How I got in, part 2
Working writers talk about how it happened for them and how they've kept it going.
Andy Bobrow: Hi, welcome back and happy New Year! The big unanswerable question about a screenwriting career is “How do you get in?” But one of the easiest questions to answer is “How did you get in?” So here’s the second in a series where working writers tell their origin stories.
Jennifer Maisel: Wow, how did I get in? Let me tap into my long term memory. After college I spent a year in NYC working for several Broadway producers (there are stories there) and then got into NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Dramatic Writing Program MFA. I was focused primarily in playwriting but I do think the best part of that program was them making sure you were also fluent in writing for screen. I oddly moved to LA for what I thought was going to be a brief stint working with some theatre people I loved, and thought, while I was here I really should explore film. I was teaching test prep and my LSAT students couldn’t understand why if I could score so high on the test I didn’t want to be a lawyer. The weekend of the Northridge earthquake I was in Northern California visiting my brother (lucky me) and an incident I saw on the beach there, where a little kid went missing for a while, sparked the beginning of a screenplay. That screenplay went under option with the help of my theatre agent’s assistant. It was a thriller and led me to writing a whole slew of TV movies that were in that genre at the time. I loved having freelance work that meant I could also do my theatre work. And it’s been varied for me - I’ve been hired for indie features, MOWs, an animated feature for Disney, I’ve staffed and sold pilots. I have had two long sequences where I couldn’t score any work and every time it’s felt like I have to break back in again. The latter one just came to an end and I’m working on a pilot right now and a streaming feature. I’m still living in LA. I’ve been with one of my reps for over 20 years (except when I had to fire him for a year) and another for over 10. I feel like my jobs come in from a mix of their efforts and my own that is delicate and complex. The pilot I’m writing is from a book series my theatre agent reps that I put together and pitched with a producer I met on a two hour I wrote that came out of something my agent had put me up for. And that screenplay I got the idea for that day on Muir Beach that got optioned at the beginning of my career? It was optioned a several more times after that, falling through again and again - and then 15ish years later it was bought and made.
Eric Tipton: As a kid movies had always been my refuge. I made Super-8mm films in the backyard, blew up model kits for miniature effects, that kind of thing. That JJ Abrams movie SUPER-8, was my life from the 6th grade through high school, but without the alien monster thing.
I went to college in the same town where I grew up. A friend and I had taken a stab at writing a first script – completely self-taught – and blindly sent it to agents in LA (via snail mail) because we literally didn’t know any better. One of them called us and told us we weren’t ready for representation but had talent and should move to Los Angeles.
A year or two later, after my writing partner and his brother graduated from college (they were both a couple of years older than I was), they decided they were going to move to LA, so I dropped out and joined them. It wasn’t a huge loss. I wanted to be a filmmaker and the film program at my university was really geared more toward churning out film critics for local arts weeklies, not filmmakers. There was no production component. I didn’t have the grades or the money to go to a real film school, so I rolled the dice.
And then we moved. Our first apartment was in North Hollywood and ended up being right across the street from James Jeremias, who co-wrote the spec that would become THE LOST BOYS. He saw the computers coming out of our rented truck and said, “Let me guess. Writers. And I bet you thought there were only a lot of ACTORS here.”
Flash forward three or four years, I had been working temp jobs to pay the bills, writing alone and with different partners, but nothing was happening. I didn’t have any family in the business and no connections and I was really struggling to get my stuff read, let alone repped or sold. I don’t think there were even any contests at the time, other than the Nichol and a couple of studio fellowships – Warner Bros, and maybe Disney – so there weren’t a lot of channels for discovery like there are today.
Through my then-girlfriend, I became friends and later roommates with a guy who, it turned out, had a grandfather who was a living legend comedy writer. After a year or so of hanging out and living together, we decided to write something – a big action feature that we thought was pretty good. We showed it to his grandfather with the hope that he would hook us up with agents, or executives. He read it and refused to help us. He said, “I’m not going to help you for two reasons. First, I can make a phone call and get you into any agency or room in this town, but they’ll be taking the meeting as a favor to me, and it won’t make them like your writing any better. Second, you don’t need my help.” Which was both shattering in the moment, and an amazing compliment in hindsight. After that, we ended up showing our spec to everyone either of us knew or had ever worked for.
It took a couple of months, but eventually one of the people we sent it to shared it with an exec at a big action producer’s company who then helped us get our first agent. It’s crazy. By that point I’d spent a total of about five years banging my head against the wall with script after script, and the gates wouldn’t open. And then, suddenly, with this script, getting signed became the easiest thing in the world. It was the right thing at the right time. We all want our latest and greatest piece of work to be the thing that opens the doors, but, no matter how much we wish it were different, we aren’t the people who get to make that decision.
That spec went out wide – this was back in the mid ‘90s, when you could sell a spec script for a million dollars overnight. The night it went out, we started getting phone calls at our apartment from execs saying crazy things like, “Look, if someone comes in for a million and we only offer seven-fifty, I want you to know we really want to make this movie so don’t just go for the money.” This was a landline, back before ubiquitous cell phones. I have no idea how they got our number.
It was very heady. And because it’s Hollywood, that script went on to… not sell. To anyone. Ever. BUT it did lead to a lot of buzz and a ton of meetings. Our second feature spec went on to sell in 24 hours to Arnold Kopelson and Fox. Which was lucky because it was late October, I was newly married at the time, and my wife and I didn’t have enough in the bank to make November rent. When our agents called to say we’d sold the script, it was literally life-changing.
And then we were in the club, so to speak. We sold some other stuff. We co-wrote and directed a little indie festival movie. We got invited to speak on panels and were profiled in “FADE IN” magazine back when that was a thing, in an article about “Hot Duos”. There was no Black List yet.
We were kids. It was lot of fun. Then my partner left the business and, not having any solo samples, I got dropped from my agency and my management company and had to start completely over from square one. Well, maybe not square one, but definitely square two or three. No partner, no reps. No idea if I could really do this on my own. It took time, years even, but I managed to claw my way back because I wanted it, and still want it, more than anything else. Because that’s what it took.
It's been up and down since. I’m leaving a LOT of stuff out because I’ve already gone on long enough. I managed to sell a movie every year or two from the early 00s until about 2013/2014. Never for a TON of money, but enough to eke out a living. For some reason I never really got into the OWA game. In 2015 I switched to TV. By 2018 I had four shows in development simultaneously – two at networks and two with independent studios who were paying for development, but none of them got made.
As someone who has never worked on staff, the ATA action made things very hard before COVID killed them entirely. But every writing career is filled with peaks and valleys. I’m very lucky. I have a great team and a wife who has been willing to carry most of the weight when I’m not working. Things were so bad at the end of ‘21 that I ended up taking a seasonal gig delivering holiday packages for UPS. That’s one of those things you don’t want to tell your reps, or executive contacts about, and I considered not saying it here, but I think it’s important for people to know this is not a linear career. Sure we can see the JJs and the other cottage industries in our business, but also have to understand how few of them there are. How rare it is. Working as a professional writer is like playing professional sports. How many kids grew up wanting to go to the NBA versus how many actually made it?
In the last few months my business has started to bounce back. I’m talking to a bunch of places about TV development and a movie I wrote finally got made this past fall, so that has opened new opportunities in features. Which doesn’t mean I get to breathe or slow down. I have to take advantage of this momentum – such as it is – and keep making things happen. I’ve been at this for 25 years and every day, every project, I still have to ask myself if this is still what I want and if I’m still willing to do what it takes. I’d love to get to a place where I can feel some ease and comfort and know that my family and I don’t have to worry about the next job. I’ll let you know if that ever happens.
Kinan Copen: I’m first generation Palestinian American. My dad’s a refugee. Being a writer was not something that was an option for me until I realized I really didn’t want to be anything other than a writer. But it took a while to reach that point. Made little movies all through high school and college, back when Public Access channels were a thing. You could edit there for free as long as you let them broadcast whatever you were working on. After college, I worked in television news until I saved enough money to move to California. I didn’t know anyone in LA, but scrounged around until I connected to a friend of a friend of a high school classmate of my sister’s who was a creative executive at a studio. He put me in touch with a lit agent. Through that connection, I got hired as an assistant in books to film before being promoted to the desk of the head of the lit department, where I was soon fired for not wanting “to party enough.”
Was placed by said lit department head in a development job at a film production company at a studio. Wrote freelance for magazines on the side, but was getting increasingly disillusioned about the feature side of the business and how writers were (are) treated. Wasn’t til I took a job running feature development for a tv director that I saw inside a television writers room and realized that was where I belonged. Quit that job and took a writer’s assistant job, working for a comedy writer with an overall deal. He was a great mentor and during that time I developed a pilot of my own with a POD that went out but ultimately didn’t sell. It did get me my first agent though, at a different big three agency than where I had worked. Felt like I was getting somewhere. Then, I was all set to be staffed on my boss’s next show, but as luck would have it, the newly attached million dollar plus star decided he wanted to bring in his own guy to showrun, and we were pushed off and then the strike happened. Played a lot of Rock Band during that time with other unemployed writers.
Post strike, a producer I’d met through my agent at the time was a big fan of my work and doggedly wanted us to sell something together. We pitched a lot and with his name, got in some great rooms - but the one that did sell fell apart in business affairs and that was that.
I decided to try to start staffing, but then I got pregnant with twins and took a year to reassess.. During that time I realized I’d rather be a drama writer than a comedy writer, so I wrote a drama spec. My former agent said he didn’t have the “bandwidth” to “rebrand” me as a drama writer after making so much headway (?!) as a comedy writer. I promptly fired him and my managers. Then I spent a few months in a panic until a writing team I was friends with got an animated kids show on Netflix and kindly gave me several freelance scripts, which was an awesome, affirming experience at a time when I really needed it.
I later got signed by a different, much better management company and by a different, much less prestigious but harder working agency, where they were more than happy to take that same spec pilot and build a drama career for me. I got my first official staff writing job, on a network show no less, through this agent. Even though the showrunner wasn’t planning on filling the diversity spot, my agent called him every day until he hired me.
That same showrunner took me to his next show, where he promoted me and then let me go after the first thirteen. I spent a year unemployed and wondering what it all meant before landing a super coveted job and title bump on a super coveted project based on super coveted IP, with super coveted attachments for premium cable. We wrote the season but it died on the vine.
Another year passed before I got my current gig, another network show, which I’ve been with for three seasons now. We’re waiting on a pick up though, so fingers crossed…
Tiffany Yeager (Romigh): I was fired from my corporate job. That’s OK: I had to do my work from the women’s restroom so that my bosses couldn’t hunt me down, when I wasn’t crying around the side of the building. I wrote a novel. So, the first time I broke in was when Mark Gordon optioned it. He asked me to adapt it. I didn’t know how to use Final Draft. I failed. My marriage fell apart. I woke up every day excited to work. No one hired me for two years, but I kept writing. The second time I broke in, I wrote about love even though I know nothing about love. I wrote about cheerleaders even though I never made the squad. I lied. I cheated. I made morally questionable choices to stay in the game. My choices met me on the way back down and I took a minimum wage job handing out towels, sometimes to people who just months before hired me for projects. I kept writing.
The third time I broke in, I stopped eating sugar but developed a taste for humble pie. I decided to write about it, how it felt to make mistakes and pick myself back up. I rolled up my sleeves. I stared into myself and one day she was staring back at me, that person I was writing about. I began to feel the sun on my back at the laptop. And then, the jobs came. They ended. More came after. I kept writing.
I’m still scared. In the night, I’m strangled with worry. I wake up every day excited to work like I did at the beginning and forget until I look in the mirror that some days I no longer look the part. Have I broken in? Unclear. Will I make it? Not sure. But I’m not leaving.
I will keep writing, to tell myself that I won’t always love the things I can’t seem to grab; that I won’t always live wondering what would’ve happened if I’d been able to. I will write to remind myself that there’ll be a time when the feelings that I have now – the ones that force to me question if I’m even a good person – will give way to ones of gratitude for what I did grab, even when I inevitably lose them again.
I will keep writing it because it will open my heart, and maybe then I can reach in to where my boundless belief still is, and find it. Find myself. Trusting that, like water below ground or the last can of Diet Coke at the back of an icebox, I just have to dig it out.
Sarah Conradt: I’m not sure if being known for tenacity and perseverance is a good thing? Since it means you’ve put in a huge amount of time and have been up against a lot of rejection, which isn’t always fun to admit. But it also means you never gave up, and I guess I’m okay with admitting that. Recently, I was on a screenwriting panel and the moderator, when introducing me, pointed out that here I am with my first produced feature and it stars two rather fancy Oscar-winning actresses—her comment was how amazing, really how lucky I was, that my “very first feature” out of the gate is so “notable”. I took the opportunity to point out that I’ve been at this a very, very long time—that I’ve written features for several studios and indy financiers over many years… this may be my first produced feature, but it’s definitely not my first rodeo.
It all goes like this: I was a month out of college with my English/Writing degree when my boyfriend at the time (now my husband, bless his awesome heart) saw an ad in Vanity Fair for the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting and, knowing that I had a dream of one day writing movies, encouraged me to enter a script. I wasn’t about to just type something out and send it in, though. I wanted to know what I was doing first—I wanted to study scripts with guidance, learn all about structure and format… I wanted to be good. My uncle was a writer/director and had given me a book on writing “teleplays” when I was 12, but he wasn’t someone who was ever going to offer himself up to help me break in. He wasn’t that kind of family. So I enrolled in my first screenwriting course in my mid 20s and worked hard to figure it all out. I’d always written, and I’d always loved movies, and finally I was marrying these two passions. I read every screenplay I could get my hands on, and completed my first feature script in that 8-month course. I had big, big dreams of getting started on this career as soon as possible (insert laughing and eyeroll emojis here). Sometimes, ignorance is the only way you can reach for the stars—but, I think I prefer to call it idealism. I was a dreamer. I wanted to believe that anything was possible.
I discovered the “Hollywood Creative Directory” (I think they stopped publishing these) and compiled the contact information for every producer whose work I admired, every agent who repped writers I idolized, and every appropriate production exec at studios both major and minor. I was determined to get someone to read my script. Since I also had a degree in graphic design, I let loose on designing precious little handmade booklets that were like printed “teaser” decks for my spec which I hoped would stand out in the mailroom. I put them in can’t-help-but-be-noticed transparent envelopes and mailed them off with reply cards and SASEs. I didn’t hear back from everybody, but I did hear back from many—and just like that, I was slipping a handful of late-night Kinko’s-printed hard copies of my first feature spec script in the mail, bound with two brads (not three), to Columbia Pictures, et al (you all know how long ago this was since there were no emails or PDFs involved). I remember one of my coworkers at the time saying, “Oh my god, it’s going to be *that* easy for you?”
The answer was no. Not by a long shot. To this day, I think she jinxed me with that comment.
I got some encouraging feedback from those who’d read my spec along with compliments on the little teaser booklets, but no bites. That’s okay, onward. I then entered the Nicholl Fellowships with that script and reached an “almost-there” by being 50 scripts out from making the quarterfinals. That was enough encouragement to keep me pushing forward. So I wrote another spec and submitted it the following year. This one made it to quarterfinals (top 200). So I wrote another one and submitted again the following year—this one made it to semifinals (top 100). It became my annual addiction. Every May 1, with the exception of a couple of years here and there, I would either submit a new spec or one that had already landed in the semifinals. I was determined to get to finals (top 10) and finally win the thing (top 5). I did this for more than a decade. My scripts landed in the semifinals 14 times, sometimes more than one in a given year. I never won. BUT—
—every year, the Nicholl would publish a list of the quarter- and semifinalists, and I would get calls from managers and young agents looking for new clients, and from producers looking for new projects, some of them names I knew with filmographies that got my heart thumping. And every year, they’d read whichever script had made the semifinals that cycle. Twice I “sold” options to two of those scripts to upstart producers in the same year (“sold” is a negligible term here because those first year options were only $1, since some form of payment had to be exchanged in order to make the contract legally binding, but they were paying out of their own pockets, so…). I was thrilled just the same. This was it! I was getting two of my specs set up by young producers who were backed by big names I knew. Those stars in my eyes were getting brighter. This was about 5 years into it. I was living in Seattle, but flew down to LA for parties and meetings with agents… I was in! This was happening! My producer/director called me the “It Girl”. I bought right into it.
I quit my day job in order to devote more time to writing—I was barely 30 and senior lead graphic designer for the University of Washington at the time. I’d hardly made enough money from writing to pay a couple months’ rent in total, so I made sure to hang on to as many of my UW design clients as I could. My husband and I were now both freelancers (he’s an artist) with no back-up financial support. We were on our own, living hand to mouth, renting a house in Seattle, just making ends meet. We couldn’t afford to relocate to LA. But man, how I loved movies! I watched everything I could. I wanted to do this for a living with every fiber of my being.
A year or so later, one of those optioned projects had been set up with exciting name-actresses attached, and we had our greenlight—until the producer/director fell out of favor literally overnight, and everything went black. It was suddenly over before it began.
The other project never got off the ground—the young upstart producer had moved back home to somewhere in the east. My gamble of maybes and almosts was now tainted with nos.
During those Nicholl semifinals years, I got the random call from various producers who had read one of my scripts and wanted to take it out around town to see if they could set it up. I remember in particular the day Sam Goldwyn, Jr. called to tell me he wanted to give the script to his son Tony to direct (Tony passed). And the legendary Fred Roos calling wanting to give it to “Coppola’s niece” to direct (she passed, too). More almosts. A lifetime of almosts.
Then a manager called me off the Nicholl Semifinals list about my most recent placing script, which she’d read—and she said she wanted to rep me. I didn’t hesitate. I said yes, absolutely. She was like, “you sure you don’t want to think on it a bit?” Nope! Let’s finally get this career off the ground. By this time, it had been 17 years since that first spec script went out to Columbia Pictures. 17. Years.
Next up—three years of flying down to LA for general meetings on my own diminishing dime. In one week alone, my manager had set up 25 meetings for me in the space of 5 days—from The Donners’ Company to Paramount to everything in between. The whole trip went on a credit card. I did this several more times. I was still betting on myself because there were just way too many almosts to quit. By this time, when I shared stories of my LA trips or potential projects, I was starting to get the glazed-over look from friends and family who were losing faith in my journey and growing weary of hearing that every exciting nibble always turned out to be dust in the wind.
Those same three years I also spent chasing every OWA that came my way, and got so damn close with my takes, you wouldn’t believe how close, over and over, but never landed any. I’ll never forget the studio VP fighting for me after my pitch on one particular project by calling the reluctant big-wig producer while she was being prepped for a surgical cosmetic procedure, hoping they could persuade her to say yes to hiring me to write the script while she was under sedation—but alas, they could not. I didn’t get that job. I didn’t get dozens and dozens of jobs. I stopped counting. I was giving my all on takes while doing my best to keep my little Seattle freelance graphic design business breathing. We were maxing out our credit cards and borrowing from our house to stay afloat. The gamble continued. And every day, I considered giving up. But always, those almosts came in from people who could make all the difference. It wasn’t “no” that was killing me, it was “maybe”.
THEN… a general meeting at Bad Robot led to a nugget. The nugget became a take. The take became a full-on pitch. And within hours of learning my latest spec had just been set-up, I found out my pitch had won me my first paid writing gig for none other than JJ Abrams and Adam Goodman, the President of Paramount at the time. This got me my CAA agent. It had been 20 years since that first spec. At last, I had a WGA card in my pocket and just enough cash alongside it to buy a horse (which I did, still have him). I was finally in!
I wrote the script, gave it my all… but the project wasn’t a priority for Bad Robot, and then Goodman left Paramount. The script went on a shelf. Next job was for Focus Features—very exciting, politically-charged project—but after two drafts which the director stood behind, the exec got cold feet and it went on a shelf. Next job was writing a script for Luc Besson and Europacorp, an original inspired by one of Luc’s mental doodles, but despite him liking the script, it wasn’t among the three projects his company decided to pursue that year, and on a shelf it went. This continued—from gigs at Lionsgate where my project was top of the chain with hotshot producers until our studio exec left unexpectedly and the guy who filled his slot wasn’t looking for this kind of project—to a foreign remake script for MGM which was well-loved until the SVP left on maternity leave and no one cared to pick up where she left off. Then there were similar false starts at Amazon, Netflix, and so on.
Meanwhile, one of my specs made the Blacklist, and another made the Hit List, but neither were getting produced—one getting stopped in the 11th hour, even with half the financing, and talent and director attached—and the other begging around trying to find its home.
Turns out I was “in”, but not “in in”. Another dozen plus project pitches, many broken promises, and a lot more maybes… I’ve gone from being repped at CAA to ICM to Gersh, and at long last, I’ve finally had my first feature made this past summer with yes, two pretty remarkable Oscar-winning actresses starring. Fingers tightly crossed it will be released soon. 30 years, my friends. 30 years from first script submitted to the Hollywood machine to first wrapped film—and in all that time, I never gave up—for better or worse.
In March, we shoot my spec in Rome—holding my breath. I’m still working long-distance from Seattle, still chasing OWAs, still pitching, still losing jobs and sometimes winning them and, I admit, I honestly don’t know what “in” actually means. It could all go away tomorrow, or every dream could come true. There’s absolutely no way to know. So no, it wasn’t *that* easy, but still—I have something to say, seems a few people want to listen, and I choose to believe that anything is possible.
Andy Bobrow: Wow, thank you all for contributing, and thanks for reading. We have a lot of cool discussions planned and if you’d like to participate, please reply to this email or email us at writerscollectivesubstack@gmail.com. See you next week!