Max Landis is a Hollywood disrupter with an attitude

West Hollywood, California

LAST year, when prolific screenwriter Max Landis was spending long days in script development on Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, the BBC America TV series he created, he decided to blow off a little steam - by writing another screenplay.

In just seven hours, Landis bashed out a spec script (as unsolicited, over-the-transom screenplays are known) for a psychological horror-thriller called Deeper, about a disgraced astronaut. Almost as quickly, a bidding war broke out, and in April, Deeper sold to MGM for US$2 million - a breathtaking sum in an era when most speculative screenplays sell in the low six figures.