I'll Mature When I'm Dead (11 page)

That’s where the process bogged down. We spent much of the first day using the magnets to make dirty words on the whiteboard. We did come up with some movie ideas. But none of them had that subtle, elusive quality that, for want of a better term, I will call “not being really stupid.” I began to understand why so many movies—movies that were made at great expense, and with much effort—are so bad: It’s really hard to come up with a good movie idea that somebody else hasn’t already thought of. If you think of a truly original movie idea, one that has never been done, the odds are extremely high that it will suck.

What I think happens in Hollywood is, studio executives get constantly bombarded with horrible ideas, and this causes their brains to deteriorate. Eventually they reach the point where, if they hear an idea that sucks just a little bit less than all the others, they believe it’s actually good. I say this because at some point, a conversation like the following must have actually taken place in a major Hollywood studio:

A similar brain-deterioration
problem afflicted Gene and me. There is no other explanation for the movie idea we came up with. You’ll have to take my word for this: We are not complete idiots. We both have a lot of experience in the field of writing. We have both seen many movies.
We have both won Pulitzer Prizes
.
¹⁸
And yet, after three solid days of brainstorming, the movie concept that we settled on was:

Evil mutant superhuman chickens.

I swear I am not making this up. Our idea was that the chickens in an Iowa poultry plant, after years of being force-fed hormones and chemicals, have mutated and become powerful and highly intelligent, although they still look like regular chickens. These chickens stage a revolt in their poultry plant and take an entire Iowa town hostage. Our hero, a young reporter named Mark, works at a supermarket tabloid newspaper patterned after the
Weekly World News
. He finds out about the chickens and writes a story about it, but nobody believes him because all the other stories in the paper are obvious fabrications like
Vampires on Supreme Court!
So he goes to the town and, with the help of an attractive female townsperson named Tami, saves the day by Super Glue-ing all the chickens’ rectums shut.

I’m kidding about that last part. But I’m not kidding about the rest of the plot, which also involved the president of the United States, who goes to Iowa on a campaign trip and gets tangled up with Mark and Tami and the chickens in a fun and wacky way. Our working title was:
Chickens!

Following the standard professional-screenwriter procedure, we wrote “CHICKENS” on an index card and attached it to the whiteboard with a magnet. To my knowledge, that was the last thing we ever did with the whiteboard. We spent the rest of our time typing on my computer, outlining the scenes we would include in our screenplay. I have saved the notes we made during this process. Here is a sampling:
¹⁹

I don’t remember exactly what plot reason we had for that last note; maybe we were just responding to the universal human longing to see Wolf Blitzer inundated by chickenshit. All I know is, when Gene left Miami, we honestly, sincerely believed that this was the screenplay we were going to write.

Fortunately, as soon as we stopped exposing each other to bad ideas, our IQs started to rise. When we tried to actually write
Chickens!
, we quickly realized that we had come up with possibly the most ridiculous movie concept ever that was not part of the
Star Wars
franchise. So, using our restored brain function, we analyzed
Chickens!
, trying to pinpoint the problem. We decided it was: the chickens.

So we tweaked it. We kept the supermarket tabloid reporter and the presidential campaign, but we replaced the chickens with a political theme, and we wrote a screenplay that we called
Head of State
. We spent months working on it, sending scenes back and forth, writing and rewriting them. We got into heated arguments, because we had serious creative differences about certain elements of the story, by which I mean the size of the female characters’ breasts. Gene felt they should all be small and perky; I did not. This dispute was both idiotic and irrelevant, because you don’t put physical descriptions of characters in screenplays. But Gene, who for the record is insane, would regularly send me scenes that began like this:

I would feel compelled to revise this and send it back:

We also worked on the actual plot, and we came up with what I still think was a pretty clever one, with numerous fun and wacky elements. To my knowledge,
Head of State
is the only screenplay ever written in which the president of the United States uses a nationally televised appearance to send a secret message by doing, in very slow motion, the Hokey Pokey.

When, at last, Gene and I were satisfied with
Head of State
, we sent it off to our agent in Los Angeles, a smart and savvy guy whom I will identify only as “Matt” so he can continue to have a career. Gene and I then sat back and prepared to consider the various incoming offers so we could decide which studio was the best “fit” for us in the sense of giving us the largest total number of dollars.

Except that no offers came in. I don’t know what the problem was. Maybe we didn’t have enough quadrants. Every few days Matt would send us an e-mail updating us on which studios had most recently passed on our screenplay. He tried to cheer us up by including tidbits of positive feedback (“This time it came back with very few vomit stains”). But as rejection followed rejection, we started to get the sinking feeling that our many hours of work had been for nothing, not to mention the cost of the magnetic board. After a while we both were convinced that the project had been a complete waste of time, and we pretty much forgot about it.

But sometimes, in real life as in the movies, there are happy endings. One day Gene and I got a brief e-mail from Matt: A studio had made an offer! He wanted to set up a conference call to explain it to us. I will never forget the moment when, after Gene and I were both on the line, Matt revealed the amount of money we were being offered. We were totally floored when he named the figure.

Fifty-eight dollars.

OK, technically it was more than that. But in Hollywood screenplay terms, the offer was the equivalent of $58. It was definitely less money than the average Hollywood movie production spends just on muffins.

Gene and I were deeply disappointed, and somewhat insulted. But in the end, we took the money, and for a very sound professional reason: We are whores. Also the contract said that if the studio decided that the screenplay needed to be rewritten, we would get first crack at it, and we would also be paid for that.

Several months after we sold our screenplay, some studio people called Gene and me to talk about the possibility of a rewrite. They were very nice. They said they really liked our screenplay, but wondered if we might want to consider “taking it in a different direction.” Two of the directions they suggested—bear in mind, we had written a comedy about presidential politics—were:

This is kind of like telling Herman Melville you really like
Moby-Dick
, but you want to lose the whale. Not that I’m comparing
Head of State
to
Moby-Dick
. For one thing,
Head of State
has more fart jokes. But you see my point. We couldn’t make it about the NFL without essentially dumping everything we’d written and starting over. And we definitely were not capable of turning it into a musical. I have written one reasonably successful song in my life, and it’s about Tupperware. And compared to Gene, I am Mozart.

So we declined the offer to attempt a rewrite. As far as I know, nobody else has attempted one, either. I think
Head of State
has gone to that Big Screenplay Dumpster in the Sky. Although you never know; weird things can happen in the movie business. Maybe, in time, the studio will decide to revive our screenplay; maybe they’ll hire somebody to rewrite it; and maybe it’ll actually get the green light. So if, someday, you go to see a movie, and it turns out to be a musical about the NFL, remember whose idea that was: not ours.

But if it has superhuman chickens in it, I will be
pissed
.

6 A.M.