Good afternoon. So, I think this is going to be the—well, not that there are others that weren't—but this hopefully will be the fun panel, and hopefully we can avoid a little bit of politics. Although that's been a decent conversation as well. We have with us John Grisham and Michael Lewis. And what we're going to try and talk about is taking great books that these guys have written and turning them into movies. So to remind everybody, there have been lots of movies made of John's and Michael's books. On the case of John, just to name a few: The Firm, The Pelican Brief, Runaway Jury, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker. Michael: The Big Short, Moneyball, The Blind Side. And you've had great directors working on these things. Everybody from Francis Ford Coppola, Alan Pakula, Adam McKay. So, you've seen a lot. So, my first question is sort of asking you to look back when you first sold your first book to the movie business. What were your impressions of those interactions in the first moments? Not in the first moments, but as you sort of got to know the studio or the writers or the producers. How did you feel about that?
Me or you? You should go. Okay. You're the elder statesman. Well, I've got—I didn't find Hollywood. Hollywood found me. I wasn't looking for Hollywood. I'd published my first novel, A Time to Kill, in 1989, and the book was a total flop. Same year, Liar's Poker came out. Yep. And his was a bestseller. A Time to Kill went nowhere. And I had almost finished my second book. The working title was The Firm. I didn't think the title would ever stick. And I'd sent The Firm off to New York to my agent, who wanted to make some changes. And I didn't want to make the changes. So the book went nowhere, and this fall of 1989, and there was no book deal. I wasn't sure I'd have a book deal for The Firm, and I thought my career was probably pretty much on the ropes, and I would have to go back to just suing people for a living. That's what I really enjoyed, you know.
And early one Sunday morning in January of 1990, the first Sunday in January, I'd already gone to church with the kids, and my wife came later, and she said, "You've got to go call New York." And I said, "Those people don't work on Sundays. They don't work on Fridays. They don't work in August or January." I said, "What's going on?" She said, "Something big. It's some kind of movie deal with The Firm." So I raced home. We were two blocks away, and I raced home and I called my agent in New York and I said, "Hey, what's going on?" He said, "Well, something big is about to happen. I need your authority to take the highest offer for the film rights to The Firm from Disney, Touchstone, Paramount Pictures, or Universal." And I said, "We don't have a book deal. We haven't sold a book yet." He said, "I'm well aware of that." I said, "You haven't sold the book yet." And he said, "Okay." I said, "Well, all right." He said, "We have to act fast because these studios are sitting by their phones for the final round of bidding." And the word "bidding" had a nice ring to it, and I said, "Okay, just for fun, how much money are we talking about?" He said, "I'm asking for half a million, hope to get 400,000." And I said, "You want my authority to go do that?" And he said, "Yeah." I said, "Okay, okay. You have my authority to go do that."
And I went back to church, and Renee and I were in shock, and it was one of those really long church services, some Baptist service. We almost skipped and went home. But we hung in there, and it was communion, you know, a guest speaker, my favorite, the baby dedication service, you know, all that wrapped into one. Like, I never got out of there. Raced home, and the phone was ringing, and it was my agent. He said, "We sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures." And I said, "That's hard to believe." And he told me what a great job he did, you know, buffalying around all the lawyers from the studios and all this kind of stuff. And finally I said, "Okay, just for fun, how much money did we get?" And he said, "600,000." And I had not earned 600,000 in 10 years of practicing law in a small town. No kidding. And I said, "You got to be kidding." And typical, my wife and I were raised in these very strict Southern Baptist homes where there were certain rules. And one rule was you never discuss money outside the home. There was no money inside the home, but never talk about money. And we said—we were rattled. You might guess, you know, it was 1990. I was 35 years old. Renee was 29. And we said, "Look, this is going to really change some things around here. We'll tell people that we sold the film rights, but we're never going to tell anybody about the money." And we believed that. First thing Monday, Paramount issued a press release with all the—and that's how I got in the film business. Wow. Wow.
What I didn't know back then, the studios had talent scouts in New York in publishing, and these people were supposed to find the hot new manuscripts. And if they found something, they would send a copy. And there was a copy of The Firm lying around the copy room at Doubleday. This is long before the internet. And again, Doubleday didn't buy it, then they bought it later. And somebody sent a copy of the 600-page manuscript to a guy in Hollywood who pretended to be my agent, and he ran 25 copies and sent them to all the studios and producers, you know, trying to make something happen. He got nervous when they started calling him back, and one thing led to another, and they finally called my agent. They had a big fight and they made up. They said, "Look, something good's going to happen here. Let's be friends." And so they cut a deal and started having the bidding, the final rounds and all that. At the very last moment, somebody said, "Hey, has anybody talked to Grisham?" And that was the phone call. And that's where the writer always is. It's in Hollywood. That's where the writer stands with Hollywood. Yeah. Michael, how about you?
So, I think of this question, there's like two parts to this: when I first encountered the movie business and when it got real. Yeah. So Liar's Poker came out and it went boom. It was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list two weeks after it came out. And I was inundated with—the agent was inundated with movie offers, and I didn't know what that meant. And I just let him do what he did. But I had in the back of my mind, right before the book had come out, I had lunch with—I'd met my hero Tom Wolfe, and I had lunch with Tom Wolfe. And Tom Wolfe—I told him that this book was coming out. He says, "You're going to get movie offers, and let me just tell you, don't have anything to do with those people." He said, "Go drive across the country, throw your manuscript into Los Angeles, have them throw a sack of money out, and go as fast as possible in the other direction." And so I took that to heart. I thought, like, this is different from what I'm doing, and I don't want to get mixed up with those people, is what I kind of had in the back of my mind. But I was pretty happily mixed up with those people for 20 years, like magazine pieces and books, and I'd throw the thing in and they'd throw the money out, and no one ever made anything. It was just fabulous. It was just a racket, you know, that I didn't know why they wanted to buy these things if they were never going to make them. And that was my experience for the longest time.
And flash forward to 2003. Moneyball has just come out. Once again, I've thrown the book in. A whole bunch of money got thrown out, but this time they want to buy the life rights of the main character, Billy Beane. And Billy Beane calls me and he says—he was kind of irritated with the book when it came out. He made peace with it, but he did not like the publicity. Like, he did not want the attention. And the book generated so much attention in his life. He said, "I'm just going to let you know that they're calling me. They want to buy these life rights for the movie. And I'm not going to do it. I'm just not going to do it." And it was your company that was doing this. Michael was running Sony at the time. And I said, "Billy, you got this all wrong. They never make the movie. You're never going to get any attention." You're born to be in Hollywood with a line like that. I said, "They never make the movie. They just—you throw the book in and they throw the money out, and then they say they're excited and enthusiastic, and eventually they cease to be excited, enthusiastic, and they never make it." And I started listing all the sums of money I had been, you know, and it was big sums of money, you know, Liar's Poker, I think they paid a couple quarter-million bucks for it. And I said, like, it's just amazing. It's a money machine, and all you got to do is sign it, and they'll throw you some money, and they'll pretend to be interested for a little while, and then they'll go away.
And for seven years he did it. It was like an 18-month option. And so there were, what, three or four times he called me, and he goes, "You're a freaking genius." He says, "I just got another check. I got another check and it's free." And this is fantastic. Thank you for, like, disabusing me of my concern here. And then one day he calls me up and he says, "You asshole." He said, "Brad Pitt just called. He wants to come over to the house. The babysitter's putting on makeup and my wife is putting on a dress." And he said, "You said this wouldn't happen." And I said, "I just—I mean, I'll believe it when I see it," kind of thing. But that's kind of when it started to get real. And so for the longest time it seemed like this insane industry where no one knew what they were doing. And then all of a sudden it got real, and books started kind of getting made, and that's it. That's its own thing.
Your book, The Firm, must have been made right away. Oh, within—it was easy. The book came out in spring of '91. They started filming in the spring/summer of '92. Came out in—which seems impossible now. Yeah. Uh-huh. But it came out—The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and The Client all came out within a span of 12 months, from the summer of '93 to the summer of '94. And we thought that was normal. Looking back, I haven't had a movie made in 20 years. So in the last 20 years, not a single one—one Netflix documentary, but no movies made in the past 20 years. It's a different world now. Yeah.
Can I—how much of a difference did it make to your career that those movies got made?
Tremendous impact on the career from that period of time 30 years ago. Those first four, five, six books—A Time to Kill, then Runaway Jury, The Client, Chamber—those movies came out in a five-year period from '93 to '97, '98. And I was writing a book every year, and it was just a total frenzy. It was easy, you know, and it had a tremendous impact on everything that's happened since then. And today those movies are still selling books. They're on cable somewhere tonight being, you know, reshown again, reshown again. And they're very popular movies. I'll walk through the den just casually and see The Firm and just start screaming and leave the den. I can't say—I can't take it anymore. The Firm—when The Firm came out in '93, I saw it three times in the first week, and I said, "Hey, I've got this, you know, I know how it ends. I know the story. I'm sick of this movie, okay?" And I haven't seen it since then. I've seen pieces of it. I can't go back and read one of my books. I can't go back and watch one of the movies. I had the same feeling about that. Yeah. Can't do it.
And so leaving aside, you know, now once the movies are getting made, what is your attitude toward the making of them? Because obviously more—well, I should say this probably—more people see the movie at the end of the day than read the book. And the question I would have is, like, do you want to get involved in the making of the movie? Make sure you want to stay away from it?
No. No. Right. Right after The Firm came out, I got a note in the mail one day, return address from Bangor, Maine. It's from Stephen King, and I'd hit the bestseller list. He said, "Welcome to the big leagues." Thought it was pretty classic. That is. So I met Stephen shortly thereafter, and we're still friends, a long time ago, and we talked about movies. And he's had 60-some-odd movies made from his stuff—short stories, books, whatever. No one can touch him, and he's had every experience in the world, from having Kathy Bates win the Oscar for Misery to having to file a lawsuit to stop a movie. So he's had everything in between. And so he's been there, and he said, "Look, there are a couple rules of Hollywood. You just said it. First of all, nobody knows what's going on. That's a fair assumption. No, no, no one knows." And he said, "Number two, there are a couple rules. If you choose to deal with Hollywood, there are two groups of writers: those who don't deal with Hollywood—it's a very small group—and those of us who do. If you join the second group, a couple rules: get all your money up front, kiss it goodbye, and expect it to be something different. If you don't like that, go join the first group." So I knew that right off the bat.
Yeah, that's—this is interesting. This notion that you take the money and then you get upset. And that I don't understand. I think you either don't take the money, or you don't and you don't get upset. Right.
And the funny thing about this is the movie industry is a little neurotic on this subject. I think the movie industry would much rather the author be dead. They don't really—you—they don't think you're actually going to tell them anything. They've got the book. You're not going to tell them anything that's at all useful, but they know you can cause trouble. And so I have found that in each case this relationship emerges, and it's them pretending to be interested in what I have to say to the point where they won't leave me alone. Like, "We'd love to talk to you about it." Quite obviously they don't care what I have to say. So I have to—to keep things socially pleasant, I have to pretend to believe they care what I have to say, right? And so the relationships start as this kind of lie that they're pretending and I'm pretending, but out of that lie has emerged these beautiful friendships. Like, I'm friends with all the directors of the movies, some of the actors have stayed in my life. And I mean, kind of—I've been kind of in awe of the process. Like, I've been very lucky.
You've been pretty lucky, too. Like, really good movies getting made.
Extremely lucky. Yeah. And that's not the norm. But I've just been kind of in awe of the craft, you know, that you see the glitz. Yeah. But the craft—these things in particular, because I'm dealing with your people, are made up. So they could do anything with them. But my people are real people, and they could actually still do anything with them.
We sort of made a lot of stuff up with Moneyball, I seem to remember.
But a little bit. Not really, though. And it's amazing—but to me, amazing to watch people I know being brought to life on the screen in a way that's just shocking. When Michael Oher saw The Blind Side the first time, and Sandra Bullock—she won an Oscar for the role—rolls onto the screen, Michael goes, "There's two of them." It was like she so nailed it. And I've had the chance to talk to these actors about how they're doing what they're doing, but it's unnecessary in a way. They don't have to do that. Yeah. But it's been awesome to watch it, to watch. And so I'm impressed. But they don't really care. They don't see any use in me. I've never felt like, oh, I said something and they heard it and something happened because of it. I've never seen that.
So when you're talking to a screenwriter or a producer or director, nothing?
Nothing. You think it's all just—it's kabuki ritual. It's just like, we've got to do this because it's polite, or just to stop him from saying we never did this. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but I don't talk to them.
Really? Yeah. No, I don't talk to them. You don't even think I'm fun. I don't befriend them. I don't make friends with them. I mean, I feel like maybe I've transgressed here. Maybe I shouldn't either. What have I done? No, but I mean, you meet them. But we go to the set, you meet the crew, you meet the director, you hang out a bit, and you take the kids, and it's a big deal. Take some pictures, and we go back home. When they finish the movie, they pack up and leave. Yeah. And go to the next project. There's no lasting relationship anywhere.
You know, for a while, you tell me I make-believe friends. No, there are real friendships in Hollywood. Real friendships that matter. It might be true. It might be true. They're friends in my head. I don't have a single relationship with anybody who had anything to do with those movies back in the day. Matthew McConaughey, for a little while, we kept in touch. But yeah, again, the friendship was based on a temporary arrangement, and they moved on and I moved on. So I don't—I don't—Oh, you want to hear a great story? Of course. No, no, no. We don't want to hear a great story. So I don't get involved in the movies.
Okay. They finally—Joel Schumacher did The Client, and he and I liked him. We trusted him. He did a good job, and he kept pestering me to do A Time to Kill, and I had not sold the film rights to A Time to Kill. By the end, the book had been a bestseller for a long time. And I said, "Okay, we'll do A Time to Kill, but I'm going to retain a couple of rights here. I want to be able to have a say-so in the casting of Jake, because Jake is a very autobiographical character—lawyer in a small southern town, blah, blah, blah." And so I said I would at least like to be able to have some input. And so they put together this cast that included Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Kiefer Sutherland, Donald Sutherland, Ashley Judd—this great cast. They didn't have Jake, didn't have the star, and they had a lot of money behind it. They were on the set in Mississippi ready to film.
Wait, they put everybody in Mississippi without having the star of the movie yet? Yes. Wow. Okay.
And all big contracts. New Regency was doing it, so they had plenty of money, and they were getting ready to start filming, and they were all in a panic because they don't have the star. And Joel again—Joel Schumacher, the director—and we were talking a lot. And he suggested an actor. I said, "No, that wouldn't work." And somebody else, I said, "No, that's not going to work. Those guys are not right for that role." So we had a big fight. The lawyers got involved, and my lawyers were better than their lawyers. And there's a clause that said I had the absolute right to veto the casting of Jake. And my lawyer read that to him very slowly, and it sunk in. And so it was about to be a really big mess. Okay. And Joel Schumacher said, "Hang on. I got an idea for this one kid." He said, "Did you see the movie Dazed and Confused?" I said, "No, I missed that one, too." And he said, "There's a kid in that movie I like a lot." And I said, "Okay." He said, "I'm going to pull him in from another movie and do a quick screen test, and I'll send it to you." I said, "Okay, fine. Hurry up." And they did that, and Matthew did this screen test. This is in 1995, before the internet. So they sent me the old cassette tape overnight by FedEx, and it came in the next day, and Renee and I are waiting for it. We get it and plug it in the old cassette box, you know, we used to do. And there's Matthew, and he's, you know, doing a screen test. And I didn't say anything. The first thing Renee said was, "I think I'm in love." That's how Matthew got the role. And he did a great job. And, you know, we kept in touch a little while after that, but he's gone on to do other things, and so am I. But I don't—I mean, I just—I'm not rude to them. I just don't talk to them.
Nowadays, many of them, like you said a while ago, the options—everything gets optioned. But they don't—used to, they would buy the rights outright for, you know, a nice figure and go make the movie because they had a lot invested in it. Now they want to give you an option for two years, 18 months, for $25,000. And so everything's under option and nothing ever happens. Yeah. So we're going through a real dry spell. Got it. Got it.
So, do you have favorites out there? Are there movies, Michael, of the ones that were made—three that were made—which one do you like? Or, you know, which one don't you like?
So, I like them all. I can tell you that—so the first one that actually got made was The Blind Side. And Moneyball was kind of right on its heels. But when I saw The Blind Side for the first time, that was my first experience of seeing something I had written being put on the screen, and that was when I got the education. It's like, you know, a book is 100,000 words, a screenplay is 8,000 words. They're going to cut something, and there's incredible compression involved, and then some embellishment. And in my case, it's embellishing a reality. So that's a little weird, but I remember sitting there with my wife, Tabitha, watching it for a benefit before it came out. And I was supposed to get up afterwards and say what I thought about it, but I had not been shown anything. And I remember leaning over to her and saying, "I don't think I like this." And she said, "Don't say that. You can't say that." I said, "I'm not an idiot. I'm not going to say that." But as I watched it, I cried. I laughed. I cried again. And I thought, like, how often does that happen in a movie? It clearly packed a kind of punch. And so I had that brief moment where I thought this isn't exactly my thing, and I realized what I was doing when I was watching it. What was working when it worked, I took complete credit for it. Oh yeah, I did that. Complete. I did that. And when it was a little tricky, I felt it didn't work, I thought, "Oh, they screwed it up." And so I was doing that game, and I stopped. The minute I realized I was doing that, I just stopped. So, but I do have a favorite. If you said—I'm actually happy with all of them. And The Blind Side we got to talk about because it's generated enormous controversy. It's got—but that's been the most—You want to talk about that? Yeah, totally. Okay. We can get into that. But the success of it generated controversy, generated 300-and-something million dollars at the box office, and the kid it was about thought he deserved a lot more money than he got, and that was the beginning of the problem. But we'll come back to that. I think the movie that's likely to stand the test of time is Moneyball. It's the one—you have this—you know, when you walk through the room and you see The Firm, you say, "I don't want to see that anymore. I know how it ends." I have the same feeling with all of them, but every now and then I'll see, like, Moneyball on, and I want to watch it. I like it that much, and there's something about it. It's enduring. But they're all—I mean, they're all nominated for Oscars, right? I mean, these are not sucky movies. These are good movies.
And they have enormous effects on your career.
Yeah. It changes your relationship to the audience. I say this about the one thing—The Blind Side has a special place in my heart because no one read the book. The book was the worst-performing book I published. It kind of nipped the bottom or the middle of the New York Times bestseller list and went away. And we didn't know what we had when we came. It was a weird book to publish because it was a chick flick inside of a football book, and it kind of fell between two stools. And we thought when we were selling it that the publisher thought, wow, you know, you're going to tap into the evangelical Christian market and you're going to sell two million copies. And we put—unfortunately, which is sort of what happened with the movie—but with the book, it was The Blind Side, and the subtitle was The Evolution of a Game, and Christian booksellers wouldn't stock it because the word "evolution" was on the cover. Wow. And also, I think any decent evangelical Christian, when they read my work, smells a rat. They, like, know he's not one of us. And so I couldn't pull that off, you know. But the movie—even though they were even more ratlike than I was, the movie people—they would, you know, if you put an evangelical Christian in a room with me and one of these movie people, they'd pick me. The movie somehow got to that. And I can't go—if I'm in red America, if I'm in Oklahoma, if I'm in Mississippi, and I say, "Oh, I wrote Moneyball or The Big Short," nobody knows. But if I say I wrote The Blind Side, I don't have to pay for my meal. I mean, it's just like that movie hit people that I have trouble reaching. Yeah. And I love that. I love that. I wouldn't want to lose that. Right. Wow.
And John, do you have a favorite?
Yeah. All you can hope for when you sell film rights is when you get rid of it and you select the person you want to deal with, if you're lucky. You just want them to remain true to the spirit of the story, knowing they have to make a bunch of changes. And all I've asked for is, you guys stick to the story. Don't give me something really different, because the story works. The story's been proven to work in the marketplace. It's sold a lot of copies, has a following. So just stay true to the material. Francis Ford Coppola wanted to do The Rainmaker, and I was honored, and I met him, and we had a nice conversation, and he signed it. He said, "I'm going to stick to the material. I love the story." And I said, "Okay, great. We're off to a good start." And he said, "I want you to write the screenplay." And I said, "I don't know how to write a screenplay." And I'd never done that before. He said, "Well, it's no big deal. You can do it. Anybody can do it, you know." And so I wrote a screenplay that was about 400 pages long, and—which is about four times what you get. Yeah. And he read it and he said, "You know, you're right. You don't know how to write a screenplay." He wanted me to come—he filmed it in Memphis, and he wanted me to be on the set every day with him, to sit down between takes and drink cappuccino. He had a brand-new cappuccino machine, and he drinks like 25 cups a day, and we would just sit there and talk about the story, and he was just so focused. He's a writer. He loves writers, and so he wanted me there all the time. That's the only time I've ever really hung out on the set. It was young Matt Damon, was fun to hang out with, and that's the only time I've done that. But when the movie came out, he called one time. He's so obsessive. He edited and reshot, edited, reshot. It went on and on and on. He couldn't finish the movie. And he called us one time and said, "Okay, the movie's finished. Come watch it." I said, "Okay, where do you want us to come watch it?" He said, "Napa." Well, it's hard to turn down. So we flew out one night—Renee and the kids went to Napa and stayed with Coppola. And he has a viewing room where he watches his movies, and he invites his neighbors to come over and watch the movie with him blind. Okay. And his neighbor was George Lucas. So I'm sitting there with George Lucas and his kids and my kids, and Coppola, watch the movie, and then, you know, they turn the lights on, and you go around the room and everybody says what they want to say. And Lucas did not read the book, had not seen the movie, and had some great, you know, comments. So Coppola edited some more, cut some more, all this kind of stuff, and finally released the movie one week before Titanic. Ah, yeah. So timing is everything. It is. It is. It is. It got swamped. Yeah.
So yeah, Mike, I have a question for Mike. Mike, when you were running Sony, you saw hundreds of books. You bought hundreds of books to turn them into movies. Yeah. There's some essential transformation that's got to happen that neither he nor I have ever done with one of our books successfully. I've never tried to write a screenplay of one of my books. A brief—I did try Liar's Poker once. There's been seven attempts and—
They've all failed. What is required when you were sitting there watching these projects come through? What's required to turn one of these books into... why do they work and why don't they work?
I think, well, it's not a function of why they work or don't work, because some of them, just to your point, you get them in the market and they get squashed. But why do they get made or not made is what you're asking. And I think it's mostly about momentum at the end of the day. The business is completely alchemy. So imagine you have to put together a group of individuals — screenwriters, producers, directors, actors — and you're never going to get the right people in the right place at the right time, because everybody's working on... so you're sort of... it's a lot of moving pieces. And what invariably happens is something locks in, like a script comes in and Brad Pitt shows up and says, 'I want to play Billy Beane,' and all of a sudden everybody comes around that idea, right? And that then gets another actor and then eventually you get a director. But in the case of Moneyball, you have to remember we went through three directors. Steven Soderbergh got fired a week and a half into the picture. I flew in to Los Angeles to have dinner with Brad Pitt, and then I got a call saying Brad Pitt doesn't want to have dinner because his movie just got cancelled and he was about to start shooting Moneyball.
And that it was you who cancelled it.
Yeah. And well, I'll tell you the story.
And this story is... I've never actually fully heard this story, so I kind of want to hear it. What happened?
We gave the picture to Steven Soderbergh to make with Brad Pitt, and Steven Soderbergh said, 'I have a new idea. I'm not going to tell you what it is. I'm going to show you as I shoot it.' And I had just broken my shoulder. I was sitting at home, and Amy Pascal, who was running the studio, called me up and said, 'We have a serious problem and I need to come over and show it to you.' And what Soderbergh had done is he had spent $7 million to shoot a bunch of old-timers in real time. And he insisted that it be 20 minutes long as the opening of the movie before we even got into the Moneyball part of it. And we realized all of a sudden, oh my god, if this is it, we are in a heap of trouble.
And you didn't find this out until the day before?
He wouldn't show it to us. So at that point, Mr. Soderbergh left, and we had to go and find the next one up. I remember. So instead of going to Brad Pitt's house, I landed... I got detoured to the Chateau Marmont bar, where I met Steven Soderbergh, who said the movie business is in ruins and I'm never going to make another movie again. He's since made many.
No. Right. No, yeah, he's still going.
Right. So, before we go on to The Blind Side, what is the worst experience you've had when it relates to Hollywood? John, do you have one that just sort of epitomizes it? Leaving aside The Lost Room, maybe it is a lawsuit, or was nothing terrible?
The Chamber was a book that I really liked. It was hard to write, hard to finish. And we sold the film rights immediately to The Chamber, and it got passed around. It didn't take long, but they showed me a screenplay of The Chamber, first draft. And they always show me the screenplay because they want me to love it and they want your notes. Don't you love to get notes? And you give a bunch of notes and they just ignore the notes. They're not going to listen to you.
A pattern is emerging here. They don't pay for the notes.
Yeah. The screenplay was so bad. And I've read a lot of bad screenplays since then. There were a lot of bad ones out there, and this thing was awful. And I sort of got angry, and so my notes were really, really pointed, to the point where they were sort of insulted about what I said. And they sort of dug in and said, 'Well, you know, look, Mr. Smartass, you're just a writer. We know how to make movies and you don't, right?' And they stayed with that script, and I bowed out real quick. But I said, 'If you guys make this movie, you're in big trouble.' And it was Gene Hackman on death row. It had such potential. They made the movie. I never said a word to any of them. And once the movie was over, they realized how bad it was. And they sent the movie to me to watch, just me. Rene and I went to...
What, like a disc or a cassette or something?
Whatever they had back then.
1995, but not in a theater.
Yeah, it was in a theater.
Yeah, we were in the theater during the day. Nobody else was there but Rene and I. We sat down and watched the movie, and the studio guys are sitting right behind me. And I watched the movie, and it was really bad. And I got up and walked out, and they said, 'What do you think?' I said, 'Thanks for bringing it,' and that was it. I never criticized the movie because, again, I don't believe in doing that. If you take the money, you play the game. If they screw it up, you shouldn't criticize them. At the same time, if it's great, I do what you do. I take full credit. I wrote the story. It's my story. You can't lose. We're in perfect position. And the movie came out and bombed, and nobody went to see it. And that was an unpleasant experience. It's the only bad movie out of eight or nine I've had. So I've been, like Mike said, I've been very, very lucky with Hollywood, luckier than most people.
Michael, have you had a really bad one?
Yeah, of course. The Blind Side, but subsequently... But I was thinking that along the way there have been sources of conflict. Oddly not with The Blind Side, but with both Moneyball and The Big Short, the real people freaked, including Billy Beane, that a movie was going to be made of their lives. Billy was trapped because you had his life rights, so he couldn't get out of it. And he couldn't insist on having his name changed. But I've had several characters, people who I'd gotten somewhat close to, who were... Paul DePodesta, Oakland A's number two, the guy, the brain trust, when he found out that Jonah Hill was playing him, he was so upset because he imagined himself looking differently.
Yeah, I know that people get upset with that. That's what upsets them, if the actor doesn't look the way they want to be portrayed.
He wanted Brad Pitt, right? They want to be Brad Pitt, right? And that's happened with four real people between those two movies. 'Take my name off it.' In the case of Paul DePodesta, he said, 'This is going to be bad for my brand.' So they played a little joke and they named the character Peter Brand. But in every case, those people go on to spend the rest of their lives explaining that, 'I'm the guy who was in the movie. It was really me.' And they come back and they're so upset that they didn't actually participate. So there was some unpleasant, like, little conflict about the movies. But none of that was horrible. What has been horrible is the post-mortem, the after-effects of The Blind Side. And this is...
It's totally the third time he's brought that up.
I know. I think you should pursue that. Let's go there.
No, no. So it was a question.
No, no, no, no. I agree with John. I agree with John. I didn't want... it was for timing, right? I wanted to hit Michael. Go, Michael. Can we do this? I, for one, am confused about what's happening there.
So I got to tell the story of The Blind Side. I've told it from this stage once already, but not years ago. But he's got a special interest in a way because he was at law school at Ole Miss when Shaun O'Hara was the point guard on the basketball team. Shaun O'Hara, who is the Tim McGraw character in the movie, and a New Orleans boy, a New Orleans athletic legend. And I got to tell you, Shaun is not a literary person. Shaun is so not a literary person that when I went to his house, I remember looking around for where the bookshelves were, and there were no bookshelves. And he let me wander his house to get to know how he was living. And I went into his closet, and there were two books way up high over the shoes — those shoes he never wore — and they were John Grisham books. And he said, 'Oh, those are John Grisham books.' He said, 'John Grisham gave them to me.' And I pulled them down, and it was to Shaun O'Hara, you know, whatever. John Grisham. And Shaun says, 'I never read him.' Never read him. Never read him. I never read anything. Like, I don't know if Shaun has ever read a book. And Shaun just... including The Blind Side.
