Here’s something you don’t hear about every day: A film school student gets his script picked up by a production company. Still, I’ll bet it helps to have an in to the business, like, let’s say, a famous dad.
The Hollywood Reporter shares with us that Legendary Pictures has picked up a modern-day fantasy spec script titled ‘Slayer’. The script comes from Martin Helgeland, a student at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angles. The recent acquisition is Helgeland’s first script, but you may have seen his last name around. His father, veteran screenwriter Brian Helgeland, wrote quite a few films over the years, including ‘L.A. Confidential’, ‘A Knight’s Tale’, and ‘Mystic River’. The senior Helgeland is also one of three people to have ever won an Academy Award and a Razzie in the same year.
‘Slayer’ is about a young doctor who discovers that his estranged father was a dragon and creature slayer before he passed away. Upon making the discovery, he too must become a slayer.
It’s been a while since we’ve had an old-fashioned, live-action dragon story, let alone one set in modern times. With the many technological advances introduced to filmmaking since ‘Reign of Fire’ or ‘Dragonheart’, I’m sure that ‘Slayer’ will be quite the sight to see, especially since Legendary Pictures is known to present some excellent visuals to the screen, as they did with ‘300’, ‘Watchmen’, ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, ‘Clash of the Titans’, ‘Inception’, and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.
Oh, and if you detected a hint of jealousy in the first paragraph, I’ll remind you that I too studied to be a screenwriter and leave you with the words of the fictional Ernest Hemmingway from Woody Allen’s great film, ‘Midnight In Paris’: “If it’s bad, I’ll hate it. If it’s good, then I’ll be envious and hate it even more.”
