Tales from the Script

10 No Is the Path to Yes

Even with the considerable financial rewards that screenwriting can offer, having scripts repeatedly rejected, rewritten, and regurgitated by an unforgiving factory system is enough to challenge the optimism of the most emotionally balanced individual. And since artists are trained to become as emotionally sensitive as possible, the ease with which screenwriters can turn into cynics is immediately apparent.

As writers including John D. Brancato note, a certain degree of cynicism is helpful, because laughing at the preposterous extremes of the movie business is an effective defense mechanism. On a deeper level, learning to separate one’s professional life from one’s creative life is among the most complex growth experiences that any working artist undergoes. Those who find this delicate balance can retain enthusiasm for their work. Those who do not run the risk of derailing themselves, because few writers can remain creatively viable after becoming jaded about their own craft.

Leavening cynicism with optimism is just one of the coping strategies that screenwriters employ in order to sustain long careers, because each individual wrestles with demons in a different fashion. Some focus on the finish line, viewing rejection as a distraction along the path to acceptance. Some empower themselves by declining lucrative offers in favor of personally fulfilling endeavors. Some, like Shane Black, cling to vestigial traces of the “childish hunger” that drew them to screenwriting in the first place. For many writers, wonderment at being able to make up stories for a living is the greatest balm of all. James L. White reveals that the dream of becoming a screenwriter was so powerful that it helped him defeat an insidious personal hardship.

Perhaps the most brilliantly counterintuitive advice comes from John Carpenter. If the previous chapters have revealed any underlying truth, it is that the writer’s lot in Hollywood is unlikely to change anytime soon. For some, fighting that fact fills them with the strength of righteous indignation. For others, blocking out that fact allows them to remain upbeat. But for Carpenter, simply acknowledging that fact is a means of moving past adversity and focusing on what really matters: the work.

Rejecting Rejection

JUSTIN ZACKHAM: The problem with this business is that you are always a hair’s breadth away from being a millionaire—it’s just the widest lock of hair on the planet.

JOE FORTE: A lot of times, I describe what I do as being a bank robber. You know, there’s a vault out there with your name on it and money inside. You can have it if you can figure out how to open that vault.

NORA EPHRON: I think the most important thing you have to know is that it’s a very, very hard business, full of rejection and setbacks. If you don’t want to succeed really badly, you won’t. But, of course, if you get a movie made and it works, there’s nothing like it. Nothing.

ROBERT MARK KAMEN: Rejection is easy. Having the knives surgically removed from your back is hard. I have had my fair share of knives removed. There are still one or two that I leave embedded as a reminder that getting too comfy can be hazardous to your creative health.

JANE ANDERSON: The secret to longevity is to ride this crazy roller coaster, and just know that it happens to the best of us. It happens to the most famous artists in this field. It happens to the stars. Careers are broken only if the artist allows it to be broken.

ALLISON ANDERS: You should never take rejection personally. You should just say, like, “Okay, they didn’t want that—maybe they want this.” Try to keep those relationships going, if you like the people. If they suck, fuck them—you don’t ever have to go back to them again. Go to the people who are open to your ideas, and who you feel compatible with, and you will come up with something together.

JOE STILLMAN: I gotta say, going to writers on the topic of rejection is just great. It’s like going to an alcoholic to ask about beer.

I think all rejection is ultimately justified on some level. I’ll give you a “for instance.” In the last few years, I went for a few projects—some of them were rewrites and some weren’t—where I felt like, “Okay, I just need the job, so I’m gonna kinda go for it.” In one or two cases, I lost out to somebody who had come up with the right take. What I realized was that I was spending a great deal of time pursuing something that wasn’t my passion, and that was not the best thing to do. That’s caused me to make a real sea change in terms of what it is that I’m willing to pitch on.

Joe Stillman

MIKE BINDER: You can focus on what’s gonna go bad or what’s gonna go right, so I’d just as soon focus on what’s gonna go right. You wanna take your dreams and make ’em reality. You wanna be a storyteller. So you gotta be thinkin’ about your own stories, your own dreams, in a positive way. I think that the more positive you are—the more you’re thinkin’, “This is really gonna be a good project, and I see it happening”—the more you’re gonna have the energy to get it done. If you can’t do that—you’re more like, “Ah, who’s gonna want this?”—you never finish anything.

DANIEL PYNE: One of my mentors was William Sackheim, who was a legendary television producer. In television, you’re usually getting rejected at a higher rate. You could write three pilots in a year, and they could all get rejected. I watched Bill go through this, and I realized that he had this marvelous ability to just forget. When it was time to develop new ideas, he just started all over again. I think that’s what sustained him. It’s what made him have a fifty-year career. I’ve tried to emulate that a little bit, to not fall into that trap that writers tend to fall into, where you say, “They’re not gonna buy this because it’s a thriller, and they’re not making thrillers now.” I love writing, and I love filmmaking, so if I focus on the parts I like, there isn’t room for the rejection to take hold and defeat me.

NAOMI FONER: From the beginning, I did this because I thought there were stories that had nothing to do with me, but needed to be told, and that if I could be the instrument of telling them, then they could keep me going. If you do it to be rich and famous, that’s a terribly wrongheaded idea. If you’re doing it to tell stories that need to be told, you can get yourself through the bad moments, because you’re doing something bigger, something that transcends you.

JAMES L. WHITE: Hold on to your dream, and do what you have to do. I was a city health inspector in Boston. Do the necessary work to pay your bills and take care of your family, and you’ll get there. Talent has a way of workin’ itself out. Hollywood will find you. Eventually.

One of the things that Ray Charles and I had in common is that I used to use heroin like he used heroin, but we both were creative at the time. Of course, he did a lot more with his creativity than I did. But I imagined being here—that’s what kept me going, and that was one of the ways in which I was able to kick drugs. I knew this is what I wanted to do. In a drugged state, I could never accomplish this—I’d write a page or two, and if you didn’t get it, man, you weren’t smart enough. I was high. When I sobered up, I read it, and I didn’t get it either.

I imagined getting to this. But I’m glad I got here sober.

James L. White

MARK O’KEEFE: All you really need is a good idea, and to execute it in a good way, and you have a movie.

STEVE KOREN: There is a sense of being in the Old West here—it’s like panning for gold. Generally, if you have a great idea, someone will buy that idea. You’re always one script away from a career. But you have to be prepared. It could take many years before someone will bother to consider your work.

MARK O’KEEFE: Basically, anyone who is relatively bright, and is taking the trouble to read this book, and is going through the process, and considers themselves a writer, and is going to keep doing it, and is willing to critique their own stuff, and is willing to take criticism…I think there is a place for everyone.

STEVE KOREN: There’s a giant group of people who want to be writers, and a smaller group who actually write, and an even smaller group who are actually going to strive so hard that someone’s going to pay attention to them. And when you get to that smaller group, you have to really commit yourself. I don’t know about Mark, but I was obsessed at one point. I took every course, I read magazines, and I just kept going to movies. I remember at one point, I sat down and wrote down Rocky beat by beat.

MARK O’KEEFE: Wow.

STEVE KOREN: I wanted to understand the structure of what was happening, you know? I wanted to take myself through what those writers had gone through. You have to commit.

MICHAEL WOLK: Going through no is the way to get to yes. Going through no also means, I think, understanding why people are saying no, and being proactive in getting toward the yes, and listening to the feedback, and moving forward so that you’re getting rejected by a better class of people as you work your way up. The more gracious you are in handling rejections, the better you can develop relationships that are initially based on rejection. You got the door open half an inch because they liked the idea, but they thought you couldn’t write dialogue. Next time, you send ’em a thing and say, “I’ve been brushin’ up the dialogue, and I took your words to heart.” A no can be really the start of a yes.

KRISS TURNER: My pastor at church says, “A setback is a setup to a step up.” That’s what I believe.

ADAM RIFKIN: I was hired to direct a movie called Barb Wire, which starred Pamela Anderson. I had made a number of independent films. This was a bigger film, she was a high-profile figure—on paper, it seemed like the smart career choice, even though some voice inside of me said, “This isn’t what I feel passionate about.” Ultimately, I got fired off that movie. I got caught in the middle of a political battle between Dark Horse Comics, who owned the character, and Propaganda Films, who was financing the movie.

All the people who had called to congratulate me for getting the job wouldn’t return my calls after I’d been fired, because it was on the front page of the trades. I thought to myself, “I could either sit around and feel sorry for myself, or I could use the only power I have in Hollywood—the ability to generate material.”

I sat in a room and went on a writing frenzy. The first script I wrote didn’t sell. The second script I wrote didn’t sell. And then I had an idea for a movie. I had never written a family movie before, and I told Brad Wyman, the producer I’ve worked with on many films, “I have this idea for a movie, but I think it’s too stupid. I shouldn’t write it.” He said, “What is it?” I said, “It’s about two brothers who inherit an old drafty house that’s worth a lot of money, and there’s a mouse in the house, and they become obsessed with killing the mouse. But the mouse is much smarter than they are, and the mouse ruins their lives. It’s kinda like a live-action Tom and Jerry.” He said, “You should write that immediately. You’ll sell it for $1 million.”

I wrote it really fast, and I thought, “There’s no way this is gonna sell. This is too stupid.” But I just got into all the cartoons I loved when I was a kid, went to that well for inspiration. While Barb Wire was still in production, Mouse Hunt went out as a spec, got into a bidding war between a number of studios, and DreamWorks bought it for $1 million.

If there’s any point to this story, it’s that Hollywood is all about rejection. Everybody in Hollywood is rejected over and over again. The only thing you can do is love what you do and keep doing it—because eventually it’s gonna pay off. For me, that was an example of ignoring the rejection and plowing forward, and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

The Better Part of Valor

JOSE RIVERA: One of the things that kept me sane earlier in my career was saying no to certain things I didn’t want to do. Being a Latino writer, I was pitched gang movie after gang movie. People wanted me to write a movie about a Salvadoran gang. I said no. Then they pitched me a girl gang, and I said no. And then they pitched me a deaf gang—a gang of New York kids who can’t hear. I said no to all that stuff. I said, “I don’t want to write about gangs, I don’t want to write about drugs, I don’t want to write about any of that stuff. I think that’s a Latin cliché, and I don’t want to be part of it.” One of the healthiest things a writer can do is to know where to draw the line for themselves and say, “You know what? I don’t care how much money you’re offering, I don’t do that kind of work.”

ROBERT MARK KAMEN: I called a producer yesterday and I passed on a job. I’d already been talking about “This happens in this act” and “This happens in that act,” so I was a little nervous about calling because I didn’t want to be yelled at, or to hear this again: “You’ll never work in this business again, you son of a bitch!” I called them up, and I said, “I don’t really feel this,” and they said, “There’ll be something else.” They don’t want to give me a big paycheck, and have me go into a studio and pitch, and then have me turn in something that is less than inspired. That won’t be good for them; it won’t be good for me. I get paid a lot of dough to do this, and the expectations are very high. If I don’t meet those expectations, I won’t get a job next time.

RON SHELTON: I learned early on that I can’t write anything if it’s not about me. I don’t mean that in a sense of megalomania. I mean about my experiences, needs, fears, desires, whatever. So even if it’s about a photographer in the Nicaraguan revolution, like Under Fire, his issues have to be issues that I care about personally. I would make a lot more money if I was a good mercenary—you know, somebody says, “Here, we’ll pay you $3 million to write a script about aliens and space stars exploding…” I can’t do it. I want your money, but I don’t know how.

JOHN D. BRANCATO: A couple of times, we’ve had movie deals, and then had disagreements early on in the process, and just said, “Look, no harm, no foul—let’s go separate ways. You don’t have to pay us. We’re outta here.” I’d like to think that I can always do that. A lot of people don’t have that luxury.

JONATHAN LEMKIN: If you let your lifestyle expend your last check, you then say yes to a really bad project to keep the checks coming. The quality of your work goes down, your reputation goes down, and it’s harder to get the next job. I’ve definitely taken the wrong job a couple of times, and it’s very hard to do your best work if you’re feeling like, “Oh, this is the wrong job.”

PAUL MAZURSKY: If I had needed jobs desperately, I might have behaved differently. But I made a great deal of money on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, so I had “fuck you” money. It gave me courage.

LARRY COHEN: I made some mistakes over the years, but I don’t know that they were really mistakes in the long run. When I was doing television, I created Branded and The Invaders and Cool Million—I created eight television series. ABC came to me and said, “We’d like to set you up as a supplier.” They were tryin’ to turn me into, like, an Aaron Spelling.

The opportunity to become a supplier for a network is a multi-million-dollar opportunity. If I had taken that job, my career might have moved off into a different direction. I wouldn’t have been writing anymore. I would have been supervising other people, and would have made a lot of money—probably much more than I ever made. But I wouldn’t have been doing what I wanted to do, which was writing.

So that was the big crossroads in my career—whether I was gonna take that chance to become a supplier for ABC, or whether I was gonna continue just being the lone wolf out there writing scripts, trying to sell them in the marketplace, and never having a big suite of offices and a bunch of employees.

You know somethin’? I’m happy I didn’t take the job.

MICK GARRIS: David Cronenberg recommended me to write The Fly II, which was great. However, there were four other writers after me. It’s not a movie I love, and when I saw the first sneak preview of it, I kinda sank down in my chair because it was so far removed from what I’d written.

I had come up with an idea that I thought was meaningful and scary and interesting. It was all about Veronica Quaife, the leading lady from the first Fly. She has her pregnancy, and she decides she’s got to get an abortion. She runs into a clinic, there are people who say, “Don’t abort your baby,” and all that. It turns into a religious anti-abortion kind of situation. My idea was sort of political and dramatic and adult. Scott Rudin was the production executive on Fly II, and he really liked this edgy take, which was trying to continue what Cronenberg had set up in what I think is one of the great horror films.

At that time, 1986, there was a lot of teenage horror, so the studio wanted to turn it into a teenage monster movie. Fox was being run by Leonard Goldberg, and there were big fights between Goldberg and Rudin on the direction they wanted to take. I got about halfway into the next draft when I was offered a movie to direct. Because there was so much infighting going on at Fox, I chose the moment to make my exit—and to make my feature directing debut.

SHANE BLACK: I jumped ship on Lethal Weapon in kind of a fussy way, because I had my own vision for the series. I didn’t think that the first movie violated it too badly. There was one sort of outrageous scene in the first movie, where there’s a hundred cops on the front lawn of Danny Glover’s character, watching a man beaten to death and cheering like, you know, Thunderdome or something. I didn’t like it then, and especially in view of later LAPD high jinks, it became very difficult to watch. But at least they managed to avoid straight comedy.

Shane Black

When doing the sequel to Lethal Weapon, I tried to think of something that would make it seem like it had come full circle—what if it was one big movie, number one and number two? What would the run be? It came out that the Riggs character would die at the end, and they didn’t like that. They didn’t like a lot more too. They changed the tone and decided it was going to be a feel-good cop series about funny people doing funny things. I couldn’t write funny, and I couldn’t write cute, and I couldn’t write feel-good just for the hell of it—especially in a cop story. I was used to Dirty Harry, and they wanted Dirty Harry 4, where he’s got a farting dog.

So I hopped ship. Turns out the next movies made a great deal of money, and that’s fine—I’m happy to take the paycheck for having gotten this thing rolling. But, man, I didn’t wanna write comedies.

MARK D. ROSENTHAL: When the filmmakers are giving you ideas that you just find preposterous, you’re very tempted as a writer to call up your agent and say, “Replace us.” You know, let’s walk off, and we have our integrity. We have found over the years that that’s a very dangerous form of self-pity. It’s okay to be pushed out of the plane, but don’t drop a parachute and jump, because by staying on the plane, at least you might win little battles.

MICHAEL WOLK: After I first had my flush of success out in Hollywood, I was assigned several things by a studio. After that, I tried once again to write an original screenplay to sell. It didn’t sell, and I was really downhearted because I was expecting it to sell. There was a nibble, but no bite. A few weeks later, my agent said, “What are you doing now?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Look, I just had a guy who wrote The Poseidon Adventure meets Jaws. It’s called Tentacles. Write something like that.”

Something that will always sell in Hollywood is high concept, and it’s usually, “You take this and you match it with that, and then you got a movie.” Like with Innocent Blood, it was, “Mafia? Vampires? Hey! It’s a movie.” Well, there’s your high concept, and then there’s the studio’s high concept. As an artist, your idea is going to be satisfying to you, but when you’re told a high concept that sounds pretty low to you, that is very hard to invest your energy into.

I went back to New York. I just said, “I’m gonna write a novel and say good-bye to Hollywood for a while,” thinkin’ it would be there when I got back—which is not the way to do things. My advice to screenwriters would be to stay in L.A., and take as many meetings as you can, and work the community, because eventually the jobs will come around.

My initial success, and the striking level of it, didn’t prepare me for the reality of the marketplace. If I had really thought about the future, I wouldn’t have been so much of a diva. I took my chips and I left, and I spent a lot of the chips—and by the time I realized that I wanted to court the Hollywood community again, they had moved on.

All About Attitude

GUINEVERE TURNER: Everyone’s like, “Oh, you have a cushy life—you just sit around and write.” I’m like, “No, it’s actually really hard.” As I like to say, I wish that my job was being a bricklayer—because I would lay the bricks, the wall would be built, and that would be it. Nobody could deny that it’s a fucking brick wall. Nobody’s gonna come along and say, “Mmm, I think that brick should be over here.”

I stay positive because most days, I don’t have to get up until I want to get up. I also work in my pajamas for most of the day. I get to go to movie premieres, and have people vaguely acknowledge my contribution. I stay positive because I love my life.

You know, I had an office job once, for a year and a half, and I was suicidal. I was twenty-two—maybe I was suicidal anyway. But I mean, I love that I actually get paid, more or less, to do what I do. And whenever I’m feeling whiny and sorry for myself, I’m like, “You’re not homeless, you’re not dyin’ of cancer, you slept until ten, you get to go out and party tonight. Your life rules.”

MICK GARRIS: Our complaints mean nothing compared to the complaints of people who are pipe fitters for a job, or working on ships, or fighting overseas in the military. You know, those people have the right to complain, and they’re the least likely to complain. And here’s a bunch of people who live in Beverly Hills or whatever, with very comfortable homes, cars, partners, a good income, and the like, bitching about somebody making them change their script and having that give them ulcers and sleepless nights—it’s just not worth it.

MARK O’KEEFE: You forget that compared to a normal standard, you’re doing very well. It’s easy to get caught up and in the L.A. socioeconomic scene.

STEVE KOREN: That could actually affect your writing. Suddenly, you want to write a movie about a guy who’s having problems with his investment banker.

MARK O’KEEFE: Yeah, exactly.

STEVE KOREN: You’re like, “Yeah, that’s relatable. Everybody I know has this problem.” You forget.

MARK O’KEEFE: Yeah.

STEVE KOREN: I actually keep my dad in mind when I write. He was a mailman. He came home at night and he loved watching movies. So what could he relate to? That’s what we tend to write. The ones that we’ve talked about, that excite us, are ideas that everyone can relate to.

BILLY RAY: The best writing advice I ever heard, I actually read in a book of interviews with screenwriters. It came from Paddy Chayef sky, who you’d have to rank as one of the best screenwriters of all time. His advice was: “Don’t think of it as art, think of it as work.”

Because when a screenwriter is stuck, and he calls in another screenwriter to help him, that second screenwriter doesn’t come in and say, “What is the art problem?” He says, “What’s not working about your script?” And they push up their sleeves and they start to fix what’s not working, as if it were a car with a broken engine. You need to approach it like work. If you are an artist, it will come out as art anyway, but at least you will have done your job.

I write every morning the same way. I take my kids to school. I’m at my desk by nine. Someone feeds me at one. I get back behind my computer at two, and I write until five. My nights and my weekends belong to my family, but basically I’m at work all day long, like a plumber, or a guy who cleans pools, or a secretary.

JOHN AUGUST: One thing you have starting out that you don’t have later on in life is abundant time and energy. I was just sitting down with a kid who had just graduated from college and who had moved out to Los Angeles looking to be a screenwriter-director-filmmaker-everything. I encouraged him to do everything all at once. Because there’s something about those first couple of years, where you’re broke and poor and sleeping on the floor and eating Top Ramen, where anything is possible. You have very little to lose. You sign on to be a PA on a no-budget short film and maybe meet somebody great, or maybe that film ends up being something terrific, or it leads you in a new direction.

The challenge comes as you get older, and you develop more responsibilities. You have to balance things you didn’t have to balance before. I have regular hours. I work from nine to six, and then I need to be home, because somebody needs to give the baby a bath and put her to bed. I can’t work weekends. So it’s a very different kind of life.

Your natural instincts are to treat your job kind of like finals in college—screw around for a couple weeks, and then spend a couple of all-nighters writing that paper you really need to get written. As you get older and develop more responsibilities, that’s not practical anymore. You find yourself having to budget your time and make a plan, and do all those things that are sort of the anathema of what you think a freedom-loving writer should want to do. It becomes much more of a job.

The luxury of experience is that you actually have craft. I can just muscle through things where I used to have to sit around and wait for inspiration. You have new skills that are different from what you had at twenty. In exchange for all the energy you’ve lost, you have a focus and a precision that you lacked early on.

JOE STILLMAN: The number of rugs that can be pulled out from under you in this business is vast. I kind of know that intellectually, so when those times happen, I think, “I’m in the film business. I chose to be here. I’m not a victim.” You know, “You can’t get the ups unless you get the downs.” But then you take a few more downs, and it starts to feel like, “Oh my God, what am I doing here? One more, and I’m outta here.”

A lot of us get a sense of who we are based on what we do. So when I’m riding high—forget riding high, when I’m actually employed—yahoo, I’m great! And when the opposite is true—I’ve pitched three or four things and haven’t gotten anything—I must be utter crap, and I can’t stand it anymore. It’s a hard way of looking at the world, and it’s very common here. I think that attitude is even fed and nurtured while we’re here.

One way to deal with that is to recognize that whether up or down, neither is who you are. I’m working to consciously develop other aspects of my life so that I’m not quite as emotionally dependent on the ups and downs.

Joe Forte

JOE FORTE: If you just define yourself as a screenwriter, and you have a bad day as a screenwriter, then that’s your whole world. You’re building your life on this very singular pylon. It’s important to remember that you’re a brother or a father or a boyfriend, and also that you have interests and hobbies that feed you and nourish you, and bring ideas in and balance you out. If I have a bad day screenwriting, I can come out to my studio, and I can paint and connect with myself. It’s important to build a broad life that feeds you, that nourishes you, that gives you stability.

DOUG ATCHISON: It’s wise to stay out of situations where fellow artists are grousing about Hollywood, because you can get into a circular conversation about how messed up Hollywood is, how inconsiderate the people that run Hollywood are, and how they don’t get it. That’s not healthy. The film business is a hugely difficult thing to pursue, so you have to realize that this is impossible—but you do it anyway.

BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: I meditate every day. I sit down and I let go of my mind. I let go of the struggle, I let go of the tension, I let go of the anger, and just, in a sense, immerse myself in this very still pool. That pool is very reviving. It’s very loving, very joyous, very full of life, of newness. It’s always about what is in the moment, as opposed to what was and what will be. It’s so present and refreshing.

I go there every day. I often go back there many times a day, because it is the place from which real creativity can come, and from which your revival as a person—after all the onslaughts of degradation that occur in the Hollywood sphere—can come. It brings you back to you. It brings you back to what you’re about, why you do what you do, and it completely reinvents your life, in a sense, on a daily basis.

I have my anger. It definitely comes up, but I don’t live in it. Sometimes I get caught in it for a period of time, but because I practice this thing every day of letting it go, that’s where I get relief. The problem, for most people, is that they never go there—they don’t even know it’s there to go to. They go to, you know, Prozac or Johnny Walker Red. They go to whatever they can to kind of diminish the pain. I go to a place where there is no pain to diminish.

Don’t Let the Bastards Get You Down

JOHN D. BRANCATO: Once you are seduced by the pleasures offered to you, you kinda lose whatever edge you had, and you start to say, “Well, I’m doing this one for the car,” or “I’m doing this one so I can have a long vacation.” The thing you want to avoid is waking up and saying, “I have become exactly the hack that I most loathed when I first started to write screenplays.”

Somebody says, “We’re gonna pay you $1 million to write Bug Boy 3.” You think, “Well, okay…” Even though you know it’s not gonna be a good movie, you find a way to say, “Bug Boy 3 could say something about the human condition that hasn’t been said.” You have to lie to yourself. You have to have amnesia. You have to do a lot of things to really succeed as a screenwriter.

On the movie Catwoman, at some point in the process I started to get curious about the whole notion of a day self and a night self, and the opposition between the two, and archetypes of women as good girls and bad girls, and the interplay between them. Trying to write stuff that would play to that set of concerns became interesting. Forgetting Halle Berry, forgetting movies, forgetting all the attendant crap on the project—from a writing perspective, it was exciting to think about those issues. So even on the most thread-bare, hideous, stupid project, you can still—if you’re any good at all—find something that’s interesting and fun and worth some creative energy.

I’ve read screenplays, plenty of them, where the writer obviously hates what he’s doing, and thinks it’s bullshit. That kind of cynicism is pernicious. It hurts the project. It hurts movies in general. So I try not to be cynical about the thing itself—about the screenplay, about the movie—while being cynical about every single other thing attached to it. Staying innocent in the creative process is the thing.

NAOMI FONER: I remember Alvin Sargent saying to me when he saw Running on Empty, “This makes me want to do my own best work.” I never got a compliment better than that, and whenever I see something that makes me feel that way, I try to say it to the person whose work I’ve just seen. That’s how you should feel enough of the time to keep going, ’cause there’s so much stuff that happens that wants to push you back.

MARK D. ROSENTHAL: I have gotten better at picking up the signposts, like, “I think they’re out looking for another writer,” “I think he didn’t like this draft,” “I think something bad is gonna happen”—you know, the zombies are gonna break into my psychic room and rip my throat out. I feel, “Well, I’m a professional. I can see that coming.” But when they rip your throat out, it doesn’t feel any better.

DAVID HAYTER: To continue to justify working in the business, you have to start saying, “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” Once you start to go down that road, that’s pretty dangerous. I mean, a lot of them may not know what they’re talking about, but a lot of them do. There are a lot of smart people in this industry. Once you start to create a divide in your mind between you and them, that divide will only widen and widen and widen.

JONATHAN LEMKIN: What I try to do to maintain my sanity is alternate between artist and whore. If I was just an artist, I’d be broke, and if I was just a whore, I’d be sad. So I go back and forth. It’s not quite “one for them, one for me.” Sometimes it’s “two for them, one for me.” But generally, after I’ve done some rewrite work, or I’m just feeling burned out, it’s like, “I’ve gotta do something that’s original.”

ZAK PENN: If you don’t have a good coping strategy, you probably won’t last. I mean, some of the typical ones are alcoholism, drug addiction, nymphomania—I’ve managed to avoid those. I play a lot of video games. Killing people on the safe field of the Internet is a good way to get your aggression out.

DANIEL PYNE: I get incredibly frustrated and bitter and cynical. How do I stay positive? I try not to go to movies. I try to stay away from Hollywood parties. I have friends outside of the business. I try not to read the trades…. I shouldn’t be saying this on tape.

ANTWONE FISHER: I have written a lot of screenplays, but only two of them have actually been made into films—the ones that came directly from me, only two in sixteen years. My job, as a screenwriter working in Hollywood, is to give the producer and the studio what they want. Whether they make the movie or not, that’s in someone else’s hands.

RONALD SHUSETT: Quiet periods are torture. The older you get, the more painful it is, because you’re afraid they’ll never give you another shot. If you don’t get movies made for several years, it’s worse than having flops. You disappear. It just gets harder and harder to get your movies made. And I never imagined that. I thought making bad movies was gonna hurt you more. From 1992, with Freejack, to 2002, with Minority Report, I didn’t get a movie made as a writer or a producer. And it looked like I didn’t have the stuff anymore. During that time, I had movies I could have gotten made, but I didn’t believe in them. I had offers from studios. Keep your oar in the water, and keep rowing—because if you don’t, they think there’s something wrong with your talent just by vacancy.

Ronald Shusett

MICHAEL JANUARY: I was fairly depressed at one point that I was getting these action movies made, and was not getting paid a lot of money. And so I went to therapy. Some guy was offering a little therapy thing for creative people, so I said, “Okay, I’m feeling bad. I’ll go and sit and talk it out with some other people in the same situation.”

So I’m going to therapy because I’m getting these movies made and not making a lot of money. In this session is this other guy who’s working over at Warner Bros., getting paid an awful lot of money, but he can’t get any movies made. That’s why he’s in therapy. So I started going, “All right, maybe it’s not so bad. I’ll just get over my issue, because the other side of the fence is not all that pretty either.”

Anybody in Hollywood has things that they wish they could be doing. They have their pet projects they wish they could get made. There are writers who wish they could be directors. There are directors who wish they could write. You kind of get the career you get.

JOHN AUGUST: There are days I’m very down on Hollywood. Sometimes it’s because of a pass, where I went out and pitched an idea and nobody bought it. Other times it’s because you see people making choices that you know are the wrong choices, and you can’t stop them—they’re hiring the wrong director on a project that you spent two years developing, they’re asking for another rewrite on a project that really doesn’t need it. There are times where you get really, really frustrated by this whole industry, and you just want to go off and write a book, where at least no matter what you do, it’s yours and you have full control over it.

The only way to get back on the horse and regain your love for the business—or at least your strange, abusive, crack-addict relationship with the business—is sitting in an audience that’s watching one of your movies, where all those jokes which have stopped being funny to you are suddenly funny to a hundred people around you. That keeps you going. It’s the random person who says that they really liked that obscure script you wrote four years ago. That keeps you going. It’s the validation from knowing that you wrote something really good.

JOHN CARPENTER: “Embrace the darkness,” as Steve Buscemi says. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s okay. You’ll survive. It may be a great idea that you’ve done. It may be your best work. But you’ll do another one. Don’t worry about it. Because if you worry, you’re gonna eat yourself up, and then you become an enemy to yourself. You can’t do that. You have to maintain this joy of the work. It’s the work. It’s not, “This is my masterpiece, and they screwed it up.” Well, they paid you for it, okay? They paid you for your masterpiece. So stop bitching, stop whining, and move on.

SHANE BLACK: I sort of slid off the map a little bit after Long Kiss Goodnight was such a failure back in the nineties, and I don’t know quite how I got back on the map. Because of the turnover in these offices, the executives at the studios are now twenty-five, and they saw Lethal Weapon when they were eight—so there’s a sense of being an old-timer before I’m even an old-timer. I had to reinvent my career at age forty. That’s the disadvantage of succeeding early. Eventually, you have to find the second stage of your career. You go back to the source, to the kid you were when you were hungry, while you were still eating, breathing, and sleeping this stuff. It reminds you not just of where you’ve been, but where you’ve yet to go, and hopefully reinstills in you a little bit of that childish hunger. When you lose that, you’ve lost everything.

GERALD DiPEGO: I knew I wanted to be a writer by the time I was twelve years old. I just turned sixty-six, and there’s a moment in each production where I’m twelve again, because carpenters came and built this building, and there’s a sign on the door that has the name of the character I thought up. What’s more fragile than a story? It’s this wispy thing you make up in your mind. And to see flesh-and-blood actors walking around, being your characters, and to see carpenters building buildings, and it all came out of this dream…. There’s still a moment where I’m that twelve-year-old kid saying, “Wow, look at this.”

The Therapist’s Perspective: Dennis Palumbo

Dennis Palumbo

The uncertainties of a Hollywood writing career are enough to send the strongest soul to a psychotherapist’s couch, and often the therapist in question is former screenwriter Dennis Palumbo. Following a television career that included a stint as the story editor of Welcome Back, Kotter, Palumbo transitioned to features by cowriting the acclaimed comedy My Favorite Year (1982), among other projects. He then retired from show business to become a mental-health professional specializing in creative issues.

The Healing Game

I was in therapy myself, and I fell in love with the process, so I started going back to school and volunteering at a psychiatric hospital. But then one day, I was having lunch with a producer who wanted me to write a movie. I was late for going down to the hospital where I worked doing group therapy with schizophrenics, and I couldn’t wait for the lunch to be over. Driving down there, I said, “What’s wrong with this picture?” I knew then that I was going to sit for the exam and become a therapist.

I would think the two things that benefit my patients the most are that I used to be in show business and I was a screenwriter, so I understand their dilemmas. There are so many ways in which, as a writer, you can have your aesthetic violated. Each different person responds based on how they’re made up emotionally. You know, there are a lot of people who have a kind of defense mechanism that says, “As long as they pay me big money, I don’t care what they do with the script.” It’s a way to armor yourself against the pain of having somebody do something to your material that you don’t like. Most writers, though, are more porous than that.

The thing about therapy is you can’t really put a template on it that works for everyone. It depends on who the person is. How they respond to criticism and rejection has so much to do with their self-concept, their self-esteem, the lessons they learned in childhood. There are people for whom criticism is a way to get better as a writer. There are people for whom criticism is a devastating confirmation that they’re untalented, depending on what kind of emotional resources they developed in their family of origin.

If you look at the biographies of famous writers, or artists of all kinds, there are four or five major periods in their life where they fall down, they stagger, they get blocked, no one likes their work. These are almost like the steps a child goes through where he crawls, and then he fights to learn how to master standing, and then he fights to learn how to walk. It’s part of the natural developmental arc of an artist to navigate these crises, and then grow from them and move on.

I have a number of patients who have written ten or twelve films, and now their excitement is how big the deal is gonna be, and how much it’s gonna kick into their financial nut. They’re so used to the film being dismantled by the studio, mangled by the director, poorly acted, not getting the distribution it needed—and then if the film doesn’t do well, getting all the bad notices for it—that the movies have become just a big income stream to them.

I think all of us have been assholes at one time or another. Anyone can start believing their own publicity, and start thinking that they’re the new creative genius. So show business can be very humbling. On the other hand, studio executives and agents, for reasons beyond my understanding, get to stay assholes and it doesn’t seem to affect their livelihood at all.

My feeling is you write to communicate. And if what you’re writing doesn’t communicate to more than four people, you better be okay with that, because the reality is the marketplace needs certain dramatic elements. On the whole, I think you’re better off writing what it is that excites you. So if you want to write a big action-adventure movie, it better be because you like that kind of movie, and therefore you’ll write one that fits the pattern of what they’re making.

I have a patient who was working on a big action-adventure—one of those Die Hard kind of movies—and he d said, “The difference is the guy’s gonna die at the end.” And I said, “Then no one’s gonna buy it.” Because if you’re really a fan of those movies, you know that one of the satisfactions is seeing the guy triumph at the end. If you want him to die at the end, you’re gonna have to go find independent funding and make it in Spain, ’cause they’re not gonna make it here.

You Are Not Alone

It’s much more common now than at any time I can remember for a screenplay to have eight or nine writers on it. There’s a lot of money at stake, so there are too many chefs. Part of the surrealistic experience in Hollywood is that the originator of the material—from the moment everyone else claims to love it—is then the subject of an attempt to remove them from the material as much as possible.

The wonderful screenwriter Frederic Raphael once said, “You better have a good time writing your first draft. That’s the last moment of pleasure you will ever have on that project.” This happens to my patients every day—and they’re also the ones who are rewriting other people. I mean, it’s such a funny situation. You can be sitting in my office complaining that the script’s been taken out of your hands and given to some hot young Turk who just came on the scene. Meanwhile, you’re rewriting someone else at the same time.

If you feel the person rewriting you respects the original material, it’s a little more tolerable. If it’s a wholesale rewrite—where you feel that the new writer is trying to make as many changes as possible so that when arbitration time comes, they’ll get a shot at a screen credit—then you feel like you’re being erased.

Regardless of the fact that my practice is all show business, we don’t talk about the business as much as we talk about their lives. We primarily talk about relationships, money worries, child rearing, substance abuse, the relationship they have with their families of origin, their envy of their best friend, the extramarital affair they’re having.

What makes it particularly difficult for a writer is that writing is not a regular job. It’s not stocking shelves at a supermarket. It’s a very erratic career, such that if you have a family, you’re concerned because your income could go up and down based on the vagaries of the business. All of a sudden you go from being on the front page of Variety to now you can’t get arrested, and your wife or your husband is going, “What are we gonna do for money?” That’s very tough to live with.

Plus you’re always looking out the window, thinking of things. You can’t enjoy a movie with your family like everyone else, because you’re going, “I don’t know how this bum got a job,” or “Do they call that a second act?” or “I remember the movie they stole this one from,” or “I had an idea like that myself.” So it just wrecks the experience for everyone you’re with.

I always remember a quote from Robert Frost. He said, “The one thing all nations of the earth share is a fear that a member of your family will want to be an artist.” The key is to remember that you’re not alone. Every successful writer used to be a struggling writer. And I can tell you, I have those successful writers in my practice and they still struggle. They still have act two problems, they wonder if all of their success so far was a fluke, they say to themselves, “I’m no Preston Sturges,” or whatever.

Because we respect the writing and respect our craft, we all worry about whether we’re doing it right.