[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Mike, you were involved in one of the highest script sales in history. You have to tell us the story.
Mike Thompson, Screenwriter/Script Consultant of TheMissileSite(dot)com: Well, it’s actually a story that continues to this day.
It was this script that my former writing partner and I wrote called Steinbeck’s Point of View. We had kind of found our groove, found our voice. We had written a script called Dragonfly before that. We’d started to figure out who we were as writers. We were just looking for concepts that were compelling to us.
Sitting in his backyard one day I just had this notion of corn growing up out of the ground. What if it brought something with it and something hidden if you will.
That led to a discussion.
How could that be?
How could we find a way into emotion?
That led to the notion of what if it was a plane crash had crashed into the earth and then way later this crop came up out of the ruins of the plane crash and brought with it the remnants of the people that had been on that plane. [It] seemed like a really interesting way into an exploration of grief and of humanity through the props that each of us carries with us…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Mike Thompson is a veteran Hollywood writer/producer, perhaps best known for his feature films, Dragonfly, starring Academy Award-winner, Kevin Costner, and Love Happens, featuring Emmy-winner Jennifer Aniston. He also co-created and was a showrunner of the FOX television series, John Doe, starring Dominic Purcell, and co-wrote and produced the indie horror film, Choose, starring Academy Award-nominee, Bruce Dern. In the documentary realm, he executive produced the multi-award-winning feature, A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar, and appears as himself in the cult classic award-winner, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. In addition to his produced credits, he is uniquely distinguished for having written and sold dozens of high-profile spec scripts, pitches and teleplays to nearly every major Hollywood studio, including multiple seven-figure deals and at one point, the “highest-paying scripter deal ever” ~ Variety. He has collaborated on projects involving the likes of Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Johnny Depp, George Clooney, Will Smith, Edie Falco, Chris Pine, Michael Keaton, Richard Gere, Academy Award-winning director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump), and presently, blockbuster producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun: Maverick). Upon graduation from film school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Mike began his career at Paramount Pictures, where he worked as an assistant to Academy Award-winning producer, Scott Rudin (No Country for Old Men), and subsequently for legendary producer, Larry Gordon (Field of Dreams), who set up Mike’s very first spec script sale at Walt Disney Studios. Mike lives and works in the mountains outside of his hometown of Seattle, near the U.S. military’s decommissioned Nike “missile site” where, as a kid, he cut his teeth on his first camcorder short films, thus inspiring The Missile Site Blog.
CONNECT WITH MIKE THOMPSON
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