PVW: How did you become involved with A Nightmare on Elm Street?

CS: That was a Hollywood boot camp experience. Clive Barker had actually recommended John and I. We were invited to pitch because we were working on this one project and doing a rewrite on this really ridiculous film, Class of 1999 - the exciting sequel to Class of 1984, which was recently stolen and redone as The Faculty [laughs]. High schools of the future controlled by gangs, then killer robot teachers. Later on it became this brilliant new film about high schools being invaded by killer alien teachers. That gives you a little insight into Hollywood [laughs]. We were invited in to pitch, and they were having a cattle call of writers, and for some reason they liked what we had to say.

PVW: How did you feel about the final product?

One of the first things I said going in the door was the first order of business is everyone graduates from high school. Let’s change the landscape a little bit here: scary things happen to people other than high school students. Freddy, Alice, and she’s pregnant were the basic jumping off points we were given. OK, so Freddy’s been kicked out of the world again and he wants back in but he can’t get back in. Alice and friends graduate from high school, and her boyfriend is the college football jock. He’s going off on a scholarship, she’s a working class girl from the wrong side of the tracks, and they’re having their last thing together, it’s gonna break up, it’s all heartbreak and then he gets her pregnant. What we wanted to do is take Nightmare on Elm Street in this one and talk not about the nightmares that you have necessarily when you’re sleeping, but the nightmares you have about the dreams of your life. These people are all graduating from high school, and they’re looking at what the rest of their lives are going to be like. They all have dreams and they’ve all got nightmares.

"We were trying to chart what it is that makes a sociopath, and we started noticing parallels between Freddy Krueger and Charles Manson."

So we had Freddy over there who can’t get back in. Except he could come back in through her baby. And because of the collective unconscious, the Jungian thing about that place where we all link up to each other, that’s where he went. He came up through the dream pool - originally it was called The Dream Pool, our working title. We wanted the dream pool to be this image of Freddy coming back up through that subconscious place, then finding her sleeping, unborn child. A child in the womb is in a perpetual dream state. He wanted to take that over. Freddy needed to be back in the world and the best way he could do that and be the lovable, awful Freddy Krueger we all know is to recreate the circumstances that first turned him into what he was: bastard son of a thousand lunatics. We were trying to chart what it is that makes a sociopath, and we started noticing parallels between Freddy Krueger and Charles Manson. We wanted to run with that and make it kind of a grown-up horror story. Of course we all know what happened with that. We were so young, so naïve, so unknowing in the ways of Hollywood.

We wanted to do what I thought would be legitimately cool stuff. But Hollywood being what it is, they hire you to do a thing, and the second they got you they proceed to dismantle everything that you’re there to do. So you’re basically engaging this highly paid form of torture. They’re paying for your time and your creativity, but they’re going to systematically dismantle your authority as the writer. With books it’s completely different - almost totally opposite - than in Hollywood. Everyone in Hollywood has one third of a screenplay. The old shtick is that everybody’s got a screenplay, but that’s not true. Screenplays are usually in three acts and writing an entire screenplay, that’s hard. So everybody’s got the first act of a screenplay, and they’re just looking for somebody to put it in development so they can finish it. You can have a decent idea and get one act out of it, and you can have an idea for an ending. It’s the middle act where you’ve got to link everything together. How many movies have you seen where it starts off great, it might have even ended great, but in the middle it kind of unraveled? Act Two is where it gets hard.

There’s an old joke: a Hollywood producer with an idea is like an 80-year old man with an erection - they’re so thrilled they even have one they want to show it to everyone, and it doesn’t matter if its any good. Everyone thinks they can write. They’re just too busy or too important or too this or too that, and nobody can point out the fact that everybody’s full of shit. They don’t want to admit that, so they bring you in because you have such great ideas, but the second you actually try to do any of them, you’ve got fifteen cooks in the kitchen trying to change it. Pretty soon, the thing’s done by committee, it’s completely unraveled and you are just basically reduced to a typist. You’re trying desperately to perform some form of creative alchemy on this increasing abortion of a project. You’re trying to hold it together and make everyone happy and serve so many different masters. I stay in because I genuinely love movies, and I guess Hollywood’s just what you have to go through to get there.

I’ve come to the conclusion that good movies are made in spite of the process, not because of it. If you see the whole movie and you go "wow, that was great," it was against best efforts. The system is designed to do everything under the sun to screw it up.

"If you don’t have anything to actually do on a shoot, there is nothing in the world more tedious than being on a movie set."

PVW: Were these the experiences that you had on Volcano: Fire on the Mountain?

CS: That was one of the rare exceptions. One of the reasons why there is such a gap between the last Skipp & Spector book and my new book is that I was about a hundred pages into my new novel when all of a sudden The Light at the End got optioned and I was adapting it. That started a process of about three-and-a-half to four years where I was working back to back, mostly in television - going from one project to another. I was writing and working constantly, but very little ever got produced. It was languishing in that zone called "development hell." That’s the irony of the writer in Hollywood: you can work constantly, but nobody ever sees it, because for every movie that you see, there are at least thirty that were in development never made it out, and from those there are at least another hundred that are trying to get into development. It’s astonishing the number of scripts that get generated, and projects that people try to get set up versus the ones that actually come out. It’s a fraction. There were projects that I was working on for two, three, four years, trying to get them going. And then Fire on the Mountain just came from out of nowhere. I had worked with the producers before, we had a really great relationship. The exec at ABC had just come in from Hearst Entertainment and he inherited this project. It was a project that was already in motion at the time when Dante’s Peak and Volcano were racing each other. It was steam engine time: TV wanted to get one and ride the wave, so this movie was going to get made.

One day I came home to fifteen messages on my answering machine: "where are you, call us, you’re hired, save us." All of a sudden there’s a knock at the door and there’s a messenger handing me a script. I opened up the script, sat down to read it, started laughing. When I met with them, and they asked me what I wanted to do, what kind of changes I had in mind. I held the script up. "See this?" I tossed it and said "You can’t fix this. That’s the problem, it’s un-fixable. But we can bag this, take the basic story that you guys already developed and I’ll go another way with it." I wrote five drafts in two and a half weeks. And it got green-lit off of hour one. While I was writing hour two, they were in helicopters over Vancouver scouting locations.

It was weird, because here are these projects out there still in development hell, or in turnaround, and this weird little Irwin Allen on a shoestring project gets picked up and made in record time. When they were shooting, it was sub-zero temperatures. If you don’t have anything to actually do on a shoot, there is nothing in the world more tedious than being on a movie set. The only thing worse than being bored would be being bored and freezing. I went up for the ski lodge scenes. At one point I was over at the monitor watching them orchestrate this whole big thing and the director was doing the blocking and that ad lib stuff that always happens during the moment. They were reblocking the scene and Brian Kerwin, who plays the lead, asked "what am I supposed to say?"
And the director said "Hey, wait a minute, the writer’s here."
And he turned around and yelled across the room "What does he say?" I was sitting there staring at the monitor and I’m like "Who me? Uh, he says this."
And I threw a line back. The whole room just stopped, and then the director said "Yeah, that’s good." And they shot it on the spot. It was one of those times when you feel you have some particle of control.

PVW: Do you have any more film projects in the works that you’re at liberty to discuss?

CS: I recently spent two years adapting F. Paul Wilson’s The Tomb for Beacon Pictures. Officially I did about five drafts; unofficially I did about 15. As with all things, I ran my contract out and now Beacon is in bed with Universal on it. They brought in Scott Neimerfrau from Tales of the Crypt, he worked on it for about a year, and now I hear they’re off looking for new writers. I wish them luck, I hope it gets made. I enjoyed working on it, and it was great that I had Paul [Wilson]’s approval: he e-mailed me when he found out I was hired, and said he was glad they picked me. I did what I could, and tried to be mindful of his fans, and the fact that if this thing gets made they’re going seeing the movie, and I didn’t want them to be disappointed. I wanted it to do all the things it had to do to be a big Hollywood movie, but still be true to the story. Fool that I am, I believe it is possible to make something that the average person who’s never read the book will like, and yet people who read the book will also like.

Page 3. Spector talks about StealthPress.com

Interview Copyright 2000 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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