Notes From the Screenwriting Files: On Root Beer and Self Worth

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He scarfed down the first pages we sent him, licking his fingers and scraping the bowl. But the next batch stuck in his throat. The phone rang immediately. “This stuff is terrible!  Do you guys have any actual talent or did I make a mistake? Come over here now. I want to talk to you two.”  Oh shit! Three days on the job and we were being summoned to the principal’s office. But this wasn’t just the principal. This was the king!

We looked at each other, shaken to the core. Flying high off Cool Runnings, and finally making that big “production re-write” money, the last thing we expected was to have Steven Spielberg ask us whether we had any actual talent. We walked over to his part-time trailer office with our up-and-coming writing team tail between our legs. Amblin, his southwestern style fiefdom was up the road a bit on the Universal lot, but he was slumming over at Warner Bros.

He began with a half hour lecture on the difference between good screenwriting and bad. It was the gospel according to Saint Steven, and though I would love to tell you the actual psalms and beatitudes I can’t because I don’t remember a word he said. Just the sickened feeling rumbling in my gut. This was not a note session from a disappointed producer. This was a referendum on my entire self-worth!

The great man pontificated but I couldn’t even keep my ass in a chair. Michael (my partner) did, sitting across the desk like a good employee taking his lumps from the boss, but I just paced around the room like a somnambulist.  “I’ll show you. I’ll show you. I’ll show you what I can fucking do.” That was the voice in my head, which grew increasingly louder until it reached “Tell-Tale Heart” volume. Unable to take it any longer I excused myself in the middle of the meeting and rushed back to my computer to right this awful wrong.

The year was 1993, and the movie was Little Giants. A story about tomboy pee-wee football star Becky “ice box” O’shea, and the inner battle between her athletic prowess and burgeoning femininity.  It is also about two brothers, one an ex-football star played by Ed O’Neill and one a nerdy schlub played by Rick Moranis, who is Becky’s dad. They put together a team of rejects and castoffs and take on Ed’s powerhouse pee-wee squad.

Once back in my office I threw caution to the wind. Steven was talking about the importance of the father-daughter dynamic between Becky and her dad, and so I wrote a scene where they played the car trip game “I’m going on a picnic” and filled it full of humor, hope and tenderness. I wrote it like a scene from an indie-movie or a play, not a commercial family comedy, and gave him two other scenes as well. All of them in that indie style. That was on Friday. Saturday morning my phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Tommy, it’s Steven. I’m up in Malibu, but I wanted to call and tell you the new scenes are great.”  

It was a menschy thing to do. He had been rough on us when he thought the writing sub-par, but now he had gone out of his way to let me know I had done good work, ringing me up on a Saturday from “the Colony.”  The smile almost broke my face. But that feeling was short lived, and though we ended up earning Spielberg’s respect there was something creepy and unsettling about the entire experience. So much so that a week in I found myself clutching at my own neck with an OCD like compulsion, the tic lasting ‘til the gig ended. I was in auto-strangulation mode over a kid’s football movie!

We actually wrote our asses off on that one. A young female reader for Warner Brothers said that our draft was the first not to set back feminism thirty years. I also remember Steven telling Dwayne Dunham the director “I need to be there when you shoot this stuff because this is some funny shit.” It was a scene where the rejects argue over which positions they will play, but it never made the movie. In fact, after endless “comedy polishes” the only thing of ours left were two of the longer dramatic scenes. (A comedy polish is where they bring in joke writers who are very serious about laughs and very unserious about character and story.)

The whole Little Giants experience is summed up for me in a couple of key events:

One day we showed up for work and were told by the Production Office Coordinator that one of the major studio big wigs wanted to see us immediately! We walked into her office, and she leveled us with a look a look of heavy disapproval. “Is it true that you guys went to a Dodger game last night?” We were her thirty year-old writers not her thirteen year-old nephews, but I guess in her mind we were indentured servants, and taking in an evening ballgame a dereliction of duty.

Another was the way we were fired. It was over the phone. Done by a different hot-shot exec who decided the script was getting worse, not better. And we weren’t just being canned, he wanted us to give back some of the money! That’s when CAA super-agent Jack Rapke rode in like the cavalry, and informed him that art (even dumb art) does not come with a money back guarantee. In his strong Brooklyn accent, Rapke set the record straight. “It’s Rashomon. You say it’s one thing, they say it’s another. It’s Rashomon!” The Kurosawa defense worked and we got to keep all our dough.

We even ended up getting credit on the movie after guild arbitration. (Arbitration is where a committee of Writer’s Guild members decide a movie’s writing credits after reading all the drafts and statements from each writer or team.) I think it shocked everyone, and we even got a call from golden boy producer Walter Parkes, who looked like he stepped off the cover of Town and Country even though he was a Jew, asking how we had done it.

The movie was a mild success when it came out but found a life in video. The thing people remember most is “The Annexation of Puerto Rico,” a special play drawn up by “Nubie” (the glasses wearing, snot-bubble nosed, uber-nerd genius) to win the big game. In fact, I heard it referenced by football announcer Tony Romo last year when a team was down to their last desperate play.

The Monday after opening weekend we got a call in our funky Laurel Canyon office. It was Spielberg. This time he was calling from an airplane. “I just want to congratulate you guys. You did a great job.”

Thanks Steven.

The Root Beer Post Script:

Spielberg drank root beer. A&W. I found this appalling considering all the great artisan options around— IBC, Virgil’s, Avita out of New Orleans. It stuck in my maven craw that the reigning god of commercial cinema, and now, with the success of Schindler’s List, black white auteur (of his recent Academy Awards he told me “It’s nice. You can’t put box office grosses on the mantle”) was drinking shit root beer, and completely oblivious to it. So, one Monday I brought him a six pack of Thomas Kemper, a small soda maker out of Poulsbo Washington who offered a magnificent brew. He loved it! I hadn’t just taken his sexist movie and infused it with some second wave feminist soul I had turned Stevie S onto the good shit! But a few days later he was back to the dreaded beige can of his awful A&W.

I think that says a lot not just about his tastebuds but his cinematic career as well. He might have dabbled in the indie world of handcrafted soft drinks for a moment, but when push came to shove, he put his faith in the American consumerist juggernaut. A juggernaut his movies had both co-signed and accelerated.