Chad Damiani is a screenwriter working out of Los Angeles. Along with his writing partner JP Lavin, Chad has written and/or developed feature films and television projects for Robert Zemeckis, Brett Ratner, Bryan Singer, Eli Roth and others. He also performs longform improv with CAT BATH! — the house team for a bimonthly show called Catsby!.
Chad and I know each other from our college days at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ. I can remember going to the college theater and being thoroughly entertained by a performance of three short plays Chad had written at that time. I’m not at all surprised by the success he’s enjoyed so far. He is bright, funny, and very busy. Last week I snagged the opportunity to catch up with him by phone to chat about his journey to becoming a screenwriter. It turned out to be a lengthy but fascinating interview, well worth the read and your time.
1) How did you get started as a screenwriter?
I started writing really young and wrote through college and got kind of discouraged. I ended up taking a different career path for a while, which was announcing for professional wrestling. That was just a fun, crazy job, and through that I got to dabble a bit in terms of writing. I started doing some freelance articles. I had some visibility because I was doing some TV stuff and was part of a popular website, so I was able to build a little freelance business. But I still wasn’t getting back to what I really loved, which was stories and plays and ultimately things like screenwriting.
The pro wrestling company I was working for was bought by a competitor and we were all fired. It was a crazy time. I was about 30 or 31 and it was like I was at zero again. I just figured since I had nothing, that I might as well try to do all the things that I dreamed about when I was in high school and college. I came out to Los Angeles and at first I kind of fell into that trap…I mean, it’s all a journey…but that trap of trying just to find work, period, in entertainment of any kind. I worked on reality shows and anything I could make a paycheck off of.
I had some success there, but realized I wasn’t happy and was like, “You’re just going to have to accept that you’re going to have a period of failure.” I think that’s one of the hardest things to accept when you’re starting in a field like writing. You’re going to have a period where your work’s probably not going to be that good and people aren’t going to respond to it and you’re not going to make any money, but you’re going to have to just stay in that zone until you earn the right to be somewhere else.
I think it took about five years of writing things I wasn’t terribly happy with, giving things I’d written to people and having them respond poorly, constantly reassessing the product I was putting out and my practice in terms of how [and what] I wrote, until I really found my voice and started to get noticed.
I moved out to LA in 2003 and started making a living as a full-time screen writer in 2006.
2) Describe or outline your typical day.
It’s very important to have a regimen. My day starts pretty early. I get up and walk my dog. I write all morning, take a few hours off, then try to write a few hours in the afternoon.
I work with a writing partner [JP Lavin], so when I talk about those windows of work, sometimes those windows are taken up with meetings. We spend a lot of time on the phone with each other. We don’t write together in a room. We both work on things separately, but we talk out a lot of our ideas and why things work and what changes need to be made. Then we both go off separately. Usually when you’re a writing team you work on multiple writing projects at once. It’s one of the benefits because you have to split your money, but you can do twice as much work. So I try to make sure that mornings are a time I get a few things in, because for me the later you get in your day, the more you’re carrying your day with you, and probably not in a way that’s going to inform your writing.
3) So how challenging is that, to be doing that back and forth with JP? How do you make your ideas come together?
Well, that was part of that failure period I talked about. There’s an old adage that says, “Failure is a gift that no one wants.”
JP is a strong personality like I am. There are some writing teams — and I think actually they’re the writing teams that function at the lowest level — that have an alpha and a beta. They have someone who’s a really strong personality, and someone who just supports that personality. It wasn’t like that for us. We both have very strong opinions. We have very different likes and interests and we tend to approach things differently. So we spent a long time just arguing with each other and fighting for our own ideas instead of just listening to what the other person was saying or agreeing that it didn’t matter who came up with an idea, as long as that idea served the story the best.
We started working together in 2004, so we’re coming up on almost 10 years working together. It’s not uncommon now for us to have a brainstorm session and both present ideas and then end up fighting for the other person’s ideas by mid-conversation. Essentially you have to check your ego. This story, this thing you’re creating, if you do it right, it’s bigger than both of you, it’s the universe. The idea that you somehow know all the pieces of this universe before you start the process is just hubris. You have to let it grow and let it inform you, as much as you inform it. In that process, you also to have to be open to wherever that goes, even if the thing you love the most is completely lost. If it’s for the better of the project, then that’s absolutely the direction you have to go.
4) In terms of working from home and collaborating with JP, do you consider yourself truly your own boss?
I think that’s an interesting thing about bosses. I have a friend who just went into business for himself in a whole other field. He has said to me, “I just want to be my own boss.” I mean, you have more control over your destiny, but everybody is your boss when you work for yourself. Anytime you sign a contract to deliver a script, you’re working for those people. JP and I can’t make any decisions without the approval of the other. No one has the right to veto.
I think there’s this idea that if you have complete control over your direction, that that’s somehow so much better than working for someone. I think the real fun of working for yourself is just being able to choose the things you work on and being passionate about them. Understand that you’re still providing a service and whenever you’re providing a service, you’re still working for whomever you’re providing that service to.
5) What do you find challenging about that aspect of it, or is it challenging at all?
From the artistic standpoint…I’m not working on Merchant Ivory movies. I work on action comedies. I work on mainstream, big movies and really try to do my best to use as much technique and creativity to provide movies for a wide audience. What’s most challenging in general, for me personally, is accepting that lack of control isn’t a bad thing. Good things can come from notes you might hate from an executive. Good things might come from putting a lot of pre-work into a project that you don’t get, because you learn something in the process of going for that project.
In general, I think most humans feel a little unbalanced when they don’t know what’s coming next or they don’t know what tomorrow brings. The reality is, that’s what’s great about working for yourself — new challenges, constantly having to adapt and rely on yourself for all of the things that you can control.
Artistically, anyone who tries to gain complete control just doesn’t understand what it means to be an artist. An artist isn’t a product of just what takes place in your mind. An artist is a product of how [he] copes with [his] environment. It’s all the other things that inform on a project that sort of bring it to another level. We don’t work in a vacuum.
(Wait, he’s not finished. Continue reading about Chad’s journey here.)
