The Authorized Ender Companion (55 page)

Yet from Joe’s perspective, the differences
were
major shifts. Scott had taken leaps of creative license that Joe hadn’t intended him to take.

When the meeting was over and Scott had agreed to do a rewrite, everyone’s stress level had tripled or more. We all parted ways civilly, but the mood was somewhat tense.

I mention this experience, not to diminish your hopes that the
Ender’s Game
movie will ever be made, but rather to give you a glimpse of how difficult and delicate the process of moviemaking really is, particularly in the early stages of a film’s development when everyone is still trying to figure out how best to tell the story.

Too often when we think of filmmaking, we dwell on those activities that happen on set during production: managing the extras, moving the camera, coordinating a stunt, yelling “action,” all the fun stuff. Those are all critical pieces of the overall puzzle, yes, but much of moviemaking—perhaps the most difficult part of moviemaking—happens in meetings such as the one just described, behind closed doors, long before a single actor is cast or a single camera rolls.

Script development is especially dicey in the case of a big-budget film because so much money is on the line. Nowadays it’s not uncommon for summer or end-of-year movies to cost as much as 150 million dollars or more to produce. And in a studio’s mind, every one of these films is a huge financial risk; if moviegoers don’t come out in droves, studios could lose their shirts.

Take Carolco Studios, for instance. The name probably doesn’t ring a bell because their big-budget pirate movie
Cutthroat Island
sank at the box office back in the nineties, losing 82 million dollars when all was said and done and taking Carolco Studios down with it.

A more positive example, one in which a studio bet big and won, is New Line, which invested hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown director and a trilogy of novels entitled
The Lord of the Rings
. Maybe you’ve heard of them?

Had those movies tanked, New Line, like Carolco, would have gone the way of the dodo.

But as luck (and Peter Jackson) would have it,
Lord of the Rings
brought in bajillions of dollars and New Line was spared the joke of becoming Old Line.

In other words, the movie business is, above all things, a business. Behind every studio decision is the American dollar. Studios invest money yes, but
always cautiously, always reluctantly. They’re just as protective of a million dollars as you and I would be if we had it.

The old joke in Hollywood is that a movie executive’s favorite word is “no.” And it’s true. Getting a film green-lighted is hard.

And yet movies get green-lighted all the time. It’s not impossible. If studios
only
said no, no films would be made.

The trick is to assemble the perfect package. All the planets must be aligned: the right, proven director must be on board; the script must be production ready; talent must be attached; every
t
must be crossed and every
i
dotted. Get all those ducks in a row, and your chances are good. But if any of these factors seem uncertain, the studio won’t finance the film.

I can only imagine Joe’s anxiety, therefore, when he read a script that deviated, even if only slightly, from the outline he had shown the executives at Warner Brothers. Perhaps Joe worried that the differences between the outline and script would cause the studio to lose confidence in the project and drop it, forever ruining his chances of producing
Ender’s Game
.

Who knows? What
was
clear was that Joe wanted a rewrite. He wasn’t showing the script to Warner Brothers as written. Changes would have to be made.

I left the meeting feeling somewhat spent. Getting
Ender’s Game
produced wasn’t going to be as easy as I had hoped.

Scott left the meeting determined to write a better draft, and I didn’t envy his assignment. Getting the script to a place where everyone would deem it ready was going to be very difficult indeed.

NEW WRITERS

Years ago, when Scott Card was first approached about Hollywood adapting the story, someone suggested making Ender a handsome teenager with a love interest. The story wouldn’t work as written on the big screen, they said.
Ender’s Game
would be better told with the addition of a few proven Hollywood conventions. Young love. A dashing young rising star.

To Orson Scott Card’s great credit, and to the relief of us all, that proposal was flatly denied.

So it was with some trepidation that Scott Card had entered this agreement with Warner Brothers in 2002. Would the studio attempt to alter the character of Ender as had been proposed in the past? Would
Ender’s Game
become something Scott had never intended it to be?

To protect his own and the story’s interests, Scott made a stipulation in the
contract with Warner Brothers that he would get a crack at the screenplay and have final say on how Ender was represented onscreen.

It was a smart move. Scott knew better than anyone why
Ender’s Game
had been such a beloved novel for so long. He had lived with the character for two decades. If anyone knew how Ender should be portrayed onscreen, it was the man who had created him.

Joe the producer apparently felt differently.

After the aforementioned meeting with Joe, Scott Card submitted a second, better draft, but Joe rejected that one also. I don’t remember Joe’s reasoning, exactly—I’m not even sure that he gave us one. We simply found out one day that Joe was securing a new writer to bring a fresh perspective.

We were disappointed by this news of course, but hope was not lost. We reminded ourselves that scripts get new writers all the time and that this was merely part of the business. The film wouldn’t be made as quickly as we had hoped and not under the conditions we had dreamed of, but the project was still alive and kicking. Hollywood was full of wonderfully talented screenwriters with plenty of proven experience. As long as the new writer understood Ender, we would be fine.

Besides, Warner was still excited about the project. The director was still gung-ho. The world was still a happy place.

As it turned out, the new writer ended up being
two
writers, a team of writers who were fresh off a very successful comic book film (their first credit).

Before they got started on the
Ender’s Game
script, the two met Scott and me for lunch in Los Angeles. I was surprised when I saw them. They were young. Very young. Younger than me, and I considered myself as youthful as they come.

But they were very polite and extremely intelligent, and I liked them both immediately. It didn’t hurt that one of them was a lifelong fan of
Ender’s Game
and even credited the book as part of the reason why he had become a writer himself. (He may have been pandering to the author, of course, but since he was describing exactly the way
I
felt about
Ender’s Game
, I took him at his word and liked him even more.)

I also happened to like the film they had just made. The movie had brought in hundreds of millions of dollars, and from the studio’s perspective that was as good enough reason as any to give these boys the job. They were young, hip, and proven at the box office. What more could we ask for?

A year later, after this team had submitted two unsuccessful drafts, Scott and I were feeling rather low. The writing team had made decisions in their
drafts that had created a very different version of Ender. I was never involved in their meetings with producers, but apparently I wasn’t alone in my assessment. Shortly after the second script submission, both writers left the project.

The director told Scott not to lose heart. All would be well. The right screenwriter would be secured. These things happen. New writers come and go. This next one will be the one we’ve been waiting for.

But the next one wasn’t the one we were waiting for. In fact, the draft submitted by the next writer was such a departure from the
Ender’s Game
you and I have grown to love, that I had to force myself to finish reading it. Had the studio produced that draft, I daresay fans like myself would have taken to the streets and much of Warner Brothers’ studios would have been leveled to the ground.

It’s ironic, really. Joe’s complaint to Scott in our initial meeting was that Scott hadn’t closely followed the outline. And yet, the three writers Joe had hired to replace Scott so blatantly ignored the outline and took such liberties with the story, that I can’t imagine what feedback Joe gave
them
.

Perhaps he asked, “Um, guys, did you even
read
the outline?”

STUDIO WOES

By December of 2005, when the option with Warner Brothers was set to expire, movie-rumor sites were saying that
Ender’s Game
was in “development hell” and that fans may never see the story come to life. Too much time had been spent developing scripts that simply did not work.

Since I had read Scott’s draft, I knew these rumors were not entirely accurate; there
was
a script that worked. Scott Card had written it long before any other writer had been hired. But rumors are rumors. What do you do?

Scott and his producing partners at Chartoff Pictures, along with the aforementioned director, met again with Warner Brothers to develop a plan. Fortunately, the studio agreed to extend the option for another year or so with Scott as the sole writer, writing a page-one rewrite not based on any previous script, including Scott’s own.

When asked in an interview at the time why the studio hadn’t given the green light, Scott said, “There was no filmable script, though in fairness to the writers so far, they may well have been following faithfully all that they were actually asked to do.
Ender’s Game
is simply a very hard story to put in script form.”

A year later, after Scott had submitted another draft, the studio seemed to
be stalling. The director attached to
Ender’s Game
had released a big-budget film that year, which had done poorly at the box office and lost Warner Brothers a great deal. No one can be certain why, but it became clear to everyone involved that Warner Brothers had decided to pass on the film and put it into turnaround.

In mid-2007, it happened. The option with Warner Brothers expired, and
Ender’s Game
returned to the open market, available to any studio that might be interested in acquiring it. For legal reasons I can’t go into specifics about the film’s status now, but suffice it to say that
Ender’s Game
is as alive as ever. Hollywood still wants to make this movie as much as we, lovers of all things Ender, want to see it made.

So believe me, it’s going to happen. Despite the many disappointments since this project began, I remain resolute in my belief that
Ender’s Game
will hit the big screen. This isn’t the first time a film has been in development this long. Nor will this be the first time a film has gone into turnaround only to get picked up by another studio and made into a great film:
Forrest Gump, E.T., Splash, Speed, Syriana, The Last Emperor, Black Hawk Down
, to name a few.

And if that doesn’t comfort you, this will: there are a lot of incredibly talented and smart people in Hollywood working on
Ender’s Game
right now—producers, managers, agents, investors—all exploring new options to make this thing happen.

So, yes, there have been some hang-ups and delays and big disappointments, but keep the faith.
Ender’s Game
is still in the ring.

Just ask Orson Scott Card. When he attends book signings and fans ask about the progress of the film, Scott often jokes, “The character of Ender will be played by a young actor and most likely an unknown one. I used to think that that actor, whoever he is, had in all likelihood been born by now. But now I’m pretty sure that he’s at least in school.”

You see? Progress. We’re getting closer all the time.

Since the project left Warner Brothers, Scott has written a new draft, one that takes into accounts all the mistakes and successes of his previous drafts.

And it’s great.

Fans of
Ender’s Game
would not be disappointed.

What follows are my personal notes on five of the screenplay drafts that have been submitted over the years, three written by Scott and two written by others. I’ll also share some of the challenges the writers faced in adapting the story and why I wholeheartedly agree with Scott’s statement that
Ender’s Game
is a very hard story to put in script form.

TWO NOVELS. ONE SCREENPLAY
.

The biggest challenge the screenwriters had to face was deciding how best to adapt two novels into a single feature-length screenplay. I don’t recall who first suggested the idea of combining the novels, but everyone, including Orson Scott Card, thought it a brilliant idea.
Ender’s Shadow
added depth to the original story and gave us the origins of Bean, a character some consider the most interesting and complex of the Enderverse. Filmmakers thought fans would be thrilled to see both stories come to life simultaneously.

For the screenwriters, however, this new depth of story proved to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it gave the screenwriter more story elements and subplots to work with, but a curse because the process of adaptation would now be twice as difficult.

Steven Pressfield, a novelist and screenwriter, has said that adapting a novel into a screenplay is not merely deciding what to include, it’s more a task of deciding what
not
to include. That’s the difficult part of adaptation, deciding what has to go. Screenwriters, therefore, must have a cruel hand, willing to cut out a beloved scene or even a whole character simply because it doesn’t fit into the film.

I think it’s for this reason that there persists a belief in Hollywood, among some, that a writer can’t adapt his own work. He’s too close to it. He holds it too precious. He can’t bear the thought of losing that particular scene or character he worked so hard to craft and bring to life.