How I Got In, Part 3
Andy Bobrow: Welcome back to the trenches. Since the WGA negotiations have begun, we don’t want to talk over the negotiating committee regarding contract issues. That makes this a great week to talk about how we got into the business. Let’s hear some origin stories! How did you guys break in?
Tyler Hisel: I grew up in Kentucky. A kid in the country making movies in his backyard with an 8mm Sony Handycam. Back then, the best film education that a kid in the Midwest with zero connections could find was from the internet (it probably still is, but bad advice wasn't so commonplace). For me, that was Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio's website wordplayer.com. A lifeline to a kid who wanted to make movies and a rare glimpse into the JOB of being a writer. The job sounded terrible and I instantly knew that there was nothing I wanted to do more (the site is still there, go read it all!). I was fortunate enough to be the first person in my family to graduate from college, getting a degree from a small liberal arts school in Kentucky. It afforded me the opportunity to jump to LA for an internship.
With my first feature spec in my back pocket, which I'd written in my parent's basement, I landed in LA. A year later, my internship turned into a desk job for a producer (in between I worked as PA, an extra and the guy who loads you onto the Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios). All the while, I sent that feature spec to anyone who might read it. I submitted to contests, fellowships, etc, etc. Strike-out after strike-out until the day I fielded an email from a literary manager while at work. I did what I certainly should not have done and said "Hey, I'm also a writer with a new spec if you wanna check it out." He dug it, sent it around and that script managed to land on the annual Black List that year (2009). Off to the races, I thought! But not quite. That script announced my existence (I was swimming in meetings and could pitch on endless ill-fated OWAs), but it would take 4 years for that movie to get made and nearly as long before I could call myself a full-time screenwriter.
I got to that place by sensing what most of us did around the late 2000s, that the tide in drama was turning toward serialized TV. So, on the heels of that first feature spec, I pivoted and spec'd a pilot and series bible. It landed me my first agent (who I'm still with to this day) who sold the show. I had to spec and sell yet another series before I finally managed to get staffed. Since then, I do much the same things, though thankfully with more frequency and less often on spec. As we all know, this job is a momentum game and, thankfully, the momentum has built. How have I stayed in? Largely, by generating my own jobs as best I can. Development. Working in both features and TV. Selling pitches. Hunting for IP, always. Signing onto OWAs when the fit is right. Taking the occasional staff gig when a cool opportunity comes along.
Almost a decade ago, after several years in LA, I got to the place where I could do this from my current home base, back among the green grass of the country. That's where I hide when I don't have to be anywhere else. Looking at a dry erase board of projects in various stages and keeping the plates spinning. That's the job of being a writer, I've realized. Keep the plates spinning.
Holly Sorensen: Writing in Hollywood was a dream far too big for me, being a paid writer at all wasn’t even on my radar. It was simply beyond the realm of the possible, growing up in central Montana when I did. I got a scholarship to college - first time I was ever east of the Mississippi or on an airplane - and everyone seemed to know how the whole break in thing worked.. People got internships in the summer, I went home to bartend and make cash. I didn’t take any writing classes, which is crazy to me now, but again, I couldn't see that for myself as a career.
It was several years after college that I read that Ms. Magazine was returning without ad support - at the time, that was crazy. And thinking that corporations were the root of evil, I thought it was great that Ms could publish covers without models wearing makeup for the first time - because they didn’t need Cover Girls’ money. On a whim, knowing no one and living in Minneapolis, I applied to be an intern, sent them a very unconventional resume - a resume with a piece of tracing paper stapled to the top and a note that said, “if you want to know what really happened to me, read the top. If you just want the resume, throw the top away.” And the tracing paper had in the margins all the real things that happened to me - being sexually harassed by a college prof and a dean, for instance.
I knew I had to do something to stand out in a hypercompetitive environment, and being my most authentic self was my only shot. (Id also been reading a lot of deconstruction, lol. ) From MS. I got the insanely lucky break to segue into PREMIERE magazine, which at the time, was an incredibly hot magazine and one that was all about the movie industry, before the industry was covered the way it is today. That was beyond lucky for several reasons - I knew no one there, I was a slightly unconventional assistant, older, I hadn’t gone through anything like the Columbia Journalism Program that many had, the magazine had access to and covered Hollywood like nothing else, and the people there were incredible. I learned sooooooo much about sooooooo much there. It was a grad school education in writing, in Hollywood, in just knowing how to act in the world.
The New York Magazine world was probably more competitive than Hollywood in those days. So by the time I moved to LA, I had all that knowledge, and I had some ideas to produce. Again, I didn’t see myself as a writer. I walked up to Brian Grazer at the Ivy in Santa Monica, true story, maybe a drink or two in me, and said, I think you should do a movie about x and y. Here's why. And he gave me his card and he told me to make an appointment. And I did, and I set up a project, became friends with one of the writers who became my writing partner, and we wrote something on spec together - an idea I had forever. It was my first script, it got me my first agent, and my first deal. People think that is crazy and it is, crazy lucky - but by then I had also been an incredibly diligent student of Hollywood and had read hundreds of scripts for my job, so maybe not. It was also a good script, with a very original idea and a fun unique voice, as my writing partner and I were both pretty whisky tango.
I think something like 50% of all WGA writers don’t work past five years. So staying in is much harder than getting in. In some ways getting in is easier than it has ever been. People can find showrunners on twitter, for godsakes, you don’t have to approach a producer cold at The Ivy. But staying in might be harder. For most of us there are lean years, for lots of reasons. I’ve struggled even after having my own show on the air. Most of us will.
Make sure you have a way of making money in the tight spots, I was lucky enough to be a freelance journalist with a lot of credits. I have now seen three decades, almost, of people trying to break in. It’s really no different than it has ever been. The biggest problem is thinking that once you are in, you are home free. I wish it worked like that, it doesn’t. It always could go away in a flash. It is an entrepreneurial business. You have to do whatever you can to be a little better than the next guy, and try to see what is coming. Don’t count on an agent or a manager for guidance, you’ve got to do the real work yourself.. Some people have connections and privilege, that's life. Don’t let it stop you if you don’t and this is what you want.
Kamran Pasha: My big Hollywood break was as random and chaotic as the rest of my career would end up being. It was late 2000. I was 28 years old, working as a lawyer in New York City at a big firm and I was unhappy. It wasn’t exactly the exciting life I had imagined from watching my favorite legal dramas such as LA LAW and THE PRACTICE. I had always been a creative writer as a hobby but never imagined that I could make a career of it. I was a random Pakistani Muslim guy with no connections to either Hollywood or the literary world. How would I even begin? So, I wrote for my own amusement. I had a horror script lying around that I thought was pretty good. It dealt with the idea of astral projection – a theme that the brilliant horror film INSIDIOUS would explore ten years later. I thought my script might actually be good enough to get made. But I had no idea how to achieve that.
I vaguely understood that I needed an agent, but I had no idea how to get one. So, I went to the bookstore and found a guide that had the names and email addresses of literary agents and taught how to write query letters to get someone interested in your project. I went through the list and sent queries to people, explaining who I was and what my movie was about. I didn’t hear back from most of the people I emailed. A few sent me terse responses: “We do not accept unsolicited submissions.” After a few months of being ignored / rejected. I gave up and forgot about the whole thing.
Then on Christmas Day, I got an email back from an agent. My screenplay had been lying around in a pile of unsolicited scripts on his desk for months. For some mysterious reason, he decided to pick mine up and read it. And he liked it. I was shocked. It’s like that old Seinfeld skit, when someone actually wants to buy a Ginsu knife from a TV ad and the vendor is like “Really? Are you pulling my leg?” The agent not only liked my script, he liked my background. A Muslim writer was something he had never encountered. Maybe I would attract attention on the diversity front as well as from the strength of my writing. I had several other writing samples, including some Sci Fi specs. My new agent (I couldn’t believe I had one!) shopped them around. And he sold them to Paramount. I received a very large check for the two scripts and a letter from the Writers Guild of America saying that my script sales made me eligible to join the union. I had become a professional writer, when only a few months before I thought it was an impossible dream.
Feeling as if I had discovered my destiny, I quit my job at the law firm and moved to Los Angeles in April of 2000. My agent told me I should write up a legal spec that he could submit for one of the many network lawyer dramas. I quickly cranked out a spec of THE PRACTICE, David E. Kelley’s seminal legal series that was a major hit on ABC. Being a Muslim, I thought I should bring my knowledge of legal controversies in the Muslim community at the time, specifically how “secret evidence” would be used to prosecute Muslims accused of links to terrorism. Evidence that was kept hidden from the defendants and their own lawyers.
That spec flowed from my heart and my agent thought it was fantastic. He sent it around town and I was suddenly getting meetings for TV staffing. And then I had my next big break – I met at Dick Wolf’s company with an executive who wanted to submit me as a writer for a miniseries that was being built around the LAW & ORDER franchise. It was a show that would bring in all of the various L&O cast members to investigate a terror attack on New York City. If I did well on the miniseries, it could lead to staffing on one of the Wolf flagship series. I was excited – my career was moving so fast that this was all indeed destiny!
The meeting for the miniseries was set for the week of September 11, 2001.
That meeting was canceled, as was the miniseries. New York was reeling from a real-life terror attack and nobody wanted a Hollywood dramatization while the memory of the Twin Towers collapsing was burned in everyone’s consciousness. Shortly thereafter, my staffing meetings stopped. My spec on a Muslim being false accused of terrorism wasn’t something anyone wanted to read. I went from being the hot ticket in this town to feeling like a pariah. I spent the next several years struggling to get the momentum back. I wrote script after script but couldn’t get any traction. And I began to think that I made a terrible mistake leaving my cushy job as a lawyer in New York to live as a broke writer in Los Angeles.
Things changed in 2005. That old legal spec I had written years before got in the hands of the showrunners of a new terrorism drama being developed at Showtime called SLEEPER CELL, about a Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates Al-Qaeda. When the showrunners, Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, met me, they were intrigued by the fact that I was a practicing Muslim (there weren’t many of us around back then, there still aren’t many today). I was hired on the show, and it ended up being a success, earning multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Suddenly I was the hot ticket again in town, and I was getting not just more job offers, but major news coverage. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times wrote articles about me as this up-and-coming Muslim writer who was shaking up Hollywood. My ego got huge, and I burned a lot of bridges thinking I was a big shot. My destiny had come at last!
And for a few years, it felt like it had. During the infamous War on Terror under President George W. Bush, Hollywood was clamoring for Muslim voices to counter the neoconservative call for perpetual war against the Islamic world. I was their Muslim “Go To Guy” to “Fight the Right Wing.” And then something unexpected happened. In 2008, America elected Barack Obama as President, a man who was going to end the Bush wars and get us out of the Middle East. We were going to be saved by a liberal President at last. And suddenly, Muslims weren’t attractive partners anymore.
Despite Hollywood’s protestations to the contrary, Islam is seen by many in our industry as a threat. It is perceived to be a socially conservative religion that is hostile to the progressive values that Hollywood embraces, particularly when it comes to sexuality and gender. And Muslims are seen as a threat to Israel, a country with which many in our industry feel a deep emotional affinity. So, with a nice liberal African American guy in the White House, Muslims were no longer needed as allies, and became the subject of Hollywood critique. During the Obama years, the Muslim terrorist trope came back to Hollywood with a vengeance – and Muslims were largely not wanted inside writer’s rooms to challenge that trope. The day Obama was elected, my career stopped again. I spent the next 8 years back in the same penalty box I had endured after September 11, desperately trying to get work.
And then Donald Trump was elected in 2016, promising to ban Muslims from the US, and my phone started ringing again. Suddenly Muslims wearing hijab became the face of The Resistance. I shook my head, because I had learned the awful truth. We Muslims were just political tools to be used and discarded as needed by the times. When Joe Biden became President, the process reversed again. The Pentagon started dropping bombs on the Muslim world and Hollywood ignored it, just as they did during the Obama years. And the hijab went from being a symbol of resistance to right-wing nationalists, to a sign of oppression of women by right-wing religious fanatics. If a Republican is elected President in 2024, then I am sure my phone will be ringing off the hook again as I am asked to be a Muslim voice against the evils of the right wing.
And during all of these twists and turns in my journey, I have survived through only one trait – persistence. I have never given up, even though I have often wanted to pack it up and move back to New York. I stay here, I keep writing, I keep trying. I know what it is like to be popular in Hollywood, and I know what it is like to be blacklisted. The only thing that remained consistent in both situations was that I kept writing. I have no idea whether I will look back at my career and consider it a success in the end. But I know one thing – I plan to keep writing until the day I die.
AB: It’s so great to hear those stories, and we’ve got a few more coming. Also, if you’d like to join one of these conversations, reply to this email or write us at writerscollectivesubstack@gmail.com. Thanks for reading Writers From The Trenches. We’ll be back soon.