Farrands, Dan (The Amityville Conflict)
Dread Central Staff
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Look back on the last decade and you’ll find few horror films that have had a broad emotional impact on audiences like those birthed in the ’70s. Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense got lips a-flappin’, but it pales in comparison to the barf-blowin’, faint-inducing effects of The Exorcist and The Omen. Stuart Rosenberg’s 1979 entry, The Amityville Horror, strummed an unforgettable chord in the monetary sense. The film became a box office hit, boosted by the popularity of the Jay Anson book of the same name, an allegedly true account of the Lutz family’s 28 day stay at 112 Ocean Avenue. Through print and celluloid the haunted abode became a distinguished blemish on the Long Island, New York map and sent a collective shiver down the spines of supernatural believers everywhere.
Amitvyille sequels followed the first film’s success, some of them charting the vague origins of the Amityville evil; other follow-ups explored its reach beyond the house through a sundry of ridiculous household appliances and fixtures. For some, however, the curse’s determined strength very much exists outside of its silver screen and literary incarnations. Rumors of funky happenings on the original film’s set circulated to drum up publicity (and have since then been debunked by actors James Brolin and Margot Kidder), but nearly twenty years later, the Amityville name would be stirring up trouble for one Hollywood writer and the house’s former owner, George Lutz – one man who has never actually kicked a steady flow of Amityville-related legal troubles.
In the late ’90s, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers scribe Dan Farrands set about the task of renovating the Amityville franchise which, until that time, had been flushed into the septic well of the direct-to-video market. Having personally helmed The History Channel’s two-part History’s Mysteries: Amityville, Farrands felt he had a grasp of the material and vision to revisit the property and make 112 Ocean Avenue a plot of land to fear again. What followed became a convoluted series of events reflected in the Hollywood trades.
A quick chain of events breakdown would look something like this: In September of ’03 Variety reports Farrands’ new Amityville script is being produced by the triumvirate Emmet/Furla, Barstu Productions, and Integrated Films and Management; the following month MGM reveals their plans to remake The Amityville Horror with Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes; less than a week later Dimension becomes a player in the Amityville game, becoming the new rights holders of the property Farrands brought to the table; now two Amityville films are in development with Dimension and MGM vying to get their picture to the big screen first. The race is officially called off on November 3, 2003 when the trades report Dimension, MGM, and Platinum Dunes have decided to pool their talent and resources for one Amityville film. The remake.
Anyone following these developments knew something was up. Reading between the lines didn’t yield many answers to the questions that arose like ‘Why did Dimension suddenly drop their competitive edge?’ and namely ‘What happened to the script Farrands had developed?’ With the Scott Kosar-penned remake now upon us, Dread Central turns to Farrands for his account on the events that led up to this moment.
Ryan Rotten: Let’s start just before your involvement in The History Channel two-part special. How did you weave yourself into the Amityville thread?
Dan Farrands: Back in 1997 I had an idea to resurrect the Amityville name. And at that point there’s been sort’ve straight-to-video “in name only” sequels which is the lowest rung on the ladder that you can take a famous franchise to. They don’t have anything to do with the story. They were just these random horror movies slapping the Amitvyille title on them and there’s no connection to anything. So I thought this is a great title and what an interesting story. How much would someone have to be paid to spend a night alone in the Amityville house? At that point all I had known about it was the movie and I had kinda remembered the book when I was a kid. And I thought, ‘That would take a lot of money!’ That’s really scary! I started to research it online and other than a lot of people who ran websites who had their own opinions about the case, there was nothing about the actual people involved. The first person I met involved in this whole thing was a professor of parapsychology named Dr. Hans Holzer who is a longtime veteran, teacher, and writer of all things paranormal. He was one of the people that I had known of that investigated the house and had written a couple of books on the subject, one of which was non-fiction, the other two were fiction. Through him I started researching the case and I said, ‘Look, it’d be really interesting to do a film. There’s another story a lot of people don’t know about. There’s been a lot of rumors about Amityville and this persistent story out there that the family who had gone through this [the Lutzes] had admitted it was a hoax. I thought that was interesting because I found out that wasn’t the case at all. The media had just spun one person’s comments (a lawyer with dubious motives of his own) into something everybody had attributed to the Lutz family. The Lutzes have always held to their story that the house was haunted, that they fled after 28 days, left most of their possessions, and gave the house back to the bank.
RR: Through Holzer you met George Lutz?
DF: Yeah, Dr. Holzer put me in contact with George Lutz, and he and I started talking. Early on we had these really intense conversations talking about the phenomena that he and his family experienced while living in the house, and he talked a great deal about the essence of what he believes this thing – this presence – was. The thing that really impressed me at the beginning, and that I started to get a really sense of, was it really seemed to have affected this family’s lives in a profound way. From their point of view, this really happened and it changed all of them. Mind you, it took a lot of ‘getting to know you’ before Mr. Lutz opened up. As I got to understand the story more, we began talking about different ideas for a documentary but also the sequel film and television rights which were held by George Lutz (as well as now the trademark to “The Amityville Horror”), which basically deal with anything having to do with the continuing story.
RR: Had he been accruing any profits from the sequels at all?
DF: Amityville II and III ended up in litigation for over twelve years because what they attempted to do, as it’s been explained to me, was use and trade on the Lutzes’ experiences and their name to sell these other movies that had nothing to do with them and in fact prevented them from moving forward with their own version of a sequel. Amityville II proclaimed itself to be a prequel but was only very loosely based on the DeFeo murder tragedy, and that unleashed a series of lawsuits that went on for the next twelve years where George Lutz attempted to retain some control of the story, which of course was their story. The media at that point grabbed hold of it and, as they often do, the tabloids ran with it and people saw what they wanted to see and tried to make things bigger than life. And at the time with The Exorcist and The Omen still big, everyone had a taste of the devil. But people have to understand that many of these accounts were written by others who weren’t involved with the story or who simply wanted to make a name for themselves by trading on a title as famous as “The Amityville Horror.” So when I went back and read through that stuff, I took it all with a grain of salt. I was far more interested in what the Lutzes had to say. I believe in going right to the source!
RR: Who had the rights to Amityville at this point?
DF: I believe Orion Pictures ended up inheriting the rights through AIP and then Filmways. The one thing we didn’t have was the right to remake the original film based on the [Jay Anson] book. But we did have the feature sequel and television rights. There were a couple of other books that told of some eerie things that went on with the Lutzes and people who knew them after they fled the house in 1976. All of that was really interesting, but there was another controversy around the guy who wrote those, a guy named John Jones, who basically made a lot of money and sold the rights to those books as the basis for those straight-to-video films I mentioned earlier and apparently disappeared with the money, or so I’ve been told. So, going back, there was the John Jones book, called Amityville Horror II – that was originally meant to be a sequel to the original film. When producer Dino De Laurentiis got involved in the series he apparently didn’t want to make the Lutzes’ [second] movie and opted to make a prequel of sorts instead. In fact, I think he may have even coined the term “prequel.” That became the movie, “Amityville II: The Possession.” When the publicity for the prequel came out, the trailers and the poster, each and every one of them used the Lutz name, which is what set off more litigation. The case was settled in the mid-’90s and George thought that was the end of “Amityville”…then I came along. [laughs]
RR: And after all of this, did he even take to the idea of doing another film?
DF: He did but his mandate was, ‘I’m not gonna give anybody ultimate control of this. If we’re going to do something I want to have some say. I understand that a whole series of fiction has been done on this and I can’t do anything to change it, but I would like to do a project that contains at least some of the truth of the story. So that if people see it, they may be interested in learning more and maybe that will refer them back to the Anson book and my website.’ Mr. Lutz has spent a lot of time building his website, answering questions in online chat sessions and e-mails with people from all over the world. He’s also done quite a bit of lecturing at various universities and conventions. He doesn’t mind answering the tough questions and in fact welcomes them. But I think it’s important to him for people to understand that, from his perspective, these things do exist and that maybe by telling his story he might reach other people who are or have experienced similar things. I think in a way it’s cathartic for him to talk about what happened.
RR: Did he see Anson’s book as being close to the truth?
DF: Close enough. When the Lutzes left that house, they left everything. They took a couple nights of clothes and a cedar chest George’s grandfather had built and they basically, all five of them, moved into Kathy’s mother’s house. They really had nowhere else to go. Pretty much after that they were approached by a mutual friend who knew an editor at a local publishing firm who knew Jay Anson. Anson wrote the book from his hospital bed after he’d had a heart attack, and it was based on a series of cassette tape recordings George and Kathy had made shortly after fleeing the house. And they just sort’ve sat down and reviewed collectively: What was this thing? What did we just experience? I think they felt whatever force was in there divided the family. It was a divisive thing where each one of them experienced something different from what the other family members had gone through. George told me that the tapes were sort of like sitting down and collectively bringing those stories together for self-therapy. Whether they were accurate in terms of what day of the week it happened or how the weather was, all that stuff’s been disputed, who knows? They were just sitting down and recounting as much as they could recall within those 28 days. And Anson, I don’t think, was a great fact checker. I think he wanted to tell a really exciting story. There’s a lot of dialogue in the book, and it’s like, how would he know what they said? So the book, while certainly more accurate than the movie and the various tabloid stories and books written by would-be detectives and parapsychologists, is probably a “heightened reality” version of the events that happened to the Lutzes in the house. But it is still, George Lutz maintains, pretty darn close to the true story.
RR: It’s a very cold book, too. It reads like a piece of journalism or something…
DF: He presented it in that style because he was a documentarian. But George feels that the book was as accurate as could be given the conditions in which Anson wrote it. The Lutzes weren’t really available for consultation. They had basically packed their bags and moved off to California. George reviewed the first editor’s galleys of the text, asked questions, and made some notes. I don’t know if they were all addressed or incorporated. The Lutzes didn’t even sign the book contract until a couple of weeks before the book came out. So it was all initially done on a handshake.
RR: Given George didn’t mind doing something fiction as long as it had a modicum of truth, where did you two decide to take the story?
DF: What would happen if, for whatever reason, the Lutzes had to return to that house? Something that would prompt them to deal with it all over again. Just in terms of the movie, the house is what people want to see. You can’t do the Lutzes living in California and not have the iconic part of it. That’s like doing a Friday the 13th without Jason…
RR: Or a Halloween without Michael Myers.
DF: [laughs] Exactly. I thought this is really cool because we can revisit the characters and maybe bring James Brolin back to play George Lutz, which is something that was being considered, an offer had been made at one point to bring him back. Kathy really didn’t want to be portrayed. She had a chronic respitory illness. She was nearing the end of her life [sadly she died in 2004 at age 57], though, I think she wanted closure to the Amityville thing. Talk of a new movie was something she wasn’t interested in. She did ask not to be depicted in any fictional films. I took the limitations and decided, great, let’s focus on George Lutz. Also, the kids didn’t want it to be the story of their lives.
RR: Doesn’t leave you many family members to work with…
DF: We opted to take George Lutz and fictionalize a family member and use them as the basis for our “fiction-based-on-fact” update. That was the springboard for the whole thing. I spent a year and a half on the two documentaries for The History Channel so by the time I was done with that I was, to put it mildly, burned out on Amityville. At that point I pitched the idea for an updated Amityville Horror, a – I’m gonna use a trendy Hollywood term – “re-imagining” of the story rather than a direct sequel. We couldn’t do a remake so it was an updated version. Most of the people we went to said, look, nobody’s really interested. It was a tough sell. My manager suggested I go and spec out a screenplay (which basically meant I wrote it for free). But I had just had enough of it, so I brought some help in and called a few writer friends of mine and collaborated on some ideas. Ultimately, none of those early versions seemed to work, and I went off on my own and started writing a draft. There were things about the real story that I knew about from my own experiences making the documentaries that nobody else did. So I thought, ‘Let’s incorporate all those things.’ There’s a funny mock-reality to the final script I wrote because all of the strange and bizarre characters I had met during the making of the documentary, all of the people who came in and out of the story and thought it was a hoax or thought they could cash in on the “Amityville” name and get famous. I thought that was an interesting point of view. Why don’t we deal with the fact that the town called this thing a hoax and in our pretend universe, let’s say the house has been sitting there like an eye sore and they want to get rid of it. George Lutz comes to the town meeting where this is all gonna end and says, ‘If you tear it down, whatever’s there is going to get out.’ So he’s trying to prevent the house from being destroyed. That’s the jumping off point of the film we were trying to get going.
RR: And what was the general response to this spec draft?
DF: There was some interest now. We got a draft done, I worked with another writer to reshape it and polish it up, then I went ahead and worked on it some more. It was that draft that created some real interest in the project, and that’s what we sold. We were able to sell that script to an independent veteran produced named Paul Mason [Barstu Productions] who had a connection with a company who, he claimed, had deep pockets and theatrical distribution and they were ready to put their money into this. At that point things were really taking off. Pay-or-play offers had been made to James Brolin and Brad Renfro to play the fictional Lutz son – a kid who was born after the family moved out of the famous house and knew nothing about what his family lived through yet he had to deal with the public scrutiny and was resentful. Good role for Renfro. Rebellious kid. Paul Mason was supposedly putting the financing together for the film, and a bunch of things happened as a result of that. My manager, Steve Whitney, had been very passionate about this project since the beginning when I just pitched him the idea back in 1999.
RR: Which was?
DF: Amityville Horror: 25 Years Later. A25 [laughs] I say that in jest. Then again the studio may have gone ahead and just thought that was cool. One thing I should also mention is that because of my ongoing relationship with Mr. Lutz, we started a business partnership where he gave me exclusive rights options for a period of time. So I really started as a producer on all of this. When Paul’s money guys fell through, my own manager [Steve Whitney] made the decision to partner with Paul to purchase the rights package. That was a bit strange – and probably the only time I’ve ever heard of a manager dig into his own pocket and pay the clients a fee! We were hearing rumors at the time that there was interest on Michael Bay’s part to do a remake. Platinum Dunes had just done TCM, and they were looking for other titles. Apparently they came across the Amityville title and tracked the rights down to MGM, who allegedly inherited the remake rights from Orion. I’ve been told that even that issue is being debated right now.
RR: When Orion folded I thought the rights were scattered and that MGM wasn’t exclusive to those rights despite Orion being the sister company.
DF: I think you’re right, and again, that’s the question that’s being argued. The problem is MGM – this is what I’m given to understand – did not have a written transfer of copyright between Orion and MGM. They may have a handshake deal or a memo within the company saying, we give you the rights, but if there is no transfer of copyright, according to law, my understanding is that the legal owner would be the last person or entity to have the copyright. In this case, Orion. Not MGM.
RR: So with Platinum Dunes now circling the property, where did that leave Whitney and Mason?
DF: They got involved with Emmet/Furla Productions who, I believe, just happened to be on the Warner Hollywood lot where Steve’s office is located, and they got interested when he mentioned Amityville. They came in rather quickly and said we want to do something with this and bought in for a piece of the rights package, as I’m told. Now we’ve got four produces attached. So what do they do? They bring the package to Nu Image Entertainment and sell the rights off to them! The truth was that everyone (especially Steve and Paul) were looking for someone with deep pockets to bail them out financially so they wouldn’t be left holding the bag on this big rights purchase. And of course the motivation was to go make a movie. So the deal was put together rather quickly even though it had taken four years to get to this point! Now suddenly they said, we want something more than this. We want three sequels that we can bankroll right now, and in fact we want to put this project together within a month. They flew George Lutz out to L.A. and hammered out a deal to do a three-picture license. There was a strange urgency to the whole thing we couldn’t explain. They also wanted to revise my deal and cap my fee.
RR: In other words they just wanted you for one film.
DF: Which was fine because I didn’t want to be known as the Amityville sequel guy forever, just like I didn’t want to be known as the Halloween sequel guy, as cool as those things can be. We did the deal with Nu Image, and they said there would be an exciting announcement about it sooner than you can image. Well they were right – but it wasn’t the announcement George and I were expecting. As we were left waiting for this big “announcement,” and remember at the same time, MGM had an idea of doing a remake with Michael Bay. Before the story hit we were warned this might happen, but we were reassured constantly that we would get our movie made first. That was the reason for the urgency in getting our deal done, they told us. So we could get our movie made before Michael Bay or MGM or anyone else came along. The news broke that we made a deal in September of 2003. And almost immediately there’s an even bigger announcement there’s this remake in the works. Over the next two months or so there was this succession of almost page one Variety and Hollywood Reporter stories about the dueling “Amityville” projects. What had happened was Nu Image had taken our rights package and sold it off to Dimension.
RR: That’s where Dimension comes in!
DF: That’s the piece of the puzzle. That’s great because now we got a major distributor. The money to go do it. There were all these trade stories with Bob Weinstein saying we’re going to beat them, we’re coming out first. We were going under those assurances. But no one other than Steve Whitney is really talking to us at this point. A month later there’s a story in the trades about Dimension making an overall deal with Michael Bay. There’s another quote in that article with Weinstein saying, we’re still making our own Amityville, if he [Michael Bay] wants to do his, that’s fine.
RR: Got that quote here, he tells Variety, “The race is on. We don’t anticipate a lawsuit, because the story and the events surrounding the house are public domain. MGM owns the remake, and we will not touch that story; Amityville as an entity and a real story is another matter. We’ve come up with our own take on the story, and I’m sure that their remake can be a success. I know one thing: We’re very good at coming out first.”
DF: I felt like that was a giant piece of posturing because ultimately what they wanted was one movie and to take our rights off the market so we wouldn’t be competition for Bay.
RR: And a week later, MGM and Dimension join forces…
DF: Exactly. One of the things they forgot to mention is that Dimension made a deal with the producing team of Mason, Whitney, Nu Image and Emmet/Furla which clearly stated that any Amityville movie Dimension makes will trigger all of the contractual obligations contained in the three-picture package. Anything. It’s a built in sort’ve trigger. It was a smart move on our producers’ side to include that card because it gave them the ability to go to Dimension in a legal sense and say, look you can’t just do a remake and leave us in the cold. You made the decision to partner with MGM, so great, we’re coming along. The door on me was shut at that point. I heard nothing but what was going on in the trades. I was also saying to my manager, “What’re you doing about this, I am entitled to a producing credit and participation in this project and now this opportunity’s been killed.” His answer was, while the new movie was being prepped and shot, is that their lawyers were on it and were going to negotiate some kind of settlement with the studio. And George Lutz and I were basically told to say nothing until the movie came out because then we would see what kind of remake this was and if it violated our rights in any way, they would sue. So Mr. Lutz and I bided our time and let our manager and the producers do their thing. Then, out of the blue, a trailer appears for the remake with producing credits featuring everyone who we are in business with! Steve Whitney of Integrated Films and Management, Paul Mason and Emmet/Furla are all listed as co-executive producers on the new film! It was a side deal all done surreptitiously and behind our backs. What our own manager had done was basically bought our silence, while he and the other producers went and made a side deal for themselves to receive credits and fees on the remake! Now of course they have all kinds of reasons for leaving us out in the cold, but now it’s become a Writers Guild issue and they’re looking into it as a violation of contract.
RR: That’s insane considering you and George practically brought this whole thing to the table.
DF: A lot of people are taking credit right now for work they didn’t do and for rights they never would have had if it weren’t for me and especially Mr. Lutz. To say it’s a major backstabbing would be an understatement. But that’s the way it goes sometimes in Hollywood. Be careful who you trust. Unfortunately this whole thing has been about greed. This franchise, the name Amityville, seems to bring out the worst in some people. Maybe that’s the case whenever people see dollar signs. I have to be careful not to give it any more credence than that. George Lutz wrote a letter through his attorney to MGM, and this is coming second hand, saying this title has been caught up in lawsuits for years – that there are elements of this that we want to make sure you have the rights you say you do and don’t extend those rights beyond what you really have. MGM’s response was to simply sue George. They filed their lawsuit, he filed a countersuit, and this is being waged right now. So the sick and twisted irony here is that there’s a guy named Steve Whitney who’s receiving co-exeuctive producer on this remake, knowing full well that the studio he sold us out for is suing one of his own clients! I mean it’s just insane. If that’s not one for the record books, I don’t know what is. George really does believe that whatever is in that house is still very much at work and that it likes to create confusion and wreak havoc. It thrives on that because that’s how evil perpetuates and spreads. It works in secret and will do anything to avoid being exposed. A couple of years ago I may have dismissed all of that sort of thing. But with all of the things I’ve seen and the various people I’ve seen become infected by this “Amityville Fever” as George calls it . . . it does give you pause, like, what’s really going on here? Maybe I need to call a priest!
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