2/1/23
Newsletter 237
The Crack of Dawn
A couple of more things about ER. First of all, a person who read my story yesterday about coming up with a TV show called ER two years before the actual ER construed that I was implying that somehow Michael Crichton stole the idea from me. I meant nothing of the sort. Michael Crichton wrote the original script for ER as a feature-length film in 1974. He sat on it for nearly 20 years until he worked with Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park (1993). Spielberg liked the ER script, thought it would make a better TV show than a feature, and set it up. The fact that Ivan Raimi and I came up with a story that took place in an ER, based on Ivan’s experiences, was pure coincidence.
In 1989 I had just gotten a new agent. She was one of eight agents that I had over the course of 25 years. No agent ever got me a job, and no agent ever had a good idea. What agents are very good at is killing ideas, both good and bad, and explaining in detail why an idea like that one, whatever it is, will never sell.
So, the big blockbuster movie of the year before had been Die Hard (1988). I knew that there would be sequels and all sorts of knock-offs, and of course there were many. However, at that exact moment in 1989 there was only one Die Hard movie.
Meanwhile, Clint Eastwood’s career at that time was in the doghouse. He had just made the fifth Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988), and it both sucked and tanked, although it did open well. His film before it, Heartbreak Ridge (1986), also sucked and hadn’t done much business.
All right, given this environment, I came up with what I still think is one of my better, commercial ideas – Die Hard in the White House. It went like this: Dirty Harry Callahan retired from the San Francisco police force, and went into politics (just as Clint Eastwood had recently done by becoming mayor of Carmel). Harry runs for mayor of SF on a hardline, anti-violence platform, wins, and does an excellent job cleaning up the city. Lacking a candidate, the Republican Party nominates Harry Callahan for president, also on an anti-violence platform, and he wins. That’s all a pre-credit montage. Meanwhile, Arab terrorists dress up as tourists, arm themselves with plastic weapons that won’t set off metal detectors (like Glocks), and take the White House tour. When they’re inside, they pull their weapons, kill the nearby security guards and secret service agents, then seal off the building, which has tourists, the entire White House staff, and the president inside.
President Dirty Harry Callahan is seated at his desk in the oval office. The head secret service agent dashes in and apprises the president of the situation. Harry patiently listens to the details, then slowly his upper lip begins to twitch in anger. He reaches down, opens his desk drawer, and there is the .44 Magnum. The rest, as they say, writes itself.
My new agent hated the idea. She explained in a tone of impatient disgust that there already was a movie called Die Hard and nobody needed or wanted anymore movies like it; the last Dirty Harry movie had bombed, so nobody wanted anymore of those, either; Clint Eastwood was old and washed up and would probably retire, then die soon thereafter. Why didn’t I just come up with something that was “edgy,” which was the popular, indefinable word of the moment in Hollywood. Me, and no doubt every other writer in Hollywood, asked our agents, “What does edgy mean?” And we all got back something along the lines of, “Oh, you know, edgy. Edgy is edgy.” I guess they had never heard that you can’t define a word by using the same word.
Die Hard sequels and rip-offs became their own sub-genre. Die Hard 2 came out in 1990, Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995), Live Free or Die Hard (2007), and A Good Day to Die Hard (2013). But let’s not forget Under Siege (1992), which is Die Hard on a boat; Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), which is Die Hard on a train, Speed (1994), Die Hard on a bus, The Rock (1996), Die Hard at Alcatraz; and then actually nearing my idea, Air Force One (1997), which is Die Hard on the president’s airplane. The White House is a much better location, with tunnels, and rooms full of priceless paintings and pottery to shoot to pieces, and who knows what?
Therefore, agents not only never got me any work, but they shit on any number of my ideas, both good and bad. Every second that spent trying to get an agent, and then having one, was wasted. Of course it was good experience.
In William Goldman’s seminal book about Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he tells you up front, a half dozen times, that the most important truth about the film business is: Nobody knows anything. At the vanguard of this axiom are agents. Not only do they not know anything, but if they should mistakenly hear anything that resembles a good idea, they’ll kill it as fast as they can. Agents want to be producers and studio executives.
In conclusion, I will quote the author and screenwriter, John Gregory Dunne, who also wrote a very good book about being a screenwriter in Hollywood called Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (with a quote on the front of the book by Michael Crichton). “Every executive in Hollywood thinks that they are a better writer than the writer, if they just had the time. The fact that the writer has the time, makes them an asshole.”
Off we go into the wild blue yonder.