2011 Go Into The Story Screenwriters Roundtable

A conversation with Chris Borrelli, F. Scott Frazier, Jeremiah Friedman, Nick Palmer, Justin Rhodes, Greg Russo, John Swetnam

As something of an elder member of the screenwriting community, one of the wonderful experiences I have had since I started the blog is to get to know dozens of young writers. Not necessarily young in terms of their age, but rather their zeal for the craft and their brazenness in how they approach storytelling. There is a kind of fearlessness in evidence among this group, along with obvious talent, and I find their words, both in conversation and in their scripts, uplifting and inspiring.

In 2011, I gathered seven of these writers in a virtual roundtable. In the two previous years, collectively they had sold 12 spec scripts.

Chris Borrelli: “The Vatican Tapes” [Black List 2009], “Wake”, “Sad Jack”.

F. Scott Frazier: “The Numbers Station”, “Line of Sight” [Black List 2011], “Autobahn”, and a fourth project as yet unannounced.

Jeremiah Friedman & Nick Palmer: “Family Getaway” [Black List 2010].

Justin Rhodes: “Second Sun”.

Greg Russo: “Down”, “Autobahn”.

John Swetnam: “Evidence”, “Category Six”.

Our conversation covered many topics and is a unique opportunity to learn what it’s like to go from aspiring to professional screenwriter. Beyond their insights into the craft, I’m sure you will be inspired by their passion for what they do, their love of movies, and just in general how much fun they are.

SM: I thought let’s start off with a reality check. As recently as one or two years ago for most of you, you were on the outside of the business looking in. Are there times today, like when you drive onto the studio lot for a meeting or you’re sitting with a director on a project where you say to yourself “My God, is this really happening?”

Scott: Yeah, I mean for me it’s almost sort of something that’s completely unreal. Almost on a day-by-day basis. John Swetnam and I were getting beers a couple weeks ago and we were just like… we promised we would hit one another if either one of us ever got out of the position of thinking that this wasn’t cool anymore.

Nick: It’s all like incredibly surreal. The thing that I’m surprised by is how quickly you start to… it all feels very strange, but you still find yourself bitching and then when you start bitching you go, “What the hell’s wrong with me?” Like we’ll complain about trying to find parking on a lot and stuff like that, and it’s like wait a minute. This is ridiculous.

Scott: Although I will say that people who don’t validate, I mean come on.

Greg: Yeah, that’s annoying.

Jeremiah: CAA is a nightmare.

[Laughter]

SM: That’s so funny. I mean, put yourself back two years ago and think “Oh my God, I’ve been complaining about parking?”

John: Just to reiterate what Scott [Frazier] said. In my last year, I’ve had a thousand moments that have just kind of given me goosebumps. And the thing is, I feel like this generation, we know how hard it was to get here, that in the next thousand of these moments, I want it to feel exactly the same as it did the first time. You know what I mean? Because it’s literally every day I try to be grateful for the position that we got put in to. So it’s something that I think about all the time and we just can never forget how lucky… I mean, I’m not as talented as Scott is, so I just got lucky and I’m very very happy about that.

Scott: I have no comment on that.

[Laughter]

Greg: You know, I think everyone’s got that moment that they can point to where it’s kind of an out-of-body experience. And I remember the one that I had, my first time pitching to a studio, I got very lucky because I got to work with a really talented writer at the same time, Chris Morgan [Wanted, Fast Five]. And I remember this moment where I got invited in to sit with Chris and Michael Bay’s people. I’d written two little movies and I kept having to pinch myself so I’d know where the hell I was and how I got here. I was such a fan of the action films these guys had made over the years. It’s little moments like that that make all the other difficult moments worth it.

Chris: I’ve been in the business a little longer than a lot of you guys and I was in physical production, then I was in development, each of those about four or five years. But I’d only been in the business a little while and I got used to conversations on a set where a producer’s yelling into the phone “No, I need the tarantula for Tuesday! Just Tuesday, not the whole week!“ And that’s almost like every day in the physical world of making a movie which I always think is kind of like planning a wedding reception every day. Every single time you try to shoot something or accomplish something, it’s so complicated. But I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for everything, I’m grateful for what we get to do, that we get to use our imaginations and Lord knows, I’d be bad at about every other possible job. I find it exciting and when things do get frustrating I try to remember how lucky I am. And there’s almost no better job in the world than what we’re doing.

SM: I broke into the business in 1987 and I sold a spec script like you guys have, and I still remember the very first piece of advice I got from my agent. He told me “Always be nice to the assistants because some day, they’ll be the people hiring you.” And I was wondering, have you guys gotten any advice like that?

Chris: Let me just mention that yesterday I had a meeting with a DOD who was my last agent’s assistant. And I was nice to him and he’s doing real well now and this was just yesterday. So I think it goes for everybody, being nice as possible to everybody that you can be. I’m not one of those guys who believes in karma necessarily, but I believe that there’s a sort of logical version of it, where if you’re a real prick to people, it does come back to you. And the reverse is also true. So I think that’s great advice.

John: I got a piece of advice sort of like that, but mine wasn’t in a meeting. I was at a party and a friend of mine who was like a young executive told me to be careful how much I drink when you’re at these parties. I remember I went to this first party and there’s all these good-looking actresses and I’m like where the hell am I and this is amazing and I got completely wasted… I was like dancing on a table, just being completely ridiculous…

Chris: I want to party with you!

[Laughter]

John: I’ve heard it forever. Now I’ve learned how to wait until the after-party to sort of let loose. The first party’s always like have four or five drinks then get the hell out of there and hit the real party.

Nick: Right, the real lesson: You should not drink, you should just do cocaine.

[Laughter]

John: Exactly.

Chris: Or wait for the after-party.

[Laughter]

SM: Any other words of wisdom you’ve discovered in your stint as Hollywood screenwriters?

John: The biggest pieces of advice I ever got, when I first came to town I started out as an intern at a production company at Outlaw Productions for a guy named Bobby Newmeyer. He produced Training Day and The Santa Clause movies. It was all these guys that I met there interning and I knew I wanted to be in the business, but I didn’t know what kind of writing I wanted to do so I was, at the time, writing. They were doing these big concept comedies so I started writing big concept comedies. I totally realized I was not funny, but what I learned from that experience was, it was one the guys, one of the VPs told me that it always starts with the concept. That’s the one thing I always tell people every time someone asks me about… I just had a conversation today with a guy where he wanted advice about his script and that’s all I keep telling him. It’s just so important to start with the right concept and think as much as you can about that concept before you start writing. Bobby used to say it was all about the idea and I’ve never let that go because I feel like that’s so true.

SM: Yeah, I knew Bobby. Outlaw optioned a script we wrote and we worked up a pitch on another project with them. Bobby was a terrific guy…

John: He was. I was actually working there when he passed away…

SM: It was up in Toronto…

John: Yeah, it was crazy. We were actually working on a script together and I was still going to the office and I’m still friends with… I actually just had dinner with the VP of Outlaw a couple nights ago. Bobby was a great guy and I just remember him always talking about the importance of the idea.

SM: I think that’s a good example. The script for The Santa Clause had been passed on by everybody and Outlaw — because Bobby thought the core concept was a great one — optioned it, reworked it, then the movie became this hit and a big franchise. Let’s stick with that as long as we brought it up. How important is it to you, that core idea, the story concept?

Greg: I just want to agree with John and say that the idea really is everything. It’s the beginning of everything we do, everything follows that idea. I can’t tell you how many ideas I throw out on a daily basis just trying to find that one. It’s hard. To me, I think that’s the hardest part of doing this. Finding the idea.

Jeremiah: Yeah, building off that, at least for me and Nick, it’s a lot of times about, we’ll get a nugget of something but it’s finding the version of that idea, that really works for us, and that you can build a movie on. Everyone around Hollywood talks about how they want something kind of new and original, which they do, but they also want something not too original, it needs to feel somewhat familiar so they can wrap their heads around it. Finding a way to strike that balance and find the new way of doing something, that’s what we’re always kind of struggling with. And something that can sustain a whole movie. We’re just actually ended up jumping off a project because we just couldn’t make it work in the end. We weren’t excited to write it.

Nick: Yeah, and we’d spent several months on it and it was something where we’d heard the origin… this was not our original idea, this was someone else’s, but it was some people we were excited to work with, so we… even though the initial concept, we were kind of like “That seems interesting… we could make something of that,” but it didn’t really excite us. So we spent months on this thing, developing it and finally just this week realized the concept doesn’t work for us, even though we want to work with the people involved, so we just finally jumped off of it.

Scott: I had a similar experience this summer where I was working on a project, again with a company I wanted to be in business with and one of their creative guys had an idea. Initially I was like that’s a cool idea. I didn’t do the due diligence on it, I just kind of jumped right into it, and I finished a draft of the script, like 120 pages, and it’s the best possible version of that movie you can have. But an almost fundamental level you can tell the idea and the concept was flawed and no matter how good I execute the script, it’s still never going to be a movie. It’s not ever going to get to that stage unless there’s a serious re-working of the core concept.

John: I think that’s really interesting because, what you just said where, what I’ve found also is that like there’s a lot of people who can make a living writing scripts. Like you can take a shitty idea and execute it and create a 110 pages of stuff. But I don’t want to write scripts, I want to make movies. So there’s a difference between writing a screenplay and writing something that is a movie. And I think people really have to think about that, especially in the spec stage. It’s like, you want to… unless, again, some people can write great samples, but they can never be a movie… I want to write something that is a movie, that can sustain 120 minutes on the screen.

Scott: I would totally agree. Like if someone gave me the choice between the best 120 page script that would get all these accolades and writing a 100 page movie? I would opt for the movie 100% of the time. I mean, to me, when I’m reading spec scripts, the ones that always stand out to me are the ones that are written like a movie. Like the edits are written in, like just reading the prose of the script, I can literally imagine the movie, in my mind’s eye I can see every edit, I can see every shot, I know what the movie looks like… I mean to me, that’s super important. And those are usually the specs I end up reading all the way to the end. As opposed to stopping at 30 or 40 pages and saying, “Ok, I get it.”

Jeremiah: For us, when people are asking us for advice in terms of when we have friends or people come to us for advice in terms of how to write a spec that sells. Obviously there’s no answer to that really, but we do talk about finding that idea, about the execution, but also thinking about those things that make a script a movie. I think Scott, on the blog, you had something from Ron Shelton the other day, just talking about what movie stars want to play. And writing a role that’s going to attract an actor. Because nothing’s going to happen with the script unless an actor attaches. Thinking about those kind of larger picture type things I think is important.

Chris: One more thing that I’d like to add to this whole idea we’re talking about here, we always think of us as the writer, and of course the movie, which is sort of step Z, we’re step A. You have to think about the exec who gets excited by reading your spec and then has to go pitch it to their boss. And if you have a high concept, great idea that he or she can say in one or two sentences, it makes their job easier. It’s going to make the agent’s job easier when you’re attach a director, when you’re trying to attach an actor. And honestly, step Z, people deciding what to see that week at the movies, they always say “What’s it about?” That’s always the question that gets asked. If it’s a great, simple, clean concept, something you can say that quickly, it works for everybody. So it’s really really important… the idea, a clean idea, and if it’s not, it really is just to me a good writing sample. And I feel I’ve written enough of those. I want to write things that get bought and get made.

Right off the bat with this interview, a huge piece of takeaway: The importance of the story concept. It’s got to be better than good, it’s got to feel like a movie.

If you have a decent story idea, but it doesn’t feel like a movie, instead of jumping into writing that script, why not take some time, generate a bunch more story concepts, and see if in that process you can nail a great one? Then write that one. You stand an exponentially better chance of finding representation and selling a script if it has a killer story concept at its core.

Each day for this series, I’m going to highlight one of the participating writers. Today: Chris Borrelli.

Chris Borrelli has two features in post-production. The Vatican Tapes [Black List script] will be released theatrically on February 27, 2015, and the thriller Eloise, which wrapped shooting in June 2014.

Another spec, Wake, is going into pre-production with a start date in January 2015. Two other specs, Rounds and Sad Jack, are currently under option with the latter having been re-sold to a new financier this month.

In the past, Chis wrote the Universal / Gold Circle horror thriller Whisper and co-wrote the Fox / WWE action film The Marine 2. Other credits include the remake of Bad Influence for MGM, the French horror film ILS (“Them”) for Gold Circle, the live-action series Necessary Evil for the Cartoon Network, “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” based on the Joe Hill short story of the same name for Mandalay, and a blind deal at Focus / Rogue.

John Swetnam: It’s just so important to start with the right concept and think as much as you can about that concept before you start writing.

SM: How do you know when you have one of those great story concepts? Somebody like Justin, you wrote “Second Sun”, sold that to Warner Brothers. Did you know, immediately when you hit on that idea, it was a great concept, had the potential to be a movie?

Justin: My idea drawer is filled with hundreds of half thought out things that are terrible and suck and should never be made into anything. The ideas that end up being good are the ones that I keep looking at and they stay in my list of candidates for “Maybe this is a good idea.” If after six months of looking at my list of what I think are my best ideas and it’s still on the list? That’s kind of when it starts to survive. So for me the litmus test is just that it still sounds good after a long period of time. Because most of the ideas that I get really excited about, two weeks later I see why it shouldn’t be a film.

John: I think the first spec that you sell, that idea is probably the hardest one to judge, but once you get that one out of the way and you’re really entrenched in the town, taking meetings, and you start to get a real pulse of what people respond to, what people are looking for, that’s when it becomes a little easier. I’ll pitch a few little things to people and I can tell now a lot better what makes a movie, just because I’ve sat in rooms with so many people and have taken their pulse.

SM: John, is that an intuitive thing at this point or are there actual schematics or elements that you’ve learned over time where you feel like, oh, that makes this a good idea, that makes this a bad idea.

John: I’ve learned a lot of stuff. I worked in film marketing, so there are those kinds of things that I think about. I try to think as a producer and a studio executive in those ways, but at a certain point it does become instinct. And I think what I told you that one time… and this is my litmus test… can you honestly see your movie opening this weekend on three thousand screens? If you can answer that completely honestly and then be able to flesh that out into, what does that mean in terms of a poster, a trailer, an actor, if you can honestly believe that and see it in your head, at a certain point you just have to trust yourself. If you really can see that, then I feel like that’s when I have something. When I can just imagine it going to play at the Arclight on Friday and seeing my poster, and being there when the movie starts. That’s sort of how I test my own ideas, anyway.

Scott: For me, the idea of self-honesty is really interesting and it’s one of these things that no one really talks about. You learn how to compose a scene and you learn how to write dialogue and put together character arcs, but this idea of being actually honest with ourselves about what works and what doesn’t from the macro all the way down to the micro I think is one of those tools that separates the people who sell stuff versus the people who don’t. You have to be honest with yourself, you have to maintain that objectivity. Not in the middle of writing the script, but definitely before and afterwards, like John’s saying, you have to be able to honestly say to yourself, can I see this up on a big screen. Do I see this playing in a movie theater in Los Angeles and Arkansas and New York?

SM: Chris, you have an interesting background because you actually worked in development and so this idea of whether a concept is good or not, whether it feels like a movie… does that fit with your approach of assessing story concepts as well?

Chris: When I was a buyer for four years, or a DOD or whatever, I read two scripts a day or more and it definitely helped to do that much reading. Now, I am hopefully very self-honest as well. I think Frazier made a really good point just then. When you hand something to someone to read, a friend of yours, you’re getting feedback, or even when a spec is sent out, if someone doesn’t respond to it, it’s not that you’re not a good writer, it’s that they didn’t respond to the emotion of it. It’s nothing personal. And the best thing you can do beforehand is to try and be that hard on yourself. I think the same way as these guys do. The one word for me is emotion. What’s the emotional reaction I’m going for, what do I want the audience to feel? I’ve done horror, I’ve done action, and there are plenty of genres I stay away from, but whatever that genre is, does it deliver within that genre? Does it give people what they want, maybe not in the most expected way, which is the sign of a really good film I feel, but it’s been helpful just to see it from different angles.

SM: I recently did an interview with Mary Coleman, who is the head of the story department at Pixar. And she said something, Chris, very much like what you’re saying. She said they literally will go in and pitch three ideas to John Lasseter [Chief Creative Officer, Pixar]. Everybody on the creative team is expected to deliver three ideas to John on a semi-regular basis and he’ll piece out whether they work or not, but that’s one of the first criteria: What is the point of emotional connection that the audience is going to find with this story? Do the rest of you feel that’s as important when you’re sourcing through your ideas that you’re either going to work an assignment or you’re going to pitch or you’re going to spec?

Greg: For me, it really comes down to being a fan of these kinds of films. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m a fan of the genre I write in. I try to watch everything, have been for years, so I know what’s out there and I kind of have a taste for what excites me. So I rely on my own knowledge and enthusiasm for the genre that I write in. And hope that when I come up with an idea or someone brings me an idea that I can honestly say, you know what, that’s something I haven’t seen before, which would hopefully be something that you — the collective you, the audience you — hasn’t seen before either. And that excites me.

SM: So it’s like you’re making a translation. If I get excited about this, I’m passionate about this, then there’s a good chance the audience, they’ll be excited about it.

Greg: Absolutely. Hopefully, they can see it from the page to the screen. Again, there are so many targets you have to hit. It’s not just will it play in a movie or can you see your poster, it’s also would I want to buy a ticket if I was going. At the end of the day, I need to be excited about the idea enough to sit there and write the script, to spend weeks with these characters and their story. I think that’s one of the biggest tricks. You’ve got to be excited or else you’re wasting your time. And it’s going to affect everything, including the finished film.

Justin: Going back to this idea of emotion, I might even break concept down as something that has two component parts: the idea, or the conceptual… oh, it’s a bus, it gets attacked or something, the plot side… then the emotional POV or the emotional window into it. And those can be different and divorced and sometimes remarried and you can find different points of view back into it. Do you want to do War of the Worlds from the point of view of the soldiers, or is it War of the Worlds from the point of view of the guy on the ground? You have the concept and the emotional window into it, which to me are discrete entities, but usually it’s the second one that invigorates the first one because the first one is generally more generic.

Scott: I would agree. I’m in the middle of working on a spec and I got the first draft done and the plot and the emotion, they were not tying together very well. And it was one of these things where I knew what was going on, so much so that while I have the plot, the throughlines, for my rewrite, it’s completely changing up the entire core concept of who the main character is and what he’s going through. And it’s not like you can suddenly mash the two together, it’s that in the first draft I was literally missing the whole point of the movie myself, and in going back and rewriting it, I’ve been able to find it again.

Justin: I might jump in to say that your particular emotional attachment to it actually is your point of view on the script. The reason this draft is going to be different because you wrote it is because of what part of it interested you specifically. So that emotional reaction in a lot of ways, I would say is everything.

Scott: I’m doing a lot of nodding my head.

John: Yeah, where’s the thumbs-up button, the like button?

Jeremiah: We agree!

[Laughter]

John: I will chime in with this, and this is just something that the more I hang out with writers and talk with writers, I think the one absolute truth is that all of us go about it in a completely different way. We probably all think about the same things at the end, but our sequencing of how we think about things is different, the way we approach story is different — is it concept first, character first — and that’s what makes it fascinating and why I think there’s always going to be room for so many different writers. I’ve sat down with some of you guys and we’re so different in the way we approach it, and that’s what will give us room to have careers because everyone has their own voice or their own sort of thing that they do well. That’s a good thing. I struggle with character a lot, I struggle with really trying to find that emotion. But then I can have Justin rewrite me and that’d be fine, and just sell the concept.

F. Scott Frazier: You learn how to compose a scene and you learn how to write dialogue and put together character arcs, but this idea of being actually honest with ourselves about what works and what doesn’t from the macro all the way down to the micro I think is one of those tools that separates the people who sell stuff versus the people who don’t.

Scott: For me, it’s one of these things where you don’t really teach… I’m not a big fan of screenwriting books because you read them and they tell you what your process should be. And I think that figuring out your own processes is one of the cornerstones of turning this into a career… and actually learning what you personally need to do to get a script from page 1 to page 110. It’s different for every single person, so when you read one of these books that tells you have to hit an act break at 28, 58, and there has to be a whammo and all this junk, you lose your own sense of process and you start writing for I don’t know who. You completely miss the boat of what it means to write.

John: I agree with that. Because it’s your specific process that will end up helping accentuate your own voice, so I think it’s important to have your own process and embrace it and not try to pick up somebody else’s process or some book’s process, like Scott’s saying.

Chris: Right. I would say that if you look at great directors like Scorsese and Tarantino, there are directing rules, right? Don’t break the 180 degree rule, don’t break other rules. They break them because they know the rules already. So it’s good to know all the processes first. You have to do your own thing though. This is just a theory of mine but in the next few years, I think we’re going to stop getting so close to this act structure of page 75, this happens, page 90, this happens. And I think it’s going to come from movie-goers, not from people in our business. This is just one of my crack-pot theories, but the reason is I don’t think I can see any more romantic comedies where Act III winds up with someone professing their love to someone else in a train station or an airport. And I don’t think I can see too many more action movies where the coach type of character dies end of Act II, or the best friend. I think it just gets a little bit old. So I think we’re going to start seeing a little bit of change in the process itself.

Scott: And you almost are starting to see it already. The Paranormal Activity movies basically don’t have a typical act structure. Almost at all. I guess you could go in and figure out… but it’s not immediately apparent.

Jeremiah: Right. It’s hidden. So I think the process will keep developing. Hopefully.

SM: There’s a question from one of my blog readers that dovetails into this. “As a professional writer, did you ever want to kill a professional reader? Meant to be funny but seriously, the inexperience of some of these kids who read and the checklist, predominantly Save the Cat mentality that so many specs these days are being funneled through in my humble opinion is a problem. It’s a one size fits all approach that audiences are tired of. Or at least the people I talk to are, and some of these folks were huge movie buffs four or five years ago. So again, as a writer, did you ever want to kill a reader?”

Scott: I actually think the readers are unfairly put upon, and just in my complete anecdotal experience, to me it always seems like, if the script is bad, but they’re trying to be nice. They come back with these Save the Cat, Syd Field kind of beats with what’s wrong with the script. This is what’s wrong with the script! Because you didn’t have your end act point on page 30. But if a script is great, I don’t think they care about that sort of thing.

Chris: I’ll tell you, building off of what Scott said. First off, short answer: yes, I have. And there is a bitterness that comes to people who read and read and read, and think that they can do a better script and they get mad when scripts sell, and they think their scripts are better than that. But that said, if you got asked in life why you don’t like something, you kept getting asked this about all these different things, at some point, you run out of things to say. Sometimes you just don’t like things. And these readers are doing at least two scripts a day and they didn’t like your script and they have to give a reason to fill out their three or four page coverage, sometimes they just go to templates or some basic things. So I don’t read too much into reasons why people pass unless I hear it over and over again. Because sometimes — and I’ve been on the other side of the desk — you have to say something, but a lot of times you just don’t connect to it.

Justin Rhodes: My idea drawer is filled with hundreds of half thought out things that are terrible and suck and should never be made into anything. The ideas that end up being good are the ones that I keep looking at and they stay in my list of candidates for “Maybe this is a good idea.”

Scott: And I think not connecting to it goes right back to that emotion we were just talking about.

John: A lot of these readers, though, they work for somebody, and they’re also filtering their own opinion through the opinion of the person they’re working for. So they know their boss’s sensibility and to me, that’s really their job. To know what their boss likes. A lot of the time, they’re the first bit of the filtering process and you can’t really blame them because their boss told them to look for romantic comedies.

Greg: I’ll throw something out there to the person who asked the question, who I’m assuming is trying to break in as a screenwriter. Don’t worry so much about readers passing on your script. Be careful not to give them any easy ways to pass on your script. If they’re not going to like your concept, they’re not going to like it. Everyone’s different and everyone has their own taste. The best thing you can do is nail the things you can control: make it professional, make it read smoothly, have your beats where they should be. Probably the most important rule… don’t take it personally. It’s a hard thing to do. Screenwriting is an art form and whenever there’s a judgment of art you’re going to take it personally. This is our way of expressing our creativity and when someone says it’s wrong, well, fuck ‘em.

John: I had a script a couple of years ago that I had written that my agent at the time… I don’t know why he did this, but he slipped me the coverage that the guy wrote and it tore me to shreds. It said I might as well be a fourth grader, blind, three fingers typing… it really destroyed me. And I tried to find him because I was going to fucking kill him, but I never found the guy unfortunately. If he reads this blog, I think he was at Paramount. So tell him I’m going to find his ass.

[Laughter]

Jeremiah: It’s tricky because you have to walk that line between staying open to feedback, to criticism, to all the things that are going to make you a better writer and make the material better, but you also have to come into everything, not with an arrogance, but with a confidence in your skillset and your craft and what you’re bringing to a project. It’s a brutal job. You’re constantly writing things to give to people, whether it’s a reader, an executive, an agent or an actor, people are constantly coming back with feedback and criticism, and a lot of the time it is negative, or it is critical and you have to toughen your exterior. Take your ego out of it. Otherwise you’re going to get eaten alive by it. Because that’s what the job is: you write stuff, you turn it in, and then people tell you what they think of it. And a lot of the time it isn’t what you think of it. You can’t let it get to you.

Chris: When I was on the other side of the desk there, I was writing on the side and I had a coverage woman I’d pay to do coverage of my scripts for my company. But I slipped her one of mine, actually a couple. And she liked the first two, and I didn’t put my name on them, and the third one I slipped her, she called me up before she sent the coverage: “I really hated this one. I know you’ve been sending mostly good stuff…” And I had to sit there on the phone with her and pretend that it was someone else who did the script. I did a lot of nodding on the phone, like a glazed over look, but yeah. That was extra painful. After that, I can pretty much take anything and not have to change my name like I did back then.

Scott: Another anecdote: The script I used to get representation went out and I had a friend of a friend get coverage at CAA. This was before I knew anyone in town. The friend of the friend sent me the coverage and it was the worst coverage ever. They basically said that the script was confusing and that it made no sense and it stung me. Three weeks later, without changing a single word in that script, I got a manager, I got an agent, and we sold it four months later. So again, it is just somebody’s opinion.

Greg: Here’s an anecdote that’s always stuck with me. A buddy of mine, great writer, Scott Neustadter who wrote (500) Days of Summer. He took his script to an agency meeting and the agent took the actual draft — you’ve seen the film so you know it’s written in a very stylistic and very interesting way — this agent took the script and walked to the other side of the room and held it up. Showed it to Scott, his own script, and said “Come back when you figure out how to write one of these.” That was his first meeting with an agent. The lesson? Everyone gets shit on when they first start.

SM: That is really low. And it raises a question: How do you incorporate a bad note into a screenplay? If you can’t ignore it, how do you handle that situation?

Greg: That’s a hard question.

Scott: Heavy drinking.

[Laughter]

Jeremiah: I think you have a responsibility, if you can, to fight the note. Not in an antagonistic way, but we always try to… we think you’re paying us to do a service. So if we think the note is bad, we will express that and tell you why we think the note doesn’t serve the script.

Nick: We found that this has worked for us on a number of really bad notes we’ve gotten that we’ve ended up convincing the execs around. If you’re very clear about why it doesn’t work and you offer a few other alternatives, then usually we’ve been able to diffuse most of the really bad notes. There are some notes you get that you have to just make the best of it, which there’s no one way, there’s no secret to dealing with that. You just find your own way into it and accept the fact that you have to take the script in a different direction than you’d like, but you find the best version of that script.

Greg: I’ll just say this: Pick your battles. You’re going to get a lot of notes and there are going to be some that are more damaging or hurtful or some that piss you off more… fight for the stuff you think you can get and then give in on everything else.

Chris: And in a more subtle way than just a straight bad note, sometimes if you get a bad suggestion, which is slightly different than a bad note, or a note they want you to do, sometimes you can look at the root of why they feel that way and come up with a different solution. The exec could even be correct in what is “wrong” with the script, but their solution is wrong. You mentioned a service they pay us for: It is important to not just be a note-taker. Not be someone who just goes and gives them back exactly what they want. We’re supposed to add our creativity to it. But again, sometimes you’re just screwed.

Jeremiah: Yeah, they’re recognizing something that doesn’t work, they’re just misdiagnosing it. They say they want more action in the second act, but it’s not really about more action in the second act. It’s about something else and it’s your job, using your knowledge of the mechanics and about how to actually make a story work, what’s not clicking together for them. Because you do ultimately want it to work for them. You want the project to go forward, you want it to move to the next level, whatever that is.

SM: It’s an interesting little dance we do. Greg, what you said: Pick your battles. I’ve heard that quite a bit over the years. You do an assessment of what the important ones are and sometimes you’ll fight for the ones that are more important, then give in on some of the ones that are less important.

Greg: But really enthusiastically give in on those lesser ones. “You don’t want his eye color to be blue? Awesome!”

Nick Palmer: If you’re very clear about why it doesn’t work and you offer a few other alternatives, then usually we’ve been able to diffuse most of the really bad notes.

SM: That gets into the whole area where you’re trying to give them [producers, studio executives, directors] some ownership over the project or the story, right?

Scott: You absolutely have to. Here’s the thing: My dad was a TV writer and he gave me advice as I was getting into the business over the last couple of years. And one of the things that he would always tell me, having spent time on TV shows and sets for two decades, is that it’s a collaborative process. There are gaffers and grips and catering people: This is their livelihood, right? They want to be a part of the process. They don’t just want to come in and service a movie, they want to actually be a part of it. And that goes from executives to directors, too. As much as we start a process, we just start with a blueprint. And being able to hand that blueprint over to other people, and being okay handing it over to other people, and then saying okay, now you add to it. Nobody sets out to make a bad movie. Nobody sets out to collaborate on getting bad ideas into a movie. It’s one of those things that you have to be okay with. It’s a shared vision. Unless you’re a guy like Quentin Tarantino who gets to write and direct and edit, it’s a collaborative medium. We have to share.

Justin: Something that I would add, one of the areas that you do have control over is who you get into bed with. So if you’re worried about getting bad notes or a bad collaborative experience or them having ownership over something, it’s kind of “Don’t make a baby with a woman you don’t want to live with.” That’s my perspective on this. If you’re going to sell a screenplay, you don’t have to sell it to the first guy who asks if you don’t want to. Or you go to a meeting and you don’t think you guys are going to gel.

John: My problem is that they give me money, I’ll just sleep with anybody.

[Laughter]

SM: Let’s talk about that now because it’s a big difference now you’re all established and in the business. You’ve got representation, you’ve all been working with some top agents and managers. How much help are they in that regard, in terms of interpreting those types of people that you may or may not want to work with? Just in general, what’s your working relationship? What do you expect from your agents and managers and what do they expect from you?

Scott: They expect us to write, that’s what they want from us. They want us writing scripts, they want us writing movies. I always say that the currency of the screenwriter is a completed script. Very few people are going to pay you for beat sheet or an outline or an idea: It’s a completed script. That’s what I bring to the table for them and I expect advice about navigating the tricky waters of Hollywood. And I take their counsel seriously. I wouldn’t be repped by them if I didn’t respect and appreciate their counsel.

Jeremiah: Yeah, we’ve had some friends who’ve had less fortunate experiences with representation than we’ve had once we ultimately signed, and I think for us we expect honesty above all else. That when we give them material and we ask for their opinion or we ask about a meeting or an executive we want to have a truthful conversation about that stuff. We try and work as much as we can as full partners. I think there’s a lot of preconceptions about what agents are going to be like, but if you can find your way to relationships that feel like a partnership…

Nick: Yeah, feel like a partnership and that you can turn into a partnership and think of it as a team effort, then it can be incredibly beneficial.

Greg: Your agent, your manager… They’re your eyes and ears. They’re out there laying down covering fire while you’re down in the shit. They’re out there scouting what’s ahead of you trying to find the best way to get you through. It really has to be that team or else you’re going to get killed down there. I’ve been thoroughly impressed by that with my team and I love when they come back and say that they’ve got all this research on a project and who’s going in and this is where they’re going to position me. That’s what you need cause you can’t be worried about that. Your job is to just go in there and kick ass when you get the chance.

John: For me, I had been through a couple different managers and agents over the last few years, and after going through the process with a lot of different people… and they were all really good people, they were all really good friends and partners in a lot of ways… but what I wanted for me now was I wanted to talk about my career. My future. It always seemed to be about the spec you have. When you get your first manager or first agent with that spec, a lot of the talk is about the strategy of that particular spec. And what I want to talk about is where am I going to be in ten years. How do we get there? What do I need to start doing now in order to become the guy I want to be in five years? And when I met my guys, I had a meeting with a bunch of different people, and that was the reason why I signed with them. Because I went into the day and said, “Loo, this is where I want to be.” And it wasn’t just… I’m pretty arrogant, as Scott can probably tell you, but I have these huge goals, and I wanted these guys to believe in those goals and that they actually had a plan to help me get to that place that I wanted to get to. So it’s about thinking about the future and planning ahead, because this business is way too hard for just right now. All of us want to be doing this conversation in five years. That’s the important part to me… longevity.

SM: I want to jump to something that I think Scott said, basically that the stock and trade for a screenwriter is a completed script. I think there’s something going on with you guys. I’ve been around 25 years now and I’ve tracked the spec script market every year since then. And there’s something going on that’s different. Now. With this group of people. It used to be that Joe Eszterhaus would come along and he’d actually sell two or three specs or what not, but by-and-large what happened, the paradigm was you’d use a spec to break in, then you’d go after writing assignments and pitches and the rest of it. And very rarely would working writers come out with spec scripts. It happened, but not that often. You guys, some of you in particular, you seem to be going back to that. That is your stock and trade in a way: You keep going back to these spec scripts. So I’m curious, is that strategy? Is that driven by your desire to get that story written? What’s going on there where you’re going back and putting spec scripts out on the market, even though you’re well-established in the business.

Chris: For me, I found it was a trap early on, where I was creating documents. I had a script, but I was just creating documents for execs, and a year went by and what had I created? What had I added? And thinking again, not from our point of view as writers, but thinking from the point of view of buyers, and people who make money off the buyers — agents, managers, etcetera — our real value is to create story, to create scripts. There’s a saying in business — nothing to do with film — don’t look for a job, create a job. So I don’t ever plan to stop writing specs. I’d love to do two a year, if I get really busy, maybe less. Maybe I can do more. I’m no Frazier, I can’t do seventeen specs a year, but I can do some. I think that’s our value: always be creating. And another thing about a spec is that it’s a wonderful advertisement for you. It’s the best commercial you can do for your career. It goes out to a hundred people who read it, and they may not need it/want it/like it, but hopefully they like it enough that you’re on their radar even stronger than you were before. I’m a big fan of it. And I also believe… I call it brick-laying. I’m never happier career-wise than when I finish writing five pages a day. And that movie, whatever it is, feels closer to me. It’s not just a document. It feels somewhat real. I’m a big fan, I don’t ever plan to stop writing specs.

Scott: For me, I went out on a lot of assignments this year and it’s not like it was a choice to only do specs, but I’ve gotten sent out on a bunch of assignments, and I’ve gotten close, but they’ve never materialized. But I have sold two specs this year, and I sold two last year, and so I’m being successful in that. It’s what I’ve kind of gotten used to. And if I wake up every morning and I’m not writing, I feel off, I feel weird. So if there’s nothing else to be working on, I might as well be writing my own thing…

Chris: — that you love –

Scott: — exactly, that I love to do. That I’m fortunate enough to be able to do.

John: Yeah, I only wrote my last spec because I was tired of Frazier fucking selling so many, and I had to keep up so I had to go write another one. I was just going to sit around and do nothing and drink but… thanks, Frazier.

Scott: I’ll tell you a funny story about that. The first time Swetnam and I ever met, it was the middle of the summer and I’d been doing a lot of assignment after assignment, where I was putting together documents, beat sheets, all this crap. And I hadn’t written an original page in probably two-and-a-half months and it was getting to me. I was literally like physically itchy. I needed to write. So Swetnam and I go out to get a burger, and it was three days before his movie Evidence started shooting, and he was telling me about how awesome it was, and they were building sets out in Valencia, and they were about to shoot a movie. And I was like, son of a bitch. I need to write a movie. So I went home — and this is no joke — and I was so pissed at Swetnam for getting this movie made, and I’m thinking, what is a movie that I could write really quickly? And I had three or four ideas that I’d had sitting on the back-burner, and one of them was a contained thriller. And I went home that night after burgers with John Swetnam and I sat down and wrote the first draft of Autobahn in like ten hours. Because of John Swetnam.

John: Where’s my fucking ten percent, dude?

[Laughter]

Scott: So, I don’t know. We push each other.

John: Then I went and wrote Category Six because he pissed me off writing a script in ten hours, I wrote mine in four days and I was really pissed. So I just wrote one last week in a weekend, so fuck you, Frazier.

Chris Borrelli: There’s a saying in business — nothing to do with film — don’t look for a job, create a job. So I don’t ever plan to stop writing specs.

SM: Greg, you sold a second spec after you landed some assignments, right?

Greg: That was a spec that I’d written a year ago and had gotten a lot of good feedback on it, and it had bounced around. It was really stressful until we finally found the right shop for it… after changing the title and also calling it Autobahn. By the way, I think everyone here should write a script called Autobahn. There’d be seven in development, it would be amazing.

[Laughter]

SM: Jeremiah and Nick, I know you are working on The Bodyguard, but do you have an interest in continuing to write specs down the road?

Nick: Yeah, we’re developing one pitch with a company and after that, we’re really excited to get going on another spec idea. Kind of because it’s so different from an assignment. It’s really exciting for us to sit down and write something that’s completely our own idea and it’s just the two of us sitting together working it out, as opposed to all the red tape you’ve got to walk through or all the people you have to deal with for assignments.

Jeremiah: All the hoops you have to go through.

Nick: Yeah, and going to the producers and pitching for six months to try and win them over for your take on something. It’s more fun just to write the script.

John: And there’s something really exciting about spec scripts. You’re rolling the dice and you’re working for free, fifteen hours a day, and the coffee and the cigarettes, and you have no idea what’s going to happen. And you could spend three or four or six months on this spec and nothing happens. But the reward of selling a spec is just so amazing. It’s worth it. Every day, it excites me. There’s so much potential and possibility. Whereas with the assignment game, once you’ve got the assignment, for me it just starts to feel like work. I got in this business so I didn’t have to work. That’s why I like the specs for myself, they’re just more exciting.

Scott: I’m actually worried that Swetnam and I may have a physical addiction to selling specs. We talk a little bit about it like it’s heroin.

SM: It’s like you guys are the Lennon and McCartney of the spec world. John Lennon would go away and write a song and then the next day, McCartney would show up with another song…

John: There’s something fun about this whole thing. Me and Frazier aren’t sleeping together, I promise, but what we both get is that this is exciting. And I want to keep it that way, I don’t want it to feel like too much of a 9-to-5 job, that I’m working for somebody else and all the deadlines. Obviously, that’s part of the game, but I feel like this is such an amazing opportunity for all of us, and it’s just too much fun to not play the game and enjoy it, and see what we can do. Because we are the ones that are going to pave the future and, hopefully — like I said — five years from now, we can look back at this and say that we changed the way the spec game was. And we changed the kind of movies that were written. We have the potential to do that and it’s fun to think about that.

Greg Russo: You should be online every day reading the trades. I still do. I go on and see what went down that day, what got set up. Because if I don’t know what’s selling, then how am I going to try and do it myself?

SM: That’s my larger point, that you guys are perhaps doing that. Not to say you’re the exclusive reason why the spec market has rebounded the way it has this year… another spec sold today, so by my count we’re at 108. Essentially, if two more specs sell, it will be a 100 percent increase in spec sales from last year, which is extraordinary. What I’m hearing here is a real respect for the spec script, a passion for it, and I see it in your pages and your concepts. They’re fresh takes on interesting ideas that maybe are reinvigorating this whole development world in terms of the spec. Do you feel like there’s something going on in the spec script market right now? It’s widening out, it’s bubbling up, it’s coming to life.

John: I do. I think a lot of it — and I could be completely wrong — there are so many smaller buyers out there, there are so many people who are trying to make movies. I don’t know what the numbers of big studio sales are and if those have gone up, but there are a lot of people out there that want to make movies. So sometimes, you can write for those smaller companies. When I sold Evidence, I never thought that was going to be a studio movie. I wrote it because I was going to make it for fifty thousand dollars, but it was finding a company that said, okay, we’ll go ahead and make this movie. And I think there are a lot of those companies out there and you can target your specs to some of these smaller companies that are actually going to make your movie instead of going to a studio that’s going to sit on it in development for years. And sometimes when you sell it to a studio, like with Category 6, we were like we’re only going to do this if you guys are going to make this movie and now they’re going to make the movie. It’s all about the movies being made to me, it’s not just about selling a spec script. It’s about selling a spec script that’s going to get made into a movie.

Scott: For me, everything goes in cycles. And I feel like we’ve hit the end of the cycle of reboots and remakes and comic book movies, and not that I ever think those will fully go away. It’s the same way there was a glut of erotic thrillers in the late 90s, right? And now we get two a year. It’s not that movie types will ever go away, but I do think that for the last couple of years, there has been a premium on established IP. Characters that people all around the world can recognize. And I think we’re slowly moving away from that into more original territory. I think it’s cyclical.

SM: And this year, it’s interesting: for many, many years, comedy has been the number one genre in spec script sales, but this year, it’s been thrillers or action-thrillers. Any sense about why you think that might be the case? Partly, perhaps, because it is original content, but is there anything else driving that?

Scott: I’ve always heard that thrillers play better overseas than comedies because in comedies, a lot of the jokes don’t translate properly to every language. But Liam Neeson electrocuting a guy’s balls? That’s fantastic in France, Germany, Russia…

[Laughter]

SM: Justin, I wanted to get back to you. You sold a spec, I know you’re working on some secret project that’s still not yet announced. Do you feel like you might ever go back to writing specs?

Justin: I think I might be the outlier in the group. I’ve never really written a spec in terms of writing something by myself. Second Sun was developed with Scott Aversano, who’s the producer, almost from the beginning. So most of what I’ve been doing is that, and I sold two pitches earlier this year before that. Those haven’t been announced yet for a variety of reasons, so it was a weird thing. Even when we went out with Second Sun, we didn’t go out wide. They slipped it to Warner Brothers and Warner Brothers bought it that day and that was it. So I don’t know. I don’t actually have any experience writing a script just for me, on my own. I think it’s something that might be rewarding, but the two projects I have coming up right now are pitches with attachments, so I actually don’t have any plans to write a spec in the near term.

Greg: I’m going to jump in and agree with Justin. I love working on assignments. I love working with producers. I’m just a collaborative person, so I’d rather work on a project with a very smart producer or executive, or even a director, who I can work closely with to bring it home, rather than just break it by myself. The other thing I’ll say is… producers, execs… they’ve got the best ideas. They’ve got all the cool shit, they’ve got all the cool IPs. So it’s hard when I’ve got my list of ideas and I’m going, “Man, that would be interesting to work on.” And then all of a sudden some producer’s like, “Hey, you want to work on this?” And I’m like, “What the fuck, of course. Are you crazy?”

SM: All right, a few more questions if you’ve got time for them. Thinking back on all the things you did when you were prepping yourself to become a screenwriter, I’d just like to go through a list of these things really quickly and just get some quick, gut reactions, figure out how important they were in your process. Watching movies. How important is watching movies for learning how to be a screenwriter?

Chris: Huge.

John: Yes, very important. Watching movies is the easy part. At a certain point, you have to start watching movies objectively. Or more strategically. Obviously all of us have watched movies forever for just entertainment and I think we’ll continue to do that, but when I was starting, I would watch movies with the lights on with a notebook in front of me. And I’d watch them over and over and over again. So for me, that was a big part of it. Going from what’s on the screen and then trying to translate that into the page.

Scott: I do that, too. I’ll have the remote handy and I’ll click over to check the time into the movie every now and then, just to see when things are happening structurally. And I like to take notes that way.

SM: How about reading scripts? How important is that?

Scott: I think reading scripts is the number one thing you can possibly do to become a better writer in a very, very short amount of time. There’s so much to be learned from a hundred pages of a Tony Gilroy script. If you’re actually paying attention and you’re not just reading it to read it, but actually reading it to — again, how we were talking about watching movies — to read it to understand it. You can learn so much in a hundred pages of a script, more than you could ever learn two or three books.

Chris: I should probably read more scripts. I read a lot at one point. I try to see lots of movies, I try to read other things, but I would say that, taking a step back in a broad sense, imagination comes from putting things together that haven’t been put together before. It doesn’t always come out of the absolute stratosphere, it’s things you put together. And to do that, you need to experience lots of different things, and have a lot of things in your memory, and notes. So both of those are really important. And back to movies. We should have all seen lots and lots and lots of movies of different decades, stretching back, so we have all those ideas in our heads or those characters, or the way a certain movie or a certain script handled a situation. And what they got right and what they got wrong. I think there’s a lot to be said for watching mediocre movies, movies that didn’t quite work out. Trying to figure out why that is.

John: I think that’s the same for scripts. The way you… at least for me when I was trying to break through, when I did that watching movies that were huge at the box office and break them down. I did the same thing for scripts, where I’d great scripts by great writers and then watch the movie. Or I’d watch the movie first and then read the script. Then I’d also read spec scripts that sold, and then I’d also read shitty scripts. It’s not just watching movies and just reading scripts, there are four or five different ways to do both of those things and for me, both of those things were super important for me as I was trying to learn the craft.

Jeremiah Friedman: There’s a lot of money to be made in TV and like you said, it’s a writers medium, but for the people reading who are still trying to break in, there’s something to be said for just focusing. Movies are really hard and TV is really hard. Just focusing your attention and trying to develop your craft at one thing is hard enough before you go expanding into other things.

SM: So thinking that the people who are going to be reading this are aspiring writers, people who are out there where you were a few years back, what about studying the business? How important is that for them to understand the business aspects of filmmaking?

Greg: I would put that close to the top. I know you always preach this, Scott, and it’s a great thing, read scripts, watch movies, write pages, but I think one of the biggest things you can do is just follow the business. Read the trades, look at what’s going on, look at what’s selling, there’s your proof right there. And if you’re outside the industry, if you’re not here in LA, you still have access to the internet. It should be one of your biggest tools. You should be online every day reading the trades. I still do. I go on and see what went down that day, what got set up. Because if I don’t know what’s selling, then how am I going to try and do it myself? The other thing that you’ll learn is that you’ll start to get a database in your head. Names of people, managers, producers, who’s selling what kind of stuff, and it’s only going to help you down the road.

John: Totally agree with that.

SM: Let me ask you one last thing. Films are, of course, primarily a director’s medium. Have you been thinking about TV or have your reps been steering you in that direction because it’s so much more of a writer-controlled, writer-oriented thing?

John: Yes, my main focus for this upcoming year is television, and then I’m also going to direct one of my scripts. For me, TV is just really fascinating. I’m working on something right now and one of the guys who I really, really respect, he told me something that I thought was really interesting. He said that the movie business is primarily a development business, where television is a business of production. Every Friday night, something has to be on the air. For me, I get a little ADD sometimes. I want to write something and I want to shoot it. I want to be pushed, I want to have forty eight hours to turn in sixty pages and then we’re going to be shooting it in the next week. What happens with features, and I’ve been lucky with my only two specs look like they’re going to get made but I like the idea of making something. I don’t consider myself to be a writer, to be honest with you, and I’m sure I’m different from a lot of these guys, I don’t want to just write pages, I want to create something that’s actually on the screen. Right now, it feels like television is the place where I can do that and have the most control, and if that isn’t that, then I’m going to go direct my own script. So that’s super important for me and my guys are definitely behind me and have helped me get that set up for this upcoming year.

Scott: There’s definitely been some pushing on my end to push me towards TV, but the thing that I bump up against is that all the ideas that I come up with are two hour ideas. I struggle to come up with an idea that’s a hundred episodes. I love TV. Five years ago, TV had never been better. Things like “Battlestar Galactica” and “Lost”, now we’ve got shows like “Breaking Bad” — television is amazing. I guess my brain isn’t wired to think in terms of that kind of story-telling, so unless I wake up one morning with this amazing idea, it’s movies for me right now.

Jeremiah: We feel the same way but also, once you get in, there’s a lot of pressure and there’s a lot of people pushing you towards TV. There’s a lot of money to be made in TV and like you said, it’s a writers medium, but for the people reading who are still trying to break in, there’s something to be said for just focusing. Movies are really hard and TV is really hard. Just focusing your attention and trying to develop your craft at one thing is hard enough before you go expanding into other things. And I know for us at least, we feel like we’re not firmly set enough in the world of film that we feel comfortable yet expanding into TV. That being said, if we get some amazing TV idea, we’d probably pursue it. But we just don’t have that idea yet.

John: Yeah, I just want to get a TV show going before they realize I’m a fraud when it comes to feature films. Like one year before everyone realizes it, I’m going to try to set up a TV show and makes all kind of money.

[Laughter]

Chris: I’m here with Frazier, and we spent a couple of months writing a TV spec together, so what he said was real news to me.

[Laughter]

Chris: But for real, I plan to eventually get in to TV, and it’s sort of a “when” kind of situation, but I am working on a spec with or without Frazier and working on another one. So I’m looking forward to some day at least having one foot in television.

Greg: I’ve taken a couple of pitches out to a couple of studios in the past year, but I’m still learning. I didn’t realize how different that part of the industry is. It really requires a whole different mindset. I’m not giving up on it, I’m going to try and crack it this year and I think I may just have the idea!

Justin: Pretty much everybody seems to be chasing television, that seems to be where more of the money is, so I’ve had a lot of encouragement to go that route. I’m not, for whatever reason, not as interested in television as I am in films. It’s a medium that I don’t feel like I understand as well so I haven’t made the jump yet, but I imagine at some point I’ll give it a try. We’ll see.

SM: Well, I’m glad to hear you guys like film, because to me, there’s nothing better in the world than sitting in the dark and watching a great story unfold on screen. It’s been terrific talking to you guys, and I feel really invigorated by knowing that there are these young turks out there who are bringing this energy into the screenwriting trade.

John: I just wanted to say if everybody is in LA, we should all be drinking together, or having dinner or something.

SM: After-Party!

Thanks again to Chris Borrelli, F. Scott Frazier, Jeremiah Friedman, Nick Palmer, Justin Rhodes, Greg Russo and John Swetnam for their participation in this conversation.

For 100s more Go Into The Story interviews, go here.