A COFFEE WITH ...

'Fanboys' screenwriter gets bitter taste of Hollywood's dark side

Austin's Ernie Cline wrote a little script about 'Star Wars' fanatics, but never could have anticipated the evil antics of one 'Darth Weinstein.'

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM WRITER
Thursday, February 05, 2009

As Austin screenwriter Ernie Cline describes the tumultuous journey he has been riding like an embattled Millennium Falcon for the past 10 years, his succinct delivery fashions what sounds like a polished 30-second pitch for a new movie idea.

It goes like this: "I was in this whole insane development hell for years, then, wow, my movie's going to get made, then it gets made, then it gets taken away from the people who made it, then there's a fan boycott of the studio, then the studio gives it back and lets us finish it, then it ends up in theaters."

Someone should make a movie about it. But no. Not this one. That's more like the documentary extra included on the DVD of Cline's actual movie, a loving and funny tribute to imperishable "Star Wars" obsession called, with spit-shined directness, "Fanboys."

The rowdy, road-comedy valentine to all-encompassing geekhood stars Jay Baruchel ("Tropic Thunder"), Kristen Bell ("Veronica Mars"), Seth Rogen ("Pineapple Express") and a galaxy of startling cameos (Carrie Fisher, Billie Dee Williams and — no you didn't! — William Shatner). It opens Friday.

Cline can barely believe it. "Just some 'Star Wars' geek in Austin writes a 'Star Wars' movie and they end up making it, and Lando and Princess Leia and Captain Kirk are in it."

The Force is so with him.

Calmer than Yoda is Cline sitting at Dominican Joe coffee shop on South Congress Avenue. Yoda, so tranquil and wise, would abstain from the fidgety pollutions of caffeine, and today Cline adheres to that prudence. He sips a large hot chocolate, upon which an iceberg of whipped cream drifted before its tragic consumption.

Cline wears nerdy glasses and speaks softly. The coffee shop clangs and bristles with activity: the zippy whine of an espresso machine, crosscurrents of human babble and what might be the unintended destruction of earthenware. Cline, a native Ohioan, is unruffled.

He's not always so poised. His passions do roil. Mention mega-mogul Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Co. produced "Fanboys," and Cline's blue eyes light up like a specific kind of saber and his caterpillar brows dance. Weinstein — infamous across the film industry as a megalomaniacal meddler, a film-taking-away philistine, a movie re-cutter dubbed Harvey Scissorhands by legions of detractors — that Weinstein.

But, first, here's that pitch again, long-form: In 1998, fanboy and proud geek Ernie Cline writes a screenplay based on his lifelong "Star Wars" fanaticism, quitting his job at Internet firm Texas.net to do it. He tries to make it himself, cheap and fast, a l? Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi." ("I had no idea what I was doing," Cline recalls.) Harry Knowles, the Jabba the Hutt of the entire geek cosmos, reads the script and raves about it on his site Ain'tItCoolNews.com. Hollywood studios jolt and call Cline.

The screenplay is optioned, but years pass before a deal is made with Kevin Spacey's production company. The film almost gets made at DreamWorks, which passes it on to Weinstein, who decides to make the movie for $3 million — moon dust in Hollywood, where the average film costs nearly $100 million.

A director is chosen, rewrites ensue. Cline is fine with that. He's been waiting long enough for his movie to be made. "I just assumed it was never going to happen," he says.

Filming finally takes place in 2006. Cline and the filmmakers are aiming for a 2007 release, the 30th anniversary of "Star Wars." At test screenings, "Fanboys" earns decent if not blockbuster scores. Weinstein gets nervous and starts fiddling and cutting and adding.

Weinstein demands reshoots and rewrites, some of them his own. Cline and the director, Kyle Newman, are banished, the movie snatched from them.

"Anybody involved with the original version was not welcome," Cline says.

Weinstein axes a crucial plot element — a main character is dying of cancer — that gives the idiosyncratic "Fanboys" some needed emotional ballast. He inserts homophobic and scatological jokes, none of them remotely amusing.

Cline says, "He added a lot of stuff that I hated," including a gay Mexican bar called the Mantina after the Cantina in "Star Wars." The scene, mortifying, remains in the finished film.

About now, real-life fanboys who've been waiting for the film — their film — to hit theaters, for, like, forever, rally and shout. They revolt, harnessing the power of the Internet for what it's best at: generating buzz and spreading calumny like a disease. They re-christen Weinstein "Darth Weinstein," which charges and delights the howling throngs, and threaten a boycott of all Weinstein products until the Dark One promises he will release the original version of "Fanboys."

Weinstein reportedly receives 300,000 incensed e-mails from fans. Those and the creation of a Darth Weinstein T-shirt at last buckle the Great Destroyer.

"Just make it end, and you can have your little movie back," Cline recalls Weinstein saying.

It's a victory as fantastic as Luke Skywalker taking out the Death Star in "Episode IV."

Not quite. Cline reserves many gripes. He hates the movie's poster. He hates the trailer.

As for the film itself, "This version is a big compromise. It's very different from my first and second drafts. This is never what I pictured. It was much geekier with more guys talking the minutiae of 'Star Wars,'" he says.

Cline will be 37 next month, making him 5 when "Star Wars" was originally released in 1977 — the "perfect age."

"Everybody thinks that they were the perfect age when they first saw it," Cline explains. "Peter Jackson says he was 12, the perfect age. And I feel like I was the perfect age at 5."

(Both are wrong. At 9, yours truly was the perfect age for the virgin "Star Wars" experience.)

Cline, a one-time spoken-word poet who lives with his poet wife and baby daughter, has brushed himself off with impressive ?lan. He has sold an ambitious video game script, "Thundercade," to Lakeshore Entertainment for a plump fee that's allowed him to become a full-time screenwriter. He can't reveal the "insanely big names" attached to the project yet. But you can tell he isn't kidding. The eyes ignite. He squirms in his chair and smiles coyly.

"It's freaking me out," he says.