Hollywood Tales

“We wrote our first screenplay in the food court of the newly opened Beverly Center mall. Mostly because it had cheap food, rest rooms, and lots of stores to waste time in. I had found the idea for the script in the back of the New York Times — a small note about a young girl, a teenage thief, in India who was eluding police, hiding out in sympathetic villages. We turned her into a strong-willed, heroic girl from Florida and in two weeks finished her odyssey in screenplay form. I was back home in Philadelphia waiting for my father to come out of the ICU after triple-bypass surgery when my partner called and told me we’d sol this first screenplay in two days. The euphoria lasted until the night I returned to L.A., when the phone rang. It was the director who’d just been put on the project calling to say, ‘I can’t make any movie I haven’t written myself, so you’re fired.’ We ended up having to sneak in line with a group of teenage girls to see a screening of our film. It took me four months to recover from what they had done to the story. Since that time I never see any movies made from one of my scripts.”

 — Mark Rosenthal (co-writer with Larry Konner of The Jewel of the Nile, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, For Love or Money, The Beverly Hillbillies)

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