Subjects pulled from the headlines have longed served as a treasure trove of source material for feature films, including classics like Battleship Potemkin, Dog Day Afternoon, and Zero Dark Thirty. For the eighth Esopus subscriber invitational, we asked readers to submit an item from a local news source—such as their town’s newspaper or a neighborhood blog—that they felt made great movie material. We invited legendary screenwriter Hampton Fancher (Blade Runner) to choose the submission that offered the best prospects for a screenplay adaptation, then asked him to write a film treatment inspired by his selection. In the end, Fancher was drawn to not one, but two subscriber submissions. He discusses his particular attraction to both, and his unique methods of approaching a film adaptation and screenwriting in general, below. Fancher’s two treatments, Your Lucky Day and Enigma Titanium, appear in the issue.

You ended up selecting two “local-news” submissions—the first, sent in by subscriber David Brendel, was a story about a psychic who bilked a forlorn, lovesick man out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. What attracted you to this one?

I think somebody being desperate enough to become foolish is wonderfully human. And the more desperate and the more foolish—and the more intelligent—the better. The idea of losers is beautiful, especially at a literary distance. It’s quixotic, and we love windmills.

Why do you think these types of characters make for good movies?

Because there’s a destination that seems inevitable and then there’s a trick played, and the character comes out on top. Narrative-wise, that’s a good structure. It’s short and sweet, and there’s some mucky stuff that’s got to be swum through.
   I’m a nonbeliever, but I’m fascinated by belief. I’ve also been in situations where I’ve been desperate and done things that are absurd and laughable because I so badly wanted to have a little bit of optimism. I went to a fortune-teller once in a “Will she come back to me?” moment. Another time my fucking agent at William Morris sent me to a psychic, a 19-year-old albino in the Valley who was supposed to tell me how I was going to become a movie star. Pathetic.

The other submission you chose, sent in by Cassandra Jenkins, offered you a lot more latitude in terms of story. It was, quite simply, a snapshot she had taken of a cover of Crime Times, a magazine that reprints mug shots from local police precincts.

There were lots of subscriber submissions that were interesting and had substance, but this one had no substance: It was just this photograph. But I was triggered by those mug shots. I knew a woman whose lover, just on a whim, stole a fish in a fancy market and got busted. It had ramifications that were not pretty. So that resonated for me. What happens if somebody winds up on the “wall of shame” and fate intervenes, for better or worse? I also like the idea of someone falling from grace—someone you assume has got it made, but then it turns out they were walking in a minefield.

Your takes on these submissions, reproduced on the following pages, are “treatments,” in a sense, but they’re also more impressionistic, and more literary, than a typical film treatment. Is this how you normally approach writing a screenplay?

Well, I think that times have changed and I’m just a throwback. It used to be, you’d tell your agent, or maybe your producers—if you’re the flavor of the month at some studio—“Hey, I’ve got a great idea. It’s about this donkey trying to get up this hill and this guy tries to cut its head off.” “Okay, sign here.” I did that for about 15 years, and I’d ultimately write screenplays based on these ideas. But my agents were always getting pissy because I wouldn’t sign a deal until I knew details from beginning to end that informed the narrative. I wanted everybody to say, “Yes, good,” to the concept before I started; I didn’t want to waste my time writing and then have everybody say “no.” So I would work a couple of months making a kind of an outline—a synopsis, basically. Like for the new Blade Runner—before I wrote the script I wrote a pretty detailed treatment, just to see what we were getting into. The treatment took longer than the screenplay, as it turns out, but the treatment was the screenplay in a way. A 40-page version of it.
   This is how I work, partly because I have a poorly organized mind. I don’t have good deductive thinking at all. I can’t add, literally. But I have imagination, and so I think of disparate, scattershot things that I like and then write them down and weave them together. Sometimes I have a beginning and an end. One thing informs another, and things unfold. Then the task of making a pair of pants or a shirt—something identifiable, something tailored—is the hard work.

That tailoring metaphor is apt, since part of your process is literally taking scissors to these initial ideas.

I always do that. Preston Sturges said that screenwriting isn’t writing, it’s architecture. He was being facile, but it’s true. Like everything else, a script has to have structure. Directors, producers, studios—they all use these index cards. You’ll have 40 of them on a wall, and the story will go from this one to that one, and then you’ll have to figure out what happens in the spaces between, and so on. It’s a design challenge. So to know that I’m on the right track, I’ll write different lines and scenes that inspire me, but then I cut them up to see what might match with what.

What’s the next step for these two treatments?

Well, either through a connection I have—producers, etc.—or with one of my agents, I’ll say, “What do you think of this?” And then if they like it, the next step is to see if they have a target in mind, a studio or a production company that might be susceptible to it. And then they’ll say, “Maybe Mr. So-and-So is crazy enough for this.” And then they’ll give it to him, and then she’ll call me to say let’s have a meeting. And then they’ll have questions, and they’ll push for certain narrative ideas.

You cite potential actors in parentheses to play characters in both of these; do you have any directors in mind? Or would you be interested in directing one or both yourself?

I don’t know about the fortune-teller story, but Enigma Titanium I’d be very interested in directing if I could do it on the cheap—for a price, as they say. Maybe there are some Esopus readers out there in the money who will bankroll a five-million-dollar movie.

What are the specific challenges associated with writing an adaptation as opposed to creating something from scratch?

I actually don’t make a distinction. I think maybe a so-called original might be a little less arduous to write than an adaptation. First of all, you have to understand that only very rarely, maybe once in a decade, is there a film adaptation of a news story or novel that ends up being a total reflection of what was originally on paper. A movie is a totally different animal—you sit in a theater and something has to be coming at you every few minutes, so things have to be changed from whatever the source material is. Does an egg look like an omelet? It doesn’t: They’re different things entirely. But you couldn’t have the omelet without the egg. Does that make any sense?