I had returned from my 3-day LA jaunt (details of which can be found here) but the writing muse was apparently still on the West Coast. I was not tackling the new draft of my script as quickly as I ought. Granted, I had only been home a couple of days, but this was MY BIG BREAK and I needed to put on my big boy writer pants. So I made a big decision. I was going to buy the new AtariWriter program!
A few years earlier, after I sold my first script for The Galaxy Rangers TV cartoon, the first thing I did with that check was buy the Atari 130XE, hook it up to a portable TV and put it on a desk in my bedroom and I had a writer’s office! It was the whole kit: keyboard/PC, floppy disk drive and traction printer and the AtariWriter word processor cartridge. Cutting edge. At the time. For me. Also, you could plug in the Pacman cartridge and play that. The original word processing program was not the easiest way to type a script, but I was able to figure out some keystrokes to center character names, do slug lines and make dialogue margins. It didn’t make writing scripts any easier, but it sure made rewriting them easier. Now, with my “Real Hollywood Script” under construction, I wanted to see if the AtariWriter Plus would be better. In the meantime, I was cutting and pasting a new script into shape. With actual scissors and paste.
June came to an end. It had only been 10 days since my meetings but my spirits were low. On one hand, I had heard the stories, I knew writers rewrite. But here was the best script I had ever written to that point. It had heart, soul, laughs, a great chase scene (I love chase scenes). It was good enough to get optioned by a Hollywood studio! And I had to tear the whole thing down and start again, pretending it wasn’t from scratch. I had to turn it into a “Pee Wee Herman movie. Don’t get me wrong, I like Pee Wee Herman. I have half a dozen scripts that could be tailored to him. Not this one.”
My comedies tend toward the old-school style with set pieces and snappy patter. Those could so easily be rewritten to fit a new comic character. In fact, they could beg for it. I was writing Laurel and Hardy, Abbott & Costello-style comedies with no Stan, Ollie, Bud or Lou to send them to. “The Kringle Project,” as it was first called, was not one of them. I was looking at a 1940s, film noir style, weary detective-type lead. It carries a different vibe now, but when the producers mentioned an actor they had in mind for the lead (pre-Warner Brothers Pee Wee suggestion) I was excited by the idea because he was so much closer to what I had envisioned. Jim Belushi. Yeah, it was 1990. He was still a thing.
By the beginning of July I had assembled about 32 pages of “Pee Wee Saves Christmas, Too.” Only 73 pages to go…
By the beginning of July I had assembled about 32 pages of “Pee Wee Saves Christmas, Too.” Only 73 pages to go…
