Hollywood Tales

“I wrote a script called White Sands, which is a very complex, dark thriller set in the Southwest. Well-received, but not really — it was too challenging; it was too much. I got complaints from people that it was too hard to read. It took them two hours; they wanted to be able to read it in forty-five minutes by their pool. So, based on that reaction, I decided to write Pacific Heights, which was really my attempt to prove that I could write something very lean… I gave it to my agent and he thought it was too dark, but he put it on the market and it sold in a day. Morgan Creek bought it, and within a week and a half they’d set John Schlesinger. They started filming less than a year from when I finished it, so it was a very good first experience from an original… I got into the half-million-dollar-league, which was so much more money than I’d ever anticipated making.”

 — Daniel Pyne (Pacific Heights, White Sands, The Sum of All Fears), from “The New Screenwriter Looks at the New Screenwriter”