#6 of What Makes Me Think I Can Produce a Movie? Part 2

In the summer of '93, I took an extended trip to study Shakespeare at the London Academy of the Dramatic Arts. While I was gone, I rented my house to an actress friend of mine and another friend of hers.

My producing partner kept me up to date on what was going on with our projects - the two from the buddy cop writer and a religious thriller from a first-time writer/commercial director with an affinity for wine. I came home to little progress on all the fronts. Except what was going on inside my house.

The guy staying with my friend was a wannabe actor. He had studied theater in college (somewhere in North Carolina) and had been in L.A. for a few years pursuing his silver screen dreams without success. Undaunted, he decided to write a movie for himelf that could be shot for $50,000. He wrote the script while staying at my house. When he told me about it I asked to read the script.

It was a psychological thriller with four main characters and basically one location. And guess what? It was good. A page turner. Fresh. And cheap to make. I asked him if I could option it and convinced him it would be a waste to make such a great story into a low budget actor calling card. We could make it for more money, add a couple of names to it and have a real winner.

At the time, he was working as an assistant for some music video director and used his entertainment lawyer to negotiate the deal with us. Once that was done, the movie became our number one priority. I gave the script to a friend of mine (also a music video director) who was looking for a feature to direct. She loved the script, but of course had notes to go along with our own notes. And she wanted him to work with another writer on the changes. Fortunately, he was agreeable. The only problem was that he had a full time job, leaving little time for writing.

So, I found a private investor to give us some development money and had the writer quit his job. We paid him the same weekly salary he made at his assistant job to work full time on the rewrites. Because of our option, the writer got an agent and sold another script. Everything was going great. Except we didn't have the full financing in place. We put a business plan together. A budget. But no one wanted to give us money. They didn't have faith in the unknown first time writer. Nor the first time director. But we weren't defeated. We knew what we had - the makings of a great little movie that had the potential to make a bunch of money.

We renewed the option. Then there was the phone call. My producing partner had called the writer about something and left a message on his machine, then immediately called me. I believe there had been some minor disagreement on some story points and like producers oft times do, we were bitching about the writer. Turns out my partner didn't disconnect the call when she hung up to call me. Instead, she created a three-way call. And our private conversation was recorded on the writer's voice mail.

Needless to say, he was not a happy camper. I did my best to repair the damage but things were never the same. Then came the Northridge earthquake. My house was shaken off its foundation. And I was sick of sharing half my money with a partner whose only function in money-making part of the business was invoicing my clients. It was time to shake things up. Get out of the partnership. Being a big fat chicken at the time, my way of shaking things up was to bail. So, I moved to Vancouver.

I continued to work on getting the movie financed, the writer asked for his name to be taken off the script. What he really wanted to do was get the project back from me. He'd written another script that was sold and in production. Sadly, my final option ran out about a month before his movie was released. If I'd been thinking, I would have paid cash for the script. The purchase price was WGA minimum. Somewhere around $38,000 at the time. Why should I have done that?

The writer was Kevin Williamson. The movie that came out was Scream.