THE MAGICAL KEY

Every screenwriter’s dream is to pen that one script that will save them from their boring everyday lives. More so, they want to be able to support themselves doing what they love – writing – while creating and entertaining the masses. They’ve written screenplays and are loaded with ideas. But they’re still standing outside the Hollywood door. So they continue their regular jobs of delivering pizzas, washing dishes, working the counter at the porn shop or whatever it is they have to do to make ends meet. The dream will fade for most of them, it will haunt others and few will find the magical key.

Screenwriters Stephen Susco and Leigh Whannell are living that dream. The first produced screenplay for Notre Dame and USC School of Cinema and Television graduate Stephen Susco was “The Grudge,” while Australian Leigh Whannell wrote and starred in “Saw” his first Hollywood at bat. Both hit home runs. “The Grudge” grossed over a $100 million domestically and spawned a sequel, while “Saw” grossed over $100 million worldwide and has become one of the most successful franchises ever.

Though both are great success stories, was it quite as easy as it seems looking at them from the outside? No and no. Both writers recently discussed their travels to the top of the horror genre at Screenwriting Expo 5 in Los Angeles. I opted out of seeing guest of honor Oliver Stone speak to catch the session titled “The Future of Horror” and was extremely happy I did. Not much about the genre’s future was discussed, but Susco and Whannell’s hilarious panel ended up being one of the best talks I’ve ever attended at the Expo.

STEPHEN SUSCO

The extremely down-to-Earth Stephen Susco was a computer consultant when he attended the Expo as an audience member several years back. By 2004 he was speaking at the event, but he was no overnight success.

He struggled as a screenwriter for eight years before seeing one of his scripts come to life via Sam Raimi and Sarah Michelle Gellar. He had written on assignment doing rewrites and adaptations here and there, but it wasn’t until his 24th script that he finally had one produced. Susco’s foot in the door came in 1996 during his third semester of film school when he received a phone call from New Line Cinema.

“I thought it was one of my friends fucking with me,” Susco told the packed room at the LAX Marriott. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, we want to hire you for this book I think you would be perfect to adapt.’ I hung up the phone and they called back, ‘No, No. This really is New Line New York.’”

Somehow they had got their hands on one of Susco’s unproduced scripts that at one time had a director attached, but never got funding. New Line wanted him to adapt Tony Bourdain’s novel “Bone in the Throat” with the failed project’s director, who had placed a writing credit on Susco’s script. The duo got the job and received their first film credit, but it took Susco two years to figure out how.

“It’s a great story because it’s a very clear path of how to get your first job,” Susco said. “What happened was this executive producer was sleeping with a girl and he left (the script) on her night stand. She flew back to New York where she was screwing somebody else. This is all true. It’s totally true. Take notes because you have to figure this out. So she was screwing somebody else in New York and she left it on his desk. He woke up on Monday morning and thought the script was on his reading list for the weekend. He panicked and handed it to his assistant and said, ‘You’ve got to read this.’ So she read it. She liked the script and gave it to her boss, who called me. That closed the circle.”

Susco said at the time he thought landing that first writing gig meant he had made it. The film got packaged by the Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills, Ted Demme was set to direct and Susco was finally going to get paid for a screenplay. Things were looking good. Then he and his new writing partner headed over to a meeting at CAA.

“It was the best meeting of my life and it lasted about 90 seconds,” Susco said. “We got called into this guy’s office and he said, ‘Look,’ which is never a good start to a meeting. He said, ‘Look, I’m going to be straight with you. We’re CAA. We don’t know who the fuck you guys are. We rep Ted Demme. We handle Newline. We handle the producers. You guys are getting scale on this. So basically we’re not going to do anything for you. The best you can do is go out, get an agent and two years from now when we are begging to have you back, tell us to go fuck ourselves. Nice meeting you.’ That was basically it. But it was the best meeting of my life because the reality was I would have sat there thinking, ‘Oh man, the phones are going to start ringing. I’m set. My career is taking off.’ Nothing would have happened and I would have stalled out.”

So instead he finished film school and continued to work. Through the years he sold scripts to six different studios. Then in 2002 he hit it off with Doug Davison, the producing partner of Roy Lee. Davison showed Susco a scene from Takashi Shimizu’s Japanese horror anthology “Ju-on.”

“We were watching it in the middle of the day and I’m like, ‘This is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,’” Susco said. “So he gave me the tapes and I took them home. I didn’t understand a word of them, but the imagery was so interesting, provocative and the storytelling was so bizarre.”

Susco met again with Davison and at the end of that meeting it was decided not only would Susco write an American remake of “Ju-on,” he was going to direct it although he had never directed a feature. So for the next several months, Susco and Davison developed their version of “The Grudge,” which is sort of a sequel to the “Ju-on” short films.

“While we were doing that we talked to Takashi Shimizu and we said, ‘Why don’t you guys make a feature and we’ll make a feature and they’ll obviously be different and we will release them at the same time.’ Takashi Shimizu said, ‘Hai! Great. Sounds good.’”

So Susco and Davison started pitching their version to studios in May 2002, but no one seemed to get the concept they were pushing.

“They just stared at us cross eyed,” Susco said. “They’re like, ‘Asian people make horror films? What? They don’t kill the bad thing at the end? You’re telling the story out of sequence? And you’re going to direct this?’”

Enter “The Ring.” The Davison and Lee remake of the Japanese film “Ringu” opened in October of that year to huge success. It grossed over $120 million domestically. Suddenly, “The Grudge” started to make sense to studios.

“Everyone we had talked to was all, ‘Can you come in and pitch that again?’” Susco said. “And everyone we hadn’t talked to was all, ‘We heard you got this thing?’ At the same time, we got a call from Japan and they’re all, ‘Yeah, we’re sending you our movie.’ We’re like, ‘What movie?’ They’re all, ‘Ju-on: The Grudge.’ How’s your film coming?”

But “The Grudge” still faced resistance in Hollywood, so it was decided during pitches Takashi Shimizu’s latest version would be screened. In a stroke of brilliance, Susco also decided to make a separate 20-minute short film out of the first two film’s 90-minutes of material.

“We knew that if we showed people these films without subtitles it would be cool scenes, but that’s about it,” Susco said. “What I did was took the original films and made up my own subtitles, most of which were not remotely accurate to what was happening with the story. We figured we’d send it to people, tell them to watch it at night, it will scare the crap out of them and it will kind of make sense. We intended to cover the town with that after we had our first big screening.”

But all it took was that first screening to set the wheels in motion. The lights came up and Sam Raimi stood up and said, “We’re making this movie.” Raimi then came up with the idea of using American actors in Japan, which Susco was all for. Then the “Evil Dead” director came up with a few ideas that didn’t sit well with Susco.

“He said, ‘Yeah, we’ll have Takashi Shimizu’s direct it,’” Susco said. “And I said, ‘Okay, cool.’ For a moment it was like, ‘Oh damn it!’ But then it was like, ‘Okay, Sam Raimi is going to produce this film and the guy who created it is going to direct it. Okay. Fine. That’s cool.’ That was the good news. Then (Raimi) says, ‘And we’ll have Takashi Shimizu write the film!!!’ And that is where things got a little depressing for a little while.”

Meetings started to happen with all the producers and Raimi, but Susco was not invited to any of them. He would, however, hear about them. Someone would come up and tell him, “There was a big meeting yesterday” and Susco would ask, “Oh, what was it about?” “It was about you,” they would reply. Finally, he was invited to a meeting and given the chance to sell himself for the job.

“I think things went grey for awhile,” Susco said. “I know I talked for a long time. I basically just appealed, I said, ‘I’ve been working on this for a year. I’ve talked to the director. I know this movie.’ I just kind of let it all out. I pulled out the cork. When everything went back from being grey, they were all just going, ‘Okay, we’ll let you know.’ The next day I got the call saying I had got the job. It was certainly a good example of how hard films can be to get going and then after you put in all the work and have caused the film to start to happen that you will often times be the first element that they flick out of the cycle of the film.”

The script was made into one of the best PG-13 horror movies of our time and soon Susco put the threat of being flicked out of projects in his past. Now the screenwriter has his hands so full it’s quite amazing he found time to speak at the Expo. He’s writing “Dibbuk Box” for Ghost House Pictures and has been green lit to direct “White" for Rogue. Other upcoming movies from his scripts include “Crawlspace” for Paramount, the remake of “Prom Night” for Columbia, “Red,” which Lucky McKee (“May,” “The Woods”) is slated to direct and the army zombie film “Zero.Dark.Thirty.”

He also sold his first spec screenplay “Sanctuary” to Lions Gate. For those that are unfamiliar, spec scripts are written without being under contract from a studio. They are written on speculation. Most advice given to new screenwriters is spec scripts are the way into the Hollywood system.

“I just sold my first spec script this year,” Susco said. “Anyone that tells you that you have to sell spec scripts in order to be a screenwriting is either bullshitting you or doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

That of course coming from a man, who clearly does know what he’s talking about.

(Continued - Click here to read Magical Key Part II featuring Leigh Whannell)

(Click here for Writing Tips from Stephen Susco)