“‘Bad Santa 2’: The sequel so anticipated it gets … two scripts?”

Nothing like two writers working on competing projects… especially when it’s the same project! From the LAT:

EXCLUSIVE: A “Bad Santa” sequel has been a tantalizing possibility ever since Willie Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) survived a shooting at the hands of the police department and became its sensitivity trainer. Now that sequel has moved closer to fruition.

Producers on the movie and Dimension Films, which is developing a follow-up to the beloved 2003 black comedy with the newly constituted Miramax, have quietly hired writers to begin working on a new film for Thornton to star in, according to a person who was briefed on the project but was not authorized to talk about it publicly.

And here’s the hook: The companies are engaging in the unusual move of commissioning two different writers, with the idea of choosing between the scripts or even using one script for “Bad Santa 2” and the other script for a third film. (The two writers do know about each other.) A spokeswoman for Dimension Films confirmed the hires and the plans.The movie is being produced by Geyer Koskini,Thornton’s manager who produced the original and has been developing the sequel for several years.

The scribes in question are up-and-comers who’ve yet to have a film produced but who have some heat in Hollywood. One, Johnny Rosenthal, wrote a period adventure called “Iron Jack” that sold to Sony for more than $1 million in 2009 but has been stuck in development since.

The other, John Phillips, sold an R-rated comedy to Universal a few months back. That project is called “Dirty Grandpa” and is about a “recently widowed, sexually aggressive grandfather,” which sounds about as “Bad Santa”-ish as you can get.

I had already flagged this for a post when Chris Drzewiecki emailed me to ask if I knew of any other situations like this. And I’m sure there have been, I know I’ve heard or read about them, sometimes even where the writers did not know about the other writer. My mush-for-brain today can’t dredge up any specific titles. So if anyone knows of other similar circumstances, please post in comments. 

And additional thought: I’m not sure the same execs will be overseeing both writers or not on BS2, but there’s a good chance that would be the case. Imagine being that exec where among all your other projects, you have to keep straight which writer is writing which plot. That could get a tad confusing at those script meetings! “But wait, if Santa gets caught in a drug sting operation… oh, wait… that’s the other project. Never mind.”

For more of the article, go here.

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