Tom Stern

Immediately following The Idiot Box, the trio wrote and directed the 1993 film Freaked. The film was barely released largely as a result of a change of regimes at 20th Century Fox. Joe Roth was the president of Fox when he green-lit the film, but he left the studio while it was in post production. The new president was Peter Chernin, who expressed his distaste for Freaked and dumped it into two theaters with no advertising. It vanished quickly but later developed a cult following after being shown on cable television, finally being released on DVD.

Stern and Burns wrote the screenplay to An American Werewolf in Paris, the sequel to the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. Stern was contracted to direct, but after Freaked was dumped by Fox the producers decided not to honor the contract and hired a different director, Marco Brambilla, had Stern and Burns fired as writers and the script went through 12 subsequent writers before essentially dying in development. The project went into turn around and was later picked up and produced by Walt Disney Pictures with writer/director Anthony Waller. Although Stern and Burns received screen credit as the principal writers, almost none of their dialogue appears in the movie. The tone was changed from comedy/horror (a la An American Werewolf in London) to chiller/thriller, aimed at the youth market. Read Less