Go away quietly? Not these writers

Former writers' assistants on such television shows as "Sports Night," "Boy Meets World" and "Scrubs," Francis, 33, and Grifoni, 30, bonded during their 16-hour shifts and finally decided to pool their creative sensibilities three years ago. When a pair of comedy pilots went nowhere, they took a shot at a feature script, a road trip comedy called "Wieners," that in 2005 landed them 40-plus industry meetings, a $100,000 script assignment for Walden Media and an eventual sale to Screen Gems for $170,000 (including the production bonus).

Given unusual access, Francis and Grifoni were then permitted to stay on set for two months during production, asked to write an extra day's worth of promotional material for the marketing team and were invited into the editing room. To the freshman writing team, it was an exciting, illuminating experience. So far, so great.

Then their e-mails were no longer being returned and "Wieners" suddenly seemed headed for a straight-to-DVD release. But in a radical break with convention, the pair didn't roll over in quiet bitterness, just another set of disappointed screenwriters with no power. And they didn't heed the warnings of their agent and manager to keep the grousing in-house and to a minimum. (Grifoni regularly says things like, "The studio is just going about this movie the wrong way because they don't understand it.")

What they did was contact Scriptland for help, apparently seeing the column as an avenue to spark some last-ditch turnaround in Screen Gems President Clint Culpepper. In this, they are either incredibly gutsy or incredibly, well, stupid. The chutzpah! Although taking up their cause was out of the question, I had to meet any writers willing to fight this hard to get their film into theaters.

And fight they have. They offered to finance an extra test screening of their preferred cut. They cut their own trailers on iMovie and then offered to pay so they could test one of them. And despite the potential harm of being branded as troublemakers, they called a major newspaper to try to pressure the studio about to dump their "baby" into Blockbuster.