Navigating Hollywood: Dana Fox’s Strategic Approach to Building a Sustainable Screenwriting Career

From The Wedding Date and Couples Retreat to Wicked and Wicked For Good, screenwriter Dana Fox has forged an enviable screenwriting career. She began her career as a Hollywood assistant, built relationships and expanded her networks. Dana spoke with Creative Screenwriting Magazine about her breaking in story (being paid to write), her trajectory, but most importantly, how she sustains her writing career.

From a very young age, knew that I loved movies, but I didn’t come from a family where being creative and trying to see if you could make your way as an artist was acceptable. In my family, you work, you pay the bills because nobody had a lot of money.

I had a really strong practical sense that I have to make a living while trying to be a writer. I was constantly trying to develop contingency plans in. Meanwhile, I was too scared to actually write anything creative because I didn’t want to find out I was bad at it. I really wanted to be great because I’m smart enough to read great authors and great writers. I know what great is and I could tell that I wasn’t or going to be that.

From USC Cinematic Arts l Peter Stark Producing Program

I went to grad school for producing because that felt like a very practical thing to do. That was the business school of trying to get into the business, and that felt acceptable to me and my family. I worked my way through the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California.

In that program, they made you write 30 pages of a screenplay, so that as a producer, if you were going to give notes to a writer, you would know how incredibly hard it was to write and you wouldn’t give bad notes. I wrote 30 pages, and I genuinely just enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed the way the words looked on the page.

I had read a million Faulkner and Hemingway books, and I knew I couldn’t do that. I had never read a script in my life and I didn’t know that it was supposed to look that special way on the page with all that white space.

I said to myself that I don’t have to be an amazing writer. Why don’t I just try to do this as a homework assignment, do a good job and work hard? That was a model I was very comfortable with. So I did that, and my teacher said, “This is actually quite good.” What? Someone validated me? This is incredible. It gave me a huge boost. Then I decided that I would work for writers so I could learn from them.

To Al Gough and Miles Millar

I got a job working for Al Gough and Miles Millar, who are the guys that created Wednesday and Smallville.

Al and Miles were incredible to be around because they did it totally differently than I would have thought. I learned something from everything I saw them do. Then I realized I was enjoying that job too much because I was working too much on Smallville. I was never going to have time to actually try to write something. So I moved on.

To John August

I had the good fortune of getting the very coveted John August (Big Fish, Frankenweenie) assistant job, which my friend Rawson Marshall Thurber bequeathed unto me after John interviewed me. It was a dream job. I walked his dogs, and I house sat when he went out of town, I answered his phones, I took notes, I got coffee.

I never thought I was too good for a single thing I was doing. I had an undergrad degree from Stanford. I had a master’s from USC Film School, and not for one second, when I was an assistant for six years, did I think I was too good to get somebody else’s coffee. I treated every single assignment I was given as best as I could. I showed my work ethic in everything I did, and I think that exposed me to a lot of different people in the business who got to see who I was as a worker.

To Jessica Benninger

I got a call from, I think it was Al Gough and Miles Millar’s agent at the time, Greg McKnight from CAA, who said, “I have another client, Jessica Benninger. She wrote Bring It On. She has been approached by some producers. They want her to write a movie, but they can’t afford her, so she’s going to shepherd a baby writer to write a draft of the script.”

And I was like, “I’m a baby writer,” and I was thinking to myself, “Oh, God, please don’t ask me for a writing sample because I do not have one. I’ve never written anything in my life.” I think at that point I wrote a spec script for Sex and the City just to make sure I knew how to do it. This is where a scene starts. This is where it ends. This is how long it has to be. This is how it all has to hold together.

I met with Jessica. She told me her idea. I worked all night writing down every idea I had about this idea she had pitched me briefly. I sent her an email that was basically what I would do with this movie.

I had thought about it for 24 hours. I had proofread it 60 million times. And again, I was showing my work ethic through the email because I didn’t have anything else to show my work ethic with because I didn’t have a film writing sample.

She got my email and said “Wow, this is really a lot for 24 hours. You really thought about it.” So we had another meeting and she really liked me. I got the job writing the outline. But because I had never written anything, they asked, “Where’s your sample?” I replied, “My who? My what now?” I was just like The Secret Of My Success – Michael J. Fox changing suits in the elevator. I was just faking it, honestly. I hustled and hustled and I wrote a really decent outline. And they said, “Okay, this is good, but we still don’t know if you know how to write a movie script.” It was a non-WGA project adn they let me try. I think I got paid $18,000 total to write the outline and the script. And I thought, “I’m a millionaire!”

And then, of course, I paid my lawyer and my taxes, and I had 27 cents left. And I said, “Okay, I’m a little bit less than a millionaire, but still I got 27 cents out of writing.” So that was my first paid writing experience.

That got turned into The Wedding Date starring Debra Messing. They got Debra off of my first draft. They got financing. They made the movie. I thought Hollywood was so easy. I believed, “All you do is you sit down and type the thing and then they give you the movie.”

Dana Fox

To Present Day

Everything after that was absolutely impossible. I got a rude awakening after that first one. Compared to how breaking in is now, I honestly don’t understand how anyone’s getting a foot in the door when the business has contracted so profoundly.

The sheer number of jobs that are available has been cut in half, if not a third, every year. Incredibly professional, well-respected writers can’t even get jobs anymore. I don’t understand how new people who have nothing to show for themselves can get in the door anymore. I think it’s incumbent upon other writers who still have jobs to try to get jobs for those people – to actually stick our necks out and say, “I believe in this young person.” I know they can do it. I will back up their work. If it doesn’t come through, I will backstop it.” You have to get these writers in the door of the WGA.

Grab a young writer and say, “I’ll ampersand with you on this rewrite.” Just do it together. That’s the training for them, It’s the formalization of getting them into the WGA that they need to get started. And then maybe they can do it on their own. Without people like that, I truly don’t know how anyone’s getting in anymore.

I am very proud of how my career has gone. I’m a little bit less comfortable saying I’m so proud of my writing. I am very proud of how I have managed my career and how the team around me – my lawyer, Kim Stenson, my agent, Greg McKnight, are so thoughtful about the way we have done it.

I think for me, the number one lesson that I would say applies to other people trying to do it, is that every single day I treat as an audition to stay in the room the next day. I have never let my guard down. I have never stopped hustling. I have never thought, “Oh, this is all cool. I got this. No problem.” Every day I think it can all go away. You’re only as good as the last thing you’ve written.

And I also treat every job I’m in as the audition for the next job. I look around at the people I’m working with, and I ask myself, “Who in this group do I really like and want to work with again?” Then I make sure that those people, regardless of whether they’re executives or producers, that they have such a good experience with me that it almost doesn’t matter how that particular project turns out. Does it get greenlit? Does it go forward? They’ve enjoyed the experience of working with me so much and I’ve been so much of a value add that they are immediately looking for the next thing to do with me.

Almost entirely I have built my business on repeat business. There’s almost no one I’ve ever worked with who I don’t work with again. To me, the key to it is relationships.

There was a time when I was growing up in the business where people treated executives like they were the enemy. You can’t give me notes. You’re not creative. Those are my bosses. They pay my bills. They can do whatever they want and they own everything I’m doing right now. And they can fire me and get someone whose attitude is better than me in five seconds.

I do not roll my eyes at notes. I don’t get defensive about them. I think to myself, even if I don’t agree with the notes, they are genuinely trying to make it the best it can be.

They may not have the right solution that they’re suggesting, so I’m probably not going to do that. But they’re pointing at an area that has a problem. They don’t know how to say why, but they’re saying, like, “You’ve got to look in this area because I stopped and I was asking questions here, and I shouldn’t be.”

To Measuring Success

For me, that changes depending on where I am in my career. In the very beginning, I measured career success as getting paid to write. Is someone giving me money to do the thing that I want to do for a living?

Once I started getting a little bit more traction and being able to save a little bit more money and not live constantly from paycheck to paycheck, I think of career success as the number of people who want to work with me and who think highly of me.

I don’t have some illusion that I’m the greatest writer that has ever lived. I just think I am really committed to working as hard as I can and giving everything my all.

And I care so much. I care an annoying amount about every single movie I get involved with. And it doesn’t matter how ding-dongy the movie is. The movie could be about cats who are starting a business to sell popsicles. By the end of it, I’d be weeping about their backstory of why they decided that popsicles was the business that they had to go into because of who they were as kittens.

I just can’t help myself. I think other people notice that in me and they want that because the job of taking a movie from start to finish, from script to coming out in theaters is honestly, so hard that it requires, to a degree, a willing suspension of disbelief and an amount of enthusiasm, positivity and energy that is almost, not human.

I work really hard on trying to bring that to the projects I get paid for because I think it helps to put gas in everybody’s tank.

To Leaving Los Angeles

I actually moved out of Los Angeles about three and a half years ago and I moved to the East Coast. I was worried it was going to make me irrelevant in the business. In the first year I was gone, I doubled my productivity. In the second year, I tripled it. And last year is three times what I used to write in terms of quantity and hopefully quality. It’s because I’m not having the same anxiety attack as everyone in L.A..

There’s something going on in L.A. right now where everyone is so nervous about the business falling apart. It’s like being on the Titanic and trying to think of fun ideas on your typewriter. You’re on the Titanic. It’s already started sinking. So I removed myself from that energy and I feel like I’m actually very optimistic, weirdly. We’re all going to survive this. We’re going to come back and we’re going to thrive.

Now I am only around normal people who do not work in the film business – they’re military people and they’re tax lawyers. They love movies and television because it is the thing they do to relax and make them happy as they sit on the couch with their kids.

It’s such an essential human thing and people are all watching it in different ways. Some people are doing it on their phones and some people are just watching YouTube, but I’ve never been scared of technology. I’ve never been scared of change. I constantly look around me and I say to myself, “How can I evolve to fit better in this version of Hollywood which has changed today from what it was yesterday?”

I think being flexible and not being afraid of change, don’t be a dinosaur and don’t be scared of AI. Use it as a research tool and relax. If you have it, you have it. They’re still going to need it. You’re a real human being. Human interaction is still a really important part of this business. I like people. I care about people and I care about my relationships.

[More: Dana Fox Breaks Down Her Screenplay Magic in “Wicked: For Good”]

by Staff Writer

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