Go away quietly? Not these writers

Suzanne Francis and Gabe Grifoni apparently didn’t get the memo outlining the industry’s policy that screenwriters need to take their lumps wordlessly and move on.

Former writers’ assistants on such television shows as “Sports Night,” “Boy Meets World” and “Scrubs,” Francis, 33, and Grifoni, 30, bonded during their 16-hour shifts and finally decided to pool their creative sensibilities three years ago. When a pair of comedy pilots went nowhere, they took a shot at a feature script, a road trip comedy called “Wieners,” that in 2005 landed them 40-plus industry meetings, a $100,000 script assignment for Walden Media and an eventual sale to Screen Gems for $170,000 (including the production bonus).

Given unusual access, Francis and Grifoni were then permitted to stay on set for two months during production, asked to write an extra day’s worth of promotional material for the marketing team and were invited into the editing room. To the freshman writing team, it was an exciting, illuminating experience. So far, so great.

Then their e-mails were no longer being returned and “Wieners” suddenly seemed headed for a straight-to-DVD release. But in a radical break with convention, the pair didn’t roll over in quiet bitterness, just another set of disappointed screenwriters with no power. And they didn’t heed the warnings of their agent and manager to keep the grousing in-house and to a minimum. (Grifoni regularly says things like, “The studio is just going about this movie the wrong way because they don’t understand it.”)

What they did was contact Scriptland for help, apparently seeing the column as an avenue to spark some last-ditch turnaround in Screen Gems President Clint Culpepper. In this, they are either incredibly gutsy or incredibly, well, stupid. The chutzpah! Although taking up their cause was out of the question, I had to meet any writers willing to fight this hard to get their film into theaters.

And fight they have. They offered to finance an extra test screening of their preferred cut. They cut their own trailers on iMovie and then offered to pay so they could test one of them. And despite the potential harm of being branded as troublemakers, they called a major newspaper to try to pressure the studio about to dump their “baby” into Blockbuster.

“We believe in the script and the movie and the cast,” Grifoni says over a latte in a Westwood coffee shop. “I don’t want to look back 10 years from now and say, ‘We didn’t do everything possible.’ I want to know that we did everything possible to get it into theaters, that we cut our own trailers, that we tried every marketing trick to make this movie a success.”

Throughout production and editing, the writers felt the studio was pushing the tone of their “smart dumb comedy” about three losers who road trip to Los Angeles in a homemade Wiener Wagon younger and sillier. The few racier scenes -- a strip club sequence and one involving Jenny McCarthy and a dog that finds its way under her skirt -- were quickly cut, and the two official test screenings were populated with kids as young as 13, a demographic that Francis and Grifoni claim was much younger than their intended target audience.

Both test scores were unimpressive. Finally, at the end of January, Culpepper delivered the disheartening news that throwing $15 million of marketing behind a theatrical release for “Wieners” made no sense for their little $6 million movie, which could easily be recouped on DVD.

“Clint is a really smart guy,” Grifoni says. “He knows how to release certain types of movies. This is a movie he doesn’t get, and I think the studio hasn’t really given the movie a chance to be what it should be.”

A call to Screen Gems reveals that, despite Francis and Grifoni’s efforts, it is too late -- their Wiener Wagon will not be rolling into theaters. It turns out that, unbeknownst to the ecstatic writers, the film’s original financing came out of Screen Gems’ acquisitions budget, a decision that indicates that the studio was considering a DVD release from the point of sale. (Screenwriters just wading into Hollywood waters could draw the obvious lesson from this: Before selling your script, ask about the intentions for release.)

Of course, one big upside of the DVD-only release is that Francis and Grifoni now get to restore all the risque material for the de rigueur unrated version -- a small consolation for the writers.

Getting Oscar history straight

William Monahan, our newest adapted screenplay Oscar winner for “The Departed,” began his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards nearly two weeks ago by crediting Robert Bolt’s screenplay for “Lawrence of Arabia” as a crucial early inspiration. I recounted this in my follow-up column last week, which prompted several cinephiles to urge that a clarification was needed.

The Academy Award-winning 1962 epic based on the life of T.E. Lawrence was actually co-written by Michael Wilson, who had been blacklisted in the 1950s for his refusal to answer questions about his alleged Communist Party membership before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Wilson was indeed a member from 1938 until the mid-1950s). At the time, Wilson was denied any credit for “Lawrence” either on-screen or off. He was one of the most talented and honored screenwriters of the era, but it took in some cases more than 45 years for him to receive official recognition for his work.

Wilson was living in exile in France (though still clandestinely writing movies) when producer Sam Spiegel (“On the Waterfront”) hired him to adapt Lawrence’s life story. After Wilson had written a few drafts, director David Lean brought on Bolt to turn Wilson’s broader, sociopolitical take into a more focused character study of Lawrence. The film went on to win best picture, and the adapted screenplay earned a nomination for Bolt, as the only credited writer.

Wilson died of a heart attack in 1978, but, 17 years later, the WGA finally restored Wilson’s credit, and the academy reinstated his nomination for co-writing “Lawrence of Arabia.” (Afterward, Columbia Pictures corrected the film’s on-screen writing credits on video and DVD releases.)

In 1984, he was retroactively awarded his adapted screenplay Oscar (along with fellow blacklistee Carl Foreman) for co-writing the 1957 best picture winner, “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” also directed by Lean. And he had yet another Oscar nomination restored just five years ago for co-writing the 1956 drama “Friendly Persuasion.” According to the WGA, Wilson ultimately had five credits posthumously reinstated that originally either were absent or under a pseudonym.

Wilson, an Oklahoma native who broke into Hollywood in 1941, wrote or co-wrote more than 20 screenplays (including the original “Planet of the Apes”), served as a Marine during World War II and won his first Oscar in 1952 for co-adapting “A Place in the Sun.” He was nominated again the following year for “5 Fingers.” Along with director Herbert J. Biberman, a member of the legendary Hollywood Ten, Wilson also worked on the controversial 1954 drama “Salt of the Earth,” an account of a Mexican American miners’ strike that ended up on the National Film Registry. (Special thanks to B. Baker and author Joseph McBride for providing some of this background.)

Five days before his HUAC testimony in 1951, Wilson wrote a letter to his parents, who had hoped he would cooperate with the committee.

“Surely, whatever your own beliefs, you cannot see this as an alternative for a decent human being,” Wilson wrote. “To turn Judas, to sell my birthright and worship the Almighty Dollar for the sake of expediency for the sake of my career, or for the sake of your shame as to what people will think. It is not my career that is really at stake at all -- it is my survival as a free writer.... If I have any worth as a writer, it is because I have been a worthy citizen.”

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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.