The Razzie Awards have (unsurprisingly) named Battlefield Earth as “Worst Movie of the Decade,” and the movie’s first screenwriter, J.D. Shapiro (Robin Hood: Men in Tights), was on hand to proudly accept the award. Shapiro also wrote a column in NY Post to explain how it all went down. Here’s a few excerpts:

Let me start by apologizing to anyone who went to see “Battlefield Earth.” It wasn’t as I intended — promise. No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those. It started, as so many of my choices do, with my Willy Wonker. It was 1994, and I had read an article in Premiere magazine saying that the Celebrity Center, the Scientology epicenter in Los Angeles, was a great place to meet women.

Eventually, I had dinner with John Travolta, his wife Kelly Preston, Karen — about 10 Scientologists in all. John asked me, “So, J.D., what brought you to Scientology?” I told him. John smiled and replied, “We have tech that can help you handle that.” I don’t know if he meant they had technology that would help me get laid or technology that would stop Willy from doing the majority of my thinking.

During my Scientology research, I met an employee who I instantly had a crush on. She was kind of a priestess, and had dedicated her life to working for the church by becoming a Sea Org member. She said that she signed a billion-year contract. I said, “What! Really?” She said she got paid a small stipend of $50 a week, to which I said, “Can you get an advance on the billion years, like say, a mere $500,000?” And then she said as a Sea Org member, you can’t have sex unless you’re married. I asked her if she was married. She said yes. So I said, “Great! That means we can have sex!”

Shapiro goes on to describe the process by which he wrote the script, which was iniitially praised by Travolta, before he was fired and many changes were made. The whole article is fairly amusing and worth a full read.