Ted and Terry’s Excellent Screenwriting Adventures

Anyone involved in the creative end of filmmaking will tell you it’s no mean feat to get one big summer movie made. Unless your name is Steven Spielberg, to be involved with three of them within two months is nearly unheard of.

But that’s what thirtysomething Orange County natives and high school pals Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have pulled off, with their triumvirate of “Godzilla,” “Small Soldiers” and “The Mask of Zorro.”

But don’t expect to find them lolling on a beach or hitting the party circuit in celebration. They remain hard at work--with a three-year deal with DreamWorks SKG winding down--and are hard-pressed to remember the last Hollywood party they attended.

“What was the last party we went to? We were at Jeffrey Katzenberg’s house a couple of years ago . . . ,” says Rossio, turning to Elliott, as the two sit on a patio at a plush former mini-mall in Bel-Air where DreamWorks has given them an office.

“That’s the last one I can really think of,” Elliott replies. Together, Elliott and Rossio--who have known each other since high school, and often finish each others’ sentences--have a shared story credit on “Godzilla” and shared screenwriting credit on “Small Soldiers” (opening Friday) and “The Mask of Zorro” (debuting July 17).

The two have come a long way since they started sketching out scripts at a local coffee shop years ago. They admit the timing of their summer releases is largely coincidental. The three films are their first credited efforts to hit theaters since 1994’s “The Puppet Masters” and 1992’s Disney animated blockbuster, “Aladdin.” In the interim, they also worked on “Men in Black,” the top-grossing film of 1997, though credit went to others of the multiple writers common to such projects.

They finished work on “Godzilla,” then expected to be directed by Jan De Bont, more than four years ago; on “Zorro,” which also changed directors, they finished work about three years ago. “And ‘Small Soldiers,’ we’ll all be working on until the day that it goes out to theaters,” jokes Elliott of the down-to-the-wire, computer-animated / live-action film.

A spokesperson for the Writers Guild of America says the union does not keep statistics on the largest number of credits accrued by a writer within a set amount of time, though “my guess would be that it’s pretty unusual; we just don’t know how unusual.” Screenwriter David Koepp had both “Jurassic Park” and “Carlito’s Way” in theaters in 1993, for example, but those films came out months apart; the close timing and high visibility of Elliott and Rossio’s three films may be unique.

DreamWorks’ “Soldiers” is the tale of a suburban neighborhood besieged by warring “ ‘roid-rage GI Joes,” says Rossio. Elliott and Rossio say their main contribution to the screenplay was to change the tone of the film from a more whimsical tale to one with more adventure and satire. Adam Rifkin, a co-credited screenwriter (along with Gavin Scott, who wrote the original spec script) on “Soldiers,” says he’s “honored” to share credit with Elliott and Rossio, who “saw the film through to the end.”

Rossio says there were a dozen or more writers on “Soldiers” who contributed everything from the first script to a few gags. That situation isn’t unusual today, as studios hire multiple writers in an effort to get the most bullet-proof script; final credit on “Soldiers” was granted as DreamWorks suggested.

It’s “Zorro,” though, that is most likely to take audiences by surprise--and bring notice to Elliott and Rossio, who received shared credit for both the story and the screenplay. The early buzz for the movie, starring Antonio Banderas and Anthony Hopkins, is strong. Just as important to the screenwriters, they feel their original vision for the film is on screen.

“The film is bright, it’s colorful, the heroes get to smile. I don’t know who it was in Hollywood that decided people didn’t want to see that,” says Rossio. Continues Elliott, “Similar to what happened with the western, I think the swashbuckling romance became victim to Hollywood’s inability to approach the concept of heroism without cynicism.”

“Zorro” director Martin Campbell praises the two screenwriters as “fantastic storytellers.” Though Campbell has been outspoken in his belief that David Ward, who rewrote much of the film’s dialogue, should have received on-screen credit, “the DNA of the script is entirely theirs [Elliott and Rossio’s]; it’s entirely their story,” says Campbell.

Though he readily volunteers that many changes were made to the dialogue and to the order of scenes, Elliott says, “Zorro is the first totally live-action film that we feel accurately reflects our sensibilities. It’s the movie that we wanted to write, and we wanted to see.”

As is the case for many screenwriters, that’s an experience Elliott and Rossio have rarely been able to enjoy. Like most, the two struggled to break in, while working at a variety of jobs. But unlike many, they were determined and realistic: They met five nights a week to write and decided to focus on getting a film made, instead of focusing on a single pet project.

“We’d meet in a coffee shop. . . . For two dollars, you could get a table, and pretty girls would serve you coffee,” recalls Elliott, who met Rossio at Santa Ana’s Saddleback High. The two worked on the school newspaper and made home movies together.

After half a dozen years of trying, they got one of those classically Hollywood lucky breaks, through the boyfriend of a waitress at the coffee shop. Their first film that was actually produced, though--1989’s “Little Monsters”--was totally rewritten. “Though it couldn’t have been by a writer, because the [Writers Guild] strike was on,” says Elliott wryly.

Their original “Monsters” script, though, garnered enough attention to put them on the road to becoming successful writers. After working on several script assignments that remain unproduced, Elliott and Rossio jumped at a two-year deal with Disney. “Aladdin” came out of that, the film Elliott still calls “the best professional experience I’ve had. . . . We really felt like we were part of the collaboration.”

DreamWorks co-founder Katzenberg, who at the time oversaw Disney’s animated features, recalls the two took to animation “like a duck to water.” Katzenberg was so happy with their work that he signed the writers to DreamWorks’ first overall deal.

After “Soldiers,” there will still be several more years’ worth of projects in the pipeline at DreamWorks that Elliott and Rossio have worked on, including “The Road to El Dorado” (expected to come out in late 1999) and “Shrek” (planned for summer 2000). There are also scripts still in the pipeline at rival Disney that Elliott and Rossio have worked on, including “A Princess of Mars” (based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel) and “Treasure Planet,” based on Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”

Despite their success, the two answer their own phones, and don’t have a publicist. Of course, their work is not without rewards: Elliott and Rossio have entered the leagues of writers who command hundreds of thousands of dollars to work on a script.

In a somewhat unusual move for those who have “made it,” the two even reach out directly to struggling screenwriters: at Rossio’s initiative, they maintain a Web site, https://www.wordplayer.com, where they dispense advice on the screenwriting profession. According to Rossio, the site gets more than 5,000 hits per month.

“The siren call of the film business is so strong that many people spend years chasing after something that doesn’t even necessarily exist,” says Rossio, “so we try to show aspiring writers the truth. With all the how-to books out there, there’s still a lack of practical information.”

Meanwhile, Elliott and Rossio have entered that coveted realm of screenwriters who are well-paid and constantly busy. They’ve formed their own production company called Scheherazade--named for the famed storyteller from “Arabian Nights,” as well as a reference to “Aladdin.”

But how busy is too busy? Admits Rossio: “We often figure, ‘Well, there’s two of us, so we should be able to do twice as much work.’ ”