"Jack!"
"Aaron?"
"I just heard Darkness at Midnight is going to be released next week! Congratulations, man! It couldn't happen to a more deserving writer."
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Aren't you thrilled? You don't sound thrilled. I mean, you've been working on this screenplay for - what? - eight years, now?"
"Nine, actually."
"And now you're going to see your dream, your creation up on a thousand big screens! That's gotta feel good."
"Well, it's not exactly the movie I wrote..."
"Whaddya talking about?"
"Well, you remember I won the Kreighoff Writing Contest seven years ago? I got a lot of interest from producers after that, but not a lot of offers. Disney was interested in it for a while - until they realized it wasn't a remake of Green Acres. I decided to go with Miramax - the money wasn't great, but they seemed to really get the concept. Not a bad deal for a first feature writing credit."
"Hey - we can't all work for Disney."
"Uhh, right. Anyway, I had originally written a small family drama that takes place at the turn of the century in a Feta cheese mining town in Utah. The Miramax executives gave me the usual notes - 'Does it have to be Utah?' and 'I think Gouda would work better than Feta.' - you know how it goes. They wanted to nail down the details, but they left the main structure intact."
"Great."
"Fantastic. Except the executive who optioned the screenplay and bought the rewrite was having a battle with the board of directors over the direction of the company."
"The direction of the company?"
"Yeah. It wasn't making enough money. The board replaced him. Halfway into my rewrite, the new executive put all of the old executive's projects into turnaround."
"Tough break, man."
"Actually, it was a problem for a few months, but it turned out okay. Miramax was bought out by Disney. The first thing they did was replace the new executive with a...an, uhh, even newer executive. He put all of the previous executive's projects into turnaround, and looked at the projects that were in turnaround. He said he liked my ear for dialogue, and asked me to complete the half-finished rewrite."
"Hunh - I guess we all do work for Disney in the end."
"Yeah. Well. Danny DeVito expressed an interest in playing the cold, cantankerous father, and possibly directing, but he didn't want to do a period piece, so Disney asked me to set Darkness at Midnight in the present. No problem. I reenvisioned the film set in a modern-day rust-belt city. DeVito also thought it was a little dark, and needed some humour."
"Like Get Shorty?"
"More like War of the Roses."
"Ouch."
"Yeah. I tried to talk the executive out of it, but we had a long meeting in which I was, essentially, fired from the project. He would never admit it in public, but he told me that he was uncomfortable working with somebody as old as me."
"As old as you? But you're only 34!"
"He was 22. MBA. Said he was thrilled to be working with DeVito - Throw Momma From the Train was his favourite movie, right? So, before I know it, they've changed the name to Confessions of a Drama King and have some other hack reworking my original screenplay!"
"What?"
"I know. Terrible, isn't it?"
"Uhh, yeah."
"I read in Variety that DeVito was never happy with the screenplay, so he bailed on the project. Instead of killing it, Disney did another reenvisioning to make it a vehicle for Rob Schneider. That version was a comedy about a dysfunctional family in New York - like we haven't seen any of those, right?"
"Uhh...nope. You can never have enough, uhh, dysfunctional New York family comedies."
"Schneider plays a guy with 27 personalities. Do you believe it?"
"Nothing in this town surprises me any more."
"Well, get this: after six months of development, Schneider left the project to do The Animal."
"Okay, some things in this town still surprise me."
"So, David Geffen -
"
"Who's he?"
"The G in Dreamworks SKG."
"Oh. I knew that."
"Turns out he loved my original screenplay. So he bought it from Disney and asked me to come back to rewrite it based on his notes."
"Brutal?"
"Not too bad. He wanted me to shift the focus to the mother of the family because he really wanted to work with Nicole Kidman. And change the Feta to Brie."
"Doable?"
"Doable."
"So, that's the version of Darkness at Midnight that'll be in the theatres in a couple of months?"
"Not exactly. Kidman passed, so Geffen hired on Gena Rowlands."
"Gena Rowlands?"
"Yeah. I had to shift the focus of the film from the mother to the grandmother. That presented a bit of a problem."
"Why?"
"The original screenplay didn't have a grandmother."
"Ah."
"So, what have you been up to?"
"Oh...a little rewriting...
"
"Anything I would know?"
"Nothing I would care to mention."
"You're being too modest. Give me a couple of titles."
"Really. Nothing."
"Don't you - you didn't...it wasn't my script you rewrote...was it?"
"Hey! Your name wasn't on it, and I didn't recognize the title, and, and they completely reworked the plot before I got there, and, and my kid needed new braces and what was I supposed to do?"
"Don't sweat it. The way things work around here, I'll probably rewrite you some day."
"Yeah. Well. Sorry to hear you're not happy about the way the film turned out."
"It happens. Still, I've got agents knocking on my door because of this credit. I figure the next feature's gotta go better, Right? ...Right?"