Lavin and Damiani, both in their mid-40s, took very different paths to Hollywood. Lavin started as a playwright and earned an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon; Damiani was as an announcer for World Championship Wrestling in the 1990s. When W.C.W. was faltering, Damiani moved to Hollywood. Lavin was already there, trying to get his writing career off the ground. The two started thinking about reality-­show ideas. ‘‘ ‘Joe Millionaire’ had just come out. Only the worst ideas were selling,’’ Lavin says. ‘‘All I did was think about terrible reality-­show ideas.’’ The pair came up with a reality competition show called ‘‘Green Card.’’ The concept was simple: An ultra-­nerdy American guy is set up with beautiful contestants flown in from all over the globe, who compete for his affection. The winner receives a green card. (The State Department wouldn’t allow it.) There were other near misses for the duo in the reality field — a competition called ‘‘Jocks vs. Nerds’’ that a producer told them MTV liked so much it had considered putting the show on TV five days a week. (The show never aired.) They developed a hybrid scripted-­reality series called ‘‘Anchorwoman’’ (tag line: ‘‘Would you trust a bikini model to deliver the news?’’) that Fox canceled after its first night.

They also started writing spec scripts together. The first was titled ‘‘WASPloitation,’’ a comedy inspired by Martha Stewart’s prison sentence. Then they wrote ‘‘Terminally Phil,’’ in which a fraternity fools a pledge into thinking he is dying so they don’t get kicked off campus. A zombie-­coal-­mining movie called ‘‘Dead Canary’’ was followed shortly afterward by ‘‘Kamikaze Love,’’ an action comedy about a down-on-his-luck bartender who falls madly in love with a Japanese woman who has been trafficked into the United States to marry a Yakuza boss. Every year, a Hollywood executive named Franklin Leonard conducts a survey of popular but unproduced screenplays called the Black List. In 2007, ‘‘Kamikaze Love’’ made the cut, receiving more mentions by studio executives than many movies that went on to be produced, including ‘‘Slumdog Millionaire,’’ ‘‘The Wrestler’’ and ‘‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’’ Sony Screen Gems bought ‘‘Kamikaze Love,’’ and in the years since, it has been passed from one Sony subsidiary to the next. Lavin and Damiani aren’t totally sure who has it now.

On the strength of that script, Lavin and Damiani started getting commissions to develop other people’s projects, a lot of them involving I.P. Brett Ratner enlisted the pair to write the adaptation to the comic-­book series ‘‘Youngblood.’’ The deal fell apart. They wrote ‘‘Max Steel,’’ based on the Mattel toy property for Paramount. The movie ended up being made, but not based on their script. Warner Brothers enlisted them to write a screenplay for another comic-­book movie called ‘‘Capeshooters.’’ They were attached to a script based on the video game Duke Nukem and another based on the 1964 kids’ book ‘‘Flat Stanley,’’ about a boy who survives being smushed pancake flat and uses his new condition for all manner of mischief.

When they were approached by Vinson, the first thing they did was download Fruit Ninja. Lavin called Damiani after playing for a while. They agreed: There was nothing there. Just fruit. Their work on projects like ‘‘Flat Stanley,’’ though, had shown them that having less to work with provided a greater degree of creative freedom. Lavin and Damiani spent hours discussing the essence of Fruit Ninja. ‘‘For me, it is the messiness, the immediate release of destroying fruit,’’ Damiani told me. For Lavin, the soul of the game is the feeling of ‘‘frenzy.’’ ‘‘There’s like a 60-­second version of it where you can see how fast you can kill fruit,’’ he says, which ‘‘puts your brain in this weird, bizarre focused place.’’ As he sees it: ‘‘This would be the movie to go see stoned. I can imagine going in and seeing it in 3-D — just imagine a 20-foot-high pineapple monster. That shot of yellow and orange. I’d go see this movie a dozen times.’’

While they were developing the movie, Damiani and Lavin were also attending career days at elementary schools in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood. Sometimes they went to four classes a day. These gave them the opportunity to do some informal market research. Every time they brought up the script they were working on, they found the same reaction. The kids would ‘‘put their hand in the air, raise a finger and start swiping like crazy.’’ Lavin told me, ‘‘Whatever movie we wrote, it had to be an extension of that energy, that desire to tear up everything in your path and take charge.’’

Early on, Lavin and Damiani struggled to find a narrative entry point. They started with the premise that there was a magic book and an evil fruit overlord. Vinson rejected that idea. Their next concept involved scientific experiments on fruit gone wrong. Vinson didn’t like that either. Eventually, a working narrative emerged: Every couple of hundred years, a comet flies by Earth, leaving in its wake a parasite that descends on a farm and infects the fruit. The infected fruit then search for a human host. The only thing keeping humanity from certain doom is a secret society of ninjas who kill the fruit and rescue the hosts by administering the ‘‘anti-­fruit.’’ The produce-­slaying saviors are recruited from the population based on their skill with the Fruit Ninja game. With civilization in imminent danger, a cadre of unlikely heroes materializes — a little boy, a college-­age girl, two average guys. The action starts after each of the story’s heroes returns home after a horrible day and plays Fruit Ninja to relieve some stress. Damiani told me this aligns with the Fruit Ninja brand: ‘‘Anybody can play. Anybody can be a master.’’

With the story intact, Vinson, Lavin and Damiani started ironing out a pitch. They’re known around town for being good in the room. Lavin has a background in theater; Damaini does improv comedy and teaches clowning. Their presentation was 35 minutes — fast moving, full of laughs. ‘‘It felt a lot like how you develop clown work,’’ Damiani told me. ‘‘You play and improvise to keep the energy up — and register what works. I’m always looking for the hot spot — the person giving us the best energy. That might not be the big boss. It might be a junior. Keep them laughing, and it spreads.’’ They estimate that they gave 25 to 30 presentations, five of which were at different film divisions within Sony. They met with four different Chinese companies. To keep their act feeling fresh, they added seemingly improvised asides and digressions. ‘‘If it’s too polished, the execs feel like they’re at a TED Talk, and then you see the eyes go to the window,’’ Damiani says.