drama in a fantasy world, that was kind of different at the time... I always thought of it as a musical. They kind of saw it worked in the world of an MTV video. Gross says he and Hill were also influenced by the teen films of John Hughes. We were in the universe of the teenage movie. Teenage reality. So we said here's what's going to be weird about the world of our movie: No one's going to be over 30. The world is a high school, essentially. And Tom Cody will be the football hero. And Willem Dafoe is the greaser. Remember: You had John Hughes at the time, and then you had Coppola making two high school movies: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. So Walter said we’re going to make a high school movie that's also going to be a comic book and also going to be a musical. Gross says Hill did not want the film to be especially violent – there would be no blood and no one would die. "He'd say it would be inappropriate to direct this movie if there were any blood", said Gross. "We’re in the world of Cocteau, we’re in the world of Beauty and the Beast. This is a fairy tale. Now...he neglected to mention that some fairy tales are very violent." Gross and Hill would work out their ideas in detail. Gross would do a draft and Hill would rewrite it. "He did not love creating scripts from scratch; he loved rewriting." However, by this stage Gross and Hill had worked together so closely Gross says "I began to develop a strong sense for knowing how to sound like he did." Financing When the script was finished, they sent it to Paramount. Gross says that Jeff Berg (Walter's agent), Larry Gordon and Michael Eisner, head of production at Paramount, "got into some kind of a fight when the script was finished. We learned later that, I believe, Eisner rejected it on the grounds that it was too similar to Indiana Jones. Conceptually. So they didn't pull the trigger and Berg ended up selling it to Universal." They submitted the script to Universal executive Bob Rehme on a Friday (in January 1983) and by the end of the weekend, the studio had given them the go-ahead to make the film. This was the fastest ever greenlight Hill had received