As an aspiring writer, first in New York and later in Los Angeles, I worked on a number of projects, most never seeing the light of day. There were historical dramas, romantic comedies, ensemble comedy/dramas, and experimental plays. I still have the rejection letters from major studios and production companies for a pet project that, given the current situation in the Middle East, is more timely than ever. One studio reader summed up the general response: “This is an important project that needs to be filmed. Good luck getting it made.” I have a feeling it would garner the same response today.
There was one project in particular I enjoyed working on that was a writing-for-hire gig in Los Angeles and which had a lot going for it. A small production company owned the rights to a true story about the miraculous recovery of a young girl who was injured in a car accident on an icy mountain road in Colorado. The attending EMTs concluded that her injuries were beyond a fighting chance for survival, but the attending physician’s assistant was unwilling to give up and, defying the odds, the girl recovered.
I was hired to write a treatment for a screenplay based on a magazine article about the incident along with some notes from interviews with the girl’s family. We fleshed out the main characters and added a few layers of dramatic interest, principally an underlying conflict and source of enduring sadness between the physician’s assistant (“Micheal”) and his wife (“Laura”) stemming from the death of their young son years before when Michael was in medical school. Their son had sustained a serious injury and, despite Michael’s efforts, the boy died. In despair, Michael abandoned med school and the couple moved to Colorado where Micheal worked as an EMT at a remote hospital in the mountains. An eerie contrast between the injured girl, who survived, and the couple’s young son, who did not, haunted Micheal, and put their already strained marriage in jeopardy.
The project got the green light and I was hired to write the screenplay. The script was filmed in 1985 under the name The 15th Time Around and starred Michael Moriarty (Courage Under Fire, Pale Rider, Bang the Drum Slowly, Holocaust, and Law and Order) and Louise Caire Clark, but was never completely finished. The investors were not willing to cover the costs to complete the film for distribution and the project simply ground to a halt. That’s showbiz. I put the experience behind me, moved on to other writing projects, and continued working as an actor. That was nearly forty years ago.
However, D. Paul Thomas, director and producer of The Fifteenth Time Around, never gave up on it. I have no idea how many times he pitched the project to potential investors, distributors, or studio partners, but he kept the project from dying. As time went on, the challenge of reviving the project took on additional challenges. How do you justify releasing an admittedly modest character study ten, twenty, thirty, or going on forty years after it was filmed? As a period piece? The original footage, lighting, sound, and cinematic style are now all dated, and audiences might well find the conventions of the 1980s to be too great an obstacle to appreciating the film.
At some point in the not too-distant past, D. Paul found new partners who shared his enthusiasm for the project. They re-imagined the plot and characters by anchoring the timeframe to today, with the essential action of The 15th Time Around handled as flashback sequences. This required new material be written and filmed to provide the book-ends for the new film, Of Things Past. With a fresh roster of producers, and a screenwriter (Pete Bollinger) and director (Eric Rafael Ibarra) for the new material, the project moved forward.
The original ending was somewhat open-ended, and allowed for the relationship of Michael and Laura to resolve in different ways. Maybe Michael would finally be able to forgive himself for their son’s death or maybe not. Maybe Laura would leave Michael and return to New York or maybe not. There was enough ambiguity in the original script to provide credible jumping off points for fresh character development and plot. The little girl (“Kiki”) who was injured in the car crash is now a mature woman (Tara Reid). Kiki seeks out Laura to help understand and reconcile how that one sequence of events from long ago could have forever changed the lives of Michael, Laura, and Kiki.
When D. Paul Thomas contacted me a year ago about the revived project and laid out the approach taken for Of Things Past I was delighted. The revitalization of the original story by the new creative team was brilliant and I was thrilled to view the finished work. It even snagged a review in Variety, the showbiz news outlet of record, and is available as View On Demand on Amazon, Vudu, and other platforms.
Of Things Past has been an unexpected joy and I see the surprising outcome to be an enduring reminder to always do the best you can and never give up hope.
What Then? 