The Authorized Ender Companion Read online

  A more positive example, one in which a studio bet big and won, is New Line, which invested hundreds of millions of dollars on an unknown director and a trilogy of novels entitled The Lord of the Rings. Maybe you’ve heard of them?

  Had those movies tanked, New Line, like Carolco, would have gone the way of the dodo.

  But as luck (and Peter Jackson) would have it, Lord of the Rings brought in bajillions of dollars and New Line was spared the joke of becoming Old Line.

  In other words, the movie business is, above all things, a business. Behind every studio decision is the American dollar. Studios invest money yes, but always cautiously, always reluctantly. They’re just as protective of a million dollars as you and I would be if we had it.

  The old joke in Hollywood is that a movie executive’s favorite word is “no.” And it’s true. Getting a film green-lighted is hard.

  And yet movies get green-lighted all the time. It’s not impossible. If studios only said no, no films would be made.

  The trick is to assemble the perfect package. All the planets must be aligned: the right, proven director must be on board; the script must be production ready; talent must be attached; every t must be crossed and every i dotted. Get all those ducks in a row, and your chances are good. But if any of these factors seem uncertain, the studio won’t finance the film.

  I can only imagine Joe’s anxiety, therefore, when he read a script that deviated, even if only slightly, from the outline he had shown the executives at Warner Brothers. Perhaps Joe worried that the differences between the outline and script would cause the studio to lose confidence in the project and drop it, forever ruining his chances of producing Ender’s Game.

  Who knows? What was clear was that Joe wanted a rewrite. He wasn’t showing the script to Warner Brothers as written. Changes would have to be made.

  I left the meeting feeling somewhat spent. Getting Ender’s Game produced wasn’t going to be as easy as I had hoped.

  Scott left the meeting determined to write a better draft, and I didn’t envy his assignment. Getting the script to a place where everyone would deem it ready was going to be very difficult indeed.

  NEW WRITERS

  Years ago, when Scott Card was first approached about Hollywood adapting the story, someone suggested making Ender a handsome teenager with a love interest. The story wouldn’t work as written on the big screen, they said. Ender’s Game would be better told with the addition of a few proven Hollywood conventions. Young love. A dashing young rising star.

  To Orson Scott Card’s great credit, and to the relief of us all, that proposal was flatly denied.

  So it was with some trepidation that Scott Card had entered this agreement with Warner Brothers in 2002. Would the studio attempt to alter the character of Ender as had been proposed in the past? Would Ender’s Game become something Scott had never intended it to be?

  To protect his own and the story’s interests, Scott made a stipulation in the contract with Warner Brothers that he would get a crack at the screenplay and have final say on how Ender was represented onscreen.

  It was a smart move. Scott knew better than anyone why Ender’s Game had been such a beloved novel for so long. He had lived with the character for two decades. If anyone knew how Ender should be portrayed onscreen, it was the man who had created him.

  Joe the producer apparently felt differently.

  After the aforementioned meeting with Joe, Scott Card submitted a second, better draft, but Joe rejected that one also. I don’t remember Joe’s reasoning, exactly—I’m not even sure that he gave us one. We simply found out one day that Joe was securing a new writer to bring a fresh perspective.

  We were disappointed by this news of course, but hope was not lost. We reminded ourselves that scripts get new writers all the time and that this was merely part of the business. The film wouldn’t be made as quickly as we had hoped and not under the conditions we had dreamed of, but the project was still alive and kicking. Hollywood was full of wonderfully talented screenwriters with plenty of proven experience. As long as the new writer understood Ender, we would be fine.

  Besides, Warner was still excited about the project. The director was still gung-ho. The world was still a happy place.

  As it turned out, the new writer ended up being two writers, a team of writers who were fresh off a very successful comic book film (their first credit).

  Before they got started on the Ender’s Game script, the two met Scott and me for lunch in Los Angeles. I was surprised when I saw them. They were young. Very young. Younger than me, and I considered myself as youthful as they come.

  But they were very polite and extremely intelligent, and I liked them both immediately. It didn’t hurt that one of them was a lifelong fan of Ender’s Game and even credited the book as part of the reason why he had become a writer himself. (He may have been pandering to the author, of course, but since he was describing exactly the way I felt about Ender’s Game, I took him at his word and liked him even more.)

  I also happened to like the film they had just made. The movie had brought in hundreds of millions of dollars, and from the studio’s perspective that was as good enough reason as any to give these boys the job. They were young, hip, and proven at the box office. What more could we ask for?

  A year later, after this team had submitted two unsuccessful drafts, Scott and I were feeling rather low. The writing team had made decisions in their drafts that had created a very different version of Ender. I was never involved in their meetings with producers, but apparently I wasn’t alone in my assessment. Shortly after the second script submission, both writers left the project.

  The director told Scott not to lose heart. All would be well. The right screenwriter would be secured. These things happen. New writers come and go. This next one will be the one we’ve been waiting for.

  But the next one wasn’t the one we were waiting for. In fact, the draft submitted by the next writer was such a departure from the Ender’s Game you and I have grown to love, that I had to force myself to finish reading it. Had the studio produced that draft, I daresay fans like myself would have taken to the streets and much of Warner Brothers’ studios would have been leveled to the ground.

  It’s ironic, really. Joe’s complaint to Scott in our initial meeting was that Scott hadn’t closely followed the outline. And yet, the three writers Joe had hired to replace Scott so blatantly ignored the outline and took such liberties with the story, that I can’t imagine what feedback Joe gave them.

  Perhaps he asked, “Um, guys, did you even read the outline?”

  STUDIO WOES

  By December of 2005, when the option with Warner Brothers was set to expire, movie-rumor sites were saying that Ender’s Game was in “development hell” and that fans may never see the story come to life. Too much time had been spent developing scripts that simply did not work.

  Since I had read Scott’s draft, I knew these rumors were not entirely accurate; there was a script that worked. Scott Card had written it long before any other writer had been hired. But rumors are rumors. What do you do?

  Scott and his producing partners at Chartoff Pictures, along with the aforementioned director, met again with Warner Brothers to develop a plan. Fortunately, the studio agreed to extend the option for another year or so with Scott as the sole writer, writing a page-one rewrite not based on any previous script, including Scott’s own.

  When asked in an interview at the time why the studio hadn’t given the green light, Scott said, “There was no filmable script, though in fairness to the writers so far, they may well have been following faithfully all that they were actually asked to do. Ender’s Game is simply a very hard story to put in script form.”

  A year later, after Scott had submitted another draft, the studio seemed to be stalling. The director attached to Ender’s Game had released a big-budget film that year, which had done poorly at the box office and lost Warner Brothers a great deal. No one can be certain why, but it became cle
ar to everyone involved that Warner Brothers had decided to pass on the film and put it into turnaround.

  In mid-2007, it happened. The option with Warner Brothers expired, and Ender’s Game returned to the open market, available to any studio that might be interested in acquiring it. For legal reasons I can’t go into specifics about the film’s status now, but suffice it to say that Ender’s Game is as alive as ever. Hollywood still wants to make this movie as much as we, lovers of all things Ender, want to see it made.

  So believe me, it’s going to happen. Despite the many disappointments since this project began, I remain resolute in my belief that Ender’s Game will hit the big screen. This isn’t the first time a film has been in development this long. Nor will this be the first time a film has gone into turnaround only to get picked up by another studio and made into a great film: Forrest Gump, E.T., Splash, Speed, Syriana, The Last Emperor, Black Hawk Down, to name a few.

  And if that doesn’t comfort you, this will: there are a lot of incredibly talented and smart people in Hollywood working on Ender’s Game right now—producers, managers, agents, investors—all exploring new options to make this thing happen.

  So, yes, there have been some hang-ups and delays and big disappointments, but keep the faith. Ender’s Game is still in the ring.

  Just ask Orson Scott Card. When he attends book signings and fans ask about the progress of the film, Scott often jokes, “The character of Ender will be played by a young actor and most likely an unknown one. I used to think that that actor, whoever he is, had in all likelihood been born by now. But now I’m pretty sure that he’s at least in school.”

  You see? Progress. We’re getting closer all the time.

  Since the project left Warner Brothers, Scott has written a new draft, one that takes into accounts all the mistakes and successes of his previous drafts.

  And it’s great.

  Fans of Ender’s Game would not be disappointed.

  What follows are my personal notes on five of the screenplay drafts that have been submitted over the years, three written by Scott and two written by others. I’ll also share some of the challenges the writers faced in adapting the story and why I wholeheartedly agree with Scott’s statement that Ender’s Game is a very hard story to put in script form.

  TWO NOVELS. ONE SCREENPLAY.

  The biggest challenge the screenwriters had to face was deciding how best to adapt two novels into a single feature-length screenplay. I don’t recall who first suggested the idea of combining the novels, but everyone, including Orson Scott Card, thought it a brilliant idea. Ender’s Shadow added depth to the original story and gave us the origins of Bean, a character some consider the most interesting and complex of the Enderverse. Filmmakers thought fans would be thrilled to see both stories come to life simultaneously.

  For the screenwriters, however, this new depth of story proved to be both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it gave the screenwriter more story elements and subplots to work with, but a curse because the process of adaptation would now be twice as difficult.

  Steven Pressfield, a novelist and screenwriter, has said that adapting a novel into a screenplay is not merely deciding what to include, it’s more a task of deciding what not to include. That’s the difficult part of adaptation, deciding what has to go. Screenwriters, therefore, must have a cruel hand, willing to cut out a beloved scene or even a whole character simply because it doesn’t fit into the film.

  I think it’s for this reason that there persists a belief in Hollywood, among some, that a writer can’t adapt his own work. He’s too close to it. He holds it too precious. He can’t bear the thought of losing that particular scene or character he worked so hard to craft and bring to life.

  Part of me wonders if some involved in the early development of Ender’s Game held this misconception. Sometimes I wonder if Scott Card was given the true consideration he deserved or if those involved were merely meeting Scott’s stipulation of the contract and giving him a go at the script, all along intending to hire new writers once the stipulation was met.

  I have no evidence of that, of course, and no one has ever suggested as much. It’s incredibly unfair to those involved for me to even suggest it, but there you have it. It’s completely unfounded speculation and I take full responsibility for it.

  I only bring it up because in Scott Card’s case nothing could be further from the truth; Scott is protective of how the character of Ender is portrayed, yes, but he isn’t opposed to shifts in the story. Throughout this process Scott has listened openly to others’ ideas and was always willing to change anything that was nonessential to the meaning of the story. In fact, some of Scott’s producing partners from Chartoff Pictures argued in favor of sticking with the novel’s way of handling various story points when Scott changed them in the screenplay.

  I can speak from personal experience, too. Scott embodied this same open attitude when he and I adapted his short story “Malpractice.” The screenplay and novel we wrote were very different from Scott’s original creation, but it was Scott who had suggested the largest changes to the story. Were he a self-absorbed author overly protective of his work, he would have fought off any story alterations with a feverish stick instead of embracing and suggesting new ideas.

  Scott, therefore, was willing to hack away at Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow to form a single cohesive story line. But the difficult question still remained: what should be cut? How best do we tell both stories in the time allotted?

  The initial consensus was to cut back and forth between the two characters’ origins and then unite them once they came to Battle School. Scott’s first draft did this well: we see Ender on Earth with his family; we see him being recruited by the International Fleet; we see him hop aboard a shuttle headed for Battle School; and then we cut to the dirty, crime-filled streets of Rotterdam, where Bean is a tiny street urchin using his smarts to stave off starvation. Sister Carlotta tests him, recognizes his genius, and informs Battle School of her find. Bean and Ender then meet up at Battle School, and we’re off to the races.

  In a later draft, the Rotterdam scenes occur as flashbacks late in the film as Bean recounts to Ender the horror of witnessing Achilles killing Poke.

  In another writer’s draft, the sequence in Rotterdam is even briefer. We see the children coming into the soup kitchen. Sister Carlotta inquires to know who was smart enough to think up a way to get them in. And the children point to Bean. We don’t meet Poke. We don’t see Bean’s genius at work, thinking up the plan. Nor do we see Bean’s brutal survival instincts or his willingness to kill Achilles once he recognizes that Achilles is a threat. In short, we don’t see much of what makes Bean . . . well, Bean.

  In the draft written by the writing team, we don’t see Rotterdam at all. They chose to ignore Bean’s origins altogether, and therefore ignore Sister Carlotta, Poke, and Achilles as well. All we know of Bean is what we see him say and do at Battle School, making their draft 95 percent Ender’s Game and 5 percent Ender’s Shadow.

  These decisions made by the screenwriters on what not to include in the screenplay resulted in very different adaptations of the two novels. What one screenwriter considered important, another writer considered immaterial and left out completely. Here are a few more examples.

  1. THE MONITOR

  The monitor, that little device implanted on the back of children’s necks used to monitor their intelligence and determine their candidacy for Battle School, is missing from most drafts. Of Scott’s drafts, only his most recent includes a scene in which Ender’s monitor is removed.

  The writing team that followed Scott also included a monitor-removal scene, although, unlike the scene in the novel, in their version, a member of the I.F. is present to witness the removal and to confiscate the monitor.

  The third writer changed the monitor completely. In his version, the monitor is a bracelet. Why he made this change is unclear. In fact, I’m not sure that the audience would have known that th
e bracelet Ender wears in the beginning of the film is a monitor since it’s only referred to later in the script and very briefly at that. Were I in the audience and ignorant of the screenplay, I would think the bracelet a mere wardrobe accessory and not a critical tool of the I.F.

  The screenwriter does however make an effort to demonstrate Ender’s readiness for Battle School by adding a scene in which Graff gives Ender an exam. In the exam, Ender is asked to build various shapes using holographic blocks. The shapes become more complex as Ender successfully makes them, and his little hands move so quickly that we the audience can only conclude that this is one bright kid.

  The flaw with this exam, however, is that it doesn’t test the right things. It doesn’t measure those characteristics of a military leader that the I.F. would find so appealing. It merely shows us that Ender is great with Legos® and can solve a puzzle. It doesn’t show us what the real monitor showed the I.F. in the novel: that Ender is equal parts Valentine and Peter, that he won’t hesitate to use violence when no other option is available, that he understands what motivates people and drives their behavior, that he is humble, that he is capable of love, that he is decisive and quick on his feet, and on and on and on.

  2. STILSON

  An early scene in the novel that clearly illustrates why Ender is a wise candidate for the I.F. is the scene in which a bully named Stilson and some of his cronies confront Ender after school. Now that Ender’s monitor has been removed, the boys think they can push Ender around without any adults knowing. Rather than stand there and get pulverized, however, Ender defends himself and knocks Stilson down. Fearing that the other bullies will seek vengeance later, Ender puts fear in their hearts by ruthlessly kicking Stilson three times while he’s down, in the ribs, the groin, and the face. That last kick, we learn later in the novel, kills Stilson.

  The problem with the Stilson scene is that it would be hard to watch in the theater. In the novel, the scene works wonderfully because we know why Ender is doing what he’s doing. We can read his thoughts. We know he hates being violent. We know it pains him to do this.