Interview (Part 1): Harris McCabe

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Harris McCabe wrote the original screenplay “Nat Cady’s Boys” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Harris about his creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to him.

Today in Part 1 of a 6-part series to run each day through Saturday, Harris shares how he went from army brat to film school student to development executive to screenwriter.

Scott Myers: Congratulations, Harris, on winning the 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting.

Harris McCabe: Thank you.

Scott: Let’s start at the beginning, see how the journey led up to this. I know that at some point, you got an MFA from USC, but let’s start back even further than that. Where did you grow up and how did you develop an interest in film and TV?

Harris: I moved around a lot when I was a kid. I was an army brat. I was born in Hawaii and lived in Texas for many years, but I spent most of my childhood and went to high school in central Connecticut.

When I got out of high school, I tried college for a little bit and it didn’t take. Bounced around and ended up in New Haven, living there, and at some point, was like, “I should go back and get my degree.”

So I went back to school at Southern Connecticut State University. I ended up graduating from there when I was about 30. Finally had two bachelor’s degrees and was like, “Now I’m ready to start my real life.” This was 2008. Just in time for the recession.

I could not even get called back for job interviews. [laughs] I was working as a landscaper, blowing leaves. I was doing some unlicensed contracting work like carpentry and electrical, stuff like that.

Eventually I was working at a sail loft, repairing and delivering sails for boats, and making pretty close to minimum wage all across the board, barely enough to cover my rent and my bar tab.

This was actually something that I mentioned in my Nicholl speech. What happened was in my few years of that, I was in this comfortable rut where I felt good, but really wasn’t going anywhere. Life had really stagnated. Then one day I got a letter from myself that I had written five years earlier. Didn’t even recognize it, recognized the handwriting, but didn’t remember writing it at all.

It basically told me, “Hey, you’re probably working some crappy job you hate, you’re probably spending too much time at the bar. You want to do other things, you want to make movies, but you don’t know where to start and you’re embarrassed because you think it’s crazy.”

I didn’t know anybody who worked in the entertainment industry. I knew I loved movies, but I didn’t know where to begin pursuing that dream and didn’t think it was even something that you could pursue, coming from where I was from.

Then I got this letter. It was sobering. I was like, “Oh, my God. I knew that I was going to be stuck here five years ago and I did nothing to stop it. I got to make some changes.”

Being me and not a more proactive person, I went and applied to all the most selective film schools in the country [laughs] and assumed that that was going to be it and I wouldn’t get into any of them. I could say, “I did the best I could,” and settle back into my rut, but I ended up getting in. I think I got waitlisted at NYU and got into USC.

So I moved across the country, and went to grad school at USC, and got out of there in 2015.

Scott: What was your area of concentration at SC?

Harris: I was in the Film and Television Production program, which is the biggest one, the general program. I wrote my way out. You have to do a thesis project to graduate, so I wrote a script. But they encourage you to do a little of everything while you’re there. I concentrated mostly on writing, and editing. And directing as much as I could. It’s hard to get directing projects at USC. They’re very limited.

Scott: Very limited, yeah. You’d always been a fan of movies, is that right?

Harris: Mmhmm.

Scott: I was an Air Force brat. One of the reasons why I became a movie fan was when you’re living in places like Minot, North Dakota, like I did for four years, the government subsidizes your entertainment. I could go to movies for…Back in the day, it was ridiculous. [inaudible] date myself, but it was really cheap. [laughs]

They had a movie theater on the base, and so I would just go see movies all the time.

Harris: A lot of it for me was that while I am very sociable when I’m around people, I’m an introvert. I like those activities that you can do alone.

Being able to read a book or watch a movie by myself was my escape from socialization. It was a good excuse to say, “I’m going to tune out for a little while and focus on this.”

It’s so interesting to get a glimpse into some other world that you’ve never seen before if it’s a fictional one or somebody else’s life. It’s always fascinating to look at other people’s journeys and other people’s lives and look at it from the outside. I don’t know if it’s an escape or opening up your imagination and your horizons a little bit.

Scott: Absolutely. That’s one of the beauties of story. You can go to another world, another dimension, and explore another subculture. Maybe talk to us about Lunacy Productions. Is this your own production company? I knew you produced at least three movies that I found on IMDb. Maybe talk about that journey.

Harris: Lunacy Productions is the production company of one of my professor’s at USC, Stu Pollard, who I had interned with. He’s a former USC graduate who had made a couple movies when he got out of school and had produced many more since then, and he wanted to get back into that small scale indie production game.

When I interned with him, I’d read a lot of scripts that he had been working on with different writers. I heard a lot in school that I was giving really valuable notes and that that was a skill that I had, and Stu really liked my notes as well.

Even before I started working for him, he had me talking to his writers, sharing my feedback, and game-planning how they could proceed with rewrites. When I graduated, he said, “Hey, I’m going to start this production company up again. I’m going to take a shot at this. I want to make a few indie films and see if I can get any momentum going.

“I want you to head my development team since you’re already doing that job.” It was good. It was like cutting the line a little bit. Usually, to be a creative producer, you have to also do the bullshit producer producing, which I have no stomach for and learned very little about in school — intentionally because I did not want to know how to make a budget or be a line producer.

What was interesting, though, was in that experience, I got to be the creative mind behind these projects that were in development. When a script was an orphan or was abandoned, I got to do a rewrite, my own pass on it, which taught me a lot.

Rewriting other people’s material was really…You can learn a lot that way. Also, I was reading all the scripts that came in. We were a small company. I’d read the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was just reading a ton of scripts some of which were great, a lot of which were terrible. You learn a lot of what not to do reading bad scripts.

Then we actually got some things into production. A rom-com called “Plus One.” A thriller called “Rust Creek” that I’m very proud of. I really had a little hand in every part of making that. I also learned a lot of the actual physical production, the budgeting and everything. The contracts and all that stuff that I didn’t think I wanted to know about.

When I was exposed to it, I realized it’s pretty valuable. The more you can know about all aspects of filmmaking, the better writer you’re going to be. I’ll tell you, having the experience of working with actors as a director or with working with other people’s footage as an editor probably taught me as much about screenwriting as anything else I’ve done.

Having that experience of being on set and seeing how a movie’s produced on a lower budget, and then also having the exposure to occasionally be able to visit friends and be on the set of bigger budget movies really opened my mind up to the practicalities of how these scripts work and are implemented, are actually created on the next level.

It would be very difficult to write a great screenplay without that experience on set. For people who are outside of Hollywood, you’re fighting an uphill battle there. It’s an added challenge for you, because you get so much insight into how the crew uses the script when you’re actually on set and see the movie get made.

Scott: You were writing when you were a director of development there and then you’ve continued to write. Has that been your primary area of focus in the last few years?

Harris: Yeah. When I was working at Lunacy, I was trying to write my own feature scripts and get some experience. I had written two scripts while I was in school and wrote a couple more after. I was hearing a lot of praise. I looked back and reread them recently. They weren’t very good.

I think they was just good compared to other people who were learning how to write, and in retrospect, they’re pretty embarrassing. I knew that I was getting better. I knew that I was developing the craft, and that the more I wrote, the better I was.

I did get into a situation at Lunacy where so many of the production responsibilities of being at that company were taking up a lot of my time. I was also doing these uncredited rewrites on little things here and there. Passes on scripts for friends that had said, “Hey, I got this script that my buddy wrote. We agree that it’s not ready. We want somebody to take a chop at it and see if they can improve it.”

I realized at one point that…It was actually during the pandemic when none of us had social lives. I was thrilled to be at Lunacy because we were still developing projects and we were still trying to get ready for when restrictions lifted so we could potentially try to get something into production. But I had this realization that it had been three years since I’d done any significant work on anything original of my own. I’d just been working on other people’s projects, either doing rewrites myself or developing scripts with writers that were doing their own rewrites.

And I loved that. One of the most rewarding things was working with new writers and trying to tell them what I’d been learning as a fairly new writer myself, and getting into a room with them and brainstorming. When we found writers that were good collaborators and were open to notes, it was the best part of the job, was getting in there and being like, “OK, we’ve got problems. How do we fix them?” But I wasn’t doing any of my own writing, and that was frustrating.

I was hiking Runyon Canyon every Saturday with a friend of mine — that was our get out of the house, get some exercise, socialize a little bit during lockdown — and I had heard somewhere, I think from a filmmaker at a Q&A at the Austin Film Festival, about her big breakthrough coming when she started trying to write a script a month. I thought, “That seems like a fun challenge.” We had all this free time. After I clocked out for the day, I had nothing to do with myself. It was like, “Well, I could make myself a drink and watch some TV,” but I wanted that motivation of, “I need to get some work done.” So my hiking buddy and I decided to hold each other accountable and try to write a feature a month for a year.

We made it, I think, about 10 months. I wrote seven features and three pilots. I’ll be honest, only one of the pilots was okay, two of the features were good, and the rest of them were varying degrees of total failure.

Some of them were like, “Bury this and never think about it again.” Some of them were like, “I did everything wrong, but I think this still has potential. If I do a page one rewrite, I think I can maybe get a better draft of this.”

But the first two I wrote were the two that were gestating in my head the longest. They were the ones that I was most excited about, that I’d been thinking about, that had been on my to-do list for years.

They came out really good. They were the best two first drafts that I’d ever written. The first one was “Nat Cady’s Boys.” That was where that script came from.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Harris discusses his Nicholl-winning script and the inspiration for writing a Western.

Harris is repped by Entertainment 360.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.