Who is the Hollywood Geek?
In
early 2001, I lived on the outskirts of Brooklyn and I spent
every day commuting to Manhattan to make my living as a
copywriter. In my spare time, I wrote a few independent
comic books that achieved mild cult status but never seemed
to take off commercially; the comic book market had begun
its steady decline and anyone not working for one of the
major companies couldn’t make a living at it. I had studied
film in college and had tried my hand at writing a few
screenplays – I hadn’t done much with them, but the film bug
had been stirring within me for quite a while. I soon
realized that moving from comics to film was a natural
segue for me, and that moving from New York to Hollywood was
a necessity. I went online and began to scout for a place to
live, and by mid-2001 I had relocated to Los Angeles.
When
I got out here, I didn’t know a soul, and the few friends I
made were all aspiring writers or actors who, like me, had
recently made the move to the West Coast as well (newsflash:
virtually no one living in Los Angeles is a native). It
wasn’t long before I realized that the studios weren’t going
to discover my writing ability by sheer osmosis. Rather, I
had to make my own inroads and put myself in a place to get
my material read. So I again went online in a calculated
search for any job in the industry that I could find. I
spent my first summer working as a production assistant for
ridiculously low pay, and sometimes no pay at all, on
several independent films. Those were my first experience on
film sets. The hours were long and arduous; I regularly
clocked sixty to seventy hours a week.In the evenings, I tapped away on my keyboard, producing script after script, treating it as my second job. Since I had a heavy interest in genre material, I joined a few online communities dedicated to science fiction and horror films. When the production assistant jobs dried up, I did another online search and managed to land a job taking inbound calls at an online casting company. The workload was light, which allowed me plenty of downtime to hone my scripts on the job.
On
the message boards for Chud.com, I posted religiously on
horror films, and I started to make friends. One of those
friends was Matt Chernov, a horror fan who had moved out to
Los Angeles a few years before me to also try his hand at
scripting. In late 2004, we began meeting up and bonding
over our love of horror films, and it wasn’t long afterward
that we decided to write one together. I had long been a fan
of an obscure 70’s horror film called Race With the
Devil, about a small group of people running afoul of
Devil Worshipers in the Southern United States. I had the
germ of an idea to do a contemporary take on that sort of
story. Matt, meanwhile, possessed a love of 60’s biker
films, in which motorcycle madmen terrorized innocent
bystanders. We decided to combine the two and concocted a
tale dealing with a group of family and friends traveling to
Padre Island on vacation who pull over at a Texas rest stop
only to run afoul of a group of devil worshipping bikers and
then find themselves relentlessly chased by these demonic
madmen.We worked on the script for the better part of a year, pouring everything we had into it. This was a fast, brutal, take-no-prisoners script that demanded attention. It was our ode to the sort of dangerous drive-in fare that we’d both grown up on, filled with blood, bikers, high-speed chases and demonic possession. We struggled for a title that would fit the high-octane nature of our story. One Friday evening, just after midnight, the title came to me in an inspirational flash. I called Matt up, apologized for phoning so late and then breathlessly exclaimed “We have to call it Hard Ride to Hell!”
When we finished it, we had a celebratory barbecue. After a number of steaks and beers had been consumed, we pondered our next move.
Three months later, nothing had changed. I sent out dozens of query letter to agents and got nary a response. Matt and I were exasperated; we’d invested nearly a year in this project, and we couldn’t get a single person to read it.
Meanwhile,
on the Chud message boards, someone posted a thread about
the impending remake of Friday the 13th. Having
been a tremendous fan of that particular series in my
younger years (yes, I know they’re awful, which is part of
why I love them) I aggressively took part in the discussion,
putting forth my own ideas on the best way to mount a
remake.One night, I received a private message from a fellow board member. His name was Mark Wheaton, and he was the screenwriter currently working on that film (though he wouldn’t be the last). He complimented the ideas I’d put forth in the thread, and he and I began talking back and forth about how he was tackling the script. We soon began e-mailing back and forth, and I eventually mentioned the early forays that Matt and I had made into scripting. Mark suggested we all get together over coffee and talk about the writing game in Hollywood. And he asked us to bring along Hard Ride to Hell.
A week after we’d met up, he dropped me another email. He’d read the script and loved it. Furthermore, he’d recently met with an exec at a mid-size production company who was a huge fan of the genre, and he’d gone out of the way to tell that exec about our script. He asked our permission to hand off a copy to that exec. Without a second thought, we agreed.
Two days later, the production company arranged a meeting with us. An hour after we walked into our first Hollywood meeting, we had both sold Hard Ride to Hell outright and netted another writing assignment to boot. As time flew by, we picked up a number of assignments, which are the way that most writers make a living in this town. Almost every one of them ended up getting produced, but there was no movement on the script that had opened the door for us. Eventually, we figured that it would never happen.
In
early February of this year, I was up late working on a
script when I got to thinking about our demonic biker opus
again. “Hard Ride to Hell,” I said to myself. “Now
that was a great title. I wonder if anyone else
ever came up with that title.” It’s not uncommon for other
films and filmmakers to occasionally come up with a similar
or identical title, and I was curious. On a lark, I pulled
up Google and typed it into the search bar. The first search listing was an Amazon link to an upcoming film called, you guessed it, Hard Ride to Hell. I sighed and clicked the link, thinking that someone had indeed randomly used the title. As I read the Amazon page, however, my exasperated sigh gave way to genuine puzzlement – the movie had been recently shot and was due to be released on DVD on May 25th. The synopsis read as follows: “A lonely stretch of Texas desert highway leads a group of campers on a one-way ride to hell after witnessing an obscene blood sacrifice. Now, with a group of biking devil worshippers on their tail, they are pawns in an ancient battle between good and evil.”
It was our movie. Five years later, someone had made our movie!
I
quickly rooted through Google and uncovered the contact
information for the production company behind it – Reunion
Pictures in Canada. I fired off a baffled email to both the
producer and the director. Their replies were immediate and
thrilling. It turned out that exec who had bought the script
in Los Angeles has long since moved on, and many of his
projects had been absorbed by a Canadian production company
under the same corporate umbrella. Of all the unproduced
scripts in the pile, ours was the one that caught the
attention of the Canadian producers.Why? Because of the killer title, of course.
Unfortunately,
they didn’t have our contact info – it had disappeared along
with the former exec – and we couldn’t have just driven over
to meet with them, since their offices were in Vancouver.
Through e-mails, director Penelope Buitenhuis raved about
the script and assured us that we got primary credit (since
we’d been paid long before, credits were our main concern).
The producers happily sent us a copy of the completed film,
and Matt and I were stunned to discover that they followed
our script almost line for line (only making minor necessary
changes to allow for budgetary and time concerns). And
they’d assembled a cast that was a genre geek’s dream –
Miguel Ferrer from Twin Peaks, Katharine Isabelle
from Ginger Snaps and Laura Mennell from
Watchmen! Watching this talented ensemble deliver our
dialogue word for word is one of the most surreal
experiences I’ve ever had.Second only to discovering that our script had been produced while surfing the internet. But then, finding out about it in that manner makes a lot of sense. After all, everything about that script, from our meeting to the initial concept to the sale, is owed to the internet – it’s only fitting that it should come full circle.
*Post Script: Matt and I will be signing DVD copies of Hard Ride to Hell at Dark Delicacies in Burbank, California on June 5th at 2 pm. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say hello. And if you’re not local, feel free to pre-order a copy at www.darkdel.com. You’ll get a signed copy of a movie that means a great deal to us, and you’ll be supporting the best genre book and video store on the West Coast.
HARD RIDE TO HELL
On DVD, May 18!
On DVD, May 18!
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