Take Fountain

by Novak, Adam;

  WHO’S THE BIGGEST STAR AT OMNISCIENCE YOU EVER READ FOR?

  Mersault: Omniscience signed Hugo Slater after his last movie, Break the Bank, didn’t at the box office and his agents invited me to join the team. Soon, Hugo Slater was calling me “Reader Guy,” as in, “What does Reader Guy say about the script?” I felt this awesome responsibility to contribute to his legacy of films and the first script I thought was worthy was I Am Legend at Warner Brothers. The studio attached Hugo Slater to star and then Ridley Scott came on board to direct with a hundred-million-dollar budget.

  Dollars: A hundred million nowadays is a bargain. What happened? When I Am Legend came out, Will Smith was fighting the vampires.

  Mersault: I forget what year it was, but there were several projects that Warner Brothers decided ultimately not to make. It came down to I Am Legend, a reboot of Superman with Tim Burton, and a Renny Harlin shark movie called Deep Blue Sea. The movie gods did not smile on Hugo Slater. The studio chose the shark movie. I Am Legend became I Am Not Happening and I had to read all these scripts for Hugo Slater to find his next picture. One of them was called Man’s Fate by Michael Cimino, based on the novel by André Malreaux, and I passed on it, but Hugo’s agent asked me to take the director out to lunch, listen to Cimino tell me a few stories, pay the check, and break it to him that Hugo Slater wasn’t interested in Man’s Fate. I arrived at Café Roma in Beverly Hills for my Michael Cimino lunch with a package that had the director’s name scrawled on it. At our table, Cimino unwrapped the gift and found a small wooden coffin that slid open, revealing a photograph of Michael Cimino with two Oscars for The Deer Hunter. Cimino was so stunned by the handcarved coffin he looked at me and said, “Who are you?” Lunch became this memory lane about writing the screenplay with William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist, and how determined Cimino was to make Handcarved Coffins after Man’s Fate. I paid the bill and delicately informed Cimino that Hugo Slater wasn’t going to star in his script. Cimino took the news well. He held up his handcarved coffin and said, “That’s okay, I have this.”

  Dollars: Sylvester Stallone was originally going to star in Beverly Hills Cop. I’m interested in hearing what were some of the scripts you championed that, for whatever reason, Hugo Slater didn’t make?

  Mersault: I walked into our weekly Hugo Slater meeting humming the theme song from the seventies TV show S.W.A.T. and that’s how Hugo Slater got attached to play Hondo, the leader of this elite squad escorting an international criminal to his sentencing hearing with every bad guy in the world trying to free him for a multimillion dollar reward. Multi-rewrites later, Hugo Slater bailed on S.W.A.T. and the studio declared they would make the picture on the cheap as an ensemble with young stars. Frank Darabont’s rewrite of Collateral could have had Hugo Slater playing the contract killer opposite the cab driver but the best Hugo Slater script I ever recommended didn’t happen for the big guy and probably wouldn’t have worked.

  Dollars: Which script was that?

  Mersault: Three Kings by David O. Russell. When I finished that script, the moment felt holy. I barged into his agent’s office to tell him it was the best script I’d ever read for Hugo Slater and he warned me George Clooney was campaigning for the part. At the next Hugo Slater team meeting, I pitched my heart out for Three Kings and got shot down by an agent who said he couldn’t get past Hugo’s thick Latvian accent as a US soldier in Kuwait. I suggested tweaking the script to accommodate Hugo Slater by making his character part of a UN peacekeeping force but that suggestion went nowhere. Hugo Slater became unavailable after his porcine heart valve replacement surgery and it was time for me to do something else at the agency, like putting A-list packages together with my favorite scripts.

  Dollars: I’ve never been packaged by an agency so I can’t speak with authority on the subject as perhaps you can.

  Mersault: When it happens, it’s a miracle. Omniscience puts together a client script with a first-dollar gross producer, the lit department attaches a meaningful director who, by virtue of his track record and relationships, attracts A-list stars from the talent department, creating a package irresistible for a studio to finance and distribute the picture on a worldwide basis. Omniscience is incentivized to do this not just for the multiple commissions from first-dollar gross clients across departments but also to collect a hefty packaging fee from the buyer. Inevitably, I would be requested to write the coverage on a client script brought up in a staff meeting and my opinion was neither needed nor required by the packaging agent.

  Dollars: In other words, the agents asked you to sell it, not smell it.

  Mersault: Some agents couldn’t handle the truth and sent me scripts attached with kneepads. I called those coverages “glow jobs.” I had no problem servicing those scripts when I was younger, which may have had something to do with my popularity among the agents.

  Dollars: Not to mention your promotion.

  SO, YOU ARE A WHORE…NOW WE’RE JUST HAGGLING OVER THE PRICE

  Mersault: Look who’s back.

  Dollars: And quoting Winston Churchill.

  NO TELL MOTEL

  Screenplay by Aldo Garibaldi

  COMMENTS: This is an electrifying sexual thriller that grabs you from the opening image to the last fade out. Reminiscent of BLOOD SIMPLE, the story revolves around a run-down motel, five sketchy characters, and a million dollars in stolen drug money. Double-crossings and double-dealings is all you find at the No Tell Motel. The characters have subtle nuances that only hint of their pasts of pain. The script moves fast and furious, with the two cousins, sex and murder, asserting control over the players. The dialogue drips with the sweaty banter of hardened criminals and abused lovers. The plot twists and turns with surprising revelations and betrayals. No one can be trusted in this tale. In short, this is a hot script about money and murder that deserves our attention.

  Dollars: What happens to people who become readers? Thousands of scripts later, are they like my coffee: cold and bitter?

  Mersault: The story department was the real mailroom at Omniscience. A few readers became clients. My assistant sold her script Suffragette City to Castle Rock and later created the TV show Doctor Addict. Another assistant of mine became the show runner of Modern Nurses. One of the readers I hired won an Emmy for Ugly Velma. Another reader sold his biblical action script Lazarus to MGM. Danny Dortmund, who was so tough that if he liked a script it had to be an Oscar winner, sold his screenplay for My Slut Grandma to Tri-Star, which I only learned about because Variety announced the “ex-Omniscience script reader” Danny Dortmund had sold My Slut Grandma for high six-figures in a bidding war with several studios. When Danny Dortmund came into work that day to quit, he went to his reader bin and found twenty scripts, all of them overnights. He went into my office and asked me to reassign those screenplays because he had a meeting with Tri-Star in the morning and he couldn’t work for Omniscience anymore. I told Danny Dortmund to go back to his bin for a surprise. Behind the stack of scripts was a bottle of champagne and on the label I’d written: “You’re fired.”

  Dollars: When Paramount submitted Warlords of Arkadia to Omniscience for directors, I got my hands on the coverage.

  Mersault: Was it Danny Dortmund?

  Dollars: It was you. I kept the coverage.

  Mersault: You kept the coverage? That’s creepy.

  WARLORDS OF ARKADIA

  Screenplay by Dollars Muttlan

  COMMENTS: Problematic and uneven, and yet WARLORDS OF ARKADIA has a fascinating core idea that could be developed into something memorable. Subtitles and pointless narration overwhelm the tale, which is basically the French Revolution reimagined in a future where Earth (renamed Arkadia) is occupied by monster oppressors similar to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. During the first sixty pages our hero CLEM is heard only through voice-over, revealing plot details and thoughts about his fellow human rebels. This is a disastrous way to tell a story and
script finally drops the narration when Clem is captured by the monstrous warlords. The dialogue has too much stilted, bizarre futuristic lingo when English would have sufficed. Disappointing material, but cool seed of a movie might attract a visually inventive director, a world-creator who could further develop its message about human rights and be skilled enough at action and effects to realize the commercial potential buried inside this hot mess of a script.

  Mersault: Well, the movie didn’t work but you saved those kids at the Warlords premiere.

  Dollars: Saving the kids happened at the Chinese Theatre on opening weekend. The premiere at the ArcLight was scarier. My date for the evening was this pretty bank teller from Wells Fargo I’d had a crush on forever. With her, I remembered the ABCs of dating in Los Angeles: Always Bring Cocaine. Paramount sent a limo, not a stretch, but Wells Fargo was impressed. On the red carpet, nobody said a word to me, no executive from the studio hugged me, and there wasn’t a soul inside the Cinerama Dome when we took our seats. I hadn’t seen the movie. I wasn’t invited to the set during filming. All I knew was they cast the movie with some big star from Germany and surrounded him with a bunch of weird names that if you added up all their star power combined, it wouldn’t make any goddamn sense. As soon as the movie began, I started to sink in my seat. It was so awful I was on the floor hiding from Wells Fargo, who was wiping her nose and shoveling popcorn in her mouth like she was watching Empire Strikes Back or something. Usually people stay in their seats at premieres out of respect, not this crowd. The spaceships looked like toys. The audience was howling at the dialogue. At one point, after a particularly embarrassing scene of the lead actress delivering an excruciating amount of exposition, an audience member shouted out: “Show us your tits!” Wells Fargo started bleeding all over her popcorn after snorting at something on screen she found hilarious. Last line of the movie, which I did not write, had the hero announcing to his half-naked mutant girlfriend, “I’m off to my next adventure.” As my sole writing credit flashed on the screen, Wells Fargo was hemorrhaging in the ladies room and the six people left in the Dome bolted for the exits.

  Mersault: I’ve been to some crazy themed premieres where people skip the movie and show up for the open bar or the In-N-Out Burger truck serving double-doubles.

  Dollars: I’m not sure what the theme was that night. We had go-go dancers with neon pasties and Warlords ice sculptures. A lit manager came up to me, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Good luck!” I never saw Wells Fargo again.

  Mersault: She pulled a French exit?

  Dollars: I changed banks. Opening weekend I went to The Grove, bought a ticket to the matinee, and decided I didn’t want to be the only one in the theatre so I got my money back and bought a ticket to the next showtime. I walked around the Farmer’s Market, bought a bottle of hot sauce, ate something at the food court, and found my theatre at The Grove was empty again. I walked out and drove to the Chinese. I sat down and saw about two rows filled with people: an elderly couple, Korean teenagers wearing suits and ties, a black couple taking their two very young kids, and some Mexican gangbangers who started cheering when the lights went down. Minutes into the movie, the elderly couple got up to leave, angrily shaking their heads, bothered by the alien beheadings in the opening. The grandfather shouted at everybody, “You people are sick!” as if those folks in the theatre were responsible for green-lighting the picture. One of the Korean gangsters shouted, “Shut the fuck up, Grampa!” The old man paused at the exit doors and yelled back: “Come down and make me, you little bastard!” The Korean kid jumped out of his seat and ran toward Grampa. The black guy tackled the Korean reservoir dog, saving the old man, but infuriating his crew. The Mexicans threw their drink cups and tubs of popcorn at the Koreans. The black guy’s wife went over to a Cholo, waved her fat finger in his face and a gunshot exploded, her blasted hand resembled a molten candle, and her kids screamed like they were next to die. The Koreans fired their semiautos at the Cholos, who whipped out their pistoleros. I crawled on the sticky floor toward the emergency exit when I found the black kids crying for their mommy and daddy. I picked them up into my armpits like footballs, threw myself against the exit door, and got those munchkins out.

  Mersault: I saw you interviewed on Good Day LA with Jillian and Dorothy Lucey after the Mayor declared Dollars Muttlan Day in your honor.

  Dollars: I helped those kids, but I couldn’t save the box office. On two thousand screens, Warlords of Arkadia grossed three hundred and ninety-eight thousand for the lowest per-screen average of all time. Overseas, ticket sales were just as terrible. In South Korea, the movie was perceived as having anti-Christian messages. No one went to see it in Europe, Japan, Brazil, or Russia. I had a bunch of meetings lined up to hear my Moose on the Loose pitch but as soon as Warlords shit the bed they all got canceled. My agent stopped returning my phone calls. It was as if I had been cremated. When people did call me back, it was their assistants saying they had to reschedule drinks or lunch and they never called me again. At one point I took too many Ambien, shaved off my eyebrows, and stood outside Omniscience holding a cardboard sign: “Will screenwrite for food.”

  AFTER I RAPED CYBELLE, I CUT OFF HER FEET

  Dollars: Now there’s a detail only her murderer would know.

  SHE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE

  Mersault: Serial killers think they’re so smart, don’t they?

  THEY NEVER CAUGHT ME…DOES THAT MAKE ME A GENIUS

  Dollars: No, just a lucky son of a bitch.

  WHO WAS YOUR WORST READER?

  Mersault: I had a reader once who I thought would be so terrible I took bets around the office he wouldn’t last a week. That guy, a former client, a rock star who happened to be homeless, became my ace reader for any overnight request, averaged fifteen scripts a week…and was never late on a coverage…all while raising a teenage son by himself.

  Dollars: Knock it off. Your best reader was a homeless guy?

  Mersault: I got this phone call from the head of the music department at Omniscience who used to represent this band from the eighties. The agent asked if I would take a few minutes to meet this singer-songwriter who went to Bennington College, a favorite of LA Times music critic Robert Hilburn, a brilliant lead vocalist who had fallen on hard times, struggling to raise a young boy by himself, living out of his car and crashing on people’s couches. A meeting was set and Steven Tyler’s ancestor waltzed into my office, craggy face, longish hair in a bandanna, Concrete Blonde concert T-shirt, unlit cigarette behind his ear, and immediately started telling me about his misfortune. I cut him off to say he had the job as a reader. The rock star said he’d never done script coverage before, and I said something like, “You have a degree from Bennington, it’s not brain surgery.” The rock star laughed and called me a cool dude and started talking about the time he was on tour with Jetboy and Thelonius Monster and again I cut him off to explain how to write a logline, a one-page summary, an evaluation, and a character breakdown. I gave the rock star Snakes on a Plane to cover along with some samples and told him to steal any phrases to make his evaluation seem credible. After two months of living out of his car and getting the hang of writing coverage, the rock star and his son were able to move into a new apartment in the Valley. The best moment was when an agent wanted him to be his exclusive reader. I told the rock star about this request and he couldn’t believe an agent at Omniscience trusted his judgment that much. I reminded him he went to Bennington. The worst moment was when another agent called me about his negative review of a client script and ordered the coverage destroyed and the reader fired immediately. I told the agent both directives would be obeyed, not to worry.

  Dollars: That’s outrageous. The agent made you fire the rock star because he couldn’t handle the truth?

  Mersault: Who said I fired the rock star? I called him up, explained what happened, and told him to keep doing what he was doing. I explained that since our rea
ders used their initials on coverage and not their names he should just change his reader initials and no one would ever know.

  Dollars: Now that’s genius. Did he ever write a song about reading scripts?

  Mersault: He wrote and recorded this amazing album while he read for Omniscience. My favorite song was about trying to date when you’re homeless called “Back Seat Driver.”

  MAYBE I SHOULD WRITE SCRIPTS

  Mersault: I would love to read one of your scripts.

  Dollars: Mighty generous of you.

  Mersault: See, now he’s quiet.

  BOMB ON BOARD

  Screenplay by Hans Grohl

  COMMENTS: Exhilarating thriller that never lets up and delivers on its enticing premise set on a city bus that’s timed to explode if the speedometer drops below fifty-five miles an hour. LAPD bomb squad member HANK REVIS boards the doomed bus, works with the frightened passengers, and tries to figure a way out while his aging partner, MEEKS, discovers the mastermind is a disgruntled ex-bomb squad cop named WINSTON WHITE. Meeks gets killed, but Hank saves the passengers after a wild, incredible ride on a hurtling booby-trapped bus from hell that ends on a satisfying note. Piled on with external obstacles, Hank isn’t given much of a character (it would have been nice if he fought some inner demons...), but the script simply moves too fast to attempt development. Mad bomber White is a solid, stereotypical villain who’s lost his mind (along with his left thumb). There’s a fun love interest for Hank in the attractive twenty-something JANIE, who is forced to take the wheel when the bus driver is wounded. Fast and frisky cop thriller demands our attention.