BURBANKED: My humiliation lasted longer than SIX DAYS, SEVEN NIGHTS

Jun 30, 2011 June 30th, 2011

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 NIGHTSout 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.

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.

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 -

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.

So?

ALAN

(nervous but hiding it)

It's...fine. Not great. Pretty contrived, filled with clichés and not terribly interesting.

So you're going to pass on it?

ALAN

I'm leaning that way. It doesn't seem like our kind of thing.

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 -

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.

Did you see this?

ALAN

I did.

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 -

You said it was boring.

ALAN

Well, it was -

You said it was contrived.

ALAN

It was. The way they get to the -

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 -

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.

Did you see this?

ALAN

What's that?

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 -

Why did we pass on this?

ALAN

Well, it was -

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 -

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 -

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 atBurbanked.

Alan Lopuszynski

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