I don’t recall the exact date of my epiphany, sometime in high school, I believe, but the idea that movies were written by someone before they were filmed, that some person actually sat down at a desk and wrote what I was seeing in the theater and on television — the unfolding action, the spoken words, the locations — was a notion so dramatic that it determined the course of my life forever after. “That’s what I’m going to do,” I promised myself way back then, “write movies.”
I graduated from Lafayette College in 1978 and moved immediately to New York City to become a screenwriter. I studied screenwriting at the New School, wrote movies, played in wild, kick-ass rock bands, and waited on tables for ten years. Along the way I got married and worked for a commercial real estate developer, a mind-numbing two years toward the end of our New York decade that led my wife to say that if writing films was my calling — and it was — then the commercial real estate we needed to focus on was Los Angeles.
We went west in 1989 and landed on Dickens Street in Sherman Oaks, a San Fernando Valley community within shouting distance of all the film and television action in LA.
Career-path choices had to be made and I chose to start as a reader. Each year in Los Angeles, there are in excess of 50,000 scripts registered with the Writers’ Guild of America west (WGAW) that need to be read, thought about, and decided upon. Short stacks of scripts turn quickly into tall towers because executives, producers, agents, actors, and directors are often too busy making deals and films to keep up with their own reading. This critical first step in the life of a script is regularly assigned to a reader.
A reader, obviously, reads the screenplay, and then writes what is known as coverage, which is, more or less, a book report on the script — a log line, a two-page synopsis, a half page of comment, and a recommendation: pass or consider.
For two and a half years, I read scripts for CAA, MGM, Showtime, Universal, John Badham and Rob Cohen, and a dozen more agencies and production companies around the city. I read, on average, seven scripts per week, probably 50 weeks per year — somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 scripts. It sounds like a lot because it is.
For me, it was a kind of screenwriting graduate school. Not only was I reading, analyzing, and writing about scripts in need of assistance, I was also beg-borrow-and-stealing great screenplays of the movies I loved from the agencies and production companies I was reading for. I was learning what worked and why in what situations and how to fix it if it didn’t. Looking back, I wouldn’t trade that time for any other entry-level film job.
During my reader years, I wrote a feature film that an agent loved and a studio optioned. Suddenly, I was a member of the WGAW. That studio sold my script to another studio, which handed it to a production company, which set it up with Hallmark. A Season of Hope, with JoBeth Williams, Stephen Lang, and Ralph Waite was produced in 1995 for CBS.
I had written and optioned it as a feature, but — now with three children under the age of three — I happily did the rewrites to turn it into a television film.
The movie had high ratings, meaning many people tuned in, CBS hired me to write another one, and my professional career was begun. It had only taken me 16 years to get it going.
In the years that have followed, my scripts have been produced 16 times, which isn’t too shabby when you think about what a major miracle it is to get even one screenplay produced anywhere by anyone. I’ve been lucky, no doubt. But I’ve also worked hard to master my craft, to understand it as fully as I possibly can, to become an artist with the format, confident with my storytelling, comfortable at the keyboard, open-minded, hands-on, and practical in my approach.
I’ve worked (and continue to work) one-on-one with dozens of studio and network executives, high-powered producers, visionary directors, and name-recognition actors. I’ve learned something about screenwriting, about storytelling, about character development and dialogue from each of them.
After seven years in Los Angeles, and seven more in Santa Barbara, my family moved across the country, near the beach on the southern tip of North Carolina. Five of my 16 produced films were written here in the heat and humidity. You can live anywhere and write Hollywood movies.
We live in Wilmington. It’s a film town. Hollywood East. Wilmywood. The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) has a thriving, well-respected film studies department and Screen Gems Studios has a large, active lot on Twenty-third Street, not far from my 100-year-old house. The Cucalorus Film Festival happens here and numerous film crews are forever at work on locations around town.
For three years, when we first arrived, I taught screenwriting, advanced screenwriting, and screenplay adaptation as a guest artist and member of the visiting faculty at UNCW. I loved teaching, especially the personal, side-by-side relationships I developed with my young writers (many of whom are pursuing film careers of their own).
As you might imagine, I have done much more in my life than write screenplays, though I have written many. I have been a little league coach for my kids’ soccer, baseball, and basketball teams, I have owned a restaurant, I have been a magazine editor, a sleep-away camp counselor, a PTA board member, a volunteer literacy tutor, a novelist, and much more. All these experiences have fed, and continue to feed my screenwriting.
Screenplay coaching is the most natural extension of my life experiences that I can imagine. I have the perfect temperament for it. I’m funny and focused. I love to inspire good storytelling. I’m a natural organizer (thoughts, schedules, pretty much everything), motivator, and teacher, and I enjoy acting as an honest and sincere sounding board for other writers.
I’m excited to help you write the movie you so very much want to write.
I know how you feel about it. I feel that way every day of my life.
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