2014 Screenwriters Roundtable

My conversation with Chris Borrelli, Brian Duffield, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, and Greg Russo.

Between them, they have sold more than a dozen spec scripts and have multiple original screenplays on the Black List. Here is the 2014 conversation featuring Chris Borrelli, Brian Duffield, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, and Greg Russo.

Scott Myers: 2014 seems like it was a very good year for you, individually and collectively. I wanted to begin by running through generically what you’ve all managed to accomplish during the last twelve months.

A few spec script sales, pitch sales, Black List scripts, movies you wrote getting released, movies getting produced, a couple of first‑time directors, working with some of Hollywood’s top writers and producers. A couple of you added “producer” to your list of credits. Some of you are working in TV. McCoy, you’ve got a novel (“The Prom Goers Interstellar Excursion”) that’s coming out?

Chris McCoy: Yeah, in April.

F. Scott Frazier: Borrelli had a book (“Islands of Stone”) come out a month ago.

Scott Myers: That’s right. With all the success, the first question I want to ask you is, has the actual work of being a professional screenwriter gotten any easier for you or is it more challenging?

F. Scott Frazier: For me, the work, it’s become more about managing more plates in the air at one time. I think the nuts and bolts work of sitting down and writing a script is still the same as it always was.

The peripheral work, going to meetings and building relationships and pitching on things and taking your own ideas and getting things going is, I think, the more you work, the more work you get, at least for me.

For me it’s been more about, not that the work’s gotten harder, it’s just that the work that you have to do has gotten exponentially greater, the more success that you find.

Scott Myers: Do you mean in terms of the sheer quantity of stuff you have going on?

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, exactly. My manager always refers to it as, you have plates spinning in the air and you hope that one or two don’t fall down at any one time.

Scott Myers: How about the rest of you?

Chris Borrelli: For me, I’m working a little better than I used to. I think when I first started this career, I couldn’t really figure out exactly how to manage it, how to do it. It’s interesting.

Someone can be totally capable of writing a movie. At the same time they can still completely flub it in becoming a screenwriter. There are so many things going on. I think I’m working a little better. I just got better at managing time.

On top of that, I’ve changed my days. I’m taking less meetings. I think a lot of them had been a big waste of time over the years. I’m just looking at my time and working pretty hard. “The harder you work, the better your luck gets,” as a friend of mine says. That’s what I’m finding.

Chris McCoy: Yes, I think it’s still about staying in the rhythm and treating it like a job, which is what I’ve always tried to do. As you diversify and try different projects, directing and so forth, it becomes a little more difficult to find the time to sit down and write.

Ultimately, I always feel that if I don’t do it, nobody will. [laughs] I carve out the time every day and approach it like a job. As long as I keep a mindset where I don’t say to myself, “This has been a really good year, therefore I’m going to rest on my laurels,” I find that I’m productive.

Brian Duffield: Can I ask you a question, Chris? Are you still going to write scripts for other people? Now that you’re a director, is that your career?

Chris McCoy: I still have projects for studios where the only thing I’m doing is writing. I’d like to do both. I look at Joel and Ethan Coen doing Unbroken, or something like that, and I ask myself, “Why not do everything you possibly can do?”

Directing requires a large skill set that I need to keep learning more and more about and keep sharpening, but I obviously want to keep the screenwriting muscle in good shape too.

F. Scott Frazier: I know a lot of directors, not the triple‑A level, like a Spielberg or a Scorsese, but there are definitely a lot of directors who have made studio movies who still do the open writing assignments and write two studio scripts a year when they’re not directing.

Just to keep the relationships alive, you’re working on something rather than just sitting, waiting around, as a director, for the next thing to show up.

Scott Myers: McCoy followed up on what Brian said. The fact that you have directed a movie and presumably are going to direct some more, would that affect the choices you make on projects you write for other people? Do you think you’ll show more discretion in making those decisions?

Chris McCoy: I have, to this day, not written anything that I would not watch. [laughs] Which is, hopefully, what I am going to continue to try to do.

The relationship of directing vs. screenwriting is interesting in terms of choosing projects, because directing requires you to think about things I didn’t necessarily think about before when I was sitting down and writing a script. I don’t often write transitions into scenes — the camera dollying over a table, or starting on an insert of an object. I would imagine that now having some directing experience will, at the very least, inform the scripts I am putting together to direct myself. Even if you know that you’re going to start a scene with an insert shot of a calendar or some such thing, when it comes to getting it on the page you still need to put on that screenwriting hat, because you don’t want what’s on there to feel dull to the reader or to the studio.

F. Scott Frazier: Have you ever read a Michael Mann script before?

Chris McCoy: Yeah.

F. Scott Frazier: Like Heat or Collateral? His scripts are 180 pages long, and there are paragraphs upon paragraphs of camera movements. It’s crazy.

Chris McCoy: In a script the main goal is to tell a story. A lot of the technical stuff about how to execute that story, you end up figuring out in pre-production. But even if you’re planning on directing the script yourself, you don’t want that goal to interfere with the writing. If you have a paragraph about using some condor shot, that’s probably not something a reader is going to be so interested in.

Scott Myers: Scott, is that the selling script? Or is that the shooting script?

F. Scott Frazier: I have no idea. Whatever is out there, I remembered reading Collateral, couple of years ago. Literally, the first three paragraphs of the script are close‑up, 35 millimeter lens, all of this technical stuff about how the scene is going to be shot. It’s Michael Mann, so it’s amazing, but it was startling to me that that’s how he writes his scripts.

Chris Borrelli: In Heat, he goes into detail on what leather vest a bouncer is wearing. It’s crazy, it’s so detail obsessed, and then, you have Clint Eastwood who is so anti-that.

Scott Myers: Before we jump off this, Justin, Greg, and Brian, I’d like to hear what’s been your reaction to the success you’ve been carving out the last few years, and in particularly, last year. Is it easier for you? Harder?

Greg Russo: You learn to adapt. When you start out, you think you’ll only be working on one thing at a time. You soon realize that you need to develop an ability to switch on a dime, from one project to the next.

This was my first year developing for television. TV wants your attention all the time, and I welcomed the challenge. Enjoyed it really.

I know what my comfort zone is in terms of the amount of work I take on and I stick to it. If that means turning things down, then I will.

Whatever I decide to work on, I make sure that I can give the proper amount of time to each project. The work is better for it, and I never feel overwhelmed.

Scott Myers: How about you, Justin?

Justin Rhodes: The funny thing is, the more I learn about how to do this, the harder, the slower I get, because I feel like there’s more things I see.

The writing process for me, gets slower the better job I do, and at the same time, what the other guys were talking about, where I’ve had three different projects, this year chasing each other, hopefully towards production, and there’s rewrites that jump out of the grass, when you least expect it.

I am over here doing this, and some director comes on, or a new actor comes on, and suddenly you are doing this whole new complicated rewrite that they need in two weeks, that you didn’t even know was on the table.

Meanwhile, you’ve got clocks ticking, and there are two or three other things. It is a challenge, and what Greg said was right. My fantasy is to do one thing at a time, and that’s what I try so hard to accomplish, and that ends up being five and six, completely against my will.

Scott Myers: Duffield, how about you?

Brian: I loved 2014. It was great. It was good for a weird reason, in that I was nervous to take on a studio job, because I was getting married. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to devote all of my attention to the job. I had all these nightmares of getting a studio job and then just completely airballing it.

So I just wrote specs all year and I felt like it was the best my writing’s been. And I made no money, but creatively, it was really great. Since I had sold my first screenplay, I had always done the studio thing, sending specs in to studios and seeing what could happen. But the specs I wrote this year, we sent to one director at a time and tried to build them carefully from there.

With The Babysitter, we didn’t send that to studios or the typical kind of studio too much. At least, the focus for me was always the smaller places that don’t necessarily need movie stars to greenlight a small movie. So it was a great year, I felt like I learned a lot. In fact, I didn’t know what kind of career I wanted to have in 2013, and now I do.

Scott Myers: Let’s jump ahead to some of the individual projects you’ve had. Brian, why don’t we start with you? Because you talked about The Babysitter, which was a spec that sold in November. Here’s the logline: “A lonely 12‑year‑old boy in love with his babysitter discovers some hard truths about life, love and murder.”

What’s the story behind that spec?

Brian: I’ll give you a few things. I’m a really big haunted house fan, and every time I

would go to Universal Horror Nights or any of those things, I was always struck by how none of the villains were women, unless they were possessed or zombies, so not even bad by choice. I felt that was a huge bummer.

On top of that, my wife and I have a puppy, and we had let her stay with some

friends of my wife’s when we were gone once. I came back and picked her up, and I walked into this hilarious comedy setting, where you walk in and your dog is stoned off her ass and there’s weed everywhere.

It was a completely different situation than I thought it was going to be, and it got me thinking about how terrible of a parent I’m going to be, because I’m just going to assume everyone’s out to destroy my kid.

So like most things, I thought my fears would make an entertaining movie. So it came from wanting to come up with a great female villain and my fears of parenthood, I guess.

Chris McCoy: To cut you off, is it weird that you got married and came up with a great female villain in the same year?

[laughter]

Brian: No. I mean, I had that and then I have a movie I’m directing, Vivien Hasn’t Been Herself Lately. I wrote it while I was dating my now wife, and so I think she has concerns.

[laughter]

Brian: Having those experiences was always something that just stuck in my head. Then walking around L.A., in general, afterwards, for me, I started noticing there is a huge slant towards Freddy and Jason and all these horror characters.

And if it’s a woman who’s a horror character, it’s like she’s possessed. It’s like Evil Dead or The Exorcist. You don’t have too many great women villains. Or if you do, typically the air is very campy, someone being really convicted about being terrible.

That was just something that I thought would be a lot of fun to play with. Even the stuff I wrote earlier in the year, it was very non‑commercial. Even as a business, I wanted to make sure people didn’t forget me or just remember me for the wrong reasons.

So The Babysitter felt like it’s a contained and fun movie, hopefully. It felt like it was a good way to combine a lot of the things that I really like writing about in a way that was hopefully very audience‑pleasing.

Scott Myers: Well, it pleased somebody because it got bought, and then also made The Black List. What was that like?

Brian: The Black List or just getting bought?

Scott Myers: Bought. Let’s talk about that because you’ve done The Black List before.

Brian: Yeah, its old news.

[laughter]

Brian: It was great. We set it up in Wonderland, which was always a place that I had being eyeing. I really love Steven Bello over there, their exec. They have money to make movies now, so that in and of itself is really exciting.

Even beginning to talk with McG and everyone over there, it was just, “Hey! We’re not going to give you notes until there’s a director. You’re going to be involved the entire way. You can produce it, and we’ll go make it as soon as possible. And we don’t need stars because the two characters are 12 and 17.”

It was great because it was everything you are hoping to hear, and you rarely do. Everything else I’ve set up, you have that euphoria of setting it up, and then you sit down and they say the one note that you aren’t even thinking someone’s going to say because it’s so bad, typically.

So far this time, it’s been great, and they’re all amped. I’m enjoying it so far.

Scott Myers: Another spec that sold was Frazier’s Berliner, back in July. Logline: “As the Berlin Wall is being constructed at the height of the Cold War, a veteran CIA agent searches for a Soviet mole that’s already killed several fellow agents, including a young agent he’s mentored.”

Scott, what inspired you to write this particular story?

F. Scott Frazier: It started many years ago, actually. It’s probably the longest length of time I’ve ever worked on any one script. It originally started with that I wanted to do a play on Hamlet. I was actually just going to straight‑up do Hamlet in Cold War Berlin.

In researching the worlds, I realized that there were very few movies or any pop culture entertainment about The Wall going up. Even to this day, there’s still a lot of arguments and a lot of… nobody really knows what the final straw was that caused the East Germans to put up the wall.

It caught everybody by surprise. The CIA just woke up one morning and The Wall was up. 10,000 engineers had come into Berlin and put it up overnight. I thought that was fascinating. I wanted to make that the fulcrum of the story from that point on. From there, rewriting it over the course of three years, it grew into the story it is today.

Scott Myers: You’re getting feedback from some of your writing group when you’re writing the script?

F. Scott Frazier: No, this one I didn’t show to a lot of people. I was always embarrassed by it, my first draft was 210 pages long, and it was very, very bad. It never worked for over the course of three years. Literally, I would write a draft and I’d read it, I’d know that it didn’t work, I’d put it aside and work on something else, and then go back to it.

Early last year, I had an epiphany. There were two things that I switched around in the script. Big things within the script that I switched around, and were like the “Aha!” moment, once they clicked into place, I did a couple more drafts, and I was happy with it. That’s what we ended up going out with it — but no, I was always embarrassed by it.

It always seemed like I wasn’t good enough to write it yet. Every time I’d write it, I’d always have that shame of, “I know that something good is here, I just haven’t found it yet.” I never showed it to a lot of people until early last year, when I was happy with where it was headed.

Scott Myers: This is a new paradigm for successful screenwriting. Shame and embarrassment.

[laughter]

Chris McCoy: Scott, out of curiosity, if you refer back to our 2012 screenwriters roundtable, I talked about a coffee that you and I had where we resolved to name all of our scripts either like Berlin or Istanbul for foreign value.

[laughter]

F. Scott Frazier: That’s hilarious.

Scott Myers: Do you want 10 percent, McCoy, off Scott’s spec sale?

Chris McCoy: Yeah, I feel like I should get 10.

Brian: McCoy needs to write Istanbul.

[laughter]

Scott Myers: “Berliner” sold to Universal. That was a big deal.

F. Scott Frazier: It was always a passion project for me. Maybe that’s the way to go about it. It’s a thriller — it’s not a big action movie, it’s not a franchise, and it takes place in the ’60s in Berlin. It was never about hitting those checkboxes that the studios are always looking for. It was shocking to me, honestly.

I couldn’t be happier with the result, I have a number of projects with the guys over at Universal, and they’ve been great to me. It’s the perfect home for it, honestly.

Scott Myers: Does anybody else have a spec in mind for 2015?

Chris Borrelli: Yeah, I have one, about ready to go out, third week on this month or maybe first week of February, right in there. Something that I banged out and I am excited about it. It was one of those things where it didn’t take that long to do. That thing where you just have an idea and it flows, it doesn’t happen nearly enough.

I’d started several scripts. Two scripts clicked after page 30 on both of them, so I put them aside as I like to say, to make myself feel better, and banged this out, and everybody likes it, so far. I am looking forward, hopefully, to starting it off with a bang, and we’ll see this time, next year, how it goes.

Scott Myers: Chris, you had a movie produced in 2014, Eloise.

Chris Borrelli: Yep.

Scott Myers: Starring Eliza Dushku and Robert Patrick, directed by Robert Legato. “Four friends break into an abandoned insane asylum in search of a death certificate which will grant one of them a large inheritance. However, finding it soon becomes the least of their worries in a place haunted by dark memories.”

Chris Borrelli: That sounds great. Who wrote that?

Scott Myers: It’s on IMDb. How did that project come about?

Chris Borrelli: That came about only two years ago, which sounds short to me. These guys in Michigan, who were financiers and have their own studio, wanted to make a movie about the insane asylum there that’s fascinating. It’s been closed for a long time, it was the biggest asylum in the world, at one point — even had its own post office and fire department.

They flew me out there, we talked, and it’s been a great experience, because they let me create, and they had a lot of great ideas, but I came up with the idea. There is a little bit of inspiration being there, in Michigan. We were around mostly the ruins now of where the asylum used to be.

I was seeing some bad looking houses, and ruined roofs, and all those things — that’s when I got the idea. I wanted the characters to, not in the way of The Others, but to be ghosts, in a sense. If you haven’t seen The Others, I am sorry for ruining the twist.

[laughter]

Chris Borrelli: The basic idea is, I wanted to have these four people going nowhere, it doesn’t matter to most of society, if they lived or died, those kinds of downtrodden characters.

Scott Myers: Like screenwriters.

Chris Borrelli: Yeah, screenwriters before… it’s that kind of feeling, certainly, sometimes. When they go in there, they have nothing to lose. I wanted to answer why they go into, so to speak, a haunted house, even though it was an asylum. When they get in there, the asylum’s a fifth character, and plays tricks on them, and wants them to stay.

It’s a very psychological film, it’s not very slasher-y. But, the spec that’s going out, is actually surprisingly slasher-y. I surprised myself.

Scott Myers: Were you involved in the production at all?

Chris Borrelli: There is this natural course of events. They liked what I wrote, gave a few notes and I rewrote it, and then they had me out there, had a good time, but it is funny. It’s in the business. You create something in your pajamas, and then, you show up to the set, and you’re this oddity. A quick Eliza Dushku bit: I was watching the scene where she is almost being tortured as a character.

They took a break, she came out and I hadn’t met her yet, and she said, “What’s your name?” I said, “I am Chris.” And, she said, “Oh. Chris who?” I go, “Borrelli.” And, she said, “Oh, the screenwriter.” I was impressed she knew who the screenwriter was, and I said, “Yeah. I love what I am seeing here, on the monitors.” She goes, “You should, you wrote it, you sick fuck.”

[laughter]

Chris Borrelli: But it was with love — it was a very Massachusetts ego. We are both from the same area.

Scott Myers: That’s great. Do they have a release?

Chris Borrelli: We don’t have a release yet. It’s still being edited, but hopefully, late this year. The Vatican Tapes, that you’ve all been hearing about, comes out in May. That’s going to be fun.

Scott Myers: Justin, let’s jump to you, because you’ve got several projects we can’t talk about yet because they are still hush‑hush. One that we can discuss is Unmanned. As I understand it, you wrote that specifically for Keanu Reeves. How did that come about?

Justin: Originally, I had this idea for a sci‑fi project, but it’s more of a war movie. If you extrapolate some of the stuff that’s going on, like the drums, and then the vision, what is it going to be like, in another 30–40 years, it’s kind of a Saving Private Ryan story in that environment. I talked to Chris Morgan about that originally, and he had thought, Keanu might be right for it. They had worked together on 47 Ronin.

I had a meeting with Keanu, and he gave me some of the smartest notes I’d ever heard. It was a really interesting process, just in terms of creativity. I hadn’t written it yet, and originally, it was conceived as something for a 18‑year‑old rookie soldier, and I was talking to a guy who was about to turn 50, what does that do to your conception of what the character is?

The whole thing turned on its ear. He had this reputation for being great at development. He developed a script called, Passengers, which is one of my favorite sci‑fi scripts in the last five years.

He had done that with John, and so, just the chance to see what that was like, and what working with him was like, was exciting. The thing about is, now that I know who is going to play this part, I know exactly what this is, from the get-go, and I am actually talking to the guy that’s going to do it, about what he would like to see in the role, and how it works. It’s a really interesting process.

After the first draft, we did a revision with him, and he acted out, essentially the whole script in his living room. What it showed me was, the screenwriting muscles of structure and seeing how everything fits together, and what the purpose of this is, the whole macro thing.

As an actor, what he is amazing at is, seeing every single moment from a centered place of, “What am I looking at?” “Why am I looking at it?” “How am I processing what I am looking at?” “How do I move from here?”

Even in the subtle things like blocking the script, you would realize that, there are moments and depth, things that were there to be found, that didn’t occur to me. Like the revision, in terms of working with him was like a thousand little tweaks, that the result of which, took the script to a whole new level.

In my mind, it’s the best thing I ever wrote, a large part of it is all the really, really smart moment, character stuff that he brought to it. It was one of the best experiences I’ve had, to be honest.

Scott Myers: Going forward, is that something you would like looking at characters in other projects that you are writing?

Justin: Yeah. It taught me a lot. When I work, I am very structure first, and I come into the character, second. A lot of stuff that I am doing, big summer action kind of scripts, you are approaching it… at least, I am, from that macro viewpoint: this is what we do, this is the party IP that we have to include, or not include, and on and on.

This was a whole lesson in this is that movies actually live and die in these little beats, and that you can get so much out of… “he does this first, or that second” stuff that feels trivial or after stuff, or what the director figured out, actually, you can put that in, and it does take you to a new level.

Ever since, the last couple of things I’ve been working on this year, I’ve been trying to include as much of that as I can. Just the conversations we had, at least he gives me a framework for how an actor uses this thing, because he was very generous with his time in that way.

Scott Myers: Seems like a natural progression for you. As you move up the development ladder, you are getting these movies made, and then, eventually, getting a position where you are interfacing with these actors, that you are seeing this side of the whole process. Generally for the group, working with actors, have you learned anything in terms of your writing? How you approach your writing?

Chris Borrelli: Yes, for me. Actors come at things, I am going to say, being very general here, more emotionally. Sometimes, as screenwriters, we get into structure as we should, and all these character moments, but then, an actor looks at it from a different point of view, and it can be valuable. What’s the emotion? What’s the motivation?

I’d say, with actors, that’s the number one thing they are thinking, whereas, as a writer, honestly, it’s probably when I am, especially when I am writing a spec or whatever, it’s number three, four, or five, for me.

It’s good to have that. I’ve had that now and I’ve changed a little bit where I try to do an “actor pass” in my head as I read it through, making everything about emotion, and at that point, the script, putting the structure, and story, just a little to the side, making it more emotion-heavy than structure-heavy.

Chris McCoy: Yeah, it’s interesting when you are working with them, because it is such an art to be a good actor, and many actors are so internal. If they really care about the material, they are thinking about it in terms of motivations: “This happened, and therefore I am in this emotional place, which means I am doing this.” There are times when you are writing, when you tell yourself, “Okay, I know I need to have a certain kind of scene here to tie the script together structurally.” But the character motivations in that scene have to make sense. It can’t just be structural filler, or else solid actors will call you out on it.

These actors are taking their job seriously and unless you can look them in the eye and tell them exactly why something is happening and why their character is in the place where they are, then you are not doing your job. Your characters always need to want something, need to care about something.

You need to be able to communicate those motivations with an actor. Directing gave me more insight into how actors look at scripts, and knowing the kinds of questions they’ll be asking puts a little bit more pressure on me as a writer, because I need to have those answers. Understanding some of the methodology of actors is something that I feel like will inform my future screenwriting, because one way or another, a movie doesn’t get made unless you have actors in it.

Scott Myers: Let’s jump to the project that you directed, Chris, Good Kids. “Four high school students look to redefine themselves after graduation.” The stars are Nicholas Braun, Zoey Deutch, Mateo Arias, and Israel Broussard. This is a Black List script. How did the project come together?

Chris McCoy: I wrote the script to direct myself, but I hadn’t even done a short film at that point. My reps went out with it to a few different producers who they thought would be able to shepherd it along, and from there it got out and got passed around the town. We received interest from a lot of different companies outside that first small group of producers, but at a lot of those places, when I took the meeting, the executives said to me, “Wait, you want to direct it?” I said, “Yeah!” And they said, “Errghh…”

But to back up a bit, initially we just took the project to five or so production companies that we thought might be a cool home for it and might be cool working with a first-time director. Ultimately, I went with Depth of Field, who are incredible: Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz, and Andrew Miano.

I looked at the Weitzes like, “Here are guys who did exactly what I wanted to do.” Chris and Paul were successful screenwriters who made the transition to directing with American Pie and have continued to do these wonderful films and do whatever they want to do.

So Depth of Field took the project onboard and were championing it. In the meantime, I did a short film with my friend Adam Neustadter that played at a bunch of festivals, which checked the box of directing my first short. With the script having that Black List pedigree and having different actors interested in it, we were able to put together a package that was attractive to Voltage, and they let me make the movie.

Scott Myers: You shot it in the Northeast?

Chris McCoy: I shot it in Massachusetts. I am from Massachusetts, I grew up on Cape Cod, and we were able to shoot it outside of Boston in a lot of very Cape-y communities. The towns were great to us. I wanted to shoot it back home all along, and the communities there were super accommodating. They were happy that I was from there, they liked that I knew the world and knew the people.

The central dynamic of the script touches on the fact that I grew up year-round on Cape Cod. I was a local. In my film, it’s these local kids who are able to redefine themselves when the summer people come into town, because the summer people have no idea who they are.

So the rich people that visit the Cape for three or four months of the year — I’ve seen that world. A lot of the people who were working on my crew also knew that world, and we became a team because we all had the same kind of movie in mind. There was a shorthand there.

Scott Myers: I remember in our last conversation when talking about this issue, the desire to get into directing, in large part, that’s about wanting more control. How was that experience for you, when you are actually there directing, making all these choices on set?

Chris McCoy: For me, the most helpful thing was that because I wrote the script, I knew those characters inside and out. Going back to what I was saying earlier about character motivations, I could tell my actors, “You are doing this because of this.” I could explain it in a way that maybe if I was directing someone else’s thing, I wouldn’t be as intimately able to do.

On set, that was the one thing that I felt that I could really help shape were the performances, the reasons my characters were doing things. On the fly, you learn a lot about the lighting, you learn about camerawork, a lot of technical elements, but if you have a talented team like I had around me, they are handling a lot of that stuff for you. They’ve got your back.

If the crew is committed to the project, if they love it, and everyone’s on board, it gives you the freedom as the writer/director to say, “All right, this is what I pictured when I wrote it, how do we make that happen?”

Scott Myers: Another way to exert control is TV. Greg, I’d like to jump in with you because you spent some of your time and energy this year on the TV side of things. You’ve got a project at Fox with Chris Morgan producing.

“Show centers on a suburban family man, who on the side runs one of the most-successful, custom-ticket auto-theft rings in Los Angeles.”

What’s the background on that project?

Greg: My big goal for 2014 was to find a way to branch into television. The perfect career for me, would be to have a foothold in film and also be working in TV.

My hope was that I would be able to leverage the work and relationships that I’d done on the feature side, and start setting up my own projects.

It was a wild experience, and it’s been eye-opening. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. As for the project, Gone in 60 Seconds is kind of the loose pitch. As a TV show, it’s big, it’s fun, it’s Fast and Furious. I had come up with the idea a few years ago. It’s one of those ideas that you put in a folder on your desktop and forget about.

Back then, I was working with Chris on a project, and I floated it to him, he was like, “it’s pretty good.” I never had much, so I said, “I’ll put it aside for a while.” At the beginning of the year, I said, “I’ve got to get back to that goal, to get into television.”

I sat down, took out all the ideas, and I went through them, picked out about 15 of them that I had in that folder, took them into my managers at Madhouse, sat down, and I said, “Here’s 15 ideas, you tell me which one I should work on.” They picked this one out, and secretly that was the one I was hoping they would pick, so, that’s always a good sign.

The TV pitch season is quite an interesting thing. I went back to Chris, I said, “Hey man, remember that idea. Well, I fleshed it out.” I pitched it to him, and he said, “We’re going to 20th with it.” It was weird — I was flying to Ireland on a Friday and I pitched Chris, I think, on a Monday.

We went to 20th two days later, and they said yes in the room. I told everyone, “I’m getting on a plane for two weeks. We’re going to have to push this.” I got a call the night before my flight, saying, “Push your flight back. We’re going to Fox in the AM.”

Fox bought it in the room It was pretty wild. Everyone got it, they saw the idea for the show, they know the material that Chris develops really well, and this fit perfectly into his label, and the stuff he produces. The writing and notes process has been fantastic so far.

You always want to work with people that give good notes and a lot of people here, have worked with Chris, so, they know, he gives some of the smartest notes. I also have nothing but good things to say about the people at 20th and Fox too.

Scott Myers: Speaking of which, do you guys hang out over at Chris Morgan’s office? Three or four of you have worked with Chris, right?

Chris McCoy: Not me. Still waiting for the call, Chris Morgan.

[laughter]

Scott Myers: Stepping back, looking at movies and TV. What’s your take on where things are? And your relative interest at trying to work in both.

Brian: This was the first year I started getting sent things that weren’t movies or TV, which I thought was bizarre and cool.

Scott Myers: What do you mean, Brian?

Brian: At least, in my interactions, people are definitely talking about interactive stuff a lot more, virtual reality, even IMAX short films. It feels like people are starting to think, “What if it’s not movies or TV?” Building it out from there. I am not doing any of those, currently, but it was the first time where, especially towards the end of the year, I had meetings, and companies would be like, “Would you be interested in doing something that wasn’t a movie or TV or a web series?” It took me by surprise few times, and then I was an idiot for continually being surprised.

Scott Myers: Interesting. When you see the showrunners for True Detective or Fargo or House of Cards they’ll oftentimes say, “This is not really TV, it’s a long movie.” There does seem to be this elasticity now between the storytelling that’s going on, and perhaps, it’s not just like TV and movies, or anything.

Do any else of you keep running into this kind of blurring of the lines between the narrative storytelling that’s going on in Hollywood?

Brian: Even with TV, this is the first year where different companies, if they sent a book or a TV show they wanted to do, they were like, “We don’t want to do the typical pilot thing. We’d rather…”

If they had discretionary money, which I think, is a huge shift, just in of itself, where I’ve been at few places where they talked about wanting to write every episode, hire directors for the episodes, and then, at that point, find financing, and then, give it to a network. That feels like something that’s happening more and more.

I remember when Fox was talking about giving up pilots and felt like they were ahead of the curve, and now… they got a little spooked and went back to it. That’s something that is increasingly happening where, instead of having a pilot and 30 pilots, it seems like, there is more and more… networks are giving 10 episodes straight out of a gate to a show.

Especially, a lot more of just one writer working on a show the entire time. True Detective had a big hand in that, and Fargo, obviously. That’s something that’s happened this year where a lot of… at least with me, a lot of the TV stuff has been, it hasn’t been like, “Hey, would you want to write a pilot?”

It’s been like, “Hey, would you want to write a 400 page movie? You would be by yourself the whole time.” Which is appealing and terrifying.

Greg: With television right now, people are willing to take risks that they weren’t willing to take before, and the networks are being leaned on a bit, by the expanse of cable, and all these other broadcast platforms, that are taking all kind of risks.

TV is an wildly-expanding business right now. We all know that. There’s so many things being made right now, so many buyers, and so many studios and platforms that are opening up. With that, comes a desire to find the next “new” thing. To push the boundaries, so we’re seeing that reflected in the narrative devices and show structures being written.

It’s exciting, it’s enticing, and it’s not just writers who see it. This is the reason why Matthew McConaughey is going to go do a TV show, because he can do a 10 episode show and still make a couple of movies a year. Cable is luring over a lot of talent. It’s hard not to follow that Pied Piper, because TV is booming and sadly film continues to contract.

Scott Myers: I wanted to ask a question based on some of the comments you made earlier. Having these multiple projects, stacking projects, you danced around a little bit with the fact that you have to do that, but are there any keys you’ve learned other than time management to be able to manage multiple projects at any given time?

F. Scott Frazier: I try to not to actually be writing multiple scripts at the same time. If I am writing a script, that’s the script I am working on, while having other things going on, while breaking the story on something else, or while outlining something, or putting note cards up on the wall. It’s always, if I am writing script pages, that’s the script I am working on, and to not jump back and forth.

Borrelli once said that, “Writing is a lot of sitting and staring out the window.” That’s a lot of the work.

The staring out of the window portion of the work, your mind can… at least mine can be divided amongst five to 10 different things, whether it’s thinking of a solution for one thing, or outlining something else, whereas, when I get to the script, that feels like the day job, the heavy lifting, like you’ve got to go to the worksite from nine to five, and be writing pages. For me, it’s always one script at a time.

Scott Myers: Like, literally, writing script pages during the day, but at night, maybe you are doing research or…

F. Scott Frazier: Thinking about the other project. I live so far away from Los Angeles, anytime I go to a meeting, that’s automatically four hours of thinking time, just sitting in the car. Even sitting at the dining room table, my wife knows this very well, but I am constantly, “in my movies” and she knows that when I get that faraway look, that’s what’s going on.

Chris Borrelli: I blame that on movies, when my fiancée sees me glazed off as she’s talking. I say, I am thinking about an awesome movie. [laughter] But I do agree with Scott, definitely. I do it slightly differently, but the same thing: I compartmentalize the different projects, and it’s a relief to be able to put one aside and jump on the other. I do it in such a way that it’s funny.

Someone will bring up a script I wrote a year or two ago, and they’ll mention some character names, and I’ll be like, “Huh?” I’ll be like a 90‑year‑old guy who forgets his friends, I completely compartmentalize, and focus.

F. Scott Frazier: I’ll forget character names a month after I finish the script.

Chris Borrelli: Exactly. I am onto something else. I recommend that if you can do it, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have the other things circling. But for me, if I want to be writing by 9:00 AM and by noon I’ve done two‑thirds of the good work for my day or more.

That’s most of my good work, and what I can do is, switch that off and jump on another project after lunch. I don’t like to go back and forth, and I don’t like to be too distracted, it’s not the end of the world, if you don’t answer some emails, take a break. But, I really do think, you’ve got to focus. For me, I have to focus on one thing at a time, pretty much.

Scott Myers: Does anybody do it a little differently, where they are working on multiple, literally, writing pages of two different projects at the same time?

Justin: I did that most of the year, not by choice. Rewrites, different things would come up, and they are production pressures you couldn’t put it off, or say, “Let me finish this first, and get to that later.” It’s like both fires were burning equally hot and there was no way around it.

Scott Myers: How’d you manage that?

Justin: I am a night owl. I stay up really late, and a lot of what I ended up doing is, I would have an early lunch and work on one project until about dinner, and then take a break. We eat early like five, because we have a toddler, and I would eat with the family, put them to bed, and be done with that, at about eight. I’d write the next thing from eight to two in the morning.

Having that break in between helps, you get 90 minutes where you are not thinking about work at all, and you come back, it’s a new version of yourself. Sometimes, weirdly, I’ll take a shower between projects, I go shower after dinner, and it helps you to feel like you woke up again. It’s a weird mental thing.

Scott Myers: Sounds like you are almost metaphorically trying to move from one world to the other.

Justin: Yeah, it was hard. It was not a process that I enjoyed, or would necessarily recommend, it was a seven day a week thing for about six months, it’s just kind of all blurred together, to be honest.

But you get into a weird rhythm where the fact that one thing is paying off the other one, you can have a good day on one project and a bad day on the other one. So, you can sort of fail, but still have succeeded. I don’t know. It was interesting.

Scott Myers: Greg, you’re moving between projects with your TV thing. That’s something they have to do because they’re in pre‑production or production or post‑production. They got like four or five different stories when they’re in that supervising producer role they’re working on.

So, is that attractive to you or does that kind of make you feel a little nervous, possibly about your TV series if it goes forward?

Greg: One of the alluring things about television to me, is that it’s a collaborative process. You’re constantly working with other writers and producers breaking story and building the arc of the show. I love working with other people, so the idea of more work divided amongst a unified team, seems like the perfect scenario.

As a screenwriter on the feature side, it can be a lonely process. Occasionally you’ll have a notes meeting, and then off you’ll go for another three weeks alone, until you get studio notes and the cycle repeats.

The nice thing about TV is that because it’s happening so fast you’re constantly in communication. There’s always somebody to talk to about things. I find that the writing just gets better because of it.

I’ve tried to apply this formula to my film work. People know I’m a collaborative writer. I welcome thoughts and notes. My goal is to deliver the script that everyone wants. This is only capable through open dialogue and communication.

Scott Myers: Wendy Cohen’s joining us and she’s been tracking the conversation. Wendy, you’ve got a couple of questions. I know you had one for Scott about Berliner.

Wendy: Yeah, of course. I’m really interested in your research process. I was curious if you actually went out and interviewed people or if it was just a lot of reading. How did you go about researching a project like that?

F. Scott Frazier: It’s hard. It’s going to sound like such a cop-out. A lot of the stuff that I write is research-heavy roles. I write a lot of spy stuff and a lot of things that require that.

I don’t really do much research beforehand, outside of what I already know about the worlds. Specifically for Berliner, I did very little research of The Wall and how it went up and why it went up, and that sort of thing.

After that, I put it all aside. I just wrote the story that I wanted to write. What I do is, after I have that draft that I really feel good about, that I’m like, “Okay, this is close to being a movie.” I go back and do the research, and make sure that everything that’s in there adds up to reality, and how everything worked.

I do it backwards. I write the story, and then I go back and do the research. If the research proves things wrong in the story, then I’ll adjust it on a fly. There have been times when I’ve researched things beforehand. I almost trapped inside of reality and the history of everything. I never want to have to make the concession for the story, based off of reality, I guess.

Wendy: Yeah. Research is a great way to procrastinate.

F. Scott Frazier: That, too. It’s definitely a trap. I just go about it backwards. It’s half my own process, and also half that I’m just a little bit lazy. I don’t want to sit and spend two weeks looking through books when I’d rather be writing script pages.

Scott Myers: We’re going to add to shame and embarrassment, laziness, as a key to being a screenwriter.

F. Scott Frazier: Yes.

[laughter]

Scott Myers: Wendy, you’ve also got a question about spec scripts sales.

Wendy: There was a really sharp drop in spec sales this year. They went down by about a third. For all of you, did you notice any trends either at agencies or production companies this year creatively or on the business side? Are people being a lot more cautious?

F. Scott Frazier: I’ll just jump in, because I keep track of this thing. A good friend of mine is very obsessed with this thing. What we’ve seen in the last year is that, people are no longer referring to options as sales, whereas, for the last four or five years, everything was a sale, whether it was a one dollar option or a million dollar spec sale. They moved away from that. What we saw is actually the reality of this situation, as opposed to a couple of years before that, where the numbers were seemingly inflated by things that weren’t actually sales.

Scott Myers: You’re talking about John Gary, right?

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah.

Scott Myers: I’ve started to adjust that on the blog. If I can find out if it’s an option, I’ll put it on there. I refer to them as deals as opposed to sales now.

F. Scott Frazier: It’s tough, especially for me when I first came into the business and that reality adjustment of the majority of things that you sell are going to be options. And it’s going to be for an amount of money that you’re not ready for.

It’s sobering, and it’s one of those things that, as the screenwriter, the first five or six years of doing it and actually having a career, it’s something that you have to be ready to deal with. And that you’re not going to be making a million dollars on your first script sale, and your first sale is not going to be a sale, it’s actually going to be an option.

That reality adjustment, I guess, is important.

Scott Myers: As opposed to the fabled million‑dollar spec script sale that’s promulgated by the cult of screenwriting gurus.

Chris McCoy: I don’t think that’s the reality anymore, and I always look at it like your first spec is your introduction to town. Normally your first scripts are there to establish what your voice is, what you actually want to write and what you want to bring to the town.

Then, off of a spec that people enjoy and pass around, you might get an OWA or you might sell a pitch or something like that. So often, I think with their first spec, writers are trying to write for the market. But when it comes to your first thing, the town is looking more for a voice, and when you get in the room for that first round of meetings, everybody is going to say, “Okay, what’s the next thing?” And maybe the next thing will be the one that sells. But trying to cater to the market, to me, is a big error that I think a lot of younger screenwriters make.

Scott Myers: That dovetails precisely into the next question I have, which is from a reader. They said, “Everybody’s always talking about how Hollywood is looking for writers with unique voices. How do you go about finding your voice?”

Chris Borrelli: You have it. It’s part of you. You develop it and you get better, but you have hopefully something to say. All the screenwriters on this call, we could all be given the exact same plot and would write something very, very different from one another.

So I feel you have it and you develop it and you get better at it, but you don’t actually, if this makes any sense, learn that. I couldn’t teach that to someone who didn’t have it.

Scott Frazier: A long time ago, I got into a gigantic… I don’t even know if I participated in it. On an old screenwriting message board, there was a 25‑page thread about what voice means. Everybody had a different definition of it and everybody argued about what it really meant.

It was just one of those go‑nowhere circular things that never had a resolution to it. Chris, I think you’re totally right. It’s innate to who you are, and when somebody gives you a story, it’s how you would write it.

Scott Myers: It seems like Duffield is a walking example of that. I mean, he’s written Westerns, a modern romantic comedy, now a horror thing, monster‑dinosaurs. Yet, I think he would say that people in around town, when they read a script by Brian Duffield, feel like that’s a Brian Duffield script.

Is that fair, since for the rest of you when you read over your scripts?

Scott Frazier: Oh yeah. If you looked at one script page from each of us without our names on it, you can tell that they were all written by different people.

Justin: I was going to say, I think voice is just taste. Like, “This is what I like.” Whether you’re writing a movie or directing a movie, you’re making a thousand little decisions. And knowing when to stop and say the joke is funny enough or the scene’s exciting enough or the line is clever enough or the moment’s cool enough, cool to who and funny to who?

You’re making all those decisions based on your taste. So, to me, your voice is just the thing that can’t help but express itself, because you thought these things were funny, you thought these things were cool and you thought this was good.

If people disagree on that, what comes out is knowing when to stop.

Scott Myers: That’s like what Borrelli’s saying. It’s just an extension of who you are, right?

Justin: Your voice is the same as the way you decorate your living room, it’s just, “This is what I think looks cool.” You happen to have a taste that other people like to look at.

Chris McCoy: The advantage to what we do is that we are not actors. We don’t have to wait around for someone to hand us material that inspires something within us. We can sit down and write the kind of movie we want to see.

In general, people can smell the bullshit if you are writing something that just goes with the market, that goes with the trend, what’s selling that month.

The more you step away from that mindset, and the more you go, “Okay, I am going to write things that I care about at this moment,” the less that bullshit smell is going to be there. Unless you care about your work, no one else is going to care about it. That’s what voice is: this is what I care about at this time.

Scott Frazier: To almost answer the question in a roundabout way, or in a not helpful way at all, I feel like, the more that I wrote the more I understood how I wanted to write things — does that make sense?

My early scripts, they all felt a little different from one another, but they still all had the same style, tone, and sensibility to them. Now, with my scripts, I know how I want to write, based of off having done this for as long as I have. Now, all of my scripts feel the same and look the same, and it’s based off entirely spending time doing it.

Brian: Yeah, I agree with that.

Scott Myers: Brian, I’d be curious to hear a little bit more from you. Have you ever thought about, “What is my voice?” Is it a conscious thing? Or is it more like what Borrelli and McCoy were talking about… an expression of who you are.

Brian: My voice changes from script to script. I try to write the actual script, not in the first person, but at least in the tone of who are the main characters.

For something like The Babysitter, it was about a 12-year-old that basically loses his mind. By the end of that script, the writing is super-hyper and all over the place. I am always a little humored when people think that, “Well, Brian’s voice is crazy.” It’s a deliberate choice that I am making to make the script that voice.

I’m sure there’s definitely things that are similar in everything that I’ve written, and that’s just unavoidable. The actual voice of the script I try to make it in the

protagonist’s voice, in his camera. I don’t remember where I picked that up, but it was a while ago. It stuck.

Scott Myers: This leads into this next area that I wanted to talk about, which is about the supposed screenwriting “rules,” and that Screenwriting 101 stuff you were talking about.

Avoid using voice over narration or flashbacks, you can’t include unfilmables, all scenes in the script must be something a moviegoer can see, and there’s no commenting on the moment, and so forth.

What is your general overall take on these supposed “rules”?

Brian: I think they are all bullshit.

Scott Myers: Is that a general consensus?

Greg: Yeah.

Chris Borrelli: I could speak for myself, but it helped me years ago, when I finally read one of those books. It was before I could write. My little theory on this is, people take it like a Bible, take it word for word. Think about any kind of art, think about painting or sculpture, if I had to explain it on one page, if I could do it, if I had to explain it in two minutes to someone, or 30 seconds, on one page, I’d have all these rules.

But, if someone was actually a painter, since they can actually do it, they can go against those rules, they can paint the chapel lying on their back if they want. It doesn’t have to be serious Bible that we study.

It’s good guidelines, and then, you know when to break them. But we sometimes do it, like the execs who take it word for word, because they want to be safe, to feel as safe as possible, and sometimes, as I said before, the tail’s wagging the dog.

Greg: I don’t think anybody really cares about that stuff. Look, you deliver on the big stuff, have your structure down and your characters defined, write the hell out of that story. I couldn’t imagine a studio exec saying, “Hey man, you know that line of action? I can’t film that. You need to take that out.”

Brian: I have had that happen.

Chris Borrelli: I could introduce you to few people.

Chris McCoy: If you’re following a book that wants you to paint by numbers, and everyone else is following that book, all those resulting scripts are going to feel like they were painted by numbers. It’s good to be comfortable with structure, but the script will feel more interesting to readers when you start trusting yourself to paint outside the box. It’s like, nobody wants to look at a thousand architectural drawings that are exactly the same.

Brian: Any of the “rules,” I can show you a script that completely nukes that. I’m good friends with Eddie O’Keefe, and one of my big things, as I was starting out, was never writing flowery prose, keeping it as far away from a novel as possible. Eddie and Chris’s scripts are so… every paragraph is gorgeous and it’s very colorful, it’s exact opposite of everything I wanted to do, or at least, was taught to do.

And it was so much better than anything I’ve done and it suits the stories they are telling so well. You feel like you are watching that movie, in the exact tone the writer wants you to watch. As long as it’s not boring, it works.

Scott Myers: Frazier, didn’t you post something on Dan Gilroy’s script Nightcrawler?

Brian: That script’s so good, too.

F. Scott Frazier: That’s more of a format than anything. Structurally, that script is goddamn tight, as far as the “beats of it.” But, the way it’s written, it’s written like a crazy person wrote the script. The film is saying, the protagonist is a crazy person. It feels like a racecar going down the page. It’s crazy.

For me, structurally, following the rules, the one rule I will literally get anxious about is, having the act breaks and the big moments be in the right places.

It’s really not even, “Oh, it has to be on page 30. That point has to be on 60.” It’s almost this innate sense that I have, that I’m like, “Oh my God, the first act is too long.” Just knowing that there’s not enough before the midpoint turn. That innate sense of, “There’s something wrong with it,” and just going off that gut feeling.

I think, that structure is important because movies are an exercise in structure. They’re 90 minutes to two hours. Things, generally, have to fall on the same place for majority of movies. Innately knowing that, and being able to feel that, and sense that… I think, it was Roger Ebert, he had a great quote one time about that, “Bad movies don’t feel like real‑life, but even worse, they don’t feel like movies.”

Chris McCoy: Even though you’re trying to get down to an economy of language with a script while trying to tell a story, if you’ve read enough scripts, if you’ve written enough scripts, hopefully you’ll have where the structural sign posts should be built into your DNA somewhere, and you can just rely on your instincts.

One thing that people need to think about though, is that ultimately these scripts have to get actors attached. So when you’re introducing characters, do it in a cool way. You can sometimes be a little more flowery or little more in‑depth when it comes to describing your heroes, because those descriptions will be the first thing actors will be seeing when they get the script.

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah, and if we could stop describing every female lead as “beautiful” as the first adjective that describes her, that would be awesome.

Justin: Talking about the rules and everything, what’s weird is, is in an actual draft pages, nobody seems to care. No one ever talks all that much about structure or… I even know a script this year that didn’t even have slug lines in it.

In treatments or outlines, if people flip through it and Act One has more words than Act Two, people freak out. It has to look like it’s going to have these 30 minutes per act structure. Even if one beat is going be a 20‑page scene, and you write, “They fight. It’s a huge epic Lord of the Rings fight,” because you said that in 10 words, they’re going to freak out, and think that’s a 30-second scene.

There’s this weird, whole structural thing. Everyone seems very rigid Syd Field, Robert McKee, in the treatment phase. That all goes away in the pages, always, in my experience.

Brian: I think sometimes execs seem to forget that you’ve written scripts before. They actually think, “Oh no, they’re going to hand in a 60 page script.!” There’s a huge disconnect sometimes. The fact is that we are all professionals, and we have never handed in something 30 pages short.

But, I’ve noticed that too, with treatments, where people get really twitchy about every detail not being there. It’s like, “He’s not going to put it in!”

Justin: What’s weird is, when you do a pitch, you spend most of your time on the set-up and first act. If you deliver on that in the treatment, they say, “I know about the beginning of the movie, because the writing of it informs some of the rest of it.” Sometimes, the story beats are actually more important than the content in treatments.

But, that’s the place where everybody gets very, “I’ve read screenwriting books, and this is how it must be.” Maybe in the script two characters fall in love. They say, “it doesn’t seem like they fall in love. I don’t believe it,” and you’re like, “Yeah, you should. It says that they fall in love. That’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to write that later.”

F. Scott Frazier: Yeah. It almost seems like when you turn in a treatment or outline, they expect to go on the same emotional journey that they will for the completed movie. I guess because it almost looks like a novel, they want it to have that same kind of emotional journey. If the script is like an architectural blueprint, the treatment is like a paperclip. I don’t even know what the treatment is in that metaphor.

Brian: It’s like if the back cover of the DVD was 30 pages long. I beg to not do outlines anymore. I just found that it’s excruciating, because it’s not a script. I’m like, “I could’ve written this script in half of this time.” People want more because they get uneasy. I’m actively trying to avoid treatments. I’ll be fighting that my entire life.

Greg: I hate these words, but it starts like this, “I know it’s just a treatment, but…”

F. Scott Frazier: You just made me nauseous.

Brian: Yeah. I’m agitated, right now. I want to shower.

Justin: I met this writer‑producer one time. One of my favorite meetings was, we had a treatment. Somebody goes, “This character feels thin,” and he goes, “It’s a treatment. Shut up.”

[laughter]

Justin: I can’t say that, but he could. It was great.

Scott Frazier: Just one last thing on the screenwriter gurus. I think it might have been the end of 2013. I have this full shelf of these screenwriting books. Most of them, I’ve never gotten any more than 15 pages into, or something like that.

I decided that, for one of my scripts, I was going to take one of the books, follow it explicitly in writing my scripts, and use their advice and their system to write the script.

I did it for about a week. I had nothing to show for it. I was so confused and lost. There were things that he was talking about in the book, that I was just like, “What the fuck does this even mean?” I was completely lost. This is a very famous guy, and a very famous screenwriting book. I was just like, “It’s unworkable.” It wasn’t designed to help me write a script, which I just thought was crazy.

Chris Borrelli: Many of those guys haven’t sold scripts. I actually ended up at a seminar. My old boss had bought the seminar years ago, before I was a writer. I went. It was so funny. It was so calculating the way this guru spoke. He pretended to remember little things from his time in Hollywood. I looked up his credits on IMDB. It was that one credit he talked about.

He had done one thing on a TV series once. He puts on a good seminar, but to your readers and stuff, you probably don’t need to spend the money on these seminars. I think the books are fine. That thing: those who can’t do it, teach. Sometimes, that’s fine. But I wouldn’t recommend following their advice too closely.

Chris McCoy: Everyone should just read Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman.

Scott Myers: Absolutely. I wanted to ask a fun question for you all, as we round this thing out. If there’s one big movie franchise you could write, anything, a dream project, what would it be?

Brian: I realized this year, I don’t want to do that. A franchise I loved reached out to me a while ago and I basically had a panic attack for a month. I know I could write the script I’ve been thinking of writing since I was nine years old, and it would be I could do a really great job. But I had nightmares of the movie coming out, and being a piece terrible for thousands of choices made after I wrote my draft.

And then, you’re forever the guy that screwed up that thing that you loved. I think it was the moment I grew up as a writer, where I could say, “Oh, I don’t want to do that with my life.” That’s the whole reason I got into screenwriting, originally, was writing sequels to movies when I was a kid. So I would pass on the dream franchise!

Scott Myers: Even in a fantasy version of like a happy… [laughs]

Scott Frazier: There is no fantasy version of Brian Duffield’s life.

[laughter]

Brian: A really interesting thing this year is that a lot of these movies coming out, especially in 2015 are basically, sequels to movies that people saw when they were kids, whether it’s Jurassic World or Star Wars.

I think it’s going to really have some positive results, and some negative results, like anything. This was like the year, I was like, “I would be happier watching those movies, and stressing out, just as a fan, as opposed to being a part of that.”

For me, I would love to be a part of whatever that new thing is. If it’s what some 12 year old is going to see now, and then I can be angry when that kid completely ruins it thirty years later. That’s my dream. [laughs]

Scott Myers: Anybody else who has, perhaps a more positive slant on that?

Brian: I think, it’s really positive. It was a really good moment when I realized what I wanted to do with my life, which is nice.

Scott Frazier: I would still do James Bond at some point.

Scott Myers: James Bond.

Brian: Oh, you’d be so good at it.

Chris Borrelli: Make him American, dude! Make him American.

Scott Frazier: [laughs] You know, I have been thinking the British thing is a little too fussy for me.

Chris Borrelli: I don’t think they’ll mind.

Scott Myers: So, James Bond. Anybody else have something they want to, a dream franchise project?

Chris McCoy: I feel like Indiana Jones is pretty sweet. I’m just going to throw that out there.

Greg: I would love to find a fun way to bring back Die Hard. In a way that’s less old…

[laughter]

Greg: Try and bring back the fun of the original. It’s my favorite film, and I’ve just been so disillusioned by where it’s gone. I would love to see the series re-done…

Brian: Do it from the villain’s perspective, man. Reverse it.

Greg: I’ll do it as a young Hans Gruber, set in Germany. [laughs] Quick, somebody call Fassbender.

FScott Frazier: It’s a prequel to Die Hard.

Chris McCoy: Discover a cool way that that guy got that way.

Brian: Like how he met his wife.

[laughter]

Scott Myers: Last question here for you all. I was trying to leave with something that’s a takeaway for readers. If you could to go back in time to when you were on the outside looking in, is there one thing that you would have done that would have expedited things or helped you move forward?

Or maybe, contrarily, something that you were doing that you wish you hadn’t done, and that might have speeded things up or made your life a smoother transition into Hollywood?

Justin: I’ve done mostly sci‑fi stuff and pretty big budgets, and what that means is that the poker game you’re playing is always high‑stakes. If I could go back, I probably would have tried to come in with something that you could make for 20 million, instead of everything having to be 80 or more.

That’s probably a simpler, easier way to get stuff made and get stuff moving, because people won’t always have sticker shock with everything that you’re trying to do.

Scott Myers: That 20 million and under does seem to be pretty significant…

Justin: If you have a budget that’s let’s say 75 or 85 million dollars, and even the studio is happy about it, they’re going to make a list of five or six actors that they feel comfortable leveraging themselves for. Now your entire project, getting the movie made or not, depends upon if they get the actor that they feel safe with, because of how much money they’re spending.

Whereas if you get down to lower budgets, the list of people that they’re comfortable hanging the franchise on gets a lot bigger. I wish I’d done more of that, and I probably should start to try and do some of that now.

Scott Myers: That’s a good takeaway — putting on your producer’s hat on a little bit and thinking in terms of budget.

Chris McCoy: I think the thing that younger screenwriters need to think about as well is that one way or another, like all businesses, Hollywood is a social business. Sometimes on Twitter I see screenwriters going deep into different structural rules and so forth, what should happen on page 15 or page 30, the sort of structural stuff that we were talking about before.

But you’ve got to know people. Otherwise, writing a script can be like building a plane but not knowing where the runway is. It helps to be in Los Angeles, and you can’t just cloister yourself all of the time, because one way or another the people out there in the world are the ones who help make decisions.

I think a lot of times writers are unprepared to go in and pitch and be social and do those kinds of things that all of us, in our heads, say, “No, dammit, I’m going to go to an island or a cabin somewhere and I’m going to write some great thing and everyone’s going to love it.” One way or another, this is a business, and it involves other people, and you need to get used to interacting with them.

Scott Myers: The idea of developing your social or networking capabilities is something that is of importance to an aspiring writer.

Chris McCoy: It’s two different skill sets. Writing is one, pitching to a studio room in front of eight people is a totally different thing. But for our career, we have to resolve the two. You just sort of have to get used to it and hopefully have fun with it, because unless you can talk about what you’re doing, you’re not going to be allowed to do it.

Scott Frazier: I think it’s a mistake to kind of put the two together. I think that being good in a room and networking are not necessarily the same thing. I definitely know a lot of people that think that networking is the key to success. Going to gatherings and that sort of thing. I think that’s… I guess it’s helpful.

But really what’s more helpful, what Chris is talking about, is being comfortable sitting in a room with eight other people and talking to them. Because at the end of the day, regardless of what movie you’re pitching, they’re handing you the keys to the car at that point.

They want to be comfortable doing that, and so to be good in a room and to be comfortable and be able to joke around with people, and talk to people and have a conversation about something other than movies for more than 15 minutes, I think is important. I don’t necessarily know that the networking is, but what Chris is saying is totally true.

Chris McCoy: I just feel like I’ve been at enough parties where I’ve seen people saying, “Hey, we would should do something together.” And you realize that cuts out fifty-five steps of the process of getting a movie made.

Scott Myers: It’s interesting, because I’m hearing kind of a thread here. Voice and then Borrelli talking about being a person. Just being authentic.

Scott Frazier: Screenwriting secrets revealed. Be somebody. Be a person.

Scott Myers: Be a person. Who’s got well‑rounded interests, and can talk about stuff and comfortable in their skin.

Greg: I think what you’re saying is you want to be someone that people want to work with. That’s a really important thing to having longevity in this career. You want to show up and do the work. And always be a professional.

Nothing will kill you faster than being the guy that nobody wants to work with, because you’re too difficult or you’re a baby about things or you’re too sensitive. You’ve got to get rid of all of that, because the gatekeepers don’t care. This business doesn’t give a shit about your sensitivity. It wants the ideas in your head, and your words on the page. Period.

You’ve got to be that guy who shows up and people say, “It’s you. We love you. Get your ass in here.” Be that guy.

Scott Frazier: By the way, even if you wrote the greatest script of all time and were still an asshole, you’d get that one movie made, but you’d never work ever again for the rest of your life.

Scott Myers: Somebody told me once, “People in Hollywood like to work with the people they like to work with.”

Brian: I thought that too. But regimes change all the time. [laughs] I’ve absolutely met the worst people I know I will ever meet in my life, and it’s this amazing… You see one CEO leave, and then all the sudden they’re rehired by whoever the new person is.

I went through a really, really rough year, a couple of years ago. The only thing that got me through it was other writers. I think I probably hung out a little solo before then. And I went through a pretty public shit-show that I think writers reached out to me because they’d gone through similar stuff. I think it completely kept me living in Los Angeles and writing screenplays.

I think for me I probably would have done as you guys just said, and been much more social, especially to other writers and just in terms of being encouraging and supportive and excited about what they’re working on. It’s more than what they’re working on, just how they’re doing as people. Because I think it can be a very lonely industry.

I think it’s just something that I’ve been learning the more I’ve been here, how much I value just having lunch with other writers and hearing what they’re going through, and learning who to work with and who to avoid. I think it would have saved me a lot of stress if I had that earlier in my life.

Chris Borrelli: Mine would be, if I could go back to that, I’d say putting about 75 percent of my daily work into things I could control and generate. It’s fine to chase jobs, and it’s great to work with people and stuff, but I’m in a pretty good place right now where I feel, and this sounds almost the opposite of what everybody else just said, but it honestly isn’t — I’m not depending on any one person. There’s not one exec that if I don’t make him happy, my career is over. There’s not one rep or anything like that, and it’s come about because I just really work hard at generating material. My fifth thing’s about to shoot next month, and of the five movies, four of them will have been specs. I’m not saying focus on that, because we know how hard that is.

But, put your time into stuff you can control and generate most of your time into things that can pay off later. Not to sound negative, but don’t depend on any one person. It’s just the facts of the way things roll. That would be what I’d do. I’d just go back to what I’m doing now. A more regimented career from the beginning, and working on just creating stuff, and having some control.

Scott Myers: That’s terrific. Let’s just end on this — I’d like to get your take on the movies of the year. What’s your top film of 2014, real quick?

Justin: Birdman.

Brian: Under the Skin.

Scott Frazier: I’ll say Whiplash.

Chris McCoy: I’m going to say Whiplash, too.

Greg: I’m a toss-up between Nightcrawler and Snowpiercer.

Chris Borrelli: I liked Nightcrawler. And The Purge 2 was just this weird guilty pleasure. It was my biggest surprise.

Scott Frazier: You know what, I would also like to give a shout-out to Edge of Tomorrow, which was one of the greatest summer movies of all-time that nobody saw.

Chris Borrelli: It was great. Can I change that? I’ll say that, that’s fine.

Scott Myers: I did a whole blog post on Edge of Tomorrow. That movie was so good.

Greg: Incredible that Dante Harper didn’t get credited. He brought that project to light.

Scott Frazier: It’s a total shame.

Scott Myers: Well, let’s end on that. Total shame. Very screenwriter-ly.

[laughter]

For other screenwriter roundtables: 2011, 2012, 2013.

For more Go Into The Story interviews, go here.