On writing with his father,
Richard Matheson: The first was a script called Face-Off, which ultimately became 'Loose Cannons'. It was about a veteran police detective who gets partnered with this younger detective who's a brilliant criminologist with multiple personality disorder. That was the central idea of the movie: He was brilliant as a partner, but almost impossible to deal with because you never knew when he was going to splinter off into a new, bizarre personality. We wrote the script, sold it. It went through a succession of creative teams, ultimately ended up being made with
Gene Hackman and
Dan Aykroyd. The central idea remained, but the studio bloated it into an incomprehensible, big-budget mess. They run it on television a lot and I watch it here and there. Hackman, is great. Aykroyd has moments. We distanced ourselves, kind of said, "F-ck it." Immediately wrote another spec script, sold it to
Richard Donner. Another to
Ivan Reitman.
