Miracle, a movie about the 1980 US Olympic team under coach Herb Brooks, opens today and I want to go see it. Early reviews are positive -- critics at Rotten Tomatoes are 80% positive. This is the fourth screenplay that Mike Rich has written.
Those unfamiliar with Mike Rich's background may appreciate this interview from last year. And if you missed the wonderful article that Shawn Levy did in last Sunday's Oregonian, take a few minutes to read it before you see the movie. In light of the recent screenwriting controversy, it is nice to see the New York Times lists Mike Rich as the screenwriter for Miracle in this morning's edition.
Reprinted from the Sunday, January 25, 2004 issue of The Oregonian (Page A1):
Hollywood tale: writing the script; losing the credit
Beaverton's Mike Rich, who has written screenplays for several successful movies, learns a hard lesson
By SHAWN LEVY
In his home office in Beaverton, screenwriter Mike Rich displays framed, full-sized posters of the four feature films he has written: "Finding Forrester," "The Rookie," "Radio" and "Miracle," the story of the fabled 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that opens nationwide on Feb. 6.
Prominent at the bottom of each of those posters is the phrase "written by Mike Rich," and in every case those words represent the common-sense idea of "written": Mike Rich wrote all the words the actors spoke and the scenes in which they said them.
But Rich's poster for "Miracle" is a one-of-a-kind appreciation from Disney studios. In all the other copies distributed nationwide, the space in between the names of the producers and director of "Miracle" reads, "written by Eric Guggenheim."
That's because the arbitration panel of the Writers Guild of America, applying its arcane and puzzling rules, determined that Guggenheim, a first-time screenwriter, was the sole writer of "Miracle." The film's producers had discarded Guggenheim's script and hired the veteran Rich to start from scratch and save the movie version of the U.S. hockey team's stunning Olympic victory over the Soviet team. But that didn't matter.
It's unusual for so many participants in a guild arbitration to go on record, particularly in a case such as this in which the result of the dispute seems so extreme. Maybe that's because no one affiliated with the production, not even Guggenheim, thinks that the ruling accurately portrays Rich's importance to the movie.
"Honestly, I really understand the spot that Mike's in," Guggenheim says now. "To be honest, I really feel bad about how it turned out."
Rich feels even worse: "I was naive about how the process works," he reflects, "and I learned a lesson, and it was a hard lesson."
Rich, per guild rules, cannot be acknowledged in any way on the film, not even with a special thanks in the closing credits, despite the fact that the people who produced it declare that his words and years of work were at the center of the movie.
"Mike wrote every word," producer Gordon Gray says, "and without Mike there wouldn't be a movie. Mike wrote 100 percent of the screenplay and Guggenheim wrote nothing, zero."
Rich lost out on more than a screen credit. The guild decision means that Guggenheim will receive the writer's piece of the money from residual sales to DVD or cable. And that typically amounts to about $1 million.
Script rejected twice The intersection of Mike Rich's screenwriting career with Eric Guggenheim's begins in January 2001. Hockey fan Guggenheim approached Mark Ciardi and Gray's company, Mayhem Pictures, with the idea of a feature film about the fabled "Miracle on Ice" Olympic hockey team -- a group of college players molded into a team by coach Herb Brooks in less than a year that upset the greatest team in the world at a time when America's national self-esteem seemed to rise and fall with each bounce of the puck.
Mayhem was already in business with Disney, which was making the company's baseball movie "The Rookie," based on a Mike Rich script. And Gray and Ciardi helped Guggenheim sell his hockey story to the studio.
Disney commissioned a script -- for a sum probably in the low six figures. Guggenheim's first draft, titled "The Miracle," was submitted in April of that year. Disney asked the writer for a revision, which he submitted that August. Disney rejected that version, too.
According to Gray, "Guggenheim's draft was a long way off. We decided we would take that draft and throw it literally in the garbage can and start again from scratch with Mike."
As befitting a screenwriter with more credits to his name, Rich was paid more to work on the film, probably in the mid-six figures. Both Gray and his partner Ciardi say that they never showed Rich the scripts that Guggenheim wrote. As Gray explains it, "Mike developed the outline, did the research, spoke to the players, to Herb and Patti Brooks. He did everything. No one had contacted any of the principals until Mike did."
Rich spent several months researching and writing the story, forging a relationship with the Brooks family and producing a draft that Disney immediately accepted and put into production. A director, Gavin O'Connor, was attached, and Kurt Russell signed on to play Brooks.
Rich did several drafts during preproduction -- a common occurrence -- and continued to help the filmmakers hone the words right up until the final voiceovers were recorded this January: two and one-half years of work, almost triple the amount of time Guggenheim spent on the film.
Rich had been unusually lucky in Hollywood. His first script, "Finding Forrester," won a prestigious screenwriting prize, was acquired by a production company within a week and went into production later that year with Sean Connery in the lead and Gus Van Sant behind the camera. Rich was the sole writer to touch the script.
"The Rookie," his next project, was based on an idea brought to him by Gray and Ciardi, and once again, he was the only writer on the film. Ditto with his most recent film, last year's Ed Harris/Cuba Gooding Jr. vehicle "Radio." Three films, four years, one writer: almost unheard of in the business.
Distributors who have signed agreements with the Writers Guild of America are required to submit a proposal of credits to the guild before release of the film. So last summer, for the first time, when the guild's "notice of tentative writing credit" was submitted by the studio, Rich found his name alongside someone else's. Disney proposed a "story by" credit for Guggenheim and a "screenplay by" credit for Rich.
Guggenheim, comparing his drafts to the final screen draft, thought that he and Rich should share a "written by" credit. A lot of money was at stake, after all.
"What they were proposing I felt wasn't accurate," he explains. "I felt it was biased too much towards Mike. He did an amazing amount of work on it, but Disney really forced my hand. They forced me to arbitrate. But beforehand, through my representatives, I tried to forge an accord, something that I felt was a fair and accurate reflection."
Guggenheim's effort to get his name on the film is absolutely a standard procedure, according to screenwriter Scott Rosenberg. "You can't fault this guy," he declares. "He would have been foolish to not take advantage of what is an inherently flawed system. He would have been taking food out of the mouths of his children.
"I had a lawyer a long time ago say to me, 'regardless of whether you think you deserve it or not, always go for it, because the times you think you deserve to get it, you won't, and the times you think you won't, you will, and it nets out to be the same, and don't stand on any sort of morality.' And that was really good advice."
Unlike scripts share elements Rich agreed with Disney's proposed credits, even though he admits that he recognized similarities between his script and Guggenheim's. Both begin with Herb Brooks addressing the Olympic hockey committee at his job interview; both take note of Brooks' history as a player left off the 1960 U.S. Olympic hockey team; both emphasize the rivalry of the Minnesota and Boston players on the 1980 team; both mark as a turning point in the team's progress the grueling workout through which Brooks whipped them one night after he watched them perform lazily in an exhibition game in Norway; both posit assistant coach Craig Patrick as the mitigating nice guy between the irascible Brooks and the players.
But Rich couldn't imagine that using these characters and details would have counted against him in arbitration -- or be seen in Guggenheim's favor. "Those elements have to be in the story," he says. "You would be negligent to exclude them from the story because they are the story. The key difference is in the handling of the events and characters, and that's where I saw the marked difference."
And the difference is clear. Not one line of Guggenheim's dialogue is in the final film. Virtually every subplot he wrote about players' off-ice lives has been jettisoned. Every trace of the lengthy passages he wrote about the intricacies of selecting the team, scheduling its practice games and finding financial support for the players is gone.
The final script -- echoing Rich's work on "The Rookie" and "Radio" -- deals more with the impact of the coaching assignment on Brooks' marriage, making Brooks the man more obviously the focus of the film than Brooks the hockey strategist. Both scripts end, of course, with victory over the Soviets, but Rich's script extends past Guggenheim's ending to the medal ceremony and the unforgettable image of goalie Jim Craig, eyes filled with tears and an American flag draped over his shoulders, searching the stands for his recently widowed father.
"I just looked at things on the surface," says Rich, "and I thought that they were completely different scripts. The trouble was that I spent too much time looking at the scripts and not enough time looking at the WGA manual.
"I'm a victim of my own good fortune," he admits. "I had the wonderful experience on the first projects of being the first writer and the last writer. This was the first time where it was a different game, and I didn't understand that."
Convinced that the film was his, Rich balked at Guggenheim's offer to share credit, and the guild arbitration process kicked in.
Arbitration common The Writers Guild of America sets its own rules, polices itself and has ironclad contracts with major movie distributors that entitle it to determine which writers get their names on finished movies and on the checks that arise from their profits. Almost one-third of the submissions on writing credit from the studios result in arbitration.
Guild rules historically were instituted to protect the first writer -- the person who in many cases has the initial idea that gives rise to the film -- from being robbed of credit and money by a collusion of producers, studios and more-established writers -- even if every word that person writes is abandoned.
"Just by virtue of being the first guy in the door, you're gonna get the credit," says screenwriter Rosenberg. "I was the first writer on 'High Fidelity.' The director I was working with left, then I left, then John Cusack and those guys came in, and they rewrote me. . . It wasn't my stuff: What's good in the book is good in the movie. But I was the first guy to use it, so I got credit for it."
Adds David Poland, a film industry analyst with Movie City News and sometime script doctor, "The real surprise in this story would be if the second guy had gotten the credit."
Historic vs. fictional The guild decision, though, also hinges on another line of thought that treats historic events as "fictional" creations.
Because "Miracle" is not based on a book, play or article, it is considered by the guild as an "original" screenplay, a commodity even more subject to protections than an adapted work.
But it is different from most of the other "original" films that have been the subjects of controversial guild arbitrations. Most original screenplays are works of fiction and, indeed, most of the recent "original" titles that have been the subjects of gnarled guild arbitrations and judicial litigation are works of fiction: "The Godfather, Part III," "Matinee," "The Cable Guy," "Tommy Boy," "The Rock," "The Fugitive," "Crocodile Dundee in LA," and "Armageddon."
"Miracle" is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, a fictionalized version of relatively recent real-life events. The events that shape the story, are a matter of widely known historical record. A script about the 1980 Olympic hockey team can't end with the Soviets winning, can't exclude coach Brooks, goalkeeper Craig and winning goal-scorer Mike Eruzione, and must inevitably take place against a historical backdrop of American unease and Cold War wariness.
The scripts by Guggenheim and Rich included these characters and themes, but it's clear from the guild's decision to award sole credit to Guggenheim that he was deemed to be the creator of these and other such script elements.
This is where the guild's practice falls most obviously to common-sense criticism: The first person to write a screenplay about a nonfictional story is given credit for the real-life characters and events as if he'd invented them out of whole cloth.
Cathy Reed, senior director of credits and creative rights at the guild, argues that it's possible for vastly different screenplays to arise from a historical event. "Take Abraham Lincoln," she says. "If one was assigned a screenplay based on the life of Abraham Lincoln, you could cull from a number of historical materials and cover vastly different times. You could focus on his early years, you could focus on his presidency, you could focus on his assassination. There's a myriad of ways to go, and it could be considered an original."
Producer Gray sees this as patently unfair. "You can't change the characters," he says. "Everyone knows the characters. And everyone knows the chronological sequence of the events. So there's no way you can call this an original screenplay. History wrote the original screenplay."
But using this logic, the guild decided that Guggenheim, not Rich, deserved sole writing credit for "Miracle."
Lessons learned Coming away from the experience, the two writers have distinct spins on the events that they've been through.
Guggenheim, his first screen credit in hand, is seeking more work. He claims that he hasn't overly represented his contributions to the script of "Miracle" to any prospective collaborators.
"If I meet with an executive or producer, I'm always forthcoming and candid with how much work Mike actually did," he says. "He did a tremendous amount of work on it, and the Writers Guild determined what they determined."
But Guggenheim has his own career to consider. "I've been totally candid with everyone in town," he declares, and then adds, "I believe in giving credit where credit is due."
Rich, now wiser and warier about the nasty side of the business, is moving on to other screenwriting projects.
"The unfortunate reality is that I'm going to take a hard look at anything that comes along that's a rewrite," he says. "You have to look at it as work for hire. But I went into this looking at it as creative blood and sweat -- the same way I went into the other projects."
Rather than a "written by" credit for "Miracle," he has a few tokens to treasure.
One is an e-mail Herb Brooks sent him the week before the coach died last summer, thanking him for getting the story right.
The other is that one-of-a-kind movie poster Disney made especially for him.
And he has the outrage of his producers at Mayhem. "It's absolutely horrible that Mike's name is not on this movie," declares "Miracle" producer Ciardi finally. "He had more to do than anyone with making it. He got this movie green-lit and got everybody on board. If we had the other draft we wouldn't have had a movie."
(Oregonian Article URL: http://oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/front_page/1074949658326390.xml)
Comments