I guess it’s about time I confessed: Yes, I helped develop Piranha 3-D.
I am definitely bound to see it this weekend. Whether I see it in 3D or not is questionable, since it’s so unreliable these days. But I’ll be there, hoping for packed, laughing houses of moral degenerates. That’s what we were aiming for from the start.
Will my name be in the end credits? I have no idea, but odds are way, way against it. Will I make any money if it is successful? Not a dime. But I still feel a measure of pride, and hope the final product is something like what we envisioned back at the start.
So what did I do?
Well, when you see the producing credits, two names should appear somewhere in the list: “Marc Toberoff” and “J. Todd Harris”. They were my bosses during the last stop on my development career, at a company with the thrilling name of Intellectual Properties Worldwide. Marc was an IP attorney who specialized in finagling a rights position on old movies, TV shows, and the like and developing big screen versions for studios. I already thought we were doing the devil’s work at the time, but when it comes to branded titles, we were just ahead of the curve.
My job was director of development, the definition of which shifts from company to company, but I always saw it as working full-time on the creative side of the producer’s workload. The business/legal/dealmaking side, the logistical/physical production side, other colleagues of mine focused on that; I cared exclusively about the creative content. This ranged from conceiving of and drafting story treatments to shop to writers, to trolling E3 and Comic-Con for new properties, to keeping my eyes and ears open for new writing and/or directing talent, to reading piles and piles of old books whose authors we represented, on the off chance we’d overlooked gold.
We had a trio of horror titles into which we invested a lot of time and effort: It’s Alive, C.H.U.D., and Piranha. For awhile after my script sale I was actually going to write C.H.U.D., and had done a new mythology/backstory for the creatures along with some preliminary outlining. But I decided that it wasn’t the best idea for me to be doing (long story, won’t get into it in public).
Instead I brought on Ashley Miller & Zack Stentz, a pair of awesomely nerdy and talented writers who have since gone on to write for The Sarah Connor Chronicles as well as writing the upcoming Thor and X-Men: First Class movies. They wrote a far cooler script than I ever would, and for all I know it’s gathering e-dust on some hard drive somewhere, because I have seen no news that it’s actually in active development.
We were getting a Piranha script from Josh Stolberg and his partner Pete Goldfinger. J. Todd and Josh went way back, and Josh and I had become friendly as we tinkered with different projects over the years. His career was blowing up, his scripts Good Luck Chuck and The Passion of the Ark (which got so mangled on the way to becoming Evan Almighty that his name’s not even on it anymore) were blowing up the spec market to the tune of seven figures. But he kept working with us because he liked the projects we brought him, and he liked the notes he got from me. Having worked on both sides of the table, I can tell you what an incredible currency good notes and a d-exec who understands what you are doing can be.
Josh and Pete wrote this sprawling, disgusting, hilarious spectacle with dozens of major characters and page after page of bloody “gags” built around the premise of prehistoric giant piranha feasting on Spring Breakers at Lake Havasu. Unlike the normal process, they were actually turning in scenes and sequences as they were written, rather than making us wait for a full script.
I remember the first sequence they wrote involved four young teen smoochers having a sexy night out that turns so, so bad the next morning because of a pair of handcuffs and a malfunctioning parking brake near a cliff over the water. I think the first draft of that scene alone ran over 30 pages. A lot of my job was coaxing all this enthusiasm for combining hot teens with violence (worth noting: Josh went on to write this year’s Sorority Row remake) into shape as a lean and nasty feature that, nonetheless, played fair to all its plotlines and characters.
Probably my biggest achievement was a kind of family tree for all the characters they had created – combining and eliminating some, and tracking their movement geographically and chronologically through the plot. One character in specific I created out of thin air to solve a number of problems they had written us into out of sheer no-looking-back zeal. I’ll be watching to see if he still exists in the filmed version.
Once we had a script that got us all excited, it was time to find a director. Knowing that we were coming out of the Roger Corman tradition (this franchise alone helped launch the likes of Joe Dante and James Cameron), it just seemed to make sense to honor by matching it with an up-and-coming director.
So I trolled the usual websites, looked at what was playing at horror/sci-fi festivals – sought out what was getting people excited. From that I culled a list of 6-10 directors we wanted to get to know better. One of those names was Alex Aja.
At the time, Aja’s French horror film High Tension had been acquired for American distribution, but it was an open question whether it would actually be released (it was eventually trimmed for an “R” rating). His agents set up a private screening of the movie for Todd and I near our offices in Beverly Hills. We knew basically nothing about the movie going in, which really helped maximize the effectiveness of the twists. Todd in particular was almost balled-up in his chair by the end; but we both did our share of cringing.
The next day we were having afternoon coffee on a restaurant patio with Alex and his writing partner Greg. I was young for a Director of Development, but Alex is even younger than I am; but he’s a second-generation filmmaker and grew up around the process. He was already very composed and savvy, and talked about his recent meetings with Wes Craven’s company that eventually led to his remake of The Hills Have Eyes.
Our first instinct was to pitch him C.H.U.D. – and he actually really loved the script and said he wanted to do it. So, film nerds, there’s a movie that would have rocked but will never be – C.H.U.D. remake directed by Aja from the writers of Thor.
As we got to talking, we also mentioned Piranha, and once he read that one he loved it even more. I think it’s because Josh and Pete put children in jeopardy so shamelessly. Alex enjoyed that.
He got busy with Hills, so we never got too far into the project before I left the job. From time to time Todd would tell me that it was still on, but Aja kept making other films and I really believed there was no way he was still going to be making horror movies by the time our number came up. But – and I give Todd a lot of credit for this, he’s the king of slowly, quietly pushing a movie forward for as long as it takes – suddenly there they were, posting pictures from the set out in the desert. Alex and Greg re-wrote the script, and I don’t know how extensive it was or whether they will be sharing credit with Josh and Pete, but most of what I’ve seen in the trailers has been at least in the ballpark of what we came up with way back then.
Todd also exec-produced The Kids Are Alright, and that has to be one of the stranger pairs of features for a producer to have in multiplexes at the same time. But each, in their way, should be considered a real crowning achievement for him. After dozens of indie films – many of which never even got to theatres – he’s got a classy, breakout hit that’s going to be in the conversation around Oscar time. And he’s also got Piranha 3-D, which seems to be pushing all the right buttons with its hungry target audience; and more shockingly still, is getting good reviews.
And, while I sometimes tell the anecdote about writing the story coverage that may have helped The Informant! turn into a Steven Soderbergh film, this is indisputably the biggest movie in my career to date that I can honestly say has a few of my fingerprints on it. Whether or not you see it won’t benefit me in the slightest; but hey! See it anyway!