How a US Senator Backed Our Iran Screenplay & Then Killed It

From our Hollywood annals, DC version

I almost never reread my work, published books or screenplays, produced or not.  I always want to change or improve something and it’s too late.

This is not true of the screenplay—Keys to Paradise—that Sheryl posted on here a week ago, that we co-wrote and that some of you have already read.  I reread it and I stand by it, every word (except the typos that Sheryl mentioned, endemic to most screenplays).

The script seemed as relevant, perhaps more so, than when we wrote it. It is dated June 2007, but we began almost a year earlier with some unforgettable research that remains seared in our brains and I will get to.

The title “Keys to Paradise” is a reference to plastic keys given children ”as an honor” by the Iranian regime that was using those kids to walk in front of their troops as human mine sweepers during the Iran-Iraq war.

The subject was Iran since the 1979 revolution, illustrated by the actions of recurring characters as they develop over time.

After getting the assignment with little more than a premise, we developed the story as a family drama, in a distant sense resembling “The Godfather” but with implications far beyond an American  gangster story.  Iran is doing a lot more evil in the world than running the dope trade in New Jersey (though it may be doing that too).  Our goal was to expose what living in a totalitarian theocracy not dissimilar to communism does to the hearts and minds of its residents.  The only film of recent years that does that is “The Lives of Others” that came out just before (2006) about East Germans under the Stasi.

Despite that it came to a bad end, that we were commissioned to write such a thing was amazing in itself.  Almost never in the Hollywood system do you get to work on something that has any real significance outside casual entertainment and, these days, some trivial woke propaganda.  This was epic and, crazy as it may sound, might have created positive change if it had reached the theaters.

It all really began a couple of years before when I was CEO of PJ Media and the nascent PJTV.  Our offices then were in Los Angeles (aka Tehrangeles), then and now by far the greatest home for Iranian refugees.

It was not just because I am Jewish (“Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” don’t exactly inspire confidence) but because we at the company had gotten to know many of these people through interviewing them for PJM and PJTV and had tremendous sympathy for the exiles.

This is so even though they were what could be described as a “mixed lot” with the issues and rivalries you might expect from people who had fled one of the most brutal regimes on earth. (Think “The Life of Brian” when John Cleese says, insulted, “We’re not The People’s Front of Judea… We’re The Judean People’s Front!”)

In those days I was even driving out weekly to the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley to a small studio where I would broadcast the news (in English; I know no Farsi) to Iran via satellite.

A SENATOR ENTERS THE FRAY

So it transpired my friend the historian Michael Ledeen, who lives in Washington and had been, is until now, very involved with the Iranian freedom movement, called me to say that Senator Ric Santorum (R-PA, as I’m sure you know) would like to make a fictional movie about Iran and he (Michael) had recommended me.  Michael’s wife Barbara worked for Santorum.

Immediately I wanted to work on it with Sheryl, knowing the screenplay would be better with her complete collaboration and it was.

Neither of us were huge fans of the senator in those days when he was known as “Sanctum Santorum,” but were thrilled to be asked to work on the subject, although there was something vaguely unprofessional about it.  We were reassured by the presence of Steve McEveety on the project who had been a producer on “The Passion of the Christ” and had plenty of film experience.

So we met with the Senator at a hotel in Santa Monica and all went well, although neither of us can remember too much of what he said.  It must not have been that specific, although we dimly recall he mentioned something about how the child mine sweepers being blown to smithereens clutching their keys to paradise would make a powerful film scene.

Sheryl and I went to Washington where, through Michael, we met several of the democracy demonstrators who had managed to get out of Iran’s notorious Evin Prison where they had been tortured.  One could describe what some of them looked like as resembling  Picassos from his Cubist period, their faces distorted and twisted beyond recognition by who knew what means.  They told us horror stories of the most unimaginable evil, some of which appear in the script.

After that, we went home to LA to write our tale of Iranian brothers who grow up to go in radically different directions, some, courageously, to the student movement and one to the bowels of the regime to be an officer in the Republican Guard and creature of the mullahs at their most malign.  We wrote this with more than usual passion driven of necessity.

When you deliver a script, you go through a period of significant tension, wondering about the response.  This time it was redoubled by the import of the subject.

We were relieved, actually excited, when Steve McEveety called to tell us how happy he was with what we had written.  He liked all of it, with the exception of a small correction on just one page.  If you’ve written screenplays for a living you know how often that happens: somewhere between never and once in the bluest moon.

Sheryl and I started making lists of directors, knowing this production was way too big for us to do ourselves.

Then the other shoe dropped. Santorum hated it.  We engaged him in conversations about why.  To this day neither of us have been able to make heads or tails of his explanation.  He said something about religion but religion and Khomeinist Shiism were all over the script.  It made no sense.

Sheryl and I were at immediate loggerheads with the Senator, taking turns at pleading and screaming with him on the phone, all to no avail. Only twice in my long writing career—I don’t think Sheryl ever has, being more decorous— have I had heated arguments with a producer or an editor. The other one, ironically over my adaptation of a novel called “Murder in the Senate,” I admit was partially my fault because I hadn’t really cracked the script.  This time we had.

We went to McEveety as a pro to back us up but he demurred.  It was Santorum’s money, after all, or, more likely, money from the same people who backed his political campaigns.  The man killed the movie.   

Years later I did run into the Senator in Des Moines during his ill-fated 2016 presidential run.  I can’t remember which of us turned away first.  Nowadays, I see him from time to time opining on Newsmax.  Once an adamant Never Trumper, he has recently become pro-Trump.  So it goes.

As for “Keys to Paradise,” it is appended here for those who may have missed it the first time around.  Have we oversold it? We hope not. We’re exposing it here for others to log in with their opinions.

And if you want to produce it, God bless you.

KeysToParadise

217KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download