A Hollywood Story
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 3/16/01
Comics Buyer's Guide
Okay, I'm going to start with a joke…
There's this weird counterfeiter. One day, he tells a friend, "I just printed up a batch of seventeen-dollar bills."
The friend is horrified. "Seventeen-dollar bills? You're crazy. There are one-dollar bills, five-dollar bills, ten-dollar bills and twenty-dollar bills but there are no seventeen-dollar bills!"
"There are now," the weird counterfeiter announces. "I just ran off a few dozen of them."
"You can't pass a seventeen-dollar bill," the friend says.
"I can pass them," the weird counterfeiter insists. "Come with me and see."
So they go down the street to a candy story. "Wait outside," the weird counterfeiter says. "I'll go in, buy something cheap and pay for it with a seventeen-dollar bill."
The friend waits until the weird counterfeiter comes out with a bag of candy, offers him a piece and says, "See? No problem."
"You passed it?" the friend asks. "You actually passed it?"
"Sure," the weird counterfeiter smiles. "I went in, asked for thirty-five cents worth of jellybeans and paid for it with the seventeen-dollar bill."
"Well, I apologize," the friend says. "I really didn't think you could do it. What did you get in change?"
The weird counterfeiter pulls out a handful of money. "Two eights and a sixty-five cent piece!"
I first heard that joke when I was around twelve years old and Jackie Gleason told it on his Saturday night show. I laughed for around five minutes but remembered almost every word of it. The following Monday at school, I told it to everyone on the campus. Some friends heard it five or six times and they always laughed. It's a great joke if you're twelve.
When I was 18, I began writing Disney comics. One day, I found myself in the middle of a Beagle Boys story about counterfeiting and I suddenly thought, "Hey, I can use that joke here!" So I did.
Then, in 1984, I was writing the first issue of a comic called Crossfire. I wanted to surround the title character (a bailbondsman, by trade) with a cast of colorful petty crooks — hookers, pickpockets, etc. A weird counterfeiter fit right in…and so was born Mr. Mintz, a printer of bogus currency in unusual denominations. Several friends told me they liked the guy and one — a prominent author of screenplays and mystery novels — told me I should write one or the other with my weird counterfeiter. I said, "Yeah, I should," and promptly forgot all about it.
Then, in November of '87, I was asked by a major motion picture studio to come up with an idea for a "cop film" that would be funny in the way that 48 Hours, the Eddie Murphy movie, was funny. I came up with four or five ideas but, when I went in to pitch, I never got past the first one, which was about a weird counterfeiter. Like most writers, I never throw anything away.
I led with The Joke and everyone in the room (a senior exec and two assistants) laughed. I then laid out a scenario centered around a weird counterfeiter who prints two-hundred dollar bills, twenty-five dollar bills and, yes, even seventeen-dollar bills. He also replaces the traditional dead presidents with his favorite TV stars. For instance, Merv Griffin is on the five, Ed McMahon is on the ten…and I think I even had him putting pictures of Richard Simmons on three-dollar bills.
He does this on the theory that he cannot be convicted of counterfeiting because he is not imitating real money. Though several judges fail to concur, the counterfeiter manages to elude the law. Then he gets mixed-up in a big money-laundering scheme in Las Vegas, complete with people being killed and millions of bucks being passed and…well, you really don't need to know the whole story.
The folks at the movie company didn't, either. I was about halfway-through when the Head Guy was laughing and he said, "I think we need to have a script on this."
I knew what you do when they say that. I stopped talking.
It took two weeks for my agent to negotiate a deal for me to write a screenplay based on what I'd pitched. Then I went back in for another meeting and discussed it with them in greater detail. "We'd like to see a first draft around April 1," they said. And they would have, had not the Writers Guild gone on strike on March 1.
Before that, I'd been feverishly writing, and making a number of trips to Vegas for research, including a tour of a casino's cash-counting room. It was like Uncle Scrooge's money bin and I actually got to wade around in currency about a foot-deep. (Before I left, I had to be strip-searched from the knees down.) It was going well but when the strike was called, I stopped writing and started picketing.
Five months later, the strike ended and I resumed work on the screenplay. One problem: During those five months, the executive who'd liked my idea had left the studio. So had his two assistants. When I finally handed in my script, it was to people who had never heard of it or me.
I got a call: "They'd like you to come in and pitch the idea to them."
"Pitch? They've got the finished script there. My first draft, at least."
"They want to hear the pitch…hear the overview and the selling points." So I went in and pitched to three strangers, this idea that their studio had already bought, and for which they were committed to pay me.
"I don't know," the new Head Guy, who was actually a Head Gal said. "It doesn't excite me. I don't want to put something into development that doesn't excite me…"
"It's already in development," I reminded her. "It's developed."
One of her assistants suddenly said, "What if, instead of a counterfeiter, the guy was a blackmailer?"
He said that as if that were a minor change. In actuality, it was if I'd written The Nutty Professor and — without reading it, let's remember — he said, "What if, instead of being nutty and a professor, the guy was morose and the Prime Minister of India?"
I said, "Listen, if you'd just read the script…" In fact, I said that about eighty times and I even brought along extra copies to pass out. But before they'd waste an hour reading, they wanted to find some one-line summary that sounded "high-concept"…some "hook"…
As I began to gather my things up to go, one of them said to me, almost offhandedly, "Did you have someone in mind for the lead?"
I said, "Well, when I wrote it, I guess I was kind of imagining Danny DeVito…"
Changed everything.
I was suddenly in a different meeting — a meeting to discuss a project they were eager to do. "We love Danny DeVito," they said. "We've been dying to find something to do with him." (Not long before, Mr. DeVito had made a big splash in the film, Ruthless People.)
By the time I left, the decision had been made to send the screenplay over to Danny DeVito. If he loved it, the movie would probably get made. If not, not. They didn't say this but I gathered they were thinking, "If, by some chance, this clown's script snares DeVito, we can always bring in someone else to rewrite it." Since arousing his interest was all that mattered, none of them would bother to read my script.
Neither, as it turned out, would Danny DeVito. The report back was that Danny was deluged with scripts and committed to several projects that would occupy him for at least a year. "He doesn't want to even look at anything else," his representatives told the studio.
When that info was relayed to me, I said, "Well, there are other actors who could play the part."
No, it turned out, there weren't. "We are only interested in Danny DeVito," they told me, and they were serious. They spent the next several months phoning his agents and various mutual acquaintances, trying to coerce him to read this script that none of them had bothered to read. At one point, they called me and said, "We heard you're writing an episode of Cheers."
"Just handed in my final draft," I told them.
"Doesn't Danny DeVito's wife work on that show?"
I told them, yes, Rhea Pearlman, who was one of the stars, was married to Danny DeVito.
"Well, you think you can get her to get Danny to read the script?"
I told them I hadn't even met Ms. Pearlman. I was only working with the show's producers.
"But you have access to her," they said. "Can't you approach her, like when you're on the lot some time? Tell her you're one of the writers and hand her a script to take to Danny!"
I told them that would be awkward, unprofessional and a superb way to make sure Danny DeVito never played my weird counterfeiter. They grumbled that, since they were paying me all that money, the least I could do was help them get the script to him. (Irony of ironies: My Cheers script was written to feature a certain guest star and, when he turned out to be unavailable, it didn't get filmed, either.)
Weeks went by. Months. My script remained unread by Danny DeVito, unread by anyone at the studio that had commissioned it.
At the end of a year, their option was set to expire unless they paid me a few thousand dollars to keep it for another twelve months. I expected them to set it free but, amazingly, as the anniversary approached, someone at the studio suddenly thought they had an "in" to the yearned-for Mr. DeVito.
The studio extended its option for another year…
…on this script that — as I keep reminding you because it seems so incredible to me — nobody there had read.
At one point, a producer at another studio — call it Studio B — phoned me and explained, "We're looking for a project that can star Sam Kinison. We need something that could go into production almost immediately." Mr. Kinison had walked off another picture he was contracted to shoot, everyone was suing everyone else, and my friend thought it would solve everyone's problems to come up with a quick, ready-to-go alternate project.
Sam Kinison, I thought, would be wonderful as my weird counterfeiter. So I sent the script over and the producer actually read it — the first person to do so who was not my agent. Perhaps he genuinely liked it, perhaps he was desperate, but the producer said that if Kinison would accept it, his studio would purchase it from the studio that had commissioned it.
Ultimately, Kinison decided against it without — here's a shocker — reading the script. But before that happened, the producer at Studio B called Studio A and offered to buy it for what they'd paid me, plus a nice profit.
They said no. At that moment, they were convinced that DeVito would read this script that they themselves had never read; that he would leap at the opportunity; that the resultant film would be the biggest grosser since Rhett Butler didn't give a damn and we'd all be wading around in counting rooms full of cash.
How could they forego that?
Finally, at the close of a second year of nobody there reading my script, they lost interest and the rights reverted to me. As far as I can tell, Danny DeVito not only never read it, he never knew of its existence.
Since then, the script has actually been read and optioned a few times, though I have resigned myself to the notion that it will never get made. The last Close Call fell short through my own, not-insubstantial stupidity.
I met with a producer who was in business with a certain Big Star and was looking for scripts that would thrill this certain Big Star. I described my weird counterfeiter screenplay and the producer said, "Send it over and I'll give it a read." I did, and he called me the very next day to say, "It's perfect for him but for one thing."
I said, "What's that?"
"It's this scene in Caesars Palace." And he went on to tell me that the Big Star hated Caesars Palace due to an old business dispute and wouldn't set foot in the place. " If he comes to the scene there, he'll throw the script away immediately and that'll be it."
"That's no problem to fix," I said — and it wasn't. The scene in question could be set anywhere. "How about if I change it to the Mirage?"
"Fine," the producer said. So I went back to the file on my computer and did a search-'n'-replace, changing all occurrences of "Caesars Palace" to "Mirage." Then I printed out a new copy of the script, messengered it to the producer and he forwarded it on to the Big Star.
A week later, he called and said the Big Star had gotten as far as page 22 — the first scene at the Mirage — and thrown the script away.
You see, at Caesars Palace, they have actors strutting about, dressed as Caesar and Cleopatra, and I'd described them in my script. The search/replace had not taken them out.
That's right. I screwed up because I didn't read my script.
So that's pretty much the story of my weird counterfeiter screenplay, except for this breaking news. The following recently turned up on the CNN website…
DANVILLE, Ky. (Reuters) – Police in Kentucky are looking for a customer who succeeded in paying for a $2 order at a fast-food restaurant with a phony $200 bill featuring a picture of President George W. Bush and a depiction of the White House with a lawn sign saying, "We like broccoli." Authorities say the female cashier at a Dairy Queen in Danville even gave the culprit $198 in real money as change. Because there is no actual $200 currency, the culprit could face a charge of theft by deception but not counterfeiting, authorities said.
So maybe my silly idea wasn't so silly. Or maybe some Crossfire reader was inspired by the notion.
All I know is that every police officer in Kentucky is out scouring the state, looking for the guy. If I were them, I'd put out an A.P.B. for Danny DeVito.