Revisionist HistoryIt’s the mid-2000s, Malcolm and writer/producer Stephen Gaghan (“Traffic”, “Syriana”) are running around Hollywood pitching their scripted adaptation of Blink. This conversation starts with a failed vampire love story, takes a ride in Leonardo DiCaprio’s Prius, before making an unexpectedly heartbreaking turn that leads Stephen to walk away from the project forever.
Pushkin. Many years ago, I wrote a book called Blink. It was about snap judgments and first impressions. It was my second book. My interactions with Hollywood word at that point limited. I think someone wants options something I'd written for The New Yorker, and I'd taken the meeting or two, but nothing came of it. But then one day I got a call from Steve Gagan. If you're a movie buff, you've heard the name. He'd just won the Oscar for writing Traffic, which was an amazing movie about the drug trade directed by Steven Soderberg, starring Michael Douglas and Benicio del Toro and Don Cheedle and a million other stars. And he had just rapped Syriana, another fantastic movie with Jeffrey Wright and George Clooney and Matt Damon. Anyway, I had never met him. He says, I'm coming to New York and I want to meet with you about your book Blink. Every writer dreams of getting a call like this, I promise you. I was thrilled to bits, and Steve flies in from Los Angeles and we meet in a cafe somewhere downtown and just so you get the visual I'm short and skinny. Steve is I dun'no six ' four. He's an athlete, absurdly handsome, maybe the most charming person I've ever met. And he tells me he's obsessed with the chapter in Blink about reading emotions and how there are people in the world who are really, really good at knowing what other people are thinking and feeling, human lie detectors. So over the next few years, I am basically Steve's assistant in cooking up a story about a human lie detector. It is, I believe to this day, an absolutely brilliant script. But have you ever seen a movie called Blink? No, you haven't, And what I'm about to do is to tell you the real story of why the movie never got made. In fact, I'm going to do much more than that. In the next episode, I'm going to tell you another story about an amazing movie that never got made, and then after that, another story, and then another story. Half a dozen episodes all told, maybe even more if we get into it. Because the thing I realized in talking to Steve about what happened with our long and hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking experience in trying to turn blink into a movie. Is that the best Hollywood stories are the stories that never got made. We're calling this series development. Hell I promise you there will be more name dropping and celebrity dry buys and hilarious digressions than you can shake a stick at. We're going to call up the biggest names we can find and just have them pitch us the ideas that broke their heart. I mean, come on, how are you not along for the ride? But today my very own journey into development. Hell well, thank you for doing this, Steve. What I really want to do is for you and I to recreate, just for a moment, the magic of that day when we were jetting around LA in your What car did you have then? Was it your Mercedes Wagon?
I think it was an old station wagon.
Exactly, it's an old station wagon. And we went from one mogul to the next pitching this story. It was just like, it's one of the one of my greatest memories ever. But to start at the beginning. I never met you, correct, and you called me out of the blue.
We have to even start before this, Okay, ok, Actually I think we should go back to the dawn of time. So there was the Big Bang, and that molic Jules carently came along anyway, so it's actually it's actually an incredible story. So I had finished my film Syriana, which took a lot, was like a four four and a half year effort, and I was and it was intense, and then I was like, what am I going to do next? So I'm sitting in Cavigtan and I I had this idea, this crazy idea, this is way before Twilight. I wanted to do a vampire love story. And actually what I wanted to do was a love store, a tragic love story with a happy ending. And I was like, kept thinking about, thinking about thinking about it, and then I was like, oh my god, the guy is a vampire. The love stories are as good as the things that keep the lovers apart. So picture picture a horse farm in Kentucky. It's winter that the you know, suddenly the smoke starts coming out of a chimney. You know, these big farms are all owned by Europeans who are mysterious. This guy comes to town and he meets like a veterinarian on the farm, and the sparks fly. They obviously are really into each other, but then there's also all these weird deaths that start happening around some animals, some people. Her brothers, her family decide this guy as the one who's doing it, and so they decide, you know, enough's enough, they're gonna kill him. So they poison him. Now she's in love with him. She discovers him right the sun is setting. He's been poisoned, you know, they think he's dead, they've gone. She finds him. She thinks he's committed suicide by drinking the poison. Romeo and Juliet. She's so distraught all she could do is drink the poison herself. As she's dying. The sun is setting. The vampire's waking up, and he sees her there and realizes what's happened, and he has to do the one thing that he swore he would never do, which is reveal his true self and bite her, and so she dies. But they then wakes up to internal happiness, being in love with the guys. And I was like, too much gepticism from every representative in my life. They're like, you cannot write a vampire movie. It is impossible, like you've done you know, know any whatever. So I'm sitting in cave Gittan trying to write my vampire love story. I never got past page ten or twelve. And so I'm reading I'm reading your book, Blink, Blink. And I'm sitting in there reading Blink quite happily. Every day, drinking my coffee, failing at writing my vampire love story, and in and out, every once in a while comes a plucky young actor that I'm pretty sure is going places, by the name of Leonardo DiCaprio, And so Leo sees me there, and Leo, Leo had been interested in playing the role in Sirianna that Matt Damon ultimately played. And in fact, if you know Leo at all, like he never really says yes, but he never says no, so he never passes, Like I honestly think he still thinks he can be in Syriana, Like it's just like still available. And so anyway, now I see him in Jitan and he's like, Hey, we gotta what are you doing? We got to cook something up? What do you what are you? What are you interested in? Let's come up with something. And I'm like, I think this could be a movie, like a really you know, I think there's a movie in here. Now, if you're knowing your book as you do, you realize that's a very challenging adaptation, right.
Right, Blink is nothing like a vampire love story.
Right like you and I. You know, cut to a year from this point, you and I will cook up a totally different story. But he's looking at me and he goes, I'll do it. Let's do it. That's a great idea. So that's then that precipitated me. I think maybe calling you out of the blue, just say.
Hi, and this is what it's like two thousand and five.
Maybe two thousand and six or seven.
When do we go at some point the story? So we we decided we would do something which makes no practical sense, which is turned Blink into a movie. You were from the very beginning, as ever, call attracted to a very very specific thing in Blink, the notion.
Of what I liked, the idea that somebody could have a like almost a truth a truth detector, you know, that a person could have this really heightened sense of when people were being honest or not, and that they could you know, they had like incredible empathy or or who knows what it is, you know, but it's just it's like a fact of life. And for this for someone it's also it's a little heavy in some ways. But it's quite interesting in the world we live in because I just at that time and I don't think it's changed a lot. I felt like, you know, a lot of people are saying one thing and doing another. Yeah, this person would always feel a little bit ahead of that curve.
This is because I had in Blink a chapter where I talked about the idea that a very small number of people may have the gift of telling when someone's lying, and I taught it's all about the research of a guy named Paul Eckman in San Francisco, is a legendary figure in light detection world. And this predates there's subsequently where all these TV shows about people who knew when someone was lying. This predates all of that.
Yeah, but way before that, you know, So you and I, you know, we get together, we start talking about it, and I think very quickly we realize we have nothing, like what are we going to do exactly?
But we come up with an idea. I have no idea how this comes up, But give me your memory of the story that we that emerged out of our collaboration.
So something you and I were both interested in was the looming you know, it was how giant so how corporations treated their retired employees because they had these pension funds, right that were like these giant boxes of money, and suddenly out there in the world, these like leverage buyout people and hedge fund people were going, oh my gosh, look at that. There's this giant box of money. That's one thing, but then there are all these obligations that are unfunded to these workers. Now, if you could somehow buy that company and get rid of all of those unfunded obligations that are weighing down the company, you could have a really profitable company. You go from having a bankrupt company to actually a company that works really well. You know. The only bad part of that story is that the people that actually put in the forty years or thirty years of work, you know, are left actually without their pensions or without healthcare with that very reduced pension support. And I think we were sensing that not only was this starting to happen, but it was going to happen in a really really big way. And I think very quickly we kind of got interested in and we were thinking about motors, you know, and we saw this kind of general motors bankruptcy coming and that the pension stuff would be like at the dead center of it, and we ended up making up our own fictional like steel company, American Steel, and American Steel was basically being put in play, you know, by a kind of hedge fund operator who unbeknownst to him has a son, a kind of wayward son. So it's a father son's story, and his wayward son has this truth detection, the ability yeah he that he becomes aware of over the course of the film.
So you see, you're you've the genius thing about your idea? Was you when you were telling it? Initially you started with we have one of these prototypical ruthless Wall Street predators who's like got the fancy apartment on Fifth Avenue, the huge house out and go in, you know, in in the Hampton's and he's everything you And he has this a son from whom he is estranged, right, a son who shares none of his father's values, but who desperately wants and cannot get his father's approval. You started with this really powerful family dynamic which was going to be the engine of the movie. What does a son do if he wants to win his father's love and yet he is incapable of competing on any of the terms of his father's world. Right, the son was a school teacher, wasn't he a school teacher or like teaching in Harlem?
He was. He had taken a very long time to graduate from college, like over a decade, and you know, is generally considered a lay about and kind of a loser and definitely in his own mind. And now he's graduating maybe, and he doesn't know what to do, and the dad is sort of loosely amenable to perhaps providing him a cubicle his headge found upingtechut or whatever, and he goes to work in this kind of shark shark environment that he's not at all suited for.
His dad doesn't know that the son has this gift, this magical gift of knowing whether someone's lying or not. He's no clue that his son has this. He's he perceives his son as a loser without any kind of you know, without any kind of special gifts or abilities. And he's doing his he's tossing his son a bone is not the son is still on the outside of disappointment in his father's eyes.
I think it's important to place this film like in the right tone. It has like a hal ash f vibe to it, you know, it feels like a little bit like it's in the it's in the tone of Harold and Maud or in the tone of the maybe the graduate even like that's I know, that was like something I was really really thinking about, like what are the what are the pressures on young people right now when they like are looking at what's my future? It allows you to have a little bit of a shaggy dog story, but there's like, you know, like you're pointing out really heartfelt, motional and kind of dynamic you know, of wanting a father's love. And then yes, it's moving.
And so the core little, the core little plot point is this weird quirk of bankruptcy law that if you to go back to your your, your, your, what you began with that they're with these companies that seemed to bankrupt but had this large pool of cash tied up in a retirement account for their employees. If a company is in bankruptcy, it is at the mercy of a bankruptcy judge, and bankruptcy law is unique in all law, and that it grants enormous discretion to the judge. So there are judges out there if they want to, they could waive a magic wand and say you can take this company out of bankruptcy and all the money in the retirement account is yours. Or another judge might say you can have the company, but you must honor every single obligation you have towards the retirement your employees. It's up to the judge. So if you're a robber baron, you're a predator, you're some hedge fun guy Connecticut, and you're eyeing a bankrupt company and trying to figure out whether you can make it work. Everything depends on which judge oversees this particular case in bankruptcy court.
It's incredibly it's incredibly fun as a plot mechanism because now you're just you know, billions and billions ride on, essentially gaming the system, which which of these potential judges, if you could somehow manipulate it is most likely to be friendly to your particular robber baron.
Cause yeah, yeah, So the Sun realizes this and goes to the dad. The dad is totally unsure what to do. His options are just what to do, just to roll the dice? Does he does he buy this thing, take it to bank, and take the risk that he could be completely screwed by some kind of pro worker judge. But the son comes to the dad and says, Dad, you I need to tell you something about myself. I have this gift I can I can see into someone's heart. And the dad of course rolls his eyes and says, you're bullshitting me. So the son sets out to prove to his dad he knows that he can see into someone's soul. And then Disney have a series of tests. There's the other three tests that he he undergoes to prove to his dad he has this this magical ability.
So part of the thing with the with the movie that I think worked really well is that the son finds out about the gift during the during the movie as well, so he wasn't he wasn't like swaning around saying I have a superpower. He actually runs across the professor who's doing this kind of research, and the professor is a character like he's a gambling addict. He realizes that you know, they run this test where they're like it's something some some ridiculous thing. It's like people say the line I had a ham sandwich for lunch. Oh, like hundreds of people I had a ham sandwich for lunch. And he drags this kid in there and he's like who's lying and who's telling the truth. And he watches like one hundred and fifty people saying I had a ham sandwich for lunch, and he gets one hundred and fifty of them right, and the guy is like immediately takes him to the race track like out to Belmont, puts his binoculars to his eyes and starts having him look at horses. Which horse is going to win this race? And he's like looking at the horse and he's like this is absurd, and the horse he's like, no, no horses have in her lives, Like what's going on? And he starts like telling him about the emotional lives of these horses that you know who are getting ready to go into the into the starting gate, and like one is like thinking about dinner and one has like had a bad sexual experience recently and feeling really shameful, and like they're all just and he's started by process of elimination. He's like, it's going to be this one. It's gonna be the Philly. The Philly's gonna win. Yeah, And so this professor, who's like literally a gambly, he ends up betting like to like fifteen grand like at the track and then money through bookies. And the kid is watching him and he's like, this guy's a psychopath, you know. And then photo finished, and then of course the Philly wins, and you know, and our character doesn't believe it, you know, he just thinks this is complete nonsense, and he sort of proves it to him over and over and over.
The Professor, by the way, is based on a man named Sylvan Tompkins, one of the true legends of early twentieth century mid century psychology, who had convinced himself that he could read people's in ourselves. And also the thing about going to the horses. That's Tompkins. He would frequent the horse racing and horse races. He was a pen He would go to to the horse races in Philadelphia and he would try and use all of his theories about human emotion to pick winners. So that was all straight from this he was this autodidact guy, and he wrote a book detailing his theories. And the book was The line about the book was the book was so long no one read it, even Sylvan I always loved it.
And eventually he, you know, at this inflection point with his father where that where they're not you know, the opportunities inside the family business or or not. You know, they're they're they're not going to work out for him. He like, as he realizes he has like a hail Mary pitch, which is, I can actually make sure you get the result you want right right with the bankruptcy judge and the data of course is a skeptic. He doesn't believe it either, and like, you know, you know, like I hadn't. I hadn't you know, look, I hadn't thought about the scripture and looked at it. And I mean a long time, probably fifteen years, fifteen years. Yeah, and I am I didn't even I couldn't even find the blink folder. And I was like, and then I just searched for Blink and then up came a bunch of stuff and like and and and the draft. And it's so funny because you get to know that you know, you put so much effort, you know, into trying to make these movies, and like it's so much love. It's love, and like it feels like life or death. And I just I just clicked on it and like page sixty five and up comes and this is this is dialogue. I completely forgotten this. This is dialogue between the kid and his dad and they're trying to like and they're they're at like a local, really cheesy drinking place in Greenwich where his half brother plays in a band called The Margin Calls. And he's there with his family and his step mom and they're all nodding along while this bro band does cover cover cover songs, you know, and they're eating like, you know, French dips or whatever, and his dad's a little tipsy and he's like and he's like, you know, this is all coming to a head. He's like, am I sorry? I never carpooled or sliced oranges for T ball? I don't know. I used to say that they asked Napoleon to do reading circle and Teddy's like, the kid is like, we did some stuff. We looked at pictures.
Yeah, yeah, Redmond. The dad is Redmond. The son is ted Teddy.
Exactly who went to the Met together. I remember going to the Met. I think I do, and he does his dad, you know, his dad imitates his dad and he's like, American tycoons have to appear culture. So what's the first thing they buy? And then together they say bronzes. And now the dad's like JP Morgan Frick. Teddy's like they had books, but they wanted to be renaissance men, like the Duke of Urbino, and Redmond says, yeah, if you're a real snob, you know that Castello and Rabino like the back of your hand, but you don't.
Talk about it. And then.
Teddy says, and I think I remember a bedtime rhyme about how much sleep a person needs, and he says nature needs five, custom takes seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness eleven. A his dad looks at him and says his dad looks at him for a long moment and goes, I'd forgotten it's Scottish, which is I mean, it's really funny, Malcolm.
I mean it's like it's all coming back. There's a beautiful scene I remember, I mean, one of the genius things about the idea was exploiting the idea of how genuinely conflicted the sun is about this discovery of his gift, because isn't there a scene? Am I making this up? He's on a date with a girl and the date goes awry because he can tell every time she says something that she doesn't believe, and you realize that dating under those circumstances is impossible.
It's you realize that, like this thing that started out as a joke is actually the thing that's defined his entire life.
And he derailed his entire life.
It derailed it. It's it's made it impossible to trust people in the normal flow of human interaction, you know, because the dissembling is all laid bare. He's five steps ahead of all of it, and he's just cut himself off from it.
And so he is one chance at redemption, and that is to finally use his gift to win back the love of the person who he most wants to love him, his dad. Right, So the dad tests Teddy's abilities, Teddy wins each time, and Teddy is then given the job of picking between Is it three different judges?
I think it must be.
There are three Canada judges, because you can. You can jurisdiction shop in bankruptcy, so that there's three bankruptcy courts the father can potentially file in, and the question is which one should he file in, And the son's job is to put it in retrospect. I have no idea whether this is actually how bankruptcy all works, but this was the version that we were that we were. But so he's given the The son has given the job of figuring out who is the judge most likely to rule in his father's favor, and he goes and contrives a reason right to to meet up with each one of these judges and assess their fundamental character.
Yeah, I remember. I don't remember them all, but I do remember. One was like he pretended to be an s a T tutor from one of the judges judges wayward sons, and he gets into their house and so getting into like a kind of k conflict with this guy.
Doesn't he play golf with another guy?
I think so he does. He goes to play golf. Yeah, I'm usually longer after the turn who says that Teddy or the judge Teddy says it like he's terrible at golf, and the guy's like, yeah. The guy says, try and chip the ball back to the smooth stuff. The guy, I just I've totally forgotten all this. He's like, let's cut the craft. I know who you are, I know who your father is. Human college. Oh, we're at an eating club together at the pork Ar. Motto feed your friends first.
Wait, so that judge is ruled out the judge, so what are the judges sees through Teddy, It's like, get out of here. I know what I know what game you're playing.
Let's cut the crumb. There's no way I'm ruling against labor, not in this climate, not in not in Pennsylvania. Impartiality, my ass. They'll burn my house down and kill my family. Tell him that. Toddy says, you're signing a death certificate for American steel. And he says, yeah, Well, maybe we'll get universal health care. Maybe Indian will have a social revolution, pay their workers twenty seven to fifty an hour plus benefits. Maybe Woodland gnomes will make auto parts for free, and we'll all sit sherry in the park. And he says, and he says, never ever pick up a golf club again. That he says, I'm a tennis player. Golf is for assholes, the.
Whole whiff of class warfare. And this the script is just ten years too soon.
When I was looking, I just was glancing at it, Malcolm, like for fift like ten minutes before what we got on here, and I was like, God, it's like.
It's for right now, It's for right now. It's so, it's so for right now. All right, let's take a little break. When we come back, Steve and I take our script out on the town. Okay, so we're back. Agents are now heavily involved, where it is leaked that Stephen Gagan has a secret new project. There's a frantic week where we find time on every movie executive's calendar. The plan is to hit every studio over the course of two days, which requires driving from the Valley to Hollywood, Santa Monica to Culver City. We map our root like it's the Invasion of Normandy. I fly out to La because I am now fully in the fantasy. A book, a bungalow at the bel Air Hotel. Steve Leo and yes I'm calling him Leo at this point, meet for drinks at the bell Air, but Steve is late, so for a while it's just me and Leo in a booth at the bar, and for the first time in my life, I'm like where the paparazzi And the next morning, off we go, all three of us.
Look we you know, we were really lucky, like we had we had you know, from my perspective, it's like we had Matt we had you you know, with this amazing book that was like a huge you know, it was really a best seller and everyone had read it, right, so everyone knew the book, which is wonderful.
Everyone knew Tipping Point, and then we won the lottery in that. Leonardo DiCaprio attached himself to the movie. So when we were going around pitching it, you know, we're meeting all these moguls, you know, on our day of driving around in the old station wagon, we have Leonardo DiCaprio with us.
It was hilarious.
So we're like we're like in there, like the three of us, like the three Musketeers, like sitting on like these couches and these big offices, you know, and we're pitching our hearts out. And at the end of the day, I think probably they're just like would kind of look down the couch and there would be Leo kind of you know, chuckling along. We would just nod, and I think I think more or less people at that moment we're like, we're in Yeah. Truly, we probably could have just like moved our mouths and made no sound come out, and we probably would have been Okay.
The amount of here, I must say, the entire time we were with Leo, I was like, so so hopelessly starstrucks.
He's amazed.
He later may have become more famous later, but he was on the cusp of his He was just genuine heart throb moment.
I mean, he had everything a heart throb. But he's also a really good actor, so he's like he has all these things going on at the same time, and you're when you're around him, you just you know, it's hard not to be to be aware of it.
Yeah, now anything. So we took this out over the course I believe of two days. Am I right? That everyone we met with, with one exception, bid on it. Everybody bit on it, yeah, everyone, and we were I just remember being in your car driving down like whatever Santa Monica Boulevard and just getting calls from your agent with the new someone else's signed on wants to Bid.
It was just the most absurdly thrilling to this thing was really exciting, and and it was just us just driving around in an old station wagon.
To this day, my favorite pitch story was we went to Warner Brothers, and the way we membe, we divided up the pitch and so you did the story. I did the science. So it's like roughly fifty to fifty, or sometimes we mixed it up. Sometimes you would do almost all of it and I would do almost all of it. For some reason, the Warner Brothers one, I did the most of the pitch, and there were I knew no one in Hollywood my first time aver pitching movie. Go into this gorgeous executive room and there are two men in the room. One was very very tall and very very handsome and charismatic and warm. One was short and sort of angry and whatever. I'm not knowing any better, assumed the tall, handsome one was the chairman of the studio and that this short guy was some kind of underling, flunky, assistant, whatever. So I pitched the entire script to the tall guy, and then only to discover the short guy, who I've been ignoring the entire time as a chairman of the studio, and the tall guy is just some dude who was just in the office that day. It was hilarious, And of course they did, which made me think that maybe the mistake we make. Maybe you know, maybe their reasons for bidding were that if they're gonna come in here and ignore me, I'm going to show them.
Oh yeah, I remember, I remember that, but he never got made. Yeah, there's I mean, I I think I probably have information about that that you actually don't have, that you may not even know, which you know, I can explain.
When we come back the bidding war. And then Steve tells me a story I'd never heard four, the story of why things fell apart. So we get a real life bidding war. The town went nuts. We were in Steve's battered station wagon driving around LA and every half an hour, Steve's agent would call Sony in Universal in Warner Brothers in. We have the sun roof, open, the windows down. I'm warning sunglasses. They never wear sunglasses. We don't even need Leo anymore. He gets into his Prius and drives home. We pick a studio, We huddle with our agents we pick a winner, checks are cashed, some brilliant producer is assigned to our case, and off we go. Only it never happens. A year passes, then two years, then three years. And this is why we're doing development. Hell, an entire series devoted to scripts that never happen, because this is always the most devastating part of the story, the plot twists that happened off the page.
So you know, Leo's company, they were producers on the movie, and Leo was really into it, you know, really involved, and at a certain point in time, we had essentially green light at Universal, you know, and we had a budget, a schedule and everything. A lot of things worked out. How were we going to do it? And I was talking, I said, you know, I wanted I'm going to do like a week more on the script. There were just some things I wanted to fix, and I got into it and I ended up working on it for like months and months, and I changed a lot of stuff. But the main thing I did, you know, as I the character, and a lot of this is just intuitive. I don't even know why I'm doing it, but the character got like ten years younger, and Leo, you know, when he it. He was really funny. He was like, he goes, buddy, buddy, if you if you didn't want me in the movie, all you had to do was say, so, it's no big deal.
And and it wasn't.
It wasn't that I didn't want him in the movie. But but this other thing had happened kind of off off camera, which was that I'd I met Heath Ledger and I'd gotten to be very very close with him, like instantly, like I just I just had a real connection with him that was kind of unusual and really special to me. And I got really excited and I started seeing him as the main character. And and once I started seeing that, I couldn't unsee it, you know. And and obviously it was very delicate in a way. And and Lee's totally cool, Like I mean, obviously he has a thousand choices, but I in my mind it was a big deal. I was just like, I really, if I just said to Leo, hey, I would like to do this with Heath, he would be like, I'm a huge fan of as, I love him, Let's do it. You know, it wouldn't have been a problem. But in my mind it was really a thing, definitely a thing at the studio because like at first it was like, we don't want to we we're not that interesting, you know, because it's like you can have the biggest, really big star of like someone, you know, why would you do that, the.
Really big start being Leo because Heath wasn't so big at the time.
Yeah, and then it changed, you know, because his I believe it was right around the time The Joker was coming out, because he then popped is this massive And then suddenly it was okay, you know, all this was kind of happening, and in a good way. I thought, in a way that was really right for a movie. But I also just had this feeling that I was gonna just you know, I love this guy and I was gonna make a bunch of movies with them, Heath and everything. And then I got a phone call. They were on speakerphone, and it was Heath's Heath Ledger's father, who I'd never met. So he died in a really tragic you know, like you have like a beer and like a Benadrill and like another you know, and just absolute fluke. Any other day you're fine, but just breathing stops and the dad and a guy who was really close with him, like the guy was closest to him in his professional life. They were they were there and they you know, with the body, and our script was embedded with him, and your book was on the bedside table, and I think my number was on the script like written like and these guys are in as you can imagine, they are in shock, and they dialed that number and I don't know why. And I'm in an airport with my wife, just going from one place to another, and I literally just I just like collide. It never happened to me before since like my feet went out from under me. I just literally sat down, like because I was in I was like what what and and and and the emotion like what you know, what they were going through. I should not have been a party to in any way really, And and yet you know, as a human or is of you know, somebody who just cares, you know. I just was there and I was listening, and my wife was looking and I remember her face and I was just like I could. I was speechless, and I just listened and listened and listened, and you know it's just really really sad, you know, and and uh and and it's still sad, and you know, and I think that I think that for me, I just I just had to put a put a pin in it, you know, like I just I didn't. I just I don't know. It just it's something Steve.
It's I did not know that story.
Yeah, no, I haven't. I hadn't really told anyone for a long time. And I and I debated actually when we were going to talk about it. I was like, should I talk about it? And I actually asked my wife and I thought, no, it's it's I think it's really good to talk about it because it's just say it was sad, and you know, and yet you know, and yet here we are and we're talking about something that we really put a lot of you know, we put a lot of hard and soul, a lot of effort into and a lot of care. So I don't, I don't. I don't really have a clear answer of why we never made it, but I feel like maybe I feel like that bit played a big role in it. But then you know, again, I hadn't looked at it in a very long time. And then I when I when I got it out, like right before we got on and like I was reading and I was just like, I ran to find my wife. You know that we're still married, thank goodness. And I was like, I was like, I could be crazy, but I think this script is really good. Like I think we really had something like really special, and we might have we might have been ahead of our time or something. I'm just glancing it seen by scene by scene and it's just their movie scenes, you know, and they're big and it's such a good title.
Yeah what wait, did you what was the title of? Do we call it? Blink? Yeah? Blink?
And like and the way the movie opens, you don't remember this. It's I gotta you're gonna die. Okay, you're gonna die because this is gonna come back. This is the first scene I read right I opened it. But here's the movie opens. Close up a baby's blue eye, huge and blue, like Earth from space, staring at us. Blank begin credits. Close up a baby looking into lens, A happy, curious baby doing what babies do. It makes us happy. Now you hear a woman's voice off screen. He's so sweet, so sweet, so happy, happy, happy baby. Yes you are. The baby begins to scream. Close up happy baby again, utterly adorable. But now unobserved and close up, the baby's expression seems to give clues to complex thinking. And now you hear the father. He's trying to tell us something. Father's tie drapes into the crib, wide seventies tie, heary thick risk with expensive watch. Mother, of course he is, I love mommy and Daddy, Yes, I do. And you hear the dad say, little desperado. The mother's hands, white painted nails, gold jewelry, deep tan, appear to tuck the baby's sky lou blanket. Mother os tell him you love him, Daddy loves you, Yes he does. He needs reassurance from his father. And there's a pause, and that you hear the father say sometimes it's not about me, and the mother says it's pretty much always about you. The room was totally silent, and you're just pushing up on the baby's eyes, and the baby blinks and you cut to the title blink.
Oh, that's great, it's so awesome. That's so awesome. I forgotten the only is genius. All right, we are resolved, Stephen, bring this thing back to life.
But we have to we have to figure it out.
I'd never heard the full story of why Steve had to walk away from Blink. But the more I caught up with Steve, the more I felt that maybe we were onto something back then. Maybe it's time to bring Blink back to life. I mean, there's a script. As a screenwriter, there's a wonderful idea, and if there's someone listening and some big office somewhere in Hollywood, I will get on a plane tomorrow if that's what it takes. And here's the thing, Hollywood is full of these stories. We're gonna touch on a whole series of them in the upcoming episodes. Next up in the feed is the story of a sci fi filler that had just a little too much five and not quite enough sigh, with a twist that the studios just couldn't handle. You can hear about a biopic told through the eyes of an exotic animal. You're gonna hear the Oscar winner Charles Randolph get a little emotional about a project he did with Tom Cruise that fell apart. The mines behind some of Hollywood's biggest hits, talking about the biggest failures. Join us as we take the temperature of development Hell. This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with Taly Emlin and Ben Adapph Hafrey. Editing by Sarah Nick's original scoring be Luisquira, Engineering by Ecco Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
