Underdog Screenwriter

?Underdog¹ screenwriter learns career is hard work

SOREN ANDERSEN; The News Tribune
Joe Piscatella had this idea that the life of a screenwriter is glamorous. ³He goes to work at noon, hangs out with his buddies and goes to swanky lunches.²
Where does a guy get such ideas? ³I¹d probably seen it in a movie,² Piscatella says with a laugh.² He knows better now. ³I obviously was a little delusional about what the life of a working writer was like,² he said by phone last week from Los Angeles. Born in Chicago and raised in Tacoma ­ he graduated from Bellarmine Prep in 1991 ­ Piscatella, 35, knows that screenwriting is hard work. First you¹ve got to attend endless pitch meetings, hoping to interest studio suits in your particular take on their movie projects. Then there is the writing. And the rewriting. Finally, there is the moment, practically inevitable where big-studio pictures are concerned, when someone else will be called in to rewrite what you¹ve so laboriously written and rewritten.
Piscatella has been there. He¹s done that. And had that done to him in turn.
A professional screenwriter who sold his first script in 1999, Piscatella and his writing partner, Craig A. Williams, were called in to the L.A. offices of the Spyglass Entertainment company a few years ago to pitch their ideas for a movie based on the ³Underdog² cartoon series of the ¹60s and early ¹70s. They got the call after another screenwriter, Adam Rifkin, had already taken a crack at it. Rifkin¹s script had Underdog befriending what Piscatella describes as a ³30-year-old slacker.² To make the story more family-friendly, Piscatella and Williams changed the super pooch¹s human pal to a teenage boy being raised by a single dad.
Their rewrite of Rifkin¹s material so pleased Spyglass that the project got the coveted green light. What was once a concept would now become an actual movie. (The picture opened earlier this month.) Spyglass wasn¹t the only entity that liked the pair¹s take on ³Underdog.² Their script also pleased Disney, which had been sniffing around the project. The entertainment giant decided to join with Spyglass to put up the money to get the movie made. ³Our draft was the one that got Disney onboard,² Piscatella said proudly. Rewrites followed. And then, sure enough, the inevitable happened. ³They brought in a couple of people on what they call a ?weekly rewrite¹ to do some comedy punch-up.²
Piscatella wasn¹t bitter. He understands very well how this world works. ³It¹s part of the process,² he said. ³Underdog wasn¹t my character. I didn¹t create him. Had Underdog been our own creation, I probably would have been a lot more upset.²
As it was, ³we were hired guns.² And well-paid ones. Thanks to his screenwriter earnings, Piscatella owns a home in Pacific Palisades, a pricey L.A. enclave.
At least as satisfying to him as the money is the fact that he and Williams are listed in the credits, along with Rifkin, as ³Underdog¹s² writers. The names of the ³punch-up² guys are nowhere to be found in those credits.
They had no dealings with the man whose script they rewrote. ³I didn¹t meet Rifkin until the premiere a couple of weeks ago,² Piscatella said. That, too, is common in the screenwriting trade.
Piscatella is realistic about the reasons why scripts are always being rewritten. ³It¹s a way that the studios cover their own butts: ?Oh, let¹s hire an expensive rewrite guy for a week to come up with some new jokes.¹² And if the picture bombs, he said, the suits blame the writers. ³At the end of the day, the studios are not in the business of making good movies. They¹re in the business of making money. And it¹s not like they¹re trying to hide that fact,² he said.
³Why does ?Underdog¹ get made as opposed to just calling it ?Wonderdog¹ and making it your own character? It¹s marketing. It¹s a whole lot easier to market ?Underdog.¹²
Writing for the movies was never on Piscatella¹s radar when he was growing up in Tacoma. The son of Joseph C. and Bernie Piscatella, authors of a best-selling series of diet and nutrition books (³The Healthy Heart Cookbook,² ³Choices for a Healthy Heart² and other titles), Piscatella liked movies as a kid back during his Tacoma days. ³But I don¹t think screenwriting had crossed my mind as a career option.² After graduating from Bellarmine, he went off to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he graduated with a double major in government and English. He also was a punter on the school¹s football team for four years.
³When it came time to graduate, I realized that everybody from Georgetown goes either to Wall Street or law school,² Piscatella said. He didn¹t want to do either. In school, he had liked writing and he was good at it. ³I liked the idea of writing, and I liked the lifestyle I perceived a writer had.² You know: clocking in at noon and dawdling over swanky lunches.
But gigs like that were hard to find, so he got a job working for a consulting outfit headquartered in the Watergate complex. ³Within a year I was writing jokes for speeches these consultants would give. It wasn¹t easy.
³The mandate was to write jokes that didn¹t offend anybody.² That skill served him well years later when he went to work for Disney. ³There are certain parameters you¹ve got to stay within within the limits of good taste,² he said. Keep the language clean, keep the sexual and drug references out. Working for those consultants made him skilled in all of that.
After a year of that, though, he was getting bored. While home in Tacoma for the Christmas holidays in 1995, he said, he realized he wanted to be a screenwriter. The lure of those swanky lunches was strong. He applied to the University of Southern California, one of the top film schools in the country, almost by default. It was the only school where application deadlines hadn¹t already passed for that year. He sent his application off, ³thinking there is no way I¹m getting into USC.² He got in, much to his astonishment.
At USC, he met Williams, and they soon became fast friends and writing partners. He says that friendship and partnership was the most valuable thing that came out of his film school experience. ³You don¹t need a master¹s degree from USC to be a good screenwriter,² he said. You either have talent or you don¹t. He and Williams did.
Within a year of graduating with their master¹s degrees in ¹98, the pair had landed their first job, writing an episode of a short-lived NBC sitcom called ³Stark Raving Mad.² Since then, they¹ve sold close to a dozen scripts for movies and TV. ³Underdog² is the first to make it to the big screen.
They specialize in family comedies, and they do most of their writing in a studio behind Piscatella¹s house in the Palisades. And while the dreamed-of leisurely lunches and abbreviated workdays are still just that ­ dreams ­ the expectation that he would spend his days hanging out with friends has been met.
³My writing partner is my best friend, and I sit in a room with my best friend a lot of the day trying to make him laugh, and vice-versa. It¹s a pretty fun way to spend my day.²

"Anybody can direct. There are only 11 good writers." ? Mel Brooks