A little ride of horrors

Passport? Check. Bug spray? Got it. Local currency? Yup. Left arm and spleen? Dang -- maybe that last village has a lost and found ...

Detailing a vacation more grisly than Griswold, Michael Ross’ screenplay for “Turistas,” a thriller that opens Friday, recounts the kind of horrifying travel-abroad scenario that makes food poisoning seem like a quirky local custom. After a bus accident strands an international gaggle of young backpackers in a small village in a remote part of Brazil, the tourists encounter some colorful locals and end up losing a lot more than their luggage.

Much of Ross’ script -- his first -- was informed by what we might call “location writing.” Ross and director John Stockwell (“Blue Crush,” “Into the Blue”) wanted to keep the story as grounded in realism as possible, rather than in the supernatural or super-stupid. So President Marc Butan and co-owner Todd Wagner of 2929 Productions, which financed the $10-million creep-fest, sent the filmmakers on a location-scouting trip to the coastal Brazilian state of Bahia in spring 2005.

As Ross and Stockwell traveled and discovered visually striking local landmarks -- a breathtaking cliff-face, a waterfall, a strange house deep in the jungle, a gigantic network of underwater caverns -- Ross would tweak scenes while riding around on the bus to build the physicality and geography of the sites into his script. As a result, the two weeks that Ross was supposed to spend polishing the screenplay turned into 3 1/2 months of production work on location as he reworked pages up through shooting.

Ross wrote “Turistas,” which will launch the new youth-targeted genre division Fox Atomic, after hearing a public radio piece about a rampant myth in Central and South America that Americans and Europeans kidnap native kids to harvest their organs on an international black market. There have been several incidents of violence in this context, in which tourists have been beaten up, stabbed or set on fire by fearful locals. An early scene sets up this dynamic when one of the backpackers takes a photograph of a child and the villagers turn hostile.

The suspenseful narrative is “more gory than most thrillers, but not torture porn,” Ross says. “[It] feels very real and gritty and something that could happen.”

After graduating from USC film school in 1993, Ross spent eight years working up through the editing ranks on such films as “Jerry Maguire,” “Meet Joe Black” and “Wrong Turn.” Two years ago, he was cutting “2001 Maniacs” for writer-directors Boaz Yakin (“A Price Above Rubies”) and Eli Roth (“Hostel”) at Raw Nerve when “on a whim” he decided to spend his lunch breaks hammering out his own horror scenario.

Any experienced filmmaker will tell you that a movie is actually written three times: first by the screenwriter, then by the director and actors during filming, and one last time by the editor. So Ross had inadvertently been enhancing his storytelling skills all those years in the editing bay.

“It wasn’t until I was cutting myself that I realized, ‘Hey, I really have some confidence in terms of what’s compelling in telling a story,’ ” the 35-year-old screenwriter says. “It helped too working on some troubled pictures, which was just as educational, if not more educational, than working on stuff that was really sharp from the beginning -- what problems you can’t solve and what problems you can. In writing [‘Turistas’], I used as a litmus test whether or not this would be a scene that I would want to cut.”

From Faulkner to ‘Deep Throat’

What do you do if you’re a screenwriter who becomes blocked while working on an extremely difficult assignment? You may go for a jog, let’s say. Or start slamming vodka tonics at Tom Bergin’s (you know who you are). Maybe stalk the racks at H&M.; Or, if you’re Merritt Johnson, you may just stick a bookmark in your copy of “The Sound and the Fury” and settle in to watch a little cinema masterpiece called “Deep Throat.”

OK, I know what you’re thinking: This sounds like nothing more than the go-to procrastination tool for every sad soul with the shocking temerity to gaze upon Final Draft with anything resembling hope. But before you think I’m libeling Johnson, you should know that he can actually make a legitimate case for it. In addition to adapting William Faulkner’s monumental, multiple-viewpoint tour de force, the Shreveport, La., native is also writing a biographical film about America’s original porn star, Linda Lovelace -- sometimes in the same day.

It’s more the rule than the exception that screenwriters work on several assignments simultaneously. And turning to your other project is often a successful way to provoke a breakthrough. Johnson has recently been making this work for him.

Originally published in 1929, “The Sound and the Fury” is arguably Faulkner’s greatest work -- an epic told from four points of view, in smash-cut time jumps -- but also his most challenging to adapt into a film.

Frequent Faulkner adapters Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch (“The Long, Hot Summer,” “The Reivers”) tried to shoehorn the unwieldy novel into a 1959 film that starred Yul Brenner and Joanne Woodward. After Oprah chose it for her book club last year, a variety of Hollywood players once again tried to acquire the rights.

But it wasn’t until this summer that Johnson, a Faulkner buff with an English lit degree from Louisiana State but no produced credits, and his boyfriend, Jason Weinberg, a well-connected talent manager, persuaded Faulkner literary estate representative Lee Caplin to give Johnson a shot.

“The theme is this notion of, ‘What happens to the descendants of noble and honorable men if all they do is stand on the shoulders of their ancestors and don’t do any work themselves to continue that legacy?’ ” says Johnson, his laid-back twang, white Coca-Cola baseball cap and 6-foot frame filling every anecdote with an all-American flavor. “Which I think makes it relevant to today. Ideally, I want to connect it, but not in a heavy-handed way, to what’s happening very generally in America.”

Johnson now has a 200-plus page draft that retains the book’s varying points of view but with the major events placed into chronological order. He hopes to sculpt a strong first draft by the end of the year.

As for Lovelace, Imagine Entertainment once had the rights to her life story and books, plus a draft of a script that she reportedly didn’t like. After Lovelace died in a car accident in 2002 at the age of 53, producer Brian Grazer decided to make the documentary “Inside Deep Throat” instead, a jauntier enterprise than the darker journey of the film’s complicated star. Johnson later got in contact with a producer friend of Lovelace’s who had reclaimed the rights and sold her on a treatment he had written for a film version.

“The thing that was interesting to me is that she represented the two conflicting attitudes toward sex in America,” Johnson says. “She was the very first porn superstar and then she flipped and became the antiporn, feminist activist. What happens that one person can embody both of these?”

In his script, Johnson splits the story around these two periods of Lovelace’s life: the thrilling ride in the ‘70s as “Deep Throat” becomes a phenomenon and her struggle in the ‘90s as a welfare mother on Long Island trying to distance herself from her previous life. Courtney Love, who has played Larry Flynt’s wife and Andy Kaufman’s girlfriend, signed on to executive produce and star as the later-years Lovelace.

“She was the first one to say, ‘Nobody’s going to believe me as a 22-year-old just off the hay truck, but people will believe that I’ve faced some of these similar demons,’ ” recalls Johnson, who is still working on a first draft for Paramount. “She’s looking for her next great role. When you think about it, in terms of Courtney Love and who she is now, she’s not going to be playing Nanny McPhee. So this is a good match.”

Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. For tips and comments, e-mail fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.