Honestly, I’d kinda forgotten what a landmark movie it was -- “Flatliners,” that is.
Next year is its 20th anniversary, and what amazes me is that people still use the word as a noun, not a verb (as in, “He’s flatlining” ... meaning all those monitors you see in TV shows are beeping and the patient is dying). Which is what writer Peter Filardi meant when he created the phrase in the 1989 script “Flatliners.”
I know. I was the one who paid $450,000 for a script from a first-time writer, submitted from an unknown agent.
That subsequently led to a lawsuit that saw (now) legendary producer Scott Rudin being escorted virtually bodily from the Columbia lot.
Paramount ultimately tried to suborn the script for Rudin with, finally, infamous studio chief Michael Nathanson (what has happened to him since the Heidi Fleiss affair?) cautioning us that if Rudin contacted us, we were to immediately contact Columbia legal.
Who knows, in those days they might have taken him off to the South Sea islands, tied iron ankle bracelets around him and left for the sharks.
(Actually, it still does bother me that if you look at Scott Rudin’s resume, he claims credit for the film though he was banned from the set….)
What reminded me was a cover story this week in our local L.A. paper pointing out that, after throwing three touchdown passes last month over his former team, the Green Bay Packers, Minnesota quarterback Brett Favre sent a one-word message to his old coach, Steve Mariucci: “Flatliners.” He’d killed them.
Now, no telling how the NFL season is going to turn out -- at the moment, Favre seems to be ahead -- but what I find interesting is that a word made up by an unknown writer (Filardi had one TV episode credit on his resume) has, within two decades, passed into the lexicon. Trust me, you hear it on everything from “Grey’s Anatomy” to “House” ... and it’s a completely made-up word from a movie!
The story begins when Nathanson was the president of production at Columbia Pictures under Dawn Steel. Dawn had just signed one of her favorites, Michael Douglas, to a major producing deal at the studio; Douglas (advised by CAA agent and now Universal Pictures head Ron Meyer) had hired former HBO president Rick Bieber as his partner and Rick (advised by my then girlfriend, “CSI” producer Cyndy Chvatal) had hired me to help him create the company Stonebridge Entertainment.
Later, we would produce everything from classic family fare like “Radio Flyer” to Brian Bosworth and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies (although we never put our names on those films!). But in the spring of 1989, we had just opened shop and no one knew what we were up to.
The only thing I knew was that Nathanson didn’t think we were moving fast enough -- for the money he was paying Michael, Rick and myself, he expected product and by then, six months into our four-year contract, he didn’t think we were producing enough.
