Jim and Ken Wheat classify themselves as working screenwriters--which means that, after a career that spans more than two decades in the business, "you learn to have strong finger muscles just to hang on," Ken says.
"We're more like migrant laborers moving from crop to crop," Jim adds. "You're always looking for the next job."
Still, the Wheats work relatively steadily, though they do so in a kind of industry backwater: sequels, low-budget sci-fi and scare fare, TV movies. Now, to a resume that includes "The Fly II," "The Stepford Husbands" and "Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master," they can add the sci-fi thriller "Pitch Black," which opens today.
The soft-spoken, middle-aged brothers have found their way in Hollywood largely by writing screenplays that can frighten teen audiences, an irony not lost on them. Notes Jim, "We found our niche doing scary things. A lot of our friends commented on how two nice, mild-mannered guys could come up with such things."
"Pitch Black," which generated early buzz on the Internet for its imaginative reworking of several familiar science-fiction and horror conventions, crash-lands a spaceship full of travelers (including a serial killer) on a planet that has three suns and seemingly no night. Then the lights go out and the planet's photophobic inhabitants emerge, ready to feed.
"Our models were movies like 'Five Came Back,' 'Sands of the Kalahari'--and 'Stagecoach,' " says Ken, the older of the siblings at 49. "You've got characters battling the elements, deadly natives--and they're fighting with each other."
Adds Jim, 47, "It all goes back to 'Stagecoach'--desperate characters thrown together, forced to depend on each other if they're going to survive. And you know they all won't."
Having toiled in the vineyards of made-for-TV movies for much of the '90s, the Wheats are excited at the prospects of "Pitch Black." They hope the film, which stars Vin Diesel (who is also in "Boiler Room," opening today) and Radha Mitchell ("High Art"), could be the kind of genre potboiler that crosses over to mass-audience success. The breakout success of such genre films as "Sixth Sense," and "The Blair Witch Project" in the past year--and of course "The Scream" trilogy--proved a film didn't have to be a major epic to be a blockbuster.
"Pitch Black" began with an idea suggested to the Wheats by executives at Interscope Films: a vague idea about people landing on a planet with perpetual daylight that goes through an eclipse--at which point ghosts attack.
