Is there a movie that you would simply delete from history if you could? Just travel back in time, knock off the screenwriter and then watch the movie’s IMDB page fade away into the space-time continuum?
We’ve all got these, right? Historically speaking, we’d all have been better off if some movies just didn’t exist. If we hadn’t wasted our time watching them; if we hadn’t spent the money buying them; if our favorite actor or director hadn’t sullied their otherwise fine reputation by taking on a doomed project.
If I could, I would readily go back in time and blink SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS out of existence.
That may seem like an obscure choice, but it’s for the simple reason that SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS represents one of my most embarrassing experiences as a rising Hollywood mover-and-shaker. It taught me important lessons about showbiz and my place in it. In fact, it may have signified the beginning of the end for me in terms of staying in Hollywood and deciding what I really wanted out of life.
Or maybe it was just a crappy script that I rejected.
Every producing company in Hollywood has development executives, and they run the gamut from whip-smart to smarmy and from brilliant to bozo. One of your primary job assignments as a D-guy or girl is to bring quality material into the company - screenplays, manuscripts, news articles, treatments, outlines, pitches, writing samples, all of it. You bring the material in, work with writers to make it better, and then you have to push, cram and force it down the throats of your superiors in the company until someone takes you seriously and does something about it. As a development executive, you have no power other than the strength of your convictions, and you live and die - in your company, at rival studios, among your peers - by the material that you bring in and the projects that you successfully champion.
D-types have to work very closely with literary agents in order to find quality scripts, and from the agent’s perspective it’s a very delicate dance. They may have only one chance per movie studio to get their script sent up the ladder of readers, VPs, producers and other gatekeepers, all of whom stand in the way of a big fat paycheck.There’s a lot at stake, and each agent has to choose a development exec with great care in order to maximize the chance that their script will get submitted to the studio for consideration. If they choose unwisely, it can sour the entire studio on the script and ruin the agent’s chances not just for that script, but for future submissions as well.
That’s what makes it all the more surprising that such an agent chose me for their hot script on a Friday afternoon in May of 1996.
I had a lot to prove. Two Director of Development positions at my Warner Bros.-based company had recently been vacated, so this allowed me the opportunity - after nearly four years with the company - to step up to the plate and get on my boss’ radar as someone who could make things happen. The president of Spring Creek was a spectacular producer named Paula Weinstein who had had a lot of successes and near-blockbusters at the company she had started with her late husband Mark Rosenberg. And although I’d read thousands of scripts for them and been called upon daily to provide insight and analysis, I’d never brought in a script all by myself. What’s more, I knew that if I even liked the script I was fighting so hard to convince the agent to send me, that I’d need to also convince at least one of the company’s two VPs to convince Paula to convince Warner Bros. to buy the script for us to produce.
I received the script at around 4:00 in the afternoon. One of the company’s VPs knew that everyone in town was reading this script, knew I’d landed it for our company, and stopped by my office just as I was cracking it open. Our chat went something like this:
INT. ALAN’S OFFICE - WARNER BROS. LOT - DAY
ALAN sits behind his desk as VP leans into the room.
VP
Is that the script you were waiting for?
ALAN
Yeah, I just got it. We have to make a decision by the end of the day.
VP
Well. What do you think?
ALAN
Well, I just got it. (pause) Do you want a copy? You could read just the first 25 pages at the same time and we can meet in a bit and see what we think -
VP
No, that’s okay. Start reading and I’ll stop by in an hour.
CUT TO:
INT. SAME - ROUGHLY FIFTY-TWO MINUTES LATER
VP KNOCKS on the door and opens it. He’s wearing his jacket, carrying a briefcase. Homeward bound. Alan’s pouring through the script - a bit disheveled, clearly conflicted.
VP
So?
ALAN
(nervous but hiding it)
It’s…fine. Not great. Pretty contrived, filled with clichés and not terribly interesting.
VP
So you’re going to pass on it?
ALAN
I’m leaning that way. It doesn’t seem like our kind of thing.
VP
Great. I just wanted to see what you were going to do.
ALAN
‘Course, if you wanted to take a copy home, read 10 pages and call me, we could still get this into the studio if you liked it -
The door is already shutting behind him -
VP
No, that’s fine. Go ahead and pass and I’ll talk to you Monday.
And that’s exactly what I did. So imagine my dismay on Monday morning when I read - along with every other person in Hollywood - that the SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS script had sold to Touchstone Pictures for a pretty sizable amount of money.
I suddenly had visions of becoming an infamous Hollywood footnote, a historical embarrassment of epic proportions - you know, like the stories of Columbia passing on E.T. or how every studio in Hollywood rejected BULL DURHAM. Would you like to have been one of the many people who thumbs-downed Oliver Stone’s PLATOON for a good 10 years before it got made?
That following Monday morning, this happened:
INT. ALAN’S OFFICE - WARNER BROS. LOT - MORNING
VP enters, carrying VARIETY. He shows a headline about SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS to Alan.
VP
Did you see this?
ALAN
I did.
VP
Didn’t we get a look at this script?
ALAN
Um, yes. That was the one that I was reading at the end of the day Friday. I was a bit conflicted -
VP
You said it was boring.
ALAN
Well, it was -
VP
You said it was contrived.
ALAN
It was. The way they get to the -
VP
You see it sold, right? That script sold. Do you think we should have shown it to the studio?
ALAN
Maybe next time we could both read it and -
VP
Okay, fine. I just wanted to check in with you before Paula asks me about it.
Now if the story had ended there, it probably would have been fine. A minor embarrassment and nothing more. But the problem was that SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS kept popping up in the trades for months afterwards. Ivan Reitman got attached to the project as director. Harrison Ford decided to make it his next movie. Julia Roberts was considering starring in the role that would eventually go to Ann Heche. And each time there was movement on the project, there’d be an article in Variety about it.
And each time Variety ran an article, VP would pay me a visit.
INT. ALAN’S OFFICE - WARNER BROS. LOT - MORNING
VP enters, carrying VARIETY and a rather smug expression.
VP
Did you see this?
ALAN
What’s that?
VP
It says the production of “Six Days, Seven Nights” has added a craft services guy. Didn’t we look at that script?
ALAN
We sure did. You remember, I was reading it late on a Friday, you were on the way out the door -
VP
Why did we pass on this?
ALAN
Well, it was -
VP
Because they’ve added a craft services guy. He’s probably a really good craft services guy.
ALAN
Well, I just thought the script was completely -
VP
Ivan Reitman’s attached now. And Harrison Ford. Do you think we’d want to do a Harrison Ford movie?
ALAN
I imagine we’d love to do a Harrison Ford movie -
VP
Okay. I just wanted to refresh my memory before Paula asks me about it.
And so it continued, for several months afterward, until the movie went into production.
I suppose I could have just bided my time, waited for the movie’s summer release in 1998, when it opened to a paltry $16 million with competition along the lines of CAN’T HARDLY WAIT and DIRTY WORK, and then shown the figures to the VP and said, “SEE?” Or I could’ve clipped any one of the hundreds of fair-to-awful reviews of the movie once it came out (a 51 rating on Metacritic if anyone had been seriously using Metacritic back then) Or maybe I could have pointed out that Ivan Reitman’s post-SDSN filmography would someday include EVOLUTION and - bluugcchhh - MY SUPER EX-GIRLFRIEND. All of these could have been used to support my original instinct that SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS was not a good script or worthy of movie production.
In the end, I felt wholly vindicated. A little bit smart, even.
But none of that matters, really. Nothing in Hollywood succeeds so well as the thing that someone else has that you don’t. And if that thing has recently been paid for, at great expense, then it’s deemed automatically to be worth that price, despite any evidence to the contrary. Perceived value is a fleeting, silly thing in Hollywood - but it’s also often the only thing that matters.
Contributed by Alan Lopuszynski, a former Hollywood insider and current corporate drone who blogs at Burbanked.
20/03 
20/03
8 Comments
Why are you holding onto this when the movie wasn’t a huge success by any means. It didn’t even do more than 10 mil domestic over estimated budget. And spill the dirt on how much a stupid script like this sold for without any big names attached yet.
I hold onto this kind of thing because to me it illustrates the same kind of kooky Hollywood thinking that gets movies like FOUR CHRISTMASES made. These are movies that open well, sell overseas and make money on DVD despite the fact that no one seems to like them much! FOUR CHRISTMASES is currently running at about 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. And let’s consider another bad rom-com, something random, oh I don’t know, a movie like FAILURE TO LAUNCH. Worldwide BO of about $128 million, RT rating of 26%. By any and all Hollywood standards, that constitutes a hit movie.
Movies like these and SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS get made because they’re simple and relatively cheap and because they’ll return on the investment. It’s a paycheck for everyone concerned and it has nothing to do with how good the movie story actually is. Believe me that there are script gatekeepers in Hollywood who probably passed on all of those mentioned above, and some were likely taken to task for doing so, even more than I was for it. And it’s because the quality of story, character and plot are entirely secondary to most of Hollywood’s efforts.
That’s why I hold onto it. As you point out, SDSN wasn’t a huge success. But it and movies like it - that perform well enough to pay for themselves and show some profit - are ultimately the ones that lower Hollywood standards for future movies. If SDSN can perform, the logic goes, than four others like it will as well, and that means that some cowering development toady like I used to be won’t be so willing next time to reject a script for the relatively unimportant reason that it happens to suck.
Ah, your postscript clears things up considerably. I too was reading the piece and kind of wondering, “Is there a point coming with all this, other than SDSN generated a lot of excitement during acquisition but sputtered on take-off?”
But now that you added you were making a point that it’s sale and barely breaking even lowered the bar, the piece makes more sense and makes a good point.
The bosses in Burbank hire you to cut down on their grunt work, you think your job is to find quality material, but in truth they just want to make a sale.
I can only wonder what rewards the morons who greenlit Transformers or Twilight got.
Alan, terrific article.
It surprises me how Hollywood has continued to resist changing their methods for finding quality material. It’s out there, trust me. The enormous, impregnable wall Hollywood has built around itself is so ridiculously isolating. A talented writer from outside the system almost needs the blessing of God to reach a studio with a good script.
Meanwhile, garbage like Norbit or this movie bubble up from within.
Sad.
@JaySmack - sorry to not hit my point harder. I was trying to wrap it up in the final paragraph but was being too subtle.
@Ray - thanks! Although I’d suggest that God is usually absent from the studio development process. Quite the opposite.
And I’ll also point out that someone else brought up TRANSFORMERS, not me. I refuse to take the bait.
This time, anyway.
All Intersting points, but if you only produce movies with top notch scripts very few films would ever get made.
If you want to do a comedy a script like Tootsie dosen’t come around very often, and if your looking for a drama a script like The China Syndrome are few and far between. Like it or not Hollywood is a business and they need to make big profits. The Executive who green lighted Four Christmases knew the script wasn’t so good but once you get Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon aboard you know it will pull in a mass audience who just wants to chill out a laugh a few times on a Sat night. That’s why critically acclaimed films like Milk never become blockbusters because the avg moviegoer just isn’t attracted to the material. Sad but true. Look at TV- has any one here seen Dexter. The show is as good as it gets yet it draws less than a million viewers a week on showtime. The avg TV watcher would rather watch Dancing with the stars. Hollywood will always feed mindless movies to the masses because it sells. The script is just a guideline. The concept in there mind is much more important. As long as the masses are buying it, the industry will keep selling it! Profits first is part of any overall business. You can’t eat with out money and you can’t breath without air! Quality will always be second!
Chuck
I’m not buying it burbank. It really annoys me when people have problems with harmless comedies or rom coms. If it’s not your bag, then don’t watch them. But you cannot say there isn’t a place for them. For instance i quite like failure to launch. And i actually want to see four christmas’s. It’s not because i’m some bonehead who has no idea; it’s because i can appreciate many different kinds of movies and the place the world has for them.
And thanks for not telling me how much they bought the script for.
@SJP: Why be annoyed by a difference in opinion? I never suggested that you were a bonehead or otherwise. I have many and varied movie tastes as well, and I can certainly point out a number of my faves that higherbrow folks than me would sneeringly scoff at.
But your phrase - “harmless comedies” - is pretty much exactly my point. So many of these movies we’re discussing here are thin, toothless, simplistic. They don’t go anywhere beyond their high concept premises and although they make money for a bunch of already very rich people, they absolutely don’t advance the quality of the genre. This site is called OBSESSED WITH FILM, right? So I guess I’m just obsessed with the idea that film should be better, not average, and I get a little cranky when dull movies do well, because it simply means that more dull movies will be coming down the pike.
I didn’t avoid your question about how much SDSN sold for. The truth is, I don’t remember and the Variety archives didn’t provide me with an answer. Many spec sales at that time could be found in the low- to mid-six figure range, though.