Escape From Development Hell

There's a great column in the "Los Angeles Times" every Wednesday called "Scriptland," which covers the big screenwriters in Hollywood, as well as up and coming scribes just beginning to break through in the business. Recently, the column had one of those miracle stories of the guy working at Starbucks who all of the sudden sells a script for half a million. But the truth is stories like these are more uncommon than many realize.

Many writers still struggling to get their projects off the ground will tell you it's nearly impossible to get your script read in this town, which is why some screenwriters have tried an interesting Trojan horse to get their stories through the door.

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Take Paul Vincent Fusco, a writer living in Southern California who was going through the usual development hell periods that writers go through. "I was depressed like every other writer in town," he said.

Fusco had a script, "Soldiers of the Dead," which he calls "Black Hawk Down" meets "Aliens." The story involves a U.S. Army Green Beret unit that is dispatched to Haiti to suppress a military conflict, only to discover a mysterious village that's been taken over by zombies. It looked like a great "high-concept" pitch ("high concept" is a misleading term, since it means a commercial idea you can explain in 30 seconds or less).

And his timing couldn't have been better. Right now there's no hotter monster than zombies - witness the success of the Xbox 360 title Dead Rising, the Stephen King novel "Cell," and recent movies like 2004's "Dawn of the Dead." In "Soldiers," the zombies are created by voodoo. Think you can kill them the conventional zombie way by shooting them in the head? Not these ghouls. Their zombie-dom isn't viral, but spiritual, so a new way has to be devised to kill them. These zombies can also burrow through the ground, and attack their prey in a jungle labyrinth. Wouldn't that make a great action scene?

So what happened? A story like this should be a slam-dunk for a Hollywood studio, right? Fusco said initial readings of the script were positive, although some thought it was anti-war (how that could be a detriment these days is anybody's guess). As Fusco recalls, one stumbling block was several people who read it wanted to turn it into a bigger studio film.

"My whole feeling was if they're not going to give George Romero $35 million dollars, they're not going to give me $35 million dollars," Fusco said.

While the project languished, Fusco's friend Kevin Grevioux, the actor and writer who penned the story for "Underworld," checked out "Soldiers." He told Paul: "This is a great project. If you let it sit on the shelf, it's a sin. Why don't you do a comic book?"

Fusco was a bit flabbergasted at the idea, and it took him some time to warm up to it.

"Kevin explained the dynamics of it to me," Fusco said. "The comic book creates audience awareness. If the fans dig it and it has a shelf life, they can't wait to see the film. And it acts as a great pitch visual tool. Kevin told me when you go into meetings and pitch an idea, you lay down a screenplay and they'd be kind of lukewarm. But as soon as the comic book went down, the clock was stopped, because executives, like ourselves were all kids that loved motion pictures, and we also loved comic books."

Trying to get an original story sold these days is very tough. If you turn your script into a graphic novel, and can pitch it to a studio as something previously published, it can increase the odds of getting a film made. It would probably make a studio relax knowing someone else already believed in it enough to publish it, instead of going in with a property that won't prove itself in the market place until it's made.

"The funny thing about studios is everybody wants to be second, but not everybody wants to be first," Fusco said. Before a studio will commit, "you've got to get some heat," he said. "I always explain this to people, someone will read it and say, 'This is great, they're stupid for not making it.' And I always say: 'No, the executives aren't stupid, they have to be careful.' You're dealing with something that will cost millions of dollars, it's two years of their life, you have to do your part. You can't just show up and throw another stack of paper on the desk. Do a little work. Make it easier for them to say yes, that's what I say."

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