A Writer Lives the Dream

So here’s the pitch: A fledgling writer with no credits and only one spec script under his belt is hired for a big-budget supernatural thriller with major stars and an Oscar-winning director. He stays on the picture through production and receives solo credit.

Nice story, right? But who’d believe it?

In an era when even the most modest studio film features three or four credited writers (as well as several uncredited assists), 36-year-old Clark Gregg is living out this Hollywood fable. He was the only credited writer on the supernatural thriller “What Lies Beneath,” starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer and directed by Robert Zemeckis, and he hasn’t a single horror story to tell about the experience. He even likes the finished product, which opens nationally on Friday. “I saw it two nights ago and it was thrilling,” says Gregg, who until recently made his living as an actor and theater director.

When pushed he concedes that there is a line here and there and maybe a scene or two that he wished had been included in the film. “There’s always a little of that with any writer,” he says from behind his Cheshire grin as he launches into a hearty breakfast. “But I think it’s called killing the little darlings for the sake of the whole beast.”

Having never worked as a writer for hire, Gregg was unaware of how common it is for writers to be replaced, especially by big-name directors and stars. “If I’d known beforehand I’d probably have been terrified,” he says with a laugh.

He was fortunate that the director was Zemeckis, who has a reputation for sticking with his original writer in most cases. “I don’t believe in replacing the writer,” Zemeckis says. “After all, it was the writer’s inspiration that got the project to the place where people envisioned it as a movie, and that should be honored.”

DreamWorks’ lavish ghost story, set in a secluded Vermont house that may or may not be haunted, features expensive box-office names and costly special effects that drove the budget into the $100-million neighborhood--not the kind of neighborhood likely to attract first-time screenwriters.

Luck played a big hand in Gregg’s tale, he admits. He never set out to be a writer. But then, originally, he didn’t want to be an actor either. After dropping out of college in Ohio and moving to Manhattan, he heard that New York University’s drama department would overlook his “feeble grade-point average” if he gave a bang-up audition. At NYU, he took an acting class taught by playwright David Mamet and actor Bill Macy.

Emulating his teachers, who had started their own theater company in Chicago, Gregg and a group of friends in 1984 started the Atlantic Theater Company in New York. In addition to acting for the company he directed such dramas as “Distant Fires,” which played in Los Angeles and won him a best director trophy from the LA Weekly.

It was while he was doing “Distant Fires” that he first thought about trying to direct movies, if for nothing else, to beef up his bank account. A friend suggested that a good entree would be to write a script. He dashed out a romantic thriller that found its way to the desk of DreamWorks executive Nina Jacobson.

Though there was no interest in buying the script, after Gregg returned to New York Jacobson phoned him and pitched a thriller concept that had been hatched by one of the studio bosses--Steven Spielberg. Here’s how Gregg recalls it: “A married couple drop their child off at college, and not long after the wife starts to feel that there’s a presence in her home. At first she thinks it’s someone who used to live there. And then she starts to believe otherwise.”

“I had no ideas for her,” he says. “I’d never written for anyone else before. But I needed the money,” especially after directing a play for three months (the acclaimed 1997 off-Broadway revival of Mamet’s “Edmond”). He drove cross-country, and while on the road he started to piece together some ideas, “and by Nebraska I had it.”

Gregg was hired and turned in a draft describes as “a two-hander in a house”--a two-character story set mostly in a home in Vermont. Here’s where the luck part comes in. Zemeckis had just signed a deal with DreamWorks and said he was looking for a sophisticated supernatural thriller. Co-studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg said he just happened to have one sitting on his desk.

Script Got Scarier With Zemeckis’ Help

For the next year, Gregg and Zemeckis worked through several drafts of the script, and the story evolved. His original draft, he says, was more of a character piece “and a lot less scary.” As it developed, Gregg incorporated classic elements of Hitchcockian suspense (in which the audience knows more than the characters) and old-fashioned pops (sudden jolts when a character pops into frame or a door suddenly slams). He researched paranormal activity and discovered that in most cases the person who starts seeing spirits is already in a volatile psychic state.

“In most ghost stories the characters are merely reacting,” Gregg explains. “But I wanted the terror to come out of the basic human drama, to manifest the characters’ psychological dilemma. The spirits here are a metaphor, a manifestation of the characters’ activity. Here’s someone [Pfeiffer’s character] who, externally, has a perfect life. Then once her house is cleared out and there’s silence, all these things start coming out of the floorboard.”

Much of that remains in the first half of the film. “I was impressed that Bob [Zemeckis] was so patient in telling the story, especially considering the stars, the budget and the pressure to start the screams coming early,” Gregg says. “But he takes his time. We get to know who the people are.”

There were differences of opinion along the way, and Gregg was not afraid to air his. “It would have been easier for Bob to hire someone who’d worked with him before or who specialized in a moment he was trying to get at certain points. But it was Bob who kept me on.”

Zemeckis explains that “because I’m a writer, I understand that it’s a collaborative process. Rather than send a writer off and expect him to return with something shootable, you have to work closely with him to get what you want.”

Gregg even managed to survive the arrival of the film’s two superstars, Ford and Pfeiffer. “I was blown away that they knew the characters better than I did,” says Gregg. “As Mamet said, ‘If an actor’s having trouble saying a line, it means you didn’t write it correctly.’ There were moments when I’d gotten too cute and too theatrical. As actors they knew what they could get away with.”

The film’s multiple climaxes evolved through the various drafts as well. “We kept finding ways to ratchet it up,” he says. As the story evolved and Gregg worked on draft after draft, the mechanics became almost abstract, he says. By the time of the fourth or fifth draft, he and Zemeckis were working on “levels”--finding a balance between keeping the thrills constantly coming and giving the audience some breathing space in between. It was here that the director’s experience and storytelling rhythms came to bear on the script.

“Bob really took over then,” Gregg admits. “His visual style is so evident” in the climactic scenes. As for Gregg, he was in terra incognita.

“The funny thing about making movies like this [thrillers] is that there’s always another presence in the room.” He’s not talking about spirits, but rather “audience expectations based on the other movies they’ve seen.”

“That’s what all the scares in the ‘Scream’ movies were about. It’s not a blank slate anymore. We’ve all grown up watching how stories enfold. We expect new scares. The game is to figure out what the audience expects and try to fool them without being manipulative.”

Gregg hasn’t picked his next writing project yet, but he’s not likely to direct it. For one thing, his asking price for a script immediately plummets when he suggests directing it as well. And for another, there’s still a little of the New York street performer left in him. “I spend half my time in L.A. having meetings and the rest hiding in my New York apartment finishing a script I want to do myself, maybe in digital.” Another thriller? “No, it’s a postmodern, near futuristic neo-noir film,” he says.

And, yes, he will continue to act. “When people ask if I’m just going to write or direct now, it’s as if acting is a grind. It’s not. It’s fun.”

He most recently appeared in the film comedy “State and Main,” written by Mamet and co-starring Macy. The Mamet comedy focuses on a big Hollywood movie that is being shot in the small town of Burlington, Vt. (though it was actually shot near Boston). Gregg shuttled back and forth between that set and “What Lies Beneath,” a big Hollywood movie that was shooting in Burlington. Talk about your farfetched stories.