On one of the coldest days of January, Denise DeClue and Tim Kazurinsky could watch the snow pile up outside their office window and thank their lucky stars that they were in Chicago, not Hollywood. In the two screenwriters`
glummest possible scenario, they would be forced to move to Hollywood, where, Kazurinsky says, ”We`d have to go to opening night screenings, barbecues, pool parties.”
Even though he`s best known as a comedian, a recognizable face from stage (Second City), television (”Saturday Night Live”) and screen (”Police Academy 2”), Kazurinsky isn`t joking about his Hollywood phobia. His sentiments are shared by DeClue, herself a refugee from Second City who has been collaborating on screenplays with Kazurinsky for 11 years.
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Discussing their careers as screenwriters in absentia, whose biggest hit was ”About Last Night . . . ,” Kazurinsky says: ”The work has been non-stop. We make fine, fine salaries, and the money certainly goes a lot further than it would in Brentwood or Bel Air. We have these wonderful designer lifestyles in Chicago.”
Although they ritually commute to the West Coast every few months, Kazurinsky and DeClue don`t have to perform marathon renditions of the Hollywood shuffle, continuously singing and dancing for their breakfasts, lunches and suppers at the thrones of studio potentates. ”There are no producers looking over our shoulders, wanting the next 10 pages,” he says.
”We fly in, we get the assignment, we fly back. We write 9 to 5, like mill workers. We punch out, we go home, we have our lives.”
Working in a small suite in a Northwest Side bank building may not seem like such a dream to most Hollywood screenwriters or producers, but DeClue and Kazurinsky manage to be both comfortable and productive in their converted dental offices, which are sparsely furnished with computers, copying machine, posters and handwritten memos, such as their first four commandments for screenwriters.
A ”first-look” contract with Paramount-which gives the studio first bid on their original scripts-helps pay for the rent and the services of a full-time assistant, Sydney Lewis.
In many superficial respects, DeClue and Kazurinsky resemble the characters in the movie ”Best Friends,” a screenwriting team played by Goldie Hawn and Burt Reynolds who get married, much to their (temporary)
regret. That`s not a personal hazard for DeClue and Kazurinsky, who are married to other people: he to Marcia Lynn Watkins, a former Broadway singer, dancer and actress; she to Robert Schneiger, a free-lance film editor (with whom she co-wrote the Emmy Award-winning TV documentary ”Uptown Sounds”).
Lonely and glad of it
Both in their early 40s, they could easily play themselves in a sitcom version of their odd professional couple. The Mickey Rooneyesque Kazurinsky is just as subcompact as he appears on film and on television, but nothing like the harassed nerdnik he often portrays. The taller DeClue, with her sardonic humor, short, reddish hair and fair skin, suggests Shirley MacLaine on downers.
A reformed journalist, DeClue finds Chicago`s populist climate stimulating. ”We try to write our movies out of real life, and it helps to live in a town where we have friends who are contractors, plumbers, artists, lawyers, waitresses, people with jobs outside the movie industry. That knowlege, I hope, gives our characters more humanity and specificity.”
Writing Hollywood scripts in Chicago is a lonely profession, DeClue and Kazurinsky are happy to say. Other than John Hughes (”The Breakfast Club,”
”Curly Sue”), who occupies his own galaxy, the short list of wage-earners is headed by Frank Galati, co-author of the screenplay for ”The Accidental Tourist,” and the team of Parker Bennett and Terry Runte (”Mystery Date”), who have offices on the floor above and are presently immersed in the script for a ”Super Mario Bros.” movie.
In some measure, DeClue says, their urbane philosophical approach to screenwriting comes out of Second City and the works of Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren, a friend whose ”Chicago: City on the Make” she (and two collaborators) transformed into a stage musical. ”You make fun of yourself and you make fun of people who are stealing from other people,” she explains. ”You don`t make fun of people less capable than you are.”
Although they`d surely include Hollywood producers and directors in that category of unfortunates, DeClue and Kazurinsky don`t exempt them from their ridicule-or contempt. Among their screen credits was ”For Keeps,” a film about teenage motherhood, directed by John Avildsen, who was also responsible for the original ”Rocky” and the two ”Karate Kid” movies.
Describing in sordid detail how Avildsen turned their ”For Keeps”
script into what they see as a mortifying shambles, DeClue says: ”We wrote a dark and funny cautionary tale: What if the smartest girl in high school gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby? But he had a different idea of what the movie was about.”
Calling Avildsen ”dumb as a stick,” Kazurinsky adds: ”He turned it into `Rocky Gets Knocked Up.` He had somebody rewrite the script, or just type in the changes he wanted. So those aren`t our words on the screen.”
For all the perverse gratification they get from their Hollywood horror stories, DeClue and Kazurinsky don`t want to protest too much. Besides being well, even ”obscenely” paid for their efforts (”anywhere from six figures to zero,” depending on the year, DeClue says), they`ve had the thrill of hearing their dialogue come out of the mouths of John Houseman, Ruth Gordon and Matt Dillon in ”My Bodyguard” and James Belushi, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore in ”About Last Night …” (if not Molly Ringwald and Kevin Bacon in the rewritten ”For Keeps”).
In the case of ”My Bodyguard,” however, DeClue and Kazurinsky didn`t have the pleasure of seeing their writing credits on the screen. The script had already been done by another screenwriter and the movie was about to be filmed when the producer decided it needed a more authentic Chicago flavor.
He turned to Bernie Sahlins, Second City maestro, who tapped DeClue and Kazurinsky, then writers as well as performers with the company, to punch up the dialogue. ”It was a classic rewrite in the Hollywood sense,” Kazurinsky explains. ”In 10 weeks, we pretty much rewrote every line, created new characters. … We were told from the get-go that this other guy was getting credit. But we were paid fairly and treated fabulously. And we learned our craft on the job.”
Accidental pros
It was a craft that each discovered by accident. DeClue had come to Chicago from Boonville, Mo., picking up a degree at the University of Missouri en route. She describes herself as a ”hippie chick radical troublemaker”
when she arrived in 1969, looking for a career in journalism. She wrote free- lance articles for the daily and alternative newspapers, a couple of which
(the Chicago Express and the Daily Planet) she co-founded, and ”dog snack reports” for an uncle who was in marketing research.
She also wrote a mystery novel, featuring a woman private eye, that was bought by a publisher but never published. (While stored in her attic, the manuscript was devoured by squirrels.) Thinking that theatrical experience might help her write fiction, she signed up for Second City workshops.
Kazurinsky`s route to Second City was a lot longer and more convoluted. Born in Australia, he dropped out of high school when he was 15 and immigrated to America. ”I leave Sydney, a physically beautiful city, and come over here expecting to find Donna Reed and `Leave It to Beaver,` and I wind up living with two aunts in Johnstown, Pa., which is Flood City, all coal mines and steel mills, the city God keeps trying to flush.”
If Kazurinsky ever transforms his life into a movie, the next 10 or 15 years would flash by in a montage that shows him as a cub reporter at the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat, a waiter at the Pickle Barrel in Chicago, a student at Wright Junior College and the University of Illinois, a copywriter for a St. Louis department store, a classified ad salesman for the Chicago Sun-Times and a gray-flannel junior executive for two Chicago advertising agencies.
At that juncture, Kazurinsky decided he needed experience as a performer. ”I was terrible at getting up in front of the creative review committee, these men in gray suits, and presenting my storyboards,” he says. ”It scared the hell out of me. So somebody suggested a Dale Carnegie course. . . .”
He tried community theater. His first role was in William Lederer`s ”The Mystical Body of the Meat Grinder,” playing, he says, a father whose daughter ”turns herself into 80 percent ground chuck, and he makes hamburgers for the neighbors. It was an extremely bizarre play.” Then someone suggested Second City.
”I did that, and bingo-boom,” Kazurinsky jokes, ”that`s where the trouble started.” He spent four years with the troupe, beginning in 1978. Toward the end, he was adopted by John Belushi, by then an ex-Second Citizen who was back in Chicago, making a movie. ”After the show, he`d grab me in a headlock and take me out to a bar. He got me hired at `Saturday Night Live.`
”
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As Kazurinsky recalls, those were not prime-time years for the ”Saturday Night Live” players. Paid to write as well as perform, he says: ”Coming from Second City, where you could say anything about anybody, it was very tough. The Moral Majority was in full flower, and they didn`t want anything to do with politics, nothing controversial. For three years, most of the best material went into the wastebasket.”
During Kazurinsky`s three years on ”SNL,” he and DeClue, having long since finished the script for ”My Bodyguard,” were laboring on another screenplay, an adaptation of David Mamet`s one-act play ”Sexual Perversity in Chicago.”
The two screenwriters spent seven years writing and rewriting the script, 11 drafts in all. When the movie finally came out in 1986 (retitled ”About Last Night. . . .” in a last-minute marketing decision), Kazurinsky says,
”It put us on the map as screenwriters. It`s been non-stop work ever since.”
A backlog of work
As a high-profile performer, Kazurinsky was ready to get off the map. Although he has done occasional roles or cameos in four ”Police Academy”
movies, ”Neighbors,” ”Hot to Trot” and TV shows such as as ”Married . . . With Children,” he prefers to stay out of camera range, ultimately perhaps as the director of his own and DeClue`s scripts.
Kazurinsky and DeClue figure they should have enough work to keep them busy until they reach retirement age. After some fruitless and creditless labors on the sequel to ”Three Men and a Baby,” they have finished a second draft of what they believe could be their biggest winner, ”The Cherokee Kid,” a picaresque yarn about a runaway slave who becomes a notorious outlaw in the Old West. The script was written for Eddie Murphy, who refused to play a slave, but it later found a home at Home Box Office, which plans to make it as a theatrical film, according to the writers.
”We keep buying bottles of champagne,” DeClue says, noting the professional and emotional ups and downs of the screenwriter`s life, ”but we never drink them. We`re never completely happy.”
While waiting to pop the cork for ”The Cherokee Kid,” DeClue and Kazurinsky signed up for a fast rewrite, ”Americanizing” a script called
”Ditto” that John Cleese and Graham Chapman wrote for Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren. Also on their agenda is a TV spinoff of ”About Last Night …,” which they`ll produce as well as write; yet another movie for Eddie Murphy; and an adaptation of Dan Wakefield`s novel ”Selling Out” for Penny Marshall.
No matter how beneficial their partnership, DeClue and Kazurinsky don`t pretend that it`s a perfect professional marriage, as they demonstrated one day last week. Looking at each other warily, they make it clear that they aren`t thrilled about the prospect of four to six weeks of intense work on a script.
”We`re in one of our Hatfield-McCoy periods,” Kazurinsky says. ”It`s a combination of having stared at each other across a table for 11 straight years and quitting smoking.”
”I really love Tim a lot,” DeClue says. ”I know he`s a great person. But he just drives me nuts every once in a while.”
”Over the years, at Second City and `Saturday Night Live,` ” Kazurinsky says, ”I`ve probably written with 150 people, and 99 of them I`ve wanted to put a bullet in. Denise is the best writing partner I`ve had.”
”I think he still wants to put a bullet in me,” DeClue says.
Kazurinsky gives her an innocent ”who, me?” smile and says: ”We`re locked into three projects that we cannot do with anybody else on the planet, because it`s half the other person`s idea. By this time, I don`t know which half was hers and which was mine. Like it or not, we`re stuck in the trenches. 4 rules for screenwriters
From the bulletin board of Denise DeClue and Tim Kazurinsky, these four rules for Hollywood screenwriters:
– ”Let`s try to write movies we`d like to go see.”
– ”Less work-more money.”
– ”There`s no such thing as a two-week rewrite.”
– ”They don`t remember their lies. How can you expect them to remember their promises?”