My Top 10 Films of 2016

You can find 11-20 here. These are my Top 10 Films of 2016

1. Arrival - I first read Eric Heisserer's script ARRIVAL about three years ago and found it to be a remarkable piece of writing that broke so many "rules" but was far and away better than anything else I'd read that year. I also felt like translating that script to film was going to be an incredible challenge, particularly in the execution of the film's big twist. Damn if the result doesn't look effortless and the result is an ending that lands on you like an emotional haymaker.

Through this first contact with aliens story, we explore how humanity deals with the unknown, through our worst impulses and best. I've heard this described as "competency porn" and I agree. After a Presidential campaign where educated people were dismissed as "elite" by masses who championed their own ignorance, it was good to see a film that championed science and problem-solving. And for all that to be legerdemain while the REAL question of the film snuck up on you? Masterful. I'm hoping I'll have time to write a longer piece on ARRIVAL, but this was the best film of the year.

2. OJ: Made in America - I've previously reflected on my fascination with the O.J. Simpson case, but director Ezra Edelman comes at it from an angle I'd not seen before. O.J.'s rise to football fame is juxtaposed with rising tensions between the L.A. black community and the police. Airing across five nights in two-hour blocks, so much groundwork is laid that it took until Night 3 to reach the murders. That gives the trial a context it's never had before, particularly after seeing O.J. work hard to separate himself from the black community, and then turn around and play the race card in pursuit of an acquittal.

In the same year that saw The People vs. O.J. Simpson, it was difficult to imagine the trial exploration feeling fresh, but every moment is captivating, particularly the recollections of former jurors. The final segment of the documentary covers O.J.'s post-acquittal downfall in jaw-dropping detail, with more footage and stories you're unlikely to have seen. It's 467 minutes that leaves its mark on you and never drags.

3. Swiss Army Man - "The farting corpse movie" is probably how you've heard of this film, but it's so much more than that. A suicidal man trapped on a desert island comes upon a corpse that has surprising utility for the stranded man. That's only the start of the weirdness, and soon the corpse is talking to him, asking him questions about life and love. Writer/directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan have crafted one of the more bizarre films of the year. I'll be honest - this is often the kind of shit I mock, but the Dans (as they are called) succeed where many other fail because the emotions of the story are real. We find ourselves relating to this lost soul who seems to be animating this corpse in his mind. Because of that empathy, a late-film twist really pulls the rug out from under the audience.

4. 10 Cloverfield Lane - And now we go from a film I never could have conceived to the kind of film I really, really want to make some day. I'm a sucker for limited location thrillers where the claustrophobia is like a pressure cooker for intense acting among a small cast. I've seen and read a lot of "captive woman in a basement" thrillers, so I know all the pitfalls here. The script by Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle manages to avoid every exploitation trap and cheap scare.

John Goodman gives one of his best layered performances as a guy who keeps us off balance the entire film. Is he dangerous? Is he a decent man who's gone a little off kilter due to PTSD? Is he lying to keep Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character captive or is he telling the truth about the attack that's forced them into his bomb shelter? Goodman walks a difficult tightrope through the entire film until he's forced to show his hand. Director Dan Trachtenberg's next smart move was casting Winstead, who's able to hold her own against Goodman and make her role more than the victim that the situation could cast her as. Some people really don't like the ending, but I think it's the perfect payoff to all the suspense Goodman's claims generate. This is a genre premise done exceptionally well.

5. 13th - Ava DuVerney's comprehensive documentary is an incredible piece of work that draws a straight line from how the Reconstruction Era's 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, paved the way for mass incarceration of African-Americans. Following that path, we trace the entire history of racial inequity in America. The film's most powerful moment comes during a montage where Republican candidate Donald Trump's rally speech about longing for "the good old days" when protestors would be beaten is juxtoposed with police assaulting civil rights protestors in the 60s.

6. Moonlight - Most of my list is made up of high-concept films, issue-oriented movies, or stories that are so unusual and bizarre that they can't help but make an impression. And then there's MOONLIGHT, which isn't quite any of those, but instead is a rather moving story about a young fatherless African-American boy who has the odds piled against him. His mother's a junkie, the guy who becomes a surrogate father to him is a dealer, he's bullied at school, and he's dealing with the fact he's gay. There are a hundred ways to write this wrong. It's almost literally one cancer diagnosis from "cloying indie movie awards bait BINGO." And yet... there's honest emotion to this. We're drawn into Little's story in a way that makes him a person and not just a martyr to whom bad things happen. Writer/director Barry Jenkins sticks a difficult landing here.

7. The Jungle Book - I hate 3D. It's more often just a way to jack-up ticket prices and almost never enhances the storytelling in any meaningful way. There are only three films where I believe it truly added value: Avatar, Gravity... and The Jungle Book. It was a constant mind-blowing experience to watch this film and remind myself that just about everything on screen but the boy was created in a computer. Everything in this movie looks photo-real, and director Jon Favreau stages everything in a way that only further convinces us that this jungle is a real place that exists.

When I was a kid, The Jungle Book was one of my favorite Disney cartoons. Looking back, that seems odd. The story's pretty slight and the musical numbers have a couple good entries, but are less frequent than other films. Justin Marks's script brings a little more structure and weight to the film than the source material, but the real secret weapon here is young Neel Sethi as Mowgli. There are veteran actors who are thrown by the process of acting against a green screen, but the way Neel interacts believable with CGI animals, you'd never guess this was his first feature role. (Read my interview with screenwriter Justin Marks here.)

8. The Shallows - A lot of what I said in the 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE review applies here. This is the ultimate "chase your protagonist up a tree, then throw rocks at her" movie. Blake Lively plays a surfer who gets stranded on a reef far from shore... and in the path of a great white shark. Writer Anthony Jaswinski provides the survival techniques that are a staple of this genre. (Think THE GREY, but with a warmer climate and a female lead.) Director Jaume Collet-Serra makes the most of the beautiful scenery and the entire film is quite gorgeous. Better still, he wrings every last drop of tension out of Lively's struggle to outwit the shark. I wish we got more of these low-to-mid-budget thrillers like this and 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE.

9. The Edge of Seventeen - Sign me up for whatever writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig does next. This is another film that puts character first and doesn't give a damn if we find them unlikable. Hailee Steinfeld plays Nadine, a troubled and often abrasive teen who's rendered with so much empathy that most viewers will likely see some of their own teenage selves in her. Even as she's pushing away and alienating the people closest to her, we understand why she's doing it and we find ourselves rooting for everyone else to just back off and cut her some slack. It feels raw and honest to the point where it can stand with the best of the John Hughes catalog. This is another one that's not a high concept story, but its three-dimensional characters linger with you long after the movie has ended.

10. Hell or High Water - I have a theory that Chris Pine is not so much a Leading Man, but more of a "Michael Keaton in a Tom Cruise body." HOHW finds a way to make that work for this story of two brothers pulling off a spree of bank robberies to save the family farm. The writing lesson for this one? Have smart protagonists and face them off against smart antagonists who seem capable of beating them. I'm not usually one for westerns, but this one had my attention from the start and knew just how to pace itself.

An interview with Justin Marks: Part IV - showrunning COUNTERPART for Starz

Part I - Breaking in and the road to STREET FIGHTER
Part II - Assignments and SUPERMAX

Part III - Making THE JUNGLE BOOK


My talk with screenwriter Justin Marks concludes. THE JUNGLE BOOK opens in theaters everywhere today. You can find Justin on Twitter at @Justin_Marks_.

I wanted to save a little bit of time to talk about COUNTERPART, the Starz TV series you’re still in the midst of making. I believe this was your second pilot sold, but your first series. Am I right about that?

Yeah, STARZ bought it. We’re doing two seasons for them. J.K. Simmons is playing the lead role. He’s actually playing two roles, two versions of himself. Morten Tyldum, from THE IMITATION GAME, is directing the first two episodes. It’s an original, something I was specing as a feature and I had a meeting at MRC one day and had just been working on this idea. They asked what I was working on, so I told them and they said, “That should be a TV show. We’ll buy that. Let’s develop it together as a script and we’ll see if we can find interest in it.” We brought it out to the marketplace and got J.K. Simmons and Morten attached to it right after the Oscars last year. Starz bought it and they’ve been incredibly supportive throughout the process. We [the writing staff] have been in a room for about a year, writing the entire first season. Then we’re gonna shoot later this year.

So you got to be the showrunner without having to climb any of the usual rungs in TV.

Well, I have a lot of help from really good people. Amy Berg, another executive producer on the show, is really great at that. She’s really experienced and at the same time she’s really open-minded to doing a different process. This show is ten episodes being written before we shoot a single one of them. In our minds we’re writing a 10-hour movie with ten very solid chapters to it. It’s been a learning process for all of us as we go through it.

From what I remember of your tweets that first week in the writers room, you took to having other writers involved sort of like a duck taking to water.

Yeah! And you know what’s funny is a lot of that, I think, is because of THE JUNGLE BOOK experience and what Jon was pushing. He said, “You can’t be a screenwriter who just wants what you want, and you’re gonna do what you write and we’re all just gonna have to react to that because we’re just going to rewrite you,” you know, the director, the art department, the story department. He said, “We’re all going to be a team and you’re just one part of the team responsible for putting the words on the page in a way that makes us actually feel something.”

That process of learning to trust the process, which is the old Disney mantra, “Trust the process,” Let it suck. Let’s just throw something on the wall and let the room give their opinions on it. That’s what we applied to the TV show, and I guess that’s what every TV show does which is why television is so good because you have a lot of brains working on something together. I always used to have such anxiety on features when it was crunch time and you had to get the scene right. I sleep eight hours every night now knowing that I have so many writers with me who are all bent on “If we didn’t get the idea today, we’ll get it tomorrow.”

How did you choose those writers? You’ve never been on a show before so how did you know what to look for to make a strong room with diversely-skilled people?

First and foremost, I think you have to look for people whose writing you love. You love their ideas and the way they write scenes and surprise you and make choices you wouldn’t have made. And then you’ll have this meeting, and I think the important thing there was to find people who were open-minded enough to do a different process.

With the exception of Amy, I think we have a far less-experienced group of writers like me, who has no experience [in TV] and I think it has really benefited us in a lot of ways. We’re also able to make a lot of mistakes in the beginning, or I’m able to make a lot of mistakes in the beginning because we have the time we’ve been given to do the show right. The results have been incredible because of that and I think that was largely what we did.

We have a very female-driven room. I’m one of two men in the room and I really like it. It’s really just a great energy and a great atmosphere to work with the group we have.

An interview with Justin Marks: Part III - Making THE JUNGLE BOOK

Part I - Breaking in and the road to STREET FIGHTER
Part II - Assignments and SUPERMAX


Let’s jump ahead to THE JUNGLE BOOK. So how did you get the assignment in the first place?

THE JUNGLE BOOK came about as the result of my work on a movie with Disney called CAPTAIN NEMO, which I was doing back in the day when McG was still involved.

This was pre-Fincher, then?

Yes. And I’d worked with an executive named Brigham Taylor and a producer named Sean Bailey, who’s now the head of production at Disney. So the whole team from CAPTAIN NEMO is still at the studio and Alan Horn came to the studio post-LIFE OF PI and said, “I think that the effects were up to par enough that you could do a JUNGLE BOOK movie now. Why don’t we star figuring out how to do it?” Alan really loved the stories and thought it would be a good Disney live-action movie.

So Brigham called me because we’d worked together – and this is really instructive for other screenwriters if you think about what the process is. The idea was “We don’t know what this is yet. We don’t have a movie. Why don’t we bring a writer in to work together and figure it out.” That was largely what we did with CAPTAIN NEMO. So when it gets back to that conversation about how you want to be that person who’s a positive part of the process, probably part of the reason I got the job was, we were just partners trying to figure out a story. Until we have a movie, we’re just talking in the blue sky.

And at that point, they want someone who they can stand to sit in a room with for eight hours a day.

And that’s what I did. They threw me in an office for about seven months. I was there putting scenes on the wall. This was before a director was involved. This happens a lot . The experience of being a screenwriter before there’s a director, you’re not writing the movie in its most brilliant form. You’re like the advance recon guy. They drop him into the jungle a couple months ahead of the army and you’re just in there to be like. “I know which roads we should take. I know we might get some ambushes.” You’re there to know the material very well and to start to paint an answer to the question “Could this be a movie?”

We began to carve out a scriptment, and then a script. Jon [Favreau] came in and as is the process with every director, said, “This is all great. I like this and I like this. I want to do my version of this story and I have a vision for what this is.”So the next question is, does that vision line up with what you can offer as a writer?”

So I had some meetings with Jon and eventually we were ready to give this a try. He was good enough to give me a crack at writing the next draft. He liked that draft. It felt like his movie now. The studio wanted to make that draft, so at that point, he just kept me on for the entire part of the process to be constantly aware of what was going on and to be making the changes. Once you decide to start making a movie, that’s when the real work starts. So that’s kinda how it began.

I remember that a re-release of THE JUNGLE BOOK was one of the first films I saw in the theater as a child. Was that animated version the blueprint for yours, or did you back to the Kipling novel?

It’s a lot of both. It’s an adaptation of two pieces of material – one, the original Kipling stories, and two, the 1967 Walt Disney film. Because if you’re going to do a movie at the Walt Disney company, you’re going to do a remake of the 1967 Walt Disney film. I say that now, but in hindsight that’s not always the case. When I was just a writer alone, I was exploring a thousand different versions of what that could be. It’s really Jon [Favreau] who came into this and said, “I understand what this movie is. I know what it meant to me as a kid and I want to update and evolve that story in a way that feels responsible.”

So it very quickly became a lot more similar to the 1967 film. But we were able – because of the Kipling book – to endow the film with a lot more mythos. Kipling wrote it all to fit atop a very similar coming of age structure, which is why it was a marriage of the two.

Probably the first question you come to when you do it in live action is “How are the animals going to talk?”

Yeah, how’s it gonna work?

Was there a point where you were worried about that? You’ve got photorealistic animals speaking with the voice of Bill Murray and Christopher Walken.

The biggest fear and challenge of the project – and it did affect the script – was would the effects be able to render emotion? Would the effects be able to convincingly portray talking wolves and a talking bear in a way that didn’t make us laugh, or didn’t make us nothing because we’d feel like we were looking at a dead face.

Until you start to see things – and you’re very far down the pipe when you start to see things – it was always a question. It was like "we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that we have to play this movie almost entirely off our live action actor’s face, where all the emotions come from him." And so in the script you had to be very careful about that. Then when the effects started to come in, Jon saw it was incredible what MPC, the effects company is doing. Then we loosened up a little.

And also, we wanted to do things like the animals behaving like animals, so a wolf does not cry. These things you have to be very careful about. That was the biggest challenge.

And you’re not even shooting in real environments. It’s all rendered. You have an actor in a blue-screen room. And you’re shooting for months, waiting for the first finished shots to come back. Is that how it is?

Here the thing that no one talks about with what Jon brought to this process and I think that’s why he deserves all the credit for making the movie as good as it is. And I’m really proud of the work. I’m impressed by what he’s made. When he first came into the process he said to me, “Look, I appreciate this script. What I’d like to do, if you’re okay with it, is we’ll just do this as trial-and-error at the beginning. I want to make this movie going back to the process Walt Disney used going back to the old animated films.”

Is it similar to the Pixar process of doing like a pencil test version of the film and refining it?

It’s exactly that. It’s all iteration. That’s all they do. What that means is we’d start with a script that is a story from beginning to end that everyone likes, then hire a story department to work with the script department – which is one person. That’s me. To make it better one scene at a time. The story department is made up of animators, most of whom come from the Walt Disney school of building story where it’s just one image, flipbook, another image, and they draw these animatics, which we look at on a wall, or now with computers they can render it and we all watch it together.

Because they come from this Disney school, they won’t just take what’s in the script. [They add their own ideas and actions] and we’ll test it. Jon has this theory that ten people can read a script and have ten different opinions as to whether that script is any good or will make a good movie. When ten people watch the same scene from a script on a television in front of them, everyone agrees it’s either good or bad. You cannot argue with something you’re watching in front of you.

And yet, we still argued. Jon would bring me in and he built himself a team of rivals, what he called The Lincoln Cabinet Theory. You’d have a bunch of people fighting for different ideas in a scene and he was the ultimate arbiter of which idea was going to win. So we’d do that for every scene and it became a marriage of all of these points of view. That is the Disney process.

So Jon did that to the point where – I’m gonna get my dates all wrong – a year and a half, maybe two years ago, we had a finished version of the movie in flipbook for that we all watched with no actors yet, and we could watch it and ask, “Does this feel good?” Then began what was called the pre-vis process, but really it was the motion capture. Neel [Sethi] was cast to play the role of Mowgli, the other voice actors had been cast, and we were on a soundstage in Playa Vista that was a motion capture stage. That was like a 40, 50 day shoot where the entirety of it was motion capture. Neel himself was in a motion capture suit so Mowgli himself was motion capture.

We’d do that and watch scenes every day where the motion capture process is so amazing where you don’t have to fix your camera in any way. You can choose where your camera is after the fact. [Cinematographer] Bill Pope would have an idea where he wanted the camera, but he could still change his mind later in the process. So that allowed us to see the movie again another time before a single frame of actual live action footage had been shot.

In some ways, that was when the writer was most important to the process because Jon would [call me] in my office, which was about a mile away from where the stages were and say, “Can you come over and watch this scene that we just shot?” And he’d [show me what he felt wasn’t working. I’d suggest something else] and he say, "Why don’t you go write it and we’ll try it tomorrow." Then we’d just shoot the same scene again the very next day. It was an incredible way to see your mistakes in front of you and correct for them in real time.

Another thing I should say about Jon is he is such a generous guy and I have never worked on a movie like this before. He was so willing to allow me as a writer to make these mistakes and to teach me through these mistakes. It was the first time ever that I’ve had a teacher in this process, someone who was able to carry me through what I guess is basic storytelling. It was really fun and amazing and all of that was before they did the 100-day live action shoot downtown when everything really started to happen.

It’s a pretty intense process. I don’t thing any movie has really been made that way. Even AVATAR, which used the simul-cam and all these things, they didn’t have the time that Disney was willing to give Jon to get the movie right.

Cool! Well, I’m looking forward to seeing that. As you said, it’s a very different way of making a film.

People ask, “What are scenes you wrote that ended up on the cutting room floor” and it’s like, there is no cutting room floor for this movie.

It’s like a theater workshop is what it sounds like. You’re working it out and then by the time you’re shooting it for real, everyone knows what their part is.

Yes. And figuring it out and just getting better and better and better. So when they’re doing the live action component, all Jon is focused on is the visual aesthetic of the film, the incredible sets that the art department designed, just the area around Mowgli, like within 30 feet of him. And that’s the first time Neel’s performance is captured. It’s about finding life in that performance and to be able to focus on just that and not focus on “Is this scene boring? Does this scene make any sense? Do we need this scene?”

In that sense it’s the most-efficient and least-efficient process of all time. It’s least-efficient in the way that we shot it multiple times, but it’s the most-efficient in that once you’re doing the most expensive part of the shoot, you’re doing exactly what you need. Jon conceived of all of that. He was like, “We’re taking all the best parts from animation and all the best parts from live-action and mixing them together.” It’s fun.
Part IV - Showrunning COUNTERPART for Starz

An interview with Justin Marks: Part II - Assignments and SUPERMAX

Part 1 - Breaking in and the road to STREET FIGHTER

My talk with THE JUNGLE BOOK screenwriter Justin Marks continues.


Well you’ve talked about STREET FIGHTER in so many other interviews that I don’t want to linger on that production, but that’s your most recent produced feature credit until THE JUNGLE BOOK. And it’s my understanding you were supporting yourself entirely on your writing in between those two, is that right?

Entirely.

So explain to my audience what a working writer does when they’re not making movies in that interregnum.

Basically, for every ten jobs you get, one of them gets produced. I know that batting average is different for some people. I would say you average two or three, maybe four jobs a year. Those can be anything from a quick rewrite or a weekly or a polish to a pilot that you sell, a blind script deal or a straight two-step assignment. You’re always working on something, and then every writer should be doing a spec once a year.

So you’re always just generating new material, and I think that’s the hardest thing to see from the outside. And I wish I could say there’s something extraordinary about working four or five jobs a year – every writer does it. Some do even more.

When you’re working on these assignments, it’s probably easy to know when you’re done because they tell you you’re done. When you’re working on a spec, when do you know to give up on a spec?

Yeah, I’ve given up on some things. It’s a conversation you have with your reps and at a certain point we may stop, or we may float it out to a couple producers who we trust and ask, “What do you think? Think we can get anywhere with this?” And if they say no, you’ve gotta be willing to let it go.

It sounds like bullshit but it’s true – you don’t write to make money. You write because it’s a compulsion, that’s what makes you happy. And the ones you get money on, well that just helps you get even more happy.You write because you have to, so those scripts you abandon, maybe you just take them as a tax write-off on time that you’re making money on other things.

And when you’re coming up with ideas, are you working with your management team, like “Hey I’ve got three ideas, which one do you think I should write?”

It’s not even like that with me. It’s like “Hey, I’ve had this idea for a while.” Maybe I’ll share the first ten pages with them, and if they think there’s something there, we do it. If not, we don’t. Most of the time, once you’ve started to create a career as a writer, no matter what level you’re at, specs become something you do to expand on your “brand.” I’m using air-quotes when I say “brand” because it sounds so awful.

As an example, I speced an early 20th Century espionage script for Ron Howard and we worked on it together. I did all the research because it was something I loved and because I knew no one was gonna pay me to write that.

Because at that point, you’re “the HE-MAN guy,” you’re “the STREET FIGHTER guy.”

Exactly. So I decided to do this on it’s own just to see if I can write a movie like that and see if I enjoy it and in that case I did. We never sold it, but I took all that research and I put it into my TV show. You always win, but you do that to prove to people you can do something different.

With SUPERMAX, I want to say it was roughly around the time of BATMAN BEGINS when it became known?

It was soon after BATMAN BEGINS, like within a year that I set up HE-MAN and SUPERMAX at Warners, and they were within a month of each other. It happened very fast, and that was with David Goyer producing that.

And how did you get hooked up with him?

I met David because his wife at the time was an executive on STREET FIGHTER. Jessika Borsiczky, she’s now a writer in her own right and works on HOUSE OF LIES. She introduced me to David just for coffee because I’d mentioned – not knowing that they were about to get married – how David has always been such an influence on me. Then she brought us out to meet at the Chateau Marmont and just over the course of a coffee I pitched this idea that I had for years, sort of a Count of Monte Cristo prison-break story in the world of supervillains.

That was how we first got started together and we’ve worked together a couple times since as well.

And did that become Green Arrow because he’s the most Batman-like character who isn’t Batman?

No, actually when that was conceived, David was adamant that we should pitch it as any hero, probably someone who didn’t have superpowers.

And that cuts it down pretty fast in this universe.

So we pitched it to DC. I gave the whole story from beginning to end. After I finished the pitch, it was Greg Novak at DC who said, “Why don’t you put Green Arrow into that?” Then we brought it to Warner Bros with Green Arrow and they bought it as a Green Arrow movie.

And I think at the time, this is before even SMALLVILLE was using that character. It was like “Green Arrow? Who’s pulling Green Arrow for a movie? They’ve spent almost ten years trying to do Batman and Superman again!”

And I think to this day that might be still one of the biggest problems with it. I want to see it, but maybe the perception is, “Who wants to see a sequel to the Green Arrow story when we haven’t even seen the first one?” That may be what always slowed it down.

Part III - Making THE JUNGLE BOOK
Part IV - Showrunning COUNTERPART for Starz

An interview with Justin Marks: Part I - Breaking in and the road to STREET FIGHTER

Despite being a working screenwriter for over 10 years, this Friday brings the release of only the second produced feature film from Justin Marks, THE JUNGLE BOOK. The writer's only previous credit was the critically-despised 2009 film STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI. If one were to assess a screenwriter based only on their credits, that might appear to be an unusual career trajectory, but IMDb pages never tell anywhere close to the complete story when it comes to screenwriting.

A few years ago, Justin chronicled some of his career and a few of the two-dozen scripts he's written in a piece for The Hollywood Reporter called "My Life as a Screenwriter You've Never Heard Of." Fans of geek properties might find his name familiar, as he was the writer behind the never-produced VOLTRON, MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE, and Green Arrow spec SUPERMAX.

I recently sat down with Justin to discuss how he got his start, how one maintains a career as a writer between produced projects, and of course, the unusual process behind writing THE JUNGLE BOOK.

I wanted to reach back and touch on how you first broke in and first got repped.

I moved out here from New York and I’d been interning a lot, so I made some contacts through an internship and my first summer after graduating college I got an assistant job through those contacts and worked for a producer for three and a half years, Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern, who at that time had done Being John Malkovich. When I was working with them it was on the movie Saved!

I was just answering phones at that time and going home and writing every night, getting my scripts together. I was collaborating with a directing friend who has also carved out a career in his own right, Brad Fuhrman. But it was through my boss, Sandy, who introduced me to my first agent at William Morris. Sandy had read a script after I’d worked for him for about two years, which is about right.

Yeah! You didn’t ask on the first week, “Hey, read my script.”

I knew I had a lot of craft to work on and I had a job that was paying me while I could work on it, and I could be exposed to the process of filmmaking from production to post-production to releasing a movie and looking for new material so I had the perfect job.

Sandy read one of my scripts and passed it to a young agent who he’d been working with on some other clients. This agent read it and liked it, so I went in for a meeting with him and we just hit off. I think one of the things that agent said to me was, “It’s not about that script, or even the next script you write or the next three scripts you write. What’s important is we work on not just your craft and getting scripts that the marketplace is going to like, but these meetings and how you self-identify as a writer – what you like, what you don’t like, how you’re going to differentiate yourself from other writers.” He’d say, “you’re building a version of yourself that you want the industry to see, so you need to make conscious choices about who you are and what you’re going to sell about your life experience and point of view.

They’re not hiring a writer, they’re hiring a best friend, someone who’s going to go in and solve the problem for them or just listen to their problems about the script. They have to trust you. This is where the old “Don’t be an asshole, don’t be crazy” thing comes in. Yes, it’s about the work, but it’s about the process too, and the trust you’re building with your collaborators. That’s studio screenwriting. That’s just the job.

To go back for a second, you said it was a newly-minted agent. Did you have any hesitation about his lack of experience?

No, not for a second. You just hit it off with someone. In fact at that time I had a young manager who’s still my manager today, Adam Kohlbrenner, who when I started with him, had just left his assistant job to strike out on his own. Especially at that young age, I felt that if someone was a very successful agent, they wouldn’t pay attention to me because to be honest, I had a lot to learn. This manager had gotten some interest from other agents who’d been working for several years, and [they were trying to sell me on them]. And I said I’d rather go with the other guy. He represent the kind of writer I want to be and that’s what I think is most important. More than the big agent, it should be the person you like.

Having said that, I do think the agent or person you like should at least be at a reputable place. Which is to say, don’t go with that agent who isn’t even in L.A.

So you’re repped, you’re writing specs, I think VOLTRON is the first one—

Which is about a year and a half after I started my relationship with my agent.

That was it! That was where I was going with that! Now, was that a spec or an assignment?

In the time that I was working with my agent and manager, I generated a spec called STRAW MEN that was sort of a calling card script. It was DOG DAY AFTERNOON in a deli. It got me meetings and Craig and Adam would send me out to meet execs. I met one who worked for the Mark Gordon Company and they’d recently gotten the rights to Voltron. This was a time before TRANSFORMERS, when no one really knew what these properties may or may not be.

So this is about 2005?

Yeah, 2005. And remember, at this time I was still an assistant so I was still working my day job and after two and a half years, my boss was – it’s kind of like that Ben Affleck thing in GOOD WILL HUNTING, “I look forward to the day when I call into the office and you don’t pick up anymore.” My boss was so great about letting me go on those meetings. Provided work still got done at the office, I could leave once a day for a general.

I met this exec in a general who said “We’re looking for a take for VOLTRON.” We worked together for months. I came in with something he liked, we reworked it, brought it in to his boss, who said “Sure, go with it.” We had a pitch that we took out to every studio in town and ever studio passed on it, whether it was because my pitch was terrible, or no one really knew what to do with it… it’s probably a combination of the two.

Also, now we’re at the point where everybody who grew up on VOLTRON is at the executive level, but in 2005 you have to figure those people were lower on the totem pole.

Exactly. You had to educate people about VOLTRON. So what Mark and this exec did was find independent financing, this guy who would pay me guild minimum to write the script. That was enough to get me out of my day job and write for a living and go to more meetings than I ever went to, and be ready for it. A year later, after a few rewrites we took it out as a spec and New Regency bought, and by that point it had kinda started my career. I knew enough people that I could start going in on other pitches and building on it.

Did this brand you as sort of the toy-adaptation franchises guy, because MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE was soon after this?

These weren’t franchises at the time, they were just toys that no one what to do with. They still are. Look at HE-MAN. We’re talking about movies that never got made. And also I liked this stuff like anyone our age who grew up on it. It seemed like they wanted young people to write it because the older, more experienced writers weren’t taking those jobs. So I was just getting the leftovers of the leftovers of the leftovers and doing whatever I could to keep making a living as a writer so I could keep writing other specs and doing other, more serious things on the side.

And were your other specs different from HE-MAN or VOLTRON?

Oh my god, yeah! One I wrote was called BORDERLINE, which is now called COME SUNDOWN, which is one I’m still working on with a great director named Elgin James. It’s set in New Hampshire and it’s just about a family taken hostage in a car by fugitives trying to get across the Canadian border. It’s a battle of wills between this doctor and this criminal who find they actually share more in common than they ever knew. I wanted to do a story where basically the villain is the character you cried for at the end of the movie.

So I would do that stuff on that time and I think that would continue to boost what I was doing for money which was getting a job to write HE-MAN for Warner Bros and doing that kind of thing.

And then STREET FIGHTER came along.

STREET FIGHTER was in the middle of that. STREET FIGHTER was a job I got after VOLTRON. I wrote it for Hyde Park. It was something that Capcom was really keen on making and I think they financed half of it. So they had a lot to say about the story so I think they just wanted a writer who’d maybe say “yes” to everything. I was a 25 year-old kid - you say “yes” to everything. Today I look back on that as a mistake, but honestly—

“What else could you have done?”

And I don’t have any regrets. It kept me going. It gave me another year’s pay that would keep me looking for the next job, so in spite of the creative regrets that one might have with it, I still look back on that one fondly.

And just to underline this, how long from when you got repped to your first produced movie in STREET FIGHTER?

I got repped when I was maybe 24 or 25 and I visited the set on when I was just shy of my 28th birthday so..

So probably around four years from repped to produced? That’s actually a pretty good rate in this town!

Yeah, very fast!

And probably many specs in between there too.

A lot of them. Every year, doing a spec. And it’s fast to the point of being too good to be true, as STREET FIGHTER is evidence. The kind of first movie a guy would write within a couple years of being repped is gonna be something like that. You take the good with the bad.

We'll continue my chat with Justin tomorrow, with a discussion of assignment work and SUPERMAX.

Part II - Assignments and SUPERMAX
Part III - Making THE JUNGLE BOOK
Part IV - Showrunning COUNTERPART for Starz

This blog turns six! - There's still much more work to do

Today this blog is six years old. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised it's lasted this long and that so many of you fine people still drop by to read every new post. It's funny to think that when I started it, I wondered if I'd have enough material to keep me going six months.

Some of you have possibly noticed that the blog output has slowed a bit. That's largely due to the fact that I've exhausted a lot of the common topics and questions I could cover related to screenwriting. I've been able to compensate for that over the last few months as it's Oscar Movie season and I've had a full buffet of great movies to discuss.

The other big sea change is that it's become more and more common for people to use Twitter as an output for their musings and advice. I still like the idea of a permanent archive on the blog, partly because it allows new readers to discover those nuggets long after the fact. Even so, I know I've had plenty of times where I've tossed off a good rant on twitter and found that got it enough out of my system that I didn't feel the need to come back here and flesh it out. I'm trying to be better about that.

Ah, Twitter. I really can't believe that I still have yet to plateau in terms of followers. As I write this I have over 27,700 followers and the last time I checked, only a few percent of those were deemed "fake." It's flattering to see evidence that people are still discovering me and interested in what I have to say.

I bring this up because even more than through this blog, I've made a lot of great friends and contacts through Twitter over the last six years. It's absolutely been one of the best things I could have done for my career. I've made some good friends, including fellow aspiring writers, actors, and working writers - including a showrunner or two. I definitely recommend trying to build your own social network. It takes time but if you use Twitter right, you might find a few doors opening up for you.

As it's Awards Season, it feels appropriate to conclude this look back with a few thank yous.  There's not enough space here to acknowledge everyone whom I've met and become friends with due to this blog, but there are a few in particular I want to call out.

I did my best to put this list in random order, but I have to start with Scott Myers. About five months into the life of this blog, Scott was the one who really put me on the map when he featured me and gave me a very generous plug on the only must-read screenwriting blog, Go Into The Story. For almost five years, my relationship with Scott was completely through emails and tweets. I met him just over a year ago and it was a genuine delight to find he was everything you'd expect. Scott is the screenwriting professor I wish I'd had in college, running the sort of blog I could only dream of reading when I was taking my first steps into screenwriting. As I implore you often, please visit Go Into The Story regularly.

Hollywood has a reputation for having a lot of assholes. Some of that is earned, but my first-hand experience has been that there are a significant number of sincerely giving people. Over the years, a very high percentage of the working writers I have met have been some of the kindest, most helpful people out there. There's this myth that working writers are out to screw over aspirings. I've never seen any evidence of this, and the people I'm about to name-check are the furthest from that:

Eric Heisserer was one of the first working writers whom I got to know through Twitter, following his reaction to a tweet about the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET reboot. He later consented to an interview about the film and also authored a guest post about the life of a script in the studio development process. Even today, that post stands as my third-most-popular post of all time. On a one-on-one level, Eric has also been giving enough of his time to read some of my work and offer help where he could. He didn't do it so I'd blog about it, he's just that kind of person. Publicly he's very giving in offering the occasional screenwriting knowledge drops on Twitter, and I encourage you to follow him for his regular insights.

If you just know John Gary from Twitter, you probably have this image of him as the cranky pessimist who's the first one to say why the latest screenwriting development is a half-empty glass. But you'll have to look hard to find a more passionate advocate for writers, and someone more determined to make sure that naive aspirings aren't taken advantage of by charlatans and scams. He also regularly takes on what he calls The Hope Machine - the parent of the pie-in-the-sky fantasies that writers have about how easy it'll be to gain fame and forture from their writing. John doesn't tell you want you want to hear - he says what you NEED to hear. Like me he's seen the business from the inside as both a reader and a writer, and you would ignore the wisdom from that experience at your peril.

Along the same lines, I consider Geoff LaTulippe a must-follow. You can never accuse Geoff of not speaking his mind and while his blunt and aggressive nature sometimes gets him into trouble, he's very open to answering questions from aspiring writers on Twitter, on his podcast Broken Projector and on his personal website. If memory serves, Geoff might have been the first pro writer to reach out to me with an offer to read my script, and I know that's a courtesy he's extended to a few, perhaps many, others.

Justin Marks is a working writer who I first came to know via Twitter. We seem to approach things from a similar point of view and it's rare that there's a significant gulf in our opinions. (Justin once quipped that "we could pilot a Jaeger together.") I finally met him last year and it was a relief to learn that our rapport extended to our face-to-face interaction. Justin's got two big projects in the future: The Jon Favreau-directed Jungle Book movie coming in 2016 and the sequel to Top Gun, still unscheduled as far as I know. He's another one whose tweets can be a good insight into the business, so give him a follow.

F. Scott Frazier was one of the first writers to reach out to me to meet in person, and I'm glad I dropped the mask to do so. Scott tends to do his good deeds without advertising them, but I know he's gone out of his way to be a mentor to some writers. Like many others I know, he definitely believes in paying it forward, and frankly, he's prolific enough that it would be understandable if he didn't want to take the time to do so. I'd be remiss if I didn't plug my interview with him.

When people come to me asking for a coverage referral, I point them at Amanda Pendolino and ONLY Amanda Pendolino. Like me, Amanda's gotten a number of years as a script reader under her belt while trying to build her own career. She gives really sharp notes, and in a manner that always feels constructive. I recently gave her a script that I'm pretty sure wasn't her cup of tea, but she made a passionate, persuasive case for her opinions without making me feel like I'd been eviscerated. That's rare. On top of that, she's a great writer who deserves to be on staff somewhere. I know if I was a showrunner, she'd be one of my early draft picks.

Speaking of showrunners, Jeff Lieber is another favorite twitter-buddy. Currently one of the showrunners on NCIS: New Orleans, Jeff is one of the creators of Lost, as well as the creator of Miami Medical and was a showrunner on Necessary Roughness. He's used those assignments and others as fodder for his Showrunner Rules, which he regularly doles out on Twitter. You can find the whole archive here and his feed is always a valuable read.

The people I've named already are all great writers, but one writer whose work just knocked me on my ass was Brian Scully. I gave a spotlight post to his brilliant script MERCIFUL last year and soon after that, Brian landed management with Verve. I'm currently in the weeds on a very dark script of my own and I can honestly say that MERCIFUL has been like that rabbit they use to get the greyhounds to do laps around the track. I've read plenty of scripts that have inspired me and taught me, but MERCIFUL is one that really pushed me to be better and to not be scared to take chances.

Through my association with Go Into The Story, I also came to know Nate Winslow. Scott Myers calls him "future super producer Nate Winslow" and not without good reason. Nate is a savvy guy who's worked on a number of film projects, most recently at Defender Entertainment. If someone's smart, they'll snap him up to be their Creative Executive because he's got a great eye for projects. There are some people who you can just tell when you meet them that they have what it takes to make their own good fortune. With Nate, I know it's only a matter of time before he puts together a project and becomes one of those guys everyone is trying to get their scripts to. He's another one who keeps me motivated, if only so I don't feel like I'm standing still next to him.

And last, but certainly far from least, I consider myself fortunate to have gotten to know Black List founder Franklin Leonard. I take a very dim view of most services that ask screenwriters to pay for them. I don't typically trust coverage companies because you can't really trust who's reading those scripts, and it's rare to find such a company where the person in charge has a significant amount of credibility to put on the line. When Franklin told me he was expanding the Black List's mission to including hosting and review services for aspiring writers, I was skeptical. After he laid it out for me, I became a believer.  A few half-wits have accused my endorsement of the site of being the back-scratch that was redeemed by payola. I can assure you I have no official affiliation with the site, nor have I ever taken any sort of money, bribery or whatever you want to call it. I endorse the Black List because I believe in it and in what Franklin Leonard is trying to do.

I've been fortunate to meet many successful people. I've worked for a number of industry pros who were very good at their jobs and have been able to produce films for most of their adult lives. I want to tell you what sets Franklin Leonard apart from them. Those men and women are very adept players within the existing system. Franklin Leonard is a guy with the will and the forethought to change the system. The Black List is constantly evolving and expanding, carving out partnerships with management companies, studios and producers. More than that, Franklin is possibly one of the most above-board and intelligent people I've met out here. There's nothing phony about him, and if we had more Franklin Leonards, that wouldn't be a terrible thing for our industry.

Franklin is smart enough he could probably be very successful just playing the game as it is. Instead he's forging his own path. I'm glad that writers - both aspiring and professional - have such a driven advocate. I know he's going to continue to push to make the Black List better. I once said to him that he must be proud of everything The Black List has become and his reply was, "There's still much more work to do."

Those who succeed are often those who are rarely satisfied.

These people I have named all have a few things in common. In one way or another they have all provided support and inspiration, and I've been lucky to get to know them. And there are still plenty more whom I don't have the space to name here. I also would never have met ANY of them, had I not started this blog six years ago and stuck with it even when I was getting only 50 hits a day the first few months. I would be a poorer individual for not knowing them.

If you have good fortune, pay it forward. When you deal with others, know there's little to be gained from being a dick. When you reach a goal, start formulating the next one, pushing yourself even harder than you did before. Most of all, don't let yourself become too satisfied with whatever you accomplish.

Thank you all for six great years. There's still much more work to do.

Hear me discuss Amazon Studios on the Broken Projector podcast

I really should have linked to this sooner considering that posts about Amazon Studios tend to be among my most-viewed.  This week, I had the honor of being the guest on Scott Beggs and Geoff LaTulippe's podcast Broken Projector.  Screenwriter Justin Marks also joined the conversation as we weighed the pros and cons of Amazon Studios' new venture into producing 14 pilots and then crowdsourcing the development of those pilots.

You can find the embedded post here.

You can download it directly here.

You can subscribe via iTunes here.

Broken Projector is one of my favorite podcasts, so it was a great pleasure to be invited on the show.  If you love movies, this is a podcast you need to be listening to every week.  As a bonus, you now know the proper "voice" to hear in your head as you read Geoff LaTulippe's tweets.