As I approach my 1,000th post on Screenwriting from Iowa, I find myself wondering if I should just stop at 1,000. But then I stumble upon something fresh, new and different and it inspires me to take my car a little further down the road. See what’s in the next village.
Today that comes in the form of a quote from the director Darren Lynn Bousman, who made many of the SAW movies. Darren was born and raised in Kansas, and after making several short films at Full Sail in Orlando he spent a few years kicking around L.A. before things fell into place for him:
“I was fired from every job I had in Los Angeles… I became Tara Reid’s assistant (on the movie Van Wilder). And it was always like ‘Darrell, Derrick, Devin,’ — she never knew my name, and my job was to like hold her cigarettes and Pepsi at all times. Eventually I was fired from that job. I was at the point when I had no money. I took a side job at J-Crew doing sh*t—I hated my life. I’m like, ‘you know what, I’m going to write a script and I’m not going to stop until this thing gets made.’ And so I wrote this script called The Desperate. I sent it out, no one would read it. Because you get in that Catch 22 in Hollywood, where you have to have an agent or no one’s going to read it.
“My way to circumvent that catch 22 was, I made up a fake management company. I had letterhead made, and I had a friend of mine answer the phones. And so, I was an assistant at the time at an agency, and my job was to read the scripts that came in. And what I did was change the title of my screenplay and made it by a different person. Then I had it come through this fake agency that I had created and I put a message out to all the other assistants, ‘This is the best f*cking thing I’ve ever read…’
“And by that point, I had heat, because all the other people were like, ‘Oh, Darren read this thing, he thinks it’s great.’ And long story short, this screenplay ended up getting bought by the people who made the Saw film.”
Darren Lynn Bousman
(Director of Saw II, III & IV)
Adam Carolla’s podscast
Via FilmDrunk
via a Tweet by UNKScreenwriter
Note: The Desperate didn’t get made, but it opened the door for Darren to talk his way into directing SAW II.
[...] As I approach my 1,000th post on Screenwriting from Iowa, I find myself wondering if I should just stop at 1,000. But then I stumble upon something fresh, new and different and it inspires me to take my car a little further down the road. See what’s in the next village. Today that comes in [...] Original Source… [...]
This is scary. I see thousands trying to do the same thing….
Hollywood will not be happy.
I’m not advocating deception, but I give Darren points for creativity. And there was still a lot of work involved in the process. He made short films in film school in Florida, moved to L.A., worked grunt PA jobs, did other jobs to help pay the biils, worked his way into an agency as a script reader, wrote a script (probably several), and then used his insider knowledge to work the system.
Once he got people’s attention, then he had to put on his salesman hat and sell himself to direct SAW II—even though he had never made a feature before.
Then he took that opportunity to make a film for $4 million that went on to make $147 million worldwide.
I bet if you asked him just after he got fired from his PA jobs, or while he was working for J-Crew, if he thought he was on track to carve out a niche out in Hollywood he probably would have just laughed.
An inspiring story of resourcefulness. Thanks for posting!
@Trevor—Very resourceful. And how about his line, “I’m going to write a script and I’m not going to stop until this thing gets made.” That’s a willful protagonist.
And he actually failed at that specific goal, but the nice twist is that it opened the door for his success.
I never get tired of hearing those kind of stories.
Indeed. Love it.
Reminds me of a post I did a while back about access to Hollywood being like a self-authorizing password.
“… There’s no secret key (or a secret door for that matter). You get in once you’ve gained the skills necessary to give yourself access.”
Great quote. Who said it? If you track down that post of yours put a link to it here.
Thanks Scott! That one’s a Trevor original. Here’s the post link:
Hollywood Access: A Self-Authorizing Password
Do not stop what you are doing. Stopping at 1,000 posts is arbitrary. I’m sorry but it is.
Thanks John. I’m sure this summer I’ll find a new angle to freshen this up a little.
Hey Scott,
As a counterpoint to John — it all depends on what you want. I used to post every day to my blog, but then remembered that I wanted to be a successful screenwriter, not a successful blogger.
If you did stop soon, or do what I did and post on a much less frequent schedule, you would still have a successful blog, and would have much more time for your other projects.
Your legacy is already intact, and screenwriters have your vast archive to search, cherish and benefit from.
Life’s short and there are only so many hours in the day. I think it’s good to pause every 1,000 posts or so and do a cost/benefit analysis.
Thanks Trevor,
Here’s what I’m thinking. (Kind of a rambling work in progress.) This week I did a couple video shoots for a client using the Panasonic AF100, ingested the footage in Final Cut Pro (FCP), played around with a loose edit and did a little color correction, shot some greenscreen footage with the Panasonic HPX 170 P2, exported/imported the footage from FCP to After Effects and tweaked the footage in Keylight and took it back to FCP.
Also did some photography for clients and some post work on some selects in Aperture and Photoshop. Did a few hours of late night tuoritals at lynda.com. Worked on a script idea for a regional commercial that I most likely will shoot, direct and edit next week. Traded informative emails with an editor in Orlando, a graphics guy in Des Moines, an editor in Santa Monica, and a shooter in Minneapolis.
All while keeping the daily blog going and tweaking my latest script and preparing some creative work to submit to the Upper Midwest Emmys. Not boosting, just a typical week for me at River Run Productions on top of personal projects.
So what I’m thinking of doing at the end of June is launching a new blog that is more in line with what I do day in and day out. In many circles the multi-taskers are looked down upon. Bigger cities have union restrictions and an emphasis on specialists. But for a couple of years I’ve watched a new kind of creative emerge.
I believe Robert Rodriguez is at the top of the heep of multi-tasking filmmakers. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last, but the level at which he produces/directs/writes/shoots and edits/composes/oversee special effects is amazing. And inspiring.
What Edward Burns is doing in producing sub-$25,000 features is very interesting. In a nut shell, there is an explosion of creativity going on and while screenwriting is a key piece of the puzzle, it is still just one piece. (I also think it is the hardest discipline to nail in filmmaking and the hardest one to get traction dollar-wise.)
So I’m thinking about maintaining “Screenwriting from Iowa,” but opening up pandora’s box on a separate blog at http://www.scottwsmith.com. There all my other filmmaking notes, and experiences producing, shooting, directing and editing films and videos. Mixed with my still photography, bad boss stories/awkward moments & good travel experiences, business successes and failures, juggling dreams, family and paying the bills.
Now that it’s not unusual for still photographers to also bill themselves as motion shooters thanks to DSLR’s, and now that preditors (producer–editors) are more common in this economy, and directors are dabbling in distribution models, and five-person feature crews not unheard of—I think the timing is right to launch a blog with a focus on where I think all of this is heading.
A way to address the doomsayers of the entertainment industry, the naysayers of creative multi-tasking, and show—while I’m no Rodriguez—that I have carved out a 25+ year career working on many rewarding (and award-winning) media projects.
And while I haven’t gotten rich in the process, I haven’t starved—and being self-employed for half of my career has had its own joys and satisfactions. It’s been a heck of a ride and when I look at the future I see a lot of opportunities for a lot of people.
And if they don’t pan out the way I think they will, I hope I can smile and sing that line from Buffett’s “Changes in Attitudes”— “If it suddenly ended tomorrow, I could somehow adjust to the fall.”
Think of “Screenwriting from Iowa” as the ideal–the head in the clouds and the new blog as the feet on the ground.
I like it! I think it’s the right idea at the right time, and you’re definitely the guy to make it happen.
Wishing you every success with it!