Interview (Part 2): 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 2 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, 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.

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.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Lexie describes how both writer-director Frank Capra and actor Jimmy Stewart returned from their respective experiences during World War II as emotionally vulnerable individuals, and how those psychological wounds fed directly into the drama at the core of It’s a Wonderful Life.

For Part 1, go here.

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.