Jeffrey Boam
Jeffrey David Boam was an American screenwriter and film producer. He is known for writing the screenplays for The Dead Zone, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Innerspace, The Lost Boys, and Lethal Weapon 2 and 3. Boam's films had a cumulative gross of over US$1 billion. He was educated at Sacramento State College and UCLA. Boam died of heart failure on January 26, 2000, at age 53.
Early life and education
Boam was born in Rochester, New York. He grew up in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and his family moved to Sacramento, California, when he was 11. His father was an aeronautical engineer. He developed a taste for action films by watching World War II film on television as a child. As a teenager, he saw the film Tom Jones, which he said "made the greatest impression" on him, ultimately making him "want to be in movies." He attended Sacramento State College, earning a B.A. in art in 1969. While interested in the film industry, he initially thought that his art training would lead him to a career in art direction or production design. Not wanting to "serve in the ranks", he decided that directing would be most satisfying. He entered graduate school at UCLA film school, hoping to start a career in directing. He couldn't afford to pay for his own film, processing, and equipment. But he did own a typewriter, so he took a writing course and prepared to study screenwriting instead of directing. At UCLA, he took classes under Richard Walter. Boam took an advanced screenwriting class taught by William Froug. He decided to "target" Froug, hoping to impress the writing teacher into accepting him to be a directed studies student. Boam was impressed by Froug's success, and wanted one-on-one help. He said, "I just knew that Bill could help me, but I needed more than the slightly impersonal, two-hour-a-week instruction of the class." He gave Froug two screenplays for review, but the writing teacher wasn't impressed with either of them. This didn't deter Boam, who persisted. Boam told Froug, "Well, I'll just have to write better." Froug relented and started mentoring him, and said that over the semesters Boam got "better and better, but ... was still struggling." The two collaborated on a screenplay called Johnny, about the bank robber John Dillinger. On the day the screenplay was finished, they learned that director John Milius was starting production on Dillinger, destroying their hopes of selling their script as a feature. However, their script was bought under a one-year option for $10,000 by producer Edward Lewis, who sold it to NBC as a possible television movie. In the end, the screenplay was never produced.Boam graduated from UCLA in 1973, with a Master of Fine Arts degree. He got a job as a film booker for Paramount Pictures, where he kept track of film prints and made sure the movies were distributed to the correct theaters. All the while, he was writing scripts, trying to land a screenwriting job. Of the work at Paramount, Boam said, "I was ... in the worst kind of Siberia in Hollywood." He switched from Paramount to the film distribution office at 20th Century Fox, where he earned $200 a week. In 1976, Froug helped him get an agent, and some of his scripts were shopped around Hollywood. He got a flurry of meetings with film studio executives and producers, eventually meeting producer Tony Bill. Bill offered to pay Boam the same $200 per week he was making at Fox, but instead write screenplays. Bill's stipulation was that he get a free option on whatever was written. Before Boam entered into that arrangement, one of his scripts was optioned by director-producer Ulu Grosbard. This became Boam's first Hollywood writing job.
Career
''Straight Time''
took on the directing job of the film Straight Time, after its original director, actor Dustin Hoffman, dropped out to focus on starring in the lead role. The film, based on the novel No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker, is about a thief who is released from prison and tries to live a straight life. Boam was asked to rewrite the script, and he quit his job at Fox to work with Grosbard. He received writing credit for the film, along with Bunker and Alvin Sargent.''The Dead Zone''
As a film adaptation of Stephen King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone was being developed by Lorimar, producer Carol Baum gave the book to Boam, and asked him to write a screenplay. "I saw it had great possibilities and agreed to do it," Boam said. Boam developed a script with director Stanley Donen, who left the project before the film reached production at Lorimar. The company eventually closed its film division after a series of box office failures, and soon after, producer Dino de Laurentiis bought the rights to the novel. He initially disliked Boam's screenplay and asked King to adapt his own novel. De Laurentiis reportedly then rejected King's script as "involved and convoluted"; however, David Cronenberg, who ultimately directed the film, said that he was the one who decided not to use the script, finding it "needlessly brutal". De Laurentiis rejected a second script by Andrei Konchalovsky, eventually returning to Boam. The film was finally on track to be made when de Laurentiis hired a producer, Debra Hill, to work with Cronenberg and Boam.Boam abandoned King's parallel story structure for The Dead Zone's screenplay, turning the plot into separate episodes. Boam told writer Tim Lucas in 1983, "King's book is longer than it needed to be. The novel sprawls and it's episodic. What I did was use that episodic quality, because I saw The Dead Zone as a triptych." His script was revised and condensed four times by Cronenberg, who eliminated large portions of the novel's story, including plot points about Johnny Smith having a brain tumor. Cronenberg, Boam, and Hill had script meetings to revise the screenplay page by page. Boam's "triptych" in the screenplay surrounds three acts: the introduction of Johnny Smith before his car accident and after he awakes from a coma, a story about Smith assisting a sheriff to track down the Castle Rock Killer, and finally Johnny deciding to confront the politician Stillson. Boam said that he enjoyed writing character development for Smith, having him struggle with the responsibility of his psychic abilities, and ultimately give up his life for the greater good. "It was this theme that made me like the book, and I particularly enjoyed discovering it in what was essentially a genre piece, a work of exploitation," he said. In Boam's first draft of the screenplay, Johnny does not die at the end, but rather has a vision about the Castle Rock Killer, who is still alive and escaped from prison. Cronenberg insisted that this "trick ending" be revised. Boam submitted the final draft of the screenplay on November 8, 1982.
King is reported to have told Cronenberg that changes the director and Boam made to the story "improved and intensified the power of the narrative." In an interview with film critic Christopher Hicks, Boam said that the success of the film is generally credited to Cronenberg, and that King would not give Boam credit for writing a good script. He said, "It's hard for him to admit that he's not the one who could crack that book. But I think that movie holds together as a real movie. It's not just some kind of weird concoction of Stephen King's."