"Great" is relative, of course. Take Terry Rossio and Bill Marsilii, whose sci-fi adventure script Lightspeed was locked up by Bruckheimer and Disney for a reported "low-seven figures against $3.5 million." That is mondo money in any era, but theoretically insane cash in a town where the average pitch these days is lucky to make it beyond the commissary place-mat stage of a studio's development process. We're all reminded, of course, that this is the same duo that previously made a similar windfall for their collaboration Déjà Vu and that Rossio is generally one of the producer's most reliable scribes -- to wit, the man responsible for the ride-adapting vision that gave us the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films. So for all you spec writers hoping budget strictures might be relaxing a bit, well, it doesn't hurt to know people and/or written scripts good for a billion dollars-plus worldwide. Ahem.
That said, aim high! While the money is nice, according to Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard -- the writers who scored this year's other Bruckheimer/Disney jackpot with both Prince of Persia and The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- there are far more lucrative rewards to working with the tentpoliest tentpoler of allllll tentpoledom. Per Patrick Goldstein:
Bruckheimer was already deep at work on Prince of Persia, having commissioned scripts from Jordan Mechner, who had created the video game, as well as Boaz Yakim, who had directed Bruckheimer's Remember the Titans.
"Jerry felt the first act was solid, but it needed a lot of work," recalls Bernard. "What Jerry and everyone said to us was, 'Make it as big as you want,' which really fuels your imagination. It was a great challenge for us, since we'd been writing little period films that had never been made, and now we got to work on a huge adventure story that actually had a chance of being up on screen."
So what's it like laboring on the Bruckheimer assembly line? [...] "Jerry has a very understated style -- he's calm, meticulous and intensely practical," says Miro. "His real power is that he'll hear all the voices in the room, but Jerry is always the last guy to talk and that carries the day. Sometimes he'll only say two words, but they're the ones that count. [...]
"Jerry always says that it takes five smart guys to do a big summer movie." He laughs. "I don't know if we were always among the five. Maybe intermittently. But when we were in London in pre-production on Persia, Jerry would be reviewing all of the sets and costumes and casting decisions and instead of sending us out of the room, he'd ask us what we thought of things. There are probably a lot of producers who wouldn't even want the writers there, but with Jerry, it was -- let's see what they have to say."
Aww! Though they confirmed that most of their whims were snuffed out by the exacting preview audiences of Long Beach and other tastemaking capitals, there is no mistaking that Miro and Bernard's appreciation for the Bruckheimer Method is sincere. And at these friggin' prices, it had better be.
· Disney, Bruckheimer going 'Lightspeed' [Variety via The Playlist]
· Screenwriter duo hits it big with this summer's two Bruckheimer films [LAT]