Not in the clique
'Heathers' screenwriter Daniel Waters survived the '90s. Now he's breaking from mainstream again.
For a certain stripe of moviegoers, Daniel Waters' screenplay for 1989's biting high-school satire "Heathers" produced more quotable lines than Roget, Shakespeare or the Bible. The film, starring Winona Ryder as a wise-beyond-her-years Midwestern teen who inadvertently becomes Bonnie to her murderous rebel boyfriend's Clyde, served as the ultimate counterpoint to the far more sweet-natured John Hughes films that then ruled the multiplex.
Without "Heathers," one could argue that there would be no "Jawbreaker," no "Mean Girls" and certainly no "Juno." Before Diablo Cody's world-weary mother-to-be was hushing convenience store clerks with "Silencio, old man," the members of the student body at Westerberg High were punctuating conversations with "how very" and "what's your damage?"
Back in the early 1990s, the screenplay became a calling card for Waters, who scored writing assignments on some major studio releases -- none of which really earned much in the way of critical acclaim: "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane," "Hudson Hawk," "Batman Returns" and "Demolition Man." After moving so quickly into the mainstream, he seemed to disappear from the Hollywood radar. Until now.
Today, Waters lives in the Hollywood foothills in a home that belonged to Orson Welles in the last 15 years of his life -- the place where he died, just off the main foyer, is still outlined in masking tape. Nearby is a coffee-table book called "Pornstar" by Ian Gittler, which features production stills from the numerous adult movies that were shot here in the decade after Welles' death.
"I bought the house because I wanted to get that 'Citizen Kane' mojo," says Waters. "Instead I'm getting the end of [Welles'] career, the hanging out with Henry Jaglom, doing wine commercials and magic tricks part of his life. I mean, I enjoy my life, but come on -- where's my 'Touch of Evil'?"
His new film, "Sex and Death 101," might not earn too many comparisons to Welles' classic, but it does place Waters squarely back into off-kilter territory. The story follows a callow ladies' man (Simon Baker) who, on the eve of his wedding, receives a mysterious e-mail containing the names of all his sex partners, past, present and future.
As existential comic relief, "The Wire's" Robert Wisdom and celestial stooges Patton Oswalt and Tanc Sade preside over a kind of bureaucratic heaven, while Ryder haunts the margins as a femme fatale nicknamed "Death Nell" by the newspapers. "It's Neil Simon adapting Georges Bataille," Waters says. "It's Roman Polanski directing Seinfeld."
