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Writing spec scripts has catapulted screenwriters to success for years, but J. F. Lawton was already an A-List writer for PRETTY WOMAN when he wrote his 1990 spec DREADNOUGHT.

After selling DREADNOUGHT for $1M, it turned into WB/New Regency’s  action thriller UNDER SIEGE, directed by Andrew Davis and starring Steven Seagal & Tommy Lee Jones. SIEGE, which opened Oct. 9, 1992,  was made for $15M and did $156.6M worldwide. Its success kept Lawton busy for years.

One of the highest profile projects to come his way was from TITANIC writer-producer-director James Cameron, who in 1991 asked him to do a screenplay based on an original story and treatment called SCREAMING STEEL. That project had originated around 1981 as a screenplay by Cameron’s then writing partner Randall Frakes, who later wrote novelizations of Cameron’s TERMINATOR (1984) and TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991).

Lawton was just one of the screenwriters Cameron had work on SCREAMING, but nothing ever resulted. Cameron did, however, manage to re-work some SCREAMING story elements years later while writing AVATAR.

In 1995, Lawton wrote a spec script called HIGH ROLLER, which was nicknamed DIE HARD IN A CASINO since it was about a mobster whose gang takes over a Vegas casino and kidnaps the owner, after which the owner’s daughter and an unlucky gambler team up to save the day. Savoy Pictures bought HIGH for $1M dollars as a vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, but Stallone reportedly wanted $20M to star. Savoy refused and wound up going into bankruptcy. HIGH never got made.

Seagal and Davis were no strangers because Davis had directed Seagal’s first movie, the 1988 action crime drama ABOVE THE LAW. Looking back on SIEGE, by which time Seagal was known for being difficult to work with, Davis has said WB co-CEO “Terry Semel wanted us to get back together again. Seagal was only in the movie 41 minutes. Tommy Lee is in the movie longer than Steven…It worked out well. We had a…lot of fun making (it) and that was the movie that got me THE FUGITIVE, so it was worth it.”

The 1993 action crime drama FUGITIVE starred Harrison Ford & Tommy Lee Jones. On a budget of $44M, it did $368.9M worldwide. Ford is said to have viewed SIEGE while considering FUGITIVE, after which he gave an immediate yes to making it with Davis.

SIEGE’s success delayed production of what was then DIE HARD 3, based on the spec script TROUBLESHOOTER where terrorists invade a cruise ship. But that sounded too much like SIEGE — where terrorists invade a U.S. battleship — so it went into rewriting hell. It emerged as the 1995 blockbuster DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, starring Bruce Willis, whose plot was now driven by a New York department store bombing.