After six little words, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" Harvey Weinstein is sold

By Jay A. Fernandez
Special to The Times

June 6, 2007

It's rarely a good idea to greenlight a movie off of a title alone (unless it includes the words "Pirates" and "Caribbean"). That's like falling in love with a MySpace photo.

But when Harvey Weinstein pulled the trigger on the latest raunchy comedy idea from "Dogma" and "Clerks II" writer-director Kevin Smith after Smith had written only six words of it, Weinstein's $15 million looked like a pretty good bet.

The title? "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."

For a certain stripe of moviegoer, that's a sure thing.

"A bawdy sex comedy with heart," as Smith describes the just-completed script, "Zack and Miri" is about two friends who have managed to trudge into their 30s with a satisfying lack of accomplishment. But a 15-year high school reunion and dire rent problems spark the novel moneymaking idea of pulling together an amateur porn enterprise. As for where it goes from there, just think of Smith's characteristic sexual verbosity finally coupled with matching imagery.

"It's … dirty, with nudity," says Smith. "But funny nudity, not gratuitous nudity." Well, leave it to Smith to choose a plotline that kneecaps the issue entirely. (The civilians-making-a-blue-movie conceit also drove the narrative of writer-director Michael Traeger's "The Amateurs," which played festivals last year.) Because the story unfolds during a snowy Minnesota winter, Smith plans to film "Zack and Miri" there in February (although, Smith jokes, global warming may force him to shoot at one of the poles).

In the intervening months, Smith is publishing a book of reprinted blog entries from SilentBobSpeaks.com called "My Boring Ass Life." And he hopes to squeeze in filming of his low-budget ($3 million) horror script, "Red State," by the end of the year. Smith is aiming to give the politically charged screenplay, about outsiders who stumble into "fundamentalism gone to the extreme" in Middle America, a naturalistic, drive-in feel.

"Horror is more than a dude with a chain saw," says Smith, who engaged the Christian right promotional machine for the release of "Dogma." Given his rabid fan base, Smith is keeping the screenplay on lockdown at his Hollywood Hills home, so agents, actors and executives have needed a personal invitation to see it. Rosario Dawson, a "Clerks II" star, is supposed to give it a read this week.

After her vampy turns in "Sin City" and "Grindhouse," it sounds like a perfect trilogy.

When friends rewrite friends

It was somewhere around the time that he was in his backyard grilling ribs for Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski ("Man on the Moon") and their families that Matt Greenberg ("Reign of Fire") realized he had a unique screenwriting circumstance on his hands. Given that Alexander and Karaszewski had replaced him as the writers of the horror film "1408," a friendly barbecue would have seemed unlikely.

As with most screenwriters, all three had been hired for development rewrites before and been rewritten themselves, but none could remember ever becoming so friendly with their ostensible collaborator — at least not during the active rewrite process. But here they were communing over Stephen King and some baby backs.

It's actually supposed to be part of the screenwriters code — tacitly encouraged by the Writers Guild — that when a writer is hired to rewrite someone's screenplay, he should throw a courtesy call to the previous writer (that is, when it's not a pile-on with 22 writers, like "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" or "Stuart Little," in which case most of the involved parties would be happy that you forgot to call them).

Then there are the true horror stories of when writers are set up to make the call that inadvertently informs the previous writer that he or she is in fact the previous writer.

Greenberg worked on the screenplay, an adaptation of a 20-page King short story about a man terrorized in a spooky hotel room, for a year at Dimension. But after the project lay quiet for a while, the producers told him they were bringing on Alexander and Karaszewski.

The writers dutifully called Greenberg to get his blessing, and although both parties admit to a natural tension, Greenberg, who counts Alexander and Karaszewski's "Ed Wood" as one of his favorite movies, ultimately felt reassured by their ideas and subsequent drafts. (It also made a difference that this was not an original screenplay.)

"These guys really were doing the heavy lifting during production," says Greenberg, who met with them fairly regularly. "I tried to keep my own ego in check and just recognize that, 'Look, at this point I'm an informal consultant.' " They all eventually agreed over a handshake to a shared screenplay credit, which allowed them to bypass a dreaded guild arbitration hearing. In this rare case, their civility won out over a system designed to provoke competition.

"It was really nice that a good relationship came out of it," Alexander says. "We were all on the same page." "1408's" due June 22.