Movie Script--It May Have the Longest List of Credits

For businessman Tom Byron, it loomed as the springboard that could one day take him from manufacturing pneumatic car seats in Sun Valley to molding screenplays in Hollywood.

For screenwriter Sara Lou O’Connor, it was a chance to share her script with about 100 other writers as they took turns tapping out movie scenes on a computer.

And for high school senior Eboney Bradley, the Great American Script-athon was an opportunity to receive financial help for some filmmaking classes as well as to experience her first taste of deadline writing.

“I was so nervous at first, I went to the bathroom three times before I could write all my scenes,” Bradley said. “Now, I’m just anxious to see how they read. I just want to know what’s going to happen with the script.”

Spoken like a true screenwriter. And on Saturday, it seemed everybody was a writer for this 48-hour type-till-you-drop-while-everyone-shops screenwriting session at the Century City Shopping Center.

In a marathon effort to produce a salable movie script in two days, more than 100 writers from the nonprofit Independent Writers of Southern California organization and a dozen passers-by willing to plunk down $10 for 10 minutes at the computer churned out a screenplay called “Hot Property.”

Just how hot it will be remains to be seen. But for some collaborators like the 50-year-old Byron, just participating on a movie script and contributing two scenes and two sentences of dialogue was enough to echo the Hollywood dream.

“Who knows?” Byron said smiling. “Someone might look at this and use it as a springboard for me.”

Other collaborators shared that sentiment, if not for themselves then at least for their collective screenplay: a “light romantic comedy” about an eccentric elderly man who wants to bestow his house--the last affordable house in Los Angeles--on a deserving young couple.

The screenplay has a villain--a sinister land developer named Marvin Montebank--and a heroine named Allison Jessup who was thrown out of the Police Academy for refusing to learn how to drive and is now facing eviction from her home.

Will there be a happy ending?

Cheryl Crooks, president of IWOSC, said she hopes so--not only at the end of the 200 pages that are expected to be finished by this morning’s 6 a.m. deadline but also after the screenplay is polished and edited by a committee of writers.

“I think we can auction it to a movie studio or (independent) filmmaker,” said Crooks, adding that a special auction will be held in mid-September to entertain bids. “We hope to create the longest line of screenwriting credits in history.”

If the screenplay sells, Crooks said the proceeds will go to IWOSC, which was founded in 1982 as a nonprofit association and includes free-lance scriptwriters, journalists, authors, publicists and poets among its 450 members. And she remains optimistic.

“Everything is possible in Hollywood,” said Crooks.

One studio executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was not so sure. “I think it’s a creative idea, but we’ll have to see just how good a script it is and how it sells,” she said.

Selling the screenplay was only one of Saturday’s goals, however. Money raised during the marathon--through corporate pledges and from individuals who paid to write a scene--will go to pay for inner-city high school students to attend a special film workshop at the USC School of Cinema-Television, Crooks said.

Another goal was to entertain. And as the writers pounded away at their computers, actors--including a canine actor--performed finished portions of the script on a nearby stage, all to the delight of an audience of shoppers and tourists.