The Last Story Read Free Page A

best-seller list—the first YA book ever to do so—I was approached by numerous studios who wanted to buy the rights to film the book. They came to me with names of movie stars and forty-million-dollar budgets. I was wined and dined and finally settled on a large studio that swore the book would be on the screen within nine months, a year at the outside.

    Of course, nothing happened with First to Die, or the books that followed. They were optioned, I was paid a nominal fee, and then the stories sank into development hell. Such a slow-moving hell nothing ever happened there. Hollywood's a strange place. All the cliches about it are true: executives like to make deals. They like to "do"

    lunch. They do not like to make movies. Movies might bomb. They might get fired.
    Better to just option stuff, pretend they're going to make it. I got tired of the scene.

    I met my producer, Henry Weathers, by chance. I was buying popcorn at a movie theater in Westwood near UCLA. Peter and I went to two or three movies a week—at least we did before I became an executive producer. Anyway, Henry was standing behind me and he made a joke about how slow the line was, comparing it to how long it had taken to get the movie we were about to see on the screen. As it turned out a friend of Henry's had produced the movie, and even though it turned out to be a turkey, I liked Henry. We got to talking. I told him who I was and the experiences I'd had rewriting scripts for executives who needed readers to translate the labels on their afternoon bottle of mineral water. Henry was sympathetic, but otherwise didn't say a whole lot. We exchanged numbers and I thought that would be the last I saw of him.

    Yet a month later—after he had researched me and read all my books—he called to say he knew some people who had ten million dollars and wanted to get into the movie business.
    Was I interested in making First to Die into a picture? "When do we start?" I asked.

    "Right away," he said. "We just have to sell them on the idea."

    I liked that answer.

    That had been three months ago. We had sold the idea to the investors, and things were moving fast.

    We had a director and cast, and the cameras were ready to roll. Well, almost. Our director, although highly talented, was insane. He had a pregnant wife who did astrological charts, and a gay lover who painted billboards with food coloring and a broom.

    Our director talked to the cameras when he thought no one was looking. Our leading man was addicted to cocaine. Our villain had just gotten out of jail for hot-wiring a car and driving it off the end of the Santa Monica pier. And we had no place to put our sharks. Yes, we had rented a pool full of sharks. We needed them to eat a few of our characters. You can rent anything in Los Angeles if you know where to look. Henry did; he was an old-time Hollywood producer. He could make a few million look like a hundred million on the screen, and, as he was fond of saying, he knew a hit the moment it collected two hundred million. Henry had had his ups and downs over the years. I was supposed to be his last great up. He thought he could build a dynasty from my work.

    Before Henry and I gave our presentation to the investors, he had me prepare a scene-by-scene summary of First to Die. God forbid the businesspeople who wanted to give us millions should actually have to read a book. I would have read the blasted thing before spending seven bucks to see the movie. Maybe I'm cheap. Anyway, this summary turned out to be the outline from which I had prepared a shooting script because I had to cut large portions of the three-hundred-page novel to fit a hundred-minute film. While heading to Henry's for my meeting and Jo's rehearsal, I asked Jo to drive so I could reread my initial summary to see if there was anything I could do to improve the story at this late stage.

    FIRST TO DIE

    by

    SHARI COOPER

    The story opens on a sailboat twenty miles off the coast of Florida.