Repo Men (28 page)

I
have come to accept, at the age of thirty-five, that I am a bit odd. I write stories about talking dinosaurs, OCD-afflicted con men, women who tie up men for their own edification, and artificial-organ repossessions. Strangely enough, I’ve still got a lot of friends and business associates who choose to speak with me on a regular basis. This is my chance to thank them for sticking around.

The Repossession Mambo
, as a whole, wouldn’t be what it is without my very good friend and co-screenwriter Garrett Lerner. Similarly, I don’t know if or when this book would have made its way into your grubby little hands without the continual support of Miguel Sapochnik, our tireless and talented film director. I could go on about Garrett and Miguel—and I will, if you’ll just flip ahead and check out the essay titled “The Taming of the Mambo” following these pages. Go on, we’ll wait for you.

As always, eternal love and gratitude to my wife, Sabrina. We’ll have been together for eighteen years and married for more than thirteen by the time this book comes out, and the sheer fact that she still thinks I’m funny proves we’re meant to be together. I literally couldn’t tie my shoes without her (especially on days when my back is acting up), and I honestly can’t remember what life was like without her. In a good way.

One day, when they’re much, much,
much
older, I’ll let my amazing, beautiful, and currently innocent girls Bailey (age eight) and Chloe (age two) read this book. It’s not that I’m worried they’ll try and reenact any of the scenes within; I simply don’t want to be responsible for any more years of future therapy than I already am. So far as they know, Daddy is the silly man who sings songs, tells stories, and loves them more than anything. They don’t yet need to know he’s also the guy who writes gleefully about liver extractions. Someone’s bound to tell ’em soon enough. Playground chatter and all that.

Mad props to my parents, Manny and Judi, and I expect they’re now running to the urban dictionary to find out what “mad props” means and learning that I’m at least five years behind the times in my slang. Their support has been constant since the very beginning of my career (and long before said career took off). If I could fault them for anything, it’s for raising me in an overly functional manner; writers are supposed to be much more neurotic than I am. It’s a bit of a problem. Perhaps I could be neurotic about my lack of neuroses. I’ll have to look into that.

Thanks to my editor, Jennifer Brehl, who’s clearly as weird as the rest of us for getting involved with this in the first place. When it came time to find someone who would understand the book as a
book
, and not just as an ancillary product to a film already in production, Jennifer was the one who stepped up and stood out. I’m honored to be working with her, and hope to do so again in the future.

Shout-out to all my agents at Endeavor—Brian Lipson (novel-to-film rights), Richard Abate (book), Phil D’Amecourt (film), Becka Oliver (foreign), and Hugh Fitzpatrick (TV). A lot of agents, I know, but they’re all wonderful, and they all work so nicely together. It’s like a well-oiled machine wearing a very expensive suit.

Further on the film front, thanks to Valerie Dean, who had faith in the project when it was just a messy script making the rounds. She’s got impeccable taste, and I know that when Val’s interested in something, there’s a damned good reason for it. Thanks to Scott Stuber, uber-producer of the film, who took a risk with an odd, odd project and shepherded it through the Byzantine processes of a giant corporate-owned studio, and to Jon Mone, our co-producer, who believed in the project from day one and was on set every day in Toronto, pinky-toe frostbite or no.

Finally, thanks to my other collaborators, close friends all, who have put up with my roller-coaster life during the
Mambo
craziness and understood while I put our joint projects on hold during this process. Dan Ewen, Brian Feinstein, Ian Goldberg, and Jordan Roter are all incredibly creative and talented people who keep me on my toes, and I can’t wait to get back to work with all of them. Just give me another couple of months, guys, I swear…

The Taming of the Mambo

A film version of
The Repossession Mambo
was released under the title
Repo Men
.

T
his is the story of how
The Repossession Mambo
was wrangled from short story to novel to film and back to novel again over the course of approximately twelve years. It should be interesting to anyone curious about the adaptation process or looking to make a career in writing, and though it’s short on tabloid-style gossip, I’ll be sure to throw in a little Hollywood intrigue.

There are three main methods via which a book (or article or comic) is adapted into a motion picture, and I’ve now been involved in all three.

Method #1: Author writes a book, author sells a book to a publishing house, the book is published, the rights are optioned and/or purchased by a film company, a script is commissioned, a crew is hired, the film is produced, distributed, and everyone’s happy, or sad, or litigious, but in any case, done. This is how it worked with my Rex series, a comedy/sci-fi series exploring the lives of dinosaurs hiding as humans in modern-day society. Turning it into a two-hour TV movie was a process that took approximately five years from publication of the first book to its eventual appearance on the SciFi Channel.

Method #2: Author writes a book, author sells a book to a publishing house, the manuscript is “leaked” to the film companies, who decide to option/purchase the rights before the book is even out, and the rest pretty much picks up right along with Method #1. The book usually comes out long before the movie does, because print production schedules, though lengthy, take a fraction of the time that it takes to get a film up and running. This is more or less how it worked with
Matchstick Men
, a book I wrote in 2000 about a con artist with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The book was published in 2002, and Warner Brothers released the feature film in 2003.

And then there’s Method #3, which I shall describe, in excruciating detail, below. Method #3 is, as far as I’m aware, relatively rare, and my personal experience with it goes like so:

Sometime in 1997, while visiting my family in South Florida, I was driving along a street near my old high school and passed by a pawn shop I’d never noticed before. It must have been around Valentine’s Day, because in the window was a big cartoon heart, poorly drawn in marker, and I found myself wondering:
Are they suggesting you pawn something you own to buy your sweetie a present for Valentine’s Day, or are they actually looking to buy used hearts?
By the time I got back to my parents’ house, I had an idea brewing.

The result, a thirteen-page short story called “The Telltale Pancreas,” told the tale of an unnamed “biomechanical claims and collections” specialist who’d had an unfortunate accident with a defibrillator, received a new artificial heart that he couldn’t pay for, and was now holed up in the basement of his house, waiting for his former employers to try and come take back what was fiscally theirs. Sound familiar?

Now, keep in mind that in 1997, I was twenty-five years old, relatively fresh out of college, and teaching SAT and GRE test-prep to supplement the income my wife, Sabrina, was making as an elementary-school teacher. I had written but not yet sold
Anonymous Rex
, and it’s not like the short-story market was the booming, multibillion-dollar business that it is today. I didn’t expect much out of my little yarn, and with low expectations come low results. (That’s an important lesson to remember, kids.)

I do remember a few people being interested in the story, one of whom was Bob Kurtzman, a director, special-effects wizard, and friend who’d given me my first screenwriting gig ever. He felt like there was a potential film lurking in the tale, but I wasn’t ready to let the story go just yet. I found that I wanted to know more about my main character, and about the world he lived in. It was one of those ideas that held on and wouldn’t let go, and usually the only way to pry off the claws is to just write the damned thing. I decided to turn it into a book.

By this point, a year had passed, and in December 1998 (according to my computer) I started in on the novel. I’d recently sold
Anonymous Rex
, and I imagine that I was flush with dreams of literary stardom, anticipating that every word I’d write would receive accolades from critics and millions of sales orders from adoring fans.

It’s good to be young.

I worked on the novel over the course of the next year or so, interrupted here and there by publicity duties for
Anonymous Rex
(published in the fall of 1999) and the beginnings of
Casual Rex
.
Mambo
wasn’t the quickest book I’ve ever written, or the easiest. Its main difficulties, writing-wise, lay in the structure that I’d chosen for the piece. In order to portray a man whose job and worldview had taken away his ability to interact with and perceive humanity as anything other than a dysfunctional collection of its representative parts, I created a book that had a constantly looping internal structure and populated it with a bunch of characters who were independently related to the protagonist, like spokes of a wheel. Twenty years, five wives, ten soldiers, a score of co-workers, a hundred different clients, all in bits and bursts of sentences and paragraphs—not the most straightforward narrative.

Keep in mind, meanwhile, that the first draft of
The Repossession Mambo
was not the tome you now hold in your hands, but a rough-hewn ancestor, unruly and wild. Naturally, you’d think I’d dive into a rewrite and polish up those edges,
tout de suite
.

You’d think.

Instead, I did what I seem to do with certain books (and yet not with others)—I passed it around to friends. Surprisingly, few of them were frightened of me afterward, and most were excited by the potential. Special mention here to Brian Carter, who, over the last nine years or so, has never stopped asking me what’s going on with “that organ book.” Well, Brian, here it is. Ta da.

Then, a crucial turning point:

In May 2001, my daughter Bailey was a year old, and my wife did what many new mothers are conditioned to do: She joined a playgroup. It’s a good way for babies to get a chance to meet (and pull and pinch and occasionally smile at) their peers, and for moms to speak to other adults once in a while. One of the babies in that group was an adorable little boy named Zeke, and his mom was a friendly blonde named Kim.

Kim and Sabrina became fast friends, and, as will happen, they wanted to force their husbands to get along so we could all hang out together. It helped that Kim’s husband Garrett was a television writer, and we had all grown up within twenty miles of each other in South Florida, even though we now lived in California.

Garrett and I quickly formed a friendship. Though we had a lot in common, we never really talked about working together, mainly because I don’t have the stamina to write for television, and Garrett didn’t have a lot of interest in writing novels. What’s more, Garrett already had a longtime writing partner, a good egg named Russel Friend, and that’s not the kind of relationship you mess with lightly.

As will happen, I eventually forced
The Repossession Mambo
on Garrett, just to gauge his reaction and potentially alienate a newfound friend. Lo and behold, Garrett not only liked the book, but enjoyed it enough to suggest that we write a screenplay adaptation of it together.

Of course I’d considered the idea prior to this, but only in a far-off, one-of-these-days way. I’d never given thought to writing a script adaptation of one of my novels before even placing the book with a publisher. It simply wasn’t done. But as soon as Garrett said it, it made sense. No reason I couldn’t write the script at the same time as I was revising the book, right? As soon as Garrett ran it past Russel and got the okay—opening up their marriage, so to speak—we were off.

It was May 2002 when we began; Garrett was on hiatus from the TV season, and we worked diligently through the summer to wrestle the story lines in the book into something resembling a linear tale. We knew we’d need to give the main character a name, if only to be able to refer to him in the action of the script, and Garrett came up with Remy (ReMy—RM—Repo Man). We worked with note cards, a different color for each story thread, hopping back and forth in time and space, hoping that the visual nature of film would ground what was otherwise a tangled web of a narrative. Green note cards represented the main character’s present story line; yellow note cards were his past, slowly coming up to meet the present halfway through the film. Purple cards were designated as “pops”—quick bits of introduction to help ground the viewer in the world we’d created. The walls of my office slowly but surely filled up with this shifting, multicolored pattern.

On July 29, 2002, we had a draft. That first screenplay, while a definite adaptation, more or less presented the story as it was in the book you just (presumably) read. It starred our Bio-Repo man, his five wives, a sixth love interest and partner-on-the-run named Bonnie, a lifelong best friend named Jake, and their employers, the Credit Union.

It began in a rotted-out hotel room, with Remy at a typewriter, pounding out his life story, and ended with him in a hospital room, finishing up his tale, Bonnie’s heart beating away inside his chest. There were scenes of repossessions, of triumphs and arguments with his wives, of good times and bad times and scary times with Jake, and a lot of dark comedy that made Garrett and me laugh every time we read it. Many of those scenes would eventually make it into the shooting script and final film; many would not.

That fall, Garrett and I sent the script to our respective agents. We’re each fortunate to be represented by some of the largest talent agencies in the world, with immeasurable contacts in the industry. Naturally, we were excited when our script went out to select producers, and—

Crickets.

It was too strange. Too dark. Not action-y enough. Not for kids. Not for adults. Too expensive. Not big enough. Name the reason, and we had a pass for it. This is generally par for the course in Hollywood—there’s way too much product for too few buyers, and the law of supply and demand holds true everywhere—but doubly so for a script that actively tries to flaunt the rules. Our hero killed five “innocent” people within the first ten pages (and they said it like that was a
bad
thing).

Yet there was one lone voice of encouragement, calling out to us in the wilderness: Valerie Dean.

Valerie is a producer with fantastic taste, who’s got a knack for tearing off messy wrapping paper to uncover the perfect present within. She’s also got a wickedly dark sense of humor, which matched the
Mambo
sensibility perfectly. Over the course of the next half-decade, we’d find similar folk who would immediately spark to the script and invariably they’d be people we’d end up liking quite a bit. There’s a definite type that finds this sort of thing entertaining, I guess, and I’m proud to count many of them among my friends.

Val loved the script, and really seemed to get what we were going for. If anything, her suggestions were to make the script even darker in tone, and I couldn’t argue with that. My trusty computer lists 10 different drafts between April of 2003 and February of 2004, as Garrett and I refined the script based on our own ideas and excellent notes from Valerie.

At least two of the wives disappeared during this phase, a necessary cutback to allow us more time with the central characters. Furthermore, Val had the inspired idea to fuse the Bonnie character with the Beth character, allowing Remy not only to find love in the middle of the chase, but to re-find it, as well. We adjusted the ending to make it bigger in scale and concept, introducing the idea that there might be a way for Remy to free not only himself from the clutches of the Credit Union, but others, too.

The script, no doubt about it, was getting better.

Things move very slowly in Hollywood, and just when you think they can’t get any slower—boom—they all but moonwalk backward. But every once in a while, there’s a small shift that indicates progress. Just as we’d found Valerie a year or so before, we soon came upon the next piece of the puzzle.

Through Val, we were introduced to a young film director named Miguel Sapochnik. A British Argentinian—or is it Argentinian Brit? I still don’t know—he’d directed some music videos and commercials, but had really hit the mark with a short film called
The Dreamer
, which I’d recommend to anyone interested in cinema. (Notice how I used the word ‘cinema’ to make it sound all fancy? Hell, it’s just a great short film.)

As soon as Garrett and I saw
The Dreamer
, which is a visual mix of Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, and Stanley Kubrick (I know, big shoes), we knew Miguel would be a perfect fit for
Mambo
. Meeting Miguel in person only cemented our feelings; his wit was dry, he was incredibly easy to get along with, and, as we’d soon learn, he had a nonstop motor.

Miguel had only one concern: The ending. It was a bit too pat, a bit too easy, and didn’t follow through on the promise of the first two acts. Fortunately, it didn’t take long before we all figured out exactly what we wanted to do: a finish to the film that truly reflected the themes we’d worked so hard to infuse throughout the movie, and one that seemed to actually follow, logically, from the story that was already there. We went through a process of honing the screenplay even further.

More wives got lost along the way, and suddenly our main character was down from five wives plus a current love interest to two wives total. Peter was introduced as a character in his own right, rather than just someone who got mentioned here and there. Sergeant Tyrell Ignakowski disappeared, reappeared for a brief but glorious moment, then disappeared again. The war scenes got trimmed back; war training got lost entirely. In a screenplay, space is limited. You’ve got 120 pages, max, to tell your story, translated to 120 minutes up on that screen. Each moment so precious and difficult to pull off it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars—if not millions—to create. Every scene, every action, every bit of dialogue, has to drive the story either through narrative, character, or theme, or it goes bye-bye. There’s no space for fun but nonessential flourishes.