Take 49 - Writer Steven E. de Souza, Die Hard, Tomb Raider, Commando

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for sure, dozens of unproduced scripts littering the floor.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

All of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day.

SPEAKER_04 0:20

For every success, there is months, sometimes even years, of hype failure.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default. That's the norm. You have to be able to persevere. That process takes years. That doesn't happen overnight.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

I was being told by my manager it's yours to lose, and I promptly lost it. And I remember thinking, like, well, that's it for me. I blew my one big shot. What I've realized from that moment is it's never one big shot. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_04 1:00

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Biss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. As ever, I am your non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rutstein, and we also have with us Noah Evelyn.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Hey Dan, how are you doing? It's good to see you recording today, not from your closet, but from an actual children's bedroom, it looks like today. On today's podcast, I'm excited to have on the guy who made the phrase Yippy Kaye, motherfucker, a household term. Of course, this is Stephen E. D'Souza, the writer of literally every iconic action movie from the 80s and 90s, including but not limited to 48 Hours, Commando, The Running Man, Hudson Hawk, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, and Beverly Hills Cop 3. He's also written for TV on such iconic action series as The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Night Rider. And more recently, he created his own show called Unknown Sender, which aired on Strike TV from 2008 to 2011. Most importantly, he can finally answer the age-old question that has torn apart the internet. Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Welcome, Steven.

SPEAKER_02 2:07

Thank you. I have one question. I want to clarify the title of your show. Is it about failures or or or or are you interviewing people about their failures or are you interviewing failures? I just want to like know what I'm in for.

SPEAKER_04 2:22

They are very much not interviewing failures.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Oh, okay. All right, okay.

SPEAKER_04 2:27

Although I think you know the fun of this is obviously even people with the most extraordinary levels of success, like over two billion in box office, there's still failures and rejections and plenty of them along the way, which is why we want to have you on the podcast. And I think, although the obvious place to start is the massive movies that you've worked on and the enormous successes, I'll start with the ones, if you don't mind, which won the Razzies. So do you want to start with Hudson Hawk or Street Fighter?

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Well, um, I guess in chronological order we should start with Hudson Hawk. Uh, and I would like to say, uh, as I said when they told me it won a Razzie for uh uh uh best for for uh worst screenplay that uh they should deliver the the uh gold-pated popcorn box to uh Bruce Willis because uh uh he was rewriting the movie as it was being shot on a daily basis. And uh the the film and his name is on the uh if you look at your VHS, VHS, wait, I'm getting raised up. If you look at your uh DVD box, you'll see his name is on there, along with mine and Dan Waters.

SPEAKER_04 3:40

Fantastic. I mean, obviously, given how much success you've had, when when you win, when you have the dubious honor of winning those sorts of awards, is it just a bit of fun or is it actually at the time did it hurt?

SPEAKER_02 3:53

Uh no, I I I had no problem. I was amused by the Razzie Award. Uh we sort of all knew the movie was running off the rails while it was being filmed. Uh, so it was it was uh it was not a shock. I I mean uh I'm surprised now I have more and more people. Um sometimes I have, you know, I have a I have probably two interns that rotate through here every year because the the universities uh have an arrangement with the Writers Guild. And uh invariably as the as time goes by, they'll say, Oh, Hudson Hawk, they look that that's one of my favorite movies. Um so I know it has a cult following, as does um uh Street Fighter, and also um another film I did, which you may not even be aware of, called The Return of Captain Invincible, which is a um musical starring Christopher Lee and Alan Arkin. Where you may have seen clips of Christopher Lee online singing the songs. The songs are by by uh the fellow who wrote Rocky Horror Show, uh Richard, uh I forget his name. Um so uh maybe you have to add that to your uh inventory of catching things up. Um so um anyway, uh Hudson Hawk, I think, for its flaws, and I can go into what I think they are, um I think it also was the victim of a kind of a dishonest advertising campaign. It was kind of sold as a straight-up action movie, uh, you know, when it should have been promoted as a comedy. I think it would have people would not have been so startled what they walked in, uh walked in on uh had it uh had it uh gone otherwise. Um but uh the the history of the project was that uh that Bruce had a deal in place uh uh with uh Tri-Star Pictures to make any movie he wanted to do, uh a movie about a cat burglar, and he specifically said, I want to do it with Joel Silver and Stephen D'Souza. I've had great success with them. So he brought us in. Uh so um as it started to go a little wonky, and uh I had already finished my work, uh Dan, I I actually had finished my work on it and then moved on to another project, Paramount. And um uh our director, Michael Lehman, brought in Dan Waters, who had done Heathers with him, to uh to do another pass at it. And when I did my first draft, I was taking my inspiration from To Catch a Thief, the Hitchcock movie, and the script was much like that. It was a caper movie that was fairly straight with a lot of comedy relief and a romance. That was the intention. And in the first draft, the villain was uh a man, and we wanted to get um a Josh um, I forget his name, who was the villain in um Lethal Weapon 2. Josh Josh Auckland, I think his name. And that's who I had in mind and was writing it for. When I did the second draft, um Dan Waters said, you know what, why don't we go for a woman? Why don't we get like an interesting uh actress? Let's get Audrey Hepburn. So I wrote the second draft for a woman to be the villain. And then when um Dan Waters came in, um uh Michael said, you know what? I can't decide man, woman, man, woman, let's do a couple, which is how he ended with the couple in the final movie. Um, and that is the that's my biggest problem with the movie. Um take it, assume it's a cartoon. The movie's a live action cartoon, and this there's singing people, not singing animals. But even in movies with singing animals and and talking furniture, like the Disney movies, the villains are always play dead straight. Uh take Aladdin. In Aladdin, I mean there's magic, there's the genie, there's like ridiculous comedy, there's a carpet that's alive, right? And Gilbert Gottfried is the parrot, uh uh familiar for the villain, and the parrot is doing Gilbert Gottfried comedy, goes, uh, Jafar, right? They won't do us. We we gotta skip down this quiet, you miserable chicken. Flee now, and soon all Arabia will be under my thumb. You know, the villain is played straight, totally straight, scar, totally straight. Whoopi Goldberg's a funny, you know, um jackal, a funny, a funny um uh hyena, but the villain is played straight. So the biggest mistake in this movie is the villains are completely out of control, chewing the signature, the the furniture, and you are you judge uh a movie by the by the villain. The greater the villain, the greater the hero in conquering that villain. The more formidable the villain, the more you think of the hero. And the villain does not have to be physically formidable. I mean, Alan Rickman probably weighed like 120 pounds dripping wet. He's smaller and slighter than Bruce Willis, but he had a formidable intellect and a team. So I think the biggest problem with Hudson Hawk uh is if the villains got so goofy, and then they had goofy underlings. Now, goofy underlings are okay, you know, like I just gave the examples in the Disney movies. But here it was goofy, it's like the old saying, the turtles all the way down, you know, it was it was uh silly all the way down for the villains, and then you really it affects your your appreciation of the stakes. And Michael, um, God bless him, a very smart guy, but uh he started talking about Jacques de Ridal when I was uh working on it. He was into like deconstruction, and so that's why after what Dan Waters came in, he said, you know, I need to deconstruct this some more, and so it's I want to do the anti-rom-com, so let's make the leading lady a nun. So they can't have sex, you know. It was part of the, you know, uh, I know what they're expecting, and that's why I'm not gonna do it. Uh uh approach that kind of took over the film.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

The subver subversion. And so so I this is gonna be, you know, based on what you're saying now, this is gonna be a two-part question, one set in the past and one set in the future, but I'm not in the future, more today, but I actually want to stay in the past a little bit. So you're the guy in the 80s and the 90s that that have that wrote the biggest movies that we're all watching, not all of them, but a lot of them. I mean, there's you have a huge amount of movies that are doing really well. What is life like back life like life for you back then? I'm talking about in the in-between times when you're hustling for work and that we're this is a podcast about angst and rejection, right? Was there still people saying no to you back then? Uh and obviously I want to compare it to today when the world has changed, you know, drastically.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Well, uh I'm as my I had agents and managers tell me I'm my own worst enemy because when I have downtime, right? If I don't have a studio assignment, I like to sort of stretch. And so I never sit down to consciously write a buddy action movie. I'm told 48 hours is the progenitor of uh of all these buddy action movies, or uh Die Hard Inna, right, which became a genre in itself, Die Hard Inna, uh Die Hard on a Boat, Die Hard, you know, in a department store, um, I do something different. And I have a particular knack for like historical epics. And uh where the rejection is, because I've had so much success in box office, um, I have victimized producers who wanted to be in business with me. And they say what I really want to do, and like against their better judgment, they say, All right, I'll try this historical uh epic based on a true story and history. And so my favorite unshot scripts, of which there are many, are these historical epics, which are gathering dust on various studio shelves. So my biggest disappointments are the scripts I've written that uh almost happen. And some of them are snake bit. Uh at uh in 2005, I decided I wanted to do like kind of an American Gothic. I guess I was watching Rebecca one night. I'm a huge Hitchcock fan. Uh, in fact, the Hitchcock family asked me um to uh introduce the restored version of Psycho when it was first on home video. And I was very flattered because uh I was able to make some introductory mark remarks. So I'd say, I'll do an American gothic. So I did a thing about a young uh artist uh who is um engaged to uh a fellow artist in Los Angeles, and uh we get right away, she's like got the talent he doesn't. They get a phone call, his father has died, they have to go back to the family state. They go back to this family state, which is in the south, and right away it's like it's like uh Jade Eyre or uh Rebecca, like this that's very mysterious, there's a lot of family secrets, everybody in this small southern village hates them. And uh this William Morris packaged this, and the agents for Scarlett Johansson, Uma Thurman, and um uh uh uh uh Thandy Newton all were trying to put their star in the movie. That's how hot the script was. Um, so um I get a phone call from the producers. Uh, we're gonna pick one of these actresses over the weekend, and uh we'll have an answer on Monday or Tuesday. So I get a phone call Tuesday morning, uh and it's it's it's the William Ris people, uh, three of them, and my agent and my lawyer on the phone. And so, oh my gosh, I wonder if it's Scarlett Mahanse, I wonder if it's Standy Newton, maybe it's uh Uma Thurman. And they go, Did you hear? Uh what, what, who do we cast? He says, Oh, the producers. They were in an automobile crash, one is dead, the other's in the coma. So, so uh, so 18 months later, when the survivor came out of the coma, like everybody had gone their different ways, the picture never got made. I have a number of stories like that.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

So, I'm gonna put a pin in this in the question about like rejection failure today. Because I want to stay here for one second and we're we're we're jumping ahead in the podcast. We don't always ask this question, but you're you're actually you know circling circling it right now, which is writing your soul's work, right? Most writers who come to Hollywood and would kill to write a diehard. That's that's what attracts a lot of Hollywood writers. It sounds like you wrote a diehard another 48 hours, all these other things, and you've written your soul's work. There's these screenplays that have a written that have your name on them, but they haven't been made or they're still in the process of being made. Is that a painful process? What is that emotionally? We're trying to get the emotionality of like getting this, you know, trying to get the real you out in front of an audience instead of you know the these other movies that you that are obviously huge, but obviously you want to go in a different direction.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

Well, I literally I spent today uh with with the intern de jour uh uh punching up uh a script that I originally wrote 18 years ago, which is uh decided is now more viable than ever because it was about a very plausible script about first contact with an alien civilization. Like a day after tomorrow script, not in outer space, it's earth, it's now, and then there's there's a signal. Uh, and it was a like a very plausible thriller. Uh, I would compare it to Three Days of the Condor, where the couple of people that know that this is happening are marked for death because there's too many uh establishment figures that are fearful of contact with aliens. Uh and this is an ongoing scientific debate. Some people say uh there's a thing called the dark forest theory that uh we should actually stop trying to communicate with aliens because we might be sorry, you know, you know, over the result. Um, and there's other people that are optimistic. So I wrote this script like 18 years ago. It almost got made twice, then have gathered dust. And then this year, um an astrophysicist who was at Harvard wrote a book saying that this mysterious object that approached Earth in December 2019 was an alien communication satellite. And this book was just published. Like, aha, this makes my theme more locky. So I had to open this book up and had to take out all the references from 18 years ago to um, you know, 2600 baud modems and uh uh there's and you know, snail mail deliveries and things like that. And I have a producer who is uh uh you know this week uh very keen on it. So who knows? So I never say die, you know. Like, I mean, there's certain scripts I know that are dead, dead, dead, you know. Uh you know, uh, you know, the the biopic of that wonderful guy, Donald Trump. Maybe nobody wants to make that one now, but no, I actually I didn't I didn't write that one now. Uh uh so uh uh I would say and it and even like um uh something like uh Street Fighter, uh last year, when it was the 20, I guess it was last year, was the 25th anniversary of the movie, and I was invited to a film festival in Spain where they showed it, and there was a 25th anniversary screening here in Los Angeles, and all these people came up to me uh to autograph their like DVDs or their posters and things like that. And I realized, I'm looking at them, they're all like in their uh in their mid-30s, and I realized this was the first action movie their parents let them see because there's a whole history of how that movie came together and what went right and went wrong. And uh Capcom was determined for it to be PG 13. Uh, and right away I said he got a problem casting John Claude, only does R-rated movies, plus he has that accent, and they said what accent? Because he's dubbed in Japan. So they had no idea, like you know, what he what he really sounded like. Um and now there's a steel case, a new steel case uh release is coming out in December, and they're gonna put in the the money. You get uh you get an actual cotton uh actual bison dollar and a poster, and and so there's uh you know, all bells and whistles. So there's like a second win for some of these things. So if I yeah, and so um uh even if I had to uh uh say what was your worst experience, like on a movie, um, sometimes there's a silver lining in a worst experience, and sometimes it's just all gray cloud all the way down, you know. If you you you carve it with with a carving knife, no, it's a gray cloud all the way down.

SPEAKER_04 17:51

So I want to go back to the the uh Scarlett Johansson, Tanney Newton movie that didn't happen because literally there was a a car crash. Uh and you said you've got plenty more of those stories. So one thing I've always found fascinating when we find out why people's projects don't get made, it has been everything from you know studio execs being fired to other similar projects coming out. Recently, global pandemic TV shows haven't come out because there was a global pandemic. Can it get more dramatic than a literal car crash in terms of how some of your other projects have died?

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Well, I had another picture where the producer was murdered. Actually, it was well, I think I think I I you know I I didn't follow the the eventual trial of of the uh uh but uh I think it actually wasn't it I think it was officially manslaughter because it was it was uh uh a um an S an SM session that went wrong went south. Somebody forgot the safe word. I don't know what really happened, but that's another movie that didn't happen. Although I think there's a movie in why it didn't happen.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

The unmaking of yeah, yeah, whatever.

SPEAKER_04 19:13

Wow, extraordinary. So aside from dramatic acts that end in loss of life, when you were at the height of your powers and you know everything was a success.

SPEAKER_02 19:25

Excuse me, I'm at the height of my powers now. I just you took out the script of 18 years ago, and I realized, gee, I, you know, this scene is boring. Uh, you know, that's one of the things I recommend for writers. Uh, if you ever take an art class, they tell you to hold your sculpture or your painting up to a mirror, and suddenly you see, oh, I'm asymmetrical, uh, there's something wrong with the perspective. You hold a script up to the mirror, like it's it doesn't work. But the only thing you can do is get some distance. So I find that if I'm writing a script, let's say I'm writing a movie and somebody says, uh, when can we have the script? And I know I can do it like in three months uh or or two months, I'll say three, and I'll actually write it, put it aside, and not look at it for a month. And then suddenly you're very clear-headed on you know, on its flaws. The day you write it, it's brilliant. You know what I mean? You sit there and look, oh, what a great sentence. You can sit there looking at this perfect page for hours. Now, I I I'm so um obsessed with this idea that when I'm writing a script, I never read what I'm writing. Now, assuming that I have uh the story worked out, and I usually work out it with three by five cards, like a lot of people, on a bulletin board and move the scenes around. And once I have it in my mind, um I don't look back. So uh let's say I'm writing a picture and there's a crooked district attorney, and I forgot the crooked district attorney's name. I don't want to go look at my treatment because then I will reinforce my first thoughts, and I want to be surprised when I'm writing. This this gothic thing I told you about is a perfect example of how to separate yourself, the uh the analytical part of your brain from the creative. Uh, there's a series of murders at the estate, and um they're so bizarre, you don't know if they're murders or accidental deaths, sort of like the omen, you know, like like the truck loses its pew, the gear slips over the truck, guy gets the head decapitated, lightning strikes, you know, is it uh an accident or is it Satan? So after each mysterious death, and they're all people in the line for the will of the dead father. So you well, well, maybe it is, maybe it's the human element. Uh, I had uh had the local sheriff comes out and he's retired. He says, Boy, when I retired from the New York Police Department, I thought that headless body in a topless bar would be the worst thing I'd ever see. But this is even worse. So after the third murder, and I'm writing the script, I say to myself, gee, it's a shame this guy is like 65 years old. Because he, if he was younger, he could be a romantic uh partner for the girl when she realized her fiance is a jerk. So two or three days later, I go, wait a minute, I'm in. Charge here, you know, my first thought was retired cop, you know, stun casting, older actor. And so to get some aesthetic distance is the hardest thing of all.

SPEAKER_04 22:15

Fantastic. So I should rephrase my question. So when you first reached the height of your powers, which you remain at to this day. Thank you. Yes. In between the big movie successes, apart from when people were, you know, died as part of the process, were people brave enough to straight up say no to you on things, or did you tend to get your own way quite a lot?

SPEAKER_02 22:44

Uh no, I I I I would I would try and go up for things that maybe were not an action movie or something like that, and I would get a pass. I also found, and this is uh uh very earlier than you would think, where uh I would go in for uh projects based on comic books, and I would hear from the background, well, they teach you about somebody younger. And this is like when I'm like, you know, in my 40s, really, and they say, Well, we need someone younger for understands comic books. Meanwhile, I've I I write comic books, I you know, like I've written many comic books and that have been extraordinarily well reviewed, you know. So uh even called the best comic of the year. So it's funny, but the the assumption is, oh, we need someone younger who's actually reading comic books. Again, as if older people don't read comic books. Um, so I have been rejected, but usually on on things where I'm trying to like get out get into uh uh a different wheelhouse. I've also turned things down. I cannot tell you. Here's an example of something I turned down. Um I've told the story a number of times, and people say, get out of here, that's not true. And finally, um, when the last diehard movie came out, I hope it was the last diehard movie, when the last diehard movie came out, uh Bruce Woolz was interviewed and he told my story. A funny thing happened to Stephen D'Souza, and so it finally got in print, and now people believe it because the actor told it, not my own story, but the story is this. Um, I get a uh phone call from a producer who says, I was watching cable last night and I saw this movie, I got caught up in it, uh and with and and I saw that you wrote and directed it. And like you got Academy Award-winning actors, Christopher Plummer, and it's a horror picture and stuff like that. But you should be doing that. You should be doing your action adventure movies. So I've got a script that needs a page one rewrite, and now that I've seen that you can direct, um you can write your own ticket, you could rewrite this movie and you can direct it. So I said, fine, what is it? He said, It's Die Hard in a building.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Which by the way, I have heard a version of, so this has circled.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

Okay, no, it only finally circled because Bruce Phyllis told the story about me. Uh and and of course the guy sends the script, and it's like a shameless copy of Die Hard, except the heroine it the hero's a woman. But other than that, it's like exactly the same. Exactly the same. So I passed on that, you know. Uh, and there was another movie that um again, I was getting a lot of, you know, horror movies are inherently uh basically inexpensive. And I did a movie that is now, until your audience, it's on finally streaming on Amazon called Possessed, and we're all talking about James Bond now. So I say uh uh Blowfield Schmofield, uh Timothy Dalton, who played James Bond, is up against Satan. That's worse than that's worse than Spectre in this film Possessed, or is he against Satan? We don't know, but anyway, um, this is a picture that I did, and when it got some play and some great reviews, nobody saw it, but it got great reviews. I was getting calls on like horror pictures, and this is more like psychological horror, anyway. So, anyway, I had a picture that was like green lit, ready to go, um, and was shut to be shot in Philadelphia. It was and like it was it was my hometown, and they said, We want to shoot this picture, we want you to direct it. Uh can you be on a plane in like in a week? And I said, Um, the script has problems. He says, No, we think it works. You know, so they're dangling a paycheck in front of me, right? To immediately direct another movie, but uh I said, I need to do a rewrite. Uh yeah, it needs a rewrite. He said, Well, we don't have money for a rewrite. I said, you know what? I I thought I think there's potential here. I'd like to go back to Philadelphia. You know, just you know, I'll rewrite. He says, No, we don't want we don't want any changes. This also happened to me in a picture in Europe. I had a picture I could have gotten involved in Europe, where it was um, you know, independently financed, people want to be in the movie business. It was a friend of mine brought to my attention who's at Studio Babblesburg. Uh, and uh I said, this needs a rewrite, you know, and they know it doesn't. We like it the way it is. And I go, it makes no sense. You know, uh, I mean, you know, one of these things where like uh at child looking at the movie would go, well, if that's happening on page 10, the movie's over. Uh so you know, I have turned down uh opportunities. Um on the other hand, I've taken opportunities that worked out badly. I did a um, I did a film one years ago. Here's here's a good story. Uh, this is sort of right after Die Hard Two or something, I guess. I'm looking in the trades, it's the American film market, and they always put these inserts, you know, in the uh variety in the Hunger Porter with all the movies that are like hyping. And I see an ad, and it's kind of the generic action movie ad, only the artwork really isn't that good, like you know, like uh uh Drew Drew Stra what Drew, what's his name? Drew Strathcle wasn't available. Uh so uh, but there's an exploding bus and uh a girl with uh uh with uh low top uh blouse and machine gun fire, and it says from the writer of Die Hard, the commando in 48 hours. And I and I never heard of this movie, never heard of it. And I go, what the hell is this? Uh and I spend like hours on the phone with my agent, my lawyer trying to track it down. Finally, the mystery is solved, like four o'clock in the afternoon. My agent says, Do you remember like the second year you were in Hollywood, you got hired to to uh uh rewrite a TV movie, right, called um Nightmare in New York? And I go, Yeah, that never happened. He says, Well, that producer, uh, who's like back east now, sold that script to a third party who sold it again to another third party, and this guy's making that movie. So I go, Oh, uh okay, well, don't I get a production bonus if it gets made? Yes, you do. All right, okay, fine. You know, I now at least I know what it is, but I hope they improve the poster art when the movie comes out. So now the movie gets made, and I called the writer's guild and I say that movie got made, and I get a production bonus. So, like, let's submit a bill. It comes back from the producer of the movie. Uh, the contract I have here says if the TV movie is produced, the writer gets a production bonus. But I did not make a TV movie, I made a theatrical movie, so I'm not paying a production bonus. So I call the writers' guild, well, you know, and they go, you know what? This guy's got you over a barrel. But I want to tell you, Stephen, you your experience doing a great service for your fellow writers. We're going to amend all contracts to say if this project is made in any form, this is now standard uh uh paragraph in all Hollywood deals. If this is produced in any fashion on any medium uh now in existence or yet to be invented anywhere in the universe, the the uh production bonds will be paid. That's the real wording that's in there now. So I'm so annoyed that I go, you know what? I'm not gonna let them promote this on me. I'm going to use a pseudonym. So I use a pseudonym on the movie, and it gets great reviews. Then another time I did work on a movie. Um, Eddie Murphy specifically asked me to come in on Beverly Hills Cop 3. I wrote a terrific script that just tore Disneyland, a new one. And then what happened, unbeknownst to me, is the studio uh keeps like like a weather vane, keeps reacting to several movies of Eddie's that fail. So in my script originally, Eddie Murphy goes to our fake Disneyland because he takes his niece there. Right? Then Eddie made a movie called The Distinguished Gentleman, where he plays a con artist who gets elected to uh office as if that could ever happen. Anyway, a con artist who gets to elected to a congressional office, but then he becomes aware from his constituents that a that a uh an electrical cell phone tower is giving children leukemia. Now, this of course is an urban myth, so already you're in trouble with this premise of this movie. So the movie fails, so they end up having another writer take out the Denise. Now the movie failed because there were scenes of bald-headed children on IV trips, like not exactly the thing for the Eddie Murphy comedy, you know. And then I hear that he made a movie called um uh I forget what it was called Boomerang, which was trying to be a romantic comedy. So that tanked. So then the studio says, Well, we can't have a romance because in the movie Eddie had a romance with a woman who was an executive at the Disney Land place. So all of that, I'm unaware of all this. It turns out that five other writers like gangbang the script into what you saw. I'm unaware of this. I'm an Australia shooting uh Street Fighter when this is going on. So that was the movie I should have used a pseudonym on. You know, so I left my name on that movie. The five other writers, none of them did enough damage to get their name on it. So with the the arcane rules of the writers guild, um, if you're doing a movie that is like a sequel, right, in order to get credit on it, any success, any writer has to write a third of the movie. So if you do the math, there's six writers, right? I wrote a script that was greatly like you know, you know, beat taken into an alley and beaten up by five other people, but none of them changed it by a third. So I got all the blame. It's the way it works. So, like, so there's so there's just no way, there's just no way to call to to win. Uh, you know, people um uh you know are sometimes stunned when the a movie tanks, and sometimes they're stunned when the movie runs away. They say, Oh, we thought this would be a modest kid. Who knows? Who knew it would it would it would take on like this? Like at my Big Fat Greek Wedding, nobody in a million years would have thought that was gonna movie that was gonna be like one of the biggest movies of the year that that came out. But there, you know, my own theory is that if you have a type of film we haven't had for a while, it has a good shot at doing well. I mean, Star Wars was kind of the first science fiction movie in probably 25 years. It wasn't a super low budget, you know, um crappy picture with like strings holding up the flying saucers. Um Pirates of the Caribbean was the first pirate movie in like you know, 15 or 16 years.

SPEAKER_01 33:15

I think William Goldman's you know apocryphal phrase that nobody knows anything definitely you know continues to hold true today. I I wanna I wanna I want to ask my two-part question now with one part, but there's a myth, and it's a myth, I know. But if you were an action writer back in the 90s, you wrote a film or you had a pitch and you went to a restaurant and you wrote a log line on a napkin, a producer's gonna throw five million dollars at you, and there's huge spec sales, and this is like the golden age of like writing, selling, specing for for writers. And that has changed substantially. I mean, there's that that's not the fact that it's changed substantially is not a myth. Whether or not people were actually getting five million to write a log line on a napkin is probably a myth. But the but people were were definitely, you know, writers were getting paid more. You could you could sell a script, it would be a lottery win. You could, you could pay, you could buy a house, you could buy a whatever. And now, you know, the not the joke is, but it's like you could write a spec script to have the honor of pitching on another script project that you might not even get. I mean, that's kind of like the bus the lay of land for new writers today. But what is it like for somebody like you who does, I mean, they are they are looking for track records, they're looking for someone who's written movies that have that have hit the zeitgeist, and you've done that numerous times in a handful of genres. So, what is it like for you today, with that in mind, even though we know the world is really hard and the business is really hard, what does it look like?

SPEAKER_02 34:35

Like uh as you're I would say most of my interaction now is with with independent producers as opposed to uh studios. Uh I I would definitely say that because the studios are making fewer and fewer movies, more and more of them of the big studios are simply doing reboots and sequels. So if you have something new, uh you're better off seeing independent producers uh who may or may not have a deal. Like one project I have uh is with a producer who has a deal with Lionsgate, which is you know, not one of the like big six, it's a big independent. Uh, and to put this movie together, he's got money from Italy, he's got money from Lionsgate, and now we're out to cast. And depending on casting, the final movie money will come in. This is opposed to what you would have in the 80s and 90s, where they say we have a movie called Die Hard. It's coming out, it's coming out in the summer, it's coming out in July. We don't know who's in it yet, but it's on our schedule, right? You know, or like uh so uh, and you know, that has led that has led to some very famous um you know problems like uh Bonfire the Vanity, for example, you know, where the movie gets that's got a release date. I don't care how much trouble you're in, like you're gonna hit that release date. Or even on Street Fighter, where uh we were led into this big commitment to film at a studio in Thailand for the bulk of the movie, uh, and their equipment, the facilities were all subpar. And we had we left Thailand early uh because we fell so far behind. You know, though we um instead of the studio, they said there's a giant like airplane type hangar that was the headquarters for the Coast Guard, and they built a new building. And what's great about this, the exterior can be the UN headquarters for the movie, and the interior is this huge volume space that we're gonna put a floor in where it used to just be water, and you'll build all your sets in there is as big as the biggest sound stage in LA. Then we get there, it turns out that it has a tin roof, and it's the rainy season, so all the sound we did is unusable, and there's holes in the walls, so like there'd be daylight coming in, like the John Woo movie after the bird after the doves fly and the bullets come in, but we don't want the doves and the bullets yet. So after after uh after two weeks in in Thailand, I don't know how it worked out, but after two weeks in Thailand, we were three weeks behind or something crazy. So then we had to go move to Australia sooner than than possible. And now we had to pay overtime to build the sets in Australia, which didn't think we're gonna be there for a month. And now we want to catch up on what we couldn't get in Thailand, and the studio says, No, you're coming out December 25th. You just gotta like figure it out. Uh, so um it's uh yeah, there the advantage of there's a great advantage when the movie is has a release date because everybody's afraid to give you notes. You know, so like if there's an imminent looming date, this middle management executives, even if they have ideas they think are great, they're not gonna bring them up because it could run you off the rails. You know, like what if what if we you know, what if we had a uh another bad guy, something like an odd job character? You know, it's too late, you know. Um, when you have plenty of lead time, there's much more meddling. You know, so it it really is a trade-off. Do you like the meddling or do you like the pressure of like a looming release date? And uh there's advantages to either. Uh, I'm at a point now where um I find that another advantage of working with independent producers is they're much more trusting. And you don't have the committee meetings. When I work with someone who's like uh working at a Lionsgate or something like that, I'll go to a meeting, there'll be the executive and like maybe one aide, right? When you go to a picture like Tomb Raider, which I worked on, I'll give you an example of like the Tomb Raider meeting, right? Uh Tomb Raider was uh Larry Gordon called me up and he said, Um, listen, um I I I um I got a I got a call and a favor for it from you. And this is um well, let me give a backup here, okay? Uh a backup to another favor you don't know about. There was a famous movie that was set up in the 90s called The Ticking Man. This is a spec script by Man Nikoto, very good writer. And the premise basically was that the the uh military had built a uh lifelike robot uh that had that was a weapon that you could had a nuclear bomb in it. So you could like you know have this robot go to an enemy country and blow up. Uh so um the way the picture was set up is they sent out a dynamite with a clock to every studio. Now you can imagine this today. Like the pack package arrives, it's ticking. A ticking package, you open it up, there's fake dynamite with the ticking clock, and the script, a ticking man. So Larry Gordon bought this script and immediately says, All right, Steve, I want you to rewrite this script. It was an auction, paid a million dollars to write the script. Um, and then uh, but what is what's the fix on it? So I came in with a whole new pitch that Larry Gordon liked, the studio liked, and I was at the point now where I actually got a pay or play deal. I had so many successes that they said we're gonna pay you this staggering number, whether or not the movie gets made. None of these things, if, come, whatever. So this is the this is the height of a career you can have as a screenwriter. So uh at this point, I had written like a very detailed treatment about 25 pages long, it radically changed the original source. We go off to Italy, make Hudson Hawk. While we're in Italy, a movie comes out called uh Eve of Destruction, which is about a girl robot that also has an atomic bomb in her, right? And uh Bruce Wills' brother sees this movie and calls up Bruce and says, There's a movie that just came out, it's like that movie you want to make next year. So Bruce gets on the phone with Joel Silver, and Joel Silver should have said, Bruce, if you didn't want to make a movie about an evil robot, you should have never agreed to do this one because there was a little picture called Terminator, which had a sequel. So the so and this movie already tanked. We already know nobody went, and we're not and we're making Hudson Hawk now. We're not gonna get to this movie the next year, and this movie won't be out for three years, people have forgotten that. But he didn't say that. Instead, he said, Oh my gosh, um, you're right, we'll look like fools, being not the first people to make an evil robot movie. Uh, I have a script called The Last Boy Scout, let's make that instead. So this is why Larry and Joel broke up, because Joel should have said, Calm down, you know. So now the movie is dead, dead, and Larry Gordon says to me, sort of like a godfather moment. You remember like when the florist comes in at the beginning of the movie? And he says, and he says, he and he says, How can I think someday I will ask you for a favor? So Larry Gordon calls me up and says, Remember, like uh some years back, you got paid, you got paid for a movie we never made. You never even had to write the script, you just wrote 20 pages. Now I got to call in that favor. You guys maybe with Tomb Raider? Yeah. Uh, you know, my kids have the video game, put quarters in the machine. He says, Well, I have the rights to make Tomb Raider, uh, but my rights expire in my rights expire in four months. I've had four different scripts written. I know you can do it. We started out working in television together. You can work under the gun. I need a completely new script. The others are useless. Uh, and I need it like yesterday, I need it like in like six weeks, so I can like get the studio behind it, and I I can only pay you for a polish because we pissed away money on five other writers over the past three years, but you got paid for doing nothing. Fine. So that's how I came to uh do uh a Tomb Raider. So the picture uh is announced, it's on the front page of Variety, and um uh I guess it's um the executive at the studio who's normally very closed-mouth, uh uh uh John Goldman says, uh, we've been Stephen Stephen D'Souza has given us an enormous franchise. He actually said the front page of variety. So the first thing that happens is Joel Silver calls me up and says, I see you're working with Larry. I can't believe you're working with Larry and not me. And he hands up the phone because they broke up. It's like like how how infantile people can be. So I said that one thing that happens. Uh and then the director that was on this movie had a movie come out and it failed. So all of a sudden, the director is off the movie and they bring in a new director who says, Let me look at all the previous scripts, right? And he decides that the best movie should be. Uh, the movie he puts together, like by taking a scene from this script, a scene from that script, but it opened with a splash. So I go, all right, okay, that's the way it works. Um, my name wasn't on it. Then cut to like two years later, I'm in South Africa doing a favor for somebody working as a surrogate producer on a picture that's filming there, and I see a press release, scenes from the Tomb Raider sequel. And I go, Wow, those are like scenes from my script that got like you know torn to shreds. So I'll cut a long story short, I I I write a letter to the Writers Guild and I said, This is gonna sound crazy, but when this Tomb Raider 2 script comes through, could somebody look at the script I wrote that wasn't shot? Because I think they shot it. And it turns out that's what happened. So I did not so the Tomb Raider 2 movie incorporates the plot of that I wrote for Tomb Raider 1 that was discarded, even though all the action scenes in the first Tomb Raider movie were from my draft. But I I guess in the credit determination, which is a whole arcade thing that goes on with the Writers Guild, uh, they didn't see any dialogue or plot, they just saw the stunt. Uh so but now, you know, I I now I get like checks in the mail for the second one. So there's a happy ending to a failure there.

SPEAKER_04 45:24

Amazing. This is an extraordinary roller coaster of success and failures all mixed into to one, which I think tells a great story of the industry. We could do this all day, but unfortunately, that's not how podcasts work. So I'm gonna have to, with great sadness, ask the last question. But this is gonna be fascinating because I can't wait to hear what you're gonna say. So every podcast ends with the same question, which is if you could give a single piece of advice to somebody entering the industry, what would that piece of advice be?

SPEAKER_02 46:02

Um, I think my the best advice I could give someone is a variation of what I said earlier, is uh two things. First off, don't try and do a version of what has just been successful. Every other budding screenwriter is gonna look at, you know, um what, you know, jungle cruise and say, aha, you know, uh couple on a boat, if that's the one to emulate, but maybe that isn't. Um uh the there's an old dictum that says write what you know, and this does not mean that if you work at a pharmacy, that you should write a movie about a pharmacist. It may be that in addition to working in a pharmacy, you are a World War II buff. You're just fascinated by World War II. So maybe you should write your hobby, or you're a stamp collector. There was a whole movie, spoiler alert, where stamp collecting was the Big MacGuffin, charade, which was, by the way, remade into they took the stamp collecting out. And they go, why did that movie fail? So uh there's three things I would say: don't follow the herd. Pick something you know, and the final thing is you've got to learn to be a critic of your own work. You are, no matter how talented you are, you are limited by your own critical ability of your own work. And the only recommendation I can make on that is what I said earlier, is whenever possible, put something you've written aside for as long as you possibly can, and then look at it with a cold-blooded approach and a red pencil in your hand. When I work with other writers, which I do like right now, I have a pilot with uh uh Robert Orkey, who did uh Lost that he's going to produce, and I have a writer uh doing episodes, I have a uh television series we're gonna do in Germany, where I have another writer working for me. The first thing I do when I work with another writer is say, before we start, let me know if you can handle this level of criticism. And I'll send them a half a dozen pages that are marked up in red pencil, a big X. This sucks, boring. This scene is over. I mean, the harshest criticism you uh, I'm actually saying I do you believe this shit? I mean, this is written in red. Can you handle this level of criticism? And they go, Oh, yeah, yeah, I can handle that. And I said, Good, because this is me marking up my own first draft. And your pages are gonna be even more red. And I've had some people like just go away in the dark and never come back. They really cannot, they really can't take it. And others go, Wow, these notes really help me. And I pride myself having been on the other side of the desk where producers would say, This scene needs a button. Put a fence around it. These like vague, you're like, you know, generalities that mean nothing. So I always pride myself on giving very specific notes. Uh, one of the first people I worked for, Harve Bennett, who later did the Star Trek movies, and I worked on the Bionic shows with him. I one of the first things I wrote, he said, You don't you have a problem in the scene. I go, what? He says, Uh, you agree with the hero. I go, Well, yeah. He said, Well, you said you're a fan of Hitchcock. Look at all those scenes in Hitchcock where the villain explains what he's doing. He sort of makes sense. You've got to rewrite this scene with the villain and get behind what he's saying. You've got to like embrace his point of view, and the whole scene will be better. So that's it. Conflict, you know, whenever it's possible. And uh be a tough critic on yourself and don't follow the herd.

SPEAKER_04 49:49

Amazing. Fantastic pieces of advice, well explained. Stephen Sue, this has been an amazing, fascinating romp through Hollywood history. Thank you very much for being part of our podcast.

SPEAKER_02 50:01

Okay, and uh since it's Halloween season, this is the time to check out my little known film Possessed with Timothy Dalton and Christopher Plummer, which is now on Amazon Prime, and it is the uh based on a nonfiction book which was the true story that inspired the exorcist. There actually was an actual case. Uh, William Peter Blady was a student at Georgetown University, uh, I guess around uh 1950, when he heard rumors that there had been an exorcism at the university, and he went and tracked down one of the people who's involved in it, and he said, I will share my memories of this experience, but as the child is like, you know, it is still alive, uh, you need to change everything. So the little boy who was from a um working class family became a little girl from a wealthy family, and so on and so on.

SPEAKER_01 50:51

We we will definitely be checking that out. I love horror. I love horror on Halloween. Thank you so much, Steven. All right, thank you guys.

SPEAKER_04 51:00

Thank you for listening to another one of our fantastic episodes. Yet again, I think you'll find that I ask better questions than Noah. Noah, have you got anything to say?

SPEAKER_01 51:10

Um, as always, uh, since you've done most of the talking, I'm just gonna sit here quietly again.

SPEAKER_04 51:16

Surely there's some people to thank.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

Oh, right, right, right, right. Uh, I would love to thank James Launch for doing all of our outro music. Um, as always, I think we owe a big thank you to both of our wives who support us through this endeavor that started in our basement and seems to be ever growing. And if you want to reach out to either Dan or I, I am at at NEBslin on Twitter. I'm not sure Dan has a Twitter account. Dan, do you have a Twitter account?

SPEAKER_04 51:43

I mean, I I do, but no one cares. All I care about is being on Noah's podcast. So well done, Noah, for conceiving, producing, editing, writing, and asking the best questions of the two of us because you've done all this work and well done you.