Interview (Part 1): Jimmy Miller

My interview with the 2023 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Jimmy Miller wrote the original screenplay “Slugger” which won a 2023 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Jimmy about his creative background, his 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, Jimmy talks about his longstanding interest in writing, attending film school, working as a film and TV editor, and lessons that skill taught him about screenwriting.

Scott Myers: So congratulations on winning the Nicholl, Jimmy. That must have been exciting.

Jimmy Miller: Once in a lifetime experience. It was great.

Scott: Let’s dive into your background here. You grew up in Ohio?

Jimmy: That’s right. Medina, Ohio. It’s a small town about 30 miles south of Cleveland.

Scott: How did you become interested in film and television?

Jimmy: Honestly, it’s hard for me to say exactly how or when I became interested in being an editor or a screenwriting. But looking back, it was kind of a series of things that built. I remember in middle school I became fascinated with how TV shows sounded. Apart from the picture, the sounds of a television were really interesting to me.

I remember reruns of the show “M*A*S*H” used to play on Channel 43 out of Cleveland twice a day every day. And I used to put a mini tape recorder right next to the TV speaker and record just the sound of episodes. “M*A*S*H” was unique because it was a comedy about war that had a laugh track. And the way it sounded when I played it back gave me a totally different experience than watching it. It was amazing to me how they were like two different worlds.

But I think that taught me a little about storytelling and timing. How important setting up jokes and call backs and were. How the delivery from the actors could profoundly the effect the emotional experience. I had no idea I was absorbing all of that. I thought maybe it meant I wanted to be a doctor. But I think that was the start of my loving storytelling.

Even before that, in grade school, I would write little poems all the time. I was good at making things rhyme. And I would usually buy blank cards for birthdays and hand write a message or a funny poem. Writing felt easy for me.

At the time, I wasn’t sure where that came from. My mom and dad weren’t in the arts, really. My mom worked at a flower shop, was a real estate agent, and owned a beauty shop. And my dad was a radio announcer his whole life. My sisters like to sing and play some instruments, but they weren’t really into movies and writing. I discovered later that my mom wrote a lot in school, and my uncle wrote poetry books in college and is always working on a novel in his spare time. So maybe that’s where I got the writing bug.

But I never really thought of it as a career. I went to The Ohio State University in Columbus and tried to major music engineering. I did well in the band and was also kind of good at math and physics, so it seemed like a great idea. But just before I started my freshman year, they discontinued that program. Which I didn’t see coming. They didn’t tell anyone.

So, I tried other kinds of engineering for a while, electrical engineering and chemical engineering. And it took me about a year and a half to realize — I don’t like those things! Not really. Certainly not enough to work as hard as I would have needed to work to be any good at it. And for the first time, I realized I could maybe make a career out of writing, so I switched over to journalism my sophomore year.

Ohio State has a great journalism school. A full-size daily newspaper called The Lantern, which is still one of the biggest college newspapers in the country. That was fun and it fit me so much better, but I also kind of knew that I didn’t want to be a reporter. That wasn’t the kind of writing that got me excited.

But when I took some feature writing classes, where you write stories more about people and their personalities and their daily lives, I really liked that. Despite that, I graduated from college and decided to go to grad school and get a masters in Higher Education. I worked a lot in the student services programs for different student groups and it was fun, so I thought that might be a good career. I’ll just stay at Ohio State, get a master’s and become like the dean of something.

But before I enrolled, I had a meeting with an administrator in the program whose name I wish I could remember! Maybe she’s out there somewhere. But as we were talking about me pursuing a career in her field, something must have tipped her off I had another destiny. Because she looked at me point blank and said, “Is this really what you want to do?”

I said, “I think so.” And then she asked me, if I could do anything what I do? No limits, anything. And I said, to be honest, I’d probably write and direct movies. And she said, in the nicest way, “Well, why don’t you go do that?”

And I was like, huh, why don’t I? Can I do that? How do I do that?

This was the early ’90s. So, film schools were not a part of every university the way they are now. It was UCLA and USC and NYU, and a few others of note scattered across the country. USC felt too big, and NYU was in New York, where I did not want to live. So, I applied to UCLA and promptly got rejected!

But I also applied to a smaller film school in Washington, DC at American University and got in. So that’s where I started to get a formal education in the craft of screenwriting and filmmaking.

AU was more of a documentary film school, but I learned screenwriting there, took my first screenwriting class. That’s where I learned to edit, too. I was kind of the first generation of computer-based editors, nonlinear editing. I really took to that and spent a lot more time editing than writing.

It led to careers at Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel as an editor, right there in DC. And I developed a group of friends to AU film school with me and we were always talking about moving to Los Angeles to really get into the industry.

But after five, then ten years. I kind of realized I might be the only one who really wanted to go to LA. So, in 2004, I stopped waiting and moved out here by myself. My sister lived in Van Nuys, so I moved in with her for a couple of months, but then got editing jobs and found a place on my own. And that was when I started to write “Slugger,” in 2004.

Scott: Wow. 20 years ago.

Jimmy: Yeah. Hard to believe I started it so long ago. I didn’t really remember when I started it until the Nicholl happened. “Slugger” won the drama category at the Austin Film Festival and a gold award in Page in 2007. I always thought that’s when I wrote it.

But when I had to write a speech for the Nicholl, a called a friend who went to AU with me and worked at Discovery. I remember she read the very early drafts. She said she remembered distinctly when she read the first draft because she was pregnant with her first daughter. That daughter just turned 20!

So, it was 2004. And there’s not a single scene in the version from 2004, or from 2007 for that matter, that is now in the current draft that won the Nicholl. It’s had a long journey.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Jimmy discusses his Nicholl-winning script and the inspiration for writing a movie set in the world of baseball.

Jimmy is repped by Marc Manus at Persistent Entertainment.

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