Creating a Cult Classic

Daze chats with Snakes on a Plane writer John Heffernan

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Daze chats with Snakes on a Plane writer John Heffernan

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Daze: How did you go from writing blurbs for Cornell Cinema to writing the “cult hit of the summer?”

John: I always wanted to do something in film, which is why I worked at Cornell Cinema. I bought this big, blue child molester van with no windows from my neighbor for about $1200 and drove across country to California — it took about three months to get there. I had 500 bucks in my pocket, which was enough to move into this hotel in Little Moscow in Hollywood. I got a job teching, which led to a job working at USC as a production coordinator for about three years. From there, I got another job working as an assistant at DreamWorks, and one of my bosses then was a producer named Craig Berenson — he read some scripts of mine and really liked them. He had actually read a script five years before in which one of the subplots was about some snakes that got loose on an airplane. The script wasn’t really that good but I said (to Craig), “What if we make the whole movie about snakes on a plane?” and he said, “yeah, okay” so we pitched it around, developed the story line and finally we sold it as a pitch to MTV Films, which had a production deal with Paramount. Just when we were about to get green-lit to go into production, September 11th happened and that was devastating for so many larger reasons than just the movie. When I saw it on the news, I wasn’t even thinking about the negative effects it would have on the movie, which of course it did. Paramount put the film to turn around, which meant that they weren’t going to do anything with the script. Luckily, one of the executives who was working on the film, Don Granger, left Paramount to become a producer and co-president of Mutual Films — he bought the rights, asked me to do a few rewrites and we sold it to New Line. After that, everything started happening really fast.