Scratch this off the list

Meet the perfect girl. ¶ Go sky diving. ¶ See the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Mt. Everest. ¶ Get a movie made at a major studio. ¶ These are a few of the things on screenwriter Justin Zackham’s Bucket List, an earnest catalog of all the things he wants to accomplish before he dies, which he scribbled out in a moment of restless self-recrimination five years ago. ¶ During a single week in early September last year, he knocked out a mind-blowing three-for-one: He signed a deal to make a movie of his screenplay, “The Bucket List”; he got married to the perfect girl in New York, and the following morning, he sat down at Jack Nicholson’s dining room table in L.A. beneath an original Picasso and listened to the three-time Oscar winner and his similarly lauded colleague, Morgan Freeman, read through his searching script. ¶ “The first couple lines of dialogue they exchanged, we all looked at each other and were like, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” says Zackham about “the greatest 24 hours” of his life. “As a writer, if I never have a moment like that again, I’m still OK.”

Zackham’s drama, directed by Rob Reiner (“Stand by Me”), follows an odd-couple of terminally afflicted roommates in a cancer ward who bond over achieving as much as they can on their own lists in whatever short time they have left before they, well, kick the bucket. It opens Christmas Day.

The movie’s fruition is a heck of a karmic payoff for Zackham, who after bombing out of college as a freshman, headed to Grenada and spent six months as the only white crew member on a 300-foot cruise ship. There, his own brushes with mortality -- one co-worker tried to stab him in the chest and his colleagues twice pitched him overboard into the deep ocean in the middle of the night, he says -- declined only after he had drank human blood and begun teaching the crew members how to read (rites of passage he would later re-encounter in Hollywood as a screenwriter). He’s written a script called “Monkey Fist” about the experience.

‘Quality of the writing’

After returning to the States, graduating from NYU film school and writing and directing a frat comedy called “Going Greek” in 2001, Zackham took a critical look at his life and work and decided that he had to narrow his creative focus to things that truly mattered. As a none-too-subtle prompt, he wrote out something titled “Justin’s List of Things to Do Before He Kicks the Bucket” and pinned it to his wall.

While working his way through the items on the list it occurred to him that his Bucket List idea would be a pretty good thematic prop to hang a story on. A first draft followed in a two-week burst. “It was kind of surreal that the thing that motivated me to write in the first place ended up being the thing I wrote about,” he says.

Zackham’s agents at the William Morris Agency sent the script to 50 producers, 48 of whom passed, as did all the major studios. Eventually, a few interested producers brought it to Reiner, who was Zackham’s first choice for directing duties. Thirteen pages in, Reiner declared it his next film.

“The thing that got me was the quality of the writing,” Reiner says. “I look to see whether there’s a real unique voice working. And in this case there was.”

Given that aging and death don’t exactly scream “four-quadrant blockbuster” and that Reiner’s box office track record since 1995’s “The American President” had been fairly abysmal, even with crowd-pleasing heavy hitters like Nicholson and Freeman attached no one wanted to make the movie. Zackham’s confidence in his script was such, however, that he was ready to bolt from the industry and start an Internet company if it didn’t convince everyone of its value.

“I was like, ‘I know that this is tough subject matter but if I can’t get any traction with this, then I clearly don’t understand this business,’ ” Zackham says.

Ultimately, Reiner persuaded his old Castle Rock Entertainment partner, Alan Horn, now president and chief operating officer of Warner Bros. Entertainment, to trust him with the material.

“The whole subject matter of the movie just got me,” says Reiner, who last worked with Nicholson 15 years before on “A Few Good Men,” which earned them both Oscar nominations. “I’m 60 now, and I’ve gotten to a point in my life where you start thinking about things like that -- your own mortality, and has your life been a meaningful life, have you done the things that you feel you should be doing. So it resonated.”

This response to Zackham’s script was common. A quirky byproduct of all the rejection Zackham faced was how many people he subsequently met who had turned down his script but told him that reading it had prompted them to write their own list of things to do before they die. This led Zackham to put together a book, due next year from Random House, of Bucket Lists from such luminaries as Freeman, Hugh Hefner, Laird Hamilton and Yuichiro Miura, the oldest man to climb Mt. Everest. (Zackham still has his own original list.)

The subject of sublime fulfillment carried through to the last shot on the last day of filming. “After we called ‘Wrap,’ Morgan looks at [Jack] and says, ‘Well, this has been a dream come true for me,’ ” says Reiner. “So, for Morgan, it was like he could cross off one of the things on his Bucket List.”

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An excerpt from the script, in which Carter (Morgan Freeman) has been writing privately in his hospital bed. He has crumpled the page and tossed it away in frustration after hearing his prognosis. His roommate, Edward (Jack Nicholson), recovers the page and begins to read.

From ‘The Bucket List’

Carter: What are you doing?

Edward: What is this?

Carter: Give it back.

Edward: What is it?

Carter: City college. My freshman philosophy professor assigned this exercise in forward thinking. Had us make a list of all the things we dreamed of doing with our lives before we. . . .

Edward: Before you “kick the bucket.”

Carter: Back then I had things like, “Make a million dollars.” “First black president.” Young man’s wishes. Thought I’d make up a new list, before. . . .

Edward: But this is all so . . . (reading) “Help a complete stranger for the good”? “Laugh until I cry”? The old list was better.

Carter: Anyway, it’s pointless now.

Edward: I would argue the exact opposite. (Grabs a red pen and begins to write his own list alongside Carter’s.)