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Development Hell.
Turning Japanese, Part 5.
Hideo Nakata wasn’t returning my call. This was a first. After more than a year of working together, developing and prepping the filmed version of my novel, True Believers, I’d come to depend on Hideo and he on me. There had to be a reason Hideo didn’t want to speak with me. My instinct was [...]
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Turning Japanese, Part 3.
We’d battled and beat MGM’s lousy, last-minute notes. And after four months in a bunch of unnecessary language lessons at UCLA, Japanese scare-master Hideo Nakata had graduated magna cum laude in Shove-Your-English-Classes-Up-That-Lion’s-Ass. Then we got word that MGM was looking to Lakeshore Entertainment, a mini-studio with hits like Million Dollar Baby under their belt, for [...]
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Turning Japanese, Part 2.
“Just calm the fuck down,” said Arnold Rifkin in his usual, bulldog tone. Rifkin was the producer for the picture we’d planned to make based on my novel, True Believers. To describe Arnold as sometimes abrasive is akin to describing road tar as black and sticky. He did, though, have knack for treating his projects [...]
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Turning Japanese, Part 1
“We’ve been traded,” said David Wally, producer, friend, and at that point in the mess, a co-survivor. “What do you mean “traded?” I asked. “A trade,” said David flatly. “Like in baseball. MGM traded us to Dimension.” Just when I thought I’d seen most of it. Done some of it. But heard all it all. [...]
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The Might to Remain Silent, Part 1.
Picture this. I’m on the fourteenth floor of a Century City high-rise, anxiously rocking in place before a bank of elevators, hoping to hell the lift arrives before I lose my temper. Behind me, I hear two familiar voices. One is a producer I’ll call Big Daddy. The other belongs to a former A-List movie [...]
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Action Prison Blues, Part 2.
“I’ve got good news… and bad news,” said producer Mark Gordon over the telephone. With Mark by my side, I’d sold my pitch for a prison melodrama to Paramount Pictures. It was outside of my action-slash-thriller box. After extensive research on the subject, including an inside look around Folsom Prison (read Part 1) I’d delivered [...]
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You’re So Dead to Me, Part 2.
With the Friday delivery date looming, I wrapped up the pilot draft on Thursday and prepared to distribute the script to my producing partners at Scott Free along with our star and his business partner. Again, the phone rang. It was David Zucker. “Bad news,” said David. “He attached himself to the other pilot.” Of [...]
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You’re So Dead to Me, Part 1.
A few years ago, a studio executive invited me to pitch a TV idea to producer David Zucker, president of television for Scott Free, Ridley and Tony Scott’s thriving production company. The studio said if David liked the story, they would buy it for us to develop together. David politely listened to my pitch. I [...]
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The Smoking Gun, Part 4.
Let’s review. The story for my legal thriller was stolen and resold for millions. The producing thieves had been caught. I’d negotiated a hard but wisely political deal that allowed the celebrity screenwriter to scribble the script while the company paid me handsomely to stand aside. If the film ever got made, I stood to [...]
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The Smoking Gun, Part 3.
The perps had been nailed red-handed. One of whom had mistakenly faxed me a transcript of an audio recording that featured me pitching my legal thriller. This was the very same legal thriller they later handed to a celebrity screenwriter, who subsequently sold it as a spec treatment for nearly four million dollars. I was [...]
Read More »"Doug Richardson never disappoints. BLOOD MONEY is fast and intense and compulsively readable, populated by an unforgettable cast of characters and a plot that twists so many times you'll get dizzy. A great story from a veteran tale teller." J.T. Ellison
"Richardson delivers the goods in BLOOD MONEY with his uncanny ability to glimpse into the brutality and instability not only of the criminal mind, but also a darkness in the heroes." Maya Fleischmann for IndieReader
Doug’s Blog.
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Big Bad Bruce.
May 20, 2013It was our first morning at the location. The set, a neo-modern house the art department had dressed up into looking more like a comfortable fortress, would serve as central focus for the next four weeks, most of which would be long and cold nights. The geography was pretty steep, a hillside high above Malibu, [...]
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That Screenplay Thing I Do.
May 13, 2013“So whaddayou do, Doug?” It’s the usual, socially interactive question. Adults, stuck in the same mini-sphere, in this particular case it’s at a Little League team party hosted at my San Fernando Valley compound. Okay, it’s not really a compound. Nor is it a hacienda. It’s just your basic suburban domicile with a man-cave-slash-writing-lair in [...]
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Writer’s Nightmare.
May 06, 2013I’d just typed FADE OUT for the umpteenth time in my short career. The draft was neat and a tightly wound one hundred and fifteen pages of thrills and chills. It felt bulletproof and as close to perfect as anything I’d yet fashioned. Once it was bound by three brass brads and a cover page, [...]
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You’re Fired.
April 29, 2013I think I was twenty-five years old. Pretty young to have come to the conclusion that the man who’d helped me cross over the threshold into showbiz had to be shown the proverbial exit. My career was showing some lift and it was already painfully clear that the sweet old agent wasn’t going to be [...]
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A Million Dollar View.
April 22, 2013In a rare early collaboration, I co-penned a script with friend and former agent, Rick Jaffa. Though the partnership eventually collapsed under the weight of unreasonable expectation, the screenplay we wrote possessed a certain fire. It was a World War II action comedy titled Hell Bent and Back. Over six weeks, we’d channeled the best [...]
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