Dave talks to screenwriter Dan Duling about the painful birth of his debut feature.

Dan Duling’s Hollywood journey is symptomatic of so many other ambitious creatives – but it’s one that serves as an awkward reminder of the challenges of getting a script to the screen.

“My fairly relentless assault on producers and agents does make for a fun late-night chat,” admits the writer with a wry smile. “There was the agent who signed me and then announced his retirement from the business a month later. There was an agent who died within the first six months of his representation. A carefully picked agent that ultimately led nowhere until his announcement that he’d not been doing anything for his clients because he’d been working on his own writing projects on the side. And then there was the final twist that really confounded me: a small boutique agency with a small stable of specialty agents got enthusiastic about me and had me submit five different feature scripts so they could figure out how to best market me. I went into a meeting with the five partners beset by a heightened expectation. Each in turn told me which of my scripts was the one that sparked their interest the most: the epic period drama about Nikola Tesla based on two years of research in Europe, my romantic comedy, my contemporary quirky detective tale set in L.A., one of my award-winning plays, and a screwball comedy about a guy who’s convinced he’s genetically predisposed to become not just a criminal, but a terribly inept one at that given his parental lineage. The five of them all had a favourite. It was a a thoroughly gratifying love fest as they went around the table telling me how excited they were about the script they’d loved. But, by the end, something was beginning to dawn on me, a sense of dread that there was absolutely NO consensus. Their enthusiasm was all over the place. I walked out of that conference happy for all the compliments, but devoid of direction. Sure enough, the next day, they called to say they couldn’t agree on what to do with me.”

Thankfully, after relocating to the lush surroundings of the Oregon woods, whereupon he made a temporary home for himself in an isolated cabin, Duling managed to make some headway with a project called LAST LIVES (1997).

“I wrote it in seventeen days, committed to keeping the pace of the script as non-stop as possible. Its original title was ‘Nine Lives’. It bore little resemblance to the film that was shot, but some of the things that survived the rewriting process were the wedding assault, the initial chase and some of the genre commentary humour. The use of woody Oregonion locations like the mountain lakes and a breathtaking waterfall were all spectacular settings within an hour of where I was living, and pivotal to the violent action.”

“Anyway, I gave it to an actress friend, and it turned out she was an astrology reader on the side and this producer, Rupert Hitzig [Never Cry Devil (1989)], was one of her clients! She passed it along and I didn’t give it much more thought. He met with me briefly and expressed his appreciation for it, and I guess he gave it to Steve Beswick at Promark.” 

With a greenlight finally shining upon him, Duling was faced with more changes before Last Lives went before cameras. The key shift was another production company making an offer for locations, which meant the gorgeous vistas of the Pacific Northwest were nixed, and the less cinematic landscape of North Carolina became the backdrop. Considering the change of state, it was hardly a surprise to see Hitzig exit stage left, while local journeyman helmer Worth Keeter – who had started out under the tutelage of native impresario Earl Owensby – arrived with a noticeably tweak-heavy playbook.

In many respects, Duling was resigned to the upheaval – but there were times when it looked like every aspect of Last Lives seemed doomed, not least with the casting:

“Judge Reinhold, I was told, had been very unhappy with the shoot mostly because he’d been hoping for something better by this time in his career, and it was clear to see that Jennifer Rubin was in a very fragile place at the time. My most vivid image of her was looking up at her in the upper window of the ‘mansion’ while we stood below under rain machines, in the dark at 4:30 in the morning, waiting for her to walk into the take and call out a line to the effect of “If you don’t do what he says, he’s going to kill me!” The problem was that in the first take, the post-it note she’d stuck to the window so she could read the line fell during the shot.” 

Nevertheless, what remains of Last Lives, is at least a relatively intriguing prospect. Aaron (C. Thomas Howell) and Adrienne (Rubin) have their wedding ceremony unceremoniously hijacked by the moody-looking Malakai (Billy Wirth), who leaves hubby for dead and kidnaps the wife. Prior to this, the opening sequence clumsily attempts a little background by telling us that Malakai just escaped from a parallel universe with the intent on bringing Adrienne back with him, while Merkham (Reinhold – although Malcolm McDowell was first choice), a tracker from the same world, is hot on his trail and doing everything he can to prevent that happening, beginning with reanimating Aaron.

The resurrection idea is by far the coolest part of the picture, with Howell’s character armed with a forearm full of regenerating bracelets that bring him back to life after he’s met a variety of grisly deaths. I’d also be inclined to cite the (distinctly overlong) car chase that runs through the entire middle act as a positive, even if the bland expanse of the location do little to add any texture to it. It’s here that Keeter (who’d done a substantial rewrite) is clearly most comfortable. Explosions and flipping cars are second nature to someone with his B-movie background, even if cerebral science fiction is clearly a step too far.

Duling, however, remains reflective about the whole endeavour.

“Some brilliant work was being done in the arena of ‘90s direct-to-video, but it was also a time when many films suffered from decisions based entirely on action clichés easily marketed to foreign distributors,” he sighs. “I know and appreciate how much work it was to go to North Carolina and rethink the major action sequences – which, I believe, were a big part of the reason why Promark had taken an interest in the first place. But hell, I’m just glad the show got made, period.”

“After all, it put me in the top five percent of working screenwriters in Los Angeles who’ve actually gotten anything made!”