Writing Movies For Fun And Profit! (13 page)

The DOWNSIDE
: The producer also comes with a HEFTY PRICE TAG. The producer gets a FEE and a percentage of the profits. So—your movie, with this extra chef, will also be less profitable to the studio. But if you get a producer attached who has a reputation for earning hundreds of millions at the box office, they’re worth the price. Even if they ALSO have a reputation for throwing phones at people.

Herbie: Fully Loaded
was a total piece of s#!t. We agree. We don’t blame the director. Under the circumstances, she did the best she could. We don’t blame Lindsay Lohan, bless her troubled little heart. We don’t blame any of the other screenwriters who changed the script after we were fired. (There were twenty-four of them.) That piece-of-s#!t movie was not their fault. The reason
Herbie
sucked was the fault of one lone executive. Beware, young writers—THIS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU!

All it took was one (very highly paid) person to ruin that film: to ruin the opportunity of reviving the Herbie franchise, to waste all of Disney’s cash, and to inadvertently start the domino chain that would lead to the tragic death of Lindsay Lohan.
*

Was this executive evil? No. The sad fact is that this person was just genuinely incompetent.

Rule 5: There is more incompetence than evil in hollywood.

For every genuinely evil person we’ve met in Hollywood (and we’ve met three
*
), there are dozens who are simply idiots. (NOTE: We did not say “harmless idiots.” In Hollywood, there is no such thing.)

HERBIE
—THE RIDE

(Don’t forget your lube, and wear a poncho—you will get wet.)

We are both very big fans of the old
Love Bug
movies. We grew up in the seventies, and we saw them at the drive-in (not together, obviously). But yes, we both separately saw the
Herbie
movies at drive-in theaters. It was a kinder, gentler world back then, kids. Children weren’t raised by the internet, raping each other’s avatars and bitching about
Herbie: Fully Loaded
on IMDB. KIDS USED TO GO OUTSIDE, read books, fish in creeks, and yes—whole families would go to the drive-in to watch Disney movies.

We said to ourselves, “We should pitch a new Herbie movie. We should make it great.”

We attacked the movie the way we approach everything: we looked at the central idea first. Herbie is a car with a personality that can drive by itself, and which, like Mary Poppins, comes into people’s lives and helps them fix their own problems.

But the old Herbie movies are corny in a way you can’t get away with today. In the real world, if a car drove itself, people would call the news. They’d put it on YouTube, the story’d be all over the world in a day. And a real car that could drive itself with no explanation would also scare the shit out of people.

So the first big thing we decided was: Herbie’s magic needed to be
subtler. For example: Maybe it wouldn’t start itself when it didn’t want to go somewhere. Instead, maybe it would get stuck in a left turn and take you somewhere it wanted to go—like the big race. Maybe when it was mad at you, its horn would get stuck behind a cop car. Stuff like that. Subtler than a car that drives itself.

The second big thing was: We needed to put Herbie in a much more real world. Not some dopey, illogical, kids’-movie world, with characters like the crotchety old junk lot owner twirling his mustache and swearing “I’m gonna get that little car if it’s the last thing I ever do!!!” Kids hate that kinda stupid shit as much as grown-ups do. We never write things for a “kids’ movie.” We wrote it like a real movie—THE WAY ALL GOOD MOVIES ARE WRITTEN. Only shitty kids’ movies are written down to kids.

We set it in a very realistically portrayed world of San Fernando Valley street racing: a macho world, where an old, beat-up car would get laughed at—then be totally respected when it won some races.

We wanted the main character to be a girl from a stock car racing family. (When we wrote
Herbie,
there were NO women in Nascar.) So the fact that a dad preferred his son to race the family stock car, even though his daughter liked cars, made total sense.

• Act I: was about a girl who was forced to race in the world of
The Fast and the Furious,
even though she wanted to drive the family stock car.

• Act II: Herbie turned their lives around.

• Act III: The whole family pulled together, and Herbie won a Nascar race.

Simple, huh? So why did the movie suck so bad?

We sold the pitch straight to the president
*
of the studio. The president LOVED this take: putting Herbie in a totally real world, not a sappy kids’-movie world, and giving the movie a strong female character with a good love story and a legitimate, believable obstacle that Herbie could help her overcome.

We turned in the first draft, and the movie was greenlit.
Off the first draft
. The president of the studio agreed to pay Lindsay Lohan her very
expensive quote and make her pay or play. (That means she would get paid whether the movie was made or not.)

They were
that
confident of the movie.
Off the first draft
.

She had one note: it was too sexy for Disney. We swear. It was set in the world of street racing, so … we had some bikini girls in there. And one of these “Red Bull Girls” had the hots for Lindsay Lohan’s character because she thought Lindsay was a man. Pretty hot for a Herbie movie, we guess. Good call, Prexy.

We said great, done. We took out the sexier stuff, the “Red Bull Girls,” etc. It took us a couple of days to do the tweaks. We finished and turned it back in—and here’s where it gets interesting/horrible:

We were no longer dealing directly with the president of the studio. We were now dealing with a studio executive
under
the president.
This executive was not in the room when we sold the pitch. This executive was not there when the president gave us notes on the script.
And this executive was dumb as a stump and mean as a rattlesnake
.

We did about ten drafts for this executive: dumbing down the plot, making everything cuter, taking out things that made the movie make sense. This executive had no agenda. This exec wasn’t making a power play. This executive just genuinely didn’t understand the movie and what the president had liked about it. This executive just didn’t know good from bad.

Now, we knew we were doing some heavy damage to the script, and we tried to get the script in to the president, to run the changes by her. The executive wouldn’t let us talk to the president of the studio. (“I speak for the studio.”) When the exec wanted us to make Herbie smile, we refused. It was illogical to us. We know it seems like a dumb point for us to stick on, but … that’s not “personality,” that’s a superpower. That was just WAY too cute and dumb—the opposite of why we wanted to write a Herbie movie in the first place and why Disney had bought it.

When this exec was happy with the script, the exec turned in the new draft to the president—
and the studio UN-greenlit the movie and fired us that day
. We begged the president: look, fire us, but at least let us leave you with a script that’s not horrible.

We worked over a long weekend and gave the studio what was basically our first draft with the sexy stuff taken out. We turned it in, they regreenlit the movie. Then they fired us.

BUT this bad executive was still in charge of
Herbie.
So the exec
hired and fired twenty-four more writers to do all of the bad stuff that the studio had made us do. Then the studio made
Herbie: Fully Loaded.
This happens all the time. It’s why most movies suck donkey balls
.

We’ve had it happen to several of our movie scripts and to three pilots we sold to Fox: we sell something to the president, then some executive or producer comes in and wants to get his or her thumbprints all over it.

Sometimes it’s because the executives or producers see themselves as writers; sometimes it’s because they think they know better than the president; but more often than not, it’s just because they don’t understand the basic idea that the president liked and bought. They simply don’t get it. They don’t understand the script or pitch, so they change it.

Let’s make this analogy
:

You have a Volkswagen Bug. You sell it to someone. He says, “Deliver it in eight weeks. Make it pink.” Then that person’s underling says, “I know we bought a Bug, but all the other studios are buying SUVs this year, so let’s make it a big SUV.” Then: “I read an article about boats today and how they’re going to be popular this year—let’s make this thing kinda like a boat.” Then they say: “
Terminator
made a lot of money, let’s make this thing kinda like
Terminator.
” Then: “Make it green.” You go back to the person who bought a pink Bug, and they say: “What the hell is this giant green
Terminator
boat?”

WHAT WE LEARNED AND WILL PASS ON TO YOU!

Most times you’re screwed! There’s nothing you can do! Suck it up, cash the check (if you got one), move on, and hope it doesn’t end your career!

But remember these things:

• Before you kick up dust, always try to incorporate the nimrod’s notes first— but do it without doing any damage to the script. We are not exaggerating when we say again: “if you can master this skill, all of hollywood will be yours.” Not fighting the studio’s notes but doing a version of people’s notes in a way that actually works—that is the secret of success in the studio system.

• Making an enemy of the nimrod is a huge mistake.

Rule 6: Make no enemies. Ever.

If a writer picks a fight with the studio, they will lose.

If a writer picks a fight with his producer or executive, the writer will lose.

• (When you’ve sold a few scripts, this one applies.)
We try to never attach producers to our projects
. Producers mostly suck. We try to only deal with the Buyer—the studio. Producers are sometimes a huge added expense: their fees can be massive. And sometimes their notes directly conflict with those of the studio. And the studio is the Buyer. The studio’s notes are the only things that matter.

• When some nimrod is trying to derail your script, do anything you can to talk to the Buyer directly. Try to get a meeting with you and the nimrod and the studio head at the same time, so you’re all on the same page. If the nimrod TRULY IS SAYING THINGS THE STUDIO AGREES WITH, then do it. Suck it up. If they are NOT, get the studio to articulate what it wants, so the nimrod will hopefully shut up and let you write the script the studio wants.
Remember: you’re not writing the script for you—YOU ARE WRITING IT FOR THE STUDIO
.

Handle this meeting carefully—be superpolite and respectful to EVERYBODY. And remember:

Rule 7: nobody likes a crybaby.

If you’re the writer, nobody cares that you sold a great idea and someone is screwing it up.

And always remember
: the nimrod screwing up your script has WAY more friends on the lot than you. You’re a writer. If there was a way for the studios to generate scripts without writers at all—they would.

Suck it up. Walk it off. Move on. Sell another screenplay.

If you think we’re saying this out of bitterness, you’re taking it totally wrong. This is good advice. It’s the way it sometimes is in the studio system, and if you can’t accept that—go write novels on the moor.

TRUE HOLLYWOOD HORROR STORIES!
Part Two:

The After-Lunch Pitch!

The Producer Who Slept!

CUE SFX: THUNDER CLAP!

FADE IN.

EXT. ROBERTSON BLVD — DAY

Two young, straight, but kind-of-gay-looking SCREENWRITERS pull their crappy cars off of Robertson Boulevard, across from the fabulous Ivy Restaurant, where Lindsay Lohan once hit some dude's van with her car and where she later tragically died from a toxic mix of antianxiety pills and sugar-free energy drinks.
*

The screenwriters park in the basement of New Line Cinema, a studio that pulled one of the greatest tricks in Hollywood history:

Making the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy and $2.9 BILLION at the box office, before home video. :)

And then: ALMOST WENT OUT OF BUSINESS. :(

“Wait, what?” you ask, “They made those movies and almost went out of business?”