KEITH SHARON,,,WRITER

Keith Sharon - Showtime

The first time Orange County Register reporter Keith Sharon, screenwriter of the recent $90 million movie Showtime, pulled up to his International Creative Management agent’s office building, he was directed to the delivery entrance. He didn’t blame the kid who made the mistake – Sharon, behind the wheel of a beat-up Toyota compact, was himself having a hard time believing he was an ICM client.



But it was no accident – or overnight lucky break – that Sharon, a 20-year veteran newspaperman with a dry, sharp wit, was making his official entrance to Hollywood. It had, in fact, been a long, circuitous road.



Sharon’s journey began three thousand miles away, in 1991, when the then-New Jersey reporter finished a 600-page manuscript for a nonfiction novel called Born and Raised. It was about two Hoboken locals who plotted and carried out the murder of each other’s wives. It was a black comedy, says Sharon. “but it was so dark that you might not see the humor.”



Apparently, the publishing world did not. Even with an enthusiastic and revered agent pushing it, Born and Raised didn’t sell.



“So I moved to California,” says Sharon.



Sharon got a job for the Pasadena Star News and in 1995 wrote a series of articles on a woman who had been raped. His stories piqued the interest of fledgling producers Hale Coleman (ex-wife to Dabney) and Gino Tanasescu, who asked Sharon to write a television script about the woman. A deal was struck, everything was looking good…until the woman refused to sell her rights.



The deal fell through.



Sensing an opportunity, however, Sharon gave the producers his Born and Raised manuscript.



They loved it, and asked Sharon if he had ever written a screenplay.



“No,” Sharon said.



They handed him a script. “Here’s what one looks like,” they said. “Go try.”



Sharon, a lifelong movie buff who habitually rewrites movies in his head, took a shot. “I just tried to have something happen at the end of page 30, something happen at the end of page 90, and a big bang for a finish,” he says.



He handed Coleman and Tanasescu a completed Born and Raised script.



They loved it.



Cue the “Vital Hollywood Connec-tions” scene. It happened that Tanasescu played tennis every Saturday with David Wirtshafter, who was head of ICM’s literary division. She showed him Sharon’s script.



He loved it – a lot of love flying around at this point in the game – and asked to meet Sharon.



“He asked me if I had representation,” says Sharon. “I told him I was a newspaper reporter.”



The next thing Sharon knew he was talking his way into a parking space at the ICM offices. “I was assigned three agents,” says Sharon. He met in their plush offices where: “They told me, ‘On your way home, buy a bottle of champagne, you’re in the movie business,’” says Sharon.



He bought the champagne.



Soon, director Gary Fleder (Kiss the Girls) became attached. Sharon met with him about the script. You guessed it; he loved it. But…



There was no mystery, Fleder said. He wanted to make it a conventional thriller with a detective going after the killer of two women. “He said, ‘You’ve got to have a body on page one, an alibi on page two and two guys on page three who no one believes did it,’” says Sharon, who was perfectly willing to change it. “I figured he was the genius, the guy with the movies. I was just the new guy,” says Sharon. But then, faster than Sharon’s champagne buzz fizzled, the deal fell apart. “To this day, I have no idea what happened,” says Sharon.



But all was not lost. Sharon had still netted top representation, agents who sent Born and Raised out as a writing sample in an effort to get Sharon a writing assignment. And thus began the most colorful, most active, most frustrating period of Sharon’s career: his introduction to pitch meetings.



He met with dozens of producers who all had the idea for the next blockbuster. All they needed, they said, was a writer to come up with a pitch for the studio executives.



“They say write down a few thoughts and then they ask you 50 pages worth of questions,” says Sharon. “You have to have three acts, character, dialogue, plot twists, bits of dialog, and plenty of jokes.”



So the three-minute pitch meeting made famous in The Player is a myth?



“If you’re Scott Frank or Ron Bass, the one sentence pitch may happen,” says Sharon. “But on my level I have to convince them that I’m the guy beyond a shadow of a doubt. I have to convince them that I can’t screw it up.”



In 1998, Sharon did just that with Time Machine producer Jorge Saralegui, who had an idea for a movie about two L.A. cops starring in their own reality TV show. Sharon and Saralegui took the idea to Warner Bros., where Sharon says he stammered and sweated his way through the meeting.



They loved it. Really. They bought it for $75,000.



Sharon quit his job and spent the next six months working on Showtime, handing in a finished script in January, 1999.



They loved it. But they needed some changes made.



Which turned out to be a good thing. For two weeks of work on the rewrite, Sharon received $28,000.



Sharon turned the final draft in.



They loved it.



Then they fired Sharon and hired another writer.



With no full-time job Sharon went on more pitch meetings. They were just as draining. He was not as convincing.



A year went by and Sharon decided that Showtime had gone the way of most scripts sold in Hollywood – death in development. Sharon, who has a wife, two kids, a mortgage and car payments, went back to work at the Register.



Then, in January of 2001, a Daily Variety article announced that Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy had signed on along with director Tom Dey; Showtime was greenlighted. Sharon’s bonus for being the original screenwriter on the movie: $50,000. It was a needed boost, not just to Sharon’s pocketbook, but to his writer’s motivation.



Sharon went on less pitch meetings. “I think I like the idea of my own ideas from now on,” says Sharon. Others seem to agree. One of Sharon’s spec scripts, Peach Fuzz, a comedy about a 16-year-old boy who lives with his evil stepfather on a floating casino on the Mississippi River, was recently optioned.



Someone said they loved it. þ