Screenwriting Quote of the Day #83 (Stephen Susco)

“(USC Film School) made me realize that this wasn’t something I could take lightly; if I was serious about it, I’d have to get my butt in gear.”
Stepehen Susco
screenwriter, The Grudge, Red

Years ago I heard it said that there were plenty of screenwriters in L.A. who had never had a movie produced but were living in homes with swimming pools and driving nice cars. Meaning that even though a screenwriter hadn’t been produced he or she could still earn a decent living. I’m sure today that is still true (though perhaps to a lesser extent).

Up until yesterday the record number that I had ever heard about of feature scripts written by a screenwriter before they were produced was 18 by Geoff Rodkey who finally broke through with Daddy Day Care. Then I heard the Creative Screenwriting’s podcast where Jeff Goldsmith mentioned that Stephen Susco wrote 25 movies before he had his first one produced (The Grudge).

The Grudge was produced by Sam Reimi and starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and had an $100 million domestic gross at the box office. An interesting side note is The Grudge is based on the Japanese film Ju-On: The Grudge written and directed by Takashi Shimizu though that version only made $3 million worldwide.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Susco is not that he wrote 25 screenplays before being produced but that he wrote 25 screenplays in less than a decade. He wrote his first feature screenplay in ’96, graduated from USC film school in ’99 and The Grudge was released in ’04. But he had also been writing since he was a kid growing up in Pennsylvania far from the film industry. He also had made some short films including one that won an award in California which helped open the door at USC.

So Susco wrote his pages and paid his dues. Susco’s directorial debut Red premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Everybody’s got their own crazy story about how they got started, and for me, I had written a lot by that point. Also, when I got to USC, I got a really good recommendation from someone. What the school’s going to be able to do for you is somewhat limited, so you should try to get an internship at the studios and you can learn a lot, so I ended up getting an internship at Warner Brothers at a production company over there.

My job was basically to get coffee and water for people in the morning and alphabetize the script library . . . but I read all of them, and listened to people talking on the phone and started to figure out how the business actually worked, things you couldn’t really get in school. I kept writing and second semester I switched and interned at Silver Pictures: Joel Silver’s company, which was good for me cause I grew up on those films; I loved his films. And it was also a totally different kind of shop.

The first place I worked was sort of a smaller company, Paul Weinstein’s company, and they did a lot of sort of independent films and going over to Joel Silver, it was suddenly you’re in a middle of an episode of Entourage but there was a guy who worked there who had aspirations to be a producer also, and he had found out that I had written a couple of scripts and he said you know I have this project that needs re-writes, and I have this director involved. Can’t pay you, but if you’re interested that’d be great. I ended up re-writing their script for them, and that’s the script that ended up at New Line cinema a number months later and led me to get my first gig. It was kind of a circuitousness path- I didn’t have an agent at the time.
Stephen Susco
Interview at filmmaker.com

Scott W. Smith