As the media blitz for “The Fault in Our Stars” movie kicked off last weekend, screenwriter Michael Weber told executives at Fox 2000 Pictures that there was one place he had to stop – his hometown of Great Neck.
“They have me running all over the place but I said I have to go to Great Neck,” Weber told a group of moviegoers on Saturday after a screening of the movie at the Bow Tie Cinemas Theater on Middle Neck Road.
Weber, who also wrote the scripts for “500 Days of Summer” and “The Spectacular Now,” was scheduled to attend a “Relay for Life” rally at Great Neck North High School, his alma mater, but had to cancel at the last minute, because he had to appear at another Q&A session in Manhattan.
In an interview with the Great Neck News, Weber, now a resident of Manhattan, recalled his hometown as the place he fell in love with watching movies.
“I was at the Squire Cinema more than any other theater,” he said. “I went to a few in Manhattan, too, but not as much as the one in Great Neck.”
He said that some of his favorite movies growing up included “The Breakfast Club” “Back to the Future” “Ferris Buller’s Day Off” and “Say Anything.”
But, he said, most of the movies he saw while in Great Neck were “really bad.”
“For the most part I saw really bad comedies which I found funny at the time,” Weber said.
Weber said his second favorite thing to do while in Great Neck was to read books.
“It certainly was in Great Neck that I became a big reader,” Weber said. “Growing up, Great Neck had a handful of bookstores.”
Weber was born in Manhattan and later moved to Forest Hills, Queens. His family moved to Great Neck shortly before he started kindergarten at E.M. Baker Elementary and later attended Great Neck North Middle and High School.
After graduating from high school, Weber studied radio, television and film at Syracuse University.
He said his love of film grew even more with his collegiate studies.
“At Syracuse, I took my love of movies to another level and became a film fanatic,” Weber said.
In his junior year at Syracuse, Weber returned to Great Neck while his friends went off to spring break.
He said he began to search through the phone book and began to call production companies in the area and eventually obtained a summer internship with Tribeca Studios.
“It was exposure to people in the business,” Weber said about his time with the studios.
It was during his time at Tribeca Studious that Weber would meet screenwriter Scott Neustadter.
The duo would later work together on the scripts for “500 Days of Summer” and “The Fault in Our Stars.”
After graduating from Syracuse, Weber stayed in New York and got a job with Tribeca Studios, where he worked with and for Robert De Nero.
“It was like having a key to the city,” Weber said of his time with De Nero.
Weber and Neustadter would write several screenplays, but just for the sake of seeing how their friends would react to them, Weber said.
One of those projects was the script for “500 Days of Summer,” which tells the story of the main character Tom, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, falling in and out of love with Summer, played by Zooey Deschanel.
“We had always wanted to write about relationships,” Weber said of the project. “Scott had just gotten out of a relationship before we started writing it.”
After the two finished writing the script, they put it in a desk drawer and left it there for close to 18 months.
“At that point we just didn’t think that a career as a writer was feasible,” Weber said. “It was just something that we kind of put away.”
Months later the duo began showing the script, and other movie scripts, to movie executives.
The movie was released in 2009 and won the 2009 Satellite Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.
About three years later, Weber read a copy of “The Fault in Our Stars,” a novel by author John Green that tells the tale of two cancer-stricken teenagers, Augustus Waters and Hazel Grace Lancaster, who fall in love after meeting at a cancer survivors support group.
“I was reading it as a John Green fan first,” Weber said of the book.
Shortly after the book’s release in January of 2012, the movie rights were obtained by Fox 2000 Pictures.
Weber said he then read the book again, this time highlighting important parts of the novel that he would keep in and take out of the movie.
He said after he and Neustadter wrote the screenplay, the two pitched their script to the studio in a different way than most writers.
“Usually you talk about all the things you’d do different than the book,” Weber said. “We talked about how much of the book we wanted to preserve.”
One of the major changes Weber made to the script was the way the plot ended, which he said was praised by Green as “better than the book.”
“He said that our ending was better than his and that made him mad,” Weber said.
Weber is currently working on the script for another adaptation of one of Green’s novel, “Paper Towns.”
“Paper Towns feels much more like a John Hughes movie,” Weber said.
Weber said he is also working on a script for “Rosaline,” a re-telling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from the point of view of Romeo’s ex-girlfriend, Rosaline.
He’s also working on an adaptation of “Me Before You” by author JoJo Moyes and “Rules of Civility” by author Amor Towles.
