just couldn't get the money to make the movie. So I began to lose hope. And then he got a new team which included Wayne Wang, who's made number of movies in Hollywood. But that screenplay didn't trigger the needed funds either.
HSC: Were you involved at all with these teams?
GD: No I wasn't at all.
HSC: But they did call you?
GD: They did call me occasionally for factual backup.
HSC: And did they meet with the players?
GD: The first team did. The second didn't. But Peter Newman was, in both cases, just over-the-top ecstatic about how we were going to do this, and unfortunately it just didn't happen. The first team probably went until '98, and then he re-upped the whole thing with the second group, and that crashed in about 2000. They had about four or five different schemes to raise the money. They were going to get the money from Paramount, they were going to get the money from MGM, etc.
HSC: Did he (Newman) finance the scripts himself?
GD: Yes he did. He's an independent producer, he doesn't have a lot of money, and I think this must have cost him several hundred thousand dollars. He told me several times that never in his life had he been so in the hole for a movie. I mean, he really believed in the film. Anyway, he finally sold his option to Denver-based Crusader, as I mentioned earlier. Philip Anschutz also owns most of Major League Soccer, I think five of the ten teams. And they're losing a lot of money every year. So what he had decided to do was to generate a screenplay written from a story about soccer that would energize America about this game.
So his producer, the guy who runs Crusader for him, approached Peter, and he sold the option to Crusader, and I think that was in the spring of 2002 or winter of 2001. And at that point I was still just very happy if I could get my check every year from Peter. Never expected the movie to happen, I hardly ever thought about it. And Peter called me up and told me it was going to happen and I still wasn't very hopeful because it was the third incarnation now, but from that time on, things really began to happen.
After much back-and-forthing, Crusader hired this team of Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh, who are the writer and director for Hoosiers. And they proceeded to write a screenplay which bore very little resemblance to either of the first two screenplays, and by the way, there wasn't much resemblance to my book either, but that's okay.
HSC: There are very few people who can say that they've had the experience of creating something that people spend millions of dollars to produce and which will be seen all over the world. So this is miraculous, and must have been a tremendously fulfilling experience for you. So my question is, you've been through the game of "Hey Baby, it's gonna happen," but it doesn't. Then all of a sudden you begin to get into the fast lane with this thing. What was it like and what happened?
GD: I was seriously broke. I had borrowed money from family, I hadn't been able to sell a fourth book. Then I got the call from Peter. He was again, as is his way, wildly enthusiastic about this, only this time there was something different. He kept telling me, "you don't understand, we don't need the money, the money is already there. The only thing that stops a movie production is money and this guy's got it. He's going to make your movie." And, SLOWLY, I began to believe him. And, whereas I usually only talked to him once every few months, I started talking with him every few weeks. He called me up with an update when they had just signed the Hoosiers people, which was big news. And then there were beginnings of press stories about it--there was a little story in USA Today. The screenplay was written, and things began to look real when in September, 2002, they announced tryouts in six different cities for extras and for the main cast. There were tryouts in all the cities in which Philip Anschutz owns teams, because they used his stadiums.
Their criteria was that you had to be able to play soccer at an advanced collegiate level to even be considered for the film, and they would consider acting skills after that. And that's why the cast is what it is, because most of the actors including Gerry Butler (from Tomb Raiders) played soccer in college. Wes Bentley of American Beauty might have been the exception.
HSC: So you began to get the scent that this was the real deal.
GD: Yeah, these guys were really serious. But I still wouldn't let myself believe it. I had believed it too many times, and there was too much money involved, and it was too big a deal for my career, and I really just didn't want to believe it because I didn't want to be disappointed again. So I tried not to, and when anybody asked me how the movie project was going I would say, "well, they're doing tryouts but this whole thing will probably go south tomorrow. There will be a catastrophe, there will be a depression, there will be another terrorist attack; it's not going to happen."
And then over the course of the winter they signed the players they had to sign and I kept getting calls from Peter that "it was getting closer." There were a few setbacks, some budget problems, but over the course of it all the thing was moving forward. If I would check my name or the film's name on the Internet there would always be more stuff, and I began to believe it. I got pretty excited, and by this spring I was allowing myself to tell friends, "you know, I think my last book might be a movie pretty soon." And as I was saying it I was thinking "oh no Geoffrey, don't go there." Because on a bad day I would think it could just crash, but, at the same time, it really began to be more concrete. I got a call from Peter mid-to-late spring this year that they had got the budget approved and they were going to start filming in June. So now we were a month away and I was really believing it now.
My first concern was the money, because there was a lot of money involved, and my second concern is now the effect on my career. But I really wanted to get the money because it would make a difference in my life.
But then the roof caved in again. Basically what happened was that there were some seemingly irreconcilable budget disagreements, and Anspaugh and Pizzo walked off. And at that point I thought there was no movie. I felt devastated.
Just as it seemed the most hopeless, Peter called me and told me that there was a reconciliation and Anspaugh and Pizzo were back. He told me they'd opened an office in St. Louis, hired a personnel director, a lawyer, an accountant, and even started a payroll.
They were supposed to start principal photography on the 16th of June, and by the time this whole walkout thing had worked itself out it was already the 6th. At this point I'm going nuts. I couldn't work, I couldn't think about anything else. Is something going to happen? Is there going to be a terrorist attack? Is Philip Anschutz going to have a heart attack? I mean, something is going to happen to screw this up, and I was frantic. I had gone from trying not to think about it, with quite a lot of success actually, and in the space of three months I was thinking about nothing else!
The days ticked down until finally it was the 16th of June, and lo and behold, they started to shoot the movie. But I hadn't received a check yet. Payment was supposed to occur upon the start of principal photography. I call Peter and he calls them, and there was a holdup, they needed a W-4 from me, which I had already sent them.
We're two days into the movie, three days in, still no check. I was in Canada with my girlfriend, driving up the beautiful coast of Nova Scotia and stopping at pay phones because her cell phone wouldn't work, I don't have one. I'm stopping at pay phones in little restaurants on the side of the road, calling my agent saying, "did you get the check yet, did you get the check yet?" Crusader would say that they're cutting the check the next day, then the next day there would be no check.
It was a week after production began that he got the check. I was in the vestibule in some little restaurant, and I called and my agent's receptionist said that it still hadn't come, then the phone went silent for a moment, then she came back and said "you still there, cause the check just came in." I said "the check?!" and she said "I'm looking at it." And I started whooping! That was really the end of the ordeal.
HSC: Tell me what it was like going to the set in St. Louis with your son.
G: Ah, just really great. In early July we went out there and they were about three weeks into shooting, and they were in their last week of shooting in St. Louis. They were then going to go where they are now, in Brazil. So we went down to Missouri, and I know nothing about the film business, but I saw an entire two blocks of St. Louis, in the middle of the night, turned into New York circa 1950. Taxi cabs, New York City buses, all the storefronts had been made over with permission from the owners (they pay all the owners). Lots of old little DeSotos and Packards, all these guys in their 1940's outfits. And I watched it. I was there on the set with David Anspaugh, the director, and he brought me up to the monitor, I watched the scenes through the monitor. It was a total thrill, you know, my son was speechless the whole time. Although he tried not to be. He tried to act very cool, like this happened to him every day. And we met the actors and talked to them, and I was sort of introduced as the guy who made this happen.
There was a moment there when I'm feeling pretty irrelevant, one o'clock in the morning with a couple hundred people milling around, and I had this thought: wait a minute, as irrelevant as I feel now, I realize there's only one person in this entire area without whom none of this could have happened, and that's me. That was really a major moment in my life.
We thank Mr. Douglas very much for so honestly sharing his unique and fascinating experience.
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CHECK THIS OUT!
FRANK PIERSON'S COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS TO THE 2003 USC FILM SCHOOL GRADUATES
Frank Pierson is a writer/director. He is presently president of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences and formally the president of the Writers Guild of America, West. His writing credits include Cat Ballou, Cool Hand Luke and the Oscar winning Dog Day Afternoon.
I've been around a long time. As I look out at all of you graduating today, I think back to my graduations. All the kids in my graduating class from elementary school are dead.
All the people in my junior high school graduation are dead.
All the people in my high school graduation are dead.
The people I graduated from college with are all mostly dead.
Are you all feeling okay?
You will soon be the Hollywood of tomorrow, and I'm here to give you a little taste of the past. And my sense of the future you face.
Hollywood was once a small company town, where everybody knew everybody, and if you dropped your pants at a party or punched a reporter or danced with a prostitute in the parking lot, it wasn't on Entertainment Tonight-tonight. It was even hard to get arrested. Every studio had a publicity department which paid the Los Angeles cops to stay away from show business people. The police didn't arrest movie people. They drove them home.
We all went down to the film factories every day-at Warner Brothers even actors, directors and writers punched a time clock until the mid forties. We ate in the studio commissary, where the writers' table was preferred seating because the jokes were better there. If the New York writers were in town, slumming, sneering at the movies and cashing big fat paychecks you found yourself sitting next to Dorothy Parker or F. Scott Fitzgerald. You could wander off to a sound stage and watch John Huston or Willy Wyler shooting a scene with Bogart or Hepburn or Peck. No security. We all knew each other.
It was up close, and personal.
In the thirties screenwriters formed a union. Their first and only demand was that producers give writing credit only to writers who actually worked on the film. They were denounced on the floor of Congress. Variety said they were Communists. Darryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth-Century Fox, dictated a letter for all of his contract writers to sign. It was on their desks when they arrived for work; a letter of resignation from the new Guild. With it was a note from Zanuck ordering them to join a union Twentieth -Century Fox was forming especially for them. If anybody refused they were fired.
Philip Dunne, an ex-New Yorker writer, and one of Fox's major talents, went to Zanuck and told him nobody was quitting the Guild. Furthermore, he pointed out that if Zanuck fired all the writers who were Guild members, he would be firing the front line of his championship polo team.
It was the start of the Writers' Guild.
Up Close and personal. We knew the boss. And we certainly knew who was boss.
Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, was a legendary bully, who admired Mussolini and had his office designed to resemble Mussolini's-with a long approach into blinding lights, and himself behind a desk, raised a foot above the floor, ranks of Oscars his studio had won behind him.
He said he made only pictures that he wanted to see, and once the public stopped wanting to see what he liked, he'd quit. Not for him delegating decisions to demographers, pollsters and marketing experts. Nobody knew what a demographer was in those days.
In the sixties, when the old glove salesmen and carnival touts who built he studios began to grow old and retire to play golf or try to gamble away their fortunes, their grip on the business loosened. For a while independent producers flourished. New companies, new writers and directors burst the bonds of studio imposed style and discarded the habits of the stage.
In this fluid and diversified atmosphere there was freedom and creativity, and a minimum of bureaucratic control. The sixties and the seventies produced movies now looked upon as a Golden Age, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dr. Strangelove, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Clockwork Orange, Annie Hall, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy, Mash, All the Presidents' Men, Network, Bonnie &Clyde, and a couple I like, Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke. Even Easy Rider a wild card that symbolized the anarchistic spirit of that drug ridden time was a Columbia Studio release.
Then, on Wall Street, it began to be noticed that a single blockbuster movie could make in a weekend what a substantial business made in a year.
Warner Brothers was bought by Seven Arts, Seven Arts was bought by Kinney Services, which consisted of a chain of mortuaries and liveries, and the whole mess now is owned by America Online/Time/Warner along with HBO, Warner Books, Turner networks and CNN. Viacom owns Paramount, CBS, Showtime Cable and the Blockbuster chain of video stores. Of the 100-odd primetime shows that will premiere on the four networks this fall and winter, more than 30-including CBS newsmagazines-will be made by one or another company owned by Viacom. Another 25 or so will be made by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, which owns Fox network. That is almost fifty percent of the new shows controlled by two companies, one owned by a man notorious for his micro management, narrow right-wing political philosophy, and his willingness to use his ideological power.
We had been having too much fun to notice the barbarians were inside the gate. The polo games, the writers' table, Jack Warner's lunch time tennis matches with Errol Flynn, the cops as our friends, all were a thing of the past. We began to see Harvard Business School MBAs sit in on story conferences.
Lawyers multiplied.
As the huge debt created by mergers was added to the rising costs of making little but blockbusters, the risks of making a film forced the businessmen to be risk averse, to play to the least critical audience:
Teen-age boys with disposable income.
The problem is how to keep this "average" moviegoer, male, 16 to 25, high school education at best, doesn't read books, gets his news from the eleven o'clock news if he bothers at all, never heard of Mussolini and thinks Korea is another part of downtown LA-this couch potato, this pimply undereducated oversexed slob with the attention span of a chicken-how do we keep him awake and interested, while staying awake and Interested ourselves.
We have to remind ourselves that this viewer is only another aspect of ourselves, that we have also in us-as he does-a better part, that needs to be cultivated and to express itself. There is no single audience with a single personality. There is the larger audience-currently under-served-that has vast variety of appetites that we can, we must, satisfy.
We do manage every year to make a few films that satisfy both the lower appetite for thrills and excitement and at the same time provide the deeper satisfactions of art and truth for the viewers who are equipped to experience it.
To reach and touch the angel in the beast.
Everything else is just working for wages.
In justice there are great things that have been achieved by these companies-in 1960 to see a black, a Latino on the stage floor except as an occasional supporting actor would have been unthinkable. Now the mid Level of the corporate bureaucracy and the working place are far freer and inclusive.
What has happened in Hollywood has happened to us all, because the focus of international business has shifted from production to distribution. And further-whoever controls distributions shapes what is produced-to what will fit under the seat or in the overhead compartment.
Agribusinesses have Kamikaze researchers trying to produce cube shaped tomatoes easier to pack in boxes (and that will taste like the boxes if past experience teaches us anything) And of course we already have milk that all goes sour the same day. Watch the odd, the old, the personal, the traditional, the idiosyncratic, the family made or the regional disappear from supermarket shelves that are rented by the foot to international companies that then stock them with their own water and sugar products.
Our defense is the farmers' market, the yard sale, the auctions. We had hopes for the Internet, but that's being turned into a marketing tool. In the field of entertainment and the arts our last defense may be Tivo and the remote control.
Liberal critics have raised the alarm over corporate censorship, the exclusion from theaters and TV of anything except what seems marketable and the eliminations of anything that might offend somebody anywhere. But the danger of censorship in America is less from business or the religious right or the self righteous left, than to self-censorship by artists themselves, who simply give up. If we can't see a way to get our story told, what is the point of trying? I wonder how many fine, Inspiring ideas in every walk of life are strangled in the womb of the imagination because there's no way past the gates of commerce?
You are now our future, and this is the challenge you face. It is a bigger challenge than it seems because you cannot recapture something you never knew. It is your gargantuan task to create this spirit out of thin air, in the face of resistance and lack of interest, in your own style and out of your own imagination. Something new and as yet unknown.
To the studios the art of film and TV is a byproduct of their main business, a side effect, and like side effects, more likely to be a noxious nuisance than a benefit. I cry out to you to become a noxious nuisance, to make a personal investment of passion. It is a moral responsibility that arises from the role of movies in society.
Movies are more than a commodity. Movies are to our civilization what dreams and ideals are to individual lives: they express the mystery and help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.
You must become writers with ideas and passion, who write with force and conviction; you must become directors who have minds enriched by your lives and not a library of stunts and special effects. Be critics centered in your feelings and ideas in the culture and society, not in comparing grosses and applauding computer generated ballets of violence.
Go and make a cinema and TV that express our history and our ideas, and that foster respect for a civilization in real danger of self destruction. Be decision makers with dreams and hopes instead of raw ambition. Tell stories that illuminate our times and our souls; that waken the sleeping angel inside the beast.
We need this from you as we need clean drinking water and roads, green parks and libraries; it is as important as the breath of democratic life.
Somehow we need to keep alive in our hearts the vision of community, shared interests and understanding of our neighbors' needs, the sense of connection this fractionated society is losing.
We need to recapture the spirit of Main Street. Up close.
And personal.
That is both your challenge-and your opportunity.
God speed and good luck. We count on you.
Thanx mucho Jason Vinley for making us aware of this valuable piece.
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