Screen Plays

David S. Cohen

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061843167
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Escritura de guiones de cine

In this fascinating survey of contemporary screen craft, David Cohen of Script and Variety magazines leads readers down the long and harrowing road every screenplay takes from idea to script to screen. In interviews with Hollywood screenwriters from across the board—Oscar winners and novices alike—Cohen explores what sets apart the blockbuster successes from the downright disasters.

Tracing the fortunes of twenty-five films, including Troy, Erin Brockovich, Lost in Translation, and The Aviator, Cohen offers insider access to back lots and boardrooms, to studio heads, directors, and to the over-caffeinated screenwriters themselves. As the story of each film evolves from the drawing board to the big screen, Cohen proves that how a script is written, sold, developed, and filmed can be just as dramatic and intriguing as the movie itself—especially when the resulting movie is a fiasco.

Covering films of all kinds—from tongue-in-cheek romps like John Waters's A Dirty Shame to Oscar winners like Monster's Ball and The Hours — Screen Plays is an anecdote-filled, often inspiring, always revealing look at the alchemy of the movie business. With Cohen as your expert guide, Screen Plays exposes how and why certain films (such as Gladiator ) become "tent poles, " those runaway successes every studio needs to survive, and others become train wrecks. Full of critical clues on how to sell a script—and avoid seeing it destroyed before the director calls Action! —it's the one book every aspiring screenwriter will find irresistible.

1 “GET A LIFE”

GLADIATOR • DAVID FRANZONI

With the possible exception of showbiz legacies like Jason Reitman and Sofia Coppola, everyone starts out in the movie business at the bottom of the same mountain. We look up at the summit and start trudging, daydreaming all the way about the view from the top.

Pretty much all of us imagine ourselves at a podium, statuette in hand, thanking the Academy, but other than that, we may well disagree about what, exactly, the top of the mountain is. Some daydream of making a film for the ages, like Citizen Kane; others of having millions flock to their movies at the multiplex. Some want fame, some crave respect, others just want money.

Whatever the screenwriting mountain is, by the mid-1990s David Franzoni had set up camp pretty darn near the summit. He was an established writer with money in the bank and a staff to help him. He’d been nominated for an Emmy and was the sole credited screenwriter on Steven Spielberg’s slavery saga Amistad, so he had not just credibility, but cachet. And he was on a first-name basis with Spielberg, too—ideally positioned to pitch a movie. So well positioned, in fact, that when he pitched a big-budget gladiator movie, he barely had to open his mouth to sell it.

How many people have dreamed of being in just such a spot? But the story of Franzoni and Gladiator, while generally a happy tale, is a warning that in movies—as in mountaineering—the weather at the summit can turn very, very suddenly, for better or for worse.

I met Franzoni at the bar at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, steps away from the movie business’s epicenter of excess, the I. M. Pei–designed headquarters of the Creative Artists Agency. Not coincidentally, CAA repped Franzoni. He doesn’t carry himself like an ink-stained wretch; he arrived in a sport coat and slacks, not worn jeans, looking less like a writer than a producer—which, as it happens, he is. He was credited as a producer on Gladiator; a few months later, that credit would put a Best Picture Oscar in his trophy case.

Nor is Franzoni the classic tortured, introverted writer. He is raw and enthusiastic. He tells gripping, funny stories. He can talk for an hour and leave you wanting more. If ever a man was born to pitch, it’s Franzoni. He also, as it turns out, is a self-described “bad boy” and not one to take an insult lying down. All these qualities serve him well in the movie business.

It was May 2000 when we met, and Franzoni was fifty-two, a twenty-four-year vet of the movie business. Gladiator had premiered to generally positive reviews. He’d sent me several drafts of the screenplay, but they turned out to be so different from the movie that I just let him tell me where the whole project started.

Thereby, not surprisingly, hangs a tale.

“Honestly,” he said, “the idea originated when I was twenty-two and I was bumming around the world on a motorcycle. I was in Baghdad, and I traded a really good book on the Irish Revolution for a book on the Colosseum. It was a very tawdry, exploitative book about the Roman games. It was a book by Daniel P. Mannix, who has written tons of stuff. He was a sword swallower at one time; he became a writer. He wrote the book that The Fox and the Hound is based on.1

“He took a lot of ancient sources and pieced together the story of an animal trainer in the Colosseum. He explored the provincial arenas and modern-day sort of spinoffs, but what he really did was connect in my head gladiators and O. J. Simpson, or any great athlete, and the worship of athletes.

“From that point on, even though I didn’t know I’d end up being a screenwriter, I was trying to find a way into the Colosseum, to the gladiator.”

Franzoni may not have known he wanted to be a screenwriter, but he’d always loved film and wanted to get involved in the film business. Somehow, he ended up being a geology major in college and still didn’t have a career when he set out on that motorcycle trip.

“When I was driving to Lahore, India [sic], on my motorcycle, I had an especially difficult night getting to Lahore, because the roads went out in the jungle and they ended, and the signs were wrong, and I got diesel fuel instead of gasoline in my bike, and the water was bad. But I remember the sun came up and I was in Lahore. And I thought, You know what? If I can do that, I can do anything. And this is still easier than that.

“So I figured, okay, I’m over the hump that I can do that. The second hump was that you have to make a decision to do it or die trying. So once I got that organized in my head, I decided I wanted to do it. I wanted to be in film more than anything else in the world. And since this is my life, why can’t I have that? Why settle for second best when even the best isn’t enough?”

His family had a business, and he had the chance to join it, but his get-into-film-or-die-trying resolve was reinforced when he actually got shot back in his Los Angeles apartment.

“I decided, fuck it, I want to do this. Because what difference does it make? I’m dead anyway.”

So he spent five years writing on his own. “I remember the day I broke through,” he said. “I had a meeting with Sissy Spacek and I come out and I’ve got a flat tire. And my spare’s flat. I’ve got twenty-six bucks. I take the spare and roll it down the street. For twelve bucks they patch it for me and I roll it back. I get home. I don’t really have an agent, I have a girl at CAA who’s representing me on the side. I get home and there’s a message. ‘Sissy wants to hire you, and we sold the spec script.’” He was twenty-eight.

It would be about another ten years before he got his first official movie credit, for the 1986 adventure comedy Jumpin’ Jack Flash. He got story and shared screenplay credit for the film, which marked the rather unlikely collaboration of action überproducer Joel Silver and director Penny Marshall, who was directing her first feature film. Marshall fared a little better with Jumpin’ Jack Flash than Franzoni, as she would go on to make Big just two years later. Franzoni had to wait a while longer for his next produced credit: HBO’s 1992 film Citizen Cohn, based on Nicholas von Hoffman’s biography of Roy Cohn. The film earned him an Emmy nomination and established his knack for adapting historical material.

“Cut to 1995,” he said. “I’m in Rome for some reason, working on Amistad for Steven [Spielberg]. Because we were going to Rome, I had my book-finder find that Daniel P. Mannix book. And as a testament to the book itself, my book finder wouldn’t give it to me until he had finished reading it. Because you can’t put it down; it’s like a drug.

“So I got to Rome, I’m reading it, I’m doing Amistad, and on the side I’m kind of going nuts. My wife was going, ‘Why don’t you pitch [the gladiator idea] to Steven?’ I said, ‘I still have to work it out.’

“One day I read that Commodus had gone into the Colosseum as a gladiator and that he had been killed by a gladiator named Narcissus, about which there’s nothing except that he did that. I thought Fuck, I’m in, I’ve got my way.”

So, finally, Franzoni mentioned to DreamWorks’ Walter Parkes, who would eventually become an executive producer on Gladiator, that he was thinking about an ancient-Rome movie. Then Franzoni asked producer Doug Wick (Stuart Little; Girl, Interrupted) to come onto the project. Wick jumped at the chance.

Good news? Well, yes and no, since Wick had a first-look deal at Sony, while Franzoni had just signed a three-picture deal at DreamWorks. For Wick to do the project, Sony would have to give Gladiator a big thumbs-down. In short, said Franzoni, “Doug and I are both fucked.”

But Franzoni has been working in Hollywood a long time. He knows a few tricks.

“I said, ‘Doug, here’s what we’ll do,” he remembered. “‘Lisa [his assistant at the time] and I will go in to [see] a lower-echelon executive at Sony, and I’ll totally fuck up the pitch, do the worst job I’ve ever done in my life. We’ll get the pass.’

“Steven, meanwhile, is over at CAA hanging out, and goes, ‘Okay, what are you guys going to bring?’ And my agent said (because I told her not to) ‘David Franzoni wants to bring you an idea about a gladiator.’ Steven said, ‘You mean an ancient Roman gladiator?’ She said yes. He said, ‘I want to be there for that meeting.’ So I get this call from Steven’s office, ‘Steven has two days, he wants to be there, choose one.’ So I chose the last one. Meanwhile I’ve got to get the pass from Sony.”

He pitched to Sony, emphasizing the gore and hitting every point that would drive up the cost of production. In a twist straight out of The Producers, though, “they loved it. Loved it.”

That landed him in a pitch to a higher-up at Sony, Lisa Henson, about two or three days later. “Right away I know, we win,” he said. “She was like, ‘I don’t know, a gladiator, couldn’t he be in maintenance in the Colosseum or something?’ I said, ‘Lisa, I don’t know, a hundred-million-dollar movie about a guy who shovels lion shit? I’m not sure.’

“So I know we got the pass, so we’re clear. Three or four days later, I go over to see Steven and Walter.

“Steven goes, ‘David, how you doin’?’

“‘Good.’

“‘Gladiator? Rome? Emperor-type stuff? The Colosseum?’

“I go, ‘Yeah.’

“He goes, ‘Okay.’

“I had a pitch, but I didn’t even get it out of my mouth. He just said, ‘Let’s do it. Okay.’”

To a novice, this sounds like a dream come true. Steven Spielberg buys your pitch in the first ten seconds? What could be better than that? Spielberg, though, is famous for his business savvy, and there’s a sound business reason to say yes to a pitch without actually hearing it. If you’re a producer and you hear a pitch and say yes, you’re saying yes to what you heard. If you try to change it later, that makes for big arguments. On the other hand, if all you hear is “Gladiator, Rome, emperor-type stuff, the Colosseum,” well, that’s all you’ve said yes to. This puts the writer at something of a disadvantage later on, as both God and the devil are always in the details. This would prove to be especially true of Gladiator.

Still, twenty-five years after swapping books in Baghdad, Franzoni was finally going to get to the Colosseum. With Spielberg’s blessing in hand, Franzoni reassured Walter Parkes that he did actually have a story and went off to write. A few months later, he turned in his first draft, dated October 1997.

This 130-page script is different in almost every detail from the finished movie. The hero’s name is different. The dialogue is different and so are the fight scenes. Characters who live in the movie die in the original script. Some characters from the movie aren’t in the script at all.

There is no provincial arena in the middle of the movie. The hero is a victim of both the Roman Senate and the emperor, not Commodus alone. Commodus’s sister Lucilla has no adorable son and she dies horribly in the arena. The hero’s family turns out to be alive, not murdered by the legions as in the film, and escapes to safety at the end.

Yet with all that, it is unmistakably the same movie that opened in May 2000. In Franzoni’s original story, a Spanish/Roman general is betrayed by new emperor Commodus, cast into slavery as a gladiator, and becomes a hero in the Colosseum. The gladiator reveals himself to the emperor, but the emperor does not dare kill the mob’s new favorite.

Instead Commodus uses subterfuge, arranging more and more difficult challenges for the gladiator, including surprise animal attacks. The gladiator becomes more popular, which makes him more and more dangerous to the emperor, and the emperor becomes more tyrannical. Finally, the two men kill each other in the arena.

That’s Gladiator, all right.

Two other credited writers followed Franzoni: John Logan (Any Given Sunday, The Aviator) and William Nicholson (Shadowlands, Firelight). Franzoni, who was also a producer on the film, calls them both friends and praises their work. Yet all the essential elements were in Franzoni’s first draft.

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