Screenwriter Dan Berendsen, a veteran of movie vehicles for Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez and the Cheetah Girls, will see his latest Disney Channel project — the Jonas Brothers–Demi Lovato sequel to “Camp Rock” make its television debut at 8 p.m. Friday.
While we shared with you his unlikely journey from corporate America to Hollywood in the Morning Read today, we didn’t get that much into his actual work breathing life into a second summer at Camp Rock.
And since this will be the movie tweens and teens — and some of their parents — will be talking about now, we thought we’d share more of what took place over the six weeks or so that Berendsen worked on the original script.
When he was hired, the main request his Disney Channel bosses Gary Marsh and Michael Healy had was that there be a competition at the heart of “Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam,” Berendsen said.
“That was sort of the starting point for this,” Berendsen said. “But I came in at the end of the first meeting and knew that I wanted everybody who saw the movie to want to go to camp (by its finish).
“Growing up in California, and in Orange County, that was one of the things I always felt I missed,” he said of that traditional sleep-away camp his friends from the East Coast all seemed to share. “It’s not a California experience.
“So this is an idealized version of what I want camp to be,” Berendsen says. “I pitched that water fight. There had to be fireflies, and a lot of those experiences were you should come out of the movie and say, ‘Mom, can I go to camp?'”
As the movie unfolds, the characters played by Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers rally their rustic rock ‘n’ roll camp to stave off the threat posed by the new Camp Star, a well-oiled star-making machine of a summer camp. The Camp Star kids would seem to have the all the advantages that money can buy, but the Camp Rock-ers have heart and soul and a never-say-die spirit.
Without spoiling the movie, we can say that the outcome of the showdown between the two camps isn’t the obvious or usual one. Instead, the path chosen — and dreamed up by Berendsen — is perhaps more interesting.
“There are a million ways to do that story,” Berendsen said. “But I thought it would have a more meaningful end (this way). It’s still about kids fighting for what they believe in. I think that’s why (viewers) respond to Mitchie (Lovato’s character), because she is 100 percent fighting for something she believes in.”
A team of songwriters created the tunes that pop up throughout “Camp Rock 2,” sometimes working off simple notes left by Berendsen in the script.
“Other than the two Camp Star songs they’re all story driven,” he said. “So I think 9 out of 14 I’d write it and say, ‘I need a song that takes me from here to here.’ I’d write about two paragraphs of what the song needs exactly, and where the character needs to end up emotionally. Demi and Joe Jonas’ big number, for instance — we need to know they’re going to be OK.”
“Camp Rock 2” also broke new ground for Berendsen in what he was able to get away with this time around, he said.
“There’s always a moment in a script where I put in something that I know they can’t do, because it’s always fun to see heads explode,” Berendsen said, referring to some kind of set piece so expensive or difficult to pull off that it almost immediately gets nixed.
For “Camp Rock 2” it was an opening scene with the Jonas Brothers, showing their tour bus broken down by a picturesque lake, and through a series of mishaps, tumbling down the bank and into the water. Never, Berendsen said, did he expect the Disney Channel executives to green light it.
“And then I went to the first meeting and Gary Marsh (chief creative officer and president of entertainment for Disney Channel) says, ‘This is exactly how we need to do it!’
“They had one take and that bus flipped all the way over!” Berendsen says, still marveling that it actually happened. “I’ve always written something big…and it’s gone away — until now.”
Next up for Berendsen is his sequel to “The Wizards Of Waverly Place Movie” which he also wrote. “Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam” premieres at 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 3 on Disney Channel, with plentiful repeats thereafter.
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