DON'T BE A SCREENPLAY HERO!

DON'T BE A SCREENPLAY HERO

Perhaps the most tragically misguided, crack-is-whack script I've ever been sent (quite an accomplishment given the unrelenting competition) featured an Anal Lube Magnate antagonist smuggling drugs inside industrial-strength barrels of his "Gooey Duck" lubricant.

 

This was being developed by a major studio. I shit you not.

 

And like every other tortured project referenced in Tough Love, I have a Cloud-stashed, password-protected PDF you'll never see to prove it.

 

Shamelessly looting Walter Hill's archetypal '80's masterpiece, it fancied itself a "Gay 48 Hrs." -- with predictably catastrophic results. The Nolte character was "reimagined" as a dour, humorless, jar-headed homosexual-hater (wait, wasn't he that in the original?). His Eddie Murphy-esque partner was presented as pound-for-pound the most offensive black "gay" caricature imaginable. A loud, obvious, ass-wagging tornado of finger-snapping and "You go girl!" and every other stereotypic favorite from darker, less-evolved yesteryears gone by.

 

The "twist" (such as it was) was having Gay Cop give Fag-Hater Cop a hot homosexual stud makeover, which enables him to go undercover in West Village N.Y.C. and solve the case -- ultimately busting the Anal Lube Magnate (perhaps "busting" wasn't the ideal word choice).

 

I challenge you, Dear Reader, to name a single cliché not represented within the script's pages. Lock-jawed Bull-Dykes? Check. Transsexual hair stylists? Check. Laser teeth whitening and Freshman magazine? Check. "Butt Pirate" license plate. Check. Even the obligatory (groan) Mariah Carey and Celine Dion songs being belted out in place of Eddie Murphy's legendary "Roxanne" bit. Double check.

 

In all honesty, I'm not sure if the project was working overtime to empower the Gay Community or embarrass it. Even assuming it was written with the very best of intentions, everything that ended up on the page was an epic backfire, Exhibit A for the most offensive take possible.

 

Why was it sent to me?

 

Because it was also an open studio writing assignment.

 

Studio gigs are the crème de la crème of the screenwriting world. Nabbing one feels like a call-up from Triple-A to the Majors, from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to God's Holy New York Yankees. These jobs put you on the biggest stage, under the brightest lights, working shoulder-to-shoulder alongside legit Industry players with enough juice to actually get shit done in this town, to make things real. Sometimes you even get the bonus of Variety or The Hollywood Reporter announcing your hiring -- big-time boosting your stock with the civilians back home.

 

Major studios are the original Dream Factories, one-stop shopping with all the necessary tools and toys already in place. Nobody can jump-cut a writer from page to screen faster, and any project a studio owns -- good, bad or ugly -- can be greenlit and fast-tracked for production with a simple nod of the right someone's head.

 

Studio gigs also pay full-freight. That means they can pay whatever your full quote is when you're hired on a project. At that time, my quote was a modest $300K a draft.

 

So I did what any ambitious young screenwriter would do -- I went about coming up with a fresh take. Complete overhaul, take the house down to three studs and start over. I shit-canned the "Gay 48 Hrs." of it all and went hardcore Mike Hodges/Get Carter. The drama was folded into a darker, more street-savvy context; friends from the old neighborhood finding themselves on an abrupt collision course years after choosing separate paths.

 

The Nolte character would become an old school hard-charger who made his bones during the N.Y.P.D.'s run-and-gun days -- a man unafraid of bulldozing over a few laws if it means getting his man or closing a case. Playing him straighter and out-of-sync with the times would provide some much-needed texture, for sure, but I also wanted him to read as a results guy, a cop interested in the best ideas no matter where -- or whom -- they came from.

 

Next up was creating the classiest possible version of the Murphy gay cop; stylish, intelligent, wicked funny, but all said and done, a fantastic policeman. Despite the endless shit he takes from fellow officers, Murphy chooses to take the moral high ground and remain "radiant in the filth of the world" as James Joyce once said. Other characters mistaking that for weakness, however, could prove an unfortunate miscalculation.

 

Most importantly, any mention of anal lubricant, butt pirates or the like would be forever banished to Screenwriting Siberia.