The Phantoms of Hollywood

By John Leo

Jack Epps and Jim Cash are established Hollywood screenwriters now working on their eighth script. Top Gun, a tale about Navy fighter pilots, is one of their stories. So is Whereabouts, a story about two people who must find each other within 24 hours to win a prize of $100,000. If neither of these titles seems familiar, it may be because Epps and Cash have never had a feature film made. "There are times when you just don't believe they make movies," says Epps. Still, there are compensations. The price for an Epps-Cash script goes up with each non-picture and can now cost in the $300,000-to-$350,000 range. ^ Admits Epps: "We command a pretty good figure for not having a movie produced."

Screenwriters may be low on Tinseltown's totem pole, but they have one obvious advantage over more glamorous folk, like stars and directors: they get paid whether their movies are made or not. Paramount's vice president of production, David Madden, estimates that 900 to 1,000 assigned-scriptwriters are in the "or not" category, turning out scripts that are shown around town, perhaps optioned, then stuffed back into the desk drawer.

Novelist Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Sun Dog, has had 13 books published, but none of his 13 screenplays has yet been made into a film. "I've got a couple of million dollars for them, so I don't care too much," he says. Harrison maintains there is no stigma to having a lot of unproduced scripts. "Everyone knows that the screenplay is never the decisive factor," he says. "What counts is the deal structure, where something is shot, what stars are lined up."

Writer Nora Ephron is two for eight on the big screen. The first success was Silkwood, which she co-wrote with Alice Arlen. Now a second Ephron script is being produced: Heartburn, based on her own best seller, which leaves her twelve movies behind her parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron (Desk Set, Carousel). "For me to get 14 films made," says Ephron, "at my current rate of about one in four, I'd have to write 56 scripts and live to be 132. When they show the name of the studio at the beginning of a film, it should say, 'United Artists, or whoever, did everything in its power to prevent this film from being made.' That's what really happens."

The Writers Guild of America set new pay scales in March. An author now gets a minimum of $22,801 to do a treatment and screenplay for a low-budget film ($2.5 million or less) and $42,000 for a more expensive film. A rewrite and a "polish" can bring the high-budget price to $61,548, but a writer who has been around commands a good deal more, and fees can rise steadily with each unproduced script. Says a New York author who has sold three scripts: "If you write five a year--I get more offers than that--you can make close to $700,000." If you are at the top of the profession, you can get $850,000 for a single unused screenplay, as William Goldman reportedly did from ABC Motion Pictures.

What seems like largesse to the writers is a relatively cheap form of R. and D. for the studios. Each studio sifts through about 10,000 story ideas a year and pays writers to provide treatments and scripts for about 1,000, 85% to 90% of which will never be made into movies. Says Robert Bookman, executive vice president of Columbia Pictures: "By developing 100 projects a year, you hope to wind up with ten or 15 that are good enough to make."

Once written, even the best script may die for a variety of reasons. Material developed for a star like Dustin Hoffman will be dead if the bankable name is not interested. Heads of studios change, and so do Hollywood fashions. Current trends favor movies about teens in turmoil and Clint Eastwood films without Clint Eastwood (Code of Silence, Witness). Writers who are fashioning clones of these movies may finish just in time to see their work outmoded by a new trend. "It's like a slot machine," observes Writer Howard Franklin. "You can have done your job well, and yet it will be irrelevant."

Lucrative rejection usually brings a surge of pride, followed by a sense of resignation and an attempt to cope with Hollywood's odd system. Before making it big with Breaking Away, Steve Tesich, 42, wrote six scripts that missed. To deal with the rejection, he would start a new script before sending a finished one in. "That way I could rationalize that the really good script was in the typewriter," he notes. Ephron says she tries to salvage some of her old scripts. "I keep moving my favorite jokes from one movie to another in hopes that someone will finally get to say them."

Unproduced screenwriters often conduct internal debates on the subject of success and status. John Hill, 38, is one for twelve (a 1981 bomb titled Heartbeeps) after 14 years in Hollywood. "If you look at the amount of money I earn a year, I am successful," he says. "But if you look at the row of unproduced scripts on the shelf, I feel a failure. The money is nice, but the real point was always to write a story and watch it in the theater and eat popcorn."

An Australian western by Hill, Quigley Down Under, has been optioned three times, earning him enough to pay his young son's way through college. Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, it was announced that Quigley was going into production. "At that point a less experienced screenwriter might have started to celebrate," notes Hill, who warily waited 24 hours before breaking out the champagne. Alas, the film was never made, but Hill remains unfazed. "For all the complaining and the frustration," he says, "this beats working for a living."

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York and Cheryl Crooks/Los Angeles