Inside the development process of one production company

I think that every blogger who's out there anonymously has to be aware in the back of his mind that the day will come that their identity is known.  From the beginning, I've been cognizant of not putting something out there that I'd be afraid to stand behind one day.  Obviously there are plenty of employers who don't look kindly at all on the idea of their subordinates running a blog and that's the main reason I've hidden behind this pseudonym.  I didn't want there to be one day where the mere existence of this site would be an obstacle to getting a job.

Because of this, I've generally refrained from the sort of gossipy stories that frequently dominate these kinds of insider blogs.  Yes, it would be fun to talk about how an agent was a dick to me, or how some assistants need to be stabbed in the front for their treachery, but at some point, the information will be out there to allow people to connect the dots on what stories match with which people, and I don't want to put something out there that will embarrass anyone.

This has forced me to be extra vague when discussing the particulars of my employers, past and present.  I've long wanted to go a little more in-depth on how certain movies got made, but that often entails discussing failures as well as successes.  I'm leery of that because it's one thing for me to write a review saying why I disliked THE PURGE. It's quite another for a former boss to read an underling's diatribe about why a movie they had a relationship with sucked.  So try to be understanding that I'm not particular to whip a deceased equine, even if I'm not naming the specific film.

I want to discuss a little bit about what goes on in production companies.  When I go onto other screenwriting sites, I see a lot of people who've never gotten near L.A. speaking with seemingly great authority about how Hollywood works.  I hear them talk about "Hollywood" as if it was one monolithic collective - usually with zero insight or self-awareness of their own workings.  Some of these bitter types even act as if Hollywood deliberately is trying to piss them off with what they do.  I don't think it's helpful or accurate to let these misconceptions stand, and so I'm going to try to peel back the curtain a bit by using one of my employers as an example.

Let's call this company "Miracle Pictures," and we'll say the CEO is "Roger Bergman."  I'm going to draw on my pre-recession experience with them, because this came at a time when the company was successful enough that few decisions were made out of fear.  Pre-strike, pre-recession, it was a different place and I think there's something to be gained from examining what people choose to make when their jobs aren't riding on their next film.

Miracle Pictures output could generally be spilt among four different buckets.

The Passion Project That Was Also a Prestige Picture
If it was a Harrison Ford movie it would be: Regarding Henry, Sabrina, The Devil's Own, Extraordinary Measures

There's a reason I'm bringing this division up first - to show that Roger Bergman always put his heart and his passion behind a story that meant something to him.  I won't claim to have loved all of these films.  Indeed, they didn't speak to me as a young man in my mid-twenties, and to be honest, the young ladies in the office didn't really relate to them either.

One day we were talking about a run of films in this realm and noted all the similarities.  Most of all of them were dramas.  They tended to have prestigious casts, but centered around an older male.  The directors were solid and the scripts tended to be thoughtful, if generally light on visceral action.  You could probably dismiss some of them as "Oscar bait," but usually of a particular breed - by and large, they focused on men of a certain age.  This similarity was initially cloaked by the fact that they were usually cast with stars, and you just accepted that some of those box office draws were going to be older white males.  It wasn't until we really looked at it closely that it was apparent the real draw for Roger Berman was that these stories were about people who were dealing with the sorts of questions in life that he himself was exploring.

You're certainly free to call that self-indulgent, but if each of us had the means, what kinds of stories would we back?  When you're looking at a dozen scripts, which one is going to stand out as the story that will fuel you for the year-plus you'll be working on the film?  Ultimately, it was Roger's money and resources and I can't really fault a guy for getting excited about a tale that reaches him on an emotional level.

Every producer I've worked for has had some films that fall into this category. They don't always turn out as great films.  Honestly, a lot of them end up being more forgettable and inoffensive than bad.  As you'll see, these aren't the only movies these guys make.  The "one for me, one for them" principle was in effect back then and you'll still see it play out now, though perhaps less often.  At their core, people want to make good movies and they want to tell meaningful stories.

The "Elevated Genre" Picture
If it was a Harrison Ford film it would be: Frantic, Presumed Innocent, What Lies Beneath

This is a film with genre trappings, but generally played more grounded and dramatic than typical. You'll almost always have very accomplished, serious actors, little gunplay, a lot of tension and occasionally some supernatural entries.  These were a little more to my tastes and were largely the sorts of films I thought of when the company came to mind.

I hesitate to call any of the films in this bucket a "home run."  A lot of them were solid B+s, with the occasional project dipping below it.  You probably weren't going to rush to own these films, but you'd see them a lot on TNT.  (About half of them would make you think, "Okay, I recognize these actors, so I know I saw this. I just can't remember much about the movie.")

With these, you could feel the producers trying to please studio commercial sensibilities while trying to tell stories that they found unique in some way.  Sometimes this meant mixing genres in ways that didn't always payoff, but in general, I'll salute the noble failure over a film that doesn't have any ambitions and came to life in a cynical way.

The "IP Farm" Genre Pictures.
If it was a Harrison Ford film it would be: Cowboys & Aliens, Ender's Game.

Let me explain those comparisons a bit - not all of the films in this subcatagory were the debacles that the listed Ford films were.  The similarity is largely in that a number of projects were clear attempts at starting franchises.  To be fair, they got a couple sequels made, but the false starts out-number them.

The chief difference between this category and the previous one is that the genre films in that list were generally one-offs.  It was pretty clear that the way most of those films ended, a sequel would be difficult to justify. In this category, most but not all of the films were either efforts at franchise launching or came from existing intellectual property.  While passion played a decent role in the other films, this category seemed to put commercial concerns first.

These are the pictures that helped keep the lights on for the previous two categories.  Roger Bergman and his fellow producers at Miracle Pictures were intelligent people, but I'm not sure they were the audience for these films.  When you're not the audience for the films, you either have to employ people who understand those genres or you have to second-guess the audience.

My opinion was really only sought out with regard to one of these pictures.  It was a genre film targeted at a teen audience, so I have to give them credit for trying to capture that market ahead of Twilight.  But the script... look, I was not the audience for it.  I wrote a long memo wherein I invoked Buffy and attributed its success to how the series used metaphors to relate the supernatural to everyday trials teens face.  The monsters would somehow personify an insecurity or an issue that was emotionally relevant to the teen viewing audience.  This was something the feature script lacked, and the result was a story short on subtext.

My notes were politely accepted, but that was pretty much the end of it.  I can't really say if that was because I was pushing them in a direction they weren't interested in or if they didn't consider the suggestion to be of much weight.  This was also a project with a number of producers, so it's possible compromises were made.  When you've got a lot of voices in the project, it can become a challenge to maintain a consistent vision.

As I look at the post-recession films that Miracle Pictures made, I can see a heavier tilt that favors this category.  That's not terribly surprising.  Priority one is going to be staying in business.  But I can't help but look at that and think, "Well, I sure hope Roger is finding ways to feel as fulfilled by these films as the ones he made when I first worked for him."

The Favor Catagory

Honestly, this is a hard category to define.  It produced one of Miracle Pictures' best films and also one of its.... not-so-best.  From time to time, we would be involved in co-productions where we were largely a silent partner.  I always kind of likened it to co-signing a loan or an apartment lease for someone.  Sometimes we were partners, but with limited creative involvement.  Other times, I get the sense our contribution was largely financial.  I separate this out because there were a few pictures that would not have ended up on our resume otherwise.

These are the four basic buckets for projects that came into Miracle Pictures.  At the time I was there, the company was taking on a pretty wide diversity of genres, at least comparatively speaking.  There are some companies that focus only on horror, or on action, or on high-concept thrillers.  What I liked about Miracle Pictures is that any of those sorts of films could get traction there so long as the people making the decisions either had a passion for it or couldn't resist the commercial lure.

Commercially, I think they fared better when they were sticking to the films they loved and understood.  They were more likely to have a misfire when they stepped outside their box, but that's true of anyone.

Would I have made the same slate the Roger Bergman did? No, not in a lot of cases.  It's only with hindsight that I can look back on that whole experience and realize that the most important education was not second-guessing and saying "This is what I would do."  The real learning experience comes from understanding why they made the decisions they did.

I've had a number of bosses since then.  Some of them would never have touched the films on the Miracle Pictures slate.  But they've all had success and there's been a different method to each of their madness.  Some of them are extremely business-minded.  They'll follow the market and be rewarded for it commercially even if the artistic results are inconsistent.  Others will take big risks that are further outside the box and find a way to make those projects work.

If everyone in Hollywood was purely commercially driven and thought the same way, then Miracle Pictures would be indistinguishable from my subsequent employers.  I can assure you I'd never mistake one for the other.  They're very different people with very different passions.  The only thing they all have in common is that they've made a lot of movies and the good ones are flicks that people recognize when you list them.

If you take nothing else from my post, let it be this - people are the ones who make decisions in this town, not "Hollywood."

Webshow - "No one sets out to make a bad movie."

Considering the posts I've either linked to or hosted recently where professional writers like Geoff LaTulippe and Eric Heisserer have offered a peak at the development process that can cause good scripts to go bad like curdled milk, today's topic on the webshow seemed like an obvious one.

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer lifts the curtain on the studio film development process from a writer's perspective

Last week I pointed out a post on Geoff LaTulippe's new blog which peeled by the curtain on the studio development process, and it appears that I wasn't the only one impressed with it.  On Twitter, screenwriter Eric Heisserer made a passing comment that suggested he'd be interested in writing a similar piece.  Seeing an opportunity, I reached out to Eric and offered to host his essay here.  He responded with a piece that should be a must-read for anyone eager to understand what it's like to be a working writer on a studio film.

Eric Heisserer is the writer behind the 2010 reboot of A Nightmare on Elm Street, as well as Final Destination 5 and the 2011 prequel The Thing. Next year, he'll make his directorial debut on the Hurricane Katrina drama Hours.  Long-time readers of the blog might remember Eric from one of my earliest interviews, which can be found in two parts here and here.

Massive, massive thanks to Eric for this piece, by the way.

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My friend Geoff LaTulippe recently posted on his blog about the process of working on a studio project, in an effort to help people understand how a bad movie doesn’t equate to a bad writer at the heart of it. Geoff illustrated the evolution/devolution of a script as it went through the gauntlet from first draft to production rewrites. (Play Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” while you read it.) 

I want to chime in and echo some of what Geoff said, and provide a few specific examples of what it means to be a “professional writer” on a studio project and how one deals with elements beyond one’s control, while working to improve the things that are still within one’s influence. As in most parts of life, this is a hard lesson. 

You are brought in to pitch on a big studio project. It is most likely a remake, adaptation, or sequel. The studios have property and rights, and the way for them to hold onto those rights or to do something corporate-like and “leverage intellectual assets” is to dig into their own libraries. These are the jobs. 

Your agent tells you this is a great opportunity to get in good with a major studio. This is where the money is. This is how you will pay rent without taking a day job. In other words, don’t screw this up. 

The good news is: You’ve been brought in because someone already loves your writing. Maybe it’s the production company set to make the movie. Maybe it’s someone among the top brass at the studio. Whatever the case, you feel good—someone’s read and loved your script. Your voice is what they want. 

You pitch your take on their project, and it’s one you really want to write. You’re passionate and invested. Later you’ll realize that passion and excitement will often count more than story logic and in-depth character work. You get hired, and sent off to write your first draft with a few notes from the studio based on your pitch and/or outline. 

The first draft is where you prove yourself. This is one of the two drafts you will come to love most, because right now it has just your voice; your singular intended tone. 

That first notes meeting is illuminating. You learn right away who actually read your previous script and who didn’t. You also discover what the other people involved want the movie to be. NOTE: Rarely will everyone want to make the same movie. You’ll get notes like “Can we make it more like [popular movie]?” Or, “This feels like it should be more in the [obscure art film] neighborhood.” 

You are sent off to rewrite. You struggle keeping the movie together as a single organism versus a mixed-breed that may not work. (The phrase “fish with wings” is slang I learned about this problem; it’s a fish that can’t swim and a bird that can’t fly.) Hopefully you get it to a stage where it’s ready to be turned in again. 

Perhaps finally this is the stage where it goes to the top studio execs. You attend another notes session and are tasked with notes you feel you’ve already addressed. Things like, “I don’t know what the characters are feeling,” or “What is this person’s arc and why is it so hard to figure out?” Or occasionally, “This character isn’t likeable.” The notes can seem harsh if you take them as personal criticism. You must not. You must focus on the work. 

You must also know you’re likely at a crossroads. You can work hard to address these notes for the chance to continue being the writer, or you can push against them and walk away from the project (or be fired). This second full pass is where you’re tested. The biggest problem is realizing that some readers on the studio level don’t understand subtext. Or rather, they get it when they’re seeing a finished film, but with all the scripts they read (or coverage thereof) they have no subtext radar. It all blows by them. (Not every exec is like this, but it’s a common problem, and can sometimes extend to producers and other people in the process.) 

About this time, your agent calls again and says: Don’t screw this up. For both of you. 

Your new job: Spell out all the things you so artfully seeded through innuendo and subtle suggestion. Now you’re writing things in ALL CAPS and talking about how this is THE TURNING POINT FOR YOUR CHARACTER because she realizes SHE MUST BETRAY HER FRIEND to SAVE HER FAMILY. If you learned how to write from a certain LOST writer, you’ll be doing this already, along with statements like HOLY SHIT, this is the MOST HEARTBREAKING MOMENT WE’VE EVER SEEN. 

Reading the draft back to yourself makes your teeth hurt. This isn’t representative of your writing, it’s more like a transcript of some frat boy describing your script to his buddies. And yet this draft goes over like gangbusters at the studio. You are called and thanked by the studio, and then the producer. Once a director/movie star/both get on board, it’s all systems go for this project. 

Maybe that work has already been done, in which case, you’re getting notes from those people as well. If an actor is involved, the draft the studio loves to death will rankle the movie star. Why? Because in this draft you’ve written out all the subtext and given the actor no room for them to do their job. Actors hate drafts like this. It’s like a photograph of a starving child in some third-world country holding up a flag that reads “FEEL SAD.” Actors don’t want to be told how to play the role any more than directors want you to tell them how to direct. Your job is to do so as quietly and subtly as possible. HINT at where the camera will be versus saying “WE DOLLY IN for a tight MCU on our hero…” And so on. 

You luck out and are triggered for an optional rewrite step in your contract, and now have notes from various branches. The director wants the movie to feel more like it was in the first draft. The studio sees potential of this movie being more like some blockbuster and pushes you to make it quite different from that first draft. The actor has all sorts of thoughts, some of which are absolutely crazy, one or two which are brilliant but completely different from what either the studio or director wants. 

Now you’re feeling burnout, you’ve gone through dozens of drafts no one has seen, all in an attempt to keep this movie together. And you can’t crack it. You can’t make everyone happy, it just won’t work out. So you hedge your bets and go with whatever makes the best movie in your mind. If you have a halfway decent relationship with your director, here is where you have a private dinner meeting with them and discuss the elephant in the room and why you made the choices you did. With luck, the director understands and will fight the good fight. 

All the while, you may see several studio execs come and go, and other people involved are likely fighting their own battles. During the life cycle of THE THING (2011), we had five different execs assigned to us, one of whom lasted for only a month. Each of them had a different opinion of what the movie should be. Science fiction. Horror. Creature feature. One of them pushed hard to make the movie 3D. Every part of the movie is at risk of being abandoned or altered; nothing is ever guaranteed. 

The studio may ultimately like your latest draft but you aren’t seen as a “closer” in the business or your name isn’t big enough to be seen as “story insurance,” so they bring in someone else to tackle a few elements in the script. That writer lasts for two weeks and is replaced with another, to appease some new notes from the new studio exec / the big-name supporting actor / the director’s latest idea during prep. 

The last time you see your script, a frightening amount of your dialogue has been rewritten, scene locations have been moved around, there may be one or two new characters or a couple fewer characters, which subtly imbalance something you’d kept in harmony for the last ten months and three studio drafts. Most heartbreaking may be the clever setups/callbacks you’d written in that are now orphaned or widowed. And of course, all over the place you still see the SUBTEXT HAMMER describing action BLUNTLY so the speed-reader will NOT MISS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SCENE. 

There is some great new stuff in there, too, you have to admit. Another writer had a clever idea with a subplot. Or a better ear for comedic dialogue. But you’ll realize that sometimes changes happen because people are just too used to the story after reading the script over and over. There’s no mystery anymore. Changes don’t always happen to make things better. Sometimes it’s just to make them different; new. 

This is typically your least favorite draft. In your eyes, it’s a wreck. And you fear it will get worse during production or reshoots, trying to find its new form. The movie at this point needs to shed its wings or its fish scales and commit to being one thing. 

Invariably, this is the draft that is leaked to the Internet. With just your name on it. Your writing is excoriated online by fans. They point out everything you already know is problematic with this draft, plus a few other problems. One or two clever commenters will wonder aloud why you didn’t do this or that with the characters… choices you made in your first draft. Still others will discuss why the script isn’t more like the source material, or why it should be very different from it, or why any of a thousand decisions were made. 

You can’t tell them anything. You can’t point to the twelve hundred script pages and notes where you explored all of these ideas and discovered why using them was a Bad Plan. Your significant other tells you you shouldn’t be reading comments online in the first place, what are you, crazy? 

The movie is released. Maybe it gets a good Rotten Tomatoes score but a low audience CinemaScore. Maybe it’s the other way around. Your name is on the poster either way. 

Your agent calls and says, Congratulations. You’re a professional writer. Someone wants to meet with you to talk about your next movie. 

And you go. Because your agent is right.

Read screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe's blog!

Earlier this week, screenwriter Geoff LaTulippe launched his new blog and one of his first entries was a reposting of something he said on the Done Deal Pro discussion boards.  Entitled "Mom, Dad? Where Do Movies Come From?" It attacks a myth I've also derided on this blog - the idea that Hollywood is only interested in buying terrible scripts.

I can’t stress this enough: most of the writers working professionally in Hollywood are on a scale from very solid to fucking amazing. Sure, there are some hacks, and sure, we all wonder how they got there; you’ll have that in any profession, creative or not. Hell, I’m probably one of them.

But for the most part, when you go to see a movie that just absolutely blows, you can bet good money on the fact that it didn’t start out as a piece of shit. Is this always true? Of course not. Generally? I certainly believe so.

[...]Most terrible movies start off as really, really, really good scripts.

For more, check out the rest of the post, where Geoff gives a painstakingly detailed breakdown of the development process that most scripts face on their way to production.  And while you're over there, bookmark Geoff's blog.   It promises to be a repository of straight-shooting advice that Geoff has gained via his time as both a professional screenwriter and a studio reader.  In fact, he's even soliciting questions, so if you've got any burning queries you'd like answered from someone who's sat on both sides of the development desk, now's your chance.

Even better for us, Geoff is incredibly blunt and he's definitely no bullshitter.  I don't expect much sugar-coating in his answers.  If you follow him on Twitter at @DrGMLaTulippe, you probably already know that about him, though.

"Tower Heist" - a struggle to execute a high-concept one-liner

It took five years for the Ben Stiller/Eddie Murphy film Tower Heist to go from concept to screen, and in that time, the one-line hook that got everyone interested went through substantial changes.  The LA Times has the story:

Eddie Murphy had a simple suggestion about six years ago: Why not make an all-black version of "Ocean's Eleven"? 

Director Brett Ratner and producer Brian Grazer loved the comedian's idea, and before long, the trio was throwing around ideas about who could star opposite Murphy: Jamie Foxx, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Tracy Morgan and Chris Tucker headed the list.

As anyone who's seen the trailer for the film can tell you, the final cast was multi-ethic and predominantly white.  But you have to admit - there should be a market for an all-black Ocean's Eleven.  Heist movies are a pretty popular genre and the novelty of getting the biggest African-American stars all in one film would almost certainly have marketable appeal.

The evolution of "Tower Heist" illustrates how even a seemingly straightforward idea can go through countless iterations from concept to screen. While "Tower Heist" is credited to screenwriters Ted Griffin ("Ocean's Eleven"), Jeff Nathanson (Ratner's last two "Rush Hour" movies) and writing partners Adam Cooper and Bill Collage ("Accepted"), the script also was revised by Russell Gewirtz ("Inside Man"), Rawson Marshall Thurber ("Dodgeball"), Leslie Dixon ("The Thomas Crown Affair") and Noah Baumbach ("The Squid and the Whale").

What follows is a pretty stardard look at the development hell that many films go through.  It's a good illustration of how just having a good idea isn't enough - it takes talent to execute even the most seemingly-obvious no-brainer.

As the film's racial profile changed, another question loomed over the production: Who are these bandits, and what is their motivation? The earliest plot held that the protagonists worked in a building owned by someone like Trump. "It was a fun movie, a classic underdog story," Ratner said. "But the problem was, you couldn't distinguish the characters apart." Even more knotty, it wasn't clear what provoked their thievery.

After two and a half years of screenplay revisions, Ratner called up Griffin, with whom Ratner collaborated on "Ocean's Eleven" before Steven Soderbergh replaced Ratner as that film's director. 

"I have good news and bad news," Ratner recalled Griffin telling him. "The good news is that I am going to do this. The bad news is that I'm going to throw away your script." 

So what was the fundamental change that Griffin felt was necessary and how did that define the cast?  Check out the rest of the article here.