Stout on Screenwriting

STOUT: There was a lot of irony in my life during that period. One thing I really love is irony -- as long as it's happening to someone else! Jim Henson had hired me to write and design his next feature after Dark Crystal and Labyrinth in that same, more visually sophisticated style of his. He and his daughter Lisa wanted to produce a dinosaur film. They chose me to write and design the film. Warner Bothers was very enthusiastic about the project and committed a huge budget to it, $25,000,000.00, a lot of money at that time -- this was the early '80s -- plus $5,000,000.00 just for research and development on muppet dinosaurs. Almost a year after the script had been approved and pre-production design work had begun there was a problem.

ARCUDI: Your script?

STOUT: My script. The project got cancelled because they found out that Lucas and Spielberg were doing a very similar project called The Land Before Time, ironically written by the people who wrote the last Muppets movie. It was very frustrating, depressing. I considered my Henson script as my best screenplay ever; it was a highly personal project for me. I was really excited about seeing it on the screen. To add even more irony, later I got hired to do some of the advertising for The Land Before Time.

ARCUDI: A lot of people who are going to be reading this are going to know about your production artwork, but they're not going to realize how much writing you've done. You've written more than a handful of screenplays, right?

STOUT: Yeah. I'm trying to sell one right now, which is a live-action sci-fi thriller that takes place in Antarctica. I wrote one of the Godzilla episodes for the animated series.

ARCUDI: The more recent one?

STOUT: Yeah. Let's see here... writing. I do a lot of themed entertainment design, so I've written a lot of attractions, ride attractions and the films that go with those attractions as well. I've written the first script and all of the plots for an entire season of a dinosaur TV show I'd like to do. I've written a sequel to Return of the Living Dead and a sequel to Seventh Voyage of Sinbad using creatures that Ray Harryhausen has always wanted to have in films but for some reason or another never had the chance to do. Actually, the first film I wrote that actually got made into a movie was for Roger Corman. It was called The Warrior and the Sorceress. It wasn't the original title -- there is no sorceress in the film! The dinosaur script that I wrote for Jim Henson got me into the Writers Guild of America. I wrote a Conan screenplay as well, Conan and the Eye of Death, adapted from a lot of the Robert E. Howard stories. I had just begun to write King Conan, a screenplay about Conan as an old king, when I discovered that John Milius was writing the very same thing; it's very King Lear. So I dropped that one.

Except for the very first stuff for Cycle-Toons, I've written all of my own comics.

ARCUDI: Do you find writing to be more difficult or less difficult than drawing?

STOUT: Oh, writing is much more difficult than drawing, because it's completely abstract. There is nothing real, nothing concrete that you're dealing with because you're using abstract symbols to express thought. Whereas with drawing, I can gather five people in a room, look at a drawing, and we'll all agree that the arm is too long for that body. There's a consensus. But writing is completely abstract. Stories can go any which way -- in theory. With multiple input they often do; there's nothing really "wrong" about story changes in most people's minds -- except for in the mind of the writer. Since everyone knows the alphabet, everyone thinks they're a writer.

ARCUDI: Everyone writes letters.

STOUT: Everyone writes letters, so everyone thinks, "Hey! I can write!" So if you write a screenplay, and the lead character is an Irishman from the lower East side, and the producer says, "Does he really have to be an Irishman? Whoopi Goldberg's interested in this film. Can she be a black woman from San Francisco?" Well, yeah she could. It's fiction; it's within the realm of possibility. But that means completely rewriting everything else. They're under the assumption that you can just plug something in and out without it having any effect at all on the dynamics of any of the rest of the characters or the story. In case you think I'm kidding, the role that Whoopi Goldberg played in Theodore Rex was written for Val Kilmer!

ARCUDI: And that's why you've continued to work a lot more in film as a designer as opposed to a writer.

STOUT: Well, I'm also past the age of hiring as a writer.

ARCUDI: Oh, that's right.

STOUT: Generally, there's an unwritten but clearly understood law that if you're over 40 you don't get hired as a writer for the screen. In fact, there's a class action lawsuit going on right now over that.

I find it absurd. I think I'm doing my absolute best writing right now; when I reached 50, I discovered I had this overview of life that I'd never had before. I think I write stuff with a greater depth and richness now, but of course that's not necessarily what the greater public out there wants to see, stuff with a greater depth and richness.

ARCUDI: Is that the reason you're attempting this miniseries, to satisfy the desire to write?

STOUT: A couple of reasons. One is I've always loved superhero comics.

ARCUDI: Which really surprises me, by the way, but we'll get back to that in a second.

STOUT: I didn't say they're all good. I just said that I've always loved the genre. What's Sturgeon's Law? 90% or 95% of everything is crap? That holds for superhero stuff, too. But the stuff that's really good, I just really get a kick out of. I loved your Major Bummer, your wacky stuff for The Mask. I loved the Gardner Fox Adam Strange stuff. There are all kinds of really good things that have been done in comics. The Kurtzman stuff, the Eisner stuff, Walt Kelly's work, John Stanley's Little Lulu's, Carl Barks... there's an amazing richness within that field, within that media. So that's one reason. I really love that genre. And I think it would be really fun to write it from the perspective that I have at my age. Write it for other people my age. Don't write it for kids. Or write for kids at a level that adults can enjoy. Write it as realistically as possible. What would really happen to a guy if he suddenly had these extraordinary powers, especially a guy who has been frustrated his entire life. That's intriguing to me. Also, if I do a miniseries, there is a chance to have a licensed character, there's a financial incentive. But I should stop talking about it; it still all goes back to what Russ Manning said: Put up or shut up, basically.

ARCUDI: Getting back to your film career as a production designer, and at the same time what became of your career after that dinosaurs book. You essentially became known as the dinosaur guy.

STOUT: Yep.

ARCUDI: People frequently would come to you for things like that movie that ended up being a Whoopi Goldberg vehicle.

STOUT: Oh yeah. Theodore Rex: The most nightmarish experience of my entire film career.

ARCUDI: It's just as bad for anybody who goes and sees it, so don't feel too bad, Bill.

STOUT: Oh, it's unwatchable.

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal Winter 2003 Special Edition.]

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