A rowdy meeting of the minds

When Peter Berg was hired two weeks ago to direct the 2008 Columbia tent pole “Tonight, He Comes,” it represented more than just the hopeful rejuvenation of a long-developing genre-blending superhero project. The assignment also symbolized an act of reconciliation between two highly successful writer-hyphenates.

Berg, the co-writer and director of “Friday Night Lights,” and Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer of “A Beautiful Mind” and one of “Tonight, He Comes’ ” producers, have known each other for 15 years. During that time, Goldsman helped out his buddy with uncredited production rewrites on 2003’s “The Rundown,” which Berg directed. Berg returned the favor by muscling an overturned ATV off of Goldsman’s supine body after he picked a fight with gravity on an unforgiving hill during a trip to Mexico. (Injuries and egos were soothed with tequila back at the hotel.)

A few months ago, the two friends were working on “The Losers,” a military thriller adapted from a comic book, when they got into a shouting match over how to approach the studio on casting. (Goldsman is a producer, Berg is the director.) The scene no doubt had great dialogue but, surprisingly, given the writers involved, it was short on action. The disagreement never became volatile enough for them to use their fists for anything other than holding coffee mugs.

“We absolutely went at it in a meeting,” Goldsman says now, with obvious amusement. “Although it was rumored that we were going to come to blows, I don’t know if you’ve ever met Pete Berg, but I would last about one blow.” Ten minutes after the flare-up, Berg, who played a reluctant boxer in 1996’s “The Great White Hype,” and Goldsman were laughing it off. Berg then went off with James Vanderbilt (“Basic”) to rework “The Losers” script, and the rewrite was strong enough for Warner Bros. to want to move into production. Until Goldsman lured Berg away to direct “Tonight, He Comes” instead. (“The Losers” is now looking for a new director, and Berg has moved into a producing role.)

A “reality-based superhero movie,” “Tonight, He Comes” will star Will Smith as a conflicted, self-destructive superhero who finds himself embroiled in an affair with a married woman. Vincent Ngo wrote the original screenplay more than 10 years ago. Since then, the “Tonight, He Comes” screenplay has passed through the hands of directors Michael Mann, Jonathan Mostow and Gabriele Muccino, as screenwriter Vince Gilligan (“The X-Files” series) has been working on the emotional drama of the love story. “It’s not your father’s superhero movie,” claims Goldsman, who says Berg got the coveted directing job because of the kind of “grounded action” he orchestrated in “Friday Night Lights.” With “a comic purist’s sensibility, it applies real human emotions to super powers.” And, surely, punches will be thrown.

Tough ideas

to swallow

“It’s not just about the food,” says writer-director Richard Linklater, still looking boyish at 46 in jeans and a black short-sleeved shirt as he lounged in the Driskill Hotel bar at last week’s Austin Film Festival. “We always thought ‘Fast Food Nation’ was a state of mind.”

Indeed. Linklater’s ambitious new film, which he adapted from the bestselling 2001 nonfiction book “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal” with its author, Eric Schlosser, is the “Syriana” of happy meals. “Fast Food Nation” attempts to dramatize American culture’s obsession with profits by illustrating the connections among illegal immigration, poor public health, the corporate monolith, student activism, suburban sprawl, the exploitation of workers, crystal meth addiction, the minimum wage, and, of course, the manufacture, packaging, marketing and consumption of fast food. In other words, the ideas explored in Schlosser’s book have been super-sized.

A vegetarian for years, Linklater has long wanted to make a film about the plight of industrial workers. He’s been unsuccessful in trying to make a passion project called “Rivethead,” about an assembly line worker. He once did a comedy pilot about minimum-wage workers called “$5.15 an Hour” that he said wasn’t picked up because HBO thought it was a “bummer.” In films such as “Dazed and Confused,” “Waking Life” and “Before Sunset,” Linklater has specialized in meandering true-to-life character-driven narratives. “Fast Food Nation,” drawing as it does on Schlosser’s copious personal anecdotes, merely extends this tradition on a grander scale.

Linklater was a fan of Schlosser’s work, but it hadn’t occurred to him to create a film out of his most popular book. Then Schlosser pitched a fictional rather than a documentary treatment, and what Linklater thought would be a short meeting turned into a four-year collaboration. The film’s (and book’s) source of inspiration is Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” written at the turn of the previous century. Sinclair’s novel detailed Lithuanian immigrants working in Chicago’s meat-packing industry and sparked a trend toward a safer, more unionized blue-collar workforce -- a trend that the film “Fast Food Nation,” according to its makers, argues has retrogressed nearly to its exploitative beginnings on the backs of illegal immigrants.

Other disparate sources -- the documentary “The Corporation,” which explores its literally soulless approach to business, and sprawling film landscapes such as Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and John Sayles’ “City of Hope” -- found their way into the feel of the film. (Linklater even referenced “Psycho” to sell his pitch to the studio, but not for the reasons you might think -- it has to do with narrative structure.)

Schlosser and Linklater narrowed the scope of their script to three intersecting story lines: Don (Greg Kinnear), a naive executive from the fast-food giant Mickey’s, is sent to Cody, Colo., to investigate contaminated meat at one of the company’s plants; illegal Mexican immigrants (Wilmer Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Ana Claudia Talancon) traverse the desert and enter the violence-, sex-, and drug-fueled maw of the American meat-packing machinery; and Amber (Ashley Johnson) is a student working at Mickey’s who slowly awakens to the potential effects of her choices.

Though the film includes barbed references to the Patriot Act and corporate malfeasance, the writers were mindful of turning the dialogue too much toward the polemical. But a pack of self-righteous college students and Amber’s funky, free-thinking uncle (Ethan Hawke) get a chance to articulate their power-to-the-people rebellion. Bruce Willis, who has a meaty cameo as the company’s industry liaison, gives voice to a virtuoso speech that articulates the cold rationale of corporate interests without ever raising his voice.

Linklater saw each of the film’s characters as a representation of a different stage in his life. Hawke’s character, a former anti-apartheid activist, was inspired by an uncle who fed Linklater leftist cultural and political ideas in his youth. In his 20s, Linklater slogged for two and a half years on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. “I know what it’s like to be at the absolute bottom of an industry, where you’re the expendable labor,” he says, acknowledging that it was never as bad as what some immigrants suffer. “That always informed my view of the world.”

*

Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. For tips and comments, e-mail fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.