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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
CUT TO: REALTIME
With my agent's blessing I took a gamble and stopped taking low-budget assignments to write what I wanted to write. "Arachnid" was a labor of love, my passionate homage to the creature flicks of the '50s, the kind of movie where a Man/Insect/Alien grows to epic proportions because of exposure to Radiation/Virus/Convenient Substance and takes over whatever Town/Island/Planet the small-time production company could afford. These movies, like "Them!" and "The Blob," were canonical masterpieces of "B" filmmaking. I knew, in this revisionist mood of Hollywood, that anything from 40 years ago was being given a new cloak of respectability. Throw enough money at something and you make it legitimate -- old television, old movies or old actors. With studio funding and the right creative urge, "Arachnid" could be a sci-fi classic.
And now, waiting to enter Davis' offices, I was actually on the doorstep of the magic kingdom. After too many years of scraping and bowing I finally had something that a mega-producer liked and wanted to take to a studio. How many times had I been this close? Actually, not many -- but the constant promise of this moment had kept me working hard. Even as my agent had slowly lost some of the enthusiasm we had shared in the earlier days of my career, I never faltered or wavered on my original goal of bringing intelligent sci-fi to the big screen.
I had been told in a phone meeting with one of Davis' key development people that Davis Productions intended to make "Arachnid" its next big summer movie. It was going to budget it at $50 million, minimum. That meant hundreds of thousands of dollars for me -- financial freedom. Plus, I would have the chance to work with consummately professional actors, directors and producers who understood what I was trying to do. Even more, it was a legitimacy that had so far escaped my career: I was on my way to the writer's "A" list, where the Spielbergs and the Lucases played light-saber tag with adventuresome archaeologists.
You already know where this is going, don't you?
Davis did take the script to Fox. Before the studio would commit to a production deal (read as: before they would pay me one bloody cent), the exec from Fox wanted changes. Ridiculous, arbitrary changes. Changes as silly as the worst episodes of "Star Trek."
Maybe "Arachnid" was never great art, but it did sustain a certain internal logic and delivered on the suspense in every scene. I knew to keep the spider hidden for the majority of the film; keep people wanting to see what's behind that bush, how the spider will kill its victim. I only showed its legs, fangs, hairy armpits until it was time for the big payoff. I've been reading, watching and studying sci-fi horror for decades; I love writing it. The suggestions (demands) they piled on me wouldn't have passed my 11-year-old niece's bullshit alarm.
I struggled for a futile month on synopsis rewrites, all for free, hopelessly trying to find the focus of these ludicrous ideas. The result was reams of vacuous crap that pleased neither me nor anyone at the studio.
I was stunned. Where were the creative minds that propelled this movie business? Is the payday the only difference between the idiots at the bottom and the idiots at the top? "What did you expect?" my Cinetel friend Catalaine asked me. And maybe I wasn't a very good writer.
In the end they (Davis Productions, Fox Studios) wouldn't return my phone calls, and all the remaining steam seemed to go out of my agent regarding my once-hot/now-not career. It took longer and longer for David to return my calls.
I never heard from him again on a Sunday.
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EPILOGUE
I call it ESP, Endless Self Promotion. You learn that no matter who you talk to, or about what subject, you always mention: 1) Your latest project; 2) Your last project; 3) Five ideas for your next project; 4) All of the above -- twice.
Two years after Fox, having used my ESP, "Arachnid" ended up in the hands of an independent producer who needed scripts. Brian Yuzna ("Re-Animator," "The Dentist") had a three-picture deal with a Spanish film company that wanted to break into the American horror market. He pitched "Arachnid" as one of the 50 scripts that he could get. Those Spanish boys loved it. How can you go wrong with a giant alien spider? Then they read the script and loved it more. We began negotiating. Suddenly they didn't love it as much. In the end, they screwed me and I thanked them for it. I mean, who else is going to give me $45,000 for anything besides one of my kidneys?
I was actually happy at this turn of events. Even if "Arachnid" wasn't going to a studio, it was going to a group of people who had some low-budget chops. The producers, Sheri Bryant and Yuzna, are well known and well thought of in the horror world -- the director they hired, Jack Shoulder, equally so. The company that would do the spider effects and mockups, Steve Johnson's XFX, is one of the best in the world. Had I somehow slipped out of Fox, into a bucket of shit and come out smelling, well, if not like a rose then perhaps like one of those pine tree things you hang on your car mirror?
As of this writing "Arachnid" is well into post-production, which means it has been filmed and it is in the editing room being cut together. Is it, will it be, any good? Last I heard, the actors, competent professionals who no one was screwing on the side, did a good job. The Spanish film company had even at one point grudgingly approved some extra money. The spider puppets and animatronics had performed as promised.
All good signs.
Unfortunately, one of the producers has also recently informed me that the director is missing shots. This happens occasionally in the mad rush of a low-budget shoot, and most times it's nothing to panic about -- unless the missing scenes happen in the climax of the film and they feature (or don't feature, actually) the star of the movie, the king-size spider.
I don't know if the producers are willing to invest the money to fix the problem or if it's even possible at this late stage -- all the sets were struck. Maybe spooky hand shadows will take the place of the alien arachnid in the missing scenes.
"Did you see that giant fucking spider?"
"Where?"
"Right there!"
