LCF Resident Writes “Cellular” Screenplay

Film Opened Friday

While Chris Morgan was growing up in La Cañada Flintridge he worked at the La Cañada Video store to earn extra money. Little did he realize at that time that the video store experience would benefit him later in his screenwriting career.

“I got to know the kind of movies people liked and that helped me with my screenwriting,” said Morgan, 34, who has written the script for “Cellular” an action film now in release staring Kim Basinger and Chris Evans.

The New Line Cinema film tells the story of a young man (Evans) who receives a frantic wrong number cellular call from a woman (Basinger) who is being held for ransom by a vicious kidnapper (Jason Statham). The Evans character has to decide how much he wants to put himself in danger in order to help a stranger.

Although Morgan has been in the screenwriting business for five years, this is the first script he has received screen credit for doing. “I have worked on other scripts, usually I was called in to do a rewrite.” Rewriting, he said, can have its own problems. “if you are called in to do a rewrite, there are usually inherent problems with the script that maybe can’t be fixed,” he said.

The 1989 La Cañada High said his screenplay for “Cellular” was actually taken from an older script by the veteran filmmaker/writer Larry Cohen. One of ‘Cellular” co-producers, Morgan said, had loved the script and had taken it to the film’s other co-producer, Dean Devlin (who has produced such major films as “Independence Day” and “Stargate”), and got him to buy the story.

“We took a slightly different approach than the original screenplay. We changed it to give it a more real, less twisty premise. In Cohen’s script, the Basinger character is actually in on the ransom,” Morgan said.

Morgan said they wanted to give the film a more uplifting premise, that strangers would go out of their way to help other strangers. “I liked that,” said Morgan who lives in LCF with his wife, Michelle, another LC High graduate, and their two children, Maya, 2, and Chloe, 8 months.

Morgan said scripts are always being changed, but that his script for “Cellular” was changed for the better. “William H. Macy plays this cop in the film. We sent him the script. He liked it, but asked if he could make some suggestions. Macy sent back his suggestions and they really helped his character. What he had written was really funny. I told him that he was really good at writing and should do more of it. When I got home and told my brother about it, he told me, ‘You dummy! Don’t you know who he is. He is up for six Emmys for writing ‘Door-to-Door’ for television,’ ” Morgan said.

After graduation from UC Riverside, Morgan began his venture into the entertainment business and got his first job working on the production crew of “Flubber,” the Robin Williams’ remake of the Fred MacMurray film.

“I was working on my first script, a fifth century siege movie, when a friend asked me if he could read it. I gave it to him and forgot all about it. A year later, I get a call from him. He’s working for Dreamworks and asks me if he could submit my script to them,” said Morgan.

Morgan does and he gets a call from who he calls a “very kindly “ woman from the scripts department who tells him that they can’t use his script because they already have a film called “Gladiator” in the works, but that she would like to see future scripts from him and gave him a list of agents that he could call.

Morgan said just because a person doesn’t have a degree in screenwriting or works in the business, doesn’t mean they can’t come up with a good script. “Everyone has a story to tell. A few years ago, the Screenwriters Guild had this contest where you had to say what you liked best about screenwriting in three words or less. The winning entry was “no rules”.

“Once you get yourself into a routine, you stay at it. I write every day, even if its bad writing. I am a frustrated novelist and my stuff tends to be too long and it needs to be edited. For every page of the script that’s one minute of film,” he said.

Morgan said that what a novelist can say in two or three pages, a screenwriter has to say in a few lines. A guideline, he said, is always think editing when writing a script.

A bit of lucky irony for Morgan is that even if people don’t know who he is, they know where he worked. “Whenever I tell producers that I worked at La Cañada Video, they tell me they know about the place. They said that whenever they need for somebody to see a hard-to-find film or a foreign film, they send a runner over to the video store to pick it up. I got to know about movies at that store,” Morgan said.