Interview (Part 1): Jonathan Stokes

My interview with the 5-time Black List screenwriter.

Jonathan Stokes has written five screenplays which have made the annual Black List. They are:

• Blood Mountain (2011)
• Murders & Acquisitions (2011)
• Border Country (2012)
• Tchaikovsky’s Requiem (2013)
• Murder in the White House (2020)

For that reason alone, I thought it would be a great idea to interview Jonathan, but there’s much more going on with this prolific writer. For example, he has created a wonderful video series on screenwriting and storytelling called “Raising the Stakes.” Highly recommended!

I reached out to Jonathan to see if he’d be up for a Go Into The Story interview and he kindly agreed. We had a terrific conversation which could have gone on for hours.

Today in Part 1 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Jonathan talks about his lifelong interest in writing, how he wrote his first screenplay when he was in elementary school, and eventually headed West to pursue his dreams of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter.

Scott Myers: Jonathan, you’re not only a screenwriter. You’ve written novels, books, a musician. You play the spoons, evidently, and the saw. I’ve seen that on video. You created some Wiki thing that you sold. It’s amazing. You’re the Thomas Jefferson of screenwriters. You do everything.

Jonathan Stokes: Yes. First of all, I’m going to put Thomas Jefferson of screenwriters on my tombstone someday.

[laughter]

Scott: That comes from a UVA graduate, so that’s the real deal.

Jonathan: Wow, high praise. Hats off to your research department for finding a video of me playing spoons. I think Christopher Hitchens said there’s a relationship between music and writing. Show me a writer with an ear for dialogue, and I’ll show you a writer that had to take music growing up.

Scott: Okay, let’s start all the way back from where you began. I know, at some point, you were living in Connecticut. Did you grow up in the East Coast?

Jonathan: Yes, I grew up in the wilds of Connecticut, 3,000 miles from Hollywood, and wrote my first “book” when I was eight for a writing assignment in second grade.

In my little author bio page of the book, I wrote that when I grew up, I either wanted to be an author, or the guy who puts together dinosaur bones in the museum. I had narrowed it down to those two options. Then, in fifth grade, I wrote my first “screenplay.” It was six pages long, and…

Scott: Is this “Alienators”…

Jonathan: Yes, that’s right. How do you have the time to do this level of research? It’s amazing.

Yes, “Alienators.” One of my neighbors down the street, Seth Grahame‑Smith, directed it. Seth went on to become a very successful screenwriter. We were in love with movies in general and with Spielberg in particular — that spark was there early on.

Then, in my high school, I was allowed to put up plays that I wrote. So even though it was perhaps a handicap to be growing up in Connecticut so far from Hollywood, my school allowed me to pursue writing in a number of different ways. That was a strong asset.

Scott: You went the Claremont Colleges, is that right?

Jonathan: Right.

Scott: Was that in part to get to the West Coast because that’s where Hollywood was?

Jonathan: Not consciously. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea what the career path was, or if it was even possible. I majored in philosophy, and my poor parents had to fork over the bill for that. [laughs]

There was no film studies department at my college, but again, I found myself making movies with friends for projects whenever we could. I arrived in Hollywood with absolutely zero knowledge, connections, or possible hope of launching a writing career. No game plan.

Scott: This would be the question probably for 90 percent of the audience here. They’re going, “OK, Claremont Colleges, philosophy degree… how’d the jump to Hollywood happen?”

Jonathan: In the most serpentine, inefficient way possible. I believe the best career advice I could give is to take whatever I did, and do the opposite. [laughs] Where ever I zig, you should zag.

When I graduated, I thought maybe if I go into finance and save a lot of money, then I could become a writer. With this half‑baked plan, I moved to New York, went into private equity, and worked in venture capital and leveraged buyout.

It was an amazing time to work in that field. I worked with brilliant people, but even though I was working 90 to 100‑hours a week, I would still be writing short stories on a Saturday night. It was a signal to me that I was serious about writing, and that I should stick with it.

My goal was to save $100,000, quit, and move to Hollywood. Working in Venture Capital, I accomplished this by the time I was 23. If this sounds like a self-aggrandizing story, stick with me, because the protagonist is about to hit obstacles…

I quit my job and started the road trip out to Los Angeles with my two best friends. By the time we reached Chicago, the NASDAQ had crashed, and I’d lost half of my net worth. [laughs]

By the time we reached Los Angeles, it was deeply unclear if I should just turn around and drive back home. My whole skill set was in financial analysis, which was now useless because A) I was in Los Angeles, and B) the market boom was over.

I was unemployable, and owed thousands of dollars in taxes to the IRS. That was my humbling start to moving to Los Angeles. I thought that I had three or four years of savings with which to write, and in the end, I had maybe six months of runway.

Scott: But you learned the true meaning of plot twist.

Jonathan: [laughs] The hard way, yes.

Scott: Where does improv fit in? You did some of that, too.

Jonathan: Yes, in college, I was a member of the improv group at the Claremont Colleges, and a number of those folks went on to become terrific writers like Wendy Molyneux has won more Emmys than I’ll ever see in my life.

I did UCB in New York, and I did Second City and Improv Olympic out in LA. That was a fantastic writing education because all of the rules of improv are the rules of writing, as far as I can tell.

“Start in media res,” “assume information,” “establish a relationship in two sentences,” “establish hierarchy in a relationship,” “use truth in comedy,” “follow the shiny object…” Every rule that you’ll learn in improv is an incredibly valuable rule in writing, but you’re learning it on stage in front of an audience through trial by fire.

When you violate one of these key rules, you pay the penalty instantaneously with a silent, bored, or confused audience… Whereas if you break a rule when you’re writing a script, it might take six months for you to figure out that you’ve made a mistake. [laughs]

When you’re flailing up on stage because you’re asking too many questions instead of “assuming information,” you feel that burn instantly.

Scott: I did what could be charitably called “stand‑up comedy” for two years. Whatever it was, I made a living doing it. You’re exactly right. There is an immediacy of learning that happens when you do stuff on stage that you just can’t replicate when you’re in a room writing.

You can gather that knowledge, and hopefully, it shaped your writing, but boy, yeah, it’s nothing like dead silence when you do a bit.

Jonathan: You made a living at stand‑up…

Scott: It was just an absurdly dumb act. It was during the ’80s, during the Reagan era. My persona was Scott California, a hedonist and materialist. I did all these songs “Yuppie Love,” “Hot Tub Club,” “A California Kinda Guy.” Making fun of the whole 80s consumerism thing. It was like Steve Martin on a bad acid trip. Enough about that.

You’re in LA. There’s a crash. Did you stay in LA even with your limited resources?

Jonathan: Yes, I would say I learned about poverty as much as a college‑educated kid in America can experience poverty. My first year in LA, I had to negotiate a payment program with the IRS. I was driving in a 1988 Toyota Corolla with three bad rotors, and then got cut off at an intersection by a 16‑year‑old driver, totaling my car. I had no way to get to my temp job to pay my rent, and so I went deeper in debt to lease a car…When you’re poor, it’s really easy to just get increasingly poor. It’s hard to climb out of that cycle.

I learned that shampoo is cheaper than shaving cream, so I would shave using my shampoo rather than the shaving cream. I survived on 99-cent Trader Joe spaghetti. I lived in a three‑bedroom apartment in Silver Lake with four roommates, and just lived that chaotic, impoverished lifestyle for a lot of years.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Jonathan shares how it took a decade of misfires and “doing everything wrong” before he had a professional breakthrough.

Twitter: @jonathanwstokes

Website: https://www.jonathanwstokes.com/

Jonathan is repped by UTA and Management SGC.

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