Go Into The Story Interview: Lexie Tran

My interview with 2022 Black List writer for her script It’s a Wonderful Story.

Alexandra “Lexie” Tran wrote the original screenplay It’s a Wonderful Story which landed on the 2022 Black List. I had the opportunity to chat with Lexie about her creative background, writing a Black List script, and the craft of screenwriting.

Scott Myers: OK, Lexie. Congratulations, you made the 2022 Black List with your script, It’s a Wonderful Story. Great to have you here.

Lexie Tran: Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here. It’s been a fun couple of months.

Scott: I’ll bet it has been. I’d like to get some background here, some context. How did you find your way into an interest in writing for film and TV?

Lexie: I grew up in a town called Glencoe, Illinois, which is a suburb north of Chicago. It’s right there in the middle of what I call the John Hughes area of Chicago. Not like the city itself, very much that picturesque neighborhood that those films immortalized. I came to writing from a couple of different avenues.

One, I was always that kid who loved to read and loved to watch things and was always upset when my favorite show didn’t end the way I wanted it to or the movie did not end the way I wanted it to. I would imagine alternate endings or continuations. I’d have deep emotional feelings for fictional characters.

Two, my mother is a mental health professional, very good at talking about emotions, teaching emotions, that kind of thing. My father is high functioning autistic and an engineer, and very not good with emotions. He couldn’t read them on me in the usual way that parents do, and it led to a lot of conflict. In trying to communicate with him, I developed a fairly sophisticated knowledge of myself (for a kid) and what I was feeling, because he couldn’t infer it. And my mother gave me the tools to do that. So I grew up with that internal emotional awareness and a lot of practice trying to express it and make myself understood by my father, who did not understand me.

That seems to come through a lot of my work, it turns out. It’s a deeply formative experience to have a parent who’s looking at you when you’re crying, and they’re like, “Why are you crying?”

That led to an understanding of character, and it dovetailed with wanting to write.

Scott: That’s intriguing because I could see one of the reasons why you were attracted to the story of Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart making It’s a Wonderful Life, both of them dealing with some significant life issues. Let’s get into that in just a bit.

Do you remember some of those movies or TV shows where you’re like, “You know what, I could have written a better ending than that one,” or maybe just films or TV series that you enjoyed as a kid?

Lexie: Gosh. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was The Little Mermaid. To this day, it remains one of my favorite movies. I will fight anyone who says it’s not feminist, because it absolutely is, especially the Disney version. It absolutely enchanted me.

God, TV shows that I loved. I’m a fan of Star Trek, and I loved Star Trek — Enterprise. I know it was one of the least liked, least rated, but I loved it.

I loved The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars was big in my family, Alien and Aliens, and I was obsessed with anything period. Any and all Jane Austen adaptations, almost all of the golden age musicals. I was obsessed with Gene Kelly and Audrey Hepburn films, war films… anything that felt cinematic and of another time or another world. I started writing fan fiction. One of the things I wrote fan fiction for was Star Trek — Enterprise. I also wrote it for Tamora Pierce’s novels. Tamora Pierce is a famous fantasy novelist known for her young women protagonists, one of the pioneers of the genre. I loved original Roswell. Do you remember that?

Scott: Oh, yeah.

Lexie: I wrote a lot of fan-fic about Roswell. Didn’t like how that ended very much either. I wrote some early Grey’s Anatomy fan fiction. That’s what’s coming to mind right now that I can remember.

Scott: I’m not terribly familiar with fan fiction. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s like writing a TV spec. You’re learning the voice of the show…

Lexie: It’s a great training ground for writers. Back when I was doing it, this was before Twilight. This was before Fifty Shades of Grey. Fan fiction was very much a thing you didn’t talk about, and a lot of creators were vocal about not approving it being written about their work.

No one talked about reading it, but a lot of people read it and wrote it, and it was a great place to hone your voice because the characters and their relationships in the world are already established. You can work on what seems fun, what’s a fun adventure.

If you structure it with chapters the way a lot of fan-fic does, you learn to build arcs into acts, and suddenly you have a story, and it’s basically an episode of TV. And there’s a lot of bad fanfiction, too, which is equally educational. It’s great training.

Scott: How did you make that jump into screenwriting?

Lexie: I was about 15 when I made the leap from thinking about writing novels to thinking about writing TV and movies. At the time, it was movies specifically, that always drew my attention. Sorry, a little tangent.

When I was growing up, I was allowed either one TV show or one movie a day, and obviously, a movie would last a whole lot longer, so I watched a movie every day. Once I figured out that writing TV and movies was a thing, I read the script for Pulp Fiction, which had been published and you could buy it at any book store. I read that, and it was so not my genre, but I realized, “Oh, this is not written like a play, where it’s nothing but dialogue. There’s so much form and meat here.” It was like discovering my right hand, basically. From then on it was like, “I’m doing screened stuff exclusively,” and that’s what it’s been ever since.

I knew I wanted to write in high school. I also knew that film school was not going to be an option for me. The next best thing was get as close to LA as possible and pay my dues with internships and things like that.

I also knew that I didn’t want to do a strict English major, so I was lucky enough to get into Scripps College and I applied because, in part, they had a design-your-own major program for undergrads. I designed a more employable English major, shall we say.

Nowhere in my education did it include a screenwriting class, because there was only one and it was always full, I could never get in. Literally, I came out here, I went to college, and then every summer I had an internship in the industry. I was always the only intern not from UCLA or USC. That’s where I learned to read scripts. I stole scripts, I’m not ashamed to say.

I read through all the development stacks at ICM, and that’s where I learned what the form was. I could just log into the database, print out whatever I wanted, and I did.

Scott: A major component of your learning the craft was reading screenplays?

Lexie: Absolutely.

Scott: I’m always glad to hear that because I had that little mantra I came up with years ago, which was: Watch movies. Read scripts. Write pages. It seems like that’s the one area that people lack doing: reading the scripts.

Lexie: That’s interesting. I find that half the time you find a script, especially an older one that may be published online, you’ll see the differences between the final cut of the movie and the script and you can see like, “Oh, OK, I get why they cut this scene.”

I have an early version of Erin Brockovich. In the first act, there’s a lot of setting up of who Erin is and how bad her life is. In the first ten pages she steals medicine from a pharmacy for her sick kid. It’s not in the movie. You don’t need it. It’s great to learn editing like that early on before you even get into a situation where someone’s reading you.

Now I watch things and I immediately ask myself, “How would this look on the page?” If I can’t even imagine it, I have to go look it up and I do. It’s much easier now than it was twenty years ago.

Scott: Your internships, did that lead to an assistant gig, a pretty conventional path, if there is one, to becoming a Hollywood screenwriter.

Lexie: No, as you’ll see, my story is long and convoluted and full of perseverance because I had the very smart idea of graduating in 2008. It was just after the writer strike in ’07. Things were still chaotic and people much more established than me were struggling to find even PA jobs. It was rough.

The companies I interned at either folded or were like, “Oh, we don’t have room to take on a junior at this level.” The economy was in total meltdown. I had no choice but to pivot to pay my bills. I became an executive assistant, and I stayed one for about next…gosh, how long? The next eight years across various industries.

Everything from medical venture capital to architecture, to corporate investment finance. Lots of supporting C-level executives, which is why I can’t watch “Succession” because it’s too similar to what I experienced. [laughs] That’s what I did to pay my bills. Then I wrote nights and weekends.

You apply to the contests. Eventually, the Black List was invented and I put a couple of scripts on The Black List website. The one that launched me was back in 2019, so eleven years after I graduated college. It was a total stunt spec about the inventor of the Barbie doll.

The whole idea was, I don’t have rights to this, but I’m going to write this because I have a great take on this. I put it on the Black List website. Before I even got an evaluation, the very next day, someone had downloaded it and read it and that person is now my manager.

Scott: At Bellevue?

Lexiee: Yes.

Scott: Kate Sharp?

Lexie: Yeah.

Scott: That’s great.

Lexie: She found it right away. She called me the next day and was like, “Who are you? What else do you have?” We’ve been a team ever since.

Scott: Wow. That’s a great testament to perseverance, to productivity, and frankly to the Black List website.

Lexie: All three. [laughs]

Scott: Let’s talk about your script It’s a Wonderful Story. Plot summary:

“In the aftermath of World War II, a traumatized Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart used the making of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ to attempt to find a way back into normalcy.”

Presumably, you’re a fan of the movie. Do you remember the very first time you saw it?

Lexie: I do. I was late to it. A friend of mine in high school gave it to me as a Christmas gift because I’d never seen it. She was like, “What?” She knew I loved movies and was like, “You have to watch this movie.” Immediately I loved it.

It’s not one that I watch every year, but every year that I do watch it, I’m always curious how it got made because they don’t make films that way anymore. Its structure is so unique and it’s such a great emotional piece. You Google it, you IMDb it. There isn’t very much information. I did find a few things I thought were interesting.

One of them was that It’s a Wonderful Life was a flop, which I thought was incredibly interesting because after it was put on TV in the ’70s, it became an annual household favorite. It’s Frank Capra’s favorite, or it was his favorite film of all of his films.

George Bailey was Jimmy Stewart’s favorite character of all his characters. I thought there was something interesting there.

I ended up reading a couple of biographies of both Frank and Jimmy and learned the background of this story and thought, “Oh, my gosh, there’s totally a biopic here,” but I could never figure out the “why now?” of it.

That’s something I hear all the time now when I’m working with people and I’m pitching projects. It’s always, “OK, it’s a great story, but why now? Why make it in this exact moment?” I couldn’t figure it out until the pandemic. Then suddenly it was like, “aha!” A global, collective trauma that no one has a roadmap to navigate.

How are we going to navigate this? What prior examples do we have? The healthiest way to navigate all trauma is to try and create something positive out of it. I thought, “OK, here’s my venue. I’m going to tell a story as an allegory for coming out of the pandemic.” That’s how it was born.

Scott: The pandemic would correlate to World War II?

Lexie: Yes.

Scott: Let’s talk about the real-life Frank Capra and the real-life Jimmy Stewart. Capra was a very successful director, won several Oscars was It Happened One Night, which is incredible…

Lexie: Such an amazing film.

Scott: Can’t Take It with You, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Of course, a couple of those films Jimmy Stewart was a star in. When you were reading and studying about Frank Capra, apart from the fact that he thought this was his favorite film of all time. What stood out to you about Frank Capra as a possible character to explore in a movie?

Lexie: Capra was interesting. I read a biography of him and then his autobiography and the difference was stark. What I discovered was that Frank loved to remake his own story and remake his own image a lot. It said to me that this is probably somebody who didn’t look internally too much at the things that maybe were less savory about himself, or at the very least, he didn’t want to. He wanted to focus on the prettier, the glitzy or the more Hollywood-esque story. That was interesting.

Then the Jimmy Stewart story was so interesting because he’s such a…There’s his early work where it’s a lot of comedies, a lot of romantic lead-type stuff. Then post World War II, he’s doing westerns and lots of Hitchcock stuff, darker stuff, Rear Window, and all that. The difference to me was that after the war, and this was written about, too, in his biography, he comes back and he was 100% the man who did not talk about his experiences.

I thought it was so interesting that he emotes so much and he does so much with the material he has. To be able to channel that, you have to have such an internal richness, but to not talk about it, to not share it with anyone, I thought there was something really powerful about that dichotomy.

And I thought that was pretty universal, too, because we all have things that we don’t want to face about ourselves, that end up bleeding into our lives. Interesting guys, for sure.

Scott: You mentioned that some of those movies before 1945 when your story starts, he did The Philadelphia Story, which is another great movie, The Shop Around the Corner, delightful. Then, of course, You Can’t Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Capra and Stewart both had their unique connection.

At the beginning of your script, Frank Capra is in Washington, D.C. He’s directing and producing all those Why We Fight series of films, part of the propaganda in the positive sense arm of the government to incentivize Americans to get involved in the war effort. Meanwhile, Jimmy Stewart in what they called the Armed Air forces flying an airplane over in Europe.

Could you maybe talk a bit about those war experiences for each of them and how they each had…Well, Jimmy Stewart really did have a trauma. I guess you’d say it was PTSD in a way. Could you talk a bit about both of them, in terms of what they came away from the war with?

Lexie: Sure. I think it’s important to emphasize, too, that they were not young men for World War II. For Capra, he had served in World War I. Prior to being in film he was as a chemical engineer. He was stationed somewhere away from combat for World War I.

Capra, being an immigrant and being Italian as well, a Sicilian, even. Not even Roman Italian. He had this massive chip on his shoulder about having to always prove his American-ness because he experienced a great deal of racism even after being a successful director in Hollywood.

A lot of his service went into, “OK, well, I’m an American. I’m going to be as American as anybody else, even though I’m too old to go and shoot a gun, but I’m going to contribute what I do best, which is to motivate and inspire people to get riled up and do what needs to be done.”

A lot of what I ended up creating in the script was the sense of, what would it take for a man whose works are about the inherent goodness of man, to then put all that expertise into motivating millions to go kill an enemy. It’s so counter to his point of view, which was always about man being essentially good. The power of the little guy against the mob, against the unrighteous, and he always wins. Everything he’s known for is called Capra-corn for a reason.

Scott: Capra-corn.

Lexie: It was corny. Idealistic. Fairy-tale-like, where good and evil are clear and defined, and good always wins.

Then, there were several interviews I saw with Capra, after the war, when it became really apparent, like a lot of the Holocaust atrocities had come out, suddenly it became clear of what the war had been about, and what was at stake and how evil the evil was, and it shook him.

It altered that worldview of, “We can still be friends with these people eventually.” How do you become friends with people who commit genocide? Then I thought, too, about how this man who’s doing all he can to get people to want to go out and fight, knowing that a lot of them won’t come home.

What kind of toll would that take on him? He was a father, and a veteran. He could empathize with the loss on many levels. That would be extremely difficult. I thought about how would it feel to know that the last things you did that reached a wide audience were in service of war and were in service of killing other human beings, when your whole life has been about the goodness of man and what good people can do. That’s where that character really came from; the exploration of that idea.

Scott: He comes back and they give him a bunch of scripts to look at and they’re all war movies, essentially, because he’d done all that work. Was that true or is that something true and maybe even emotionally true, but was that something that he faced?

Lexie: That is my fabrication. What is true is that he comes home and he doesn’t have the clout that he used to have. He’d been away for four years. As we know in Hollywood, the minute you’re gone, you’re gone. People forget about you.

He’d always had a contentious relationship with his studio boss, Harry Cohn, who had made all of his hits. Cohn always controlled everything and didn’t want to make It’s a Wonderful Life, which at the time was called…

Scott: The Greatest Gift.

Lexie: Capra was insistent. After this experience and having gone through the war, you feel like, what’s the point of…What’s the word I’m looking for? What’s the point of censoring myself, of curtailing myself when life is short and can be brutal? I want to make what I want to make, studio be damned.

He quit his contract and he did go and form a partnership with two other colleagues and directors, and they formed a company that was independent. They only got to make one movie and it was It’s a Wonderful Life.

Scott: Liberty Films.

Lexie: Liberty Films.

Scott: Let’s jump to Jimmy Stewart. He had a more direct, visceral war experience. How did that impact him?

Lexie: Jimmy Stewart’s story is the less fabricated one. Stewart grew up with a family that was very focused on service. His father and grandfather had served. When World War II came to the United States, he was technically too old and too thin to enlist and was declared 4F.

He lobbied tremendously to be able to serve, and he went out and got his own pilot’s license. He was determined that he was going to serve in this way. Air combat was not new in World War II, but it was going to be tremendously important in a new way that it hadn’t been before.

At the end of the war, I believe he was a colonel, or he was a captain, I forget. He was pretty highly ranked. He commanded men. He led raiding missions over Germany to destroy munitions plants. There were mistakes. At one point, I read, they accidentally destroyed a town of German civilians. It weighed very heavily on him.

He did get what they called Flak Happy. He had PTSD. He did have to go and take several weeks off to convalesce in England, at which point he had to go back into the service. He went and he did his duty, but he came back and very much immediately was like, “I’m not going back to Hollywood. I’m going to go work in my father’s store, and that’s going to be my life from now on.”

My interpretation of that was, how can you spend your life doing something so frivolous when you’ve literally held lives in your hand and you’ve seen your friends lose their lives as a stroke of fate? How do you do that? How do you find that lightness to play make-believe?

In my script, I make it so that he doesn’t initially want to make It’s a Wonderful Life because he’s just done with that world. In truth, what happened was, he was a loyal friend. When Capra calls and says, “Hey, I need you to anchor this movie I’m making, be my blue blood on this ragtag indie.” He says, “Of course, Frank. Anything for you, Frank.” That’s what really happened, actually.

They make the film and in the making of the film, it’s pretty clear, Stewart gets into a deeper, darker place. The parts of him that you see when he’s experiencing the world if George hadn’t been born, he doesn’t have that darkness in any of his prior films.

Even the darker parts of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he’s righteous, and he knows he’s on the right. It’s a man in a picture of despair at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. That could only have come from his war experiences. He was very much alone. In real life, he wouldn’t meet Gloria until a year after the movie was made.

Again, I thought about, you come back from the war, you’re a middle-aged man and you’re alone. You don’t have a wife, you don’t have children and your parents are older, what do you have to cling to? I wrote it so that he channels that loneliness into that performance of George Bailey.

Scott: It’s interesting to hear the real-life versus the version of the script because you did make some smart choices as a screenwriter, as opposed to have him saying, “Yeah, Frank, sure, I’ll make that movie.” You have dramatic irony at work because you’re tracking two stories.

You’ve got Frank at home with his wife, and they’ve got their own issues, and Frank in his career, which is kind of stalled. Then you got Jimmy Stewart, who’s basically saying, “I’m not going to do this anymore.” Then he meets Gloria. Gloria is a really interesting character the way you shape that character.

She’s almost like a mentor figure at first, as opposed to someone that they become erratically involved with. For example, there’s an exchange where he says to her, “I’m going to quit acting.” She says, “OK, I give up. Why can’t you act anymore?” Jim says, “It feels silly, phony.” She says, “Sure.”

Jim says, “It didn’t before.” Then he follows it up later he says, “A good actor doesn’t just say the lines and hit his marks. He has to make the audience feel something. The only way that works is if it’s real to him. If it’s real to him, it’s real to the audience. Gloria, in parenthetical: getting it. Nothing feels real anymore. Jim: nothing good.”

You bring that war experience, the trauma there, it’s impacted him and getting in the way of him being an actor. At first, he tells Frank Capra, I can’t do it, but then something starts to twist him. Could you talk a bit about that shift that happens with him where he does eventually agree to do it?

Lexie: It’s that loyalty. One of the things that’s well studied and well documented about World War II veterans is the camaraderie that was forged in that experience staying with them the rest of their lives and loyalty was tremendously important to them.

He doesn’t want to do this movie. It’s the last thing he wants, but if it’s make or break for Frank, then he’ll suffer for Frank’s sake. That’s what he does. He struggles so much initially in making the movie and in trying to channel a young carefree George Bailey in his 20s. That’s what I was going for.

Scott: Literally, it’s in description at one point, I think it’s his first day. That says, “Absolutely does not want to be here.” This is after he’s committed to the movie. That’s another interesting choice you made, which probably diverges from what happened in real life, because Jimmy Stewart’s just the consummate actor, that he’s struggling through some of those early scenes.

There’s an interesting dynamic that’s going on, and I’m sure you were aware of that, milking it. George Bailey doesn’t want to be doing his job at the Bailey Savings & Loans.

Lexie: Exactly.

Scott: George Bailey is doing something that he does not want to be doing, and Jimmy Stewart is doing what he does. Actually, Frank Capra’s got a situation like that, too. George Bailey: “I want to see the world, I want to build bridges, I want to build skyscrapers.” That was what Frank Capra did with all those great movies that he won those Oscars for.

Now he’s struggling to make this movie. He’s behind schedule. He’s over budget. He’s got an actor who is struggling. They’re both struggling. In some ways, they have their own inner George Bailey thing going on. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Lexie: Yeah, definitely. The way I structured it, and I’ll be honest. I thought when I first began to write this, that it would be a quick three-month project because I knew the story forwards and backwards. I knew all the history and the trivia, and I had the structure down. My outline was great… and it still took a year to break this story. The reason is this.

I realized that I was trying to give traditional hero’s journey arcs to both Frank and Jim, and it couldn’t work that way. One of them needed to have that “from darkness to light” journey in a traditional way, and that’s Jimmy. Then Frank needs to be what I call the Paddington Bear character.

Literally, I used this when I pitched the rewrite to my manager. I was watching “Paddington 2” with my son and it hit me, “Oh, this is it. Frank is Paddington.” Like Paddington, Frank needs to maintain a certain belief, an unshakable belief that drives him regardless of whatever gets thrown at him.

It’s their unshakable belief that changes everybody around them. Frank has this drive to make this movie, which, in his words I read somewhere, was the one movie that combined everything he was trying to say with all the other previous movies. If his career is over, he wants to go out with this very idealistic idea, when the whole world is feeling very cynical.

That belief is what changes his wife and helps her overcome her anxieties and brings them closer together. It helps Jimmy realize that maybe there’s a way to take the broken pieces of his identity and forge them to something new. Not quite as good as who he used to be, but maybe still be useful. Still be worth being.

That’s the way the structure ends up. When the movie is a failure and Frank is beside himself, I organize it so that Lu knows what Frank needs. She knows that he has somehow lost the point of his own thesis, and she makes him go watch the movie by himself.

When he experiences the movie through the eyes of one regular person, he learns his own lesson, which is the lesson of It’s a Wonderful Life. Ironically he has to learn the very lesson he was trying to teach, which is that regardless of the disappointments and failures, you have no idea the impact that your life will have on others.

He learns his lesson finally, and he’s able to let the movie go and move on with his life. He retired shortly thereafter. About 20 years later, thanks to the invention of television, the film becomes everything it was always meant to be and reaches millions more people than it ever would have at first time around. It makes me cry even now.

Scott: I know. I’ve seen the movie, I don’t know, probably 15 times. I can still remember the very first time I saw it. Came home from a midnight Christmas Eve candlelight service with my folks and saw this grainy thing on TV, and by the end of it, I’m weeping. It was such a powerful experience.

Lexie: There’s that one line where George is home and the whole town is in his living room and his brother is the last one to arrive. His brother who had the life that George wanted. Brother comes home and offers a toast and goes “to my big brother George…”

Scott: Richest man in town.

Lexie: I cry every time. I can watch 30 seconds on YouTube and burst into tears because it just…It brings the whole movie home, the whole what, 90 minutes into one line. Just masterful.

Scott: Your script includes a really interesting scene, which I’m sure came from whole cloth your own creative instinct, where Gloria asks Jimmy Stewart over to the house because her son Michael has not been talking to her and has been rather sullen for three days. It’s like, the first time he’s even met the kid. It’s a long scene.

It’s like five to six pages long with the real estate of a script. Could you maybe talk about why that scene exists? Because Jimmy Stewart starts doing this acting thing with the kid. Maybe talk about that scene because it’s quite evocative and it’s a great way of showing visually this shift that’s starting to emerge in his character.

Lexie: Thank you so much for that. That’s one of the first scenes I wrote, and it’s the only one that’s remained largely unchanged through every draft. That scene is my midpoint shift for Jim’s arc. It’s the one where he suddenly realizes that “OK, maybe acting isn’t useless.”

This kid has been through something and he won’t talk about it. He’s clammed up. He’s clammed up the same way that Jim and millions of men who went through trauma are clammed up. He knows from firsthand experience that clamming up eats you from inside. He doesn’t want that for this little boy. It’s a little boy who doesn’t know him, doesn’t trust him, has no reason to talk to him whatsoever.

Jim digs deep into the tools he has. The tools he has to connect are acting tools. He shares a story about what it was like to be afraid while he was in service and it’s something he hasn’t spoken about before in the movie. He hasn’t spoken about it to Gloria. He shares it out of necessity to connect with Michael.

Then, when Michael still won’t admit what happened or can’t process what happened, Jim says, “OK, well, let’s act it out,” like you might with a therapist, I think now. A lot of therapy, you revisit traumatic situations to make them have closure the way that you need them to. That’s exactly what they do.

They enact the situation where Michael feels terrible for something he did. They bring closure to it. The whole point of that scene is for Jim to realize that acting does not really just have to be entertainment. Acting, movies, and stories can be and often are extremely healing to people who have no other way of getting that healing.

It’s immediately after that scene where Gloria, who is very intuitive, finally tells to Jim stop hiding. She can see in him that he’s hiding from himself, that he won’t give himself the same help he just gave to Michael. He hasn’t fully accepted his traumatized self.

She tells him, “Stop hiding. For your own sake, not for mine.” That’s when Jim figures it out. He puts the pieces together and figures out, “Maybe I’m not useless. Maybe I can still use this and do some good.”

That’s when he goes and is able to channel all of his really horrible dark feelings into incredible, moving scenes, and it makes the movie work.

Scott: When you think about It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s such an interesting story because this guy, George Bailey, has a powerful rage inside. He’s so angry that his life has passed him by, which is why Clarence the angel has to go, “That’s it. You’ve never been born.” Get to see that George actually did make a difference in people’s lives.

There’s a little subplot in the house, that little ball on the stair thing. The third time, he kicks over his table with his bridge, the little section of the house where he’s got his bridges. Jimmy Stewart, when you read the script, you realize that Jimmy Stewart via your story brings that inner frustration, anger, and rage to bear in his acting moments.

I thought that was very effective, how you did that. By the way, I want to ask you, how did you choose these scenes? Because these are the scenes you chose from It’s a Wonderful Life to show. After the dance, “You want the moon?” George, for the first time with Clarence, “That’s right. He’s never been born.” George interrogates Uncle Billy after he’s lost the $8,000. George seeing Mary as an old maid. George on the bridge asking Clarence to come back, the telephone scene…

Lexie: I know.

Scott: Then, “Hello, Bedford Falls!” Were you thinking, because it’s not necessarily in chronological order, some of it is, but how did you pick those scenes?

Lexie: Every one relates to what I need to show Jim experiencing in that moment. I choose some of the hokier scenes, some of the clunkier ones for the beginning of the shoot, where he’s not yet connected to his emotions.

Then later, when he’s fully channeling his real self, you get the chasing-Mary-in-front-of-the- library scene, and the incredible kiss. That’s when he’s channeled the rage. At that point, in embracing his darkness, he also frees up the lightness.

That’s when he’s able to bring the lightness of “Yay, Hello Bedford Falls!” I think I wrote it that Frank tells him “These people have been watching you get beat down by life for two hours, and they are afraid you’ll never feel joy again, and therefore neither will they in their own lives. You have to give it to them. It doesn’t matter if it’s ridiculous, just give them joy.”

Jim’s voice shoots up octaves, and he’s absolutely ridiculous. Hands in the air, his voice cracks but it accomplishes what it needs to accomplish.

Scott: Was it a challenge for you writing dialogue for Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart?

Lexie: No, not at all. No. Stewart is super easy. Is there any actor with a more known cadence than Jimmy Stewart? Everyone’s parodied at some point or other. The way Capra speaks in his own autobiography, it’s 100% the 1920s bootlegger drawl that you expect from that era.

My choices for dialogue are usually based on what the characters are feeling. If someone’s nervous, I make them a bit more chatty. There’s more “ums.” There’s superfluous words. If someone’s angry, it’s short, choppy.

With these two, I just heard them. I had watched a number of interviews with Capra so I could hear him speaking, a very soft voice, light voice. Stewart, I’ve seen so many of his movies and I didn’t even realize. One of my favorite movies growing up when I was little was An American Tale: Fievel Goes West.” It was an animated movie.

Jimmy Stewart, in one of his last roles, voices the old west shootout dog. I’ve heard that voice in my head for 30 years and didn’t realize that it was him.

Scott: You’re right. The movie did flop. If you even quote Daily Variety’s headline, “It’s a wonderful flop” the day after it premiered. Like The Shawshank Redemption, which didn’t do very well. TV brought those two movies back to where people began to love them and they became these classic films.

At the end of all this journey of you writing this script, you said it took a year for you to crack it, you’d make the 2022 Black List. Could you maybe describe were you tracking that at all on the second Monday of December?

Lexie: I don’t think anyone can track the Black List. We took the script out in October, so two months before.

Scott: That’s a good time to take it out.

Lexie: It’s always a good time to take it out. I know that almost all the reps in town remind everybody, “Hey, you read the script this year and you liked it,” but no one can ever influence the vote. From what I understand, my manager called me immediately after I found out.

The way I found out, by the way, I’m a big Twitter user. I tweeted congrats to all the Black List ’22 members before it came out. Then people were tagging me all of a sudden and I saw my name, and I was like, “Oh, shit, I didn’t know.” I had no idea.

Anybody who’s tried writing in the last 15 years has dreamed of making the Black List. It means something. Even without the success of now produced Black List films, it’s a very nice…What’s the word I’m looking for? It’s a good feeling to know that, “OK, this script resonated with people.”

That’s more than anything else; that it resonated with people. Regardless of what happens to it, enough people liked it and remembered that they wanted to vote for it. That’s all I ever want to do.

Scott: Congratulations, it’s a wonderful script called It’s a Wonderful Story and about It’s a Wonderful Life. I have some craft questions for you. OK?

Lexie: Yeah, please.

Scott: How do you come up with story ideas, things you want to write?

Lexie: I’m a big fan of combining opposites. It’s inherently dynamic. It usually produces my best results. I actually have a daily practice that I do, and there are several that I do. I’m a big believer in a little practice every day. Five minutes every day beats one hour once a month.

One of the things I do is concept generation, and I do it for 30 minutes every day. I literally sit there, and I come up with opposites in pairs.

Love and hate, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, whatever opposites that I can think of. I try to come up with a logline that somehow makes the two relational. That’s how I end up developing a lot of stuff, believe it or not.

Scott: What do you think is the inherent power of opposites in terms of storytelling?

Lexie: Initially, it promises change and conflict. If you can get it clear in a log line, it suggests the movie and the change that will take place. Think prostitute and a high-society woman. You get “Pretty Woman,” it’s about a prostitute who falls in love and becomes a high-society woman, but how does she do that?

The “how” is what you end up developing hopefully into the idea. The conflict is always what drives a high-concept idea. For me, the more opposite, the better.

Scott: I’m glad to hear you say this. I drive this point home with my students all the time that you got to come at this stuff with the strongest story concept possible. Especially nowadays, you probably agree because Hollywood is so addicted to pre-existing content, prequels and sequels and threequels, remakes and reboots, and franchises.

In order to get original content, you got to have something that’s really strong. How important do you think that story concept is to the success of a spec script?

Lexie: Incredibly. If talking success in terms of a sale, concept is the single most important thing, even more than execution. If we’re talking in terms of selling the writer, then as long as you can continue to generate similar high-concept ideas, it’s tremendous in selling yourself as a writer of potentially big box office movies.

Look, Violent Night came out a little while ago. A Universal movie, totally original, and I haven’t seen it, but the logline is: Santa saves a family from terrorists in their own home on Christmas Eve. Santa is cuddly, nonviolent, peaceful, but you combine it with the opposite, he’s a violent ass-kicker, you get this high-concept movie.

Scott: What’s your prep writing process? How do you break story?

Lexie: I am a structure queen, which means that I struggle more with character. Before I do anything, I have to have a working logline because that will tell me what I’m supposed to cleave to. For me, it’s very easy to veer in tone or theme unless I keep myself honest with the log line, and then I go from big to small.

I have a “Save the Cat!” beat sheet situation where I write out, here’s my act one, act two, act three. I have to know what the midpoint and the end are. Once I know what those are, I figure out the beginning and then I figure out the arcs in between for each act. Then I start to work on the character.

For me, it’s always got to be extremely clear. “What do they want? Why can’t they get it? What’s at stake for them emotionally if they don’t get it?” Honestly, it always ends up being life or death. It’s always a metaphorical life or death stakes.

From there, I can start to craft the story and start to create scenes and I track the emotional development that I’m trying to create from beginning to end. I create my highs and lows. What’s the list of terrible things that will force my characters to experience their worst nightmare?

If my worst nightmare is being rejected, let’s say. There’s a million ways to be rejected. Being rejected by my boss for a promotion is not anywhere near as emotionally gutting as being rejected by my husband for sex because he’s not attracted to me anymore, or, even worse, if he wants a divorce because he’s in love with someone else.

I create a list basically of what are all the things that will cause them to experience their deepest, darkest night and then I see what fits best for my narrative. Then I put those events where they need to fit in the structure.

By the way, this is something I learned from Corey Mandell’s workshops.

Scott: It reminds me of that. I always thought this was such a great insight. Robert Towne said it. He said, “The single best question you can ask a character is what they fear the most.”

Lexie: Exactly, yes. What they fear the most, and also my other favorite way to do it is, what is the lens through which they view life when we meet them and how does it change by the end? That helps me differentiate my characters.

If I have one person who goes around thinking that life is totally fair, they’re going to react differently to adversity than someone who believes life is not fair and always stacked against them, and that helps me create unique characters.

Scott: I like to ask this question because it seems like it’s the one area of screenwriting or maybe writing in general that there’s a lot of liquidity about, and that’s the idea of theme. I don’t even know necessarily what people have a specific definition better than that.

Do you think in terms of theme? Is it something if you do, do you think of it upfront? Do you think of it as something that emerges along the way? Is there a central theme you’re looking for? Are there multiple themes. Generally speaking, what’s at work with you in terms of this concept of theme?

Lexie: For me, theme is whatever idea I’m exploring in all the storylines. I probably cleave closest to Robert McKee’s definition, where in Story, he writes that for every plot and subplot you have, you’re exploring the same theme, and the subplots either prove it or disprove it. Whatever you’re trying to prove or disprove is your theme.

Scott: What about, you sit down to write a scene, what are your goals?

Lexie: My goal is always emotional change in the scene and always a build. It’s got to have a beginning and a middle and an end. I always try to get in at the latest possible stage, which is not hard for me. I’m a chronic underwriter as it turns out, not an overwriter. Really, the emotional change is what’s crucial.

I keep a post-it on my desk with the four basic emotions: mad, glad, sad, and scared. I determine what’s the basic underlying emotion at the beginning of the scene, and which one do we move to by the end of the scene, and that’s how I structure all my scenes.

Scott: You mentioned that the first script you read was Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino. You realized that it wasn’t just character. Anderson does this because Tarantino’s scene description, we all think his dialog is great, but his scene description actually has a personality to it, too.

When you’re writing what we call scene description, which seems so antiseptic, do you try to infuse it with the personality? Is there a specific, I call it, narrative voice that you’re trying to imbue that with when you’re writing a scene description?

Lexie: Mostly, it’s just how I prefer to write things. I read a lot of writers. I find that I really tend to emulate, and I would love to emulate her career, Susannah Grant, who wrote Erin Brockovich and Ever After, the best Cinderella movie ever. She just finished producing Fleishman Is In Trouble.

Her style is closest to mine, in that I like to be evocative but terse. It’s not going to be blocks of text. If you’ve ever read the script for Terminator 2, Oh, my God, talk about the antithesis of whitespace on a page. It’s just paragraphs. It reads like a novel. That’s not what I do.

You know who else? Ryan Coogler, in my opinion, is almost a better writer than a director, to be honest. The man is an incredible writer. His descriptions are incredible. He’s so evocative with so little words spent on the page. I try to go for evocative and — what’s the word I’m looking for — accessible. Evocative and accessible, but not overly wordy.

Scott: That’s right. A student of mine came up with a mantra years ago: “Screenplay: Minimum words. Maximum impact.”

Lexie: Definitely. I have a script that starts with a man walking across a parking lot. He’s white. He’s tall. He’s got a summer suit, fresh haircut. He looks like the jackpot to every guy in this car dealership. That’s how it starts. It’s staccato. It’s beat, beat, beat, beat. It sets a tone.

Scott: What do you like most about writing?

Lexie: It’s thrilling. For me, writing is like watching a movie, but I get to change what I feel at the stroke of my own pen. I’m that person who will watch something to have a good cry because I’m craving a good cry. I watch things to feel inspired, or to deal with bad days. It’s my form of therapy, really.

Writing is just powerful. I discover things about myself. When it resonates with somebody else, it’s an incredible feeling, but when it’s true to you, and you discover a truth that you never quite articulated for yourself before, that’s something indescribable.

I’ll give you an example. Recently, I was noodling with a new idea. I was trying to come at it like, “What’s the fundamental difference between men and women, adolescently?” What I came up with, and this is my personal truth, and it’s in the script as this way of my theme.

My personal truth was, “A boy becomes a man when he realizes he needs other people. A girl becomes a woman when she realizes that she doesn’t.”

That might seem like the most obvious thing in the world to anybody, you included. To me, it was not, until I literally sat there and thought it and wrote it. Moments like that feed me.

Scott: That’s a great insight. I think your mother’s DNA has diffused through you.

[laughter]

Scott: Great conversation. Last question, what advice do you have for people, aspiring screenwriters, people who want to work in Hollywood film and TV? What advice do you have for them about learning the craft and trying to break into the business?

Lexie: The best way to learn the craft, as you said, and you keep telling your students, you do have to read scripts. Read as many as you can. Read them from various genres. I have comedy scripts I read, and I don’t write comedy. I’m not a comic or comedian, but I read them to see what works and because structure is the same, regardless of genre.

It’s also incredibly important to understand the business because success is as much understanding the business as honing your craft. The easiest way to do that, is to read the trades daily. If you scroll Deadline, scroll Variety, every day, it’s gibberish at first, and then slowly it begins to make sense.

Then you begin to understand, and you wonder, “Why did they make this movie?” “What’s the story here?” Then you watch the movie come out and you wonder what the response was. You begin to have an understanding, and you begin to have your own instincts. That, then, further shapes what you want to write, how you write it, and how you position yourself.

That, I think, is something where a lot of people lose a lot of time and they don’t have to.

Finally, and this is for the younger writers… don’t put your life on hold. I didn’t wait for success to live my life. I got married, bought a house, changed day jobs and started a family all before my first paid OWA. You have to build a life. Get that pet you always wanted, move to a new city, learn to play that instrument. A successful writing career can’t be the only goal and the other goals can’t hinge on it. It’s the other things that you’ll fall back on when the writing career falters or stalls. And it will, because that’s the nature of writing professionally. You don’t want to look back on your life and think “wow, there’s so much I could have done but didn’t because I wanted to be a successful writer first.”

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.