Daniel Bruce Waters is an American screenwriter and director. Best known for writing the Edgar Alan Poe-award-winning screenplay for the cult classic teen comedy Heathers (1989).
Early Life[]
Daniel Waters was born in Cleaveland, Ohio, and raised in South Bend, Indiana.
He got his start writing for his high school newspaper--a column called "Troubled Waters". It was a section where he wrote pulp fiction short stories about himself and his classmates. Everyone in the school who read it found it extremely funny and it made him enormously popular. He went around from clique to clique and his fellow students and the school faculty looked to him to write a story or two about them. After graduating high school, he moved to Los Angles and went to work at a video store. While there, he viewed a lot of films and began contemplating work on his own. In the 1980s, there was an abundance of teen movies, and most of them he noticed didn't really paint an accurate portrait of teenagers and what high school--or anything else in life--was like. He remarked his true goal was to write "the greatest screenplay NEVER written". And thus, he began work on "Heathers". He based much of the script on his sister and her experiences in the Queen-Bee popular girl clique in high school. The script for the film was extraordinarily long. He even had to cart it around in a wheelbarrow. Like others who eventually the film, he considered it "a masterpiece".
Due to his days working in a video store, he grew certain awe for the iconic filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. And with the original first draft "Heathers" film script at a whopping 4 hours long, he figures only Kubrick could get away with such a film at that length. But when Kubrick refused (citing it an inspired idea, but not really his thing), Waters pushed for the film to get made elsewhere.
In Hollywood After "Heathers"[]
Eventually, "Heathers" received the status it deserves. Many other Hollywood filmmakers began recruiting Waters to give their own screenplays the panache he brought to "Heathers". When the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane" was getting made (based on Rex Weiner's own short stories written in Variety magazine), Waters was brought aboard. "Fairlane" was a film which told the tale of a "rock 'n' roll detective" whose beat was the music business and who stumbles upon a huge bootleg scam that involves the murder of the lead singer of the hottest band in L.A. at the moment. Although "Fairlane" just made back a small sub of it's budget in the U.S., it enjoyed considerable success overseas and many of the phrases in the movie became catch-phrases in other countries. The screenplay "won" the Golden Raspberry for Worst Screenplay which Waters shared with fellow co-scribes David Arnott and James Cappe.
The following year, Waters would co-write another vehicle for a big name star for which would win the Golden Raspberry's Worst Screenplay Award--"Hudson Hawk." The film that would re-unite screenwriter Waters with Heathers director Michael Lehmann. And "Hudson Hawk" was a movie which like "Fairlane" would be a bigger box-office success overseas and was a hot commodity as a rental. The tale of a wily cat burglar on a mad bend.