Word: screenplays
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After Miramax Film Corp.'s The Crying Game earned $60 million and the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, the hot studio was courted by the likes of Columbia and Paramount. But Walt Disney Co. won out, announcing that it will buy Miramax for an estimated $80 million. Disney, which prevailed in part because it let Miramax retain complete freedom over its projects, gets Miramax's library of more than 200 films, including smash hits such as sex, lies, and videotape. Miramax, with Disney backing, can now make bigger-budget films and perhaps secure more lucrative deals for cable and home-video...
...made his mark, if not his name, in movies too. Sister Act, the Whoopi Goldberg comedy for which Rudnick wrote the original script, was last summer's boffo surprise. Other hands diluted the screenplay, which Rudnick eventually signed with the pseudonym Joseph Howard; but the movie grossed $140 million, so now, "although there is no Joseph Howard, his career is soaring." Rudnick's uncredited rewrite of The Addams Family ($115 million) is "the reason that movie was a hit," says Scott Rudin, who produced it and Sister Act and who hired Rudnick to write the sequel, Addams Family Values...
...family values. "That's the way it was in my family," he says. "Kids were always running around all over the place all the time. That's what things looked like to me." But really, the movie's script and style were born of necessity. Rodriguez built the screenplay around the assets available to him for the 14- day shoot in Acuna, Mexico: a hotel, two bars, a school bus, a motorcycle and a pit bull. All became elements in the story -- plus a turtle found on the road. He laid on the gore to please his intended audience...
...unexpected citation -- for a tender acting turn by a first-time performer in an inexpensive ($5 million) foreign movie -- thrilled Davidson. The minimoguls at Miramax, the film's U.S. distributor, might have been tickled too, since The Crying Game received five other important nominations (for best picture, actor, director, screenplay and editing), which promises that the film's domestic gross, a robust $16 million so far, could double or better. But the Miramaxers were spooked. They had helped make Davidson's identity the best-kept open secret in recent movie history. Would the ingenue's Oscar bid spoil their hiding...
...producer; in Bedford, New York. Mankiewicz loved words; he filmed words; he realized that talking pictures were just that. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he started off as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune before entering the world of film. He won an Oscar for best director and best screenplay for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and won both those awards again for All About Eve (1950). He also directed one of the biggest film flops of all time: Cleopatra (1963, starring Elizabeth Taylor). But his cinematic successes were legion, and legendary: The Philadelphia Story (James Stewart...