Screen Plays: How 25 Screenplays Made It to a Theater Near You--for Better or Worse

354 Pages·2009·1.39 MB·English

by  David S. Cohen

SCREEN PLAYS
HOW 25 SCRIPTS MADE IT TO A THEAT ER
NEAR YOU—FOR BETTER OR WORSE
David S. Cohen
For Esther, who left too soon, and for Sue Ellen and
Miranda, who arrived just in time
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
1. “GET A LIFE” 19
GLADIATOR • DAVID FRANZONI
2. SCRIPTER: LONG ISLAND LOLITA WAS MY MUSE! 37
AMERICAN BEAUTY • ALAN BALL
3. “I DIDN’T THINK THIS WAS REALLY GOING TO HAPPEN” 53
RANDOM HEARTS • KURT LUEDTKE
4. “IT’S TWO PEOPLE; NOTHING HAPPENS” 67
LOST IN TRANSLATION • SOFIA COPPOLA
5. “GOTTA STAY ON THIS JOB” 79
BLACK HAWK DOWN • KEN NOLAN
6. “LET’S SHOOT BIG” 91
TROY • DAVID BENIOFF
7. THE ANTI-TROY 103
HERO • ZHANG YIMOU
8. “CAN I WRITE MIDNIGHT COWBOY?” 113
PAY IT FORWARD • LESLIE DIXON
9. “EVERY GOOD STORY IS A LOVE STORY” 127
ERIN BROCKOVICH • SUSANNAH GRANT
10. SITH, SCHMITH. THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH 141
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY • KAREY KIRKPATRICK
iv CONTENTS
11. ROLL OVER, CARY GRANT 151
MY BEST FRIEND’S WEDDING • RON BASS
12. LIFE’S TWO TRAGEDIES 163
MONA LISA SMILE • LAWRENCE KONNER & MARK ROSENTHAL
13. “IT’S DIFFICULT TALKING TO IDIOTS” 177
BOUNCE • DON ROOS
14. GREAT SCIENCE FICTION—BUT DON’T TELL ANYONE 191
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND • CHARLIE KAUFMAN
15. SLAVES TO DESIRE 201
HAPPINESS • TODD SOLONDZ
16. SEX AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE 213
A DIRTY SHAME • JOHN WATERS
17. “IF YOU TALK TO EARL, TELL HIM TO CALL ME” 223
WITNESS • BILL KELLEY & EARL W. WALLACE
18. THE BEST SCRIPT THAT COULDN’T GET MADE 235
MONSTER’S BALL • MILO ADDICA & WILL ROKOS
19. THE GOLDEN LION, SURE. BUT DID SHE GET AN “A”? 245
MONSOON WEDDING • SABRINA DHAWAN
20. PROTECTING HOWARD 257
THE AVIATOR • JOHN LOGAN
21. CHANCE, FATE, AND HOMEWORK 269
A SIMPLE PLAN • SCOTT SMITH
22. NO SIMILAR MOVIES 281
THE HOURS • DAVID HARE
23. GOOD WORK FAILS SOMETIMES 295
EVENING. SUSAN MINOT & MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
24. THE RETURN OF THE (SPEC) KING 309
KISS KISS, BANG BANG • SHANE BLACK
25. “ALL YOU NEED IS ONE PERSON TO BELIEVE IN YOU” 319
THE CAVEMAN’S VALENTINE • GEORGE DAWES GREEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 333
INDEX 335
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
W
hat’s the best thing you ever wrote?
It’s not a trick question. Pretty much everybody, at some point
in life, puts pen to paper, or fingers to keys, to express something
important. A poem. A business proposal. Song lyrics. A joke. Maybe a love
letter.
If you’re not a writer by trade, that’s probably where it ended. You wrote
it, someone read it.
But did you show it to anyone before you sent it? Did someone change it
without permission? If it was a class project, did your teacher suggest im-
provements? Did you take those suggestions? If so, how did you feel after-
ward? Did the suggestions really help? Even if they did, did it mean as much
to you as it did before?
Complicated, isn’t it?
WHE N I was maybe twelve years old, I was in an art class, and I was making
a candleholder in the shape of a sperm whale. I wasn’t trying to make some-
thing particularly creative, just a candleholder. The tail was the handle, and
the candle went in where the whale’s blowhole would be.
My art teacher told me it would be more interesting if the tail were bent.
Then he bent the tail—just a little, but enough to make it different. That’s
how it was fired and that’s how it came back to me for posterity. My parents
still have it in their house. Sometimes I come across it when I’m visiting them.
I still get irritated, thirty-five years later, every time I see that bent tail. Maybe
it is more interesting that way, but it isn’t what I wanted it to be, and it never
will be.
2 SCREEN PLAYS
I could bury it someplace where I won’t have to look at it anymore, but
I’m convinced that if I do, in five thousand years, some future archaeologist
will unearth it, look at my signature in the clay, and say, “Pretty good candle-
holder, except for that bent handle. Bad choice by David Cohen, that. Why
would he have done such a thing?”
Well, Mr. Future Archaeologist, he did it because he was twelve and he had
a hard time standing up to his teacher. Because he thought maybe it would be
more interesting if the tail were bent. Because he hadn’t learned yet that people
who want to help you, no matter how well-meaning, don’t necessarily share
your taste, or that other people make changes to suit their needs, even though
it’s your candleholder, with your name on it, and you’re the one who’s going to
have to live with the results.
Yeah, that tail still bugs me.
What may bug me more is how hard it was to learn the lesson of that ex-
perience. If I could go back in time and visit myself on the day I brought that
candleholder home, I think I’d put my arm around the boy’s shoulders and
say: “Young David, if that candleholder bothers you, never, never, never try to
be a screenwriter.”
Guess it’s just as well I can’t do that. I probably wouldn’t have listened to
me anyway.
THIS is a book about twenty-five movies and how their tales, so to speak,
got bent. Many of these movies are good; some of them are bad. Some are
good because a lot of people bent their tale. Others are good because nobody
did. Some are bad for the same reasons.
This is not a book about how to write a hit movie. If I knew how to do
that, I’d be doing it. For that matter, there’s no reason to think that anybody
knows how to write a hit movie. Nobody cranks out hit after hit without a
break. Pixar Animation Studios, collectively, managed to do that for its first
twenty years or more, but that was not the work of a single screenwriter. Be-
sides which, there probably isn’t any single strategy that works in every situa-
tion. What worked for Todd Solondz when he was writing Happiness or Sofia
Coppola when she was putting together Lost in Translation would never have
worked for Ken Nolan trying to adapt Black Hawk Down, for Jerry Bruck-
heimer or David Franzoni trying to keep Gladiator on track for Steven Spiel-
berg and DreamWorks. Writing a spec script is different from adapting a
novel is different from writing from a pitch.
Instead of being about “how to do it,” this book is about “how I did it”