Writers, Take Heart

This is not the story about the struggling screenwriter who goes out in a blaze of ignominious glory, taking callous studio execs and D-girls with him. It’s not the cliffhanger about how the brilliant script gathered dust on some studio exec’s shelf for 10 years before going on to win the Oscar for best picture.

It is partially the story of the script that was sold to one company and was about to be made when a similar movie came out, and then the company went out of business. Or decided it didn’t want to make pictures like that anymore. So, screenwriter gets his script back and takes it somewhere they love it, they really do, but then there’s a higher profile movie, which is sort of but not really the same, but appeals to the same audience, so it’s best to wait. Sigh.

It’s a wonder anything gets made in this town ... but you knew that.

At any rate, somewhere in Los Angeles reside four happy screenwriters (for the moment) who will see their efforts bear fruit on the big screen for the very first time. Unsurprisingly, none of them seems terribly cynical about the sometimes-tortured progress from page to soundstage (they all got their movies made, after all), but there are lessons in each tale.

Lesson No. 1

You really don’t have to have attended Brown (but a little time at NYU wouldn’t kill you).

C. Jay Cox, who wrote the script for “Sweet Home Alabama,” grew up in northeastern Nevada, on a ranch he describes as “six miles outside of a town of 600, in a county the size of Massachusetts with 2,500 people, where you had to adjust cake mix recipes to account for environmental conditions.” After graduating from Brigham Young University, he fled to L.A.

Michael Gerbosi, who wrote “Auto Focus,” grew up in Laguna Beach and attended Vassar, where he didn’t major in film.

The project germinated when he bought the rights to “The Murder of Bob Crane” by Robert Graysmith and pitched biopic kings Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (“The People vs. Larry Flynt”) with his idea to turn the story of the all-American TV star’s descent into sex addiction into a film. They liked it, they really liked it. And so did Paul Schrader, who directed with a bare-bones budget estimated at $8 million.

Burr Steers, who wrote and directed “Igby Goes Down” (made for between $8 million and $10 million) grew up in and around Washington, where he attended St. Alban’s, the prep school of choice for haute D.C. He attended NYU in the ‘80s, but readily admits his attendance at such nightclubs as the Mudd Club was far more consistent. After finishing there, Steers got some work as an actor, most notably in “The Last Days of Disco” and “Reservoir Dogs,” as well as some horror movies he doesn’t seem to want to mention.

Lamar Damon, who co-wrote “Slap Her, She’s French” with Robert Lee King, grew up in Austin, Texas, where his parents were professors at the University of Texas. He attended USC for undergrad and NYU for grad school, where he earned the ire of his fellow students by selling his first script to Disney before getting his master’s.

Lesson No. 2

There is still hope for you, even if you have the

worst job on Earth.

Until five years ago, Cox worked for the L.A. County Commission on Children and Families, in an office in the sub-basement of the Hall of Administration. “We were in charge of overseeing all the really awful stuff that happened in the Department of Children’s Services.

Gerbosi did deliveries, plus “a variety of low-paying menial Hollywood positions,” including script reader, receptionist and writer’s assistant. He also worked on an extremely cheesy TV series he refuses to name. “They were so loathsome, I’d really rather not give them the publicity.”

Steers got the inspiration for “Igby” while working similarly menial tasks. “I was just treading water as an actor and I was delivering real estate catalogs in Orange County and these ideas were coming up.

“I wrote the script because I needed to,” he explains.

Damon worked as a writer on so-called reality TV shows, notably “Road Rules” for MTV. But take heart--even though he’s been a working scriptwriter since college, “Slap Her,” with roughly a $14-million budget, is his first movie script to see production.

Lesson No. 3

Even though you’re not an actor, lie about your age.

Interestingly, the notion that in Hollywood, men age gracefully while women wither on the bone seems not to apply to screenwriters. Not a single subject in this story was willing to cop to his age. Shall we say “all graciously ensconced somewhere in the neighborhood of 39?”

Lesson No. 4

Know who you’re pitching.

As Steers puts it, “After my first couple of pitches, I had to learn that you can’t bring up ‘The 400 Blows’ and have anyone in Hollywood know what you’re talking about. ‘Rushmore’ wasn’t commercially successful enough to attract money, so then, I thought ‘The Graduate.’ Find the one sentence that you can give them that they can pitch it with.”

Gerbosi puts his approach to Alexander and Karaszewski thusly: “I had no track record at all, but my idea had sex, celebrity and murder. What’s not to like about it?”

Lesson No. 5

Learn how to connect the dots.

“We got Greg Kinnear because Scott Alexander read somewhere that he was interested in doing darker roles and called up his agent,” Gerbosi says. And so Kinnear signed on, along with Willem Dafoe, Rita Wilson and Maria Bello.

“Being an actor right now is like being a musician and being stuck on ‘The Love Boat’ playing Barry Manilow covers,” Steers says, laughing. “People are starved for good material.”

Steers, with his story of upper-crust dysfunction, hypocrisy and alienation, was happy to serve it up, and Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Amanda Peet, Claire Danes, Ryan Phillippe and Kieran Culkin (in the title role) were happy to help themselves.

“Slap Her” offered some up-and-comers such as Piper Perabo and Jane McGregor a chance to chew some scenery and showcase their comedic chops.

Cox’s feel for the interaction between Americans who stay close to their roots and those who fly as far from them as possible (plus a $35-million Disney budget) got Reese Witherspoon, Mary Kay Place, Fred Ward, Jean Smart and Candice Bergen on board.

Lesson No. 6

Do your research.

Gerbosi had a book to help him, but he also tracked down people who weren’t in the book but were involved with Crane. “At one point, I had a detective from the Scottsdale [Ariz.] Police Department who was ready to turn over the entire 2,000-page file on Bob Crane to me,” he says.

Because much of Crane’s sexual escapades involved secretly recording his partners on one of the first home-video setups, Gerbosi also made a point of researching the equipment of the time. “The movie actually documents the switch from reel-to-reel to cassette in video. I did a lot of that kind of research to get it right.”

For research on the state of amateur porn today, Gerbosi says, “all that information is a click or two away on the Web,” including a Web site maintained by one of Bob Crane’s sons where subscribers can view some of the images Crane recorded of his escapades.

Cox spent six weeks in Alabama, eavesdropping and meeting people who lived there--and it kept “Sweet Home” from turning into a camp fest of condescension. “I spent some time in Tuscaloosa, which is where the producer’s parents lived and where she grew up. Her father had a plane not unlike the one in the movie and he flew me all over the place. I met a lot of very cultivated, knowledgeable, educated people as well, which is not what Hollywood usually associates with the South.”

He then spent two weeks in New York during fashion week, hanging out with designers Todd Oldham and Cynthia Rowley, to make sure he got the fashion stuff right. “And I sure know about coming from a white trash background and trying to reinvent yourself.”

Steers lived Igby. Or to be more precise, he grew up in Igby’s milieu. He is a nephew of Gore Vidal, the high-born writer who continually delights in exposing the hypocrisies of his relatives and contemporaries in the upper crust and the hallways of power in Washington. “Living on the East Coast, I knew all of those people in one form or another,” he says.

Although Damon is of the Texas that elected Ann Richards governor, not the one that elected George Bush, he knows the Texas where “Slap Her” is set; he is descended on his father’s side from the original white families that settled Texas five generations ago.

He also credits his work for MTV with teaching him what flies and what doesn’t with a young audience. “They’re very particular, and if something doesn’t ring true, you’re sunk,” he says. “The people I worked with on ‘Road Rules’ actually referred to movie trailers not as ‘previews’ but as ‘warnings.’ ”

Lesson No. 7

Know the rules of attraction.

Cox had sold scripts; it was Alabama native Stokely Chaffin, a producer who approached him with the idea for “Sweet Home”; the story was by Douglas J. Eboch. Gerbosi took the time to think about who he was approaching with “Auto Focus.” Damon knew studios were always looking for material appealing to young audiences.

Steers had the most work to do. “I was a first-time director,” he says. “You couldn’t sell ‘Igby’ on me.

“I finished ‘Igby’ in ’97 and then I had to figure out how to get it to people and I didn’t know how, and it was all about figuring out how to get it to the right receptionist. And the real problem is that most agencies are there to make sure no unfinanced script gets to their talent, ever. They only want huge, packaged paydays. But eventually you find a champion, who knows their clients want stuff they can really show their chops in.”

Lesson 8

You need an angel.

In Steers’ case, the angel appeared in the form of Ryan Phillippe, who would go on to play Igby’s despicable older brother. “The first conversation I had with Ryan was him saying, ‘You can tell the finance people I’m attached to your movie.’ He wasn’t even the star, and what he did took guts, because once you’re signed on as an actor, if the movie can’t get financing then, it’s a dimunition of their power. Each actor was such an important component in financing.”

Cox had producer Chaffin, who shepherded “Sweet Home” for 10 years before finally seeing it get made. Damon had Jonathan King, who kept his project alive from his days as an assistant at Miramax to his current role as a producer.

And though Gerbosi’s experience was as direct as it gets in Hollywood, it did take a detour. “I had a meeting with Alexander and Karaszewski in March of ’99 and they told me they’d be willing to read a script of mine,” he says.

“Six months go by and I finish my draft and I call them up and I tell them I’ve got a draft and will they read it? And they say, ‘Absolutely, we’re over at this mixing studio and why don’t you come by and drop it off,’ ” so he did, but he left the script with the manager of the facility, who “said he’d take care of it.”

“So two weeks pass, no call, three weeks pass, no call, four weeks pass, no call, and I’m thinking they hate it,” he continues. “So I call and I say, ‘You hate it.’ And they say’ ‘Hate it? We never saw it, what happened to you?’

“So I drive back down to the mixing stage and there it is, sitting in a corner of the studio. So I picked it up off the floor and dropped it by their office and they called the very next day and they liked it. I must have lost 10 pounds in that four weeks.”

All of them have emerged from their first experience with a healthy appreciation for the absurd twists and turns getting a movie made can take.

Damon was treated to a lecture from someone who accused him of selecting a title that humorized violence against women. And then a French person accused him of selecting a title that encouraged violence against French people.

The producers of “Sweet Home” had wanted Reese Witherspoon for the lead from the beginning, Cox says. “We kept saying, ‘What a shame she’s not a movie star.’ Then ‘Legally Blonde’ opened, and she had a bunch of scripts on her agent’s desk and this is the one she chose.”

“You learn that the people in this business have a certain way of constructing a house,” says Steers, whose screenplay is so dark it’s a wonder it ever got made, much less with the cast and budget it got. “It’s the same house they’ve been constructing since 1910, but that’s the way it is.”

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Peter McQuaid is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.