Writing Movies For Fun And Profit! (16 page)

The test screenings were SO GOOD, in fact, that we made what was (at the time) our BIGGEST PAYDAY EVER to write the sequel:
Taxi 2.
Yes, this is how crazy things in Hollywood can be. One of our biggest deals EVER was for
Taxi 2
—cue the silly punctuation marks!?!?!!?!?

Then, of course,
Taxi
was released, and not only did it pretty much end the film career of our friend Jimmy Fallon, it was also so WIDELY HATED that, for a while, it was held up as an example of EVERYTHING THAT SUCKS. Even people who actually suck balls for a living didn’t want to be compared with
Taxi. Taxi
currently holds an 11 percent rating on the (very dubious) website Rotten Tomatoes. Sheesh—we were TOTALLY WRONG about this one, gang. Bob Simonds, the very smart and funny producer of
Taxi,
left town the day before the opening, having
read some early reviews and tracking numbers. He told us, “Sometimes when you’ve got a flop coming out, it’s best to skip town, as you’ll find you’re radioactive for a little while.” Good advice.

Boy oh boy,
did people hate
Taxi.
But they didn’t just hate
Taxi …
They hated US. Yes, we had turned radioactive. So what did we learn? Well, nothing really. Except that people who are willing to see a movie FOR FREE in Orange County aren’t necessarily right 100 percent of the time.

No, we never got paid to write
Taxi 2
,
*
but the studio did convert our deal into another script, which led to us writing
Night at the Museum,
which at the time of this printing is the highest-grossing live action comedy of all time.

So, long story short: sometimes your movie WILL SUCK DONKEY BALLS, even when you try your best. We didn’t set out to make a crappy movie: we just did. Gisele Bündchen robbing banks and changing outfits STILL seems like a pretty good idea to us. But in the midst of the turd storm that was
Taxi,
here are a few things that happened because we were working on the film:

1. We got to fly first class to Paris, then got to stay at the luxurious estate of Luc Besson, one of the most fun and funny men who’s ever lived. Basically, it was equivalent to visiting the KING OF FRANCE. We got to hang out at his estate, eat maple syrup with him, and watch Formula One racing on the awesome forty-foot screen in his château.

2. We got flown by helicopter from Luc Besson’s estate in Normandy back to Paris so we could have dinner at Luc Besson’s restaurant, Market. Highly recommended, very tough to get a table:

Market

15 av. Matignon, 8e

8th Arrondissement (Champs-Elysées/Madeleine)

Métro: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau

Reservations required

Phone 01-56-43-40-90

www.jean-georges.com

3. We got to hug Gisele Bündchen. Yep. Check that off the bucket list, bona fide (or should we say boner fide), HUGS from Gisele Bündchen. Yeah, we wrote
Taxi.
Yeah, it sucked really bad. But yeah … we got hugged by Gisele Bündchen. So there.

Even the poop clouds that bring shit storms sometimes have a silver lining.

It was a lot like meeting Santa Claus. Santa Claus who does kung fu on you. And who has very hot Asian models for elves.

So we’re at a table in the Hollywood Canteen on Las Palmas. We know, it sounds like a cafeteria where Cary Grant would be horsing around with Clark Gable over USO donuts—it’s not. It’s a fancy-schmancy “nouveau California cuisine” place.

We’re sitting there, waiting for our lunch with Jackie, and this incredibly hot, incredibly tiny model comes in, wearing a red plastic dress that looked like a stewardess uniform for a sex cruise to the moon in a Stanley Kubrick movie. She’s grinning ear to ear. She’s so happy she can barely contain herself, and she announces—to the whole restaurant—
“He is coming! He is coming!”
Three more models come in, and we swear to God they’re dressed exactly like Josie and the Pussycats. If they’d been wearing cat ears and tails, it would’ve gone with their outfits perfectly.

Then Jackie enters. He’s in a head-to-toe white Puma … we’re not sure what to call it. It wasn’t a track suit. It looked like … If Obi-Wan Kenobi did yoga at a place in Malibu, this is what Obi-Wan would wear.

We are both
huge
Jackie Chan fans. We’d worshipped him for years. And when we met Jackie,
Rush Hour II
was still in the theaters, it had already made a FORTUNE, and Jackie was probably one of the biggest, if not
the
biggest, comedy stars in the world.

So Jackie nods to us and sits down. He asks the waitress, “What are soups today?” She tells him there are two, cream of asparagus and tomato/basil. Jackie says, “Yes.” We all kinda look at each other, confused, and he says; “Yes. Two soup.” That’s what you have for lunch when you’re Jackie Chan. Two soup. He drank his soups, holding the bowls like martinis. Drinking tomato soup with one hand in a white track suit—that’s
balls.

We pitch him a movie: a movie that ended up being
The Pacifier
with Vin Diesel. (The duck made WAY more sense when it starred Jackie Chan. In the Jackie Chan version, he bought the duck and presented it to the kids as a present. They all cheer: “Yeaaaah!” Then he raises a meat cleaver to chop off the duck’s head, to cook it. The kids scream and stop him, and he’s stuck with the duck as a pet. The studio cut all of that stuff but kept the duck.)

So we pitch him
The Pacifier,
and after the pitch he nods and says, “Script very good.” He had two ideas.

When Jackie’s supposed to be a tough guy (“Bad Jackie” is how he referred to it) he should have a toothpick. Jackie put a toothpick in his mouth, put on sunglasses, and made his “Bad Jackie” face. Yup. That’s Bad Jackie all right. “Then”—and Jackie flicked his toothpick across the table, a half inch from Tom’s nose. It hit the opposite wall of the restaurant so hard you could hear it. Okay. We wrote that down:
Bad Jackie flicks toothpick at … somebody.

His second idea: Later in the story, when Jackie is teaching kung fu to a bunch of Girl Scouts, Jackie told us, “No offense. All evasive. I show. Come at me.”

Ben stands up in the middle of this nice restaurant, and he’s supposed to take a swing at Jackie Chan. We have no friggin’ idea what Jackie’s gonna do. Is he gonna throw Ben through a window? We’ve seen all of his movies, and Jackie throws a shitload of guys through windows. In
Jackie’s biography it says that when you break your arm doing a stunt in Hong Kong, you’re supposed to walk it off. Is that what’s about to happen? Is he teaching a lesson to everyone in this restaurant about “walking it off”?

Ben takes a swing at him. He says, “No. For real.” Ben takes a
for real
swing at him—and he takes off Ben’s jacket and wraps it around Ben’s arm so fast he didn’t even see it. We have no idea how he did it. The restaurant applauds. He bows, says good-bye, and leaves.

Josie and the Pussycats, smiling ear to ear, bow and head out after him. Now we know why they were so excited. Tom went and found the toothpick and put it in his scrapbook, and Ben has never had that suit jacket dry-cleaned.

Rule 8: The movie may not ever happen, so— carpe per diem. Seize the lunch.

TRUE HOLLYWOOD HORROR STORIES!
Part Four!

We got to meet legendary performance artist, movie actress, and diva— Sandra Bernhard!

Dick.

Yeah beyaaatch, we used a dollar sign where an “s” would have been far more appropriate. Because your royalties on a film are based on the credit you as a writer receive on it. Note: The more writers credited on a film, the crappier the Lamborghini you are going to be able to buy with your residuals. Or, as we call them in the industry, “ ’zids.”
*
Let’s face it, there’s hardly anything more embarrassing than a
used
Lamborghini. THAT’S LIKE A VICTORIA’S SECRET MODEL WHO’S THIRTY. (Yuck!)

Here’s a handy reference for how credits work and how to read them.

This is the Cadillac of screenwriting credits, if American cars didn’t suck. To put it in terms we can all appreciate: this is the topless Helen Mirren of writing credits. Classy and wonderful. “Written by” means that
you and you alone
are entitled to both “Story by” and “Screenplay by” credit. (Kaching!) This means you came up with the Story, which the WGA
Screen
Credits Manual
defines as “NARRATIVE, IDEA, THEME, CHARACTERS AND ACTION” of the script. And SCREENPLAY, which the guide describes as all of the “SCENES AND DIALOGUE.” Way to go! This credit rules. If this movie doesn’t tank, you’re going to make some money. It’s hard to calculate how much money. But (after the studio has recouped its investment) it’s about 1.5 percent of the profits. It’s such a good credit that the WGA named their FAIRLY BORING magazine after it!!!
Written By
—the magazine for writers that no one seems to read. Not even writers. You can even follow
Written By
magazine on Twitter: @written_by (but we’re not sure why you would).

Way to go! Story by!
This is a pretty solid credit to get. And here’s what it means. You get this credit if you did
not
write enough of the movie to get a “Written by” credit, after all the other writers who rewrote the movie worked on it, but you
DID
CREATE THE STORY. That means, per the
Screen Credits Manual,
that your work is “distinct from screenplay and consisting of basic narrative, idea, theme or outline indicating character development and action.” This can mean you wrote an outline that somebody else used to write the movie or even that you wrote A WHOLE DRAFT OF A SCREENPLAY and some other writer threw out everything you wrote but kept just your story.

Way to go. Nice job on that. Pretty good cred’, homey. But you will be sharing your residuals forever with whoever got “Screenplay by.” So … you get about half of that 1.5 percent of the profits.

Note: “Story by” cannot be shared by more than two writers, ever.

This means that you wrote most of the script, but you still have to split your residuals with the writer who got the “Story by” credit.

This is an interesting bird, the old “Screen Story by” credit. It means that there was SOURCE MATERIAL for the movie you wrote, BUT—THE STORY IS “SUBSTANTIALLY NEW AND DIFFERENT IN THE MOVIE FROM WHAT IT WAS IN THE SOURCE MATERIAL.” For example, if you were to adapt
Goodnight, Moon
and create an entirely new
story line about the Old Lady Whispering Hush and how she goes off to fight sexy teen vampires in the hot back alleys of Future Detroit, it’s quite likely that the credits for the film would read:

(At some point you got fired and they got hired and they won the arbitration.)

In this last scenario, the movie has to be a PRETTY HUGE HIT for you to start dating even a, let’s say, THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD VICTORIA’S SECRET MODEL. (Yeccchh. Sorry. Better luck next time.)

Wait, what? Seriously—we’ve never seen this credit used, like … ever. Apparently it exists. We’re guessing it means you, um … wrote the narration. So the stuff that, let’s say, Morgan Freeman says offscreen while the movie is happening. For example:

MORGAN FREEMAN (V.O.)

Pretty weird that there’s a whole credit for this kind of stuff, but seems like there is. Just for fun, Google the words “Narration Written by.” It will only ask if you mean something else. “Narration Written by” won’t make you rich … at least as far as we know. Hard to say when we’ve NEVER SEEN THIS CREDIT USED. EVER. Hmm. If you get this credit for some of your hot narration, let us know how it turns out, and
we’ll try to include a photo of you in the next printing of this book. (Also, this narration for Morgan Freeman is free with purchase or theft of this book.)