Interview (Part 1): 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.

Today in Part 1 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Lexie talks about how she honed her writing skills doing fan fiction which eventually led to her interest in 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.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Lexie reveals how she made a living in L.A. as an executive assistant and writing at night, then how she was discovered by a manager who found Lexie’s script on the Black List website.

Lexie is repped by Agency for the Performing Arts (APA) and Bellevue Productions.

Twitter: @LexWojTran

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