Okay, so, maybe they don't need my services anymore... seems like the Mullen's are getting plenty of ink from reputable sources these days... Variety... now Creative Screenwriting! But, since I love em', I'll still give them some electronic props right here at home.
The article above reads:The Mullens: 2 Years, 2 Brothers, 5 Deals
by Peter ClinesTom and Tim Mullen grew up in Helena, Montana, far from the film industry. Tom wanted to be a journalist as far back as he can remember. "Yeah," he laughs, "it was pretty dorky." Tim is a bit prouder of the credentials he received from Capital High School. "I got class clown," explains the younger Mullen, "and somehow I parlayed that into wanting to write." While they shared a common sense of humor and creativity, they also knew there was little market for it outside of screenwriting, and for a long time, Tom explains, "both of us considered that the equivalent of going into NASA."
Still, when they moved to Los Angeles six years ago, the lure of Hollywood became irresistible. Many of their friends worked in the industry, and after a while the brothers wrote their first script, a "red-state teen comedy" called Deers & Beers, which they describe as going against the classic John Hughes standards of heroes, popularity, and fun. Deers caught the attention of an acquaintance, television director Terry Cunningham (Wicked Wicked Games), who arranged a script reading that helped the brothers quickly land both a manager and an agent.
Now with representation, the Mullens tried to focus more on writing, but paying bills still got in the way. "You come home from work," Tim explains, "and you're beat and you're tired and you're not very funny. Then on the weekends, when you want to write, you just happen to get really hungover, so that doesn't work either." One of them, they realized, needed to be writing full-time. So, Tom quit his job {insert me bawling here, because Tom quitting meant much less fun for me here at the office!} while Tim continued working. "I thought pulling the big brother card would work to my advantage in having authority in the relationship, " smirks Tom, "but essentially I became Tim's bitch." Tom wrote during the day, then the two of them would review his work each night. They worked like this for over a year and a half, until last April, when they were hit with an unexpected wave of success.
That's when Deers & Beers was picked up by Ivan Reitman's Montecito Picture Company for a mid-five figures deal. A month later, the brothers scored the assignment for Strike, a modern version of Aristophanes' Lysistrata (now set between rival fraternities) for Mark Waters (Mean Girls). Another pitch session (and two sixteen-hour days) landed the Mullens a page-one rewrite of Time Travel for Dummies, which Tom describes as "Back to the Future meets Dude, Where's My Car?" NBC bought a pilot script from them. And then, the big dream: a pitch with Sandra Bullock attached to star sold for six figures against a cool one million dollars.
The brothers are very aware that selling their pitch gives them pretty much every possible success for a writer in under a year—"besides having something made," Tim adds with a laugh—so they have no plans to change how they work. "If either of us jumped in with another writing partner," says Tom, "at some point you assume you're just going to go your separate ways. In our partnership that's just not something we're looking at."
