CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 5/08/09

Before They Were...:
Screenwriter Survival Stories

BY PETER CLINES

Nine Hollywood screenwriters share their humble beginnings in a companion piece to one of our parent magazine's articles.

The new issue of Creative Screenwriting brings us Stacey Collins' wonderful article, "The Screenwriter's Survival Guide." Collins talks about ways fledgling writers can support themselves, and also gives tips on a few excellent career choices that could aid your writing in the long run.

However, the mentions of former stripper Diablo Cody (Juno), former reporter Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous), and former criminal defense attorney Terri Kopp (Law & Order) got us thinking over at CS Weekly. Even though it's hard to believe when looking at a string of credits, at one point every screenwriter in Hollywood was "just starting out." Which begs the question, how many other stories of clock-punching, Top Ramen, and frustration were there out there?

In their own words, nine professional screenwriters take a moment to talk with CS Weekly about some of the jobs they survived before breaking in, and to give hope to those folks still working them.

Matthew Michael Carnahan
Before The Kingdom he was a paralegal and a public speaker
"My first job out of college I was a legal intern doing paperwork for a pro-bono defense of an Irish Republican Army terrorist in San Francisco. His name was Kevin Artt. He and eight other guys escaped in the biggest non-wartime prison break in British history. They all made it to California and he was captured in San Diego selling used cars and living on a boat. That was my first job out of college. From there I went to this think tank in DC. Hospitals, academic medical centers would hire us to do research for them, and then it was my job to go out to them and explain what we had found."

Josh Shelov
Before Green Street Hooligans he was a mail room temp
"I had a hundred temp jobs, like every other writer in New York. I worked in Martha Stewart's mail room for a two-month temp stint, and it really was a very chilly atmosphere where people lived in fear. I never actually spoke a word with her, but imperiousness was in the air. She was inside people's heads. 'Oh, I don't think Martha would approve of that. Maybe just this once, but after that I really think that she would say something. For God's sake, keep it on the straight and narrow.'"

Billy Ray
Before Breach he was a junior executive
"I was working for two TV movie producers. I had interned for them during summers, and when I got out of college they gave me a job as a gofer. Eventually I became paid as a reader, and then I became sort of a junior-level executive. I was trying to write at night, but the workload of my real job was heavy enough that I didn't have time. So I had to set aside one night a week, which was Sunday night, and I would just write. I wrote a novel. It took a year. I didn't sell it. I wrote another novel. Another year. I didn't sell it. I wrote my first script. That didn't sell. And I was still showing up for work every day. Then I rewrote that script and finally sold it for $5,000. It was a movie that never got made, called Untitled Thriller. The $5,000 was not life-changing money—I couldn't even quit—but it was enough to call myself a professional writer. Armed with that sale, I could walk in and sell my first pitch, which I did. Then I was a studio writer, and then I could quit. That was January 1988."

Christopher Smith
Before Severance he was a cubicle slave
"I worked in an office for seven years before I went back to university to study film. There was something that occurred during the time I was there when this 'new initiative' came in for 'health and safety' and 'work in the workspace.' We had this form to describe what we did every minute of every day. At the end of the day you'd put down, 'I spent three hours on this project, four hours on that project…' But I knew that no one was reading it, because I knew that it was bullshit, you knew everybody above you would know it was bullshit, so I used to just write any old fucking bullshit. And I get caught doing it, and they said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'Well, no one's gonna read it, so what's the point of me spending time on it? It's a load of nonsense.' I left about a year later, because once I got into that zone, I knew it was all bullshit. I went on a team-building course, though, and my job was so boring that I loved it. I had the greatest week of my life. Did I learn anything? No, I just got drunk every night."

Robert Eisele
Before The Great Debaters he was a playwright
"I tried to be a playwright from the west coast, which is not an easy thing. I sent my plays around and I was getting produced. I had one play that probably had 15 professional productions around the country when I was in my middle 20s. I remember I was getting a play done at the St. Nichols theater in Chicago, which is David Mamet's theater, but he wasn't there when I was getting produced. I could see my breath in the room they put me up in and I just said, 'I'm gonna go back to L.A. and write a screenplay.'"

Dave Willis
Before Aqua Teen Hunger Force he was a production assistant
"I was a PA on some roller-coaster ad. I was underneath this loop-de-loop with a fog machine. Christ, they went through, easily, a hundred times [with] a walkie going, 'Fog it up, Dave!' I'm looking at all these young people my age. They were all getting to do the creative stuff, having bagels torn apart and fed to them like they were baby birds [laughs]. And I'm sitting there with a fog machine, getting rattled in this very dangerous situation. I thought, 'Jesus, I'm smart, I'm creative…I can't believe I'm running the fucking fog machine.' So that's how I got into writing."

Richard La Gravenese
Before Freedom Writers he studied acting
"When I went to school I was a theater major. When I was at Emerson, I started writing monologues, because I was tired of performing and auditioning with the same monologues that everyoene else was doing. Everyone was doing Richard from Our Wilderness and Biff from Death of a Salesman. So it was just an original way of auditioning, and I started selling my monologues to other people. That's when I thought to myself, 'Wow, I really love the writing, and it's much more creatively fulfilling.'"

David Goyer
Before Batman Begins he was a production office assistant
"I graduated from USC film school and I was working as a PA at a studio. I was delivering mail to offices, and soft drinks, things like that. I was as low on the totem pole as you could go. I sold a script to Jean-Claude Van Damme for $125,000 in '89, and I think I was making $17,000 as a PA. So I was able to quit my job, and I never had to go back to a job after that. So, I only had a real job for about five months."

Robert Seigel
Before The Wrestler he was a newspaper editor
"My background is at The Onion, the newspaper. I was there from 1994 to 2003. I was editor-in-chief for about six years somewhere in there. During the tail end of my Onion years, I started to get a little itchy to try my hand at something else, to use a different part of my brain beyond writing the headlines. So I just started writing a screenplay."




Peter Clines grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and made his first writing sale at age 17 to a local newspaper. He currently lives somewhere in southern California, and can often be found ranting on his cleverly named blog, Writer on Writing. His first novel, Ex-Heroes, will be released in fall 2009.



Breach, The Kingdom courtesy Universal Studios Home Entertainment
Batman Begins courtesy Warner Home Video

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