Go Into The Story Interview: Carter Blanchard

My conversation with the 2012 Black List screenwriter.

Carter Blanchard is a great example of talent meeting persistence. His first writing credit is a short film he directed in 1989. Since that time, he has landed numerous writing assignments and sold multiple spec scripts including “Virus” (1994), “Frigid & Impotent” (1995), ”Bedbugs” aka “Dead Asleep” (2004), and “Near Death” (2007). For anyone working in the entertainment industry, that is a long stretch of time. However it is with his most spec script “Glimmer” that Carter’s fortunes took a quantum leap, the script selling in a bidding war and making the 2012 Black List.

Here is my 2012 interview with Carter in its entirety.

Scott: When did you first become aware of the fact that there are these people know as screenwriters who actually write movies?

Carter: I always knew people wrote movies, but I became more keenly aware of it in film school, when I started to think about how they were actually put together. I basically started writing as a way to become a director and then I just ended up loving writing and ran with it from there.

Scott: You were at Boston University, is that right?

Carter: Yes.

Scott: You didn’t start out in film studies, you made a switch.

Carter: I was raised by a very artsy family. My father was an artist. My mom was always writing. My sisters were writers and artists. I grew up around this atmosphere, of not only artists, but hard-working artists. My parents dedicated all their free time to pursuing their creative endeavors. Yet I was always seen as a kid who knew how to make money.

I collected coins with my dad. We went to coin shows together. Something that never occurred to him was to actually haggle with people… get a better price. I started doing that, then he started telling me what coins to buy and sending me to tables. I’d play my poor kid routine, pretend I only had $3 if the coin cost $6. They’d give it to me for $3. So he wanted me to go to business school as I got older. I was creative, too, but I don’t think he saw a future in it. He underestimated his own value and his own lifestyle, so he pushed me to that. About two and a half years into college he took his own life. That was a big wake‑up call for me.

I had been unhappy with business school at that point and decided…when that happened it suddenly freed something within me to pursue an artistic career. I just came to realize life’s too short, for one thing, to do what you don’t like. I happened to be at a college that had a decent film program. I applied for an intra‑university transfer and I got in. Then I took to it like a duck to water.

Scott: That must have been quite a shock to the system, what happened to your father. It reminds me of Joseph Campbell talking about the Hero’s Journey, how oftentimes we’ll find ourselves on a path that seems pretty well laid out for us, but the easy path is probably not the one we’re supposed to be on. It’s another path we’re supposed to carve out on our own. Does that have any resonance with you?

Carter: Oh yeah, absolutely, and on both ends of the spectrum. My father’s death gave me a lot of drive. I would safely say my film school friends would agree, I probably was a lot more focused and driven than most of them were at the time. I went to school with some pretty talented people who have done well, but later on as the roller coaster career of writing went up and down, there have been times — as recently as 2011 — when I didn’t make any money. Where I looked back and wondered if this was all a huge mistake. [laughs] Maybe I should have stayed in business school, and right now I’d be doing whatever I wanted because I would have made money on Wall Street or something, which I’m glad I didn’t do.

But you go through hard times in this business and sometimes you can’t help wondering where the other path would have led. I can safely say now that it was the right path. It was definitely a very dramatic calling at that point in my life too, the way it happened.

Scott: So you have that experience. You change to film studies at BU. You come out to Los Angeles. As legend has it, you landed a gig where you were given like 150 scripts to cover in three months. Is that true?

Carter: Yeah, more. It’s probably more scripts and less time. That was at 20th Century Fox with a company called Grantwood Productions. When I went in for my first day of work my boss had stacks of scripts all around his desk, three feet high, a lot of them. He was like, “Okay, I’m a little behind on my reading. I need you to do coverage on these as soon as possible.” I think I was reading 15 to 20 scripts a week and doing coverage on them, while also working as his assistant. But that was the best way to learn how to not write.

Scott: That’s funny. The best way to learn how not to write.

Carter: There was so much crap. This was a small company so they were getting scripts from every agency out there. A lot of old scripts that had been floating around forever. But one of them I read, I got so excited over the weekend. It was the best thing I ever read. I came in, wrote my coverage with a big recommend. Well, it was “The Silence of the Lambs” by Ted Tally, which wasn’t yet in production. I didn’t know anything about it because I wasn’t reading the trades as much as I should have been at the time. I remember giving it to my boss. He just looked at me like… you idiot. It was just a writing sample.

Scott: I’m sure you probably have some pretty strong feeling about the value of reading scripts in terms of learning the craft.

Carter: Oh yeah. I’d highly recommend doing some script reading, especially for new writers. Like I said, you learn what not to do. You have an act to grab the readers, especially in this town where people are so busy, and everyone has ADD. If you can’t get their attention, if they’re not excited at the end of act one and want to see where the story’s going, they’re going to put it down most of the time. It’s amazing how many of those scripts I had to read didn’t grab my attention, but as a reader you’ve got to read the whole thing and then write up a synopsis and do coverage.

You really learn, “OK, why didn’t this script get my attention?” and you have to analyze it and you have to explain why it’s not good. Is it the characters? Is it the story? Did it start off slowly and just never really take off? Is it disjointed?

The more you’re reading scripts that don’t work and writing coverage and telling your boss why they don’t work, it sticks when you sit down to write your own. Suddenly you’re looking at your blank page, and you’re like, well, I don’t want to start off that way because that’s like the other script I read and that was terrible. I need a big character moment in the first scene, I need to get people’s attention. My act one turn really has to propel the story into a new direction with great purpose.

That all became very obvious very quickly by reading that many scripts.

Scott: Let’s talk about your script “Glimmer”. It made the 2012 Black List and sold to Dreamworks in a bidding war. Here’s a logline: “When three friends go missing on a camping trip in a forest rumored to be haunted, the two left behind discover clues that lead them to a safe deposit box containing video tapes showing exactly what happened to their friends.” What was the very first iteration of this idea?

Carter: I was in a place of desperation. I hadn’t landed a job in the 16 months since I changed my representation. I hadn’t given my new agent anything that he could sell yet. I was feeling a lot of pressure. I spent a lot of 2011 trying to write a young adult novel and two specs that didn’t quite come together. It was the end of January 2012 and I was talking to a good friend in the business. I had a found footage idea that he always liked. I figured, “Okay, I can write it quickly and found footage is a hot genre.” So I started writing that, and literally within three hours of doing that, I started thinking, “What else haven’t they done in found footage..?”

I came up with the idea of a videotape being left in a safe deposit box by someone who is stuck in the past. I stopped writing this other thing and started writing all the ideas that were flooding into my head based on that one notion. It quickly became a full story. I think I wrote a full draft in three weeks, literally from that moment up until giving a draft to my agent, David Boxerbaum.

I gave it to him late in the day and then he called me first thing the next morning, really excited, and that’s when I knew I was onto something. But it still needed a lot of work, at which point I signed with Adam Kolbrenner and Ryan Cunningham at Madhouse. We spent another two and a half months working on it before it sold.

Scott: The movie has a time travel component and so you’re cross‑cutting back between the present and the past. I’m thinking maybe the seeds of that story, you going down the track of this business degree in school, then choosing another path which is the film thing, so you have in your own life these parallel paths you could have gone on… I’m wondering if there’s some innate draw you have to that idea of parallel lives that might have been working in your subconscious, that helped feed you in terms of “Glimmer.”

Carter: Oh, I’m sure there are. I’ve always thought about parallel paths. I’ve always had this fantasy in the back of my head that my father didn’t actually die, that he just found a way to escape his current reality and that I’d run into him in New Mexico or something. But yeah, I definitely thought a lot about that last year, what my life would be like had I stayed in business school. But that just taps into something about writing, in general, where your subconscious really comes up with a lot of great stuff and it’s important to keep your ears keened to pick up on when you have a good idea.

Scott: This dovetails into, perhaps, that moment where you were three hours into the original found footage idea, and then, all of a sudden, boom, this other thing comes out. It’s almost like you’re following up what you were just saying, you had all this stuff building up inside and then at that precise moment, you tapped into this new idea and that opened the creative floodgates feeding the process for “Glimmer.”

Carter: I’m also attached to that time period, 1977, when I was still a kid. That was before things in my life got real and difficult and in my face, unavoidably. The veneer was no longer covering the world in front of my eyes. I think that was part of it too. Part of me is still stuck back there in that era when things were fun and there weren’t any pressures and you could be a kid. I think that has always been floating around in the background in my head, just in my everyday life. That’s part of the draw to time travel for me… to go back and live in that world again for a while.

Scott: The story starts out in a classic teens-camp-out-in-the-scary-woods vein. You figure they’re going to be picked off one by one, that kind of thing. But then it makes this dramatic shift into a time travel mystery. Was that an intentional feint on your part to fool the reader, or was that just a natural extension of the story you wanted to tell?

Carter: Well, I wanted it to feel real, and I wanted it to come out of a place where you could really believe this was happening, selling the portal as far as how they get back. I didn’t want to do something stupid or goofy. Hopefully what I chose isn’t. I figured it would be some kind of a natural structure or some place that is accessible but not obvious, otherwise everyone would be going in there. So by necessity I started to invent where it would be, how it would come to be and how it would have existed all these years without a major public discovery. It would have been some place where people go to hike that’s partly challenging and dangerous. Caves are always a little dangerous and you wouldn’t necessarily see this one if you walked by it at a certain time of day.

This led to the missing persons mythology of the area and the fact that the hero’s brother went missing, which led to the hero’s obsession with this place… trying to figure out what really happened to his brother. Then once I settled on that, I thought it would be a fun twist to set it up as a horror movie which most found footage movies were at that point anyway.

Then it turns into a completely different movie that propels act two. There was a risk of mixing genres. I didn’t want to come off like that and have people put it down thinking it was a good horror movie and suddenly it’s science fiction and now they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. But I think it’s a worthy risk to take if you’ve got a good story.

Another unconventional component in “Glimmer” is that you’re not always staying with the hero. I did an earlier draft with Madhouse where we tried to keep the hero in the story the whole way through. It didn’t work. So we went back to the original version and just said, “OK, this is our structure. It’s unconventional, but this is what the story is.”

Scott: You also have a mystery dynamic going on bouncing back and forth between these two time planes in act two, but then naturally evolving into an action type movie in act three. In a way, you’ve got a cross-genre story here, and yet it feels very natural. How aware were you of the fact that you were doing something nonconventional?

Carter: I don’t know how aware I was beyond what I just admitted to being aware of. One of the big surprises to me was that everyone saw it as an Amblin movie [laughs]. Before it went on the tracking boards, my reps said, “Which logline do you want to use?” The logline you read to me at the start of this interview is the one I threw out there. The other option was logline they came up with, which was something like “An Amblin‑esque found footage movie the likes of which you’ve never seen” or something like that.

When they called it Amblin‑esque I was like “huh?” So I said, “Use the one I came up with.” They said okay and then they used the one they came up with anyway, which was actually brilliant in hindsight and why I love these guys. Here I thought I’d written a found footage movie that somebody would want to make for a lower budget, like Summit or someplace like that which still would have been great.

But I wasn’t really aware of anything at that point. [laughs] I was just caught up in finally nailing down a really good story. I think we did 14 or 15 drafts at Madhouse between when I came to them and the draft that sold in June. It was one of those situations where it was my gut feeling about certain things in the beginning and then I just trusted Adam and Ryan. I don’t think anyone was thinking, “Now it’s an action movie.” It just was what it was. This was the direction our characters needed to go in, in the course of what was happening to them.

Scott: You’ve got to follow the story where it takes you, right?

Carter: Yes, absolutely.

Scott: If I was going to give a thumbnail summary of “Glimmer,” I might say it’s “Back to the Future” goes to the dark side. Is that a fair take?

Carter: Yeah, definitely. I like that.

Scott: With time travel movies, you’ve got to do a lot of careful thinking about who’s doing what where and how their actions influence time. You even mention it in the script, that whole “Butterfly effect.” How much of a challenge was that for you in writing “Glimmer” where you’re writing 14 or 15 drafts, how you’re really having to be cognizant about the implications of actions and events?

Carter: That was something that Madhouse really pushed for. I like being a little more cosmic with my storytelling. I like thinking that you’ve got to have some things in there that the kids do that doesn’t directly affect them, but leads to there being a different president. I put that in one draft. Adam really wanted to keep the cause and effect tight, because otherwise anything is possible. It comes down to a central screenwriting doctrine. If you don’t have any rules in your story, especially with science fiction or the supernatural, then it’s just really easy to lose your tension if anything can happen.

The first big spec I sold was about virtual reality. That was a huge challenge because anything could happen in virtual reality. How do you limit yourself within this world and keep your characters pushing forward in a narrowing funnel of tension and purpose? You need cause and effect, and you need to follow it religiously as you go.

With time travel, it’s very easy to yank the yarn out of the sweater, and suddenly you have a bunch of yarn again instead of a nice sweater. I just moved forward in chunks as we kept cleaning it up. “OK, everything makes sense up to here and all of a sudden this happens. Why would this happen?” It’s like combing snags out of long hair. You have to keep going through it and going through it and going through it. Sometimes it requires some painful yanking, but eventually, hopefully, you’ll have a nice smooth head of hair.

Scott: When I read a script, I’m always looking for characters I can relate to and find some emotional connection with to pull me in. Yet I always look for movies that have an intellectual component, something that makes you think. “Glimmer” does both very well because the characters are compelling, the situation’s compelling, but there’s also this really interesting interplay you have, basically where you’re really digging down into this idea of time travel in a way that I’m not sure I’ve seen before.

Carter: Cool. [laughs] I’m glad to hear that. I had a lot of help of with the characters. I feel like I’m throwing a big praise-fest for Madhouse, but Adam just kept pushing character and why is someone doing this? What’s the relationship? The love story was something he emphasized early on.

One of his first notes was: Okay, if we’re going to have a fractured structure where the hero isn’t always in the story, we’ve got to feel the stakes for him throughout. One way is to focus on the love story and have it be really strong and compelling and lead to a situation in act three where he’s going to have to go save her. That and the villain, who emerged just over the course of, again, just going over so many drafts. It became the hero’s best friend when it had been a different character entirely. I thought of making it his friend rather late in the process and it was a big a-ha moment because it was so obvious. But sometimes you have to work hard to reach the obvious.

Scott: Let’s talk about that. You’ve got a protagonist, Tyler, and you’ve got his best friend, Ben. There’s this dynamic that’s in place, wish fulfillment, basically if you could go back in time, what would you do with that power? Would you use that knowledge of the present to benefit yourself? You have a bit of time with the three characters in the past where they’re doing it in order to survive and whatnot. But Ben, when confronted with this, goes down a darker path. That makes him really a very interesting character and really drives home a question for the reader: “What would I do, given that circumstance?”

Carter: Well, that’s the whole fun of writing a script like this. What would you do if you suddenly had this ability? You capitalize on the wish fulfillment, but start to realize that’s hurting other people… so do you stop? Or do you just try a different way in hopes that you’ll stop hurting people but can keep reaping the benefits? It would be very difficult to give up a situation where you can become as rich as you can possibly imagine. But certainly, people are going to be hurt if not killed because you’re altering all these trajectories. That’s why it’s fun to make a guy and his best friend go in polar opposite directions and eventually have to confront each other over it.

Scott: Isn’t it fair to say that one of the themes going on in “Glimmer” is it’s really a story about self identity, particularly comparing and contrasting Tyler and Ben, the choices they make given the unique circumstances of the story?

Carter: Definitely. That’s a lot of it. But all of that came out once the time travel logic made sense. That’s when a lot of the emphasis on character kicked into high gear, particularly when… I haven’t even mentioned Dreamworks’ part in all of this.

Scott: Let’s jump to June 2012. Your script ends up in a bidding war between DreamWorks and I think Paramount was involved?

Carter: Yeah.

Scott: Could you maybe walk us through a little bit of the chronology of how that deal happened and what that experience was for you?

Carter: Well, I was thinking about going back to Boston and teaching before it happened. My buddy teaches at BU now. That was a compelling option. I was out of money, drawing off my IRA. I had a good feeling about “Glimmer,” but you never know. It went to producers first and by the end of that day, I was getting an email from Adam saying, “This is blowing up all over town. Sit tight. Stay positive.” It felt like good news, but because he added, “Stay positive” I got worried, because I’m used to someone saying “stay positive” as a sign that things are not going well.

The next morning, my phone rang at 8:30. It was my lawyer, my agent, and my manager. They said, “Okay, DreamWorks made an offer.” I was jumping up and down saying, “Great, take it!” They said, “No dude, this is only the first studio to respond.” We talked about some details and then they said, “Go back to doing your thing. Don’t worry about it. Just always have your phone ready.”

I was meeting a friend for lunch when I got another call from the team saying Paramount and DreamWorks both wanted it and I had to make a decision on the spot. Paramount was offering a little more up front, but DreamWorks’ was a progress-to-production deal, meaning they had to start shooting in 12 months or I got the script back free and clear. Then Boxerbaum said, “You’re also going to meet Steven Spielberg tomorrow if you go with them.” So then it’s not even a question anymore. DreamWorks! [laughs]

My favorite movie of all times is “Jaws.” Hands down. That movie is ultimately why I went into the movie business, if you go back to the real origins of what inspired me. So this whole situation was so great. It was just an amazing thing. The deal closed in the middle of lunch and my friend was like, “You’re buying.”

The next day I went in and met Mr. Spielberg. He was incredibly nice and really complimentary about the script. I kept thinking maybe he wasn’t really there and I was talking to a hologram because it was so surreal. I had another meeting five days later and then I was commenced on the rewrite. It was the fastest I’ve ever been commenced after a spec sale before. Usually it takes months. And DreamWorks’ notes have been excellent. The script has improved enormously under their watch.

Scott: Let’s follow‑up with even some more good news. What was your reaction when you found out the script made the 2012 blacklist?

Carter: Oh, that was great. It was a nice way to end a really good year.

Scott: Safe to say that 2012 was a hell of a year for you?

Carter: Yeah. Kind of a life changing. Life saving in some ways. As a writer, it’s the kind of year you dream about.

Scott: That leads me to another question. You’ve been working in the business for about 20 years, and obviously anybody who works in Hollywood, you have ups and downs in terms of employment. What are some of those keys you found in being able to sustain a career as a writer?

Carter: Well, luckily I did have that IRA money to keep myself going in 2011. I sold my first big spec script in 1994. I’ve been able to make a living at it ever since. That’s been one thing I didn’t have to monkey around with too much, was find other employment to keep things going. Psychologically it’s a different story. There were a few things that hit pretty big and then dissolved.

One was a spec called “Frigid & Impotent.” In 1995 I sold that to New Line and Drew Barrymore was attached to star. It was a pitch black comedy… very of the ’90s tonally, just whacked out. It got a lot of attention, a lot of press. It put my name on the map. Marty Bowen was my agent at the time. He did a lot for me but I didn’t know how sustain the success. First, that script was something I worked on extensively for two years. I did the student film, then did a draft, then had a writing partner on it for a year and took it out pre-Marty with a boutique agent. Got a lot of positive reads and meetings, but no sale. I took it back, sat on it for about four years before I came back to it and rewrote it on my own. Then I sold it, but only because I’d worked so hard, done so many drafts.

When you’re starting out, you’ve got to put in the hours, you’ve got to put in the time. Part of sustaining a career is sheer persistence. Just writing and writing and writing and not giving up. I always had that fire in my belly back then to keep working through times when I think other people might have dropped out. It was just stupid arrogance on my part, I think, which I’m glad I had, but my ambition at the time was completely unrealistic. [laughs] Because once I got out there with this sample everyone liked, I couldn’t follow‑up. A couple of jobs I got, they were expecting a draft delivered in 8 to 12 weeks and I didn’t have the chops to do that yet. I had good ideas. I was a decent storyteller. But I was still in the process of learning the craft of writing. It was a trial by fire.

I skipped along, got some jobs. Then I got a big assignment, “Marian and Robin,” at Disney. That somehow made the front page of the Hollywood Reporter when it was announced, or Variety, one of them. Another burst of attention after a cold spell. But it wasn’t a script I did a very good job on. One reason was that was the wrong script for me to be writing, which is another thing you have to pay attention to. You should only go for stories you really love. Stories that you feel confident that you can tell.

A couple years later I was going broke when I sold a spec called “Bedbugs” to New Line. That was a similar situation to “Glimmer” in that it sold in a day. It was the most money I’d ever made and kept me going for the next several years. But my mistake in following up that time was that I pitched everything that was thrown at me and got overwhelmed. I was going up for too many things, so I couldn’t give my full attention to any one thing. I burned myself out pitching a lot of shit and didn’t land a single job in the wake of that sale. I got ice cold again before selling a spec called “Near Death” to Searchlight in 2007. That wasn’t as big a sale, but it led to a few assignments. Then nothing got made and suddenly it was 2011 and I’m running out of money again. But that time it was worse because I was older and the spec market had contracted. That’s when I started thinking, it was a good run, but I’ve reached the end. Milked it dry.

I knew there were still some good scripts left in me and I was going to keep writing, but I was going to find a job teaching or work in reality TV where I knew some people. I could make a living doing that. I didn’t know what was going to happen at that point. Then this story just came to me.

Scott: What I’m hearing there is persistence, hard work. I think that phrase you said, was it “stupid arrogance” or something?

Carter: Yes. A fool’s confidence. I just thought I was brilliant back then. I don’t think I’m brilliant now. I think I’m lucky and hard-working. But before I used to think, “Oh, I’m so talented, I’m so brilliant, and anything I come up with is going to be amazing.” That’s just so funny when I look back at what I was writing then… what an idiot I was. But I had to feel that way or I would have quit. Any rational person would have thought, “What am I doing? This is stupid. I’m going to ruin my life pursuing this.”

Scott: How do you come up with story ideas?

Carter: I think I covered some of this before, I write down ideas and file them away. I read the news every morning. I look for ideas in there. I listen to people talking about life when I’m out… like hiking Runyon Canyon when you hear someone bitching about their relationship or something. Little seeds can come out of overhearing people. Even if it doesn’t launch an idea for you, it can launch or shape a character.

When I came up with “Glimmer,” I don’t think I would have tried a time travel movie without the found footage element. Everybody wanted to do found footage, but time travel was something they hadn’t done in that genre yet. That made it compelling for me. When you mix genres up or you put an unlikely character into a familiar construct, sometimes that creates a whole new mechanism. I try to do that a lot. I try and come up with something familiar that is done in a way I haven’t seen before. That’s a big aspect of how I think when I’m trying to generate new ideas.

Scott: One thing I hear you are saying to yourself, “I need to feel some passion for the idea. I need to feel like this would be something that would be entertaining to me.”

Carter: Yeah, and that’s what I learned… a good metaphor is, I played high school football. In practice, I’d always try to implement exactly what the coach would tell us to do instead of just going with the flow of what would’ve been more effective, after getting that initial blueprint on how to run through a play. The same thing goes for screenwriting. When I went out pitching after “Bedbugs,” I was delivering what I thought they wanted from me, instead of making it my own and coming in with some real fire in my belly about telling a story that they weren’t expecting to hear.

They’re hearing pitches all day, all week long. Depending on the situation, they may have heard 30, 40, 50 pitches already on a certain project. And now they’ve got to sit through another one, and even a fairly brief pitch is going to last 15–20 minutes. Then there are people who pitch for 30–40 minutes, as I sometimes did. [laughs] It’s a great cure for insomnia.

But if you are not excited and you’re going through the motions and simply giving them a blueprint for a movie that we’ve all seen before… it can be well-executed and you hit all the right points along the way… but if it’s not exciting to you, then it’s not going to excite anybody.

Scott: I’m also hearing don’t be satisfied with just an idea. To look for something that makes it unusual and distinctive. You hit on a core concept, then you say, “Okay, so how can I take that and elevate it to something that makes it more attractive in a distinctive way?”

Carter: Yeah, and even looking back at “Frigid and Impotent” is a good example. It was just a lovers-on-the-run movie, but it was this totally weird black comedy about serial killers who killed out of sexual frustration and then they meet each other and finally have great sex for the first time in their lives. That’s when the cops catch up to them and they hit the road. Then they have to deal with being two completely broken people in a new relationship for the first time in their lives. That script served me as a great sample for a long, long time. People really responded to it. As a young writer, I had no idea why the story worked, I just got lucky. I tried to write even weirder darker stories after that and they all fell flat.

Scott: How about prep writing, brainstorming, character development, plotting, outlining? How much time do you spend prepping a story?

Carter: It depends. For “Glimmer,” probably three days, but normally I would say two to four weeks. The idea I’m working on now I’ve been at for a couple of weeks. It’s coming together in stages. I’ll get broadstrokes and run ’em by Madhouse. They’re like, “Great, but you need to get things moving faster and find a better device to propel act two.” Then I go back and do more work. It will probably take a little longer on this one just because when I’m ready to go I really want to be ready to sit down and blaze through the script. I think the more time you spend developing a story the less time you’re going to spend writing it, which is a great way to write because then you don’t stop to figure out the next plot turn. Although I have some writer friends who don’t work that way, and they do fine.

Scott: Yeah, everybody is different. Right?

Carter: Yeah, but I think most writers work that way.

Scott: With young writers and students, I always tell them you at least owe it to yourself to work up an outline once. At least go through that process where you’re getting a scene‑by‑scene comprehensive outline. You may not end up working that way, but most professional writers, when the turnaround is eight to twelve weeks, you’ve got to have the chops down and the confidence that you know how to break a story.

Carter: Yeah, I’ve come to the point where I write a pretty detailed treatment. The thing I’m working now, it’ll probably be 15 pages long, the treatment I’m going off of. I usually start with a conceptual image or scene idea… “Glimmer” is a great example. The videotape in the safe deposit box. I put that down on a card, stuck it on my board and that’s going to be the beginning of act two. You build around that.

Next, what immediately pops into my head for this story? Introducing the characters, having some of them go back in the past and some of them staying here. Who are the two main characters to stay here? It’s going to be a boy and a girl. Okay, so they’re going to fall in love… That all goes on cards. Then come up with some wish fulfillment stuff. It would be cool if they go to Yankee Stadium in 1977, etc. Just start writing down all that kind of stuff… and the plot points that come out of necessity… and a structure starts to evolve. At the end of the day I can fill up half the board and get the rest of it down in another day or two and then go over it and make sure that it works. Then I’ll write it in long form, read the treatment. There will be lots of obvious flaws. Then I usually go back and start a new board with fresh cards, post all the stuff that I know works and pull the rest so there are new blank cards to fill. I might go through that process two or three times.

Sometimes you lose interest during this process or find you don’t have the solutions yet. When I was younger, I plowed ahead no matter what. But now it’s just like, eh, if I really want to do this I’ll come back later. But right now, I’ve got to come up with something new. There’s that part of it too, knowing when to cut bait on an idea that isn’t there yet.

Scott: How about developing your characters, any specific tools or techniques that you use to develop them?

Carter: It’s funny, because sometimes you write a script and people say, “Who do you see in this role?” It’s like, “I have no idea.” I’ll have images of people in my head, very vivid to me, but they aren’t anybody in particular. They’re just beings who have manifested in my imagination and they look a certain way. I can see them clearly when I’m writing. For me the story forms the character.

Say you’re going to be stuck in a car for a thousand-mile drive with three people. You want the driver to be the world’s worst driver who refuses to give up the wheel. It makes the other two nervous throughout the trip. So that character starts to take on qualities based on that first situation you came up with, which is also a story point. So as I pull the story together, the characters start coming to life and each informs the other.

But usually, the way I work, characters come to me later in the process. And then I get help. I get an awful lot of help from some really talented people who are always harping on character. So sometimes I’m forced into it. [laughs]

Scott: How about dialogue? Writing dialogue, is that something that a writer is born with, or is that something you think that they can develop?

Carter: I don’t know. I think you can develop that. I think it’s a matter of listening. You hear people talking and you pick up little mannerisms… the way people talk. You obviously don’t always want to write all the pauses and the stuttering as people do in real life, but you can get an idea for character through dialogue, or vice versa. You want to come up with characters who go well together, whether in harmony or in conflict. You usually want a little of both. I think dialogue for me just is another way of informing who the character is.

But I really just write what’s in my head, and then as the script gets further down the road, I start to define character more distinctly. That’s when some of the dialogue mannerisms come up, like Ben in “Glimmer,” who is just a little bit more from the wrong side of the tracks. I can be guilty in the early stages of writing just a little too… not phonetically, but just obvious, I guess. It’s bad dialogue, just because I’m trying to force this character into existence by hearing him talk in my head. For Ben in the early stages; he kept saying, “Hey, yo, what up, yo?” Everything was “yo, yo, yo.” I kept seeing him in my head as Jesse on “Breaking Bad” who talked like that. That’s already a dated way of talking, but it helped me get him there. Then later we took all the “yo’s” out. I think there might be a couple left. I don’t know, it’s hard for me to define this stuff. I don’t really know how I do it. [laughs]

Scott: You just do it.

Carter: Yeah, and half the time it’s terrible. Most of the time, I would say, it’s terrible. You wince your way to the finish line.

Scott: How about theme?

Carter: It’s another thing that comes to me later. I think people who tell the best stories or make the best movies probably think about that from the beginning. I’m always impressed when I meet writers who… I hate pitching. I’m probably better at it than I give myself credit for, but I’m just always so impressed when I talk to a writer, they pitch me their story, and it’s 10 minutes long and sounds amazing. Or they’re thinking in terms of theme first. Or they’re thinking in terms of what demographic they’re targeting. All that stuff to me is like, “What?” [laughs] I always feel I just wandered into this business and got lucky.

But theme‑wise, it’s something that Adam was pushing me toward once we got much further down the road. “What is this about?” That helped inform the conflict between the two friends and the love story a little bit more. I don’t know. I feel like an idiot when I talk about stuff like this, because I don’t think I’m qualified to talk about it. I was on a writing panel last year. I broke into a sweat, like, “What am I doing here? I don’t know how to tell people anything about writing.” That was one of the things, when I did start to think about teaching, I told my friend, “I don’t know what the hell to say!” [laughs]

Scott: Then maybe it’s a good thing that one of the bonus points of selling “Glimmer” is it kept you out of having to teach 18 and 19 year-old kids.

Carter: [laughs] Yeah. I went to speak to this high school film group once at Fairfax High. I just started talking to them about how studio development works. They were staring at me for 10 minutes… and as you can tell, I can talk fast… and they were all looking at me with their mouths hanging open at one point. One girl finally raised her hand and said, “We’re just high school kids.” I was like, “Oh, yeah, right. Well, here’s a camera…” [laughter]

Scott: I want to pick up on another craft question here. You mentioned this earlier, having the experience of reading all those scripts that you did when you were first out in LA, how important it was to convey something entertaining about the story in the first Act. But I was struck when I was reading “Glimmer” how efficiently you introduced your core cast of characters and established that story world. How important do you think the first 10 pages of a script is?

Carter: They’re critical, for sure. I might have been generous before, saying that they’re going to read the first act. I would hope most of them do, and I’m sure no one’s going to want to hear me say that they might not, but just the volume of scripts that come through, a lot of the younger executives have to read all of them. And if you know something isn’t working early on, you know it. So it’s really important to start off well. If you grab people that early in a script, they’re going to keep reading. That’s the main thing.

Scott: What’s your actual writing process?

Carter: I get up, make coffee, check the news, start writing. I take a hike in the middle of the day or go to the gym, come back, have lunch, write some more. That’s basically it.

I always work at home. For a while I was going to The Writer’s Guild, but too many people start talking to you there. Being in control of my writing environment is important to me. Except for the occasional cat ambush that I can’t ever control. But it’s good to be home and not have to deal with going anywhere. When I want a break, I hike, do errands, meet a friend. There are always general meetings to break up the week.

Once I’m in the writing stage, I really like listening to music while I work. Once I’m in the flow and I know where the story is going and I’m feeling good about it. The right music really helps me write action… good heavy music. I get physical with the writing when I’m writing action, I guess, sometimes, like listening to loud music and then really hammering the keys. I’ll catch myself with all this tension in my shoulders and then be exhausted after.

Scott: What do you do if you get stuck?

Carter: I’ll take a hike. That’s always good. Just being outside is really good. Anything to distract me… if I was still in a place with a big yard like where I grew up back east, I’d probably mow the lawn, something repetitive, something focused.

There are some trails in Griffith Park where you’ve got to pay attention to where you’re going. It puts you in the present and takes you out of spinning everything in your head for a while. Usually I come back and have answers unless it’s a bigger problem, and then maybe it’s just a case of the story not working. That’s the case usually if you’re banging your head against the wall for two or three days, talk to your guys about it… if they don’t have answers, they don’t pull you out of it, then usually within a week it’s a good indication that it’s time to move on for me. Though if it’s an assignment you can’t… then you just fake it. [laughter]

Scott: It’s interesting hearing you talk about your process, your relationship with your agents at Paradigm and managers at Madhouse Entertainment. You talk about them being intimately involved in the creative process. Could you unpack that a little bit?

Carter: They have the long view and the short view. The short view is literally like when I was developing this new idea and talking to them about it, my lead character is 15 years old. Adam said, “Age him up a little. Make him 17 or 18 if you can. It’s not going to hurt the story. It’s just going to be easier to cast that role and help sell the movie and help get the movie made.” Things like that are part of the strategy from the beginning, thinking in terms of how to make this movie… make the spec script appeal to as many people as possible and make the biggest impact possible. There are times I’ll disagree and say, I see your point, but I want to do it this way anyway. Like the original situation with “Glimmer” structurally, we went through a bit of that.

The long view, career‑wise, they’ve all had some talks with me about where they see me going and what I can do from here given what I’ve done already and then if “Glimmer” gets made, what the best approach is.

We contemplated television because it sold right at the height of selling season for TV. I’ve dabbled in TV before, and I just went through that and came out of it thinking, this isn’t really what I feel comfortable with right now. So there’s that to consider, too. And they’re all very flexible in terms of strategizing based on what motivates me.

Scott: I have one last question for you. It’s always the one that I’m sure you get hit up with whenever people talk to you about this stuff. What advice would you offer aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft? When they ask, “How am I going to break into Hollywood?” what advice do you have?

Carter: Just write because you want to write, first of all because there will be a lot of times when you’re not making any money at it and you’re struggling and you’re trying to figure out how to do it. So you’d better love it to start with. You’ll find that out pretty quickly, when funds are running low. You’ll either keep going and find a way to make it work or not.

If you do love it, don’t make excuses for yourself. You’ve got to live the life and write every single day. It would be better to write an hour every day of the week than six hours on Monday and then not again until next Monday. There’s something about getting up every day and writing. If you don’t have any ideas on a given day, keep a journal and write about your life instead. Keep a little morning notebook or something. Write about what happened to you yesterday. Just get in the practice of writing as a routine, that’s the most important thing.

Once you have something that you’re proud of, show it to friends and get feedback. Be gracious and show appreciation to the people who are taking time to read your script and give you notes. If they don’t like it, it’s not because they don’t like you, so separate your personal feelings from a solid critique. There are few things more valuable to a writer. Sometimes people who have not liked my scripts have given me notes that I’ve used and the script later ends up selling. You can get very valuable feedback from negative comments. Negative’s the wrong word… critical comments.

Always thank people for their time. The quickest way to get someone to stop reading your scripts is to be an asshole if you don’t like their notes. Being defensive and arguing with someone who’s trying to help you is a bad idea. That person has just given you their time. You want to keep that relationship strong so they’ll read your next one. Take them to lunch, send a follow-up email or a hand-written thank you card. But learn how to take notes well, because your whole career is going to involve getting notes from people.

Don’t just force in every note you get, because nobody is always right. People don’t want you to put in their bad notes because they’re going to get it back and read it and say, “This doesn’t work.” They’re not going to remember if they gave you that bad note or not and they won’t care. Learn how to separate good notes from bad ones… and learn how to execute the good ones, because that’s what going to make your script better in the end.

Once you’ve gone through that process and have a decent script, then getting representation is very hard these days. If you can swing working in the industry on some level as well as writing on the side, do it. Because then you’ll have a direct pipeline to get your script to somebody who’s in position to help in a far more concrete way, like getting you read by an agent or a manager… or their boss. It makes the process of finding a rep much easier. But you still have to write a good script.

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