We sold the first script that we ever really went out with and that’s been in the process of production for five years now. It has been greenlit, Sony has put together most of the money, but there’s always something. Getting movies made is almost a miracle. There are so many things that can go wrong. Now we’re in this stage of, can we get the right director? Can we get the right actor? Beyond that, we’ve worked on probably a dozen movies at this point and some are still in play, but none of them, other than our spec, are to the point of even being greenlit. Some projects are dead.
It’s not uncommon for a screenwriter to have to wait as long as 10 years before he sees something that he’s written make it to the big screen. It’s a patient man’s business. There are certainly stories of USC students or UCLA students who wrote a spec for their thesis and it got made a year later. I mean, that does happen, but that’s the exception.
What you do as a screenwriter is mostly just spend your time trying to make a living and also proving to the town that you can deliver consistently good work. You’re sort of building goodwill through the first part of your career. And then, if movies start to get made, if you’re lucky enough to be in that category, you get a different type of assignment. You’ll get rewrites on set, so you’ll get rewrites of movies that are in principal photography, which is a guaranteed movie on-screen. Or you’ll get home-run assignments, like a sequel to a movie that’s definitely going to get made. But in the early days you tend to have to risk more and do projects that they’re not as sure will get made, so they’re not going to pay a million dollar writer to write it because they need to hedge their bets early on in the process.
12) So you’re at this stage where you’ve had people come to you to ask you to write. Do you still have to market yourself? Or do you have an agent who does it for you? How does that all work?
Yes, we have an agent at William Morris Endeavor. We also have a manager.
Having an agent is more about the relationships a large agency provides you in terms of getting you in the room on some really big projects. Being with a successful agent reflects upon your status. I mean, it’s unfortunate, but true. That’s how this town works.
A manager for an actor or writing team tends to try to manage your career more and see that you’re going up for the right projects. [He or she] tries to decide how to meter out your time because your time and creativity are limited. Even at a time like right now, where we’re really busy and have multiple projects, we still go on general meetings all over town on a weekly basis just to meet with new executives, pitch ourselves, and try to establish relationships and connections that might not pay off for two or three more years. We’re actually developing something right now with a producer we met in 2008 and nothing really came of it until two months ago. If you want to do this, that’s definitely a part of it.
You don’t necessarily have to work the club scene or schmooze, but you have to be out there, get your face seen, and create relationships like any other salesperson to keep yourself alive. You also have to present yourself in a manner with which people will want to work in the future. I think one of the harder things for writers is, you spend decades getting to a certain point and then you’re kind of forced to work with younger people on their way up. You can’t get a sense of entitlement. You have to respect their ideas. You have to understand that this industry is a young industry and that to be a part of it you always have to be open-minded. You have to respect your peers and the people you’re working for.
I know writers who have talked their way out of working regularly in this town because they just reached a point of frustration. But we’re writing movies. If you want complete control of your project, go write a novel. This is the most collaborative of all writing mediums, more so than playwriting or anything else. You have to embrace that part of it or you’re just in the wrong business.
Is that an aspect you particularly enjoy about it, the collaborative aspect?
You know, it’s funny. I took longform improv classes with UCB and iO a few years ago and before that it was harder for me. I definitely feel like if you can embrace this idea that a collection of ideas can be stronger than just a singular vision…and I’m not saying that there haven’t been some great singular visions. Obviously there are guys like Orson Welles and brilliant filmmakers who were very headstrong and controlled all aspects of production and made some amazing things. But there’s something really fascinating to me about being brought a collection of ideas and figuring out how it relates to you and how it brings out something different in you in the process of presenting those ideas. So I like it. Can it be frustrating if you feel at some point in the chain, someone has taken a project in a direction you don’t agree with? Of course, but at the end of the day if you’re open to being a collaborator, then you’re also assuring yourself that you will never run out of things to say.
13) What three pieces of advice would you give to someone who wants to break into screenwriting?
First, I always say, “Treat it like a job.” I think there are a lot of writers who don’t feel like they have to write all the time. If you want to be a great writer, then you should be going the same path that you would if you wanted to be a great lawyer or a great guitar player — repetition, challenge yourself, put in the hours. If you’re someone who talks about being a writer all the time and hasn’t written for a month, then you should feel the same way about that person as [you would] a person who says they’re a gymnast and hasn’t been on the parallel bars for month. “Are you really? You do more talking about it than doing it.” So understand that there are people out there who are putting in the time and no matter how talented you are, they will beat you. They will eventually overcome whatever raw talent you have and, in fact, you should probably view that raw talent as your greatest weakness, because talent breeds complacency. You have to earn it to work.
Second, don’t fall in love with anything in the early stages of your writing. Always respect that a good piece of written material is probably going to be re-written many times. It’s actually re-writers who end up having careers, not people who produce the most brilliant prose on their first try. People [have careers when they] can step away from what they’ve written and ask themselves really hard questions, separate themselves emotionally from whatever ties they have or separate their egos from any funny lines that they’ve written, and make choices that serve that script the best.
Then, finally, learn to love failing. That’s the hardest thing. You have to redefine your relationship with failure. You can’t have it be something that makes you run away or want to quit or question your value. You have to look at failure as the only way to possibly grow as an artist. You’re going to write things that aren’t going to be any good and you’re going to try to rewrite them and you’re not going to be able to fix them to the level that you’d be satisfied. That’s ok, because just that frustrating process of running into those walls will inform the choices you make when you write again — if you’re open to it.
So you might as well enjoy it. You might as well get excited about learning things, even at the expense of your own time.
(Aw, c’mon. You’ve hung in this long, you may as well finish reading. It’s worth it.)
