Written Interview: Michael Bacall (“21 Jump Street”)

Slashfilm interviews Michael Bacall, co-writer of 21 Jump Street:

/Film: Can you sort of fill me in to how you got involved with both 21 Jump Street and Project X?

Michael Bacall: Yeah. Well let’s see, which happened first? JUMP STREET started first. Jonah [Hill] I had met while I was developing an original comedy I wrote that Todd Phillips was actually producing called PSYCHO FUNKY CHIMP about this kid who is an obsessive Pez collector and Jonah was attached and the project didn’t end up happening. We got along really well and he called me a couple of years later and said, “What do you think about doing a hard R buddy cop film? And we use 21 JUMP STREET as a vehicle for that?” I said, “Oh man, I’m a fan of the show. That would be awesome.” So he… He’s a great producer on this film. He got it set up really fast and then we were just off and running and taking a couple meetings… It was always really casual, we would just go grab lunch or kind of hang out and start talking about the story and we wrote a treatment together and from the first day we knew we wanted it to be about guys who have these unresolved issues from high school and thought that they were over it, and then as soon as they get back all of the old wounds get ripped open. The drafts went through a lot of changes, but that was kind of the heart of it the whole way through.

/Film: So story-wise you guys sort of broke it down, but then you went on your own, wrote the script, and sent him pages or something like that? Is that correct?

Michael Bacall: Yeah, well I would… We got the treatment in and then I went to work on the drafts. When I would finish a draft I would send it to Jonah and [producer] Neal Moritz and then we would all sit in a room and do notes and change things, come up with new things… I’d run off and write another draft and then eventually Phil [Lord] and Chris [Miller] came onboard. So it would be the five of us kind of developing it and I would just keep cranking out these drafts and we finally, I think probably on our third draft, the studio greenlit the movie and…yeah that was the process. It was a good collaboration with some very smart people who are terrific writers in their own right and it just kind of got better and better as it went along.

Sony has already greenlit a sequel to the movie and Bacall is signed up to do that. More info on that in tomorrow’s Screenwriting News.

For more of the interview, go here.