At the insistence of one of Hollywood`s premier agents, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman packed up and left Chicago, having been persuaded that a lucrative career in screenwriting was (as Price puts it) ”going to be a snap,” just as soon as they`d relocated to the Coast.
”We had written this one script, `Mr. Whistle,` which was very precious to us,” Seaman says, recounting in comic but painful detail the reconnaisance mission the collaborators made to Hollywood in 1979, to ”beg and wheedle and whine and plead” for work as screenwriters.
This was years before Robert Altman`s film, ”The Player,” so Price & Seaman couldn`t have known what evil lurks in the heart of Hollywood moguls. In the Altman movie, a studio boss demonstrates his contempt for a screenwriter by murdering him, a ”crime” for which he`s never held accountable, legally or morally.
Widely regarded as satire, ”The Player” is ”cinema verite,” according to Price, who now speaks from 13 years` experience as a screenwriter.
”It`s frighteningly close to the way it is,” adds Seaman, comparing screenwriters to ”busboys” in the studio hierarchy. ”The difference is that in real life they leave you only half dead. It`d probably be better if they killed you.”
While creative directors at the Leo Burnett agency in Chicago, the two writers had regularly commuted to Los Angeles, so it wasn`t as if they had rushed into unfamiliar territory. They`d given themselves two weeks to score with an agent, Seaman says. ”We couldn`t get anybody to call us back. Then on our next-to-the-last day in town, we got a call from the hottest agent in town. He`d finally read our script and thought it was great.
”He took us to lunch at the hottest restaurant in town. He said: `This is a fantastic script. You guys are going to be huge, huge. But first you`ve got to do two things: You`ve got to go back to Chicago and rewrite this script. Then you`ve got to settle your affairs and move out here. I`ll take care of the rest.` ”
”We did all this work on the script and mailed it off to the agent,”
Seaman continues. ”We sold our apartments, loaded up our cars and drove out. It was like `The Grapes of Wrath.` And we could never get that agent on the phone again.”
Agentless, jobless but not yet penniless, Price & Seaman hung in there for a ”grim couple of years,” Seaman says.
”A big mistake most writers make is that they write one script, thinking this is the one. The fact is, the odds are so stacked against it ever getting made that you might as well keep writing them. We like to think of it as a poker game. If you can stay at the table long enough, sooner or later you`re going to get lucky.”
It`s plain enough that Seaman & Price got lucky just from the executive suite they occupy on the Universal Studios lot, with its roomy, stylish offices and private brick patio in a building that`s also headquarters for Angela Lansbury and Tom Selleck.
A more accurate way of measuring the screenwriters` good fortune is by their credits, which are truly coveted commodities in a city where sybaritic offices are as common as bougainvillea and smog. In Seaman & Price`s case, they include one blockbuster, ”Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and one modest hit, ”Doc Hollywood” (not to mention, as they usually don`t, one high-megaton disaster, ”Trenchcoat”).
”Just say that we`re at the pinnacle of power,” says Price, displaying the comedic sense that has kept him and Seaman alive and (relatively) sane. Even though screenwriters can command payoffs of a half-million upward for their services, they are not major players on the Hollywood scene, as any viewer of Robert Altman`s ”The Player” can`t help but be aware.
”The guy who plays Griffin Mill (the paranoid, homicidal mogul) in `The Player` says the studio looks at 50,000 ideas a year, and they make 12 movies,” Seaman says. ”And that`s probably not much of an exaggeration. The odds are really stacked against you.”
Price: ”Actually, we`re surprised that nothing like that`s ever happened. There are a lot of really angry people out here, certainly a lot of angry writers.”
If they`re at all angry, Seaman & Price manage to cover it up behind a fusillade of quips and lighthearted banter, some of the residual wit that they salvaged from their years at Leo Burnett, where their colleagues included Don Novello (a.k.a. ”Father Guido Sarducci”), John Hughes, Alan Gross and Tim Kazurinsky.
Though both were raised on the North Shore, the screenwriters took separate routes to the ad agency. Seaman, 40, was brought up in Lake Forest, educated at Hotchkiss prep school and Harvard, while Price, 42, came to Leo Burnett via Glencoe, New Trier and the University of Illinois at Urbana.
Interviewed in their Universal offices, the screenwriters, each of whom is married and has two daughters, displayed a polished teamwork, finishing or elaborating on each other`s anecdotes.
Besides North Shore backgrounds, the two found at Leo Burnett that they shared an ambition to make movies, along with a misplaced affection for the Cubs, which became a major handicap the summer after they left Burnett to write scripts.
”The Cubs were really playing great that year,” says Price, ”and we were in the rightfield bleachers every day. We weren`t getting much work done, but if the Cubs won, that was all we needed. It was like we`d sold a screenplay.”
In 1983, while aggressively trying to sell screenplays in Hollywood, Seaman & Price were asked by Disney to do a script from a book titled, ”Who Censored Roger Rabbit?” ”We worked on that for a year,” Price says, ”until we had `creative differences` with the studio over the script.”
”Then we bought the rights to `Last Holiday,` the old Alec Guinness film, wrote the screenplay, and tried to produce it ourselves. We had a flashing green light from Paramount, then we were miraculously fired from the project, even though we were the producers and the writers.”
”We were in our depths,” Price says. ”That same week we got a phone call that our script for this long-dormant project, `Roger Rabbit,` was being resurrected from the ashes. Bob Zemeckis (`Back to the Future`) was going to direct.”
As it happened, Zemeckis had read the Price-Seaman script years earlier, before it had been doctored by platoons of other screenwriters. ”He had been given all these scripts that had been done subsequent to our departure,”
Price recalls, ”but he said, `Where`s the one I read in 1983? That`s the one I want to do.`
While ”Roger Rabbit” ended happily for them, it does illustrate an occupational hazard common to scriptwriters, what Price calls the ”tag-team approach” to the profession. Because each successive writer or team of writers wants screen credit, they tend to gut the previous version, no matter how filmable it may be.
”I don`t think any script has ever benefitted from this,” Price says.
”Our philosophy,” Seaman explains, ”is to grasp as much of the power as we can. That`s why we`re here on the Universal lot, trying to produce our own projects. Because every time you can eliminate one of the people who screw these things up, you`ve got a better chance.”
As a stretching exercise, each has already directed an episode of ”Tales From the Crypt” for HBO television. For now, Price & Seaman consider themselves fortunate to be working with Zemeckis (”Romancing the Stone”), a ”no B.S. kind of guy” who also comes from Chicago and doesn`t treat writers like busboys. Zemeckis is committed to directing their next script,
”Houdini,” but ”there are many, many drafts ahead of us,” Price says.
Higher on their production schedule is ”Johnny Bago,” a television series that will begin filming later this summer, with Seaman, Price, Zemeckis and Frank Marshall (”Arachnophobia”) dividing up the writing, producing and directing duties. Focusing on a small-time mobster pursued across the country in his Winnebago, the show is described (by Seaman) as a cross between
”Goodfellas,” ”The Fugitive” and ”On the Road With Charles Kuralt.”
While they have their ”little spats,” Seaman & Price call their partnership a ”marriage that really works,” both professionally and therapeutically. ”It`s a real reality check,” says Seaman. ”We get in these meetings where some insane stuff happens, and we`re always able to look at each other and go, `It`s them, right, not us?` And we always have somebody to lunch with, which is important.”
At one of their meetings, a few years ago, Price & Seaman found themselves in a conference room with the illustrious agent, who had induced them to come West, then refused to take their phone calls. ”Afterward,”
Price says, ”I asked him: `Do you remember us? We`re the guys from Chicago you were going to make rich and famous.` He looked at us for a minute and said, `Well, I was right.` ”
