A Real Rags to Fishes Story

Two words: Jurassic shark.

In high-concept Hollywood-speak, that is all you need to know about the plot of the first novel ever written by 37-year-old Steve Alten, a family man who had $48 in the bank when he lost his job last month in a wholesale meat plant.

And here’s all you need to know about Alten today, after Walt Disney Pictures and Bantam-Doubleday-Dell bought his high concept and 400 pages of manuscript for more than $3 million: rich.

“In a way, I’m not shocked by this,” says Alten of his sudden fortune. “I always believed this would happen. I am not fooling myself; I haven’t been writing ‘War and Peace’ here. But it’s a fun read, and it will be a tremendous movie.”

Alten’s book is titled “Meg,” short for Carcharodon megalodon, a prehistoric big-toothed white shark thought to have become extinct some 100,000 years ago in the aftermath of the Ice Age.

But think again. At the bottom of the 7-mile-deep Mariana Trench, warmed by thermal vents and still hungry after all these years.

DooDooDooDoo.

Sound like “Jaws”? Of course it does. But Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel about a great white shark that terrorizes Long Island and spawns a blockbuster movie, along with three sequels, was published 22 years ago. And besides, Jaws was only 25 feet long. Meg is 70 feet long, weighs more than 20 tons and has teeth the size of Shaquille O’Neal’s hand.

Meg could eat Tyrannosaurus rex for breakfast. So imagine what this critter is going to do to Hawaii and Southern California when it makes its way from the Pacific Ocean to the big screen in the summer of 1998.

“It’s a mega-monster,” says David Vogel, president of Walt Disney Pictures, referring to both the fish and the movie he plans to make. “We’re in a cycle of the fantastic, of science fiction, and this story has a freshness that seems completely right.”

Although the hardcover edition of “Meg” won’t appear until next summer--just in time for beach reading--it is already a guaranteed bestseller, says Doubleday, thanks to more than $1 million worth of advance orders at the Frankfort Book Fair earlier this month.

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Alten, a tall, rangy fellow from Philadelphia who once figured he’d be a basketball coach, began to write his novel about a year ago, claiming a space to work in a corner of the dining room in the small rented townhouse where he, his wife, Kim, and their three children live in west Boca Raton. The idea for “Meg,” he says, came from a science article in Time magazine.

“The article was about efforts to descend to the bottom of the sea, which is largely unexplored,” Alten says. “But with the warmth of hydrothermal vents, creatures have evolved that don’t need sunlight. So why couldn’t sharks be there?”

He wrote on a primitive word processor. He stayed up many nights until 4 a.m. And many nights, his wife admits, she pleaded with him to come to bed.

“He always had dark circles under his eyes. He was grouchy,” Kim Alten says. “He has tried a lot of things, and I didn’t really think this would work out. I was pretty negative. He didn’t listen, thank God.”

Before “Meg,” Alten’s writing had pretty much been limited to college research papers and a dissertation at Temple University, where he earned a doctorate in sports administration in 1988. His dissertation title: “A Comparison of In-Season Versus Off-Season Grade Point Averages Among Intercollegiate Division I Football Players. (The results: players’ grades went up during the season.)

Alten moved to Florida in 1990, and with a partner opened a small business selling water purification systems for the home. The systems were expensive, at $3,500 each. Alten was selling door to door. Eventually the business failed.

About two years ago Alten took a job as general manager with a meat wholesaler he had met when he sold him a purification system to inject water into corned beef. But even with Kim working as a physician’s assistant, money was tight. When he started writing, Alten says, “We were JOB--Just Over Broke.”

When the manuscript was finished, he sent a two-page query letter to about 50 literary agents he found listed in writers’ guides. Only one responded.

“There was a depth of knowledge in the manuscript, a lot of good science,” says Ken Atchity, a onetime comparative literature professor at Occidental College who now heads a Beverly Hills agency, Atchity Editorial / Entertainment International. “I saw the potential for something that could be bigger and better than ‘Jaws.’ ”

Nonetheless, Alten’s manuscript needed professional help, Atchity told him, and that would cost money, about $5,000. To raise some of the cash, Alten says, “I sold my baby”--a 1971 Chevrolet Malibu convertible, a car he had owned since he was 17.

“You have to believe in what you’re doing, and I believed,” Alten explains. “The money was more than I had, but then I asked myself: Do I want to stay an employee of a meat company, or go door-to-door selling water systems? That’s not my dream.”

Working with Atchity and an editor, Alten came up with a rewritten 100 pages and a plot synopsis, which led Disney to buy the film rights for $1.5 million.

From there Atchity went on to auction off the book. Bantam-Doubleday-Dell took it for $2.1 million, which includes Alten’s next novel.

“His work has a Crichton-esque quality,” says Alten’s editor at Doubleday, Sean Coyne, referring to thriller maven and “Jurassic Park” author Michael Crichton. “Steve writes great characters while combining science and storytelling. He’s going to get better and better.”

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Already the manuscript of “Meg” has undergone extensive rewrites. Some of Alten’s subplots have been eliminated, characters have been collapsed, and both the beginning and ending have been changed. Still, Alten says the story remains his.

In the last couple of weeks, the Altens have begun to enjoy their new prosperity. They have bought a television, a new Ford family car, and they are looking at houses. Kim says she has given notice at the doctor’s office where she works so she can stay home with the children. Next month the couple will visit California for the first time.

And while finishing a final rewrite on “Meg,” Steve Alten has begun to work on his second novel, a science fiction thriller tentatively titled “Phobos,” the Greek word for “fear.”

“I’m a better writer now, so the second has got to be just as big,” Alten says. “And I wouldn’t want people to say ‘Meg’ was a fluke.

“So, there is pressure, sure. The underlying thought is, ‘Don’t blow it.’ But I like the pressure. You have to go out on a limb to get the fruit.”

DooDooDooDoo.