Perhaps it goes without saying that the latter didn’t quite fare as well. Esterhas would later repeat the feat, nabbing $3 million for another script of his, Showgirls. Eventually, directed by Paul Verhoven and starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, the film divided critics but became a runaway success at the box office. Producer Mario Kassar won out, paying a whopping $3 million for the script-a record breaking sum. The script to Basic Instinct began to rapidly circulate around Hollywood, and when Esterhas made the brazen and unprecedented move of selling it via auction, the studio bosses came to bid. The writer started drinking, smoking and listening to the Rolling Stones as he banged out a draft in ten days. In the meantime, he’d had an idea for an erotic thriller. As a hard drinker and philanderer, he loved to spout incendiary comments in interviews while chain smoking the entire time.Įzsterhas had ruffled feathers in 1989 when he slammed Creative Arts Agency head Mike Ovitz as a thug in an open letter to the trades. The writer also became known for his “bad boy” behavior. The result became one of the biggest movies in history, and a franchise that continues to thrive to this very day.įor better or worse, writer Joe Eszterhas became the screenwriter of the 90s for his potboiling, sexually-charged scripts for thrillers like Jagged Edge and the musical Flashdance.
#Scream movie scripts pdf plus#
Fox saw the property as a Gremlins-style creature feature, and tapped Joe Dante, while Universal had in mind a friend of Crichton’s: Steven Spielberg.Īuthor Crichton made an unheard of demand of $1.5 million plus gross points to sell the project, and Universal eventually won out. Warner Bros., sensing a comic book epic, tried to buy the rights for Tim Burton. Columbia favored Richard Donner, the action-comedy maestro behind Superman and Lethal Weapon.
Several major studios vied for the rights, each with a director already in mind. Jurassic Park ignited a bidding war before the novel had even made it to publication. Dinosaurs though, made tinseltown salivate. The author had already produced a string of bestselling novels, several of which had already become acclaimed films: Westworldcontinues to have a cult following (enough so that it is getting a remake on HBO) and the movie of The Andromeda Strain from director Robert Wise opened to strong box office and great reviews. Some managed to parlay the moment into a thriving and lucrative career, while others drifted into obscurity as a flavor of the moment.Īuthor Michael Crichton was no stranger to Hollywood when he announced work on a story about geneticists cloning dinosaurs for a theme park. The scripts and writers listed here (in no particular order) got a taste of that glory. Even more miraculous, some writers manage to sell spec scripts (that is, original scripts they wrote without any pay or encouragement) for huge amounts of money, the sale becomes front page news. In the mind of Hollywood, a writer is responsible for everything wrong with a movie, and gets no credit for anything good.įor those reasons, when a writer actually does break into the biz, it’s a rare event indeed. Forget that the writer helps conceive an idea and provides the guide for an actor and a director to make a good film. Writers have a particularly hard time breaking into the business, as the rest of the industry generally looks down on their craft and considers them as interchangeable as lightbulbs.
They don’t like to invite newcomers or outsiders to their decadent parties, which makes it all the more amazing when some newby scales the wall and ends up a megastar. A cabal of writers, producers, directors and actors have all the power, and like to keep things “in the family” so to speak. Hollywood works like a fortified compound.
0 kommentar(er)
