Q&A: Jeremiah Friedman & Nick Palmer
When last we heard from the screenwriting team of Jeremiah Friedman & Nick Palmer, they were just coming off the sale of their spec script “Family Getaway”:
The pair worked various jobs while writing nights and weekend for almost two years to birth “Getaway.” Friedman acted in an administrative capacity in the minimally invasive urology department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and delivered catering for Joan’s on Third. Even with this week’s deal, Friedman was still at work as an assistant at TV producer Atticus Entertainment.
“We both went into shock and are still shock,” Friedman said. “It’s a dream come true.”
Palmer has been teaching engineering and robotics using Lego Robotics in an after-school program.
“I put in my two weeks, obviously,” he said while conducting an inventory of Lego pieces, adding half-jokingly, “Now I can write about robots.”
Friedman and Palmer said they were amazed at the speed with which the deal was made, especially considering how they spent months working by themselves on the script and working more months with their managers at Mosaic to make the script leaner and clearer.
“When it started to happen, it was happening very fast,” Friedman said. “We went from crawling to sprinting almost overnight. We were bracing ourselves for a much longer process.”
The duo broke into the business with the sale of that spec and since they had followed my blog for some time, they agreed to do a GITS Q&A. It’s terrifically informative and I’ve provided the links to its four parts below.
I reached out to the guys to see how they were doing and as it turns out quite well indeed. Once again I prevailed upon them to do a Q&A and they agreed. This is a great opportunity for GITS readers to see the first steps in the making of what I hope is a long screenwriting career. Enjoy!
First off, any news on the “Family Getaway” front?
NP: Actually, we just got a call this week that a director might be signing on. We’re keeping our fingers crossed because we love the guy’s work and would be really excited to work with him.
JF: If all goes well and he does sign on then we’ll probably do a new draft for him in the next few months.
So you sell a spec script and go through that rewrite process. Meanwhile what was happening on the development front for Friedman & Palmer? Were you meeting studio executives and producers? Talking about other projects internally with your agents and managers? What was that experience like?
NP: So yeah, as soon as the spec sold we headed into three months of what are called “general meetings” with producers and studio execs. They basically feel like first dates. While sometimes specific projects come up, it’s usually more about getting to know each other and seeing if there’s a basis for a long-term working relationship.
JF: People in the industry refer to it as the couch and water tour. Kind of like a talk-show junket for an actor. Each meeting is more or less the same but every so often something sparks in the room, whether it’s a possible rewrite, an open writing assignment or an original idea we have that an exec gets really excited about.
NP: For every possible lead, we might put in weeks to months of work, bouncing ideas, taking follow-up meetings and developing a pitch but nine times out of ten, nothing comes of it in the end. But even if the particular project doesn’t work out there’s still the relationship there with the company and the execs.
JF: Exactly. We’re actually in the middle of developing something right now with the same company and same two execs we were talking to about a project that wound up not coming together last fall.
NP: We’ve lucked out in that our managers [Mosaic] and agents [UTA] are incredibly supportive of our goals and instincts. We’ve found that it really works best, at least for us, to keep them fully in the loop and approach decisions about what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do as a team.
How did you happen upon doing a remake of “The Bodyguard”? Did you come up with the idea to remake it? Your reps? The studio?
JF: Funny as it may seem, this was actually our idea that we brought to Warner Brothers. The original came out when I was a kid, I remember seeing it in theaters and I somehow always found myself watching whenever it popped up on TV. And I think the reason is the story that Lawrence Kasdan came up with has got serious legs. That combination of action and romance, the culture clash between warrior and celebrity and that central idea of a man willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, to give his life, to protect another human being is inherently so dramatic.
NP: I was less convinced. I was much less familiar with the original so my knee-jerk reaction was pretty negative. And even though Jeremiah was trying to sell me on it, I know he at least shared one of my concerns, which was: do we really need another remake? Just like everyone else who loves movies, we usually groan when we hear a new remake is in the works. Because the truth is most movies don’t need to be remade. But if only to save the writing partnership, I agreed to sit down and watch the movie and pretty soon, I started to come around. What I saw, when we re-watched it, was a great premise, with strong characters, but set in a world that no longer exists.
JF: The original film never could have predicted the emergence of the 24 hour new cycle, TMZ -–
NP: And so on and so on. And the more we started to talk about it, the more I realized there was a really great opportunity to tell a new version of Kasdan’s original story, a version that’s as much an action-thriller as a romance and one that feels relevant in today’s world.
JF: Now keep in mind all this brainstorming happened before we sold Family Getaway and really before we were even repped. So our imaginary remake of the Bodyguard kind of became our solution to writer’s block. When it was closing in on midnight and we were at Nick’s place failing miserably to crack a scene on Family Getaway, we’d switch gears and start playing around with how we’d remake the Bodyguard.
NP: So few months later Family Getaway sells and we have a general at Dan Lin’s company, where we discover Dan’s a fan of the Bodyguard too. Then with Dan’s support, we went to Warner Brothers and luckily they didn’t laugh us out of the room.
“The Bodyguard” is a Warner Bros. movie, the same studio that bought “Family Getaway.” Did the fact the studio was familiar with your writing and had worked with you recently help you in terms of getting involved with “The Bodyguard”?
JF: Without a doubt. Especially since the Bodyguard is a straight action-thriller. I don’t think any other studio would have taken a chance on two writers who’s only sale had been an action-comedy. If we hadn’t already worked with Warner Brothers and earned some trust, there’s no way it would have happened.
The original version of “The Bodyguard” was a gigantic hit, grossing over $400M worldwide, helping to make a star out of Whitney Houston and one of Kevin Costner’s biggest movies. Has the thought of adapting such a big hit ever scared the shit out of you? If so, is there some sort of mantra or psychological practice you can give us for facing such abject terror?
JF: If you don’t have confidence in the story you’re writing you really shouldn’t write it. Now, whether that becomes a good movie or resonates with audiences to the tune of $400M worldwide is so far out of our control that honestly we try not to think about it because if we did, we wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning. At least for now, all we focus on is delivering the best script we can.
NP: So I guess our mantra is just focus on your job and write the movie you want to see.
This was perhaps your first experience with a pitch. If you wouldn’t mind breaking that down into each of the steps up through the time you pitched it to Warner Bros., I’m sure we’d all love to see what that process is like. What did your final pitch consist of? How fleshed out? How many minutes was your pitch?
NP: This was our first pitch that made it to the studio-level, but we’d already developed a couple of pitches for production companies and while the projects didn’t wind up coming together, we learned a lot from those experiences. There’s really no one way to do it. It’s just about communicating your vision for the film as clearly and concisely as possible and getting your audience excited about the project. You really want them to see the movie you’re pitching. For The Bodyguard, just to get over the hump of preconceptions based on the original film, we decided to use a power-point presentation filled with images to help the execs grasp the characters and world we were pitching.
JF: Shorter’s usually better but it’s tough because in today’s climate, they really expect you to pitch the whole movie. You need to know all the major beats so basically you need to write the movie before you’re hired to write the movie. In general though, you really want to focus on the characters, their arcs and the emotional story you’re telling along with a few big set-pieces people can get excited about. The less bare-bones plot, the better. I’d say our final pitch was around twenty minutes.
“The Bodyguard” was written by one of the best screenwriters in the last three decades Lawrence Kasdan. Has he been involved in your project and if so, how much and what has that been like?
JF: You asked about being intimated by the project and I can honestly say the stakes were all pretty abstract until the moment right before we met Lawrence Kasdan. The guy’s a giant. He wrote the movies we grew up on, the movies that made us want to get into filmmaking in the first place and The Bodyguard was actually the first script he set-up in Hollywood back in the 70’s, so going into that first meeting, we were terrified.
NP: I was doing breathing exercises on our walk up to his door just to keep from having a panic attack. But once we sat down with him, he pretty quickly set us at ease and we wound up just spending two hours talking about movies, which would have been worth it even without The Bodyguard. To then have him give his blessing to our take on his story was kind of surreal. And since that first meeting, he’s come on board as a producer and has really been incredibly generous with his time. I mean, he literally encouraged us to call him to bounce ideas –
JF: Another surreal moment there. But we should also say he’s also given us a lot of room to work and make it our own and we’re really grateful for that trust. We’re just working our asses off not to let the guy down.
What has it been like switching gears from “Family Getaway” to a different kind of movie and a remake as well with “The Bodyguard”?
NP: After six months of meetings we’re just happy to get back to actually writing.
So you can scratch “sell a spec script” and “sell a pitch” off your screenwriting to do list. What’s next for Friedman & Palmer?
JF: We feel incredibly fortunate that so far we’ve been able to only work on projects that we’re really excited about and could honestly say we want to see in theaters and that’s kind of our guiding principle going forward.
NP: As long as we can keep doing what we love and pay the bills, we’re pretty happy.
Three things:
(1) Getting a director attached to “Family Getaway” is a critical next step for that project and for the guys as that’s the most direct route to getting that movie made. Plus it will give them the chance to work with a director, an invaluable learning experience.
(2) The fact Warner Bros. agreed to let them write “The Bodyguard,” a completely different genre / story than “Family Getaway,” speaks to their talent, their take on the “Bodyguard” and the strength of their representation going to bat for them. It also sets up Friedman & Palmer to have a lot more latitude in terms of potential OWAs as opposed to being typecast as just comedy guys.
(3) I wonder how many writers use Power Point presentations nowadays when they pitch? I remember we sold a pitch to Paramount using an 8-minute videotape we edited together using film clips and still photographs. Basically played the tape, answered a few questions, and they bought it. For some stories, it can really help to give the buyers as much in the way of visuals as possible — a point Friedman & Palmer appear to have discovered upfront in their careers!
For the exclusive 4-part interview I did with Jeremiah and Nick last years, here are your links:
Friedman, Jeremiah & Palmer, Nick (Part 1)
Friedman, Jeremiah & Palmer, Nick (Part 2)
Friedman, Jeremiah & Palmer, Nick (Part 3)
Friedman, Jeremiah & Palmer, Nick (Part 4)
Thanks, Jeremiah and Nick. Just bought yourself a vat of good GITS karma!