Here is the story of how I sold my first feature film screenplay to Hollywood.
Believe it or not, I wrote it in four days.
I was an undergraduate in the Dramatic Writing Department at NYU, and I had to write my senior thesis, which of course was to write a screenplay.
I didn't have an idea, so I procrastinated and went out to see a movie called THE BOOGEYMAN (2005). That film scored high at the box office, but I thought it was terrible, and I decided if people are going to get paid for lackluster horror films, it might as well be me.
So I wrote a movie called SCRIBBLE FACE in four days, graduated with honors, and then my thesis advisor passed my script along to Norman Twain Productions, who'd produced the Morgan Freeman film LEAN ON ME (1989). Horror was hot, and Norman wanted to get into the genre.
I sold the script.
But here's where it gets tricky - I lived the classic Hollywood story of watching my screenplay completely change by the time it reached the screen...
SCRIBBLE FACE began as a supernatural horror story about a zombie that rises from the dead, his face having been torn asunder by a hacksaw. I rewrote the script 60 times over 12 months, with notes from three producers and the director.
Talk about cooks in the kitchen!
Even though what I'd written was essentially a zombie movie, one of the notes I got was "take the zombies out". The project title changed from SCRIBBLE FACE to SWEET SIXTEEN to SCAR, and everything else about it changed, too. When they brought in the stereoscopic 3D equipment from Japan to film it, the title became SCAR 3D.
Here's the script and some of the storyboards:
Luckily, I was able to spend the entire shoot on set, executing rewrites. The production took place in Calgary, in the winter! The shoot lasted four weeks. As glamorous as it might seem to be on set, there's a tremendous amount of down time, the motif being 'hurry up and wait'. There were a lot of cold days sitting in the video village, a tent with monitors in it. Because the 3D cameras were bulky and complex, camera set-ups sometimes took hours.
Here's a look at the rig with the cinematographer:
Sitting around eating craft services, I ended up putting on almost one pound of bodyweight per day. (You can get a look at me in the top photo.)
SCAR 3D went on to place #1 at the Russian box office, and it placed #8 in Finland, beating out the Hanna Montana movie that was released at the time... what an accomplishment, to be bigger than Miley Cyrus, at least once in my life.
Here's an advertisement on a bus in London:
The DVD release:
And SCAR's feature on the cover of Fangoria magazine:
The reviews were harsh, and the film is one of the elite few to get a rating of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes:
I can't say I blame the critics... the film was a pretty big misfire, but I was proud of it, making a sale coming straight out of undergrad.
Nearly ten years later, I got a call from the WGA telling me they'd tracked down some residual money from Germany and the Netherlands. I waited a few months for the check, which their foreign levies office said could be anywhere from $25 to $1,000,000. When the check finally came, it amounted to $500... I'll take it!
Such is the life!
On to classier films...!