“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” So begins Ford Maddox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier. Every screenwriter has at least one sob story. This is mine.
Back in the early 70s, before I got my first screenplay credit, I wrote a spec script, “Almost Grown,” about a high school kid, Burdick (no first name). (The title came from a Chuck Berry song.) The movie never got made, but I folded the Burdick character into a young-adult novel, It Looks Alive to Me!, that Harper & Row published in the mid-70s.
In It Looks Alive to Me!, Burdick lives on 77th Street in Manhattan, across from the American Museum of Natural History. (Which is where I lived the first three years of my life.) A moon rock goes on display in the Hall of Minerals. The next morning, the moon rock is gone—stolen—and the museum has undergone some changes: a Tlingit Indian is missing from the war canoe the lobby, the wild dogs who yesterday were only menacing a stag are now devouring it. Only Burdick seems to notice the changes. He hides himself in the museum. Adventures ensue, involving, among other things, a giant centipede, elephant-hunting pygmies, and an Egyptian pharaoh. In company with the missing Indian, the Transparent Woman from the Hall of Biology, and Charles Darwin, Burdick solves the mystery of the missing moon rock—hooking up, along the way, with Lola, a girl he unsuccessfully tried to pick up the day before (and who nearly ditches him for Ramses II.)
It Looks Alive to Me! was reprinted in paperback, and came to the attention of David Begelman, head of Columbia, who had his own production company, Gladden Entertainment. Begelman bought the rights in perpetuity—i.e., forever, and for roughly 40 times what I’d made on the book itself.
Begelman starts ordering scripts.
I get the first shot. There was no way to do the book as written—this was way before CGI—so instead of all the action taking place in a museum setting, Burdick would pass, Alice Through the Looking Glass style, through the plate glass of the dioramas, and then find himself in whatever environment the diorama represented: Puritan America, the Serengeti plain, Montezuma’s Mexico.
No second draft is ordered. Other writers get hired. Begelman supposedly throws a million dollars at the project, which now appears to be dead.
So I ask for a meeting with Begelman to see if I can somehow get the book back. Begelman was famous for his charm, but wasted none of it on me. He calls my adaptation a “tuppenny adventure” (this was several years before “Raiders of the Lost Ark” made two-penny adventures respectable) and declares, without visible irony, “I’m still waiting for someone who can execute my vision of the project.”
In 1976, for reasons having to do with his gambling addiction, Begelman forges Cliff Robertson’s name to a $10,000 check. He’s sentenced to go into therapy and make a documentary (about the perils of gambling, presumably), thus proving that one man’s punishments are another man’s privileges. Eventually he goes bankrupt, and in 1995 shoots himself to death in his room at the Century Plaza Hotel.
I was told that, as a result of the bankruptcy settlement, It Looks Alive to Me! became the property of Credit Lyonnais, and then, through some fiscal twist, Polygram Pictures. Through a series of maneuvers, my wife Carol manages to get the book out of hock and optioned by Disney (for a reported 50 times what TV usually pays to option a project) as a possible Wonderful World of Disney movie.
I’m not on Disney’s list of approved writers, but Carol fights to get me and our son Will Baum hired. (We were writing partners in the 90s.) We write a script. David Seidler (Oscar winner for “The King’s Speech”) and his then-wife, Jackie Feather, are hired to rewrite us. Their script, which focuses rather narrowly on Alexander the Great, a character we introduced in our version, doesn’t turn out well—but the project is given a flashing green light.
Until Peter Schneider, a Disney president, reads the script and kills it. Carol isn’t surprised—but she’s definitely taken aback when Disney features starts developing a movie about a museum of natural history coming to life—and doesn’t attach the producer (namely, Carol Baum) who brought the company the project. That’s show business, and Carol has little choice but to let go of a project she spent countless years promoting—many more hours than I spent writing it.
Disney’s version never sees the light of day. Neither does a movie version of It Looks Alive to Me! Around the same time, Fox starts developing their own museum-of-natural-history-comes-to-life movie, based on a picture book for children age 4-7. In 2006, “Night at the Museum” comes out and, along with its sequel, grosses a billion dollars worldwide.
Carol has never seen “Night at the Museum,” and neither have I. We once did a 180 back into a theater lobby to avoid the trailer. At one point there was a billboard for the movie over the entrance to the Century City Mall. We ducked as we drove into the parking lot.
Our granddaughter says it’s pretty good.