The Birth of THE MESSENGERS

The Messengers was another first for lil ol’ Toddly.
With “Jason X” I got the job because I was the writer on staff at Cunningham Productions. It sounds easy but I paid my dues writing whatever I was told to write for three years. The movie was shot, my contract with Cunningham ended and the movie went into a can for over a year.
Unemployed, I wrote a spec. Got an agent. Sold the spec. Another first. After the spec sell I made the rounds meeting dozens of producers and executives. One of those was Derek Dauchy, an exec at Revolution Studios. Nice guy, bald like me.
I’m good in a room and fast at the keyboard but my price tag never put me very high on the go-to-guy list. I was very naive and never wanted to bother my agent. I was an idiot. Those who scream the loudest tend to get the attention. Live and learn. So, on those rare occasions when I would check in with my agent just to see if there was anything out there, I was sent back to talk with Dauchy at Revolution. The Revolution guys and gals had an idea for a horror movie. Later it would become known as THE MESSENGERS but back then we called it SCARECROW. I met with Derek and he told me the idea. Long story short…The Shining on a Farm. On the drive from Santa Monica back to my apartment in Korea Town I came up with my take.
The following day I was standing in the conference room at Revolution. Derek was there and his assistant, Navid Mcllhargey (now a veep at Silver Pictures). The guys and gal from Blue Star: William Sherak, Jason Shuman and Lauren (who oddly enough is now married to Mark “Smiling Jack Ruby” Wheaton). And then John Hageman was in New York, listening in, via AT&T long distance.
I did a ten minute pitch. Derek said, let us discuss. I went home.
I used to try to read a meeting. Did it go well? Poorly? Thing is, when I thought it went brilliantly, nine times out of ten I heard zilch. And if you’d asked me about this one, I would have said, eh. Although there were lots of smiles in the room, Derek stayed pretty unreadable and he was the Studio Exec. Shows what I know.
That afternoon my agent called to say I got the job. As I said, another first. The first time I got a job based on a pitch.
I met with the players again and was asked to write up a two-page outline. I called my agent to double check. Do I write an outline? Yes, just this once, was the answer. So I did. The outline, to me, was just a step in the process. I knew that the set up was important and the ending pay off was important. But the middle details were just fodder. Those would change once I entered the world of the script.
Then came a meeting with Todd Garner. One thing stands out. The fear. Not mine. Everyone else’s. I was specifically told, “Don’t argue with him. Just nod, agree and we’ll deal with the notes later.” What an amazingly odd business. One note stood out. Garner never wanted to see the scarecrow move. I didn’t argue, but I did ask some questions, which I could see out of the corner of my eye was making everyone uncomfortable.
I figured the end of that meeting would bring the commencement to write. But I was asked for one more outline. More detailed so that everyone would be on the same page. Why not, it’ll give me a chance to work out some of the details. So this time I wrote a 12-page outline. And sure enough it got a lot closer to what the script would be. Although I knew much of the late second act and third act details were just filler. I sent the new outline.
And Derek later called to say, go write it.
During the process, Jason and William asked that I send the finished draft to them first, allowing them to give notes before we officially gave it to Revolution. I called my agent. Should I give them a free rewrite? Yes, just this once, was the answer.
So, when finished I sent Bluestar the draft. They hit me with notes and I agreed with half of them.
Now, here’s something to consider. Hollywood was going through another one of her odd shifts in how things are done. But nobody sent me the memo. My mentors were guys like Dean Lorey, who was writing on My Wife and Kids and Jonathan Hensleigh, who was attached to direct my spec and had recently come off of writing Armageddon. These guys were telling me to stand strong behind my writing, my ideas. Don’t get pushed around. At the end of the day it’s your name on the script.
So when I did the “producer’s draft” I only made the changes I agreed with. And I really thought the script was much better based on the notes they’d given me that I had addressed. I turned the draft in and I recall Shuman calling and saying, “Why didn’t you make that first change?” I had ignored the very first note on their list. I told him, I didn’t like it. I thought it was a fair question and a fair answer.
Then they said they wanted to send the script to John Hegeman in New York since he was a producer as well and would only be fair to give him a chance to get his notes. Uh, hello? Why hadn’t he read the first draft and gave notes then? This ticked me off. I called my agent. Should I do a free Hegeman draft? Yes, just this once, was the answer.
I remember it took forever to get Hegeman’s notes. It took as long to get his notes as it did to write the original and the producer’s draft. But the notes finally showed up. And they showed up in two bulks. Hegeman’s notes and Bluestar’s next wave of notes. And the two sets of notes were full of contradictions. Hegeman’s notes were nutty. Half of which I didn’t understand. He was clearly seeing a different movie than what I had pitched. Bluestar, however, had some decent notes bunched in with all those I had ignored the first time.
My biggest challenge with the whole producer set of notes was the existence of “fear notes”. These were the notes that were there, not because it would make the script better, but was an attempt to address issues that Todd Garner “might” have. Those notes drove me nuts. Let’s just write the best draft possible and let Garner tell us what he likes and doesn’t like.
So, I made the changes I liked and ignored the rest. This time I sent the draft to my agent and she made a call to Dauchy, which I assume went something like this. Todd’s finished the first draft, where’s the money? Thus the commencement and first draft checks arrived. And Dauchy was sent the “official first draft”.
Time passed. Finally I got a call. Big meeting to discuss the polish, the final step owed.
When I showed up in Bluestar’s lobby I met Patrick Lussier and Lou Arkoff. Patrick had been Wes Craven’s editor since NEW NIGHTMARE. And both Patrick and Lou had worked on the reshoots for DARKNESS FALLS, the Bluestar/Revolution horror due out in a couple months. It was then that Patrick told me that he had been hired to direct SCARECROW and Lou hired to produce.
So, we went into the meeting and Patrick gave his notes on the “official first draft”. I had written a thriller disguised as a killer scarecrow horror. Patrick was pitching something that with a supernatural spin. Basically, instead of these characters existing as delusions inside our hero’s head, they were ghosts. The horror version of A BEAUTIFUL MIND was gone.
And Lou was suggesting we change the setting from a cornfield to a sunflower field because sunflowers followed the sun and that would be creepy.
And evidently both Garner and Revolution hated the idea of a killer scarecrow movie. Which was odd to me considering that wasn’t what I wrote. It was about a guy going nuts. Regardless the name was being changed to TOTEM. The mythology of the spiritual Totem would somehow play into the supernatural elements of the story.
My vision was dying. I had fought the producer notes but I couldn’t see how I might fight the director’s notes. And although I didn’t love the ghost slant, I did like Patrick a lot. He’d clearly done a ton of work in preparation. And Lou was about as charming as they come.
So, with Patrick’s notes in hand I returned to the dungeon and wrote the draft that would never see the light of day. I took all the notes I liked and implemented them. I changed the corn to sunflowers. And when I was finished I loved it.
And I almost sent it to Patrick but I didn’t. He’d mapped out what he wanted and what I wrote wasn’t it. It was still a thriller disguised as a horror. I had not implemented the supernatural. So I saved the draft and dove back in addressing his remaining notes.
Although it wasn’t going to be the movie I had envisioned, it was still a good creepy story. This movie was now in the hands of Patrick’s vision. Arguing would only hurt the movie. I changed my way of thinking. He was the director. I figured it was my job to make his job as easy as possible. And what happened between Patrick and I was actually a lot of fun. I wrote several drafts. In fact, I’m looking inside my Completed Projects/Scarecrow/Totem Folder and I see: Totem1, Totem2, Totem3, Totem4, Totem5, Totem6, Totem6a, Totem6b, Totem7, Totem7a, Totem7b, Totem7c, Totem8, Totem8b.
Most of these are small. We were turning drafts over in a day or two. I’d send him a draft, that night he’d send me notes, the next morning I’d send a new draft. And as I said, it was actually a lot of fun. We laughed and brainstormed and had a great time. It wasn’t his way or the highway. I trusted his judgment and he trusted mine. And as a result we are still very good friends to this day.
We finally handed in the polish a few days before the premier of DARKNESS FALLS. It’s my second favorite draft. It’s everything I loved with a more supernatural slant.
Mel and I joined Patrick and Laura at the premier and joined them at the party that followed. All of the producers were coming up to us praising the latest script. I was glowing. JASON X hadn’t turned out very well in my eyes. Not to mention it was the 10th installment of a series. Not the sort of thing that gains you very much respect. But TOTEM, as it was now officially called, was something I could be proud of.
A week or so later, I got a call from my agent. She’d talked to Dauchy and there were some serious problems with the script. I thought she was joking at first. Everyone had praised it at the premier. What problems? She didn’t know.
So I called Patrick.
He’d just heard all of this himself. Turns out, only the producers had read the latest draft before the premier. Garner hadn’t. And neither had Dauchy, which allowed Dauchy to keep his opinions to himself until he heard Garner’s thoughts. And Garner didn’t like it.
The word on the street was that Revolution was embarrassed by DARKNESS FALLS. Not that Falls had failed. It hadn’t. It made its money and would kill on DVD. But Falls was a horror. And although SCREAM had certainly revealed that the financial benefit of horror could outweigh the perception that horror was beneath other genres, there were still those looking down their noses at horror. Now, had Darkness Falls pulled in 100 million, I’m pretty confident the situation would have played out differently.
In the end, the story had little to do with it. Nor the writing. It was politics.
Stuart Beattie was hired. I heard this from Patrick. Stuart was coming off the Story By on PIRATES as well as the spec sell of COLLATERAL. His price tag dwarfed mine. Later Patrick convinced Dauchy that calling and telling me I’d been replaced would be a stand-up thing to do. And Dauchy did. And it was a stand-up thing to do.
Patrick later slipped me Stuart’s draft. He’s a great writer. He created the Irrigation Guy who hates water. A great character. You can’t teach that. Its just second nature. But for the most part Stuart was acting on notes I thought were horrible. The second act reveal of the daughter’s being dead was tossed. Jessica was now alive and well. And the third act contained a giant Aztec Ruins rising up out of the sunflower field.
Again it was never about the story. Revolution didn’t want to do a horror movie. Didn’t matter who wrote it. The project went into turnaround. That’s never a good sign.
Roughly a year later, I heard Ghost House pulled it out of turnaround. And from here we’re simply in the world of hearsay. Raimi mentioned Stuart in several interviews but I’ve no clue if he ever did a draft for them or not. I heard the title went back to SCARECROW then that it changed again because of the Hackman/Pacino movie of the same name. I heard the Pangs were hired and wrote their own draft. Then I heard that draft was tossed out. Saw that Mark “Smiling Jack Ruby” Wheaton was hired. And for the most part, the movie that now exists was his, structurally anyway. It was around this time that she became known as THE MESSENGERS. And finally she went into production. I read Wheaton’s draft. Two different movies, two different visions, like Deep Impact and Armageddon. If my vision wasn’t going to be shot then it should have been his. But no one asked for my opinion.
Months later Wheaton came up and introduced himself after I’d been on a Fangoria Weekend panel. He had recently been replaced by yet another writer. And was pretty bummed about it. I told him that he should be proud. He wrote the greenlight draft. His draft was responsible for hundreds of jobs. Because of him the movie was being made. Dean Lorey was with me and later commented that he thought it funny that I was giving the guy who replaced me a pep talk about being replaced. Whatever. None of it matters in 100 years anyway.
Now, where I’m basically continuing the story by means of hearsay, you can and should check out Mark Wheaton’s story. He takes up where my hands-on process ends. He blogs about his experience over on his myspace and it’s a great read. I was cackling earlier and I’ve only read the first two parts. It just goes to show you that no matter which part of the process you are on, it promises to be a fun and bumpy ride.
So, what started with me, passed through the keyboard of Beattie, the Pangs, Wheaton and then the new writer. Five writers. At one point I got an email from Mark Swift (FREDDY VS. JASON) with a friendly heads up that he and his partner had been offered the rewrite but passed due to time constraints. Four more sets would follow for assorted rewrites and polishes. And in the end I think Wheaton said he went back in for some final tweaks.
I don’t like that line of thinking. You don’t shoot a movie with eight or nine different directors, but no one bats an eye at eight or nine different writers. I can’t help but think, something is lost in that process. But again, no one is asking my opinion.
Finally, the producers sent out their suggested writing credits. Screenplay By Mark Wheaton, Story By Todd Farmer. I read the shooting draft as well as the reshoot pages and made the decision that the story had changed so much that I would not arbitrated for the shared credit. I knew this would be a financial blow because it means I would not be receiving a backend. Had I received the Screenplay or even shared Screenplay then I was owed a nice six figure chunk. By settling for Story I would get nothing. But at the end of the day, I didn’t feel I deserved a shared Screenplay. Sure I got the ball rolling but it was no longer my movie. I actually expected one of the six or seven sets of writers would arbitrate. But no one did.
The credits fell as the producers suggested.
Today is Saturday the 3rd of February. The Messengers came out last night. Looks like she pulled in around 6 million for Friday. That means 13 to 16 million for the weekend and lands her in first place.
It’s been an interesting process. High highs and low lows. Hope you enjoyed the ride. :)
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