Homer Simpson,
jack of all trades that he is, decided to try his hand at
screenwriting in 1998 when he came up with the idea for the movie
The Terminizor: An Erotic Thriller in the "
When You Dish Upon A Star" episode of
The Simpsons. The plot of the film revolves around a
killer robot driving instructor who travels
back in time for some reason. The robot's best friend is a talking
pie. Homer's script consisted of only seventeen pages (most film scripts are 120 pages in length), and most of those pages were just drawings of the
time machine (a
lawn chair with an
umbrella wired to a
clock and a
flux capacitor).
Ron Howard was supposedly attached to
direct, although he later denied having any interest in the project.
Homer had hoped to convince
Alec Baldwin and
Kim Basinger to star the film, although they each turned down the roles he had planned for them. Once the stars rejected the project Homer pulled out of it as well, leaving the script with "
Potsie". It looked as though
The Terminizor would never see the light of day.
But...
Although Ron Howard turned down the chance to participate in the Terminizor project he later pillaged the main plot of the script in order to sell one of his own ideas. He combined the robot driving instructor with the theme that the robot would have to decide whether his best friend, the pie, would live or die. Ron was hailed as a genius and given bags of money as a reward for his shining vision.
References:
http://www.snpp.com