Q&A: Tom Benedek, Part 3
We continue our Q&A with screenwriter Tom Benedek, a co-founding partner of Screenwriting Master Class:
You’re perhaps best known for the movie Cocoon. How did you get involved in that project? The movie was cast so well and the script has such wonderful characters. How did that process evolve?
When Fox fired Zemeckis from Cocoon, the project went into this crazy limbo. It was green lit. But we didn’t have a director. They offered it to everyone on the A list, all these directors who the studio would make the movie with, but who probably weren’t really right for it. Richard Attenborough (Gandhi) George Cosmatos (Rambo), etc. I suggested Ron Howard who had just done Splash. Miraculously, he had already read the script and was very interested. Ron’s background at that time was in TV for the most part. And the lessons of situation comedy character development were used to great effect by us on the script of Cocoon. We heightened the character conflicts and set more clear emotional outcomes for all members of the ensemble. I believe the movie really benefited from the influences of both Zemeckis and Ron Howard greatly. The producers didn’t want to make great changes to the script with Ron — but we did strengthen the character arcs one by one.
What are some of the unique challenges involved in adapting a book into a screenplay like you did with Cocoon?
Cocoon was a manuscript. An unpublished novel. David Saperstein was a New York based writer-producer-filmmaker. Within the novel, there was a great story embedded about aliens, Atlantis and a group of senior citizens in Florida. I took the large strokes of this and tried to re-imagine it in movie terms, through cinematic elements. I took a lot of chances when I pitched my approach to the producers. Zemeckis wanted to re-think the whole thing from what they had. And that is what I did. After a certain point, I just disregarded the narrative of the book and tried to make it my own. Of course, I was always filtering what Saperstein had created. In some ways, this has to be a sefless process. It was never about putting my stamp on anything. It was just about finding the movie in the story and telling the story as a movie.
Tomorrow more from Tom including his work in TV and some of his original art projects.
Tom Benedek has written screenplays for Robert Zemeckis, Lawerence Kasdan, Lili Fini Zanuck and Richard Zanuck, David Brown, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, Harold Ramis, Lauren Schuler Donner and Richard Donner, Ray Stark, Brian Grazer, Working Title, Jersey Title, Jersey Film, Chris Blackwell and many others. He wrote the screenplay for Cocoon, Free Willy and other films.
He is a member of the Writers’ Guild of America, West and the Writers’ Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he is a James Gindin Visiting Artist. Tom is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he received a Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration in Film.