(This article was written for The CBC StationBreak Newsletter in March, 2003)

My Big Hollywood Movie Writing Deal
Last summer, a Los Angeles film company called Regent Entertainment hired me to write a TV Movie of the Week. I'd met them once before, in 2000, after my first movie, "Without Malice", had come out. We'd had a nice meeting on a Santa Monica roof-top overlooking the beach and they politely passed on my script pitches. So, 2 years years later, I was stunned when they E-mailed me out of the blue to say they had a project for me to work on. But it had to be completed in two weeks.

"What?", I thought, "A 90 page script in 2 weeks? Not a chance. Can't be done."

Then I read the next sentence. They'd pay me $--,--- (mouthwatering sum of American dollars).

"Ka-ching"! One 90 page script in two weeks, coming up!

Regent sent up a 3 page synopsis of the movie they wanted. Five young men and a female doctor are vacationing on Grand Turk Island in the Caribbean when an alien space virus turns the island into a deadly wild-fire hot zone. It's a race against time for the doctor to find a cure and save everybody before the American air force bombs Grand Turk into atoms. All right, a fast-paced thriller with a bit of sci-fi thrown in, hey, my kind of movie. I immediately sat down to begin writing, sending pages down daily to Regent for approval and re-writes on the fly.

Right off the bat, there was a problem with my descriptions of Grand Turk's mountains and thick jungles. Turns out Grand Turk is pretty much a flat spit of sand just slightly above high tide. No jungles, no mountains. Oh, okay, no problem, I simply moved a lot of scenes down to the beach.

Then the five boys become just one boy, now the son of the vacationing female doctor. Again, no problem, I cheerfully slaughtered off those four little punks, they were just virus fodder anyway. Except now I'd lost several pages of male bonding and teen-age hi-jinks. And the next change was that the virus couldn't be alien anymore, it had to be something realistic, something medically accurate. Damn, now I had to actually do research, I couldn't just make stuff up. And time was running out faster than I could think of a witty analogy to time quickly running out.

With no real idea of the budget, I had jet fighters chasing down Piper Cubs, attack helicopters shooting up fleeing power boats, and a cast of thousands leaving Grand Turk on an armada of sea craft filling the screen in a Ben Hur-ian vista. A few sobering calls from the producers had me sadly hitting the Delete key, sending more pages into oblivion.

Regent was pitching this "Virus Goes on Holiday" story to PAX , a very conservative, family orientated network. This meant people couldn't bleed messily from the eyeballs or anything yucky, so I had them cough a lot and fall into nice clean comas. It was a prime-time PG plague.

Ten days in, the newly hired director called me, having just read the partially completed script. Brian Trenchard-Smith was a veteran of several low budget, quickly shot TV movies. A simple scene of a girl on a cliff watching rowboats heading out to sea, one that took me a minute to write, would take him all day to shoot. I had no appreciation of the tactical difficulties of organizing all the boats and positioning them in the choppy seas while dealing with the lighting, weather, wind, sound, blocking off local traffic on land and sea, all the while setting up the camera shot. He had other concerns, suggestions, and ideas. This meant...oh God...more changes. It would be a very long week-end.

Literally on the last day, my wrists carpal-tunneled into spaghetti, eyesight now short-focused to just 18 inches away, and with a developing case of spreading Computer Ass, I finished the script. It was 95 pages of either pure genius or total crap, I couldn't tell anymore. But it was done. Now it was up to PAX to accept or reject the script. The contract I'd signed with Regent was for a pitifully small sum up front with the rest of the pile only upon completion. In other words, no movie, no money. So I sat and waited.

And waited and waited. Months went by without a positive word. I was resigning myself to being a Third World screenwriter, making 10 cents a page, when on Thursday, Jan 2nd, 2003, Regent phoned me at work. "Oh God", I thought, "this is the "Sorry, PAX-wants-a-real-writer" call."


Opening Credits for the movie
"The Paradise Virus".
"Peter, we start shooting on Monday."
Did I really hear that? Sometimes deluded people hear voices saying, "The cat's an alien", or "Buy Nortel at 30", but, no, in actual fact, "Paradise Virus" was ready to go. Starring was Lorenzo Lamas, Melody Thomas Scott (Nikki on Young and Restless), and Ralf Moeller, a German actor, whom I remembered as being extremely impressive when he fought in the Coliseum beside Russell Crowe in Gladiator.

The film aired Friday, Feb.14th…yes, a movie about a virus on Valentine's day.

Some here at work have suggested a little premiere, that we set up a VHS screening room with some ginger ale on ice and maybe have 2 guys stand outside sweeping the ceiling with flashlights. Sounds good to me, anybody wants to organize it, have your people call my people.

I'll be by the pool.