How movies are made
I’m almost finished reading the best book about how movies are made I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a lot), Peter Biskind’s “Down and Dirty Pictures.” It recounts how Miramax and the Sundance Film Festival changed the movie business over the last twenty years.
My favorite story from the book is about the development of Good Will Hunting, which Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote to jump start their acting careers the same way Sylvester Stallone had with Rocky. Their script was originally bought by Castle Rock, Rob Reiner’s production company, at the urging of filmmaker Richard Linklater, who had a deal with the company. (Affleck had appeared in Linklater’s most recent film, Dazed and Confused.)
When a studio or production company buys a script, they hardly ever go shoot that version. Instead, as part of the deal, the writer is expected to do rewrites based on notes from the company’s development executives. This process continues until they decide to make the movie or lose interest in it and put it in turnaround, at which time other companies can buy it from them, which is how Miramax eventually ended up with Good Will Hunting.
Before that happened, Damon and Affleck had started to suspect that the people at Castle Rock weren’t even reading the rewrites they were turning in, so they put in a scene where the psychiatrist character (eventually played by Robin Williams) gives Will Hunting a blow job in his office.
From the book:
Recalls Affleck, “Nobody at Castle Rock ever said anything to us about it, and we were like, ‘All right, I guess the blow job scene works.’”
