In the summer of 1998 producer-writer David Beedon had nearly completed a screenplay entitled "Game Over, A Dead Man's Chronicle". It was the story of a dying man whose imminent mortality made him virtually fearless. He goes up against a crime boss and is able to defeat him.
Unfortunately, a short-lived television series had so many similar elements that the project was shelved. But as 1999 came Beedon's business partner, Jerry Witt suggested they rework the story. First they concentrated on mining some of the comedic elements from the story. But when they switched the antagonist from a drug lord to a compulsive TV host the story began to gel.
"We were particularly interested in the phenomenon of a famous person getting away with murder," says Witt. "Remember, this was in the wake of the O. J. Simpson verdict and not long after the "Subway Vigilante" Bernard Goetz was back in court. We felt it would be interesting to have a lead character that was willing to go to extremes in the name of justice. But this protagonist was not a superman like Charles Bronson in Deathwish. He's an ordinary guy -- a software engineer."
If you are really interested, the script is available here.
BACKSTORY
From 1998 to 2000 we were hired as the post production company for the Discovery Channel's new retail stores. Under the direction of Tim Newman, we created various multi-screen productions for them. These were designed to play in-store, on large video walls. Working in this format led to exciting revelations. When composing for these multiple screens you not only had to edit temporally but spatially. To put it another way, what was next to the images was at least as important as the shot before or after.
Some sample compositions from the multi-screen project we helped create. You can also see an example QuickTime movie.As we developed Last Words, we began to realize that this was a valuable storytelling tool; one that had yet to be fully exploited. With that in mind we decided to capture multiple points of view at the same time while filming Last Words.
