Seeking a perfect home for writer’s final work

You must drink.

You can’t talk about the movie business.

These were the two nonnegotiable rules pugnacious TV and film writer William Kelley (“Witness”) laid down for aspiring scribe Tim Casey when Casey asked to join Kelley at a restaurant during a break at an Aspen screenwriting seminar in the late ‘80s.

Casey, a Colorado Springs firefighter, eagerly obliged (despite the clock face reading 9:30 a.m.), and a deep friendship developed over the next 15 years. So when Kelley died in 2003, Casey tracked down the only copy of the last feature screenplay Kelley wrote, a comedic western called “Strayhorn,” which had been abandoned in a storage closet at USC.

Now Casey and Skip Press, an L.A.-based author and screenwriting teacher, are trying to find a home for the irreverent western about a charming, hot-tempered former U.S. Cavalry sergeant named Cletus Strayhorn, who wanders west in 1882 in search of gold, his young love and every kind of trouble. Robert Duvall and George Clooney (who had been looking for a western to do with his buddy Brad Pitt a few years ago) have read it, but thus far no one has taken on the material.

Kelley was a former Air Force boxer who became a novelist and TV writer on shows such as “Gunsmoke” and “Kung Fu” in the ‘70s. In 1986, he won a screenwriting Oscar for his only produced feature, “Witness,” which had begun as an unused teleplay for “Gunsmoke” (note the classic western structure of the Peter Weir-directed film) that he revamped with former TV writing colleague Earl W. Wallace. Kelley, who idolized Hemingway, had a reputation for expressing a little too much unvarnished honesty in studio meetings and even sat whittling a spear with a huge knife during one of them.

“Strayhorn” is a throwback written with real joy for the traditions of the genre, which is precisely why it’s a tough sell in today’s marketplace. Most westerns are now relegated to television miniseries (Duvall’s “Broken Trail” did very well on AMC last year), and to many cineastes, David Webb Peoples’ Oscar-nominated script for “Unforgiven,” released at the time Kelley wrote “Strayhorn” in 1992, played like the definitive eulogy for the genre.

But Casey, who holds the option on “Strayhorn,” remains undeterred.

“It’s a passion piece for me,” Casey says, maintaining that he wants it produced with Kelley’s words unchanged. “I just want to see it be a movie, and I want it to be something to honor Bill. In my fantasy world it would win another Academy Award for Bill posthumously.”

‘Blind Side’ gets fast-tracked

Fox has just fast-tracked an adaptation of Michael Lewis’ nonfiction book “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” to be written and directed by John Lee Hancock (“A Perfect World,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”).

In “Blind Side,” Lewis uses the fascinating example of Michael Oher, a 300-plus-pound homeless black teenager whose widowed mother was a crack addict, as a case study with which to analyze the financial, cultural and ethnographic inner workings of football. Oher was taken in by a wealthy evangelical white couple in Memphis, Tenn., and before long his size and agility made him the target of every college recruiter in the country (Oher is now building a distinguished pigskin career at the University of Mississippi).

When the studio won a bidding war last October for the film rights to the just-published book, Lewis (“Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” “Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street”) had this to say of the Hollywood system:

“It’s a process that’s mystifying to me,” he griped in an interview with Fortune, referring to stalled adaptations of his other books at Sony and Warner Bros. “A producer buys the book and then hires someone who knows nothing about the material to write the screenplay as if it’s an independent expertise that has nothing to do with the subject. And then for $1 million they write a bad screenplay, and the studio loses interest.”

Hancock, an in-demand rewrite artist who directed Mike Rich’s real-life-inspired baseball screenplay, “The Rookie,” in 2002 and most recently co-wrote and directed the hugely underperforming “The Alamo” in 2004, has as good a shot as any to tackle the material.

A website for writers to read

If you’re looking for a good forum to try to understand the real-time thoughts and concerns of the screenwriting community, there are few places better to log on to than the Artful Writer (www.artfulwriter.com).

Subtitled “information, theory and debate for the professional television and film writer,” Artful Writer was created in 2005 by Craig Mazin (“Scary Movie 3”) and Ted Elliott (“Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”) to help younger writers understand the business. It certainly is smart -- Mazin and Elliott truly take care to try to enlighten as well as provoke -- but it leans heavily on the debate part of the equation. The endless response threads often read like bar fights.

Most of May was consumed by a throw-down between Mazin and Elliott on one side and J.F. Lawton (“Pretty Woman”) on the other over the arcane details and potential criminality of the Writers Guild of America’s foreign levies headache (I know, just reading that much about it induces a migraine). The most recent site dust-up was provoked by a treatise Mazin wrote supporting the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s new policy of including on-screen smoking in its consideration of film ratings.

“I knew that I was going to light one up with that one,” Mazin says.

For an unadvertised enterprise with no profit angle, Mazin and Elliott’s blog draws a lot of traffic -- more than 30,000 unique visitors a month. And while they’ve drawn established regulars such as Stephen Susco (“The Grudge 2”), Marianne Wibberley (“I Spy”), Carl Gottlieb (“Jaws”) and Josh Olson (“A History of Violence”), a lot of young or emerging writers turn to it for Mazin and Elliott’s essays and primers on complicated creative, political and technical aspects of the profession.

“The whole purpose of starting this thing was to get them while they are young,” Mazin says. “It’s nice to be able to empower them with some information and with our particular philosophy.”

Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. Please e-mail any tips or comments to fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.