Rewrites & drafts

come what may, and he was frantically rewriting on the set whilst they were shooting it. And that was for tax reasons as well, that the film had to be shot within a certain window of opportunity, otherwise the money wasn't going to be there. Yeah, and even James Caplin, you know, he didn't have time to develop the screenplay as it should be either. And, you know, it's a very complex storyline, you know. It's film noir. It's investigative, you know, plot.

41:20 · jump to transcript →

But yeah, no, to me, it has a graphic novel feel to it. And I think it succeeded in that respect. Did Clive ever offer to do storyboards for this? I know because he was an illustrator. Did he suggest? Did he make drawings or do any drawings at all for you? No, the problem is once Clive finished his second draft, which the producers rejected again,

58:53 · jump to transcript →

I had no contact with him because they hadn't made him aware that there was a rewrite going on, which really pissed me off. And I kept begging them every day, you know, you've got to tell Clive what's going on. You know, I want Clive to be here on set with me. And, you know, we worked together on this. And it wasn't until much later, I think halfway through filming, that they had informed Clive that, in fact, there was another writer.

59:22 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

Masha was going to be on the screen, explaining to Max that she had been killed by Videodrome for leaking Brian O'Blivion's name. This was a rewrite of the scene I described earlier, which would have excused James Woods from the bathwater, and still allowed the video crew their moment of glory. Michael Lennick and Lee Wilson, with the help of David Stringer, had worked out a reliable means of waterproofing a working television set, but under pressure of a looming deadline, it was determined to be a false turning point in the story.

57:47 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

Here we see Max coming up the stairs at the Crawford location, the interior of Civic TV, newly programmed by Barry Convex to kill his partners. When I interviewed Rick Baker, he told me that the first draft of Cronenberg's script had Max shooting quite a lot of people with his flesh gun, including Masha and Shinji, one of the Hiroshima video guys. There is some subtle muttered comedy when he goes into his office and finds Rafe and Moses talking about a piece of foreign programming they are thinking of acquiring.

1:05:57 · jump to transcript →

Tim Lucas

Moses suggests that he might rewrite the shows and fix them in dubbing, which he feels qualified to do because he used to write in high school, before he, quote, lost it, end quote. As originally scripted, Max's handgun was supposed to fire an unexpected form of ammunition, gobbets of flesh that attached to the target's face and reduced it to a mass of cancerous tissues.

1:06:27 · jump to transcript →

John Mackenzie

That's where we did do a bit of rewriting again because we wanted one big last patriotic speech defiant from Harold before he was defeated. But that's settled it. Once and for all. Yes, I'd like a porter to... We shot it actually in the Savoy, this, in a suite in the Savoy.

1:46:59 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

which he did write a first draft screenplay when PolyGram was sold by Peter Guber and Jon Peters in the early 90s. I can't remember the name of the guy who took over, but he came to John and asked him to write a sequel. And John deliberated about it. He thought about it for a long time, didn't really have anything that was significant

50:28 · jump to transcript →

Now, he wasn't going to be a preacher, was he, in your first... No, in the first draft he was a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist and a film buff, if I remember. He had posters up. Did he not? Yeah, and we had lunch that day. Here she comes, dynamite. He had done Equus on Broadway and just played the psychiatrist, so he came up with the concept of the preacher. Well, I'd seen, since I was in America...

9:12 · jump to transcript →

for the rights of other nerds. I mean... As Steve and Jeff said, you know, substitute nerd for I'm gay. Yeah. I'm black. That was always the... I'm short, I'm tall, I'm anything. Yeah. I think we both wrote our own speeches. Yeah, I remember some rewriting going through here. That's not at all the way it's written in the script. And the script only has three pages in it, folks. I'm a nerd.

1:23:12 · jump to transcript →

landed gentry, but had to live in the Hollywood Hills for some tax reason. And Rob was living at the L'Hermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills, and we gathered at his hotel room. He'd gotten a deal from Marble Arch Productions, which is Lew Grade's company. He had $50,000 to write a first draft screenplay of the movie, and we gathered in his hotel room for about three days trying to write a screenplay. And just at the end of the...

4:25 · jump to transcript →

Roger Moore

technical jargon. And I would go with the script lady and rewrite the whole paragraphs and get her to type it up and then get the director to give it to him just before the take and say, oh, we have these changes. And watch Desmond. So the panic would come into his face. And then we'd have to say quickly, no, no, it's a joke.

14:47 · jump to transcript →

James Cameron

This is Jim Cameron. I wrote and directed this film back in '83, and directed it in '85 through '86. It was released in the summer of '86. July 17th, if I'm not mistaken. It started as a treatment. I was having a meeting with David Giler and Walter Hill, talking about another project, and that pitch was not going very well. I could tell by their sagging expressions that they didn't like any of my ideas. But they had read my 7erminator script and wanted to work with me on something. I was getting up and making my way toward the door and David Giler, one of the producers of the first film, said "We do have this other thing", and I said "What's that?" He said "Alien 2." And all the pinball machine lights and bells went off inside my head but I maintained a straight face and said "That could be interesting." And I suggested that I write a quick treatment, a quick outline, just to give them an idea of what I might do with it. So I raced home and stayed up for three days straight, drank about eight pots of coffee and wrote a 40- or 50-page treatment. Really what I did was I adapted a story I had already written, which was called Mother, which was an "alien on a space station" kind of story. It had the power loader machine in it. I had written this treatment a few months earlier. So I adapted it, dropped Sigourney's character and a bunch of marines into it, and in that one quick stroke created all the character names - Gorman and Hicks and Vasquez and all those folks - and dropped it on them a couple of days later. I think they felt like they'd hit the jackpot. That was the film they wanted to make. So they authorized me to go ahead and start writing the script. The problem was, that day I landed the job to write the script for the second Rambo film. So I called them up and asked David Giler what I should do. And he said "Don't be stupid. Take both jobs." So I took both jobs. I also had to do a rewrite of my 7erminator script to start production in February, so I had a three-month period where I had to write three scripts. So I decided that each script was gonna be two hours long, so it'd be 120 pages. So I figured out the total page count, whatever that is - I guess 360 pages. I divided the total number of waking hours I had during that three-month period by 360 and figured out how many pages per hour I had to write, and then I just wrote that many pages per hour.

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Well, yeah, I mean, it's not like Fast and the Furious, but, you know. Exactly. Those are things, I mean, what they've done with special effects is rewrite the laws of physics so they don't apply, so that things have, things happen in action sequences that could not possibly happen just in terms of the weight and speed of things. Yeah, it's just kind of funny. I remember, like, when this hit, blockbuster video, you know, you walk in, you run a movie called My Best Friend is a Vampire. You don't expect to see this big.

54:28 · jump to transcript →

And the idea of the scene, teaching him how to kiss the girl that she would like to see not living on the planet Earth, is pretty unique. And John wrote it, I remember... After the script was completed, we were doing rewrites and he said, "You know what? We need another scene. We need a scene." And he just started writing this, and it was done in... I don't know. You know, five minutes, and... It's a great idea. - I read it and went, "Oh, my God. This is so much fun, but also, underneath, so poignant."

57:30 · jump to transcript →