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''Snakes on a Plane'': Inside summer's riskiest thrill ride | aug42006_889_lg

Most people would freak the hell out if a six-foot serpent wrapped its leathery body around their shoulders and tickled their cheek with a fluttering forked tongue. But as he made clear at EW's photo shoot, Samuel L. Jackson is not most people. He is in person as he is on screen: suffer-no-fools intense and unflappably cool, even with a reptile nuzzling his gray-flecked goatee. (Hard to believe that cinema's baron of badass is 57.) Watching Jackson gently raise the snake's head with a finger, it's strange to think that this is the first time in his SoaP experience he has held a live serpent. ''I never even touched a snake while we were shooting. My agents put into the contract: 'No snakes within 25 feet of Mr. Jackson.' They were more scared of the snakes than I was.''

Actually, Jackson's management was spooked by the whole prospect of Snakes, which was met with skepticism from the day in 1999 that producer Craig Berenson first pitched the project. At the time, Berenson was an exec at DreamWorks' Patchwork Productions, where every Friday the staff rang out the workweek by drinking margaritas and lobbing gonzo movie ideas. One afternoon, Berenson pitched a concept based on a script called Venom by David Dalessandro. His presentation went like this: ''Take two of the biggest fears people have — fear of flying, fear of snakes — and throw them together at 30,000 feet and see what happens.'' Then Berenson hit them with the title: Snakes on a Plane. The room exploded with groans. But Berenson took their revulsion as a good sign: ''A visceral reaction is half the battle. That was gold as far as I was concerned.''

Optioning the rights to Venom from Dalessandro (who has a ''story by'' credit on SoaP), Berenson redeveloped the concept with his assistant, a budding screenwriter named John Heffernan. After a deal with MTV Films unraveled due to Hollywood's post-9/11 plane phobia, Snakes was purchased by New Line, and after two years of rewrites in pursuit of the proper tone, the project found a director in Hong Kong action master Ronny Yu. Four months later, the helmer parted ways with New Line over budgetary and creative differences. But he did make one lasting contribution to SoaP: Samuel Jackson.


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