Latest / Cinema Yūgen / The September Screenwriters Series: Bill Marsilii (Part 1)

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The September Screenwriters Series: Bill Marsilii (Part 1) · Cinema Yūgen

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G'day. That's right. It's that time again. Time for cinema.
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Music.
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Yes, Yuga Nights, the September screenwriter series, concludes now with Bill
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Marsili. Now, who's Bill Marsili?
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Well, if you've heard of the film Deja Vu, directed by Tony Scott and starring Denzel Washington.
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That is the film that Bill Marsili co-wrote with Ted Rossier,
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and it still holds the record for the highest paid spec screen.
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So far, at $5 million.
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It's a fantastic story. It's Bill Marsili. Part one. Well, thank you.
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Let's see if I can condense the saga into a minute or two of thrilling podcast listening.
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I uh yeah no because I I
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too I do tend to go on and feel free at any
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point to jump in and say yes Bill but
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we were saying my my start
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so to speak I mean I I begun actually
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as an actor right I've done done theater uh I've studied at Circle in the Square
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through New York University in New York in the early 80s and graduated with
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a drama degree and like so many of my,
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friends and classmates I found that we had spent four years you know in theater
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training and learning about Shakespeare and Moliere and two days a week we were
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required to take dance classes and American stage standard speech and then we
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graduated and we blanked and we went,
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what's a headshot what what now you know
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you know what do we do they they have our money and
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we're we're out here in the world and so
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a number of us as theater students are want to do a number of us got together
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and formed a theater company actually to be fair my friends formed it first
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and then invited me to join it was a company called bad neighbors that was situated
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in the lower east side of Manhattan,
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and doing a lot of theatrical pieces in the East Village. And.
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While in school and everything, I'd also been very interested in writing.
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I was often writing and performing my own kind of comedy pieces and stuff.
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And when we formed the theater company, it was kind of interesting.
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It turned out to be a really great training ground for screenwriting.
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Because, yeah, because we couldn't afford to pay royalties on plays,
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and nobody wanted to see some East Village production of Othello so we were
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writing and producing our own stuff,
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we couldn't afford to pay any of the actors so every
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role had to be good right every character
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had to be interesting or a star part nobody's going to give up their Saturday
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evenings with their boyfriend to come be a waitress in your play it's a funny
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waitress and And we were doing basically high-concept plays because since we
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couldn't afford advertising,
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we, like some of the best blockbuster movies or whatever, frequently the movie
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business depends on word of mouth.
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There's something going on now called, I think they call it the Twitter effect,
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where a movie will do really great numbers on Friday night and then they'll start dropping off,
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Because halfway through the movie, the teenagers are on their cell phones tweeting
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or writing their friends saying, this movie sucks. Right, right.
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And you don't even make it all the way through the weekend yet, you know.
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And the other thing about it was such a kind of a training ground was that in
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terms of the high concept plays that I mentioned.
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Right. It doesn't afford advertising.
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I'm sorry, what? Just to jump in there, that...
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That whole Twitter thing seems to be also the generator for hype.
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You know, like I've read about a couple of cases recently with some of the tentpole
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movies, like Last Jedi, like the current Black Panther.
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They let a bunch of critics or film writers in, and they're allowed to tweet one thing afterwards.
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You know? Oh, they're embargoed except for one tweet? Yeah, yeah, one tweet.
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They're taken to a screening and then they're allowed to come out and go,
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you know, it was good, it was, you know, not that.
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They're not allowed to say what it's about. They're just allowed to say,
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like, a general reaction, that sort of thing.
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Actually, I think I had seen some tweets like that about Last Jedi where,
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wow, you went for a treat in a week. Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah, and social media has just turned everything into...
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A new culture and in in some ways i confess i'm a bit of a ludite i do not have a twitter account,
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i'm trying to peel myself off of facebook because
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i just i'll i'll be at it and i'll blank and three hours have gone by and um
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and i i haven't said hello to my daughter yesterday but i know what But somebody
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that I met once in high school had for dinner. Right.
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I don't know, blank. Why did I do that? But getting back to my... Sorry.
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I warned you, and I warned you kind listeners.
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I do tend to go off on a tangent. That's okay.
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Anyway, you were signing. Sorry for getting off on a tangent.
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So I was writing and performing in...
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My own work through Bad Neighbors. I wasn't their only playwright,
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but we were all kind of doing that.
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And we had done an evening of one-act plays, and I wrote and directed and acted in one of them.
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And after about the second or third time that this had happened,
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where somebody in the audience who was a literary agent, in this case it was
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the mother of a girl I was trying to date, she said, you know,
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you really ought to take a crack at a screenplay.
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And she was right, because I didn't grow up like in the theater, so to speak.
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I was really trying to get away with writing plays on stage. Right, right.
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You know, my storytelling sensibility was very much about, you know,
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setups and payoffs and bills and kind of more the language of cinema than stage plays.
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So when I was about to turn 30, I thought, oh, my God, it's now or never.
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Right. And I started working on a screenplay called The Invisible Choir,
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which was about a secret agent nun.
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Sorry? A secret agent nun, as you name you in? Yes. Yeah.
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Sister Audrey. If you ever want to see somebody dropkick a bad guy through a
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stained glass window, that's your movie. Wow.
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But, and it was one of those, it turned out to be one of those scripts.
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Actually, I'm getting slightly ahead of myself. Yeah. Because one of the things
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that I trust your listeners might find helpful is, you know,
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far too often people will tell stories about how they broke in.
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Right. And then they'll just skip ahead a little bit. And they'll go,
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so my agent sent the script out.
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And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's get an agent. Right.
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Shortly thereafter. I did. Yeah. So I had written this script.
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I took it through two drafts on my own before I even told anybody what it was
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about. I made it as good as I could.
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Then I asked a number of my trusted friends if they'd be kind enough to read it and give me feedback.
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Because having gone to school at NYU, I had friends who were in the film department
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as well as in theater, and some of them had gone on to work in film companies in New York.
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And one of them was a script reader for MGM, and I showed him the script,
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really just to get his feedback, and he called me and he said,
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you know, this script's better than,
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90% of what my bosses give me to read. Can I show it to them? Yeah.
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And I said, yes, you may.
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And he showed it to his boss. He showed it to her boss. They showed it to their boss.
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And by the end of the week, it was on Alan Ladd Jr.'s desk in California.
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Wow. Now, yeah, MGM ultimately did not buy the script.
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Okay. But they were kind enough, an executive named Judy Farkas.
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Judy Farkas and Claudia Sintkiewicz, who had since gone on to,
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I believe Judy's now a literary manager, but they were kind enough to recommend
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the script to agents for me and this is one of the things that perhaps people
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don't all that much know about them the way the film industry works,
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it's their job to find new talent and if an executive at a film company,
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reads a new screenwriter and even if they don't buy the script if that executive
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hooks you up with an agent,
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then that agent owes that executive a favor. Oh, okay.
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So it's one day I'll come to you asking for a favor and it's like the mafia.
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My knowledge, they don't machine gun each other to death and all those things.
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But then again, I'm still naive in some ways.
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But yeah, I was very pleasantly surprised that even though they didn't buy the
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script, they were kind enough to recommend agents.
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And one of the people they recommended me to was a fellow named Steve White,
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who then became my agent.
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He's now a producer and a literary manager.
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And where this is also relevant to Deja Vu, let me tell you,
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when I wrote the script, I did not the script for Deja Vu, but the one that I broke in with.
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I did what all the books tell you to do and nobody ever does.
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I asked everyone I knew, and,
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if anyone they knew, knew anybody in the film industry.
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Because I was living in Hoboken, New Jersey. Right, right. Yeah.
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And that's three degrees of separation. Yes. So, for instance,
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my friend's maid of honor, her son,
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worked for Jerry Zucker, the Zucker brothers out here, and I was one contact.
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Right. Another guy, his ex-roommate's girlfriend.
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This is starting to sound like space balls, Bill.
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I'm your brother's sister's cousin's nephew's former roommate.
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Yeah, you've got to be careful not to stretch it a little too far.
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There were some people who wouldn't talk to me.
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Even after I made the list of 14 names, yeah it took me two weeks to work up
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the courage to call any of them right and,
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something that your listeners might find helpful now keep in mind everything
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I'm telling you about right now happened in the last previous millennium okay
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thank you back in the dark ages in the 20th century yeah back back when,
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picture if you will a time when Facebook did not exist and nobody had cell phone,
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unless they were the size of a brick and had a battery that lasted 20 minutes.
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Oh, God, forgive me. Where was I? Oh, yeah. So you're working up the courage to call these people.
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Yeah, and I called people, and I figured that people hate to be asked for favors,
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but it's flattering to be asked for advice. Right.
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Right. So I called people. I've scheduled a trip to fly out to Los Angeles for a week.
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And I called people and asked, you know, I would say, my friend Lee so-and-so gave me your number.
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And I could hear them rolling their eyes on me in line going, yeah.
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And I said, I'm a screenwriter. And I said, yeah.
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And the conversation would usually turn around when I'd say,
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and I don't want to lopscript at you or try to be your best friend from hell
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or anything, but I'm going to be in Los Angeles next month.
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And Lee spoke very highly of you or Judy spoke very highly of you or whatever,
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and if you could spare 15 minutes or a lunch I'd be very grateful if I could
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sit down with you and ask you a few questions so that I don't waste your time
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with the wrong kind of material when I do finish my script,
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and people would blank and go oh what you use a lot of taunt yeah okay fine
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how about next Thursday day, you know? And I got a number of meetings out of that.
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And here's how I met Terry. Because when I sent the script out...
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I, okay, here's another side story, but I'll deal with it quickly.
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That's cool. When I finished the script, I was temping in New York.
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I was doing desktop publishing.
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Right, right. And for about three weeks, I got a temp gig where I was answering
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the phones and typing letters at the New Yorker.
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Okay. Right. Okay. Yeah. So I hope the statute of limitations is over as far
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as petty larceny goes. but I typed up cover letters to agents on the New Yorker stationery.
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And went down to the mailroom and copied and ran off 30 copies of my screenplay.
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Yep. And I sent it out through the New Yorker mailroom on New Yorker envelopes.
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Wow. I didn't lie in the cover letter. I never said I'm going to.
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But it got the envelope torn open. Exactly.
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And I thought maybe out of those 30 people, I could get one or two to read it. Yeah.
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Five of them said, we want to represent you. Wow. There you go, folks.
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Yeah. Some in New York and some in Los Angeles. Right.
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And I didn't know how to, I didn't quite know how to handle it.
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Wow. and I don't mean I started drinking or
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something I didn't I so I went on
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to America online you remember that yes yes
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that's when that was a thing yes and my email
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address is still AOL I figured nobody
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bought I figured nobody's gonna bother to hack that because
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they think I'm an old lady with a coin collection if I but but
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I AOL had a forum for
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writers to like a bulletin board you know
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and there was an area for screenwriters and I was trying to get some advice
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and on that that chat board so to speak I noticed that there was this guy who
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seemed to be roughly my age who was a professional screenwriter he'd broken
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in with a stack like like it seemed I was and he was really cool about answering people's questions.
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And this was Terry Rossio. Wow. So there you go, folks. Yeah, here we go. Yeah.
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Okay, finally, Bill, you got to the point.
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No, no, no, I mean, no, no, that's, you know, it's almost, we're almost talking in screenplay.
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Turn here, you know, and there was a man roughly my age, this was Terry Rossio.
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Yeah. Oh, exciting incident. Okay, we got to do some editing here. But, yeah, and I.
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I wrote to Jerry, or I put on the bulletin board, because Jerry was giving some
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advice about, you know, how to have a screenplay, what are some ways that you
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can get people to want to read it.
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And I chimed in, and I said, he's right. You know, I wrote the script,
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and so I'm getting meetings.
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And Jerry wrote on the board saying, wow, that sounds great. Congratulations.
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So I sent him a private message, and I said, hey, I'm coming to Los Angeles
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in a couple weeks to meet some of these agents.
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And if I could call you and ask your advice, I don't know how to handle it. I don't know what to do.
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And he wrote me back with his phone number and said, sure, give me a call.
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So I called him and keep in mind at the time I was living just outside New York
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City in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Terry was out here.
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Actually, at the time he was living in Corona Del Mar, which is about an hour
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drive south of L.A., But I called him, and he said, actually, that's funny.
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My partner and I, Ted Elliott, with whom he wrote Shrek and Parts of the Caribbean,
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he said, Ted and I are going to be in New York next week.
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I said, oh, you're going to be here? Maybe we can meet here.
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And he said, well, that could be difficult, because Saturday is the screening
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and Sunday is press conferences. And I thought, okay.
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I said, sounds like you have a movie opening. And he said, it's a benefit screening,
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but yes, it's Aladdin, you know, the Disney animated film.
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And I said, oh, I've heard of that. Maybe I'll go.
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And he said, it's $500 a ticket. And I said, maybe I'll rent it.
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I'll see you when, let's talk, let's get back to talking about meeting in LA when I'm there.
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But this is how cool Terry Rossio is. The following Saturday,
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I came home from a bookstore or something, and there's a voice message for me.
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Bill, this is Terry Rossio.
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I have an extra ticket to the screening tonight, and you're the only person
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I know in New York. All right.
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Yeah. That's cool. Hey, Terry. So I put on a suit and showed up at the Lowe's
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Astor Plaza, and limousines are pulling up, in entertainment tonight filming
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people and i'm standing there trying not to look like a dork,
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and a limo pulls up and two young guys get out
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one of them looking around he points at me and goes bill uh
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terry hi wait a minute and we went into the movie and sat down behind martin
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scorsese and watched this big ass movie right um and his his believe me from
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here on out i'm gonna to pick it up a bit. Okay.
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Because after the movie, there was a benefit for the Museum of Modern Art.
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Right. So they had the after party at the museum, and there's belly dancers
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and fire eaters and camels. Wow, camels, huh?
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Yeah, there was one camel. Oh, one camel. Outside.
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And I was walking around nodding at the artwork because I didn't want to hang
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on to Terry's coat all night or something. Right.
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You know, tailing after him. And towards the end of the evening,
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he, you know, caught up to me or something and said, actually,
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I think I'm going to leave. I think we're going to leave now.
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And I said, I think I'll leave now, too. So while we were at the door getting
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our gift bags, Terry said, Bill, is there any chance I could read the screenplay,
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that people are interested in about you?
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And I went, aha! And I pointed at him.
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I just happened to have one.
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One right here that's right no i didn't have
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one on me i'm not that desperate but um but i
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i said i'm like a vampire i do not come in uninvited when
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you ask things yeah yeah now
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i'm going to send you this script and in a week or two i'll ask you have you
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read it yet you know that sort of thing yeah um and i sent it to him and he
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called me a few days later and cherry rossio and if you're everyone interested in interviewing him,
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I'll try to help them and make that happen. Yeah, that'd be fantastic.
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He's one of the most genuinely... People use the word mild-mannered,
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and you only think of Clark Kent, and that's it.
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But Terry will drop the most life-changing news on you, as if he just said,
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you know, I'm going out to the store. You want anything?
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I'm going to pick up some milk. And Jerry Bruckheimer wants to buy Deja Vu.
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And I go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what? What?
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Yeah. So he called me and he goes, oh, this is Jerry.
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Ted and I have a deal at Disney that includes seducing.
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We've read 200 writers and you're the first person we want to work with. Wow.
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Yeah. And so we, he, I did fly out to LA and met with him and he asked me if I had any other ideas.
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Yeah. And I told him about a children's book that I thought would have made
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a really wicked little Christmas comedy.
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We got the rights together. The script was called Jingle, and I sold it on a
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pitch to TriStar, and that's how I broke in.
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Sandra Bullock later became involved as a producer, and we had it at Warner
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Brothers and Disney. The movie still hasn't been made. That was how I broke in.
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And now for the deja vu part, because after the second time,
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By the way, let me take a breath, because I don't think I've allowed you to
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ask a question in about 10 minutes.
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That's okay. We're our camels.
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Or a camel. Oh, we're back to the camel now. Yes, no, sorry,
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did you say hello to Martin Scorsese?
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No. Oh, okay. You didn't tap him on the shoulder again, did you?
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Actually, one of the only other things I remember was that, because all the seats had a wet...
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Little pieces of paper with a printout, like reserved for so-and-so,
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reserved for so-and-so, and a name.
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And there were a number of famous names. And then I remember reserved for,
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and it was a print symbol.
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Okay, that's fantastic. I remember when he changed his name to a symbol. Oh, that's great.
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Anyway, going back to after Jingle, after the second time I went into Turnaround,
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I fell into a kind of a funk.
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Terry called me and said, what are you going to do now? I said,
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I'm going to write a spec this time.
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Because finding a book, it took two years just to get the rights to that book, that children's book.
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I said, I want to do something I completely control.
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It was kind of charming. Unsolicited, he started sending me ideas,
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figuring if I liked one of them, I'd write the script, he'd still be the producer,
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and we'd be back in business. And I was like, well, thank God,
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at least somebody in LA still wants to work with me.
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Because I was temping again, you know?
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And one of those ideas was the basis of Deja Vu.
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He told me about an idea. He had a six-paragraph, one-sheet kind of an idea
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called Fire Conviction. Fire Conviction.
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About an investigator. I think we'll set him in the near future,
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but it's an investigator whose girlfriend gets killed.
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And he's able to use this device that lets him look one week back into the past,
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just like the time window in a movie where it's a single scrolling stream, you know? Yeah.
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And he watches the last few days of his girlfriend's life to try and figure out who killed her. Yes.
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And when Jerry told me about it, I got very excited because I love time travel yeah and,
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I think it's a great idea but what if I think
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he should fall in love with her while he's watching the last few days of her
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life yes how cool is that you know he's going through her diaries and looking
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at her photo albums and the first time he sees her should be at her autopsy
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I've never seen a couple meet that way yeah you know and I got really excited
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about it and Terry just said go run with it,
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and I spent spent a few months a couple
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months outlining it i was going great guns
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on the screenplay and at one
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point i got terribly blocked right some of that was because of career stuff
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that was going on where i was like oh my gosh why bother anymore but but the
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other thing was at one point september 11th yeah actually yeah yeah because
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as you recall deja vu opened with a terrorist attack.
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Yes, yes. And I was living in New York. I used to work in the World Trade Center. Wow.
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I wasn't, and at the time of the attack, I was working, I was temping,
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I'd been temping in the World Financial Center at Merrill Lynch, which was directly.
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The World Trade Center was my subway stop, basically. And you walk through the
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Trade Center, there's a glass-covered walkway, and then the building I worked in was right behind it.
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Wow. Across a short atrium.
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Yeah. Everyone I worked with did get out, and I wasn't working that day. Wow.
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But when I saw the second tower fall from the street, I was a witness,
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not a victim. I don't want to try and paint anything.
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I wasn't covered in ash or anything like that. but when that happened I thought,
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oh hell you think you're over something you know excuse me,
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when that happened I just thought there's never going to be a fireball in a
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movie ever again oh my god you know so I put the script aside and I didn't even look at it,
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for months in fact it was like the next following like May I think that Terry
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called me and he said... Are you still alive?
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Well, no.
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Everybody involved knew. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of that horrible
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attack... No, no, I meant in the Hollywood sense, because if they don't hear
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from you for a couple of months, they assume you did.
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I see. If you don't have a movie coming... In the case of those attacks,
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it could have been literal.
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Yeah, I know. No, no, I wasn't, I wasn't watching, joking about that.
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I mean, you know, in the, in the Hollywood sense, you know, if you don't have
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a, if you take a break for too long in Hollywood, they think you're dead or something.
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I do know what you mean. And you're, you're not, you are not wrong.
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And and in fact my my career at that time had gone a bit fallow so because i
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was still living in i was still living on the coast and i wondered oh no did
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i dwell it should i move to los angeles when jingles sold right but he called
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me in i believe it was may over the following year,
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and he said bill why don't you send me what you have on deja vu by that time
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i had i changed the name of the story, among other things.
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And so I sent him the outline, and I'd written about 55 pages of script,
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including the ending, which at one point I tried to jump past the block by just writing the ending.
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And my internal muse or whatever crossed the line and said, okay,
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we're done. And I'm like, no, there's still a whole middle. I have to write.
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But I sent it to him, and he called me and he said, you know,
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Bill, this is forgive me, I'm quoting him, but Bill, this is really good.
28:23
Got the whole thing plotted out. It's more than half written.
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Do you think if I co-wrote the rest of this with you that we could finish it together?
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And at that point, he'd been nominated for an Oscar and I was temping. Yes.
28:36
So I said, yes, you may. The September Screen Runners series continues,
28:43
ladies and gentlemen. We hope you enjoyed this episode.
28:45
There is another one hot on its heels, so stay tuned.
28:49
And as always thank you for listening to us little yuganites on spotify or wherever
28:56
you choose to listen to your favorite podcasts so until next time this is kent
29:01
saying thank you for listening and stay tuned to the one and only cinema.
29:13
Music.