TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052190/0521207.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.4 KB | 77 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 66

"I Really Won the Lottery This Time"


    Do you recognize these big Hollywood names: Joe Eszterhas,
Shane Black, Jeffrey Boam? No? You may know them better by
their products: Flashdance, Lethal Weapon, Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade. Eszterhas, Black and Boam are practitioners
of an essential yet mostly invisible movie-making craft:
screenwriting. While actors, directors and even producers gain
fame and seven-figure salaries, screenwriters have
traditionally been the Rodney Dangerfields of Hollywood.

    But that lowly status is on the verge of a major rewrite.
As studios battle one another for the limited supply of
surefire scripts, screenwriters have begun snaring huge fees.
In a spectacular bidding war among major studios last month,
producer David Geffen bought a Shane Black script titled The
Last Boy Scout for $1.75 million, which is believed to be the
most ever paid for a single screenplay. Says Black: "I really
won the lottery this time."

    A Pittsburgh native, Black, 28, had earned $400,000 for
writing Lethal Weapon. He spent four months holed up in a cabin
to write Boy Scout, an action mystery in which a private eye
and a retired football player team up to solve a murder. Black
wrote the script "on spec," meaning on a speculative basis with
no studio commission, a status that entitled him to shop it
around for the highest price. The bidding started with an offer
of $850,000 from 20th Century Fox and escalated until Carolco
Pictures reached a top bid of $2.25 million. But the
screenwriter went with the lower bid by Geffen because he
agreed to hire producer Joel Silver, who handled Lethal Weapon.

    Not long ago, screenplays seldom cost more than $300,000.
But a dearth of innovative scripts and an escalation of film
budgets may soon make the seven-figure script an industry
standard. "The studios are creatively bankrupt," contends Steve
Tisch, an independent producer. "I think the agents are aware
of how scarce ideas are, and they're taking advantage of that."

    Agents and writers have become savvy about inflaming the
bidding passions of the big studios. Last month about 20
producers and studio bosses received packages containing black
alarm clocks and the cryptic message "The Ticking Man Is
Coming." The note described a screenplay by Manny Coto and
Brian Helgeland about an android with a nuclear bomb implanted
in its head. The next day producer Larry Gordon bought The
Ticking Man for $1.2 million.

    The hunger for stories is enriching novelists as well.
Producer Richard Zanuck was filming Driving Miss Daisy a year
ago when he heard about a first-time novelist peddling a
manuscript based on her real-life experience as a Texas
narcotics cop who got hooked on cocaine. By the time author Kim
Wozencraft sold Rush to Random House for a $35,000 advance,
Zanuck had already won the film rights for $1 million. The
price was no fluke. Last month Tom Cruise paid about $1 million
for the rights to Big Time, a novel by mystery writer Marcel
Monticino.

    The high pay and new prestige are likely to produce a bumper
crop of screenwriter wanna-bes. And by getting better stories,
Hollywood may make better movies. Says Black: "Studios now
realize that even the best actor in Hollywood can't carry a
lousy script."


By Michael Quinn. Reported by Patrick Cole/Los Angeles.