By Scott Essman.
Research and Assistance by Lindsey Newman.
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski
For over 10 years, Margaret Keane produced infamously unforgettable paintings of waiflike children with big, elfin eyes, while her husband Walter ruthlessly took credit for her work—that is, until she finally mustered the courage to stand up to him. While the story made headlines in the 1960s, it was widely forgotten until screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski stumbled upon it in the early 2000s. That story became the real-life inspiration for the currently released film Big Eyes, directed by Tim Burton, whom the duo previously worked with on 1994’s Ed Wood. Though Big Eyes was seemingly a straightforward project, the team was faced with over a decade of setbacks as they worked tirelessly to get the film produced.
In an exclusive interview with Creative Screenwriting, the screenwriters revealed what inspired them to tell Margaret Keane’s story, what it was like collaborating with Burton for a second time, and what was finally required, more than 10 years after the film’s inception, to bring Big Eyes to the big screen.
Inspiration and Research
“Back in 2003,” Alexander begins, “we were rewriting a sci-fi comedy which was about a supreme higher intelligence on another planet that gets destroyed when pop culture from earth crash lands on [their] planet—albums, sitcoms. We were looking for examples of weird pop culture kitsch. My wife had a book from 1990, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. It had a two-page article about the Keanes—the rise and fall. I showed it to Larry… It seemed to have everything we love. It’s a very fringy piece of pop culture, a story nobody knows, with two amazing characters. We were really intrigued.”
The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, by Jane and Michael Stern
Having just come off of a biopic about the Marx Brothers that never got made due to budget constraints, the duo had begun searching for an idea that could be done for a more modest budget. When they came across the Keane story, it seemed like a perfect fit. “We were reverse engineering that concept for Big Eyes,” said Alexander. “[We thought]: he’s a fascinating character, she’s a fascinating character. We don’t need many locations. We can attract two major actors.”
Armed with inspiration and a story to tell, Alexander and Karaszewski embarked on a mission to discover more. “We had to track a lot of things down,” said Karaszewski. “We spent six months doing the research and getting to know the story before we began to write. What we like about these funny pop culture figures is that we had idiosyncratic tastes. If you have a research person, they would miss that stuff. The broader strokes miss the tiny details.”
Immediately, the pair started looking for of every piece of information about the Keanes that they could find, searching for key events and details that they could develop into a screenplay. “We went to the UCLA research library,” said Alexander. “We went through microfiche from the San Francisco newspapers from the 1950s and 1960s. The Keanes were major figures in the city back then, especially Walter. A lot of them were written by the same guy, Dick Nolan, who did a gossip column in the San Francisco Examiner. We contacted the Honolulu newspapers and pulled up all of the stories from the courtroom trial. We learned everything we could from the written words.”
“We really obsessed over the facts,” he continued. “Months and months trying to track down every piece of information we could, highlight the important ones, and incorporate every quirky detail that we can. When you cram someone’s life into two hours, if anything, you are omitting stuff. We try to cover as little time as possible.”
“With this movie, when we did all the research, we found the public story—the Walter Keane story,” Karaszewski added. “We knew that even in the broad overview, Walter would be more the antagonist.”
The real Margaret Keane with Amy Adams on the set of Big Eyes
Meeting Margaret
However, the public story failed to illuminate the nuances of the real story, and this gave the duo inspiration for the film’s plot. “Why did Margaret go along with it? Why did it happen? There was a lot of he-said-she-said stuff back and forth,” Alexander said. “We really wanted to know the details, so, we contacted her gallery in San Francisco. They were a little resistant at first. She is very private, but we had good intentions.”
After some convincing, they secured a meeting with Margaret to unearth the details about her years with Walter. “We met with Margaret and wanted to understand all the steps of how it happened: How did it happen the first time, claiming it was his own when he wasn’t a fan of the Big Eyes at first. What was it like living with that?” said Alexander. “Walter kept his propaganda intact until he died. He loved the sound of his own voice. He was the master of conquering all media. He kept putting out the Walter version of events for decades and decades… Walter is not an artist; he’s a salesman. That’s his art. He’s actually very, very good at what he does. Her art would have gotten nowhere if it wasn’t for Walter’s abilities. We had to introduce him as a salesman.”
However, the duo knew that even with Margaret’s support, the biopic would be incomplete without one essential component: the art. “We wanted to option the rights to all of the art,” Alexander said. “They are all public figures on some level, but we needed the art. We had to win her over. We had to earn her trust, so we sat with Margaret and asked a lot of these questions. She started realizing [our good intentions] and opening up with us. She started talked about her life and her daughter Jane, the person she is closest to. They still live together. Margaret would look her in the eye and say, ‘Walter is the painter.’ She really regretted it. We knew that would be in the movie.”
Once they gained Margaret Keane’s trust, Alexander and Karaszewski began to uncover story points both small and large that would play a key role in the screenplay’s development. “She told us that ‘Walter wouldn’t let me have friends, he didn’t want me going to lunch with them or them going into the house, Walter and [journalist] Dick Nolan palled around together,’” and she divulged how finally, she was strong enough to take on Walter,” Alexander explained.
“We had this idea that Margaret’s story paralleled the women’s movement, leaving the ‘50s representing gender politics… The story begins in 1950 and ends in 1970,” added Alexander. “This wasn’t anything stated in the movie. But we wanted her story to work as a parable for the role of women in the country at that time. That setting gave it that feeling.”
As with many biopics, some details had to be altered to create a more cohesive plot, such as the fact that the real Honolulu trial actually took place in the mid 1980s, not 1970 as it does in the film. “In truth, there was 15 years of legal back-and-forth,” Alexander revealed. “Suits and countersuits. Press events. Walter wouldn’t show up. For us, all of those suits and countersuits could be expressed in the final scene in the courtroom. We found no reason to acknowledge that 15 years went by… It was a climax [in the film] and ended around 1970, the beginning of the women’s movement.”
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski on the set of Big Eyes
Delays
However, despite the headway that the screenwriters made in developing the material, the project didn’t come together overnight. Over a year went by before Margaret agreed to give Alexander and Karaszewski the rights. “It was a long time to get through it,” Karaszewski said. “We spent six months researching and a year or so writing it while doing other projects. We had our first draft end of 2006 and the first one we showed to people in 2007.”
Regardless of the inherent value of Big Eyes’ screenplay, it seemed that every time production was about to commence, the team was faced with additional changes or budget adjustments that would force them to alter their approach and, ultimately, further delayed the film’s development. “The plan kept falling to pieces,” Alexander said. “We were always attracting great actors, and we always had a lot of great crew who wanted to work on the movie for scale—shelves of Oscars. Then the financing would fall apart, the stock market would crash, the lead actor would get pregnant. Over the years, we’d prep the movie in L.A., then Portland, then Salt Lake City, New Orleans. All had different versions of the movie. We spent a lot of time on these versions, yet they’d all fall apart. No one paid us for those ten years. It was a delusional thing. We weren’t taking paying jobs—we were endlessly trying to get Big Eyes made.”
But Alexander and Karaszewski had a secret weapon in waiting: Tim Burton. “We knew Tim was a fan,” said Alexander. “We worked with him on and off over the years. Tim had always been a fan of our writing. “
“Before working on Ed Wood, we were not well respected,” Karaszewski added. Tim shot a first draft of Ed Wood. It gave us a boost of confidence. It gave us the ability to try things like The People Vs. Larry Flynt or Big Eyes. We have written some odd movies, but without that initial encouragement from Tim, we would not have had that confidence.”
Tim Burton with his Margaret Keane paintings
Eventually, they gained the support they needed to propel the project towards fruition—or so they thought. “Tim came in as a producer,” said Alexander. “We finally had a version going in 2012 where we had the cast ready to go. Then our actress got pregnant. We met Margaret at 75. We were raising her hopes, then crushing them.”
Despite the setbacks, the duo remained optimistic about the state of the film. “Just under two years ago, Christoph Waltz came in as Walter,” Alexander continued. “Tim got really excited. We looked at each other, and we knew Tim would get the movie made. We wanted to see the movie get made; we wanted Margaret to see the movie get made. We knew Tim was at a point in his life where he was looking for a smaller movie himself. We knew what the movie was worth in the marketplace. It was an arty movie—it was never going to get a lot of money to shoot.”
“Independent movies are cobbled together by a lot of foreign financing,” Karaszewski explained. This, combined with the film’s less-than-traditional narrative, presented a number of challenges as they sought support for the project. “One, it had a female lead character, not a lead male role. Two, it was a movie about art. They were afraid it was going to be Pollock, a serious movie about art. They didn’t get the tone we were going for,” he continued. “The movie that got made was an old-fashioned 1950s female empowerment movie. An audience goes for it and goes with Margaret — people clapping in support of Margaret.”
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski
Fruition
Although the duo had originally planned on directing the film themselves, they eventually realized that they needed the star power of a top director for the project to receive the financial backing it mandated. “We didn’t want it to get out that we were looking for a director to take over,” Karaszewski explained. “We wanted to get the movie made, in part because of our personal obligations to Margaret Keane. We wanted her to be around, since she’s now in her late 80s. It happened really quickly.”
As with Ed Wood, Burton agreed to do the project based on the strength of the draft of Alexander and Karaszewski’s original script. “When Tim came on as director, he was very happy with the version of the screenplay we had—a two-hander with two characters,” said Karaszewski. “It’s the lowest budget he had since his first movie.”
“Tim only had 39 days and $16 million,” Alexander added. “He liked the mixed tone that we like. The notes he had on the film were because of the budget. Cost-saving notes like tear out some locations and pages to shorten the script; take out some shooting days.”
Discussing the creative reunion with Burton a decade after Ed Wood, Karaszewski explained the dynamics of working with the famed director. “I think we work so well with Tim for a number of reasons,” said the screenwriter. “We have a great deal of affection for outsiders who don’t get their due, on the fringe of pop culture… We like to mix tones; we’re not afraid of that. With Tim, one of the things he gets out of our screenplays is you can tell a joke in the middle of one of our serious scenes…With Big Eyes, there are elements that are funny, really sad, and a thriller with a wife trapped in a house and a husband losing his mind. It’s a tricky thing.”
Once Burton agreed to direct, the movie finally secured the backing it deserved — and very quickly. “We handed it off to Tim,” Karaszewski explained. “Within three-four days, he met with Christoph [Waltz]. Amy [Adams] wrote Tim a letter saying she wanted to play Margaret. Harvey Weinstein came in with financing. The whole movie came together in about a week-and-a-half.”
“Amy was so right for the part,” Karaszewski added. “One of the tricky things about our screenplay is that our protagonist, Margaret Keane, had less dialogue than our antagonist. You were telling the story through Margaret. The godsend of Amy Adams is that she can do so much with her face; she’s almost like a silent movie actress. She displayed this weird combination of love and being afraid of this man. She is so watchable — she keeps you pulled into the Margaret Keane character. Sometimes, that kind of acting can be overlooked and underappreciated. What Amy’s doing is so much tougher; it made the editing process easier. You would watch her and be so captivated.”
Amy Adams on the set of Big Eyes
The Result
And captivated audiences were. In the end, Big Eyes was a critical success, gaining Adams the Golden Globe for Best Actress for her compelling portrayal of Margaret Keane, along with a handful of other awards nods, including an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Alexander and Karaszewski for Best Screenplay.
After the arduous process of getting Big Eyes made, what’s next for the screenwriting duo? “Scott and I haven’t found the next thing that we want to do as directors,” says Karaszewski. “Television right now has some of the most interesting drama being written. We are doing a 10-hour miniseries about the OJ Simpson trial: an epic scale, reality TV, 24-hour media. For that story, we never would have done it as a movie. We are able to explore all the crazy offshoots — it’s a fascinating process.”
