Interview (Part 4): 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 also knows how to play the saw as a musical instrument.

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 4 of a 6-part series to run each day through Sunday, Jonathan talks about how as soon as he fired his reps who weren’t advocating for him, the phone began ringing, but he still continued to teach piano for a year and a half before he was confident enough to focus solely on screenwriting.

Scott: I know Daniel Kunka, and he’s got the six‑word test. He says, “I need to be able to reduce it to…” He’s got this movie that’s being shot right now with Netflix called the “Lift,” which is about a heist that takes place in an airplane.

Jonathan: Wow.

Scott: Literally, I think he said it was even three words. It was like, “Gold airplane,” or something like that. “Gold airplane robbery.” Do you know what I mean? Is that it for you, like, “OK, it’s the guys in the parking lot. They’re trying to decide what movie they’re going to go to. I need to be able to come up with a story idea that I feel would work in that environment”?

Jonathan: You’ve expressed it far better than I did. There’s that Marshall McLuhan line that Americans prefer variations on things they’re already familiar with rather than anything that’s actually new. I think that new twists on familiar ideas are easier for us to latch on to than things that are completely brand‑new.

Scott: I’ve written about that in the blog: Similar, but different. Precedent and analogy in Hollywood. There was “The Great Train Robbery” in 1902. Then, in 1903, they made “The Great Little Train Robbery,” which was a train robbery done with little kids and smaller trains.

[laughter]

Jonathan: Now, Daniel Kunka’s doing it in an airplane.

Scott: Exactly, in an airplane. I think they’re more comfortable with that, too, because it’s such a fear‑based business. “OK, it’s like this that was successful. Therefore, I could go into my boss and pitch it.”

Jonathan: Yes. The time to do your crazy outside‑the‑box idea now is in television. The time to do it in film was the 1970s, the 1990s, or maybe the earlier days of Netflix.

Right now, I think it’s a very frightened Hollywood environment given the market crash and layoffs. They’re probably not going to take crazy risks right now.

Scott: What was the first script that, “OK you sold it, and now you can get your car out of hock?” Do you remember what that was?

Jonathan: Yeah. The second screenplay I ever wrote, I had optioned. I had this initial taste of success followed by just astonishingly bad luck for a decade, more than anyone I know, honestly, Scott.

There’s probably a lot of screenwriters who would claim this, but my ratio of screenplays that were about to sell, but didn’t, or about to go into production, but didn’t — it would just bring tears to your eyes. I guess what you’re asking is, how did I break in?

Scott: Right.

Jonathan: I had an agent and a manager for five and a half years who had never sold anything, and a good actor friend basically staged an intervention for me, took me out to dinner, shook his head at me and said, “Dude, why are you still with them? I won’t stay with a manager for more than three months if they don’t make me money.”

I’m just a guy from Connecticut, and loyalty matters to me. It terrified me, the idea of firing those reps. I thought: “no one will ever love me again!” When I let them go, I sort of gave up and thought, “Well, I’ll just be a piano teacher for the rest of my life.”

But as soon as I fired them, the phone started ringing. Execs around town knew my work and spread the word that I was on the market. New agents and managers started calling. Here I was, teaching piano lessons, with $11,000 in credit card debt, and CAA and UTA were suddenly vying to sign me. I was trying to make time in my piano teaching schedule to take these agency meetings.

I went with UTA and finally started selling scripts. But I didn’t quit piano teaching for a year and a half because I was so afraid of poverty. I had PTSD. [laughs]

There would suddenly be these situations like flying to Philadelphia to meet Will Smith for a project, and I’d have to call my piano student’s parents and tell them I was sick and had to miss this week’s lessons.

After a year and a half of this, my agents sat me down and said, “You’ve got three open writing assignments coming due, and you’re still teaching middle C position to second graders. This is getting ridiculous.” They finally convinced me to give up the piano students. That was a big step — I was convinced that the day I gave up my piano students is the day the phone would stop ringing.

Scott: That probably speaks to your poverty experience, right?

Jonathan: Definitely.

Scott: You didn’t want to put yourself in that position again, but I’m assuming that you’d had at that point several scripts that were filtering out, people would have been reading them elsewhere. UTA is not going to be coming after you. They see someone who’s got not only a talent, but also the process is prolific, persistent. It wasn’t just one script that attracted UTA’s attention.

Jonathan: Yup. Like I said, I wrote 30 scripts before I sold one. In my signing meeting with UTA, they laid out a whole strategy. They said, “First, we’re going to sell this script, and then on the heels of that, we’re going to go out with this next script.” They executed. I signed, and five days later, they sold “El Gringo” to Joel Silver.

Then, they timed the Deadline announcement for 20 minutes before my first general meeting with the vice president of Warner Brothers. Just so that when I walked into his office, he was able to say, “Hey, I just read about you in “Deadline.”

This built momentum for the next script. I had this war chest of screenplays that were gathering dust in the closet. I think there were something like four sales my first year at UTA because I had this massive back-catalog. [laughs]

Tomorrow in Part 5, Jonathan reflects on the impact the Black List has had on his career.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

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.