Story pitch was hit or hiss

IT was a Friday afternoon in Santa Monica, and the folks at Patchwork Productions were knocking back margaritas and tossing around movie ideas during their weekly brainstorming session. A stately ship’s bell sat nearby -- a gong meant an idea fell short.

When it was Craig Berenson’s turn, the development exec brought up a script he’d read years earlier called “Venom,” by a writer named David Dallesandro. It was about taking two of the biggest fears people have -- the fear of flying and the fear of snakes -- and throwing them together at 35,000 feet over the Pacific.

In other words, snakes on a plane.

Behind all the pre-release hype surrounding New Line Cinema’s newest thriller is the story of how the filmmakers relied upon those four words and photos of deadly vipers to pitch a movie that has taken on a life of its own.

Eight years later -- and after more than a dozen meetings in front of production executives who either laughed dismissively or greeted it with stony silence -- “Snakes on a Plane” arrives in theaters Friday. It remains to be seen whether all that early Internet buzz will translate into box-office bucks: Last week, one industry survey of young males -- the movie’s key demographic -- was falling short of another Friday release aimed at the same crowd, Universal’s teen comedy “Accepted.” And New Line was not screening the movie in advance for critics, often a sign that the movie is not likely to be a hit with reviewers.

But it was the visceral reaction at that gathering in 2000 that led Berenson and Patchwork executives Penney Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins, who were also in attendance, to believe that this idea just might work.

“All the men in the room went ‘Oh!’ and all the women went ‘Ewww!’ ” Berenson recalled. “ ‘Snakes on a plane,’ to me, were the purest words that tell you what the movie was about. It rolls off the tongue and is memorable. Whether they remember you with a shrug of the shoulders, with glee, or making some kind of off-handed remark, at least they are remembering you because it’s so outrageous and different.”

Beefing up the story

SHORTLY after that meeting, Berenson contacted Dallessandro and offered him a “story by” credit on the film in return for permission to reshape his original material, which concerned only a handful of snakes.

Berenson went to his assistant, John Heffernan, a budding screenwriter, for help fleshing out the story. Heffernan posed this scenario: “What if you had a plane terrorized not by a few, but by, say, more like 500 snakes?” He also thought, “What if you have an FBI agent traveling on the plane with a kid who has witnessed a murder and then have a mob boss who devises an assassination scheme to release deadly snakes during the flight?”

Heffernan, who would ultimately share screenplay credit with Sebastian Gutierrez and “story by” credit with Dallessandro, went to his agent, Ben Smith at ICM, and told him of the idea.

“I was like, ‘Huh?’ ” Smith recalled. “But by the end, I was totally hooked.”

Smith said the story is clearly a popcorn movie, but Heffernan “put it in a real world context with a real hero where it wasn’t just snakes who happened to be crawling through the innards of a plane for no reason.”

Soon, the filmmakers and Smith got together to discuss how they planned to pitch the idea around Hollywood.

“We rehearsed,” Smith recalled. “We had five different sessions.... I said to them, ‘During your pitch, we should have pictures of snakes. Let’s really make this kind of a visual presentation where people get to know this is what it’s going to be. Let’s be honest, people are either going to connect or think this is too out there and can’t embrace it.’ ”

The agent told Heffernan to keep his pitch short -- 20 minutes max. Studio executives, he explained, “hear a ton of ideas and once you lose them, you’ve lost them.”

Heffernan searched the Internet for images of vipers and made a presentation packet containing photos of snakes, which he handed out at pitch sessions. In that way, he said, each snake became like a character in the film.

There was a black mamba, so deadly that only two drops of its venom can kill a human. There was an Australian taipan, one of the planet’s 10 most deadly snakes. There was a death adder, whose name alone sends chills up your spine. And a Burmese python, which squeezes the life out of its victims.

“I also had pictures of an anaconda that had eaten a tribesman in South America -- before and after shots,” Heffernan recalled. “There was a big bulge in its stomach with a human inside. He had probably only been in [the snake’s] stomach less than a day. He had not been digested.” The writer noted that in the film, “you actually see a snake eat someone in front of you.”

Alas, Hollywood wasn’t biting.

“The worst pitches are the ones where they just stare at you in silence,” Heffernan said. “You don’t know if they don’t understand what you are saying or they’re thinking about where they want to have lunch or they think you’re a crazy man.”

Sometimes, he recalled, an executive would look at the picture of the anaconda eating a man and “kind of sit there in shocked disbelief.”

The questions, when they came, always seemed to be, “What is the tone of the movie? Is it horror, action thriller or a when-animals-attack kind of thing?”

Finally, they ran across a studio executive who got it.

Don Granger, who at the time was executive vice president of production at Paramount Pictures, was looking for projects for Paramount’s youth-oriented MTV banner.

“It was relatively easy to say yes,” Granger recalled. “The day after we bought it, [Internet movie geek] Harry Knowles posted a comment, ‘What sort of sick person came up with this idea?’ At that point, I knew we had a winner.”

Derailed by 9/11

BY the summer of 2001, the script was coming together. Then tragedy hit when terrorists hijacked four jetliners on Sept. 11. Almost overnight, Paramount decided to put the project in turnaround. The last thing the studio needed was a movie about terror in the skies, even if these terrorists slithered and only said “Sssssssss.”

“We were literally ready to turn in a second draft of the script when 9/11 happened,” Berenson recalled. “I said, ‘We all got to hunker down and continue to work and time will work itself out so the climate will be right to make the movie.’ ”

“I talked to Craig,” Heffernan recalled. “He knew right away this was not going to be good. Nobody in Hollywood wants to get near an airplane disaster flick. So the project sat on the shelf for about a year.”

By the summer of 2002, Berenson had left Patchwork to hang up his own production shingle, Cox and Rabins had departed for Sony Pictures Animation, and Granger had partnered with producer Gary Levinsohn at Mutual Film Co. Granger was approached at Mutual by Rabins and Berenson and signed on once again. “We were happy to do it,” recalled Granger. “It was always envisioned like a ‘Final Destination’ or ‘Freddy vs. Jason’ kind of picture.” Granger, who currently works for Tom Cruise’s production company, joined Levinsohn and Berenson as producers of the film.

Over lunch at Sushi Roku near the Beverly Center, Granger pitched “Snakes on a Plane” to Stokely Chaffin, then a senior vice president at New Line Cinema who had been an executive producer on the 2003 horror film “Freddy vs. Jason.”

“Stokely saw the potential of the movie right away,” Granger said.

“It was one of those things I wanted instantly,” Chaffin recalled.

Chaffin, who now has a production deal at New Line, went to her superior, president of production Toby Emmerich, and told him: “It’s about what it sounds like -- snakes on a plane. It’s sort of tongue-in-cheek and kind of scary.” She added: “Toby, to his credit, didn’t goof on it at all.”

“I thought it would be a fun genre movie,” Emmerich said.

At New Line, Emmerich, Chaffin, Jeff Katz and George Waud shepherded the film through various periods of production. Envisioning an ensemble cast, the producers were pleasantly surprised when they found that actor Samuel L. Jackson liked the title so much he wanted to star in the film.

The movie was greenlighted in March 2005 and soon began production in Vancouver. It involved building a 100-foot section of a Boeing 747 that could simulate flying in turbulence. Some of the snakes in the movie are computer-generated, some are mechanical but many are the real thing. The set had to be completely contained so the reptiles would not slither away. (Although venomous snakes appear on-screen, none were used in the company of actors, Berenson pointed out.)

Long before there was a teaser or trailer or one-sheet, the idea caught fire on the Internet. Now, a Google search returns nearly 12 million online references to the film, which sources say cost less than $40 million to make. Nearly 3 million unique users have checked out the film’s website, and the Snakes on a Blog fan site has attracted about half a million visitors, many of whom groused about one thing in particular: They wanted Jackson to deliver the kind of profanity he’s known for from movies including “Pulp Fiction.”

But to do that, the proposed PG-13 film would have to become R-rated. Director David R. Ellis went back to do additional photography with Jackson now uttering what could become a classic line: “I’ve had it with these #$@**% snakes on this #$@**% plane!”

If “Snakes on a Plane” becomes a hit, imagine what pitches Hollywood executives might hear: “Bees in a Car,” “Wasps on a Bus,” “Spiders in Your Hanes,” “Bats in Your Hair.”

All rated #$@**% R, of course.