Update: Rookie scribe’s movie “Brooklyn’s Finest”
Back in August 2008, I posted this fantastic story about Michael C. Martin, a complete Hwood outsider who wrote a spec screenplay and the rest, as they say, is history:
In 2005 a car accident left him injured and his 1991 Lincoln Mark VII totaled. While he would need three months of physical therapy to deal with a bulging disc in his back, his obsession focused less on mending than on making some extra cash to buy a new car. Surfing the Web one day he came across a call for submissions in a screenwriting competition. The grand prize was $10,000. So he began to write the first scenes of what he called “kind of an epic”: the intertweaving stories of three police officers who have misplaced their moral compasses and grown to hate themselves a little along the way.
About a year after the contest Mr. Martin’s agent submitted the script to Warner Bros. on spec for a job writing the sequel to the urban cult film “New Jack City.” It landed in a pile of scripts on the desk of the producer Mary Viola. She liked it so much that she not only wanted Mr. Martin to do the “New Jack City” project but proposed that the “Brooklyn’s Finest” script be made into a feature-length movie.
Within weeks the project got the go-ahead. Mr. Martin was paid $200,000 for the script with handsome box-office incentives. After Mr. Fuqua came on board, the big-name cast (Wesley Snipes also stars as a drug dealer recently released from prison) quickly signed on, many taking large pay cuts to work on the film, budgeted at about $25 million.
An update: Brooklyn’s Finest got produced and is slated for release March 5, 2010. Here’s the trailer just released yesterday:
Looks great. Strong cast. Every lead character flawed and under pressure. And some great bits of dialogue like, “I don’t want God’s forgiveness, I want God’s help.”
Congrats to Michael Martin. Hope Brooklyn’s Finest is a hit.