The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985-1993

by Jordan Mechner

  Man, it’s different, having a boss. Deborah is the type who makes sure you’re sorry for every little error. The others I got along with better, although Mark and Marcy (the sound team) do seem to spend a lot of time bickering. In the van on the way home, Rob asked me if I had any short screenplays for him to direct.

  Two days of rest at this point would do wonders. Unfortunately, that’s not in the cards. My alarm is set for 4:20 am to drive back to Brooklyn.

  I can’t even think about the big issues, like that I’ve just moved to a new city and am sharing an apartment with my brother. I just don’t have the mental energy right now.

  Virginia wrote to say she’s getting married.

  September 26, 1990

  16-hour day, most of it spent driving around in the van. To wit: pick up dogs and trainers and bring them to set; drive to ambulance rental place and take Polaroids of ambulances for Kevin; drive to midtown Manhattan to pick up insurance certificates; drive back to Garfield Place, make pot of coffee, bring it to set. I spent at least two hours stopped in traffic in the rain on Broadway and on Flatbush.

  Today was frustrating, but I have to remind myself why I’m here: To (1) help Kevin by making his shoot go smoothly any way I can, (2) earn my entree into this NYU-film community, (3) learn something about student filmmaking. So there’s no point resenting Deborah for, say, sending me on a wild-goose chase to Manhattan during rush hour when a simple phone call would have determined that the trip was unnecessary, or for keeping me so busy with errands that I hardly get to spend any time on set. It’s all part of my education. Like boot camp.

  David read Bird of Paradise and pronounced it much improved. I should show it to Kevin when the shoot is over. And Cindy. And Irv. It would be good to get some professional opinions beyond friends and family.

  September 27, 1990

  Really enjoyed today. I got to spend the whole morning on set in Prospect Park. I decided to shadow Rob, the sound man. I asked him a few questions and he was happy to explain everything and even let me listen through the headphones. I bet I could learn to do sound pretty quickly. (Maybe I could do sound on Rob’s thesis film when he shoots it next June?)

  I’m finally starting to learn my way around Brooklyn. The filmmaking aspects of this job aside, it’s a great way to get to know a new city fast. I’ve lost my fear of driving in New York. After these three days, nothing can faze me.

  I can’t believe it’s been only three days. It seems like a whole epoch in my life.

  I need sleep.

  September 29, 1990

  Yesterday I left the set early (2 pm) to take care of some of personal stuff like: opening a bank account, getting renter’s insurance, touching base with Broderbund, etc. I did it all in a single afternoon. Thanks to this film shoot, I’ve reached new heights of efficiency in my own affairs.

  Today we shot interiors at Garfield, and I picked up the first dailies at Precision on 9th and 45th.We watched them in Kevin’s living room. They looked great.

  Yesterday Deborah gave me a blistering lecture: “Why does everything seem to be so confused with you?” It’s true; having spent the past several days as a gofer, I now have a much clearer idea of what skill set and personality would make the best fucking gofer in the world, and I’m not it. Listening to Deborah lay into me, it occurred to me that she’s not the greatest production manager in the world, either, and needs all the help she can get. Once I took that attitude, things started to get better right away. I think we’re on the road to a passable working relationship.

  Rob Sherwin gave me his treatment to read.

  Three hours of sleep coming up. I can’t wait.

  October 1, 1990

  Yesterday we shot in the subway.

  Today was Steadicam day. I made my screen debut as Bart’s friend who comes to pick him up. I got to wear a suit and tie.

  Tomorrow is my last official day. Deborah is begging me to stay on.

  October 3, 1990

  Spent my day off setting up my bedroom and office, buying household items, etc. It felt strange not being on the shoot. I guess I really should stick it out until the end. It’s only one more week.

  Deborah had this to say about NYU: “They say it’s a three-year program, but it really takes five years. You can expect to spend $2,000 on your first-year film, $10,000 second year, and $20,000 third year. Add that to three years’ tuition, and you’ve spent a hundred thousand dollars. What I would do, if you have the wherewithal – I mean, three years and $100,000 – is spend those three years working for free on every film shoot you can. At the end of it, you’ll know how a film gets made; everybody will owe you favors, so you’ll have a crew; the equipment rental places and the labs will know you, so they might give you a deal too. Take the $100,000 and make a feature! Then you’ll be a filmmaker.” She sighed and said: “But no one ever does that. They come around like you’re doing, and ask a lot of questions, and I tell them what I just told you, and then they go off and enroll in the program.”

  October 4, 1990

  Ambulance/extras day. It rained. I’m definitely coming down with a virus.

  I promised to work tomorrow (half day) and Tuesday and Wednesday. Deborah was thrilled.

  October 6, 1990

  The phone man came yesterday and changed my life. Three weeks of calling people from pay phones, and I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to have a phone in the house. Any time I feel like talking to someone, I can just pick up the phone and call. Wow. An amazing luxury.

  Talked to Roland, Ann Norton, Robert, Brian, and, this morning, Tomi. I also bought a modem and hooked into Broderbund’s QuickMail system.

  What will I do when this shoot is over? Put a final polish on Bird of Paradise, of course, and send it off. Start thinking about ideas for short films. Start working on the Prince 2 design. The Mac Prince graphics. And maybe, just for fun, rent a 16mm camera and shoot a roll of film…

  October 8, 1990

  An expensive day. Acquired a CD player ($270) and a Mac color card and monitor ($1,000). But it had to be done.

  Robert read Bird of Paradise and really liked it. It was very gratifying.

  Tom Marcus called to bring me up to date on Nintendo licensing. They’ve been stalling Virgin in hopes that a major Japanese player will make an offer. Hope they don’t lose the whole thing.

  October 10, 1990

  Shoot’s over. Mark Netter was hilarious during dailies, doing ad-lib voice-overs that had us on the floor. The wrap was quite emotional, actually. Rode home with Mark, Nick Sigman and Jenniphyr Goodman. “I’m gonna get so depressed,” Mark said. “Post-partum depression.” He and Nick tried to cheer themselves up by blasting Rockabilly Classics.

  Finally met the elusive Jackie Garry, who everyone has been telling me is from my hometown. To my relief, she’d hated high school. “Couldn’t wait to get out of there,” she said. Saved me from a round of whatever-happened-to.

  October 11, 1990

  Two DHL packages arrived this morning, one containing a spanking-new color monitor, the other one from Brian containing Studio 8 and Macromind Director. I downloaded Leila’s latest graphics via QuickMail (90 minutes for 6 screens). Happily, they look good.

  November 16, 1990

  I’d forgotten how gloriously warm and sunny New York can sometimes be for a few days in late fall, just when you’re getting resigned to winter.

  Asbury Film Festival. The best were “Balance” from Germany and “Lunch Date” by a Columbia film student.

  A lady named Claire Edgeley called me from Domark (UK) to say how excited they all are about Prince and to request publicity materials. We set up an appointment for a phone interview with a British journalist on Tuesday. Exciting!

  November 19, 1990

  David and I spent the day fooling around with t
he new video camera. It’s an amazing piece of engineering. I hadn’t realized the technology had come so far. Compared to the VHS camcorders I used for Prince of Persia, it’s utterly tiny, and delivers a warmer and more consistent color image than I’d thought possible without special lighting. Could definitely shoot a movie with this… If only it were possible to edit it!

  November 26, 1990

  Larry Turman called to tell me his thoughts on Bird of Paradise. “You’re a good writer,” he said. “I thought so before and I think so now. What a damned unusual story you’ve written! Where in tarnation did you come up with that?”

  He doesn’t want to produce it. “Don’t ask me why. There’s nothing I can really point at and criticize. It’s all of a piece; it hangs together… Why do I want to produce one movie and not the other? I don’t know. It’s like picking out a tie. It’s so damned hard to get a picture made, as you know at one remove from In the Dark. Maybe my head liked it a little better than my heart.”

  He said he’d give it to his partner to read, and also offered to put me in touch with some agents if it doesn’t work out with the ones I sent it to. What a guy! He didn’t have to be that nice to me.

  November 28, 1990

  Good news from Broderbund on two fronts. It looks like the sequel is going to happen. And, the Virgin Mastertronics deal has been signed! They hope to have both Nintendo and GameBoy cartridges out by Christmas ’91. Maybe I’ll make out OK after all.

  December 12, 1990

  Brian sent me an Amiga computer so I could look at what the competition is doing. I went out and bought Shadow of the Beast II and played it for a good four hours, most of that time spent waiting for it to load. Nice parallax scrolling, atmospheric music, and a smashing opening sequence that makes me ashamed of every review that ever called Prince “cinematic” (because what Prince is, really, is theatrical). Beast II is also insanely difficult, and the 45 seconds it takes to restart every time you die makes it infuriating to play. Yet it’s the #1 Amiga game right now. Maybe it’s the adventure element that people find appealing. If there were some way to get that into Prince 2…

  December 13, 1990

  Deep in game design mode. Tomi offered some good ideas, and I went out and bought 1001 Nights and played Beast II some more and Prince all the way through (finished with 28 minutes left!), but I’m still basically at a loss.

  Goddamn computer games. I’m torn between never wanting to see another one, and wishing I were back in California starting my own development team so I could take two years and create something that would blow Beast II out of the water.

  No… the way I’m doing it is right. In two years there’ll be computers with CD-ROM and the need for live-action footage. By then I’ll have made some movies, and know my way around a film set. I’ll be in a perfect position to raise some capital and put together a really hot development team to launch a new line of interactive CD-ROM games. If Doug’s still running Broderbund, he’d back me in a second. They all would. I’ll be an irresistible combination of new kid on the block and old familiar face.

  So I’m doing all the right things. *sigh…*

  December 20, 1990

  Jim Alex called from LA to say he’s got someone who wants to do In the Dark as a TV Movie-of-the-Week. Will wonders never cease.

  Brian says there’s a store in Alabama that has Prince stocked 45 deep. It’s their top-selling entertainment title, surpassing King’s Quest V and everthing else. Wow. Why Alabama?

  January 19, 1991

  I gave Kevin Burget a copy of Prince of Persia to play at the office and he’s really into it. It’s impressed him deeply. Some of the people in his office had already heard of it. Very gratifying.

  January 23, 1991

  I did read most of the 1001 Nights and I did spend a couple of hours doodling on the POP 2 game design, but have nothing concrete to show for it.

  Sequel

  January 24, 1991

  [San Francisco] Man, it’s great to be back. When I got into my rented car and hit Highway 280, I laughed out loud, I was so thrilled. The trees, the colors, the quality of the sunlight… San Francisco is the most beautiful city on the planet. It’s a wonderfully reassuring feeling to return and realize that my old life is still here, waiting for me, if I want it.

  The good news is, they’re truly hot to do POP 2. Over lunch at Gulf of Siam with Brian and Alan Weiss, Ann Kronen covered her entire placemat with ball-point notations. She was in her most no-nonsense mode, like a businesswoman in a TV commercial, leaning forward and saying things like “Brian, that’s your department.” Doug must have lit a fire under her in this morning’s priority meeting. Since she’d responded to all my previous Prince 2 proposals (the first in May ’90) with a batting of eyelashes and a “Let’s wait and see” smile, I found today’s encounter immensely gratifying. Best of all, it looks like Lance is back in the running to get this assignment.

  Toward the end of lunch, I decided there would never be a better moment, and brought up the royalty rate. Brian, bless his heart, stepped right in with the 8% figure. Ann took it with a brave blink. Brian went right on and said: “Doug waffled at first on the 8%, but because of the success of Prince 1 in Europe and Japan, and the strength of Jordan’s name, and in view of the contribution he’s going to make on the sequel, he finally said it was OK.” The way Brian presented it, Ann had no choice but to agree. I asked for 8% and, amazingly, that’s what I’m getting. Victory is sweet.

  Before I left, I dropped by Doug’s office. Kazue was there, and Jeannine Cook, and Doug’s parents. Doug’s father told a story about someone’s grandchildren shouting “Who’s for POP?” as they ran downstairs, and he didn’t know what it stood for.”

  “I thought it stood for ‘point-of-purchase,’” I said.

  Doug laughed. “Not any more.”

  Paid a visit to Presage in El Cerrito. It looks like Scott’s finally getting close to finished. My visit seemed to cheer everyone up. Funny how you can motivate someone to work harder just by showing up.

  January 28, 1991

  Eight exhausting hours of meetings at Broderbund, pushing Prince 2 on all fronts. But it’s easy, with the wind at my back. The powers-that-be have given this project the coveted “Group 1 Priority” and suddenly no one can say no to me.

  I don’t understand why they think this can be a Christmas 1991 release. There’s no such thing as a six-month development cycle. If even one thing goes wrong, we’ll miss Christmas. And something always goes wrong. I won’t even be here to run the project; I live 3,000 miles away now. Why is everyone – including me – pretending that this schedule is realistic? This is the kind of thinking that went into the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  Anyway, I’m dutifully assembling the players one by one, proceeding just as if this weren’t insane.

  February 2, 1991

  Brian said that after talking among themselves, they are now leaning toward making Prince 2 a real splashy showcase for multiplane scrolling, CD-I upward compatibility, etc., with a “cinematic” opening sequence to rival Wing Commander and King’s Quest V. This would mean it would be a “right-after-Christmas” release. Sensing Doug’s hand in this, I of course agreed.

  I’m in George Hickenlooper’s apartment in Pasadena. He’s playing Prince of Persia on his monochrome LCD laptop.

  February 11, 1991

  [Back in NY] I called Ken Sherman and told him I want him to represent me as a screenwriter. He was glad.

  Prince appeared in the #10 slot on the Egghead bestseller list for Sept.-Oct. That was a surprise. Could it be that this game is going to be a hit after all?

  Domark signed a licensing deal to do an 8-bit Sega version for Europe.

  Brian sent me a copy of a two-page spread ad in Login for the new 68000 version: “Finally, Prince of Persia comes to the 68000 computer,”
with a picture of the Prince jumping from one computer screen to another. Two pages! Very cool.

  A letter from Fumiko Feingold, asking me to sign a get-well card to her nephew in Japan, who’s a Karateka and POP fan and was thrilled to read in Login that I live in Chappaqua.

  Laid out like that, it sounds quite wonderful, doesn’t it?

  February 19, 1991

  Watched the rushes in class today. Ours came out pretty well. When it was over, people clapped and someone shouted “Good photography!” I wouldn’t say ours was the best, but it was probably the most consistent, considering that we stuck to our allotted three rolls of film (few other groups did) and shot only one take of most setups. Some of our shots were even aesthetically pleasing, in a mild way. I’m not about to start calling myself a D.P., but at least I didn’t fuck up. I’m more than happy.

  It’s a magical thing, to see someone or something you’ve photographed projected upon that screen in front of an audience. Somehow, what appears is more than what you recorded; it has a reality of its own. My mind is starting to churn looking for things to shoot. I wish I had an Arri S right here so I could load it.

  January royalty check came in at $56,000. I’m still in a daze. That’s the whole next year paid for right there. I guess now I can stop worrying about money.

  I wonder where it came from. Nintendo? Sega? Japan? The royalty statement doesn’t say.

  February 28, 1991

  The ground war is over. We lost 26 people, or something like that. Pretty amazing. I thought it would be a long drawn-out bloodbath that would sap our spirit and divide the country.

  Bush was right and I was wrong. What disturbs me, though, is the dissociation between his real thinking and planning, and the words he uses to justify his actions to the public. It’s the CIA mentality: As long as what we’re doing is right, we can take whatever official line is necessary to make it happen.

  I had an argument with Dad about this last night. Me, while I can admire Bush’s diplomatic skill, his strategy and tactics (I’m almost certain he deliberately suckered Saddam into invading Kuwait so that we’d have a pretext for destroying him), I don’t like being lied to like a child on national television. We’re old enough to fight for our country, but not to be told why we’re fighting?