The Bridge

So I'm told there's a Scandinavian TV show called THE BRIDGE about a Danish cop and a Swedish cop who have to work together when a body is found straddling the border between the two countries. And they have very different personalities, see, and speak different languages...

Jutra Nom

I'm delighted to see that Bon Cop was nominated for a Jutra Award for Best Screenplay. The award is for French Language films, so it's doubly exciting to be up for the award.

I'm in Toronto for a flock of meetings, and it is always nice to be able to start a meeting by talking about your nomination for something...

Available December 19!

They're charging $50 for Bon Cop Bad Cop at Amazon.com. But Amazon.ca will sell it to you for less than $25! Should get to you just a little bit too late for Christmas. New Year's present, anyone?

Canadian Screenwriter Article

The new issue of Canadian Screenwriter has a feature on Bon Cop Bad Cop, focusing on Leila Basen's work creating the script with Patrick Huard, the star, and my work as a script doctor during pre-production.

I gotta say though that the article pretty much completely ignores the entire middle part of the script development. After Leila left to showrun her show Mental Block, Kevin Tierney, the producer, worked with Patrick for I don't know how many months on I don't know how many drafts of the script. The draft I read when I came on board was a funny, funny script already, and Patrick's character was all there.

I understand the Guild wants to showcase its writers. But it's not fair to ignore Kevin and Patrick's work. The movie would have been different without Leila or my contributions. But it would not have existed without Kevin and Patrick.

Biting the Hand that Feeds

Bill Cunningham responds to my remark that I am not primarily concerned with the studio making money:

Do you really want that statement out there, Alex? It seems a bit, "biting the hand that feeds."

As a writer, I want my financiers/clients to do well with my writing. I want them to succeed because in doing so, I succeed. Even if it's just a low budget contract job where I'm paid a flat fee. The publicity value alone is worth it.

If BON COP BAD COP tanked, you wouldn't have had as many PR opportunities as you've recently had would you? You wouldn't be able to tell people you were part of a movie hit, tell them you have two books on the shelf, and that you're available for work. Your agents certainly want your producers/studio to succeed because that means they have "an easier sell" with you next go around - you're the guy who wrote that hit Canadian movie.

Sure. But let's be honest. I'm not in the screenwriting business in order to make money. I'm in the screenwriting business because I love writing movies and TV, I get off on people watching my stuff, I get off on watching my stuff, I enjoy the process, I like being with show people. I am concerned about the stuff making money, but only secondarily: because if it don't, I don't work.

When I am writing a screenplay, I am mostly trying to write the best screenplay I know how, within a commercial genre I believe exists. Commerciality affects what I write to the extent that I don't write something I don't think can get made. But once I'm writing the script I'm trying to write a movie I'd enjoy, and hoping other people would enjoy it. I would find it quite hard to write something that an audience would enjoy but I wouldn't. (That said, I have pretty mainstream tastes.)

And Bill, I bet you write movies you love, too, and hope they make money. Because both of us could probably make more money in another line of work. I quit computer science to go into showbiz.

PORKY'S DETHRONED

And in other news, Bon Cop Bad Cop erased Canada's national shame -- that its highest national box office ever was for Porky's. Bon Cop Bad Cop now has the title. (If you don't adjust for inflation. And we're not going to.)

UPDATE: I see from Zip.ca that the DVD is coming out December 19. Then you can start bugging Netflix about carrying it!

WHOO HOO, DOUBLE DIGITS

Bon Cop / Bad Cop has passed previous Quebec champ Seraphin to become all-time Quebec box office champion, raking in $10.3 million so far -- only $1.3 mil in Rest of Canada, in spite of a belated marketing campaign there. This puts it on track to pass the $11.2 million Porky's made in 1982. (Let's not adjust for inflation, k?)

WE'RE NUMBER 3! WE'RE NUMBER 3!

Bon Cop Bad Cop held at #3 in the Canadian box office, in its fourth weekend in Quebec and its second weekend in the Rest of Canada. That's beating Snakes on a Plane (2 weeks), Beerfest (1 week) and World Trade Center (three weeks), among others.

It is a silly movie. But I'm proud of it.

And now I would like to point out the direct relationship between marketing dollars spent and receipts. BCBC got $1M in promotion throughout Quebec (pop. 8 or so million) and $1M in R.O.C. (population 25 or so million). Opening weekends were 1.4 million in Quebec and 350,000 in the Rest of Canada.

In other words, where Alliance spent three times as much money per capita promoting the picture, we got four times the opening.

I am sure the argument for spending less promoting the picture in ROC is that Canadian movies in French do much better in Quebec than Canadian movies in English do in all of Canada. French movies made in Quebec have climbed to 27% of the French market; English films languish between single digits and decimal points:



But maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy there? If they actually promoted English language films, instead of merely making them ... in other words if people actually knew what they were about and when to go see them ... maybe market share would go up?

Two weeks prior to the opening in Quebec, you could not avoid knowing about Bon Cop Bad Cop. I turned on French radio maybe four times, for maybe ten minutes each driving to pick up my daughter from day care. I heard stuff about Bon Cop twice. Once was an ad, once was a talk radio guy saying it was the "must see movie of the summer." Bus ads? Everywhere. Posters? Everywhere. Humongous posters in the multiplexes? Check. Trailers, ben oui.

Two weeks prior to the opening in Toronto ... zip. If you'd been to a movie, you'd have seen a trailer. Otherwise, crickets.

Maybe Telefilm should spend a little less money helping fund movie production, and a little more money promoting movies that have been made?

Advertising.

Just putting it out there.

(And here's James Oregan on the same subject.)

BIGGEST. OPENING. EVAR.

If Craig can crow about Scary Movie...

Bon Cop / Bad Cop broke the box office record for the biggest release in Quebec history last weekend. Not just the francophone copies; the English copies did good business, pulling in about $11,000 per screen. Which is particularly awesome since it bodes well for the release in the Rest of Canada, especially as anglo audiences even in Quebec tend to ignore anything with any amount of French in it.

The big tell will be la deuxième weekend, of course. Combien of that audience do we keep? Est-ce que nous avons des legs? Well, whatever sera, sera.

GOOD REVIEWS ALL OVER

Bon Cop is getting pretty good reviews everywhere. Here's Brendan Kelly in the Gazette. And he even mentions the writers!

BON COP PREMIERE

Lisa and I walked up the red carpet last night into the Montreal Opera House and got to watch the official premiere of Bon Cop Bad Cop, a movie I rewrote a summer ago. It was fun. The audience laughed in the right places, and the thriller parts were energetic. Patrick Huard was charming and funny and Colm Feore was perfect: relaxed as an actor playing an uptight character. Watching Colm Feore play an uptight cop stoned out of his mind (they've been caught in a burning marijuana plantation) ought to be worth the price of admission.

Of course, some of the things I rewrote out of the script got re-written back into it. Some of the things I liked had to be cut for production. Filmmaking is not a perfect art. So half of me enjoyed the picture while the other half grumbled at some of the choices. I doubt there's a writer in the world who doesn't experience that watching a movie he worked on.

Everyone's big question is how the film will do. In Quebec there's been a huge marketing push, and many of the funniest performances are the ones in French. It ought to do huge business here. But how will it do in R.O.C. (the Rest of Canada)? I didn't notice ads for it when I was in Toronto. If there is an appetite for a bilingual buddy cop comedy about hockey murders, this film ought to hit big. But you never know what the audience wants until they turn out.

NICE REVIEW OF BON COP BAD COP

Here's a nice review of Bon Cop / Bad Cop, the bilingual buddy cop comedy I did the production rewrite on. Can't wait to see it at the official premiere on Monday!

Courtesy of Martine...

BON COP DEBUTS AUGUST 4

According to Playback, Bon Cop / Bad Cop is rolling out big time here starting August 4. Should be fun. Nice they mention the screenwriters in the article!

BON POSTER

A friend sent along the Bon Cop / Bad Cop poster. It's oddly sedate for an action buddy cop comedy thriller about hockey. But who cares? It's got my name on it on the lower right. A reader writes:

Q. IMDB lists three writers for the script and one for "scenario". Never seen that before. How is that different from story credit?

The IMDB credits are not the contractual ones. Someone (not me) sent in their credits and included other people, including the director. In this case "scenario" seems to mean "story" though actually "scénario" means "script" in French.

The credits on the poster are the credits as they'll appear on screen. The arbitrated credits are:

Story ("scenario") by Patrick Huard;
Screenplay by Leila Basen & Patrick Huard and
Kevin Tierney & Patrick Huard and
me.

I don't think anyone wanted to see that kind of a mess on screen, so everyone gets their name on the screenplay once.

CREDIT!

I just heard from the WGC that after all the hard work and writer's statements and arbitrators reading and re-reading, the Bon Cop / Bad Cop credits are... exactly what the producer proposed in the first place. Which gives me my second feature writing credit.

Whoo hoo! Feature credits are always good, even on bad movies, and I think this movie could be a hit, in Canada at least. I haven't seen the dailies, but the script was really funny.

And, under WGC rules, a substantial production fee is divvied up among the credited writers. And money is always good.

Contrary to US credits, which are generally in order of who contributed the most, Canadian credits are given in the order the writers worked. I was the last writer on the show, so I've got the last credit. I like looking like a script doctor. I love writing my own stuff, but rewriting other people's material is its own challenge and reward.

And let's face it, there's more work for script doctors -- and because you come on late in the production, there's more money available and less time to do your job in. When you're on a flat rate, less time is good.

Tags: screenwriting; film

MURDER, MEURTRE

The Gazette has a writeup about Bon Cop / Bad Cop, the bilingual French/English buddy cop comedy I worked on this summer. Should be a fun movie, eh?