It’s a strange day when Borat hijacks your dreams on a yacht in Monte Carlo harbour. And when I say hijack, I don’t mean I was fast asleep dreaming of a yacht in Monte Carlo harbour when a naked Sacha Baron Cohen danced in front of my eyes. Oh no. I was being shown round a real mega-yacht in the real Monte Carlo harbour, taking vague notes and nodding while in my mind I was racing across the Med with Eva Longoria casting admiring glances at my deft wheel flicking action. ‘How much are these babies?’ I asked, running through my Post Office savings book with a mental finger. ‘Over $16 million, sir,’ the man turned to smile at me. ‘They are not for lottery winners.’
Minutes later, over lunch, I read that the astonishing success of the film Borat meant Baron Cohen had apparently inked a $42.5 million deal for his next script – playing a gay Austrian fashion designer called Bruno. I realised the only way a chap like me – white, college-educated, unskilled, lazy – was going to hit the big time and persuade Longoria to take a ride on my 18-footer was by selling a script in Los Angeles. After all, if Baron Cohen can do it by putting on a silly voice and being rude to people… well, I’m British, for goodness’ sake. That’s what we do.
But first, I had to write the script. There are many books on this subject, but few by anyone who’s written a best-selling script. Some argue that all scripts need to be written in a three-act structure. Others insist it’s all about action and dialogue (as opposed to nothing happening and nobody talking…?). In High Concept, Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, Charles Fleming suggests having a pure idea before setting pen to paper. In Hollywood parlance, this means your pitch should be deliverable in one or two sentences and should excite studio marketing chiefs. Alien was pitched as 'Jaws in space' and Star Wars was pitched as 'Flash Gordon in a cowboy movie'. In the end, the only book written by a screenplay legend that I could find was Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman, and his main piece of advice is, essentially, if you want to write movies, get to Hollywood.
Before heading out, I knock something together I think is sufficiently high concept – a twist on the black-and-white classic rom-com His Girl Friday. In my version, a powerful woman police chief tries to get her maverick detective ex-husband to stay in the force instead of leaving to get married – initially because she needs his skills on a case but eventually because she realises she’s still in love with him. It’s 'Out of Sight meets Dirty Dancing' but with cops.
Packing my script, my laptop and a mobile phone, I book my flight and a room at the Beverly Wilshire near Rodeo Drive, mainly (well, entirely) because it was the hotel used in Pretty Woman. And you don’t get more Hollywood than that. There are even tabloid rumours that Britney Spears is a fellow guest and I spend quite a lot of time by the pool artfully flicking through my script in the hope that her ‘people’ might drop by looking for something better than Crossroads for her to launch her movie comeback.
It doesn’t go well. I phone Miramax. Repeatedly. They shuffle me around the phone tree and I keep leaving messages for people who never call back. Screaming ‘Get me Harvey Weinstein!’ doesn’t help because apparently he’s left the company. Perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree, so that evening I head down to Hollywood Boulevard for a movie premiere.
There is at least one premiere every night in central Hollywood and tonight’s is for a vampire movie that looks like a rank outsider. I plan to gatecrash and thrust my script under the producer’s nose. But I find the bouncers are very thorough when it comes to examining tickets. Indeed, I still have the scars.
Taking pity, a friend of a friend introduces me to his mate, Alan Braxton – a British TV writer who moved to LA after securing a deal with a Hollywood studio to develop a film and a TV screenplay. Braxton tells me that in theory this is a good time for new writers. ‘Hollywood is a little worried about 2007,’ he explains. ‘It was a record billion-dollar plus summer but most of the hits were sequels or remakes. Spiderman, Die Hard, Fantastic Four, that sort of blockbuster. In 2008, the big movies are set to be like the Indiana Jones and The Mummy prequels – all pre-sold titles. None of the indies – such as Lions Gate, Kingdom or Rendition – made money. Michael Clayton struggled to hit $21 million despite its star George Clooney going out and ‘beating every bush he could find’. So they want good writing but they won’t see you unless you have an agent and preferably a manager.
