Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

Ron Howard? Apollo 13, Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind? That Ron Howard?

  “Sure,” I said, “why not?” I assumed it would lead to a polite not for us thanks rejection, but just knowing that Martin thought it was worth Ron’s time meant that I’d pulled off the writing. I finally had an agent at CAA who believed in my work enough to let it actually leave the building.

  None of this helped resolve my money problems, however, which were growing more substantial by the day. Having exhausted the last loan possible against my retirement fund, I was now officially out of options. I’d put so much time into working on Changeling that there was no time to write anything else that could be sold quickly to pay mortgages and bills. After a week without news, I reconciled myself to the reality that I would have to sell my house. I’d just started contacting realtors when Martin called.

  “I thought you might like to know that Ron read the script,” he said.

  I nodded absently, mentally filling in the rest of what I expected him to say. He liked it, but he had a few problems with the story, and it’s not really his sort of film, so he passed. I have some ideas on other people we can approach with this, but it might be a long, slow haul . . .

  “He liked it,” Martin said.

  “Great,” I said, awaiting the hammer.

  “He wants to buy it.”

  I froze. “He what?”

  “He wants to buy it, and he wants to direct it.”

  I leaned against the desk for balance. I couldn’t breathe. My heart was trying to tear its way out of my chest. I gradually realized that Martin was still talking.

  “We should get a call in a few days from Universal business affairs to start negotiations. Since this is your first original screenplay deal, and because Universal is playing hardball on spec acquisitions, we won’t get top dollar, but when someone like Ron steps up to the plate they have to factor that in, so we might be able to get around six hundred thousand, maybe six-fifty.”

  Six hundred thousand? Dollars?

  American?

  There was some more talk after that: Ron would want to meet after the deal closed, there might be revisions, and there were no guarantees that it would actually get made because Ron had a lot on his plate. I tried to play it cool.

  Martin hung up. I hung up.

  And I screamed as loudly as I’ve ever screamed in my entire life.

  I wouldn’t have to sell the house! I could pay off all my bills and then some!

  But the very best part was that Ron bought the script based solely on the words on the page. He hadn’t agreed to buy it because I was a nice guy, or someone he owed a favor . . . and he hadn’t declined to buy it because I was difficult. A director as well respected as Ron Howard liked the script enough to buy it on its own terms.

  I should call somebody, I thought, starting with Kathryn.

  But I didn’t reach for the phone. No one else in the world knew that my life had just been profoundly changed, and I wanted to savor that secret knowledge for just a little longer. I wouldn’t really understand what it meant for some time, but I was cognizant enough to realize that once word of the sale got out, there wouldn’t be time to sit and live in the moment. And I wanted that moment. During my time in Community I’d come across a word in the Book of Psalms, Selah, that was a signal for the audience to be silent for a moment and appreciate what was just said. It means Pause, and consider.

  I allowed myself half an hour before I started making calls.

  Selah.

  On June 27, 2006, after weeks of negotiation between Martin, my attorney Kevin Kelly, and Universal Studios business affairs, the front page of the film industry trade magazine Daily Variety broke the news that “Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment have purchased J. Michael Straczynski’s thriller Changeling, which is being eyed by Ron Howard to direct.”

  And the world exploded.

  I assumed the sale would open some doors, but having never worked in the film business, I didn’t understand that when an A-list director buys a script that he plans to direct, the curious alchemy of filmmaking also transmutes the writer into an A-lister. Prior to hitting send on Changeling, I was just another out-of-work television writer and I was fifty-two years old, a damned unlikely age to begin a career in the movie business.* But once news broke about the sale, every studio executive in town wanted to meet me. Most of them had no idea that I’d previously worked in television. Some even thought Changeling was my first script.

  Offers to write and rewrite movies began showing up on Martin’s desk. My life had gone from Get lost, bub to We’d love it if your client would consider this and Do you think Joe would have time in his schedule to write this for us? These weren’t just requests for meetings, there were offers attached. Real offers. For real money. Serious money. Every day felt as though I had awakened in someone else’s life, and I kept worrying that at any moment he was going to call and ask for it back.

  Producing Changeling would require finding a lead actress with a name big enough to convince Universal to pull the trigger, but there weren’t many of those and most had long-term commitments that took them out of the running. The odds went down another notch when Ron reviewed his list of commitments and realized he wouldn’t have an available slot to direct Changeling for at least another year, maybe two. Movies get made when there’s heat and urgency; when they grow old and cold, they fade away. Ron said he’d look for another director, and my agent began to do the same, but I didn’t hold out much hope.

  Ron then sent the script to Clint Eastwood, who promised to read it on the plane coming back from Europe. I was pleased to think that Clint was going to read something I’d written, but I didn’t think for a minute that it would lead anywhere.

  Martin called back a few days later, wonder in his voice. “Clint read the script. He loves it and wants to direct it. He has a window to shoot it this October if we can find a star by then, but nobody’s holding their breath. It has to be someone who’s available for that specific window and has the star power to move the needle at Universal.”

  To start filming in October, Clint would have to start prep in August, which meant having a deal with an actress by May. By now we were well into April, so once again the odds of success weren’t great.

  Then: another call from Martin.

  “Angelina Jolie read the script,” he said. “She wants to do it, she’s available in October, and she’s one of the few actresses who could get this made, so Universal is going to greenlight the movie.”

  When Daily Variety announced that Changeling was going into production, with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer producing through Imagine Entertainment, Clint Eastwood directing, and starring Angelina Jolie, the world exploded again. Deals and contracts stacked up like planes waiting to land at LAX. There was a waiting list for producers to hire me.

  A waiting list!

  One of these assignments was to adapt Max Brooks’s World War Z, a series of faux reports written after a fictional zombie outbreak wipes out most of the world’s population. Brad Pitt’s company had spent a buttload of money to option the property, but since it lacked a main character or narrative through-line, they couldn’t figure out how to adapt it into a movie. So I created the character who would have written those reports and gave him a family, filling out the roster of characters with his boss and others from the United Nations and then putting him in the middle of incidents carefully chosen from the book.

  Some of the films I worked on would go into production, others would not, but that’s par for the course. After enduring decades of frustration and scorched-earth network politics I was having the time of my life working with some of the most creative people in the industry, including Steven Spielberg, Paul Greengrass, and James Cameron. Finally, finally I was doing the only thing I ever wanted to do in the first place: telling stories.

  A few weeks before Changeling was scheduled to start filming, I met with Clint and producer Rob Lorenz at their offices on the Warners lot. Clint was quiet, alm
ost shy, and rarely looked directly at me as we spoke, preferring the view of the opposite wall or the piles of reference material he’d accumulated to ensure that the look was true to the period. He wanted to know where the story came from, how I’d stumbled upon it, and any details I’d left out that could inform his approach as a director.

  As our meeting drew to a close I asked Clint if he wanted any changes made to the script. After all, we were still going off my original spec screenplay and no first draft of a movie script ever goes into production unchanged.

  For the first time he turned and looked at me with eyes I’d seen in countless movies, and suddenly it was Clint Fucking Eastwood. Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?

  “You know how many movies I’ve made?” he growled.

  “A lot?” I said, sounding like a mouse addressing a very large cat that was trying to decide if I would taste better sautéed or pan-fried.

  “A lot,” he said. “But I’ve gotten more calls on this project from people I don’t even know telling me not to screw this up than on anything else I’ve done. So the way I see it, my job isn’t to change things, my job is to not screw it up.”

  The script would be shot exactly as written. First draft. Word for word.

  Unbelievable.

  That fall, I was invited to a Marvel Comics creative retreat in Manhattan where we would work out the story for their upcoming Civil War publishing event. (Much of the structure we came up with during that retreat ended up in the Captain America: Civil War movie, including material from my run on The Amazing Spider-Man.)

  On the second day of the retreat, publisher Dan Buckley mentioned that they were hoping to bring Thor back into Marvel’s publishing line after a two-year absence. The problem was that no one knew what to do with him. Known for spouting corny-sounding semi-Chaucerian dialogue, Thor wore a costume that was stuck in the ’60s, had a confusing mythology, and a nearly invincible power set that made it difficult to put him into real jeopardy.

  Having grown up on mythology, Shakespeare, and the Bible, I knew exactly what to do with the character. I raised my hand, volunteering for the job.

  They offered it to writer Mark Millar, who ran screaming out into the night.

  Standing right here, I thought. Hello?

  Next they emailed Neil Gaiman to ask if he’d like to tackle the book. It’s not Neil’s style to say no fucking way because he’s a gentleman, but if you were to run his reply through the Polite British Person to Americanese Translation System, the response would be no fucking way.

  Finally, almost reluctantly, they said Fine, let Straczynski take a shot at it.

  When they asked what I had in mind, I said I wanted to shift Thor’s diction to something that leaned into the classic sensibility but was easier on the ears, more Christopher Fry than Shakespeare. I also wanted to work with the artist to modernize the look of his costume.

  They had no problem with any of this.

  Then they asked, “What about Asgard? Nobody ever knows what to do with Asgard. You want to put it back in a Norse setting? In the sky? In another dimension?”

  “I want to put Asgard in Oklahoma.”

  A silence vast as space hung in the air for a moment. “You want to do what?”

  “Thor standing beside Iron Man or Spider-Man isn’t much of a contrast, they’re all major powers. But Thor in a small town makes him more godlike, while close proximity to ordinary folks will humanize Thor, making him more relatable. In classical mythology gods often roamed freely among the people. You could be crossing a field and run into Diana or Odin or Dionysus. They were practically your neighbors. So there’s plenty of precedence for it.”

  “Yeah, but . . . Oklahoma?”

  “The visual contrast of terrains will be great,” I said. “It’s flat-flat-flat-flat-ASGARD-flat-flat-flat-flat.”

  They thought I was nuts, but to their credit went along with it. When my first issue of Thor landed in September 2007 with a redesigned costume, a new approach to his dialogue, and Asgard set firmly in Oklahoma, the book sold out immediately, and every issue thereafter was in the top ten of all comics published that month.

  On April 23, 2008, Universal announced that Changeling would premiere in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and that they were sending me, Brian Grazer, Clint, Angelina, and Brad Pitt for the event. I was excited by the news but didn’t fully appreciate the enormity of the situation since as a TV guy I hadn’t paid much attention to the festival. I’d never attended any film festival other than the Festival of Animated Cartoons at San Diego State University in 1979, a tiny affair that was more about creating a safe space for students to smoke pot and watch semi-pornographic cartoons than fostering an appreciation for the art of filmmaking. I had a pretty good idea that Cannes would be a larger and more prestigious event than the one at SDSU, but the extent of my imagination ended there.

  From the moment we checked into the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc—a stunning French villa built in the 1870s as a writers’ retreat, which is ironic considering that few writers can afford to stay there—we were besieged by photographers. They weren’t there for me, of course; they were trying to get shots of Brian, Clint, Brad, Angelina, and other camera-ready celebrities. But since I was traveling with showbiz royalty, I was frequently caught in their wake, blinded by lightning storms of flashbulbs and requests to turn this way or that. The nights were a blur of galas overlooking the French Riviera attended by overly cologned men in tuxedos and beautiful women wearing diamonds big enough to be seen from space. Private yachts the size of shopping malls filled the bay. The festival was a tsunami of cameras, booze, food, booze, nearly naked women, booze, six-inch Louboutin fuck-me heels, exotic cars, and just a goddamn lot of booze.

  It was a long way from living in a Skid Row shanty, half starved and covered in lice and roaches, and it would have been easy to fall for the glamour of Cannes, to get all look-at-me-I’m-so-important. But I knew that I was just a very small piece lodged in the gears of a filmmaking machine that needed celebrities and press to survive, and I was more than happy to keep the madness swirling around me at arm’s length. As a reporter I’d seen the dangers of getting hooked on that kind of attention. There’s something very seductive about opening a newspaper and seeing your photo all over the place, or doing a web search on your name to discover five hundred new hits that day. And there’s an equally massive crash when you open the newspaper or go online and don’t see your name. To be mentioned is to be validated, to be important, to exist; to be forgotten is death. Which is why some celebrities go out of their way to feed the publicity machine, often to their own detriment: they leak their schedule to paparazzi or create scenes at parties or events because they need that day’s fix of headlines to confirm they’re still alive, still relevant, still important. It’s as addictive and destructive as cocaine.

  Journalist Linda Ellerbee noted that when the circus arrives, they pick someone in authority, usually the mayor, to ride the elephant in a parade from the train station to the tents across town. The person atop the elephant thinks the people below are waving at him. They’re not. They’re waving at the elephant, which he just happens to be sitting on at that particular moment.

  The press and the attention weren’t there for me. I was just riding the elephant.

  But there was one moment at Cannes that changed my life. Unfortunately I can’t explain it in a way that makes sense. I can only try to describe what it felt like.

  The night before the premiere of Changeling, the festival arranged for an outdoor screening of Dirty Harry, which Clint would introduce. I arrived to find rows of low-slung chairs set up on a beach facing a movie screen floating on pontoons just offshore. As the sun set, composer Angelo Badalamenti and his musicians took position in front of the screen and began to play music from Twin Peaks.

  Sunset in the South of France is a magical experience under any circumstances, but as I sat on the beach, watching the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen, listen
ing to the kind of music that lends itself to introspection, on the eve of the debut of my first feature film, a profound calmness came over me.

  For years I’d been going through my career like a man running for a bus: red-faced and short of breath, hurtling from one job to the next, always afraid of coming up short, trying to convince people that I had what it took to become a writer. During Babylon 5, Patricia Tallman once said, “Whenever I think of you, I always see you with your dukes up, fighting your way out of a corner.”

  And there was truth to that. I’d been backed up to the wall so many times that fighting my way out became a lifestyle. It wasn’t just a matter of slugging it out with censors and studio executives; I’d spent my whole life shadowboxing with my past: my family and my father, the bullies who’d tormented me, and the doubters who wanted to see me fail and fall and not get back up again. I didn’t know how not to fight. I was like a boxer, eyes pounded shut, swinging wild, leading with my chin, refusing to surrender an inch of ground, trying to prove something to people who had stopped thinking about me years ago.

  But that evening, on the beach at Cannes, I realized that whatever I’d set out to prove, to others but most of all to myself, I’d proven it, or I would not have been sitting on that beach at that moment. Even if I had done nothing before Changeling, the involvement of Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard, and Angelina Jolie assured that this film would live on forever. Factor in the rest of my body of work and finally, for the first time, I knew that the wind would not take away my name. With that knowledge I felt light. Lighter than I had ever felt.

  Light enough? I wondered, as a thought came back to me from the child I had once been.

  If we want to live forever, we need to learn to fly.

  But what if we try and fail? What if we fall off the roof?

  We won’t, a voice answered back. Firm. Resolute. The voice of someone I’d known and trusted since I was a child. We won’t fall off the roof. Not this time.

  I closed my eyes and saw myself standing up out of the beach chair. Looking off into the infinite horizon, I pulled open my shirt to reveal the symbol I had been carrying in secret for so many years: that symbol, his symbol. Then, digging my toes into the soft sand, I bent slightly at the knees, and pushed off with the barest of efforts, rising into that perfect sunset. The land spun out beneath me as I arced higher, gathering momentum, speeding out of the blue and into the black, until with one last surge I pierced the veil of the atmosphere.