There was drama on the set, and none of it had come from Ron Bass’s screenplay. In 1989, Kim Basinger suddenly dropped out of a big thriller at the last minute—“summoned,” as Bass remembers it, by her then-boyfriend, Prince. “We were hysterical,” says Bass, ’63. As the studio scrambled to replace Basinger, Bass suggested a 20-something actress he’d met. She wasn’t a big star yet, and Bass hadn’t even seen her supporting turn in Steel Magnolias. But “I had a special feeling about her,” Bass says, of Julia Roberts. Based on his recommendation, Roberts was cast in Sleeping With the Enemy, which, despite critical drubbing, went on to become the eighth-biggest release of 1991.
Since then, Bass and Roberts have paired together twice more, on the 1997 comedy My Best Friend’s Wedding and the 1998 tearjerker Stepmom. It’s been a fitting partnership. While Roberts has become America’s sweetheart, churning out bankable blockbusters, Bass has spent the past two decades as a sort of cinematic John Steinbeck. He’s written more than 20 screenplays, a vast list that reaches most every genre, from drama (the Oscar-winning Rain Man) to action (Entrapment), fantasy (What Dreams May Come) and chick flick (Waiting to Exhale). His films have earned more than $900 million at the domestic box office.
Bass entered Stanford in 1960, after he set flames to a novel he’d written because a writing instructor at UCLA told him it would never be published. He majored in political science, attended Harvard Law School and became an entertainment lawyer. Some years later, working at night, he tried to reconstruct the novel he’d destroyed. It eventually was published; his third novel was optioned as a movie. Bass, an experienced contracts negotiator, signed himself up as the screenplay writer and quit his day job.
It was a straight-to-video bust—does anyone remember Code Name: Emerald?—but Bass was already trying to sell his next idea (or two, or three). Most novice screenwriters spend years developing one good story, living with the characters in their head until they become fully human. Bass didn’t define that as living his passion: “I had observed why writers’ careers are so horrible,” he says. When he had 30 minutes with an executive, he’d pitch up to eight ideas, one right after the next, until he saw a glimmer of interest. “They weren’t all great,” says Bass, who draws inspiration from other movies and books. (My Best Friend’s Wedding came from a women’s magazine article on The One Who Got Away.) “I would go from studio to studio, like Willy Loman with my bag.”
His favorite screenplay, The Joy Luck Club, was co-written with Amy Tan. “I said, ‘I won’t write this unless you write it with me,’” Bass says. “I needed her voice in these characters.” Because Bass was one of the film’s producers, he was able to make heavy use of a narrative device looked down upon in Hollywood. “There is kind of a foolish snobbery about the voiceover,” Bass says. “I’m in a perpetual struggle with producers over it.”
Bass is something of a Luddite, writing his screenplays with a mechanical pencil on loose-leaf paper. He doesn’t have an e-mail address, or own a computer. “When I’m writing with a partner who uses a computer, you lose stuff with the delete button. It’s a chilling effect,” he says. Still, that means he must fax drafts of his screenplays all over Los Angeles, and tap colleagues for Internet searches. “Sometimes, he’ll call and say, ‘Can you go to IMDB for me to look something up?’” says Adrienne Stoltz, ’99, who works for Bass’s company, Predawn Productions. (Bass gets up before dawn to write.)
What’s next? A slew of projects, of course, including an Amelia Earhart biopic and a comedy with Reese Witherspoon. “How do you describe your favorite thing in the world?” says Bass. “It’s the thing that makes you feel best. Writing has always been that for me.”
Ramin Setoodeh, ’04, is an associate editor at Newsweek.
