Before going any further, a warning: Reading this article may cause undue optimism on the part of aspiring screenwriters.
“The first thing some directors do is fire the writers,” says Ken Kaufman, who, along with partner Howard Klausner, just experienced the cinematic equivalent of a monster slam dunk with the recently opened film “Space Cowboys.”
“It’s a power issue. On my first movie, a director who shall remain nameless — a former TV actor from the ’70s with a massive ego problem — looked at me and said, `Oh, a real artist type,’ and then he fired me.”
Because writers are a generally peckish breed even in the best of times, movie studio publicists generally exclude them from publicity junkets. The last thing anyone back home on the lot wants to read is whining about rewrites and debates over who wrote what.
Fearing that a total lack of the customary bitterness and spite would make it sound as if they were puckering up to Clint Eastwood’s backside, Kaufman and Klausner insist that what they experienced on “Space Cowboys” never happens in Hollywood.
“We intended it to be a technological fairy tale, and our experience absolutely mirrored that, because we lived every writer’s fantasy,” says Klausner.
“Here we had this great script, which sold just like that, and the biggest star on Earth agreed to pick it up and shoot it exactly as is. . . .We kept looking at each other, wondering, How did this happen to us?”
It would seem as if the deceptively simple concept behind “Space Cowboys” would be a no-brainer. But, too often in Hollywood, the most obvious ideas are the hardest to sell.
“Freelance producer Andrew Lazar, who works on the Warners lot, was familiar with my writing and pitched me three ideas, one of which was `Old guys going into space,'” says Kaufman. “Ideas immediately began filling my head, and we hammered out an outline, which we pitched around town. Warners said `No,’ because it had a similar movie already in the pipeline, with Sean Connery.
“Although everybody said they liked the story, they felt it was too risky because there were too few older actors around who could carry a movie. But, after Andrew encouraged me to go ahead and write a spec script, I called up my old fried Howie here, whose scripts I had loved for years, and thought this might be just the kind of break he needed.”
Klausner, who moved to Los Angeles from Nashville to attend the USC film school, first met his future partner at the Bangkok airport, upon their arrival in Thailand for the wedding of Kaufman’s brother. Eventually, Kaufman — a one-time architect, illustrator and magician, who has been writing since 1991 — became a mentor of sorts for Klausner when he decided to quit teaching and take up writing full time.
“Howie had always wanted to be an astronaut,” says Kaufman. “He has great military know-how and understood technical jargon — which I’m terrible at — and was good with characters. We hammered out a script, with input from Andrew and our agent, and put it on the auction block. It sold within 48 hours, which, for a screenwriter, is like grabbing the gold ring.
“The studio was really happy with the script, but Clint hadn’t committed to it yet. . . . In fact, he had turned it down originally. Until the John Glenn announcement, he thought it was implausible.”
Even if the senator hadn’t returned to space, the writers both insisted that “Space Cowboys” would have worked just fine. The story is about heroes, after all, and Eastwood has imbued much of the film with a distinctly Western feel.
“When he straps on that jet pack and leaves the shuttle, it’s like he’s jumping on the back of a horse,” Klausner says. “Clint could have replaced us with other writers, or put the script through an endless rewrite process, but his attitude was, If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
Again, Kaufman emphasizes, “This never happens.”
The script did undergo some massaging after the producer-director-star recruited fellow Hollywood dinosaurs James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland. Along with flight director William Devane and NASA bureaucrat James Cromwell, these four iconic actors would play a team of Cold War-era scientists and test pilots who were passed by when it came time to name the Mercury astronauts. Now retired, they hold the key to saving an ancient Russian satellite, which carries a deep, dark secret.
“The Air Force wanted us to change the villain from an American to a Russian, which was regrettable,” says Kaufman. “There were a couple of other little things the NASA engineers suggested we change, but, in the end, Clint shot our script.”
This may not sound like a big deal to most people, but, in fact, almost every script that makes it to the screen carries several sets of fingerprints. In addition to complete rewrites, script doctors — including such well-known writers as John Sayles, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne and Robert Towne — often are called in as well, to add a line of dialogue or two.
“The credit arbitration process is painful, because sometimes you have to read about 30 drafts of a script,” says Kaufman. “I was asked to rewrite a script . . . The first draft was a gem, but every successive draft — including mine — went steadily downhill. By the end — after they brought in someone to do the `hack polish’ — it was just total crap.
“With Clint Eastwood, those things don’t happen. He’s a modest, self-deprecating guy, and he has nothing to prove.”
Klausner and Kaufman, whose previous credits include “Muppets From Space” and “You’re in the Army Now,” already are collaborating on two new scripts. Neither of them expects the same good luck to strike twice.
Anyway, if it did, who in Hollywood would believe it?
