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In an interview with TheVerge.com, screenwriter Evan Daugherty (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) talks about his first job in Hollywood: writing a draft of the Masters of the Universe movie for Warner Brothers.
You can read the entire interview at TheVerge.com
So that means he just kept your script handy in case any random opportunity came up where it could be used?
Yeah. But after six months it became clear that that wasn't a real thing. He was like, "I like the script, I like the writing — but I don't get it, is this a fairy tale? Is it action / adventure?" After six months it died out and my short film wasn't taking off either. So I decided, with a heavy heart, to move back to Dallas. I just decided for a three-week period before a grant deadline to write a script called called Shrapnel [which later became the DeNiro / Travolta thriller Killing Season. It did not win that grant. But I was just like, "This is pretty good, can I do something with this?" So I submitted it to some screenplay competitions and it won one of those, and that got me a manager, an agent, and within three months of winning that, I had my first job, which was doing a draft of the Masters of the Universe movie He-Man at Warner Brothers. That was based entirely on the merits of Shrapnel, and my pitch. You know, to do any job in Hollywood you come in and you do like a 15-minute pitch.
So basically, a board meeting at Warner Brothers.
Yup. At later meetings on He-Man, there would be like ten people: me and the director, a couple producers from Silver Pictures, a couple Warner Brother studio executives, and then like four or five Mattel toy executives. I remember I got in trouble at one of those — they chastised me for putting She-Ra in. It's the same franchise but it's a different set of rights, so you had to option She-Ra separately. I remember the Mattel executive saying, "We feel like we made it clear that you can't put She-Ra in this." Sucks. Anyway. It didn't go anywhere. Most scripts that get written in Hollywood don't go anywhere. There was another dead spot of nine months where I just didn't get any more jobs, until I dusted Snow White And The Huntsman off. I don't wanna say I'd forgotten about it, but I saw that that Disney's [2010] Alice In Wonderland had made literally a billion dollars at the box office and was like, "I have something kind of like that." As soon as [that] happened, everybody wanted it. We hooked it up with the same producers as Alice in Wonderland. You create a package in Hollywood — we attached the producers, and they attached a hot commercial director named Rupert Sanders to direct it.
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Yeah. But after six months it became clear that that wasn't a real thing. He was like, "I like the script, I like the writing — but I don't get it, is this a fairy tale? Is it action / adventure?" After six months it died out and my short film wasn't taking off either. So I decided, with a heavy heart, to move back to Dallas. I just decided for a three-week period before a grant deadline to write a script called called Shrapnel [which later became the DeNiro / Travolta thriller Killing Season. It did not win that grant. But I was just like, "This is pretty good, can I do something with this?" So I submitted it to some screenplay competitions and it won one of those, and that got me a manager, an agent, and within three months of winning that, I had my first job, which was doing a draft of the Masters of the Universe movie He-Man at Warner Brothers. That was based entirely on the merits of Shrapnel, and my pitch. You know, to do any job in Hollywood you come in and you do like a 15-minute pitch.
So basically, a board meeting at Warner Brothers.
Yup. At later meetings on He-Man, there would be like ten people: me and the director, a couple producers from Silver Pictures, a couple Warner Brother studio executives, and then like four or five Mattel toy executives. I remember I got in trouble at one of those — they chastised me for putting She-Ra in. It's the same franchise but it's a different set of rights, so you had to option She-Ra separately. I remember the Mattel executive saying, "We feel like we made it clear that you can't put She-Ra in this." Sucks. Anyway. It didn't go anywhere. Most scripts that get written in Hollywood don't go anywhere. There was another dead spot of nine months where I just didn't get any more jobs, until I dusted Snow White And The Huntsman off. I don't wanna say I'd forgotten about it, but I saw that that Disney's [2010] Alice In Wonderland had made literally a billion dollars at the box office and was like, "I have something kind of like that." As soon as [that] happened, everybody wanted it. We hooked it up with the same producers as Alice in Wonderland. You create a package in Hollywood — we attached the producers, and they attached a hot commercial director named Rupert Sanders to direct it.
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