From the Case to the Screen

In 1998, an engineer named Thomas Shaw walked into our Houston law office with a retractable safety syringe. Shaw’s early development work received $649,497 across three NIH SBIR awards from 1992 through 1994, made to his company Checkmate Engineering.

There was just one problem. Nobody would buy it.

The hospital group purchasing organizations — massive middlemen that controlled hundreds of billions of dollars in medical supply purchases — had locked Shaw out of the market. Despite holding patents on superior technology and offering competitive prices, his company, Retractable Technologies, couldn't get a foot in the door. The GPOs had exclusive contracts with Becton Dickinson, which controlled 90% of the syringe market.

My partner Mike Weiss and I filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Becton Dickinson, Novation, Tyco, and Premier. We were a two-man Houston firm going up against a corporation with $4.5 billion in annual revenue. It was, by every measure, a David and Goliath fight.

Mike was brilliant. A Harvard-educated philosopher turned attorney, he had clerked for Judge Edith Jones on the Fifth Circuit, taught at two law schools, and co-chaired successful whistleblower cases. He was also, as the world would later learn, fighting a private battle with addiction that would ultimately take his life on October 2, 1999. He was 32 years old.

The case didn't die with Mike. Attorney Mark Lanier stepped in, and in 2004, Retractable Technologies settled with Becton Dickinson for $100 million. As a result, thousands of hospitals throughout the United States now use safety needles. But the human cost of the fight — and the story of the flawed genius who started it — stayed with me for years.

I had an important story that I believed the world needed to hear. So in 2004, I decided to write an autobiographical screenplay about our case. I wanted to honor the vigilant efforts of my friend and former law partner, and to expose the systemic corruption that was costing lives.

There was a problem: my screenplay was, shall we say, "weak."

I hired a New York-based screenwriter named Ela Thier to take my vision and rewrite it. She did — superbly. Then, against every piece of advice I received, I sent copies of the screenplay to production companies, movie studios, and actors. Everyone told me it was a complete waste of time.

Ninety percent of the scripts came back unread. But I got two phone calls. I flew to New York immediately and by the end of the trip, I had a deal with filmmakers Mark and Adam Kassen. The terms: I'd give them eighteen months to rewrite the script and attach a star. In return, they would give me nothing. As a lawyer, not the best deal I've ever negotiated.

Fifteen months later, they had rewritten the script with Chris Lopata — and they had signed Chris Evans.

Chris Evans was introduced to the project through a mutual agent. The Kassen brothers had seen his work in Danny Boyle's Sunshine and recognized something rare — an actor who could portray both charisma and tragedy without self-indulgence. Evans read the script and was immediately drawn to the character.

To prepare for the role, Evans spoke with Mike's brother, his father, college friends, and former colleagues. He immersed himself in who Mike was — the brilliance, the contradictions, the flamboyant courtroom style with tailored suits and wild-colored shirts, the devastating addiction.

Roger Ebert would later write that Evans' performance was "electrifying," comparing him to "other great out-of-control druggies played by Al Pacino and Nicolas Cage." He gave the film three out of four stars, noting that "a movie like this is a reminder that box-office success can be unfair and limiting to gifted young actors."

What made the casting extraordinary was its timing. Puncture was Evans' final film before the July 2011 release of Captain America: The First Avenger. In the space of a few months, audiences would see him as both a drug-addicted Houston lawyer fighting the system and the star-spangled superhero fighting for America. The range was staggering.

Filming began on February 10, 2010, in Houston, Texas — the same city where Mike and I had practiced law, where we had filed the case, where the entire story had unfolded. The Kassen brothers considered shooting in Los Angeles for convenience, but ultimately chose Houston for authenticity.

It was the right decision. The city came alive for the production. Real judges who had known Mike offered their courtrooms. Family members and friends served as extras. Paintings from Mike's actual house were used as set decoration. The energy of the people who had known Mike — his family, his colleagues, the entire network of lives he had touched — infused the production with something no amount of Hollywood craft could replicate.

Brett Cullen, a Houston native and University of Houston graduate, was cast as the legal villain — "a screenwriter's dream of what a Texas lawyer is," as he described the role. Mark Kassen played me, Paul Danziger, bringing the family-man counterweight to Evans' volatile genius. The cast also included Jesse L. Martin, Michael Biehn, Vinessa Shaw, and Kate Burton.

Evans later reflected on the weight of playing a real person whose family was watching: "If you don't give a solid performance, you're kind of trashing someone's gift to you. The fact that they gave us the story — you've got to respect that."

Puncture was admitted to the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival and selected to serve as one of the spotlight premieres — a remarkable achievement for a first-time executive producer with no Hollywood connections. The world premiere took place on April 21, 2011, in New York City.

Millennium Entertainment acquired all U.S. distribution rights shortly after the festival. The film opened theatrically on September 23, 2011, in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, before expanding nationwide. It was released on DVD and Blu-ray on January 3, 2012, and later became available on streaming platforms where it found a much wider audience.

The film was dedicated to Mike with a string of contradictory labels that I had written years earlier: "Lawyer, genius, fool, addict..." Those words, more than anything in the screenplay, captured who he was. Director Adam Kassen later said those words were what first moved him about the project — "what we kept, that may have been the bulk of it in that ending sentence."

This ten-year journey — from the courtroom to the screen — taught me that since we were exiled from the Garden of Eden, humanity has had to struggle. Struggle to do good deeds, yes, but that is not enough. We must also struggle against injustice. We shouldn't get discouraged if life presents us with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The case that inspired Puncture resulted in thousands of hospitals adopting safety needles. The film brought that story to millions of viewers worldwide. And the fight for justice — whether against medical supply monopolies or against the corporations that exposed workers to asbestos — continues at Danziger & De Llano, LLP, where Paul Danziger now represents families affected by mesothelioma and asbestos exposure as a nationally recognized mesothelioma attorney.

Mike Weiss died before he could see the victory. But his courage — the courage to lose for what's right — lives on in every safety needle used in every hospital in America today. And now, through this film, it lives on in the millions who have watched his story unfold.