That’s Not Really What Happened
That’s not exactly what happened, though. J.F. Lawton wrote the original dark script that was supposed to be called 3,000. Lawton was then a struggling screenwriter in the late 80s. He drafted a dark drama that took inspiration from movies like Wall Street and The Last Detail. As Lawton said, he was just trying to do something new to get a good gig.
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“I was a screenwriter who was trying to get a job, I was unemployed and I was working in post-production and I was trying to sell scripts, and I had been writing all of these ninja scripts and comedies, and I just couldn’t get any attention. I suddenly said, ‘Well, maybe I need to do something more serious and dramatic,’ and I had written a script called Red Sneakers which was about a one-legged lesbian standup comic which was an alcoholic, and all of a sudden, I got a lot of attention. People were really interested! People were talking to me.”