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The
Lure of the Million-Dollar Script Where is the Wizard in Today's Hollywood? And How Does He Create the Wonderful Illusions That He Does?
Snow blanketed the tarmac at New York's JFK airport while all hell broke loose back in Burbank, California. Stuck incommunicado on an obstructed runway, Bruce Berman grew increasingly aggravated while he shifted in his first-class seat aboard United Airline's Flight 7. Berman, then Warner Bros.' President of Production, utilized his phone in the way Hollywood's top executives do, as if an implement in the war of deal-making before one's enemy gets the chance to bear arms. But on this snowbound February Friday, Berman -- the key Warner executive capable of granting the $1 million bid on a script -- could not be reached. Berman was returning from the other coast after attending a memorial for Steve Ross, a legendary media executive who had originally made his fortune in the funeral business. But it was as the architect of the Time, Inc. and Warner Communications merger that Hollywood would memorialize the silver-haired mogul. While Berman stared at the snow pounding outside his window, the security procedures prevented him from leaving the airplane to check on the studio; what if he was a bomb-planting terrorist? Nor could the Warner production chief use his cell-phone on the tarmac; frequencies might get jammed. Nor could he operate the plane's phone until he was air-bound. Nothing to do but wait as more snow continued to pour. Meanwhile, phone lines at the William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills were buzzing on overdrive as agent Alan Gasmer fielded call after call. A natural-born salesman, Gasmer knew he had a hot script burning through town, causing a long-standing rivalry to emerge between Burbank's brethren studios, Walt Disney and Warner Bros. Adrenaline levels rise throughout town with a spec script's sale, an often frenetic process of pushing and pulling, which can culminate in seven-figure deals once the dance ends. At the center of this particular bidding war were 128 pieces of paper, a character-oriented historical adventure about the father of modern stage magic, Frenchman Robert Houdin (after whom America's Houdini named himself). Envisioning it as another Raiders of the Lost Ark, Disney hungered to acquire the property, and with interest potentially brewing from Universal, Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, TriStar and other buyers, Warner Bros. faced a high probability of being left out of the game. The screenplay's writers, the husband and wife team of Lee and Janet Scott Batchler, pulled over at various pay phones every fifteen minutes along their way to a three-day writer's group seaside outing. Gasmer used his inability to reach his new clients to the bidding war's advantage. "Okay, how about this," anxious studio executives would toss in offers for a script that quickly attracted Sean Connery to star and Spielberg's long-time producer, Frank Marshall, to direct. "And tell your clients to stay on the phone." "I'm going to have to wait until my clients call in," Gasmer happily and honestly replied. "I can't reach them." The Batchler's frequent stops extended what would normally be a four-hour drive up the California coast to nine. Jay Stern, a former New York location manager who had landed an executive position at Disney's Hollywood Pictures, latched onto the Batchler's script like a pit-bull. Before the days when every story editor in town feverishly tracked scripts about to enter the market, Stern directly heard about this large-scale action-adventure from Alan Gasmer over lunch the previous week at the Beverly Hills' industry hot-spot, The Grill. "Sounds great. Please, I want to get this," Stern beseeched, his appetite whetted. "That's one I would really, really like to get my hands on." The screenplay first arrived in Stern's Disney office in Burbank late Tuesday afternoon. After returning to his West L.A. home at around 11 p.m., Jay watched the news. Planning to read the first forty pages before catching his sleep, Stern couldn't stop until he was finished. By the 128th page, Stern was anxious to acquire the property, strategizing his following morning's game-plan. As is the industry's standard practice, a Disney reader also covered the script overnight to provide a shorthand analysis Stern could submit to his bosses, then Hollywood Pictures' president Ricardo Mestres and studio chieftain Jeffrey Katzenberg. Before the next day's commute to work, Stern picked up his phone to dial Gasmer, and also left messages with Interscope and Cinergi; scripts were on their way by messenger. Because of the project's epic nature and mega-budget scope, Disney -- then in an austerity phase -- would enlist one of these studio-aligned production companies to split the costs. At nine a.m. every Wednesday morning, Hollywood Pictures executives gathered for a weekly bagel-and-fruit filled story meeting in an airy boardroom of the Team Disney building. "This is a big movie, this is definitely going to sell, and probably for a lot of money," Stern announced to Katzenberg and his subordinates, all mouse ears. "A master magician goes to Algeria to debunk the sorcerers; it's an original idea, and it's well executed. I think it's distinctive and has great potential." Mestres began reading the script that morning and agreed with Jay's assessment. Rarely would a studio find an action picture with the character relationships this one offered: a love triangle between the famous magician, his coquettish wife, and the fearless American in the French Foreign Legion who romances her. Castable with a capital C. By then Tom Lassally, a prominent executive at Warner Bros., was just as hot on the material. Ricardo Mestres over-nighted the script overseas to Andrew Vajna, Cinergi's illustrious Hungarian owner, while Stern did his best to find out Warner's take on the material. It would determine what William Morris wanted from the deal. "I'm looking for a million," Gasmer told the interested parties by Friday, as the script's simmer turned to a boil. And Stern began to sweat. "TriStar was supposedly circling," Stern recalls. "What TriStar did was get it to Wolfgang Petersen [the studio-based German director of Das Boot, who would later direct Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire]. One of the things that studios do is slip it right away to directors or stars. That's always been done. I don't know if they got an answer from Wolfgang, but it was Friday afternoon and I knew that Bruce Berman was unreachable. I actually heard that he was stuck on the tarmac. I was concerned that as soon as Lassally reached Berman and had the conversation, that they would just put a million-dollars on the table." The heat generated by Burbank's burning inferno seemed to quell that nasty East Coast snowstorm. And as Berman cleared for take-off, Disney's Mestres and Cinergi's Vajna agreed to split fifty-fifty on the development costs. Snapping up the project, along with a "blind-script" commitment that the Batchlers would later write, Disney and Cinergi plunked down the money. The screenplay's title: Smoke & Mirrors. By the time Warner Bros.' Berman could check on the status, the screenplay had sold. Hollywood Picture's Mestres promptly showed Smoke & Mirrors to Frank Marshall, Mike Ovitz' former UCLA fraternity brother, who dabbled in magic himself and directed the studio's hits Arachnaphobia and Alive. Although Marshall recently signed an overall producing and directing deal with Paramount, he wanted to bring Smoke & Mirrors to the screen. Meanwhile, Cinergi chieftain Andy Vajna gave the script to his friend, Sean Connery. The former James Bond agreed to take the role of Houdin, the famous magician wooed by his government to Africa to join the French Foreign Legion in defeating a powerful sorcerer of false magic. Stern's acquisition of the hot property helped earn him a promotion to Vice President. Lee and Janet Scott Batchler, who originally met at an all-night Dungeons & Dragons party at their Bel-Air church, had a lot to celebrate over. They enjoyed a wonderful three-day weekend on California's central coast, treating their writer's group to dinner. Broke at the time, they had to borrow the money, but their friends didn't doubt they were good for it. But Smoke & Mirrors' title proved to be a premonition. Their script was rewritten and now languishes in what's commonly known as "development hell," a fate suffered by over 85-percent of studio purchased spec scripts. While the project achieved the almost unheard "go movie" status within only three weeks of its purchase, with a then $60-plus-million budget (which would run over $100 million today), ensuing mounting costs from pre-production trips to Morocco and Tunisia, as well as expensive rewrites to sharpen the characters' voices, led to the project's collapse. Connery desired more work on the script, and Paramount topper Sherry Lansing wanted Frank Marshall back at her studio (where he would later direct Congo). Momentum lost -- and now with millions of dollars in studio expenditures against it -- the ashen script may always remain an illusion. Eager as ever to work with the writers, Warner Bros. hired the Batchlers to script Batman Forever, their latest installment in what the Warner executives referred to as "their biggest corporate asset." Bruce Berman approached the amiable couple at the Batman Forever Westwood premiere, recalling the Smoke & Mirrors screenplay that brought them together. "That should have been our movie," Berman smiled under the klieg lights. "I would have made it." To buy The Big Deal: Hollywood's Million-Dollar Spec Script Market from Amazon.com, click here. To visit the book's companion website, click here. Copyright © 2000 Thom Taylor. Reprinted with permission. |
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