"I Really Won the Lottery This Time"

By MICHAEL QUINN

Do you recognize these big Hollywood names: Joe Eszterhas, Shane Black, Jeffrey Boam? No? You may know them better by their products: Flashdance, Lethal Weapon, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Eszterhas, Black and Boam are practitioners of an essential yet mostly invisible movie-making craft: screenwriting. While actors, directors and even producers gain fame and seven- figure salaries, screenwriters have traditionally been the Rodney Dangerfields of Hollywood.

But that lowly status is on the verge of a major rewrite. As studios battle one another for the limited supply of surefire scripts, screenwriters have begun snaring huge fees. In a spectacular bidding war among major studios last month, producer David Geffen bought a Shane Black script titled The Last Boy Scout for $1.75 million, which is believed to be the most ever paid for a single screenplay. Says Black: "I really won the lottery this time."

A Pittsburgh native, Black, 28, had earned $400,000 for writing Lethal Weapon. He spent four months holed up in a cabin to write Boy Scout, an action mystery in which a private eye and a retired football player team up to solve a murder. Black wrote the script "on spec," meaning on a speculative basis with no studio commission, a status that entitled him to shop it around for the highest price. The bidding started with an offer of $850,000 from 20th Century Fox and escalated until Carolco Pictures reached a top bid of $2.25 million. But the screenwriter went with the lower bid by Geffen because he agreed to hire producer Joel Silver, who handled Lethal Weapon.

Not long ago, screenplays seldom cost more than $300,000. But a dearth of innovative scripts and an escalation of film budgets may soon make the seven- figure script an industry standard. "The studios are creatively bankrupt," contends Steve Tisch, an independent producer. "I think the agents are aware of how scarce ideas are, and they're taking advantage of that."

Agents and writers have become savvy about inflaming the bidding passions of the big studios. Last month about 20 producers and studio bosses received packages containing black alarm clocks and the cryptic message "The Ticking Man Is Coming." The note described a screenplay by Manny Coto and Brian ( Helgeland about an android with a nuclear bomb implanted in its head. The next day producer Larry Gordon bought The Ticking Man for $1.2 million.

The hunger for stories is enriching novelists as well. Producer Richard Zanuck was filming Driving Miss Daisy a year ago when he heard about a first- time novelist peddling a manuscript based on her real-life experience as a Texas narcotics cop who got hooked on cocaine. By the time author Kim Wozencraft sold Rush to Random House for a $35,000 advance, Zanuck had already won the film rights for $1 million. The price was no fluke. Last month Tom Cruise paid about $1 million for the rights to Big Time, a novel by mystery writer Marcel Monticino.

The high pay and new prestige are likely to produce a bumper crop of screenwriter wanna-bes. And by getting better stories, Hollywood may make better movies. Says Black: "Studios now realize that even the best actor in Hollywood can't carry a lousy script."

With reporting by Patrick Cole/Los Angeles