CAPE'S JIM UHLS FINDS SUCCESS AS SCRIPTWRITER

The Brad Pitt film "Fight Club," for which Jim Uhls wrote the script, was No. 3 at the box office its opening weekend.

Now Uhls is pitching a script to Mel Gibson and is developing a television series with Steven Spielberg.

Uhls, a Cape Girardeau native, seems to be on a roll in the entertainment industry of California, where he moved 16 years ago.

"It's all very exciting," said Uhls in a telephone interview from his California home.

Uhls wrote the screenplay for "Fight Club," which opened Friday, and it is his first Hollywood film credit. The film is based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel. Uhls said his job as screenplay writer was to make the story more cinematic.

"I made it flow more in terms of scenes and straightened out the story logic," said Uhls, whose father, the late Joe Uhls, was head baseball coach at Southeast Missouri State University for 21 years.

Uhls also worked with director David Fincher ("Seven," "The Game") on the final version of the script.

In fact, one of his favorite memories from working on the film was working on the ending in Fincher's living room.

"We were acting out possible scenarios for the ending," he said. "Each of us would do our own version, doing all the parts."

"Fight Club" stars Pitt and Edward Norton as dissatisfied urbanites who form a club where men fight each other to the edge of death as a way of bonding.

While there has been a backlash against violent films because of hate crimes and high-school shootings in the last year, Uhls said it didn't affect his film, which has been described as a satire that uses extreme violence as a commentary against violence.

"This movie was already shot and cut together before all the violent incidents of the past year," Uhls said. "When I was writing the script, there wasn't the heat from Washington, D.C., there is today."

Uhls is working on a script called "Hard Hearts" for Gibson and Jodie Foster.

"It's not definite yet," Uhls said of the two celebrities starring in "Hard Hearts." "But they both have options on it."

He also is working with Spielberg on a television pilot about the Marines called "Siemper Fi."

Working with such celebrities is exciting, Uhls said. But it is becoming just another aspect of the job he does. "They're people just like everyone else," Uhls said.