The Family Business and A Self Made Man
By Antony Teofilo
The Family Business
Like it or not, there is a miniscule group of folks who decide what much of the world gets to see on their TV's and movie screens. They're called Producers. Yet it's statistical fact that 33.3% of the population of any street in Los Angeles has, does, or will consider themselves producers. So what separates those who really are from those who think they are? If Richard and Dean Zanuck, the producers of ROAD TO PERDIITON are to be believed, it comes down to a mix of elbow grease, nepotism, connections, stamina, dumb luck, and family. Oh, and a phone call from Steven Spielberg doesn't hurt, either.
While ROAD TO PERDITION is in places like a gangster flick, it's also a vessel for characters that stumble around a morally ambiguous world that seems a bit more realistic than that which imperious Corleones inhabit. No, ROAD tells the story of the Irish mob from the trenches, where blood and revenge share a house with math homework and snowball fights. ROAD'S world is not easy to nail down...and that's what makes it quite a curiosity. Movies like this don't often get made with such aplomb, if at all. Below, the Zanucks speak about the process of making a summer flick that plays against the norm, and what it's like to work as father and son on a father/son project.
PRESS: How did ROAD TO PERDITION come into existence?
DEAN: It landed on my desk about three years ago from a very obscure literary agent. I'd never seen or read a graphic novel before. I was on the edge of just giving it to my assistant because this guy's sent me some pretty bad scripts over the years. I started flipping through it, and thought: good artwork, good dialogue. I could handle this. I went home that weekend and read it and saw this amazing father and son story, which is what really appealed to me. As soon as I put it down, I said to my wife, 'Jesus, this if phenomenal. Something really good's going to happen to this.' I just had a hunch. I sent it to my Dad, who was in Morocco shooting a film. He read it and liked it, and said, 'I want you to send this to Stephen Spielberg.'
RICHARD:: I'm always thinking big.
DEAN: I didn't complain about that too much. [Laughs] I got it right over there. Two days later the phone rang from Morocco and it was Stephen calling saying, 'I love this. Let's tie it up. Let's go.' And away we went.
ANTONY: The father and son relationship is a huge thematic force behind this movie. Dean learned the business from the bottom up, with very little help from you. Could you comment on putting him through his paces as far as the industry goes?
RICHARD:: Dean has worked on a lot of movies. He's been a production assistant, and eventually graduated to Brian Grazer's assistant. He worked on Apollo 13. He came back to the Zanuck group in the development area. It was through that process that he found this project, and others that we're working on.
ANTONY: Could there have been any business but the family business for you?
DEAN: I didn't really think about it that much. I had a couple of summer gigs in the mailroom as I was growing up. I went to college, graduated on a Saturday, drove back Sunday, was working on a set Monday, and the rest is history.
PRESS: Mr. Zanuck, you've been involved with so many classic movies over the years, what does it take to get you excited about a movie project these days?
RICHARD:: I don't know anything else. I wouldn't know what to do with my day. In this particular project, working with Dean on his first production was a thrilling experience for a father. I actually never produced a picture with my father [the legendary Darryl Zanuck, who guided Fox Studios into the sound era] who trained me all the way through. We worked together, but I never got credit on any of the pictures we made.
Every project is different, and that's what keeps me going. We're got another project with Tim Burton starting in October called BIG FISH, which was something that Dreamworks was involved with for awhile. It has nothing to do with Dreamworks now. It's Sony.
PRESS: What's BIG FISH about?
RICHARD:: BIG FISH is, in a totally different way, another father and son journey. It's a discovery by the son that his father, (who he knows only through these 'big fish' stories that his father's been telling him his entire life) that his father's whole life has been an exaggeration. [The son] doesn't know his Dad, except through these incredible stories about giants and midgets and all kinds of weird situations. When his father is dying, the son...goes back and retraces some of these stories that the father has told the son over the years, [and they] are not that exaggerated. It's very touching.
It's the perfect Tim Burton project. A lot of it is surreal and comes from a different place. It's very emotional and very funny. We're in the process of casting. It's one of the best scripts I've read in many years.
PRESS: Is that another father / son collaboration?
RICHARD:: No. We're collaborating on other projects, but not on that one.
PRESS: You had a very tumultuous relationship with your own father...
RICHARD:: For a short period of time it was very tumultuous. When he fired me.
PLOT SPOILER:
PRESS: Would it be reading too much into it, to say that in ROAD TO PERDITION, with Michael Sullivan killing off his own father you were trying to say something about your relationship with your own Dad?
ANTONY: Holy Freud, Batman...
RICHARD:: [Laughs] No, no. That is really going too Freud...
ANTONY: My old man owned a pizza store, and things could get pretty heated around the dinner table when my father and brothers and sisters would bring the business home. Does that happen for you, or can you keep it in the office?
RICHARD:: We have the most unique relationship. Our other son who is just a year older than Dean (Dean is 29) is working on his own projects. My wife Lilly works with us. That's the whole company. It's a very unique situation. We each have an assistant, and that's it. There are no vice-presidents.
PRESS: Initially, ROAD TO PERDITION was scheduled for a Christmas release. Now, it's a very dark and serious movie sandwiched between summer popcorn movies...
RICHARD:: This movie was never meant for a Christmas release. We could never have made that date. Sam [Mendes] doesn't work that fast. There was some talk of March or April, but then we decided that at this point in the summer, people need an alternative film to see. Something that mature audiences can enjoy. It gives them a selection. July 12th, they'll be ready to see something other than [popcorn movies].
PRESS: Dean, you've got a younger son, and you're following in your father's footsteps, do you feel any pressure to continue that dynasty?
DEAN: I don't think about it much. My Dad didn't force me into the limelight. It was a decision I made after a having a very normal upbringing, education, et cetera. There are big footsteps in front of me, but I'm confident.
A Self Made Man
Before Tom Hanks, before Paul Newman. Before artificial rainstorms, hundreds of handmade costumes, and shoot dates in downtown Chicago. Before directors and P.A.'s and the carnival of chaos that becomes a green-lit movie, there is one person.
One intense guy sits, sweats, and slaves at some sort of typewriter smacking his forehead about every fifteen minutes. The dark circles that perpetually ensconce themselves under his eyes belie the fact that he sleeps little, smokes too many cigarettes, and drinks too much coffee. Several times a day he prays that this is the draft that will finally make it through the doors of the magic store. His neighbors think he's nice enough, if just a little off. They can hear him talking excitedly to himself through the water stained, paper-thin walls of his rattrap apartment. What they don't know is that he's not conversing with some unseen schizophrenic playmate. He's reading the dialogue of his latest screenplay, endlessly tweaking his characters, boring the deepest reaches of his mind for that ambrosial mix of artistic integrity and marketability: The Big One. The 130-or-so pages that will take him from the depression of dirt-poor obscurity to legitimized riches and respect in the hallowed halls of the Writers' Guild. He is a screenwriter.
This dank, decrepit creature is nothing like the David Self that I met in Chicago. Self is a tall, confident, squeaky-clean looking guy who has no obvious air of artistically induced emaciation about him. Of course, what he looks like behind closed doors as a profitable deadline looms is anyone's guess. For reasons that remained a bit too enigmatic for me to discover, it was Self and not author Max Allen Collins who penned the screenplay to Collins' graphic novel. Collins then adapted Self's screenplay into the novelization of ROAD TO PERDITION the movie.
We spoke about how Self got his start as a screenwriter, how he feels about graphic novels as an American art form, and what it's like to hear Tom Hanks spout your dialogue:
PRESS: How did you get started in screenwriting?
DAVID: I was an English major. My whole family are educators. My parents are community college professors, my aunts and uncles are all high school teachers. I always thought I was going to go into education myself. I just had this post-college Dustin Hoffman GRADUATE style experience where I said, 'Am I going to write about other people's writing, or do my own?' And I thought I would do my own.
ANTONY: What did you do for work while you were writing those first projects?
DAVID: I sponged of my parents. I lived at home. I had really nice parents.
PRESS: Were you writing at the time?
DAVID: I started writing straight out of college. I started a novel, which of course has never seen the light of day. I just didn't have the attention span. The amount of time I could spend in one 'world' was about six to twelve months. I loved to learn everything about a world, inhabit it, and get to know it, and write about it. But if I go beyond that, I get a little bored.
PRESS: How did you learn to write? Did you take one of those screenwriting classes that everyone takes?
DAVID: I went to a UCLA extension class taught by Virginia Brown, who's done a bunch of Danielle Steele, she's a soap opera writer. She was the most loving supportive teacher you could ever have. When you first start, you're just really bad. Your first script is always terrible.
PRESS: So you just kept doing it.
DAVID: Yeah. After a couple of scripts, you stop taking classes and go out and try to get an agent.. So that's what I did.
PRESS: How was that?
DAVID: [Laughs] I didn't know a soul in the town. I ended up paying $200 for a seminar, and it just so happened that the person who arranged the seminar was an agent working in the valley. Long story short, I joined this smaller agent in the valley. He got my specs sent out and eventually I got a job. Disney hired me to do a re-write on an oil well firefighting movie. It didn't get made.
PRESS: And after that?
DAVID: I did a lot of time in development on a bunch of projects. I wrote five feature projects.
PRESS: What keeps you going?
DAVID: Oh, just so much hope. You're so naive and you have so much hope. When I got that very first job at Disney, I was just like 'Wow'. Writers Guild minimum salaries are very generous. You can live on writing movies that don't get made. There are twenty scripts in Hollywood on average for every one that gets made. There's a lot of work done by writers that you never see.
PRESS: Can you tell us a little bit about the process of converting a graphic novel into a movie script?
DAVID: When I got sent the graphic novel, the thing that stood out most about it among all the other things we'd been considering was that here's a concept that's in the genre of gangster movies, but instead of being about the big crime families like the Corleones, it was sort of about thug #1. It was like if they had made THE GODFATHER about Luca Brazzi. To revisit the genre from the henchmen's point of view made it a really compelling idea.
PLOT SPOILER:
The graphic novel was written as three books that were serialized and published as one [book]. The story didn't track completely from one to the other. They were sort of episodic. The first task was to come up with an essential organizing principle. I tried to come up with a central tragic situation that you could re-hang the elements of the graphic novel on. This was an Irish-American tragedy, and I wanted to preserve that quality. The idea became, 'What if you had to kill your father figure in order to save your son?' I introduced that element into the story, and took elements of the graphic novel to make them fit that basic premise.
PRESS: Can you tell us about the creation of Jude Law's character, who does not appear in the book?
DAVID: Basically Jude's character came from a series of incidents in which Capone's various henchmen and killers come after O'Sullivan, and they get eliminated one by one. [Because there were so many], that was fairly redundant to the movie, so we consolidated it down to one character. I had this idea of this character that was a yellow journalist. He worked the crime beat and the morgue stories. He gets so jaded from exposure to this world, he steps over the line from being the storyteller to being the story maker. That was how he was conceived.
ANTONY: Are you a big reader of comics?
DAVID: I was when I was younger, and then I kind of dropped out of it as a teenager and college. I re-discovered it in my Hollywood phase. Since then of course, there's been a lot of use of comics and graphic novels or comics [as source].
ANTONY: Do you want to do more of this kind of work, adapting the comics for the big screen?
DAVID: I'd love to do some more. I find it thematically very accessible and compelling.
ANTONY: Can you tell me anything about your Submariner project? Who's Prince Namor going to be going up against?
DAVID: I can't share any of that, other than it's a Universal project, with Marvel.
PRESS: Who's Namor?
DAVID: He's the first Marvel superhero, invented in 1939. Namor the Prince of Atlantis.
PRESS: Who's going to play him?
DAVID: We don't know. He's a multi-ethnic character.
PRESS: Can you talk about what it's like to see Tom Hanks and Paul Newman reading your lines? What's it like to see your project made?
DAVID: I wasn't on set. The most shocking thing is when you see the actors inhabiting your characters and they obviate your lines because they don't need them any more. You've had a line for them, and it's so internalized that [the line] becomes unnecessary.
ANTONY: Were you disappointed that [Al] Capone [played by Anthony LaPaglia] was cut from the movie?
DAVID: No. There were only two scenes with Capone in the script. There's a scene between Maguire, Nitti, and Capone conniving over how to set up Sullivan. You'd have to ask Sam why he cut it.
PRESS: Do you think the graphic novel will begin to become more respected as a literary art form?
DAVID: I really hope so. I think it's one of the indigenous American forms like jazz or comics in general, and movies themselves. I don't know that they'll ever reach the mass audience that movies and TV can, but I'd love to see it legitimized.
PRESS: What is the literal meaning of 'Perdition'?
DAVID: It literally means Hell. In the graphic novel and the script, Perdition is the mythical town of Perdition, Kansas where [the Sullivans] go to seek refuge.
Return in a few days, loyal reader, for more meetings with the folks behind ROAD TO PERDITION.
Read The Previous "On The Road To Perdition Column"
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