Revisionist History - Blink with Stephen Gaghan | Development Hell

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

It’s the mid-2000s, Malcolm and writer/producer Stephen Gaghan (“Traffic”, “Syriana”) are running around Hollywood pitching their scripted adaptation of Blink. This conversation starts with a failed vampire love story, takes a ride in Leonardo DiCaprio’s Prius, before making an unexpectedly heartbreaking turn that leads Stephen to walk away from the project forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bushkin. It was my second book. My interactions with Hollywood were, to that point, limited. I think someone once optioned something I'd written for The New Yorker, and I'd taken the meeting or two, but nothing came of it. But then, one day, I got a call from Steve Gagin. If you're a movie buff, you've heard the name. He'd just won the Oscar for writing Traffic, which was an amazing movie about the drug trade, directed by Steven Soderbergh,

starring Michael Douglas and Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle and a million other stars. And he had just wrapped Siriana, another fantastic movie, with Jeffrey Wright and George Clooney and Matt Damon. Anyway, I had never met him. He says, I'm coming to New York, and I want to meet with you

about your book Blink. Every writer dreams of getting a call like this. I promise you, I was thrilled to bits. And Steve flies in from Los Angeles and we meet in a cafe somewhere downtown. And just so you get the visual, I'm short and skinny. Steve is, I don't know, 6'4". He's an athlete. Absurdly handsome.

Maybe the most charming person I've ever met. And he tells me he's obsessed with the chapter in Blink about reading emotions and how there are people in the world who are really, really good at knowing what other people are thinking and feeling. Human lie detectors. So over the next few years, I am basically Steve's assistant in cooking up a story

about a human lie detector. It is, I believe to this day, an absolutely brilliant script. But have you ever seen a movie called Blink? No, you haven't. And what I'm about to do is tell you the real story of why the movie never got made. In fact, I'm going to do much more than that. In the next episode, I'm going to tell you another story about an amazing movie that never got made. And then, after that, another story, and then another story. Half a dozen episodes all told. Maybe even more if we get into it.

Because the thing I realized in talking to Steve about what happened with our long and hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking experience in trying to turn Blink into a movie is that the best Hollywood stories are the stories that never got made. We're calling this series Development Hell. I promise you there will be more name-dropping and celebrity drive-bys and hilarious digressions than you can shake a stick at. We're going to call up the biggest names we can find and just have them pitch us the ideas that broke their heart. I mean, come on.

How are you not along for the ride? But today, my very own journey into development hell. Well, thank you for doing this, Steve. What I really want to do is for you and I to recreate, just for a moment, the magic of that day when we were jetting around L.A. in your, what car did you have then? Was it your Mercedes wagon? I think it was an old station wagon.

Exactly. It was an old station wagon. We went from one mogul to the next, pitching this story. It was just like, it's one of my greatest memories ever. But to start at the beginning, I had never met you, correct? And you called me out of the blue.

We have to even start before this. Actually, I think we should go back to the dawn of time. So there was the Big Bang and that molecules apparently came along. Anyway. So it's actually

an incredible story. So I had finished my film, Siriana, which was like a four and a half year effort. And it was intense. And then I was like, what am I going to do next? So I'm sitting in Cafe Jeton. And I had this idea, this crazy idea. This is way before Twilight.

I wanted to do a vampire love story. And actually, what I wanted to do was a love story, a tragic love story with a happy ending. And I was like, kept thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it. And then I was like, oh my God, the guy is a vampire. The love stories are as good as the things that keep the lovers apart. So picture a horse farm in Kentucky. It's winter. Suddenly the smoke starts coming out of a chimney. These big farms are all owned by Europeans who are mysterious. This guy comes to town

and he meets a veterinarian on the farm and sparks fly. They obviously are really into each other. But then there's also all these weird deaths that start happening around some animals, some people. Her brothers, her family decide this guy is the one who's doing it. And so they decide enough's enough. They're going to kill him. So they poison him.

Now, she's in love with him. She discovers him, right? The sun is setting. He's been poisoned. They think he's dead. They've gone. She finds him. She thinks he's committed suicide by drinking the poison. Romeo and Juliet, she's so distraught. All she could do is drink the poison herself. As she's dying, the sun is setting, the vampire's waking up, and he sees her there and realizes what's happened and he has to do the one thing that he swore he would never do which is reveal his true self and bite her and so she dies but they wake then wakes up to eternal happiness being in love

with the scouts and i was like too much skepticism from every representative in my life they're like you cannot write a vampire movie it is impossible like you've done you know no any whatever so i'm sitting in cafe jeton trying to write my vampire love story i never got past page 10 or 12 and so i'm reading i'm reading your book blink blink and i'm sitting in there reading blink quite happily every day, drinking my coffee, failing at writing my vampire love story. And in and out, every once in a while comes a plucky young actor that I'm pretty sure is going places by the name of Leonardo DiCaprio. And so Leo sees me there. And Leo had been interested in playing the role

in Siriano that Matt Damon ultimately played and in fact if you know Leo at all he never really says yes but he never says no so he never passes, I honestly think he still thinks he can be in Siriano it's just still available and so anyway now I see him

in Jetan and he's like hey, what are you doing? We got to cook something up. What are you interested in? Let's come up with something. And I'm like, I think this could be a movie. I think there's a movie in here.

Now, knowing your book as you do, you realize that's a very challenging adaptation, right? Right. Blink is nothing like a vampire love story. Right. as you do, you realize that's a very challenging adaptation, right? Right. Blink is nothing like a vampire love story, right? Like you and I, you know, cut to a year from this point, you and I will cook up a totally different story. But he's looking at me and he goes, I'll do it. Let's do it. That's a great idea. So that's, then that precipitated me, I think, maybe calling you out of the blue to say hi. And this is, what, this is like 2005? Maybe 2006 or 7.

When do we go, at some point in the story, so we decided we would do something which makes no practical sense, which is turn Blink into a movie. You were, from the very beginning as I recall, attracted to a very, very specific thing in Blink. The notion of what?

I liked the idea that somebody could have like almost a truth detector. That a person could have this really heightened sense of when people were being honest or not. And that they

had incredible empathy or who knows what it is. But it's just a fact of life for And for this, for someone, it's also, it's a little heavy in some ways, but it's quite interesting in the world we live in because I just, I, at that time, and I don't think it's changed a lot. I felt like, you know, there are a lot of people are saying one thing and doing another. Yeah. This person would always feel a little bit ahead of that curve. This is because I had in Blink a chapter

where I talked about the idea that a very small number of people may have the gift of telling when someone's lying. It's all about the research of a guy named Paul Ekman in San Francisco, a sort of legendary figure in the lie detection world. And this predates, there subsequently were all these TV shows

about people who knew when someone was lying. This predates all of that. Yeah. But way before that, you know, so you and I, you know, we get together, we start talking about it, and I think very quickly we realize we have nothing.

We have nothing. Like, what are we going to do exactly? But we come up with an idea. I have no idea how this comes up. Give me your memory of the story that emerged out of our collaboration. So something you and I were both interested in was the looming, you know, was how giant, so how corporations treated their retired employees because they had these pension funds, right? That were like these giant boxes of money. And suddenly out there in the world,

these like leveraged buyout people and hedge fund people were going, oh my gosh, look at that. There's this giant box of money. That's one thing. But then there are all these obligations that are unfunded to these workers. Now, if you could somehow buy that company and get rid of all of those unfunded obligations that are weighing down the company, you could have a really profitable company. You'd go from having a bankrupt company to actually a company that works really well. The only bad part of that story is that the people that actually put in the 40 years or 30 years of work are left actually without their pensions or without healthcare, without very reduced pension support. And I think we were sensing that not only was this starting to happen, but it was going to

happen in a really, really big way. And I think very quickly, we kind of got interested in and we were thinking about General Motors, you know, and we saw this kind of General Motors bankruptcy coming, and that the pension stuff would be like at the dead center of it. And we ended up making up our own fictional like steel company, American Steel. And American Steel was basically being put in play, you know, by a kind of hedge fund operator who unbeknownst to him has a son, a kind of wayward son, so it's a father-son story, and his wayward son has this truth detection ability that he becomes aware

of over the course of the film. So you, Steve, the genius thing about your idea was, when you were telling it initially, you started with we have one of these prototypical ruthless Wall Street predators

who's like got the fancy apartment on Fifth Avenue, the huge house out in, you know, in the Hamptons and he's everything you, and he has this, a son from whom he is estranged, right? A son who shares none of his father's values, but who desperately wants and cannot get his father's approval. You started with this really powerful family dynamic,

which was going to be the engine of the movie. What does a son do if he wants to win his father's love, and yet he is incapable of competing on any of the terms of his father's world. Right? The son was a schoolteacher. Wasn't he a schoolteacher or like teaching in Harlem?

He had taken a very long time to graduate from college, like over a decade. And, you know, was generally considered a layabout and kind of a loser. And definitely in his own mind. And now he's graduating, maybe, and he doesn't know what to do. And the dad is sort of loosely amenable to perhaps providing him a cubicle, his hedge fund up in Connecticut or whatever. And he goes to work in this kind of shark environment that he's not at all suited for. The dad doesn't know that the son has this gift, this magical gift of knowing whether

someone's lying or not. He's no clue that his son has this. He perceives his son as a loser without any kind of special gifts or abilities. And he's doing his, he's tossing his son a bone. He's not, the son is still on the outs in a disappointment in his father's eyes. I think it's important to place this film like in the right tone. It has like a Hal Ashby vibe to it, you know?

It feels like a little bit like it's in the, it's in the tone of Harold and Maude or in the tone of maybe The Graduate even. Like that's, I know that was like something I was really, really thinking about. Like or in the tone of maybe the graduate even. I know that was something I was really, really thinking about. What are the pressures on young people right now when they are looking at what's my future? It allows you to have a little bit of a shaggy dog story, but there's like you're pointing out really heartfelt, emotional kind of, of wanting a father's love. And it's moving. And so the core little plot point

is this weird quirk of bankruptcy law. That if you, to go back to what you began with, that there were these companies that seemed bankrupt but had this large pool of cash tied up in a retirement account for their employees. If a company's in bankruptcy, it is at the mercy of a bankruptcy judge. And bankruptcy law is unique in all law in that it grants enormous discretion to the judge. So there are judges out there, if they want to, they could wave a magic wand and say, you can take this company out of bankruptcy and all the money in the retirement account is yours. Or another judge might say, you can have the company, but you must honor every single obligation you have towards the retirement of your employees. It's up to the judge. So if you're a robber baron, you're a predator, you're some hedge fund guy in Connecticut, and you're eyeing a bankrupt company and trying to

figure out whether you can make it work, everything depends on which judge oversees this particular case in bankruptcy court. It's incredibly fun as a plot mechanism because now you're just, you know, billions and billions ride on essentially gaming the system. Which of these potential judges, if you could somehow manipulate it, is most likely to be friendly to your particular robber baron cause? Yeah, yeah.

So the son realizes this and goes to the dad. The dad is totally unsure what to do. His options are just to roll the dice. Does he buy this thing, take it to bankruptcy, and take the risk that he could be completely screwed by some kind of pro-worker judge? But the son comes to the dad and says, Dad, I need to tell you something about

myself. I have this gift. I can see into someone's heart. And the dad, of course, rolls his eyes and says, you're bullshitting me. So the son sets out to prove to his dad he knows that he can see into someone's soul. And then doesn't he have a series of tests? Are there three tests that he undergoes to prove to his dad he has this magical ability? So part of the thing with the movie that I think worked really well is that the son finds out about the gift

during the movie as well. Oh, that's right. He wasn't like swanning around saying, I have a superpower. He actually runs across the professor who's doing this kind of research. And the professor's a character, like he's a gambling addict.

He realizes, you know, they run this test where they're like, it's something, some ridiculous thing. It's like people saying the line, I had a ham sandwich for lunch. Oh, right. Like hundreds of people, I had a ham sandwich for lunch. And he drag, I had a ham sandwich for lunch. And he

drags this kid in there and he's like, who's lying and who's telling the truth? And he watches like 150 people saying I had a ham sandwich for lunch and he gets 150 of them right. And the guy is immediately takes him to the racetrack, like out to Belmont, puts his binoculars to his eyes and starts having him look at horses. Which horse is going to win this race? And he's like looking at the horse and he's like, this is absurd. And the horse, he's like, no, no, horses have inner lives. Like what's going on? And he starts like telling him about the emotional lives of these horses

that, you know, who are getting ready to go into the starting gate. And like one is like thinking about dinner and one is like had a bad sexual experience recently and feeling really shameful and like they're all just and he's like and he's sort of by process of elimination he's like it's going to be this one it's going to be the philly the philly's going to win yeah and so this professor who's like literally a gambler he ends up betting like like 15 grand like at the track and then money through bookies and the kid is watching him

and he's like, this guy's a psychopath, you know? And then photo finish and then of course the filly wins and our character doesn't believe it, you know? He just thinks this is complete nonsense and he sort of proves it to him over and over and over. The Professor, by the way, is based on a man named Sylvan Tompkins,

one of the true legends of uh early 20th century mid-century psychology who had convinced himself that he could read people's uh inner selves and also the thing about going to the horses that's tompkins he would frequent the horse the horse racing and horse races uh he was a pen he would go to phil to the horse racing. He was at Penn. He would go to the horse races in Philadelphia, and he would try and use all of his theories about human emotion to pick winners. So that was all straight from this. He was this autodidact guy, and he wrote a book detailing his theories,

and the line about the book was the book was so long no one read it even sylvan which i always loved and then eventually he you know at this inflection point with his father with it where they're not you know the opportunities inside the family business are are not you know they're they're not going to work out for him. He like, as he realizes he has like a Hail Mary pitch, which is I can actually make sure you get the result you want. Right, right. With the bankruptcy judge. And the dad, of course, is a skeptic.

He doesn't believe it either. And like, you know, you know, like I hadn't, I hadn't, you know, look, I hadn't thought about this script or looked at it in, I mean, a long time, probably. 15 years. 15 years. Yeah. And I, I didn't even, I couldn't even find the Blink folder. And I was like, and then I just searched for Blink and then up came a bunch of stuff and like, and, and, and the draft. so funny because you get to know that you know you put so much effort you know into trying to make these movies and like it's so much love it's love and like it feels like life or death and i i just i just clicked on it and like page 65 and up comes and this is this is dialogue

i completely forgotten this this is dialogue between the kid and his dad and they're trying to like and they're at they're at like a local really cheesy drinking place in greenwich where his half brother plays in a band called the margin calls and he's there with his family and his stepmom and they're all nodding along while this bro band does cover cover cover songs you know and they're eating like you know french dips or whatever and uh his dad's a little tipsy and he's like and he's like you know this is all coming to a head he's like am i sorry i never carpooled or sliced oranges for t-ball i don't know i used to say did they ask napoleon to do reading circle and teddy's like the kid is like we did some stuff we looked at pictures yeah yeah redmond the dad is redmond the son is ted teddy yep exactly we went to the met together i remember

going to the met i think i do and he does his dad you know his dad imitates his dad and he's like american tycoons have to appear cultured so what's the first thing they buy and then together they say bronzes and now the dad's like jp morick. Teddy's like, they had books, but they wanted to be Renaissance men, like the Duke of Urbino. And Redmond says, yeah, if you're a real snob, you know that Castello and Urbino like the back of your hand, but you don't talk about it. And then Teddy says, and I think I remember a bedtime rhyme about how much sleep a person needs. And he says, nature needs five, custom takes seven, laziness takes nine, and wickedness 11. And his dad looks at him and says, his dad looks at him for a long moment and goes,

I'd forgotten. It's Scottish. Which is, I mean, it's really funny, Malcolm. I mean, it's like... There's a beautiful scene I remember. I mean, one of the genius things about the idea was exploring the idea of

how genuinely conflicted the son is about this discovery of his gift. Because isn't there a scene, am I making this up, where he's on a date with a girl, and the date goes awry because he can tell every time she says something that she doesn't believe,

and you realize that dating under those circumstances is impossible? You realize that this thing that started out as a joke is actually the thing that's defined his entire life. And derailed his entire life. Derailed it. It's made it impossible to trust people in the normal flow of human interaction.

Yeah. Because the dissembling is all laid bare. He's five steps ahead of all of it. And he's just cut himself off from it. And so he... He has one chance at redemption. And that is to finally use his gift to win back the love of the person

who he most wants to love him, his dad, right? Yeah. So the dad tests teddy's abilities teddy wins each time and teddy is then given the job of picking between is it three different judges i think it must be three it's gotta be the rule there are three canada judges because you can judge you can you can jurisdiction shop in bankruptcy. So there's three bankruptcy courts the father can potentially file in. And the question is, which one should So he's given, the son is given the job of figuring out who is the judge most likely to rule in his father's favor. And so he goes and contrives a reason, right, to meet up with each one of these judges and assess their fundamental character. Yeah.

I remember, I don't remember them all, but I do remember one was like, he pretended to be an SAT tutor for one of the judges' wayward sons and he gets into their house and he ends up getting into like a kind of conflict with this guy. Does he play golf with another guy? I think so. Yeah, he does. He goes to play golf. Yeah. I'm usually longer after the turn. Wait, who says that? Teddy or the judge? Teddy says it.

He's terrible at golf. And the guy's like, yeah, the guy says, try and chip the ball back to the smooth stuff. And then the guy, I've just totally forgotten all this. He's like, let's cut the crap. I know who you are. I know who your father is.

Human college. Oh, right. We were at an eating club together. The pork, our motto, feed your friends first. Wait, so that judge has ruled out. So one of the judges sees through Teddy. It's like, get out of here. I know what

game you're playing. Let's cut the crap. There's no way I'm ruling against labor. Not in this climate. Not in Pennsylvania. Impartiality, my ass. They'll burn my house down and kill my family. Tell them that. Teddy says, you're signing a death certificate for American Steel.

And he says, yeah. Well, maybe we'll get universal health care. Maybe India will have a social revolution. Pay their workers $27.50 an hour plus benefits. Maybe Woodland Gnomes will make auto parts for free and we'll all sip sherry in the park. And he says, never ever pick up a golf club again. Then he says, I'm a tennis player.

Golf is for assholes. The whole whiff of class warfare in this, this script is just 10 years too soon. When I was looking, I just was glancing at it, Malcolm, like for 10 minutes before we got on here. And I was like, God, it's like, it's for right now. It's for right now. It's so, it's so for right now. All right, let's take a little break.

When we're back. Agents are now heavily involved. Word has leaked that Stephen Gagin has a secret new project. There's a frantic week where we find time on every movie executive's calendar. The plan is to hit every studio over the course of two days, which requires driving from the Valley to Hollywood, Santa Monica to Culver City. We map our route like it's the invasion of Normandy.

I fly out to L.A. because I am now fully in the fantasy. I book a bungalow at the Bel Air Hotel. Steve, Leo, and yes, I'm calling him Leo at this point, meet for drinks at the Bel Air. But Steve is late, so for a while, it's just me and Leo in a booth at the bar. And for the first time in my life, I'm like, we're the paparazzi.

And the next morning, off we go. All three of us. Look, we, you know, we were really lucky. Like, we had, we had, you know, from my perspective, it's like, we had you, you know, with this amazing book that was like a huge, you know, it was really

a bestseller, and everyone had read it, right? So everyone knew the book, which is wonderful. Everyone knew Tipping Point. And then we won the lottery in that Leonardo DiCaprio attached himself to the movie. So when we were going around pitching it, we were meeting all these

moguls on our day of driving around in the old station wagon. We have Leonardo DiCaprio with us. It was hilarious. So we're like in there, the three of us like the three musketeers like sitting on like these couches in these big offices you know and we're pitching our hearts out

and at the end of the day I think probably they're just like would kind of look down the couch and there would be Leo kind of you know chuckling along he would just nod and I And I think more or less people at that moment were like, we're in. We probably could have just like moved our mouths and made no sound

come out and we probably would have been okay. The amount of sheer, I must say, the entire time we were with Leo, I was like so hopelessly starstruck. He's amazing. He later may have become more famous later, but he was on the cusp of his he was just genuine heartthrob moment i mean he had everything a heartthrob but he's also a

really good actor so he's like he has all these things going on at the same time and you're when you're around him you just you know it's it's hard not to be aware of it. Yeah. Now, so we took this out over the course, I believe, of two days. Am I right that everyone we met with one exception bid on it? Everybody bid on it. Yeah, everyone. And I just remember being in your car,

driving down, like, whatever, Santa Monica Boulevard, and just getting calls from your agent with the new, someone else has signed on, wants to bid. It was just the most absurdly thrilling. It was really exciting. And that it was just us just driving around in an old station wagon. To this day, my favorite pitch story was, we went to Warner Brothers, and the way we remember, we divided up the pitch. And so you did the story, I did the science. So it was like roughly 50-50.

No, sometimes we mixed it up. Sometimes you would do almost all of it, and I would do almost all of it. For some reason, the Warner Brothers one, I did the most of the pitch. And I knew no one in Hollywood. My first time ever pitching a movie. Go into this gorgeous

executive room and there are two men in the room. One was very, very tall and very, very handsome and charismatic and warm. One was short and sort of angry and whatever. I, not knowing any better assumed the tall handsome one was the chairman of the studio and that this short guy was some kind of underling flunky

assistant whatever so i pitched the entire script to the tall guy. And then, only to discover the short guy who I've been ignoring the entire time as the chairman of the studio. And the tall guy is just some dude who was just in the office that day who's hilarious.

And of course, they bid, which made me think that maybe the mistake we make, maybe, you know, maybe their reasons for bidding were that if they're going to come in here and ignore me,

I'm going to show them. I remember that. But it never got made. Yeah, I mean, I think I probably have information about that that you actually don't have, that you may not even know. Yeah. Which, you know, I can explain. When we come back, the bidding war. And then Steve tells me a story I'd never heard before.

The story of why things fell apart. So, we get a real-life bidding war. The town went nuts. We were in Steve's battered station wagon, driving around LA, and every half an hour, Steve's agent would call. Sony, in. Universal, in. Warner Brothers, in. We have the sunroof open, the windows down. I'm wearing sunglasses. I never wear sunglasses. We don't even need Leo anymore. He gets into his Prius and drives home. We pick a studio. We huddle with our agents. We pick a winner. Checks are cashed. Some brilliant producer is assigned to our case. And off we go. Only, it never happens. A year passes. Then two years.

Then three years. And this is why we're doing Development Hell, an entire series devoted to scripts that never happen. Because this is always the most devastating part of the story. The plot twists that happen off the page. So, you know, Leo's company, they were producers on the movie,

and Leo was really into it, you know, and really involved. And at a certain point in time, we had essentially a green light at Universal, you know, and we had a budget, a schedule, and everything. A lot of things worked out, how we were going to do it. And I was talking, and I said, I'm going to do a week more on the script. There were just some things I wanted to fix.

And I got into it, and I ended up working on it for months and months. And I changed a lot of stuff. But the main thing I did, is the character, and a lot of this is just intuitive. I don't even know why I'm doing it. But the character got like 10 years younger. And Leo, you know, when he read it, he was really funny. He was like, he goes, buddy, buddy you if you didn't want me in the movie

all you had to do was say so it's no big deal and um and it wasn't it wasn't that i didn't want him in the movie but but this other thing had happened kind of off off camera which was that i'd um i met heath ledger and i'd gotten to be very very close close with him instantly. I just had a real connection with him that was kind of unusual and really special to me, and I got really excited, and I started seeing him as the main character. And once I started seeing that, I couldn't unsee it. And obviously, it was very delicate in a way,

and Leo's totally cool. Like, I mean, obviously he has a thousand choices, but I, in my mind, it was a big deal. I was just like, I really, if I just said to Leo, Hey, I would like to do this with Heath. He would be like, I'm a huge fan of his. I love him. Let's do it. You know, it wouldn't have been a problem, but in my mind, it was really a thing. Definitely a thing at the studio, because like, at first it was like, we don't want to we're not that interested because it's like you can have the biggest really big star why would you do that?

The really big star being Leo because Heath wasn't so big at the time and then it changed because his I believe it was right around the time the Joker was coming out because he then popped as this massive and then suddenly it was okay all this was kind of happening

and in a good way I thought in a way that was really right for a movie this massive and then suddenly it was okay you know all this was kind of happening and um and in a good way i thought in a way that was really right for a movie but i also just had this feeling that i was going to just you know i love this guy and i was going to make a bunch of movies with him heath and everything and then um i got a phone call uh they were on speakerphone and it was heath's heath ledger's father who I'd never met so he died in a really tragic you know like you have like a beer and like a

Benadryl and like another you know and just absolute fluke any other day you're fine but just breathing stops and the dad and a guy who was really close with him, like the guy who was closest to him in his professional life,

they were there with the body. And our script was embedded with him, and your book was on the bedside table. And I think my number was on the script like written like and these guys are in as you can imagine they are in um shock and they dialed that number and i don't know why and i'm in an airport with my wife just going from one place to another and i literally just i, it never happened to me before since. Like my feet went out from under me.

I just literally sat down. Like, because I was like, what? What? And the emotion, like what, you know, what they were going through, I should not have been a party to in any way, really. And yet, as a human or as somebody who just cares, I just was there and I was listening and my wife was looking at me, I remember her face and I was just like, I could have speechless and I just listened and listened and listened. And it was just really, really and and it's still sad and um you know and

i think that i think that for me i just i just had to put a put a pin in it you know like i just i didn't i just i don't know it just it's something steve that's i did not know that story um yeah no i haven't i hadn't really told anyone for a long time. And I debated, actually, when we were going to talk about it. I was like, should I talk about it? And I actually asked my wife, and I thought, no, I think it's really good to talk about it, because it was sad. and yet here we are and we're talking about something that we really put a lot of heart and soul

and a lot of effort into and a lot of care. So I don't really have a clear answer of why we never made it, but I feel like maybe, I feel like that bit played a big role in it. But then again, I hadn't looked at it in a very long time and then when I got it out, like right before we got on,

I was reading it. I was just like, I ran to find my wife, you know, that we're still married, thank goodness. And I was like, I was like, I could be crazy, but I think this script is really good. Like, I think we really

had something, like really special. And we might have been ahead of our time or something we're just glancing at scene by scene by scene and it's just they're movie scenes you know and they're big and it's such a good title yeah well wait did you what was the title of did we call it blink yeah blink and like and and the way the movie opens you don't remember this it's I gotta you're gonna die, you're going to die because this is going to come back. This is the first scene I read, right? I opened it.

Here's how the movie opens. Close up, a baby's blue eye, huge and blue, like earth from space, staring at us. Blink. Begin credits. Close up, a baby looking into lens, a happy, curious baby doing what babies do. It makes us happy.

Now you hear a woman's voice off screen. He's so sweet. So sweet. So happy. Happy, happy baby. Yes, you are. The baby begins to scream. Close up. Happy baby again. Utterly adorable. But now, when observed in close up, the baby's expression seems to give clues to complex thinking. And now you hear the father. He's trying to tell us something. Father's tie drapes into the crib, wide 70s tie, hairy thick wrist with expensive watch. Mother, of course he is. I love mommy and daddy. Yes, I do. You hear the dad say a little desperado. The mother's hands, white painted nails, gold jewelry, deep tan appear to tuck the baby's sky blue blanket. Mother OS, tell him you love

him. Daddy loves you. Yes, he does. He needs reassurance from his father. And there's a pause, and you hear the father say, sometimes it's not about me. And the mother says, it's pretty much always about you. The room is totally silent, and you're just pushing on

the baby's eyes, and the baby blinks, and you cut to the title. Blink. Oh, that's great. That's so awesome. That's so awesome. I forgot. The whole thing is genius. All right. We are resolved, Stephen. Bring this thing back to life. We have to. Let's figure it out. I'd never heard the full story of why Steve had to walk away from Blink. But the more I caught up with Steve,

the more I felt that maybe we were onto something back then. Maybe it's time to bring Blink back to life. I mean, as a script, as a screenwriter, as a wonderful idea, and if there's someone listening in some big office somewhere in Hollywood, I will get on a plane tomorrow, if that's what it takes. And here's the thing. Hollywood is full of these stories. We're going to touch on a whole series of them in the upcoming episodes. Next up in the feed is the story of a sci-fi thriller that had just a little too much fi and not quite enough sci, with a twist that the studios just couldn't handle.

You're going to hear about a biopic told through the eyes of an exotic animal. You're going to hear the Oscar winner Charles Randolph get a little emotional about a project he did with Tom Cruise that fell apart. The minds behind some of Hollywood's biggest hits talking about their biggest failures.

Join us as we take the temperature of development hell. This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with Tali Emlin and Ben-Nadav Hafri. Editing by Sarah Nix. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Engineering by Echo Mountain. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.