Fans Made It Fly
How grassroots enthusiasm gave us 'Snakes on a Plane'
By BRENT SIMON
"I hate to even say it, but the one thing that September 11 did that really worked for us favorably was that it made it more feasible, I guess, that someone wanting to do something bad on a plane would have to think outside of the box, as it were," says writer John Heffernan.
Yes, the unintended boon that Osama bin Laden provided for American B-movie fans has taken a while to materialize, but it will finally come to fruition - take that, terrorists! - in the dog days of summer, in the form of the forthrightly titled Snakes on a Plane. Already, though, its fan base is growing.
Many other films have made increasingly savvy marketing use of the Internet, but generally in much more calculated fashion. In a town where image is everything and fastidious attempts are made to manufacture and manage buzz on multimillion-dollar movies-as-corporate-investments, Snakes on a Plane is a genuine tech-age phenomenon, the closest thing to an uncultivated grassroots campaign that 21st-century Hollywood has seen. Driven by snarky, blog-posting twentysomethings with nothing but abundant time and unfettered delight over the movie's embrace of its shlocky premise, a veritable underground cottage industry has popped up around the movie, with fan websites, self-peddled T-shirts, and even one unauthorized, amateur trailer.
For stuffy types requiring some further explication, the story centers around an FBI agent (Samuel L. Jackson) charged with protecting a witness flying from Hawaii to Los Angeles to testify at the trial of a crime lord. In an effort to snuff said witness, the mob boss arranges for, yes, several hundred deadly snakes to be released into the cabin.
"The genesis of the idea was trying to take two of people's most common fears and bring them together," explains Heffernan. "Most people are afraid of flying, and pretty much everybody's afraid of snakes, so to put those both together in a claustrophobic silver tube 35,000 feet above the ocean, where there's nowhere to land, was to me pretty scary ... but an idea that could be pretty fun, too."
Heffernan, who sold the project as a pitch in the late 1990s, credits MTV Films' David Gale as an early champion of the movie, "the only one who really got it." Then September 11 happened, and the project went into turnaround for several years before landing at New Line. "It was sort of a blessing in disguise, because New Line is very forward-thinking, very open to new ideas," says Heffernan. "They loved everything we wanted to do."
Still, one thing that took some extra cajoling was the cheesy title. "Hollywood executives tend to think that you have to give it some flashy name, like Nosedive or Tailspin, to make it seem serious," says Heffernan. "But I thought: Snakes on a Plane ... it's perfect, it works, and you really can't improve on it. It's not trying to be or sell you something that it's not."
Seeing is believing, though, and it was only after fans rallied to the movie's defense with an e-mail petition - with Jackson weighing in as well - that New Line ended its flirtation with other monikers. After principal photography wrapped, too, inspired by the aforementioned phony trailer that deployed a few characteristically choice exhortations from a Jackson sound-alike, director David Ellis went back for five days of studio-sanctioned reshoots to add some cursing, violence, and mile-high-club nudity, squeezing the movie's rating up to a R.
As for Heffernan, he's now working to further capitalize on his zeitgeist moment - angling to adapt and direct an adaptation of Garth Ennis's Just a Pilgrim - and hoping that bubble doesn't pop upon the film's release, August 18. As for talk of a possible franchise at notoriously sequel-friendly New Line, a game Heffernan is taking it all in stride.
"The movie is so unique and takes so many chances that, for me, the sequel would have to be equally so. I don't know if it would have snakes, I don't know if it would have a plane, but I do know that it would be a very cool, unique, fun wild ride." Might we suggest Shrews on the Shuttle? Porcupines on a Zeppelin? Bears in the Bathyscaphe?Published: 05/25/2006
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