Take Fountain

by Novak, Adam;

  WHAT’S THE WORST THING YOU’VE EVER DONE?

  Mersault: I haven’t killed anyone. A few projects, maybe.

  Dollars: Have you done anything in your career that no one knows about, that made a difference in someone’s life?

  Mersault: I once got a phone call from my best friend from childhood, an LAPD detective, asking me if I knew anybody on the TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. A patrol officer from the seventy-seventh precinct, Ange Colletti, was shot on duty and paralyzed from the waist down. Her house wasn’t equipped for her disability and the family was trying to raise money through bake sales and donations but it would never be enough for Officer Colletti. My friend asked me if I had any contacts in reality TV who could give him the number to the front desk of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition so he could nominate Officer Colletti for the show. I told my friend that wasn’t the best way to make it happen. So I called the reality TV agent at Omniscience who packaged the show, who put me in touch with the creator of Extreme Makeover. Months later, my friend from the LAPD called and said he had somebody next to him who wanted to tell me something. It was Officer Colletti saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” When I watched the episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Officer Colletti and her family waved at the camera from inside their renovated wheelchair-accessible house, surrounded by smiling neighbors and applauding officers in blue. I waved back.

  SATANIC

  Screenplay by David Kahane

  COMMENTS: Intriguing serial killer tale unfolds with the same brushstrokes as MONSTER and ZODIAC. Same room tone of PRISONERS. While there have been several films about RICHARD RAMIREZ, this feels definitive. We never see the murders. We see Ramirez growing up in a horrible, tortured environment of abuse and drugs and murders committed against his own family members. Throughout the whole story, his longtime girlfriend, ALICE, thinks Ramirez is going to propose to her, unaware that her BF is the “Night Stalker.” Sometimes, script plays like it’s her movie, only instead of a clichéd detective pursuing the serial killer, playing cat and mouse, here it’s Alice who orbits Ramirez’s world, afraid/ashamed of him, fearful of her lonely future without him, suspecting the worst, then discovering the awful truth. Material is not a suspenseful thriller like SILENCE OF THE LAMBS nor is it about the catharsis of catching a killer and the relief of ending his reign; it’s all about the damaged people associated with the Night Stalker while he was terrorizing a city.

  PAINT A PICTURE OF A WRITER’S LONGEVITY FROM WRITING SAMPLE TO DEATH

  Mersault: From writing sample to death? Okay, you’re a senior at the most expensive private school in Santa Monica. You’re best friends with the children of studio heads and agents and showrunners. You write a screenplay about these seventeen-year-old mean girls who join a Latino street gang in East LA that gets into the hands of an executive at New Line Cinema through an acquaintance who’s an intern there and the script sells for a hundred grand. You get an agent because everyone in the business heard about your script sale and wants to meet you but you have to graduate high school first and forget about going to college when your first meeting at New Line is the day after graduation with an Oscar-winning documentary director and eight executives in the room. Another writer, more seasoned than you, is assigned to do a page-one rewrite and you never work on it again. When your movie comes out years later under a different title, it barely resembles your original premise. Your afternoons are spent taking meetings with creative executives who want you to fix their projects in development but never actually hire you. After a year or two of trying to get paid to rewrite a script your agent sets you up in television with a blind pilot deal where you pitch a show about ballerina mean girls that gets shot and lands on the NBC fall schedule only to be canceled after two low-rated episodes. Fingers are pointed, but you’re only nineteen, and every nitwit at every network wants your next show. Then you are approached by a French producer-director-mogul to adapt a novel about a mute stripper because he’s a huge fan of your work. That script gets made before the New Line thing but it’s a Canal Plus TV movie and never plays in the States so it’s like the movie doesn’t exist. Back in LA your agent sets up a round of meetings with executives who want to meet the writer who sold that script to New Line when she was twelve and you don’t correct them in the room. You write a script for yourself to direct about a homeless girl who falls for a law student and the film gets into Sundance and after you win the Grand Jury Prize everyone at the studios wants to meet you because now they want you to fix their projects by rewriting their screenplays to direct. Then you’re in a light plane flown by your uncle and you die in a fiery crash when it inexplicably plunges into an apartment building in the Fairfax district. Dollars, stop texting on your phone!

  WHERE’S THE SEQUEL TO THE LAST WEDDING?

  Dollars: You mean my movie that won a couple of Silver Unicorns at the Estepona Film Festival?

  Mersault: Did you like directing?

  Dollars: It damn near killed me. I wrote the script in a month during the time I was separated from my first wife and I was sleeping on an air mattress at the house of my best friend who officiated the wedding. I imagined what would have happened if my ex-wife had killed herself rather than filed for divorce. What if I got engaged and my new fiancée was possessed by the vengeful spirit of my dead ex-wife? I wrote the first scene in the script where the crazy wife is in the kitchen and says she’s gone off her meds and wants to have children and when my character tells her he wants a divorce, she grabs a butcher’s knife and slits her throat in front of him.

  Mersault: That script must have been difficult to write.

  Dollars: Are you kidding? This thing wrote itself after that opening scene. I had a scene at the altar where the possessed bride gives the scariest wedding vow in the history of wedding movies. I designed it as a found footage movie where everything unfolds through the camera of the wedding videographer, the hotel security cameras, or someone’s iPhone. A line producer I knew broke it down and said he could see the picture being made for three hundred and sixty thousand dollars. No stars, just talent. I sold six units at sixty thousand dollars each to a lawyer, his sister, a rabbi, a professional golfer, and the wealthy parents of my new girlfriend, who wanted to play the small but pivotal role of the demon ex-wife. I needed them to buy two units so I gave her the part. In preproduction, my lead actor dropped out to shoot a Joel Silver TV pilot in Australia so I cast myself as the groom opposite my girlfriend, who told her parents she should star as the possessed bride if they were going to invest that much money in the movie. Over everyone’s objection, I agreed to the change of casting. I slept maybe two hours a night for eighteen days. We stopped having sex when we started shooting and I don’t think we ever did again. I wanted to quit by the end of my first day. My girlfriend was such a diva on set she drove away our DP at the end of the first week. I promoted the gaffer to finish the film after he said he could handle it. Horrendous decision on my part. It gave me an appreciation for how hard it is to make a terrible movie. We did not get into Sundance. We did not get accepted to South by Southwest. I invited the investors to join me for the premiere in Estepona but no one was talking to anyone at that point so I went to Spain by myself. The Last Wedding ended up winning a Silver Unicorn for best screenplay and the Manuel Orantes best B-movie award.

  Mersault: What did your investors think about that?

  Dollars: The investors took the picture away from me and signed over The Last Wedding to a distributor called Cinema Shares, which was funny because they didn’t share a dime and they don’t put movies in cinemas.

  Mersault: Would you direct again if you had the chance?

  Dollars: In a New York second.

  Mersault: Are you working on a new script?

  Dollars: This lit manager I know sent my script over to Omniscience and the reader killed it.

  Mersault: I hope you were getting a blowjob while you were re
ading the coverage.

  Dollars: You called my script an abortion in the opening kicker sentence—

  LIFT OFF

  Screenplay by Dix Steele

  COMMENTS: Highly derivative of APOLLO 13 and THE ROCK, this abortion of a script aspires to be an event action flick and fails so utterly in every aspect of screenwriting, calling this a DIE HARD knock-off is an insult to John McClane. For DQ, there is nothing about LIFT OFF or astronaut HARRISON that merits his consideration or, for that matter, any of our top clients. Offering the barest of character depth, script has no shame claiming the Challenger disaster was engineered by the US gov’t, which drives the villain astronaut DASH to hijack a black ops military space shuttle and hold the world hostage with its nuclear cargo. Superficial script boasts stick figures for characters and banal action-movie banter between Dash and Harrison as they go mano a mano in outer space. Stale popcorn script doesn’t deserve our attention and should be declared highly toxic for our clients.

  Mersault: Dollars, you did not invite me to your class so you could lay the blame of your failure at my feet.

  Dollars: What if there never was a class?

  Mersault: I don’t get it.

  THE COLLEGE FIRED ME LAST MONTH

  Mersault: Did you text that? Let me see—

  Dollars: Hey! Give me back my iPhone!

  I KNOW WHO KILLED CYBELLE

  Mersault: It was you, texting the whole time.

  WHAT WILL BE WRITTEN ON YOUR TOMBSTONE?

  Mersault: Dollars! Put away that fucking hammer!

  Dollars: Murder is easy—

  Mersault: Unlock this door!

  Dollars: The movie business? Tough racket.

  [recording ends]

  CALL SHEET

  Bruce Wagner

  Miley Cyrus

  Michael Tolkin

  Tyson Cornell

  Jerry Stahl

  The Human Centipede

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  Greathouse

  Christopher

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  André Øvredal

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