Take Fountain

by Novak, Adam;

  Mersault: I didn’t, the part ended up going to Henry Rollins. The morning of my big scene with Anne Heche and Steven Bauer I thought I was having a heart attack. Driving to the set of The Grey Area on the PCH, I started losing feeling in my hands. I couldn’t catch my breath. I pulled over at a gas station and called nine-one-one with numb fingers. A fire truck and ambulance arrived in five minutes. The paramedic, who looked like Ashley Judd, took my pulse and asked me where was I going? I informed her I was an actor going to a movie set in Malibu. She said my vitals were fine, probably just a panic attack. I thanked her for saving my life and went to the set. This bearded grip came up to me and said he saw me at a gas station surrounded by an ambulance and a paramedic taking my pulse. I denied it was me three times but that grip pretty much told everyone on set I had freaked out. I read scripts for Omniscience all day in my trailer until I did my one scene. I was driving home on the PCH when I started losing feeling in my hands. I pulled into this Mexican place and ordered a burrito when I heard someone ask me, “Where were you? I went to your set today.” I turned around and it was the Ashley Judd paramedic. I told her I must have been in my trailer. Then she said there was an accident on the set, a fake phone booth had fallen on a grip and separated his shoulder. I prayed to the movie gods it was my Judas grip that had looked up at the falling phone booth. For the second time that day, her angelic presence made the panic attack disappear. My burrito arrived, I winked at the paramedic, and she said, “You know how to reach me, just call nine-one-one.”

  Dollars: So what happened to The Grey Area, did it play the festivals and get picked up by Harvey Weinstein?

  Mersault: After Franklin Brauner turned in his first cut, the producers locked him out of the editing room and hired the editors from the TV show Cops to ruin his masterpiece, leave Christopher Walken’s career-best turn on the cutting room floor, and transform The Grey Area into an atrocity. Since it was no longer his film, Franklin took his name off the picture. Instead of screening Franklin Brauner’s cut for Harvey Weinstein, the producers sold The Grey Area to HBO. I was jaywalking across El Habanero Drive when an agent told me Franklin Brauner killed himself. At his memorial service I spoke about the last time I saw Franklin alive, eating huevos rancheros at Duke’s Coffee Shop on Sunset, yellow cheese stuck on his goateed chin, the director talking animatedly about his next picture. Years after his death, his widow got a UK distributor for the director’s cut. I had to pick myself off the floor and do it all over again, servicing agents and their clients with scripts. I snapped out of that funk when I got called in to a meeting with Jennifer Love Hewitt who needed a great script to launch her new production company, Love Spell Entertainment, at Sony. I suggested a script that was in turnaround at United Artists about a young woman haunted by the surfing accident that claimed the life of her brother and she takes up surfing to find out what happened to him and ends up finding out who she really is. Next thing I knew, that script Girl in the Curl was announced as the first Sony project for Love Spell Entertainment. What happened was: she read the script.

  Dollars: I know that awful feeling of picking yourself off the floor. Grief brought me to Los Angeles. My girlfriend Cybelle was murdered by a serial killer who found his victims through the classifieds.

  Mersault: Dollars, you don’t have to go—

  Dollars: Cybelle was working for this music video director and she was selling his Avid editing equipment for him and she got a call from this guy who agreed to her price and told her to drive the Avid over to his place. Cybelle asked me to help her carry the equipment. The guy changed his address on us twice and we almost didn’t go through with it but her boss was in a hurry to get rid of the editing equipment so she agreed to meet him at this motel near LaGuardia. I was carrying the Avid stuff inside when the guy closed the door and the last thing I saw was him swinging this hammer at my head. I went to the hospital with a skull fracture and not much chance to survive. He didn’t even take the Avid. I missed Cybelle’s funeral because I was in a medically-induced coma. A year later I was still a wreck when I got a phone call from this reality TV producer inviting me to catch the Klassifieds Killer on their show Wanted: Dead or Alive by helping them stage the dramatic recreation of Cybelle’s murder. They put me up at a hotel across the street from CBS, and when I got to the production office they brought me in to casting sessions and gave me a nametag that said “Victim.” They cast this girl who looked so much like Cybelle I avoided her during the shoot. I actually ended up hanging out the most with the actor playing Cybelle’s killer.

  Mersault: They never caught the guy?

  Dollars: The episode aired, nothing happened. Instead of going back east, I stayed in Los Angeles and rented a guest house where I started writing, got an agent, and sold my first script to Savoy Pictures, Alive and Kicking, about a guy who avenges his girlfriend’s murder when he participates in a crime solvers program and realizes the killer is the TV host who invited him on the show.

  WHAT’S THE SECRET TO WRITING A REALLY GREAT EVALUATION?

  Mersault: Say everything you want to say about the material in the first sentence. Describe the script’s execution with the very first word (exhilarating, hilarious, uneven). Have an attitude that every agent or client reading your coverage is probably multitasking, either on the phone, getting a manicure or a blowjob, on a treadmill, or texting someone while glancing at your coverage, and they are only going to read the opening kicker sentence and see if it got a recommend or a pass. Your job is to describe the script, starting with the premise. How is it executed? Does it consistently engage you? Is the script populated with dimensional and castable characters? How is the dialogue? Describe the talk. What is the tone of the piece? Define it. Reference another movie. When you have run out of things to say about a script, you’re done. People who dismiss readers as thoughtless executioners fail to appreciate the flip side to that coin: Anybody who’s about to write coverage wants to have their socks knocked off, and when they have gold in their hands they want to promote the hell out of that script because that’s what the business runs on: passion and material.

  I WORK AT WHOLE FOODS. HOW DO I GET AN AGENT?

  Mersault: Omniscience once asked me to speak at Career Day at Crenshaw, an inner-city high school with metal detectors and security guards. The principal called me the night before to make sure I was still coming, I told him to expect me at eight o’clock sharp on the school grounds and I jokingly said I wanted a Crenshaw Football T-shirt as my payment for speaking. Next morning the principal greeted me with a Crenshaw Football T-shirt and an ROTC military escort for my first class at Career Day. The students in the classroom were indifferent until I told them I once played a crack dealer as an extra in John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood. Then they asked me, “How much money do you make?” and “What kind of car do you drive?” In my last class of the day, this tall varsity football player named Antwone said if I wore that Crenshaw T-shirt in his neighborhood people would look at me funny. I invited Antwone to my neighborhood, promised him an Omniscience T-shirt, and said if people in Beverly Hills saw him wearing that shirt they would think he was a client. The class laughed. Antwone thought they were laughing at him and told me to stop playing with him. I walked over and gave Antwone my business card and told him to come by the office next week anytime. A week later: no word from Antwone. We had an Omniscience T-shirt and baseball cap ready for the kid, but he never showed up. The principal of Crenshaw called me a couple months later and my first thought was Antwone got murdered, but the principal wasn’t calling about Antwone. He said his son was an aspiring screenwriter in San Diego and could he call me for some career advice? I said of course and hung up the phone. Thirty seconds later, my phone rang and it was the son of the principal, all nervous and grateful to be speaking with “Mr. Mersault.” I said, “Mr. Mersault is my father. Call me Larry.” Son of the principal told me his day job was selling Padres season tickets over the phone, and while he l
iked the steady paycheck his real passion was writing. I asked him how many scripts he’d written. He said, “Five.” I asked him to tell me the premise of his latest screenplay and he said it was about an Islamic exorcism of a female US soldier in Jalalabad. I told him to e-mail me the script with no expectations that anything would happen. I read it, loved it, gave the script to this Icelandic director client who read it, loved it, gave The Exorcism of Private Slovik to his agent, who signed the writer and set it up at Paramount Insurge with Michael Bay producing. Dollars, stop texting while I’m talking!

  WHAT HAPPENED TO ANTWONE?

  Mersault: Antwone was a beast for USC. He got drafted in the second round by the Seattle Seahawks.

  I KNOW WHO KILLED CYBELLE

  Mersault: That’s not funny.

  Dollars: Can you tell us anything specific about that day?

  SHE HAD BREAST REDUCTION SURGERY

  Dollars: And how the fuck do you know that?

  I LICKED THOSE SCARS

  Dollars: Of course you did. After you killed her.

  Mersault: Dollars, we can stop now. This is sick—

  Dollars: Let’s keep that guy talking. You good for another hour?

  Mersault: I’m here until you say it’s over.

  Dollars: You’re twenty-five years old when they make you the head of the story department, that’s a lot of power.

  Mersault: I wouldn’t exactly call the position powerful. Ultimately, the client decides, not the reader, which script they make. The story department was, at best, a filter, a moat around the castle to protect royalty from the barbarians storming the gate. I took reading scripts very seriously and it became my life’s work. I didn’t see my perch as a stepping stone to do something else, like go work for a studio or a production company, I wanted to do something extraordinary with the story department at Omniscience. I’m sorry, what was the question again?

  Dollars: I forgot. You described the story department as a moat, a line of defense against bad scripts. Who were the readers you hired and how could you trust them?

  Mersault: Someone once said if you only hire people smaller than you are, you will have a company of dwarves. If you work with people bigger than you are, you will have a company of giants. I wanted to create a Murderer’s Row of readers like the nineteen twenty-seven New York Yankees. I sought out experienced readers who spoke the language to break down material for agents and their clients. If I thought you were smarter than me, I hired you.

  Dollars: What do you mean “speak the language”?

  Mersault: I wanted readers who could speak the industry lingo so confidently and effortlessly that agents would instantly trust their judgment. You had to be able to praise or dismiss what you’d read with a knowing reference, an insider’s attitude about material. I liked hiring writer’s assistants, Scott Rudin refugees, and out of work outliers, loaded with industry experience, like a producer on the lot who lost her housekeeping deal or an unemployed reader with five thousand scripts under his belt now taking care of a parent with Alzheimer’s. I would interview people on Thursday morning and give them a test script with the title page ripped off, which I called Script A, so they didn’t know what they were reading. If you passed on Script A, I didn’t hire you, something was wrong with you, and believe me, a lot of people passed. If you didn’t pass on this script I would look at what you had to say about the screenplay’s voice and viability. I couldn’t use Script A for very long because Gus Van Sant signed on to direct and the movie would go on to win the Oscar for best original screenplay. Ultimately, Script A was a terrific inkblot and the applicants I hired turned out to be very, very good readers for Omniscience.

  SCRIPT A

  Screenplay by N/A

  COMMENTS: Excellent dramatic piece that packs the emotional kick of ORDINARY PEOPLE with a believable, down to earth yarn that may not offer the most commercial storyline, yet delivers an outstanding execution through its completely character-driven narrative. Cal Tech janitor PACO RUNYON runs with a rough Arab crowd of guys he considers his family when he’s arrested for fighting. Cal Tech professor JANETTI gets him out of trouble when he realizes Paco is a math genius. As part of the plea bargain, Paco undergoes counseling with shrink MEHRING, an old friend of Janetti’s, who’s struggling with the death of his wife to cancer. Paco talks about his abuse as an orphan and eventually comes to terms with his issues of abandonment. Mehring and Janetti are also affected by this young man and they grow as a result of the experience. Script offers a believable, compelling romance between Paco and blind masseuse TEAL, who’s much more than just a pretty peach, but a woman who helps Paco break down his walls. Technically, script is superb: dialogue-heavy, but the talk is funny, natural, and memorable. Characters are crisp and weighty: Janetti and Mehring are distinct and well-drawn, sure to interest older actors who’d like to try them on for size. Ending with Paco and his therapist getting down to a conclusion about each other is moving as hell. For our director clients, brave material could be memorable and end up touching a lot of people.

  Dollars: Tell me, what is the Sundance Film Festival like?

  Mersault: I’ve only been once. I came home from work and my roommate held up this VHS tape and asked me if I wanted to see a real, honest-to-god snuff film. So we watched this raw video footage, no opening credits, just this obnoxious film student named Heather ordering around these two dudes with cameras and they’re getting ready to go on this trip—

  Dollars: Sounds like The Blair Witch Project.

  Mersault: I’m watching this fucking scary movie and I kept saying to my roommate, “Oh man, this is bullshit, this ain’t real, wait, is it?” And then they find that house at the end, those handprints on the walls, and the camera goes dead. I hadn’t been that scared since I snuck into the Uptown Theatre when I was twelve to watch The Shining. I took the VHS tape to our independent film division and insisted they represent this handheld horror movie at Sundance.

  Dollars: Of course you did. How much did they get for it?

  Mersault: They passed. Too many handheld shots of leaves, they said. Years later the movie gods came back with a shot at redemption. There was a screening at Omniscience of a no-budget horror movie looking for representation called The Gainesville Evidence. I was the only one inside the Aidikoff theatre and they didn’t cancel the screening. I motioned to the projectionist to run the picture and I watched The Gainesville Evidence by myself. I couldn’t believe it was happening again, that indescribable feeling of discovery, like the time Dad and I screened Reservoir Dogs. An agent walked into the Aidikoff and asked if the picture was any good and I told the agent he had to represent this fucking classic or I would sell it myself at Park City. A month later I woke up at four in the morning in the Omniscience condo to find a text from that agent: “Just sold Gainesville Evidence for two million. You are my horror maven.” Then I had breakfast with Bob Tanner, Dad’s best friend from the Marine Corps, the guy who got me into USC Film School, who was retired and lived in Park City. I told Tanner how happy I was to see him at Sundance, how much I enjoyed working at Omniscience and he was smiling the whole time, bursting with pride. The check arrived for our breakfast and I grabbed it off the table and told him, “Bob, let me get this.”

  THAT’S IT? A DENVER OMELETTE FOR CHANGING YOUR LIFE?

  Dollars: Nobody asked you for your opinion.

  SHOOT THE DOG

  Screenplay by Manley Halliday

  COMMENTS: Strangelove for the nineties. Wonderfully subversive, well-written black comedy packs an intriguing combination of combat movie, Hollywood story, and political drama. Plot is reminiscent of CAPRICORN ONE (which postulated a fake moon landing) with the President and his advisors creating a hoax war with Brazil over sugar cane fields in order to ensure the President’s reelection. Out of work screenwriter DUDLEY DRAISH gets the assignment to concoct the build-up, the tension, the speeches, the soldi
ers’ heroism, patriotic flourishes, and a climactic battle sequence. Dudley discovers, to his horror, that he’s not writing a movie but a real war broadcast nightly on CNN. There’s a risk when the script plays so inside Hollywood, but somehow this pulls off its hugely ambitious concept and makes a brilliant satire on war movies (“Ain’t Gonna Bury Me!”), Hollywood types (“Heard you were in Rehab”), and a timely political drama with all the nuances of a White House drama. Script is undeniably filmic with its self-reflexivity and multimedia presentation (TVs, commercials, film, video, and script pages). For DQ, heroic screenwriter Dudley, painted with cynical brushstrokes, is definitely worth considering. Supporting characters are ruthless Washington types and venal movie people who could be Siamese twins so alike are they in nature, goals, and personalities. Combining elements of CAPRICORN ONE, THE PLAYER, and NO WAY OUT, this has to go for broke with star casting and a visionary director to pull it off.

  WHAT’S THE FASTEST COVERAGE YOU EVER WROTE?

  Mersault: I once got a script at noon and this agent needed a report before his lunch with Drew Barrymore. There was no way it could be done, so of course I accepted the assignment. I only read the dialogue. It was the story of Boys Don’t Cry, not the one that got made, but this other, competing Brandon Teena project. The story was fairly linear and easy to summarize. I read the script in half an hour, wrote the logline in sixty seconds, the summary and evaluation as fast as I could, and e-mailed it off at twelve-fifty to the agent’s office. I was kind of disappointed when I didn’t get a brownie basket. For my efforts working on the Norbit script, Eddie Murphy’s people sent me this obscene champagne and fruit basket that fed every reader who came by to pick up scripts and we drained that magnum all day. I worked with Wes Craven once and the master of horror sent me a thank you bottle of wine that was so velvety I thought I was drinking blood.