Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
STEVE PERSALLMichael France helped bring Hulk to life from his St. Pete Beach home. Now he is focused on the screenplay for another comic book hero: The Punisher.
ST. PETE BEACH - Michael France already had a house full of toys when his son, now 5, was born. Twin daughters followed five months ago. Now he jokes about having three excuses for all the action figures, comic books and Japanese laser discs of the entire Lost in Space TV series stashed around his St. Pete Beach home.
Be careful, it's suggested to France, that you don't start sounding like . . . like . . .
"A geek?" France accurately guesses. "Yeah, I'm afraid there's no getting around it."
Being a geek has its professional perks. France, 41, voraciously read comic books from preschool until he got his first driver's license. Now he adapts them as a screenwriter for the movies. His most recently produced script is Hulk, the Marvel Comics adaptation debuting nationwide today. France was wild about James Bond flicks as a child growing up in the bay area and in Winter Haven. Now the writer has one of those movies, GoldenEye, on his resume.
And because no self-respecting geek would wish to live far from home, France does his job mostly in St. Pete Beach, away from the Hollywood grind he tried a few years ago.
"I love it here," says the University of Florida graduate. "I need to be able to get out of the film business occasionally.
"When you live in Los Angeles, you're saturated with it constantly. You do your work, then go out and see people who are in the film business. That's all anybody ever talks about. I can't take that.
"The lifestyle here, you can't have in Los Angeles. My office is a garage apartment in front of my house. I can work there for four or five hours, then step out to the beach and run around with my son. If I were in Los Angeles and tried to duplicate that setup, I'd be driving three hours a day instead of playing with my kids that many hours per day."
The Hollywood lifestyle isn't France's way of doing things, unless you count the limousine he rented Monday night to take friends and family to an advance screening of Hulk in Tampa. The next day he planned to be in Los Angeles for the film's premiere bash, then back to St. Pete Beach and his family as soon as possible.
He'll be just in time to see his next screenplay, a $30-million live-action version of Marvel's The Punisher, marshalling production forces around the Tampa Bay area. The drama is about an FBI agent avenging his family's murder. Setting it locally wasn't France's idea; he always imagined it in Miami.
"It never occurred to me to move it to Tampa or St. Pete, because one of the things you have to do with a vigilante story is say, well, the police aren't doing the job and the neighborhood's full of crime," France says. "I didn't think it would make me a local hero to do that."
The decision to move the locale to Tampa was made by Punisher director (and co-writer, in the film industry's nebulous creative process) Jonathan Hensleigh. It sits well with France.
"Anything that moves more film business to Florida is a good thing," he says. "I wouldn't have to go to L.A. for meetings if we could just do it all right here."
Starting out, France didn't have a choice. A stint at Columbia's School of the Arts didn't satisfy him, although he almost sold one of his class-project screenplays. Moving to Los Angeles brought him work as a script reader for producer Richard Donner and Sylvester Stallone, suggesting screenplays they might want to produce. It was okay work but not very rewarding. In 1992, France decided to take one shot at writing the kind of "Die Hard on a (fill in the blank)" that Hollywood was churning out at the time.
The result was Cliffhanger, an adventure that filled in the blank with the word "mountain." Stallone made it, Tri-Star Pictures sold $84-million in tickets, and France had his proverbial foot in studio doors.
"I figured it would be such an expensive movie to make that I could just use the script as a writing sample to get better work," France says. "They took it and shot it right away. There was almost no delay, which I'm finding out is very unusual."
That's evident from one of his first post-Cliffhanger assignments, an adaptation of Marvel's Fantastic Four series he enjoyed as a child. France created a script that is still in production limbo, even after the comic book movie resurgence created by X-Men and Spider-man. 20th Century Fox and Universal currently share production rights with Marvel Studios.
"It may turn out to be the most expensive movie of all time," France says, explaining the delay. "Most superhero movies cost over $100-million, just the conventional ones that involve, say, one superpowered character and maybe one superpowered villain.
"With Fantastic Four, you have some of the most difficult effects ever attempted, for four characters. And you have to have Dr. Doom as the villain, and Dr. Doom is a huge challenge because he'll be doing some things big. Combine that with the fact that studios tend to be nervous with bankrolling $150-million movies unless they have huge stars. Then what do you do? Base another $100-million on that?"
France had better production luck when hired to revitalize the Bond franchise with GoldenEye.
"My agent lobbied hard for that one," he says. "It's not like your agent just calls up and suggests you, and somebody says: "Great idea, we'll take him.' For the Bond film there were, like, 30 other writers campaigning to get the job. You have to show up and really give them something."
France met several times with Bond series producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson about his Agent 007 ideas. They took him to meet Bond's cinema godfather, producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli.
"If the whole thing had stopped there, that would have been a definite thrill for me, to go to his house and meet him," France says. "I convinced him that I would take an approach they would like that would take the characters seriously but still have fun with them."
France got the job, wrote the screenplay, then got his first taste of Hollywood's curious approach to crediting screenwriters. Names that moviegoers see listed as authors in film credits aren't always the ones who wrote first, and perhaps not those who wrote the most. Writing credits are determined by the Writers Guild of America, a process with a built-in arbitration system because of the disputes that often erupt.
For example: France's GoldenEye script was reworked by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein, who eventually shared screenplay credit by writers guild decision. France got credited only for the story. "My thinking is that I got seriously undercredited on that one," he says. "But the guild has made changes in their arbitration process since then, so I have a bit more faith in it now."
Not complete faith, though. A project such asHulk spending nearly a decade in development makes the issue harder to decide. France's screenplay was one of nearly a dozen versions that the producers - who also changed through the years - commissioned. The writers guild decided that screenplay credit should be shared by France, John Turman and James Schamus. France doesn't mind splitting credit with Turman, whose version written circa 1994 coincidentally includes some of the elements France used. Unlike many guild arbitrations, France and Turman finished it as friends instead of competitors.
The third name in Hulk's screenplay credits is another story.
"I think there has been some exaggeration about how much of the script James Schamus wrote," France says. "There's been a lot of publicity the last couple of years that he didn't use anything that had been written before he came on (the project). That's simply not true. John Turman and I both have a lot of material in that script."
France says that Schamus, a longtime collaborator with Hulk director Ang Lee, a co-producer of the film and president of Good Machine film studios (owned by Universal Pictures), is getting more credit than due.
"(Schamus) kind of used that position (with Lee and Universal) as a platform to play up his contributions over ours," France says. "In this case, it's no secret that the studio proposed James Schamus for sole credit. We said that's preposterous, that's wrong, and we deserve credit on this." Writers guild arbitrators agreed.
Marvel Studios president and CEO Avi Arad understood France's contributions to Hulk and Fantastic Four, hiring him to adapt The Punisher for the movies.
"When I got the call, I wasn't sure about doing it," France says. "The Punisher wasn't a character that I was a fan of when I was a kid. It became more prominent in the 1980s. I thought it was a guy with two guns shooting down bad guys, and there wasn't too much more to it.
"I started looking at the comics and thought there was another approach to take to really get into the fact that he's a vigilante but he's been pushed into it reluctantly. I came up with an angle that wasn't in the comics that I thought would be an interesting way of handling the character. I didn't want to deal with it as a comic book movie but as more of a crime movie."
In the comics, the Punisher's alter ego is Frank Castle, a cop whose family gets caught in gangland cross fire, pushing him over the edge. "Vigilante 101," as France calls it.
France's version of Castle is an undercover FBI agent who, like the hero of Donnie Brasco, gets too comfortable in his underworld pose. "He starts wondering: "Is that me, the mobster? Or is this me, when I'm home with my family?' " France says.
"He decides to quit for the sake of saving his own soul and his family life. When he does, that's when his family gets wiped out. Basically, that tough side of him takes over because he has nothing else left."
Punisher fans are burning up Internet bulletin boards with opinions about the changes in character and locale. Not all of them are favorable, or even polite. France expects that kind of heat from fans, so much that he instructed his wife, Elizabeth, to avoid reading any "savage" stories about him on sites such as Ain't It Cool News (www.aint-it-cool-news.com) The site once used an unprintable headline for a story about his Fantastic Four adaptation.
"I understand there are people who were reading (The Punisher) as kids, so it's as important to them as Fantastic Four or the Hulk or other characters are to me," he says. "I take a look at those boards once in a while, and I'm amazed.
"When I go into these things, I want to treat the original material with respect. I mean, there's a reason why you love these characters when you're a kid, but there's also reasons why they've endured, in the case of Marvel characters for about 40 years. Batman and Superman and other guys are closing in on 70. There are writers who get on these projects and just rip it to shreds. There's nothing left but the name of the character.
"I want to separate what's good, what will transfer to a movie and not seem laughable. I try to be true to the spirit of the piece as much as possible. I changed the background of The Punisher, but the story I wrote is very true to the character."
Above all, France believes that creating heroes with genuine personality and problems is what makes them super, not inhuman strength and abilities.
"Once you start to believe in the characters at the center of these stories, then you can believe these wilder and wilder events that are happening around them," France says. "I really enjoy trying to blend these real characters with wildly unrealistic situations, just for the amount of time you might sit to read a comic book. Or now, the time you might sit to watch a movie."
France's next professional move, however, may be toward more earthbound drama.
"I've been looking at things to do (other than) these giant spectacles because it's frustrating trying to get them going," he says. "When you do get them going, other people start working on it, so it's a question of who did what. I want to put something together so I don't have to go through the annoying studio process.
"I never would have imagined when I got into it how much time is spent on things other than writing. Things like writers guild arbitrations. It just overwhelms the writing time sometimes.
"The best part about writing is just doing the writing. When you shovel out all that other stuff, the business stuff, the best thing is just sitting down and writing, when you can't keep up on paper with all the ideas that are coming. That's the best."