THEATER AND FILM : ‘Dead Heat’ Puts Life in Screenwriter’s Career

Not everyone is as pleased as Terry Black seems to be with “Dead Heat,” the new cops-and-ghouls comic flick that marks the 33-year-old Costa Mesan’s screenwriting debut.

Some notices have been scathing. The Times’ Michael Wilmington called Black’s script a “repulsive potpourri” with “one-note sophomoric humor.” Daily Variety termed the film a “huge embarrassment” and “dumb material.”

The public response, too, has been less than overwhelming since “Dead Heat’s” release two weekends ago. The national gross since May 6: $2.93 million, according to Exhibitor Relations Co.

However, Black, who turned from computer programming to writing full time, remains an unwavering defender of the film version.

“I think it works as spoof and pure entertainment,” the tall, bearded Black mused during a pizza-and-salad lunch last week in Costa Mesa. Opinion, he admitted glumly, is “somewhat divided, maybe . . . uh . . . sort of harsh.” Suddenly, with boyish enthusiasm, he added: “Hey, what can I say? I liked it!”

Well, he should.

He has nurtured this saga of Frankensteinian resurrection and shoot-’em-up mayhem since he introduced it to an Orange Coast College screenwriting class 2 1/2 years ago. And he is not about to knock a $5.5-million production that--his film producers still hope--will make a box-office killing and be followed by “Dead Heat II.”

“Dead Heat” is Black’s homage to the 1949 Hollywood movie “D.O.A.” That plot is now a cult classic: The hero, fatally poisoned, has only hours in which to find his own killer.

But Black, who wrote his first draft in three weeks in late 1985, embellished this film noir twist with spoofy variations borrowed from other pop genres: rotting creatures, gunfire carnage, futuristic gadgetry and hip-glib “buddy cop” heroes.

He also gave his original scenario a serious purpose, which seems based on Black’s own rather skewed, violent but gleefully whimsical view of life and death. He wanted to treat such “terrors and inevitabilities” lightly, he said, in order to make them “a little more bearable.”

The film version, he insisted, is relatively faithful to his original scenario--the one that won Black a $2,000 second-place prize in a national competition for student writers, and that Helpern/Meltzer Productions bought in 1986. (His agents are the same ones representing younger brother Shane Black, who wrote the hugely successful “Lethal Weapon.”)

Still, there were significant changes during filming last summer. Early rewrites by another writer, Black said, had drastically altered the tone in key scenes. Black refused to elaborate on the resolution of this dispute.

There were other, less drastic changes: an upbeat ending, a new villain (a dastardly doctor played by Darren McGavin) and “dialogue suggestions” from Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo, starring as the cop heroes.

One of his favorite sequences--set in a Chinatown butcher shop--has been praised by even the severest critics for off-beat inventiveness. It is a wild scene in which the heroes are bombarded by jets of berserk, once-dead chickens, ducks, hogs and steers.

Another set piece, however, was cut from the final print. This is Black at his most whimsically macabre: a dream scene in which Treat Williams, as the fast-decomposing, walking-dead cop, is given a surprise “death day” party, complete with balloons, cadaverous guests and a bikini-wearing creature who pops out of a cake.

“I really liked that one,” Black said. “I even had a cameo bit in that one.” But the scene was cut in the interest of cinematic pace. “They told me it didn’t really advance the plot.”

Win a few, lose a few.

Otherwise, he regards his first film-making experience philosophically. “It keeps you on your toes, it subjects you to a lot of other ideas,” said Black, whose draft of “The Ferret,” a far-out saga about a “genetics machine,” was finished for Helpern/Meltzer Productions before the Writers’ Guild strike began March 7.

Best of all, there is always the memory of his “private premiere.”

That came May 6, when Black bought out the 4 p.m. showing of “Dead Heat” at the Cinedome in Orange. He arrived dressed in white tie and tails, a red carnation in his lapel. His 250 guests included brother Shane, their parents, numerous writing colleagues and students from Irvine Valley College, where he teaches screenwriting.

When the theater darkened, the credits drifted by, one by one. “This happens only once, you know,” Black said dreamily, “when you see your name up there--for the very first time.”