From Idea to Million-Dollar Deal
How does a million-dollar script get written?
For Brian Helgeland and Manny Coto, it began with a phone conversation last fall. “I said, ‘Let’s not hang up until we come up with an idea we can sell for a million dollars,’ ” Helgeland recalled.
Helgeland had previously written “Nightmare on Elm Street, Part IV” and other scripts, and the pair had collaborated in 1988 on a horror-comedy called “Freuds” that didn’t sell.
During the phone conversation, Coto asked, “What if a missile became sentient?”
The missile evolved into “The Ticking Man,” a robot who looks “like Kevin Costner” and has a nuclear warhead inside of him.
The pair wrote the screenplay during an eight-week period in January and February of this year. It attracted bids from Columbia, Morgan Creek and other companies when agent Joel Milner, now at Triad Artists, circulated it. Within nine hours, Largo Entertainment, an independent production company with Japanese financial backing, bought it for $1 million.
“No one seems to mind when an actor gets $10 million or a director gets $4 or $5 million. We’re only catching up,” Helgeland said.
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