"I pitched the game to Nick Reed at ICM, who is now my agent," recalls Mechner. "He warned me that the hardest part would be to sell me as a first-time screenwriter." Eventually he was introduced to John August ("Corpse Bride") who agreed to join Mechner as co-producer and help pitch it to the movie studios.

On Reed's advice, Mechner cut together a two-minute trailer of video game footage, structured like a movie trailer, which forced him into thinking about the storyline and be very clear about what sort of movie he was proposing to write.

"Once we had the trailer, John and I spent two months fine-tuning the pitch until we could tell the story in under 20 minutes, including all the characters, the action set pieces, and the plot twists," says Mechner. "We pitched it first to Disney which loved it, but because it was such a big movie, the only way they'd take it on was with 'an established producer like Jerry Bruckheimer.' We interpreted that to mean that we needed Jerry Bruckheimer, so we showed it to him, he loved it, and we did the deal in early 2004. I wrote the first draft in three months and then spent the next 18 months writing and revising it. So it was a 21-month project, not counting the 15 years of preparation before that," he quips.

If there's a lesson to be learned from adapting a movie from a video game, notes Mechner, it's that there cannot be a one-to-one transformation. "If I'd tried to adapt the game's storyline beat for beat into a screenplay, we would have wound up with a 'B'-level survival-horror movie about a warrior prince who spends most of his time fighting off ravaging, zombie-like sand creatures -- basically, Resident Evil in the desert," Mechner explains. "You might make a good movie from that, but it definitely wouldn't be a Disney-Bruckheimer 'A'-level summer blockbuster."

Instead, Mechner's efforts went into turning his game into "an epic, swashbuckling, action-adventure movie in the tradition of Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Mask of Zorro, and Pirates of the Caribbean," he says.

Currently, the film is in preproduction, with Mike Newell (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) signed on as director but no cast yet determined. The team has begun scouting locations with an eye towards shooting in June if the writers' strike is settled soon.

In retrospect, Mechner says the best advice he can give anyone who wants to transition from game writer to movie writer -- or vice versa -- is to "really, really want to make that shift. While they seem similar on the surface, those are two very different disciplines and the barrier for creators to move between the two is going to stay pretty high," he notes. "You're moving from a field in which you already excel and are compensated accordingly into a new field in which you have to pretty much start over again, building a reputation and a new body of work.

"It's not an easy lateral move," he adds, "and, in my case, it sure helped that I owned my own IP. If you've got that, at least you've got a chance to get your foot in the door."

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Courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter

Paul "The Game Master" Hyman is the former editor-in-chief of CMP Media's GamePower. He has covered the games industry for more than a dozen years.