Take Fountain

by Novak, Adam;

  Dollars: Other than Quentin Tarantino, whose scripts did you worship?

  Mersault: Charlie Kaufman. Just like there was Quentin, and then there was everybody else, there was Being John Malkovich—and there was everything else. I was in a staff meeting when the agent who covered Columbia Pictures told the room that Charlie Kaufman was late in delivering his assignment adapting Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief for Jonathan Demme. Then I heard Columbia was not happy that he had written himself into the story, credited half the script to Donald Kaufman, who didn’t exist, and made it about a fat, balding screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman who becomes obsessed with Susan Orlean and finds out she’s having a drug-fueled affair with the orchid thief of the book’s title.

  Dollars: Charlie Kaufman received an Academy Award for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Why do you think that won the Oscar for best screenplay and not Malkovich or Adaptation?

  Mersault: Because it had a third act. I was the one who brought that script into the agency. I woke up one morning at the Santa Monica apartment of my girlfriend (who I went to the Oscars with that year) and in the kitchen there was this guy drinking fresh coffee at the breakfast table. Obviously he’d spent the night with my girlfriend’s roommate, because, like me, he was in his boxer shorts and T-shirt and we both had these smiles laid on our faces. I poured a mug of moe and introduced myself. He asked me if last night was a hole in one. I smiled, then he asked me what I did for a living. I told him, and he smiled. I asked him what he did to make rent and he said he had just been promoted to head of the story department at a rival agency called Ragnarök. We kept having morning coffee together in this Santa Monica apartment until he broke up with the roommate, but we became best friends who spoke every day and I watched him leave Ragnarök and become a producer which is what he really wanted to be doing all along. Before he left, my friend invited me to Ragnarök’s five-year anniversary party at some club on Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood. John Singleton came up to me that night and said, “What the fuck are you doing here?” Anyway, it was my Ragnarök counterpart who gave me a copy of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

  Dollars: You went to the Academy Awards?

  Mersault: That year the Oscars were held in the Shrine Auditorium near USC where I had my graduation ceremony and afterward all the graduates received a movie poster with a yellow brick road designed like a ribbon of seventy millimeter film honoring the USC School of Cinema-Television class of nineteen ninety. When you have to go to the bathroom at the Oscars there’s a seat-filler dressed like a guest who takes your place, so when the show resumes there’s never an empty seat. There was a commercial break after the in memoriam clips and I was standing at the urinal facing a framed movie poster of a yellow brick road in the shape of a seventy millimeter filmstrip honoring the USC School of Cinema-Television class of nineteen ninety and in that moment I realized where I was, how I got there, and felt very fortunate.

  Dollars: I went to the Razzies for Warlords of Arkadia to pick up my Golden Raspberry award for worst screenplay. I had just broken up with my girlfriend and she was really pissed off. When I got the call that I had won, I was told if I wanted the trophy I had to attend the ceremony and give a thank you speech. I had this friend of a friend who was a model, an absolute ten, abused as a child, used to men buying her gifts. I remember trying to date her when she asked me to buy her a dog for like five hundred bucks, and in that moment I realized I could not afford this high-maintenance chick so I said let’s just be friends. I invited her to accompany me to the Razzies and she looked smoking hot and we were just friends having a great time at this absurd event where I’m about to make a speech when my furious ex-girlfriend stormed over to us and screamed, “I knew you’d be here,” causing this unbelievable scene and security escorted her out of the building while she gave us the finger with both hands. My foxy friend looked at me and said, “That was interesting.” I accepted my Razzie award, posed for some pictures with Sandra Bullock, and as we were leaving I turned to the model and asked her if she wanted me to take her home and she looked at me and said, “Let’s go to your place and fuck.”

  Mersault: And I thought I was blessed.

  Dollars: I’d like to open up the class to questions. Text your question to thirty-three, seventy-seven, eighty-eight with hashtag Dollars and we’ll put them on screen.

  YOU PASSED ON MY SCRIPT I’M GONNA KILL MYSELF

  Mersault: Write another one.

  HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU’VE GOT A GREAT SCRIPT?

  Mersault: A good rule of thumb when something blows your mind: You read the script again and you still love it.

  WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO GET INTO HOLLYWOOD?

  Mersault: Johnny Carson asked Bette Davis what was the best way for an aspiring actress to get into Hollywood and her advice was “Take Fountain.”

  Dollars: You said your Mom went to UCLA film school. Is that who we blame for getting you into this godforsaken business?

  Mersault: My mother, Zenobia, was a child movie star growing up in Sweden. Her father, Soren, was a director who was supposed to go to Hollywood with Greta Garbo, but tragically Soren was killed on the set of his movie when a truck loaded with dynamite lost control and blew up. In nineteen eighty, Mom sent my brother Carlson and I to summer camp in New Hampshire so she could make movies at UCLA film school. Her sixteen millimeter short won best film and the winner got a job as a production assistant on a Brian De Palma movie called Blow Out. Mom invited us to visit her on set and we met John Travolta and the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and producer Fred Caruso. It was the last year of the Carter presidency and Dad was working in the White House, so Mom left the shoot in Philadelphia to attend a state dinner and there was a receiving line where guests were announced before they met the President and first lady and my parents were talking to President Carter when John Travolta appeared in line and said, “Zenobia, what in the world are you doing here?” and the lowly production assistant said, “Hello John, may I introduce you to the First Lady and the President of the United States?” When Blow Out resumed shooting, Mom got dirty looks from the other production assistants who’d heard about the Travolta incident at the White House and one of them welcomed my mom back with, “Hello Zenobia, slumming it are we?” After the movie wrapped, Mom joined the “Women in Film” organization, subscribed to Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and took me to a screenwriting lecture at the Kennedy Center where I was the only boy in an auditorium full of women listening to Diane Thomas, who wrote Romancing the Stone. I read William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade and no longer wanted to go to Yale Law School like my father. I wanted to be a screenwriter.

  Dollars: Wasn’t Diane Thomas the waitress at Gladstone’s who told Michael Douglas she had written a script and gave him Romancing the Stone from the trunk of her Toyota?

  Mersault: The same Diane Thomas who was killed in a car crash in the brand new Porsche that Michael Douglas bought for her after the success of Romancing the Stone.

  Dollars: The movie gods can be cruel. How old were you?

  Mersault: Sixteen. After hearing Diane Thomas speak, Mom and I went to the Aspen Playwrights Conference for a screenwriting seminar taught by Tracy Keenan Wynn, who wrote The Longest Yard, and Lorenzo Semple Jr., who wrote The Parallax View. Mom and I had an agreement we wouldn’t tell anyone we were related. We arrived separately and sat away from each other in class. We learned how to write scenes and analyze movies and complete a short screenplay by the end of the summer. Everyone had to read their scenes out loud and because I loved slasher movies like Halloween my scripts always had somebody getting stabbed or disemboweled. When Mom finished reading her scene out loud to the class, I blew our cover and said, “That was awesome, Mom.” This construction worker taking the class told her, “Larry’s going to be a terrific screenwriter one day,” and she said, “That, or a great butcher.”

  Dollars: Y
ale Law, UCLA film school, your DNA sounds amazing. Tell us about your very first screenplay.

  Mersault: I noticed this Variety article about a project called Handcarved Coffins that Oscar-winner Michael Cimino was going to direct based on a nonfiction novella by Truman Capote. The project was languishing in development hell because Cimino had directed an expensive dud called Heaven’s Gate that wiped out its studio, United Artists. Variety described Handcarved Coffins as a series of murders in a small town where before each victim dies they receive a miniature handcarved coffin with a picture of them inside. It was the most diabolical story I’d ever heard, better than any Friday the 13th movie, so at the age of seventeen I decided my first script would be an unauthorized adaptation of one of Hollywood’s best unproduced projects and I would be the one who would finally get Handcarved Coffins made. My slasher version was probably unreadable, and the project remains unproduced. I started thinking about film schools and the only university that offered an undergraduate screenwriting degree was USC.

  Dollars: When I applied to film school and got rejected, it was like—you didn’t know anybody, you didn’t get in.

  Mersault: There were over a thousand applicants for twenty-six spots in USC’s Filmic Writing Program. When I was applying, my Dad remembered his best friend from the Marine Corps worked at USC, a guy named Bob Tanner, so Dad called him and Tanner arranged a tour of the film school for us. They hadn’t spoken since Dad saved Bob’s life at a steakhouse in Oceanside after Bob started choking and Dad reached down his throat to pull out the piece of meat. When Dad called about his son applying to USC, not only was Tanner the head of fundraising for the university, he was the guy who took George Lucas to a Trojan football game and at halftime convinced the creator of Star Wars to write a check for five million bucks and put his name on the film school.

  Dollars: There’s lucky, I suppose, and then, well, there’s you.

  Mersault: Absolutely. I’ve been blessed to have learned from some amazing screenwriters. My professors at USC were legends: Syd Field, blacklisted writer/director Abraham Polonsky (Body and Soul), and Douglas Day Stewart (An Officer and a Gentleman). Stewart Stern (Rebel Without a Cause) developed my senior thesis screenplay. I had one professor who let each of my classmates hold his best original screenplay Oscar after he read our senior thesis treatments and declared, “None of you will ever touch one again.” He resigned the next day to write a script in Dublin about James Joyce. The teacher who replaced him was this TV writer none of us had ever heard of and we were like, “What are your credits?” This substitute professor, who’d taught screenwriting to death row inmates, told us she’d written countless episodes of Three’s Company, which impressed the hell out of us. But my favorite was the Filmic Writing 101 professor who gave everyone in the class a red-inked F after we turned in our very first writing assignment.

  Dollars: Sounds like a dick move. Why did he give you an F?

  Mersault: He said he wanted us to get used to rejection.

  Dollars: Everything I picked up I learned from my neighbor who wrote the Clint Eastwood orangutan movies. Wasn’t there a baseball script you wrote that Ron Howard wanted to direct when you were just a freshman?

  Mersault: You’re talking about Fowl Ball, which started out as a twenty-two page treatment written by the Washington Post sportswriter Tony Kornheiser about a Baltimore Orioles pitcher and a catcher, a battery, who decide to play one last season for the worst team in the Mexican League, the Juarez Pollos.

  Dollars: Was there a bidding war? How much did Brian pay for the script?

  Mersault: I never met Brian Grazer or Ron Howard. One of the bits of advice I got from my Dad was to get the rights to this baseball story Tony Kornheiser had written before I went to film school. I met with Tony and convinced him to give me the rights to Fowl Ball in exchange for fifty percent of whatever proceeds I got from the sale of the screenplay. Tony decided that fifty percent of something was better than a hundred percent of nothing and signed over the rights. A few months later, when I came home for Christmas break, I was sleeping in and my mom started screaming from downstairs that Ron Howard was calling from Century City. I was half asleep and thought she was just saying that Ron Howard stuff to get me to start my day. I woke up and found this note with an unfamiliar name and a phone number to call Imagine Films about Fowl Ball. I got on the phone with Imagine Films VP Michael Billingsley and he told me he used to be an assistant at CAA where he read this treatment called Fowl Ball by Tony Kornheiser that Tom Hanks wanted to do with Peter Scolari, his costar from Bosom Buddies, that ABC sitcom where two guys pretend to be women in order to live in a cheap all-women’s apartment building. Michael said he reached out to Kornheiser and asked him what ever happened to Fowl Ball and Tony said, “Talk to Mersault. He’s got the rights.” I told Michael I was coming back to LA for film school and that I would be happy to meet him. But there was no script yet. I hadn’t sat down and fleshed out the treatment or even written Fade In. I had a classmate who was a standup comedian and wrote jokes for comics who worked every night at The Comedy Store, so I suggested we write the script together. Michael Billingsley said when Fowl Ball was ready he would show it to Ron Howard for Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari. We wrote the first draft for free and turned it into Imagine, expecting this enormous check. Instead we got a five-page creative memo on Imagine stationary. We executed the notes, turned in a second draft, waited for the check. Then there was a writer’s strike in nineteen eighty-eight and we put our pencils down and wore WGA solidarity T-shirts on campus even though we weren’t Guild members. We didn’t hear from Michael Billingsley for a couple of weeks until he called to say he’d left Imagine Films to take a development job at Paramount for the producer of the Friday the 13th movies and we would have story meetings in Michael’s office with a cardboard lobby statue of Jason Voorhees waving a machete over our heads. Paramount passed on our script and that was it. Fowl Ball was dead. The last time I saw Michael Billingsley I gave him a novel I’d found called The Player because he reminded me of Michael Tolkin’s studio executive.

  Dollars: Did the failure to sell Fowl Ball sour you on the business or were you hooked now that you’d had a taste of driving on the Paramount lot as a screenwriter?

  Mersault: It made me hungrier. I ordered a California vanity license plate that said SCRWRTER. Eventually I had to change my plates because people would roll down their car windows at red lights to ask me if I wrote porn films.

  Dollars: Your classmates must have been jealous about Ron Howard?

  Mersault: Probably, but they got really envious when John Singleton made a deal to direct his senior thesis script Boyz N The Hood for Columbia Pictures and came to class with a red CAA script cover. I went to class with black Omniscience script covers because I was reading for them.

  Dollars: How did you get that gig at Omniscience?

  Mersault: This young agent came to speak at our class and told us he started as a reader because, “Screenplays are the currency of the business.” My classmates were dismissive: “God, I hope I’m not a reader when I get out of here.” I went up to the Omniscience agent afterward and asked him how does someone become a script reader? To his eternal credit, he told me to drop his name with the head of the story department at Omniscience and see if that got me an interview. I may have stretched the truth when I told the story department the agent was my cousin. That got me a test script to cover called The Rookie, which I liked for Charlie Sheen, who ended up making it with Clint Eastwood. The story department asked me to review another script called The Hard Way for director John Badham, who got the job after I gave the script a recommend. I liked another script called Midnight Run for Charles Grodin to play the accountant. They officially hired me when Clint Eastwood’s agent appreciated what I said about The Rookie and requested me specifically to be Charlie Sheen’s personal script reader. Now, at thirty-five bucks a coverage, I couldn’t live on what they were paying me, so I
took a side job driving prostitutes around in Hollywood. The job began at midnight and I would pick up these two girls, Daisy James and her roommate Cricket, whose boyfriend Terrondus was in prison and used to be their driver. They didn’t own a car so I got paid a hundred bucks a show to take them wherever they had to go. The deal was, I would walk them up to the client’s house as the muscle, take the cash donation, or use the credit card machine, and wait an hour in the car until they emerged from the front door. I would put the top down on my Chrysler convertible and drive under a street lamp, read scripts, and write the coverage by hand. This became a habit of mine: to write down my thoughts on the back of every script. As their beck and call driver, Daisy and Cricket would feed me at Sushi on Sunset and pay for my gas. Sometimes they would get jobs for a topless scene in some Erik Estrada straight-to-video movie and I would get paid to drive them to the set or they’d pay me twenty bucks to drive them to Rock and Roll Ralphs on Sunset so they could go grocery shopping. I was making good money driving them around a couple nights a week, two shows a night at a hundred bucks a pop. Sometimes I made more when I drove them to bachelor parties and they would share the tips with their driver. Sometimes the job meant putting my life at risk, but it was cash money, enough to cover the rent, and I really liked working for those scary pimps in the Valley. At Omniscience, my life was never in danger, but I had to be Machiavellian to get noticed by the agents. I would ask the story department if I could drop off my scripts and coverage directly to the motion picture agents on the second floor at Omniscience. John Cusack’s agent was on the phone when I delivered my coverage to her office and she said, “Excuse me, who are you?” and when I told the agent my name, she said Cusack wanted me exclusively to evaluate every piece of material submitted for him. When Cusack came to Omniscience for a meet and greet with all the agents in the motion picture department, Cusack’s agent insisted I attend the meeting. I told her I couldn’t go because I was a freelance reader and not an agency employee and she said, “That doesn’t help me.” Next thing I knew I was promoted to in-house staff reader with a salary, an office, a couch, a computer, no assistant, minimum of ten scripts a week. In the Cusack meeting I sat in the back while agents pitched him projects and every time a script was raised Cusack would look across the room for my reaction. Agents caught on, and for the next couple weeks I never got so many compliments in my life.