Jeff Nichols’ Other Roots

“[Jeff Nichols] was way beyond most students with narrative. Of all the students I’ve seen in 10 years, he’s probably the best with just taking a story from beginning to middle and end. He was raised right, as we say in the South.”
Filmmaker and Instructor Gary Hawkins (now at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies)
Storytelling Son of the South by Melena Ryzik/NY Times

Writer/Director Jeff Nichols (Mud) doesn’t just have roots in Arkansas, Austin and North Carolina—he has roots in literature as well. I think that’s one of the things that makes his work stand out.

“I was introduced to some of my favorite literature in high school, but it was in college that I started to read somewhat voraciously. At that time I was introduced to a lot of contemporary Southern writers: Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy. It was Larry Brown’s short stories that kinda floored me. Harry Crews wrote a biography called A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, a collection of essays, and that combined with Larry Brown’s short fiction and Big Bad Love and Facing the Music really kinda [made me think], especially given where I was from, ‘OK, this feels like an appropriate description of these places.’ I definitely hadn’t seen it in movies and the fact that I found it in books was pretty overwhelming. So then you get back into Flannery O’Connor and, for me, a lot of Mark Twain and then, of course, Raymond Carver. I stumbled across Raymond Carver in my junior year, which is late. I’m kind of a late bloomer.”
Jeff Nichols
Filmamker Magazine

And then there is his film roots:

“I love films and see a lot of them, but you could drop me into a film class and I might be lost. There are five films I like. Four of them star Paul Newman. There’s The Hustler (1961), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Hud (1963), Badlands (1973), and the fifth gets interchanged between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Shining, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Jaws (1975), and Stagecoach (1939). All of these films are directed by a very specific hand. Almost all of them are in Scope and treat the Scope frame with extreme brilliance. I was watching Butch Cassidy on a plane, without sound, and noticed that scenes were shot in fluid master shots; they’re not in a rush to cut images together to get you some place, but they don’t feel slow. The camera moves at the perfect moment. It feels like a scene that was edited together, but you realize that there were only one or two cuts.”
Jeff Nichols

When you watch one of Nichols’ first three films (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud) you know there is some depth there. But especially if you’re a young filmmaker it’s easy to envy Jeff Nichols’ success as he lines up to do a sci-fi film with Warner Bros, but it’s also easy to overlook that Nichols has been on this journey for more than 15 years—and he’s just starting to find a wider audience.

Go back and read the posts The Secret to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously) and How to Become a Successful Screenwriter (Tip#41) and you’ll see that though screenwriters John Logan (Hugo) and Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) took different paths to their success than Nichols—there is a common thread.

Related Posts:

Screenwriter’s Work Ethic (Tip #2)
Stephen King’s Doublewide Trailer
Stephen J. Cannell’s Work Ethic
Beatles, Cody, King & 10,000 Hours

Scott W. Smith

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Sidney Sheldon’s Secret

“When I was about 30, I had three shows running on Broadway. And that made me happy.”
Sidney Sheldon

“I won an Oscar, for The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer. And that was one of the worst nights of my life. I should have been exhilarated and I was depressed. And I thought, you know, this is, there’s something wrong. I’m not happy. And I went to a psychiatrist and he said, ‘You have bipolar disorder. You’re a manic-depressive.’ And that’s when I first learned about it. But meanwhile I’d done a lot of bad things. I’d walked out on a lot of successes that I could have had. And I finally knew what was wrong…It goes back to where I was born, and, it starts with me wanting to commit suicide. I was very unhappy. I was very depressed because I felt there was nothing more in life for me than I was doing, working at the drugstore as a delivery boy, and hanging hats and coats. Many years later, I found out that I had bipolar disorder. And that’s something that very often leads to suicide.”
Screenwriter, playwright, novelist Sidney Sheldon
CBS News Sidney Sheldon Shares Secrets

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Late Bloomer Raymond Chandler at 40

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.”
Paul Auster

If we rewind to 1928 and look at a 40-year-old Raymond Chandler, we do not see any proof that he is (or even is becoming) the writer Raymond Chandler. That is the writer of not only seven novels including Farewell, My Love , and the screenplays that would be directed by Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity) and Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train). No evidence that Humphry Bogart would so eloquently speak the words of Chandler’s best known character  Philip Marlowe on film, or that he would be nominated for two Academy Awards.

And if you met Raymond Chandler a year or so after the Great Depression when he was unemployed and drinking too much and he told you that he was going to be a writer, your response would have been something like, “Well, good luck with that.” And as you slithered away before he asked you to read something he wrote you’d be thinking to yourself, “Another delusion writer.”

Raymond Chandler in his early 40s was a walking cliché. Though he’d dabbled in poetry and journalism when he was younger, at the age of 44 he was a recently fired oil executive who decided instead of looking for a job  to become a writer.

What are the odds against him getting published, much less becoming the writer Raymond Chandler? Tremendous. But, hey, writers write.

“With a $100 a month stipend from his friends Edward and Paul Lloyd he began working on a short story for the pulp magazine Black Mask. The story was entitled ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot’ and appeared in the December 1933 issue. It took him five months to write and he was paid $180. After that, he said, he ‘never looked back,’ but he wrote slowly and made very little money from his stories.”
Chris Routledge
Raymond Chandler on Writing  

And he kept at it and kept publishing short stories until 1939—at the age of 51— his first novel, The Big Sleep was published. It introduced the detective Philip Marloww to the world, was widely read, became a movie in 1946 (with William Faulkner as one of the screenwriters), and in 2005 the novel made Time magazine’s list of  100 ALL-TIME 100 Novels (published between 1923 and 2005).

All that to say that Chandler was a highly unlikely—and successful— late bloomer.

Scott W. Smith

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“Life of Pi” Screenwriter David Magee

Though the film Life of Pi was shot in Taiwan, I just learned about the screenplay’s Midwest roots. Not only was David Magee born in Flint, Michigan but:

“Magee has had an unusual career path for a screenwriter. A graduate of the University of Illinois (where he studied theater around the same time as Lee did), he started out as an actor with, as he puts it, ‘just enough success to be constantly poor.’ To supplement his income, be began narrating audio books. One day, he had enough: ‘I said, this is a terrible abridgement of this book. It doesn’t make any sense. The characters are suddenly appearing in the scene when they weren’t before. It’s awful. I mean I could do better than this.’ And the person in charge said, ‘Well, why don’t you try?’ Magee did, and a parallel career was born; starving actor by day, ruthless editor by night, wielding his red pencil with surgical precision to get the essence of the material.

Five years later and more than eighty audio books later, Magee emerged a different person, a writer, Magee’s very first screenplay, Finding Neverland, about the adventures of Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, was eventually made into a movie starring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, which earned him nominations for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe in 2004.”
Jean-Christophe Castelli
The Making Life of Pi:  A Film, A Journey

P.S. My guess is the script for Life of Pi, based on the novel by Yann Martel, will bring Magee his second Oscar-nomination.

Scott W. Smith

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Garry Marshall’s Chicago Detour

Yesterday I did a shoot in downtown Chicago and thought I’d take brief detour from giving some of Garry Marshall’s directing tips and focus on his own detour to Chicago as he journeyed from the Bronx to Hollywood.

“Academically, Northwestern opened many new doors for me. It was the first place I learned that words mattered and could lead to a real job. I knew that sportswriting was a possibility, but at college I was exposed to so many different kinds of writing. I loved Hemingway but didn’t understand Faulkner. I remember reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time and was fascinated that Steinbeck composed a whole scene in which words were written to the beat of a square dance. I was amazed at the power of words. And while I knew I couldn’t write as well as Steinbeck, I was convinced I could write material that made people laugh. It was my hope for the future.

In addition to Steinbeck, I read a lot of plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who along with Paddy Chayefsky and Neil Simon had gone to my high school, DeWitt Clinton.) But my favorite book of all time proved to be Peter Wagner’s recommendation, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Like Peter and many of my peers, I made a connection to Holden Caulfield because he was a misfit like me. I was like a fish out of water trying to make it at Northwestern. The winters were brutally cold, and I was sick all the with asthma and allergies. But come springtime, when the snow thawed and the weather turned warm, Northwestern looked to me like the most beautiful campus ever.”
Garry Marshall 
My Happy Days in Hollywood Days (written with Lori Marshall)
Page 19 

While on the Evanston campus Marshall not only wrote about sports in The Daily Northwestern, but wrote skits that were performed on campus (sometimes by a fellow student named Warren Beatty), developed his niche for comedy writing, played intramural sports, and earned a little money as a dishwasher at Kappa Delta & playing drums in a band that performed at sorority parties and Chicago nightclubs. But his most invaluable lesson learned there was, “how to write on a deadline.”

“Sometimes we attended three-hour newswriting labs. We would sit at a typewriter trying our best to write our stories and professors would throw obstacles in our way. A typewriter would break. A siren would occur. A bell would go off. A new person would be murdered in our story assignments. I loved that class because it helped me learn to write under pressure. From graduation onward I could pretty much write any place, any time. I was trained to be a reporter. It didn’t matter that I was not going to be the next investigative reporter. It was an asset to be able to write quickly and concisely, whether it was a joke, a line or a comedy skit. I wasn’t going to stare into space and struggle with writer’s block, I could put paper in the typewriter and deliver the goods.”
Garry Marshall
My Happy Days in Hollywood

While Marshall failed to become a sportswriter, his Chicago detour turned out to be a turning point in his life which would eventually lead him to his happy days in Hollywood that including writing for the hit TV program The Odd Couple, creating the TV show Happy Days, and directing the films Pretty Woman and Runaway Bride.

P.S. Garry’s daughter, Lori (who helped Garry write both his books) also graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. And after his success in Hollywood, Marshall paid tribute to his mother by building a dance studio at Northwestern in her memory. Garry is also in the Northwestern University Medill—Hall of Achievement.

Related Posts:

The Secret to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously)—Advice from Northwestern grad & screenwriter John Logan
Screenwriting da Chicago Way
Before John Hughes was John Hughes
Ferris, John Hughes & the North Shore

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriter Dudley Nichols (1895-1960)

At the end of my post on Neil Armstrong (Shoot for the Moon) I wrote that Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dudley Nichols was also born in Wapakonita, Ohio where Armstrong was born. I’ve mentioned Nichols a couple of time on this blog but decided to dig a little deeper to see what I could find.

After graduating from Blume High School (also Armstrong’s school) he attended the University of Michigan. He spent a couple of years in the Navy and then became a reporter for the New York Evening News and then New York World. Before moving to California he spent a total 10 years as a journalist in New York City.

He not only racked up more than 60 credits on various movies, but according to Frank Beaver, “in my estimation [Nichols] was the first great writer for ‘talking pictures.’” Elsewhere I read him called the greatest screenwriter of the 30s. His first film credit was writing Men Without Women in 1930  beginning a long working relationship with director John Ford, writing eight Ford directed films including Stagecoach (1939). Nichols also co-wrote Brining Up Baby, wrote two screenplays based on Eugene O’Neill’s plays (The Long Voyage Home, Morning Becomes Electra), wrote the screenplay for Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Two things Nichols is most known for is not only winning the Oscar for writing The Informer ( 1935), but by becoming the first person in Academy Award history to turn down the award as a protest. You can read the reasons he turned down the award, and others who have also done so, in the LA Times article They Snubbed the Oscars by Susan King.)

In 1937 and 1938 he was the president of the Screen Writers Guild, which in 1954 became one of the groups that formed the Writers Guild of America. So he had a pretty full career before he died in 1960.

I couldn’t find any interviews done with Dudley Nichols, but the following quote is attributed to Nichols though I do not know the original source.

Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man’s mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.
Dudley Nichols

Nichols also produced and directed three films including Government Girl (1943) that he co-wrote with Budd Schulberg and starred Oliva de Havilliand. Other scripts of his were directed by Michael Curtiz, Howard Hawks and starred Henry Fonda, Kathrine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, Just a few of some of the biggest names of that Hollywood era that worked with Nichols.

Scott W. Smith

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The Making of Peter Bogdanovich

There’s a lot to learn from looking back at the journeys that filmmakers take on their way to being a part of film history. In the case of writer/director/actor Peter Bogdanovich, one of the things that jumps out is his education. Not his formal education—as far as I know he didn’t attend college—but his film & theater education. An education that began as a child. (All of the quotes below are from Bogdanovich himself and pulled from various sources.)

Here’s a compressed timeline leading up to Bogdanvich’s film The Last Picture Show. (A film which sits at 95 on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.)

1) Born in Kingston, New York in 1939 & raised in Manhattan.
2) His father took him to see silent films at revival house theaters in New York City. (Developed an early appreciate of visual storytelling.)
3) “At the age of 10 I remember my favorite films were She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Red River, and The Ghost Goes West.”
4) “I started keeping a card file of everything I saw from the age of twelve, twelve and a half.” (He did that for 18 years and had between 5,000—6,000 cards.)

One of Peter Bogdanovich’s film index cards

5) His parents didn’t get a television until he moved out of the house.
6) At age 15 he got his first job with a professional theater company in Traverse City, Michigan. “That was a great experience, we did 10 plays in 10 weeks.”)
7) At age 16 started studying acting with Stella Adler. (Continued for 4 years.)
8) At age 19 he got the rights to a Clifford Odets play and took 9 months raising $15,000. to direct The Big Knife. (The play was not a financial success.)
9) When he was 20 he met New York Times film critics Andrew Sarris and Eugene Archer. “They would come over to my apartment in Manhattan and talk movies into the wee hours. I learned a great deal from both of them.”
10) Started writing about plays and films for newspapers to earn some money.”It was a way of getting on screening lists and seeing movies for nothing. And getting books and seeing plays for nothing. It was totally motivated by not wanting to spend my own money because I didn’t have any.”
11) At 24, he did a retrospect on Orson Welles at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for $50.
12) Started writing freelance articles on film for Esquire magazine.
13) Had his second theatrical flop in New York and moved to LA with his wife Polly Platt to try to get into the movies.
14) “A little less than a year after we’d gotten to Hollywood I met Roger Corman by accident…he said, ‘you’re a writer, I read your stuff in Esquire. Would you like to write a movie?’ Yeah, I’d like to write a movie.”
15) He did a rewrite on one of Corman’s scripts for $300 and no credit. “The Wild Angels (1966) as it was known as— it was the most successful film of [Corman's] career.”
16) Bogdanovich also found most of the locations and shot second unit on The Wild Angels. And suggested Peter Fonda for the lead.
17) Just before turning 30 he directed and co-wrote a feature film for Corman called Targets starring Boris Karloff.
18) His next film was The Last Picture Show (1971) which he directed, edited and co-wrote. It was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and comparisons were made between a young Bogdanovich and Orson Welles after he made Citizen Kane.

That’s a good place to stop for now. Professionally, that was Bogdanovich’s mountain top experience. He was 32 years-old. We’ll look where his career went from there in a later post. But look at the journey. It’s not something that you can duplicate as a filmmaker. But you can appreciate the work and the years (even the failures) that led up to his breakout success.

It’s another prime example of the 10,000 hour rule in effect. What you can take away from Bogdanovich is he took small steps and moved forward. He was serious about the craft. From his film index card system that he started when he was 12, to working at a regional theater in Michigan as a teenager, to hanging out with New York film critics in his early 20s, directing off-broadway plays, writing articles, jumping into Roger Corman’s B-film world, to writing and directing The Last Picture Show was basically a 20 year journey.

P.S. Here’s a little bit of odd film trivia I just discovered. Bogdanovich’s first wife, Polly Platt (who had her own distinguished career in Hollywood) was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois—the same city where actor/writer Sam Shepard was born. And just 4 years apart. Fort Sheridan is a Chicago suburb on the North Shore of Lake Michigan and just 30 miles from where Orson Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Scott W. Smith

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The Making of Woody Allen in 10 Simple Steps

“I was the world’s worst student. I hated it with a passion.”
Woody Allen

“I am plagued by doubts. What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”
Woody Allen

Over the weekend I stumbled upon Woody Allen: A Documentary on Netflix and was surprised how little I knew about writer/director Woody Allen. That led me to flip through a couple of books Woody Allen has written and read various articles about him and interviews with him. I’ve condensed the making of Woody Allen down to 10 simple steps:

1) Start with a Jewish kid born in Brooklyn named Allen Stewart Konigsberg in 1935, and raise him in a strict home where Charlie Chaplin and Bob Hope movies offer a humorous relief.

2) Add coming face to face with the deep existential questions as a child; ”I didn’t like my own mortality. What do you mean, this [life] ends? This doesn’t go on like this? Deal Me out I don’t want to play in this game.” (As Allen got older he added Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment and Bergman’s movie The Seventh Seal into his mental & philosophical blender.)

3) At 17 begin sending jokes to the newspaper using the pen name Woody Allen; “A Hypocrite is a guy who writes a book on atheism, and prays that it will sell.”

4) Turn that unpaid newspaper gig into a paid gig writing 50 jokes a day for radio.

5) Turn the radio gig into a well paid TV gigs that end up paying you well working on The Sid Caesar Show and learning from the best of that era; Larry Gilbert, Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Danny Simon (whose brother Neil Simon credits him with teaching him to write), and Sid Caesar.

6) Take the style of black rim glasses from comedian Mike Merrick and wear them your entire life making them your trademark.

7) At 26, though shy, begin a stand up comedy career in New York City in 1961 just as Greenwich Village just started to take off creatively and become a household name on TV. (He once boxed a kangaroo on TV. A feat you’re—understandbly for a couple of reasons—never likely to see repeated on national TV in the United States. Other than the PBS documentary  produced and directed by Robert B. Weide that I mentioned at the start of this post.)

8) Start writing movies (What’s New Pussycat) which gets you a WGA nomination, but quickly move into writing and directing (Take the Money and Run) because you want more control.

9) At 42 win your first two Oscars for writing and directing Annie Hall (co-written with Marshall Brickman) in 1977, which is eventually named on #35 on AFI’s “100 Best Movies” and the #4 AFI “100 Best Comedies.”

10) Don’t ride off into the sunset after reaching the top of the mountain with Annie Hall. Continue making films—some good, some not so good— and win your fourth Oscar in 2012 for writing Midnight in Paris. 

Of course, that’s just the quick ten step overview of his creative journey. There were other people that helped Allen along the way. He was influenced by Mort Sahl, and he was encouraged by his managers Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe. He learned from cinematographer Gordon Willis and editor Ralph Rosenblum, and no doubt other comedians, actors and production people.

And while no one could follow that exact path Allen has taken, he has in turn inspired and influenced a whole new generation of creative people including Larry David, Chris Rock, Edward Burns, and Nora Ephron. You could say his voice (and neuroses) paved the way for their voices.

“I never cared about commercial success, and as a result I rarely achieved it.”  
Woody Allen

Yet, over his unusally long career, Allen has been able to write and and control the kind of films he’s wanted to make. And his films (including Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhatten, Zelig, and Radio Days) have grossed over $500 million., and he’s personally collected 17 Oscar-nominations along the way.

What about Woody Allen’s failures? I think of that ending line in Billy Wilder’s classic Some Like it Hot— “Nobody’s perfect.” (A film by the way, Allen doesn’t care for.)

Related Post: Screenwriting Quote #102 (Woody Allen)

Scott W. Smith

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Nora Ephron (1941-2012)

“For years, I just wrote scripts that didn’t get made.”
Nora Ephron

“Originally I went into movies not because I was burnt out on journalism but from economic desperation. When my marriage broke up, I had two kids and I figured I’d better get my act together because nobody else was going to help.”
Nora Ephron

Last Tuesday after I finished setting up for a video shoot on the Upper West Side of Manhattan I walked past a restaurant on 83rd Street and took a quick iPhone photo of restaurant that caught my eye because of the lights on the trees. Only later did I learn that just a couple of miles away on the Upper East Side, and just an hour earlier, writer/director Nora Ephron had died. And the restaurant, the Cafe Lalo, just happened to be where one of the scenes from Ephron’s movie You’ve Got Mail was shot.

A serendipitous moment of fate that characterized much of Ephron’s work. Including her best known scripts When Harry Met Sally… (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You’ve Got Mail (1998). A most incredible ten year run by the way. According to Box Office Mojo, movies from scripts she worked on grossed over $700 million.

Her screenwriter parents Henry & Phobe Ephron were two of the writers on the WGA-nominated Carousel and the Oscar-nomimated Captian Newman, M.D. (1963). At the time of her death, Nora was married to screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi who (along with Martin Scorsese) won an Oscar for writing Goodfellas. And she wrote You’ve Got Mail with her sister Delia. That’s a lot of talent connected to one family.

She grew up an avid reader and graduated from Beverly Hills High School, and later Wellesley College. She had an internship at the White House with Pierre Salinger, who was the Press Secretary for President John F. Kennedy.

“I realized many years later that I was probably the only woman who had ever worked in the White House that Kennedy didn’t make a pass at.”
Nora Ephron

In the early 60s she started out “mail girl”/”clipper”/”researcher” at Newsweek and worked her way up to being a journalist writing for the New York Post, and eventually wrote for The New York Times Magazine and Esquire magazine.  The 70s were a time of transition for Ephron as she got married, had kids, and got divorced (twice). It was her writing that allowed her to pay the bills and raise children:

“I was very lucky I was a writer, but if you’re a lawyer or a doctor or you work in a factory, you have hours, you don’t have freedom. They don’t care that there’s a school meeting in a lot of places. So I was very lucky. Had I had a full-time job, I might not have anything near the ability to be the kind of mother I was for the first ten or eleven years of their lives.”
Nora Ephron
Academy of Achievement 

When the bumpy ride was over in the early 80s she was a screenwriter. Though she had sold scripts and had some TV work produced, Ephron was over forty when her first feature was produced.  I was in fim school when I saw that film Silkwood (1983). It was powerful stuff, and much more serious drama than what she is known for now. She and co-writer Alice Arlen were nominated for an Oscar for the script. Over the years Ephron was nominated three times for scripts that she worked on.

“One of the biggest surprises you have when you come to screenplay writing from journalism, as I did, is that film is such a collaborative medium. I was in a state of shock during Silkwood, the first movie I wrote. I couldn’t believe what Meryl [Streep] wanted to wear as Karen Silkwood. And the first day Cher improvised a line, I practically had to take five aspirins. The point is that by the time I got around to directing, I’d lived through the process many times. Although the “process” is just another name for that period when the writer gets screwed.”
Nora Ephron
Rolling Stone interview with Lawrence Frascelia (July 8, 1993)

Silkwood was directed by Mike Nichols (The Graduate) who taught Ephron a lot about writing.

“One of the things that Mike teaches you is he’s constantly asking, ‘What’s the story about? What’s this scene about? What’s this section of the movie about?’ Just forcing you to understand that if you have a bunch of scenes and they are all about exactly the same thing, at least two of them are superfluous.”
Nora Ephron
Academy of Achievement 

Though journalism jobs are harder to come by these days, Ephron spoke of writing 4 or 5 years of journalistic stories about how people live their lives as great preparation for being a screenwriter.

“If you want to go into the movie business, what are you going to write a movie about when you’re 22 years old? I’ll tell you what. You’re going to write your coming-of-age movie, and then you’re going to write your summer camp movie, and then you’re going to be out of things, because nothing else will have happened to you. So, I think it’s very good to become a journalist.”
Nora Ephron
Academy of Achievement 

And writing a blog called Screenwriting from Iowa, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Ephron directed John Travolta, Andie MacDowell, and William Hurt in Michael (1996) which was shot in Iowa.

Over the weekend I re-watched Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally… and it dawned on me that she was a writer like Aaron Sorkin or Woody Allen. Writers who aren’t terribly interested in writing visual stories, because the strength of their dialogue is so sharp. A fitting end to this post is to show the scene from You’ve Got Mail that was shot inside the Cafe Lalo. (At the 2:49 mark you can see the lights in the background that are on the trees that first grabbed my attention of the cafe. I wonder if those lights were always there, or placed there by cinematographer John Lindley.)

Related post: “It’s a very, very hard business…” (Advice from Ephron depite having grown up in Beverly Hills and having parents who were screenwriters.)

Scott W. Smith

P.S. Nora Ephron’s 2010 New Yorker essay My Life As An Heiress is a good read on why having more money won’t make you a better writer.

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Screenwriting Rock Star

How does one become a screenwriting rock star?

Well, you only have to do two things:

1) Write a screenplay that becomes a movie starring Tom Cruise.

2) Date Jennifer Aniston.

But here’s the tricky part, you have to do them both at the same time. Yeah, I know that last stipulation is a killer for most of you. (And really makes it tough for female writers.) As far as I know there is only one person who fits the above qualifications.

Justin Theroux. Screenwriting Rock Star.

How does one go from zero to a rock star? I’m not 100% sure, but I think it has something to do with not exactly starting with zero.

Let me unpack Theroux’s journey. Hang with me, it’s quite a trip.

First the name Theroux is not foreign in the world of American literature and movies. Paul Theroux has written more than 45 books (novels, shorts stories, non-fiction travel) and a few have been made into films, the most well-known being The Mosquito Coast (1986) which starred Harrison Ford. One of Paul’s sons, Louis Theroux is a journalist turned documentary filmmaker, and another son Marcel Theroux is a British writer with four published novels. So we can agree that Paul has quite a literary family, correct?

Paul Theroux is Justin Theroux’s uncle. According to a 2001 Washington Times article, Justin’s mother was a writer for the Washington Post. In another older article Justin called his father  a good painter turned wealthy corporate lawyer in Washington D.C..  His parents divorced when he was young and he’s described his childhood as “relatively normal middle class,” with no thoughts of being a writer. At the age of 14 Justin began attending a boarding school in Massachusetts. He also started acting and discovered punk music around that time. He would go on to graduate from Bennington College in Vermont where he studied visual art and drama.

“I’m pretty easy to please artistically. I can be inspired by a rusty length of chain, or a car battery if it’s the right color.”
Justin Theroux

After Bennington he entered the British America Drama Academy where he performed Shakespeare.  He moved to New York and made a living painting everything from t-shirts to billboards. He also got involved with the Roundabout Theatre and Actor’s Playhouse and this is where things really get interesting. He performed in the revival of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. For what it’s worth, I happened to catch that show in New York. It was only a six week run because many of the cast were working in Hollywood and could only take a pay cut for so long. (Eric Stoltz said in an interview he made $1,000. a week doing the play. He told the New York Times, “Doing something like this is more enriching than doing a film. Ideally, we’d be getting $20 million to do Chekhov and people in silly movies would be getting B scale.”)

It was February of 1997 and Three Sisters was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. (It was also my first trip to NYC—one glorious weekend.) I went to see Three Sisters because it was Chekhov and the cast included Stoltz, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Lili Taylor, Amy Irving, Jerry Stiller and David Strahairn. It also included actors who would become quite famous later; Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, and Paul Giamatti. So Justin earned his way on the stage with some talented actors. But it was his friendship with Tripplehorn that would lead him to eventually gaining a writing credit on Rock of Ages.

Tripplehorn was dating Ben Stiller and introduced Justin to Ben beginning a long friendship. And while Justin’s had a long run as an actor (including a part in Stiller’s Zoolander) his first credit as a writer was on Tropic Thunder which Stiller directed. And, of course, that movie had a memorable character named Les Grossman played by Tom Cruise. He then earned a writing credit on Iron Man 2, and today he’ll watch a film he wrote (credited with Chris D’Arienzo and Allen Loeb) fill theaters—all with Jennifer Aniston by his side.

“The media’s always talking about overnight success. There’s no such thing. My friend Calista Flockhart [the star of tv's Ally McBeal] is a good example. She’s been doing plays for years—11 or 12 years. Nothing overnight success about her.”
Justin Theroux
2001 Interview with Sibella Giorello

Sure Justin Theroux probably had a little more coin and connections in his family than the average person, but you’ve got to think there’s a little more than average literary talent in those family genes. And there’s also the training and time to factor into the equation. From acting as a teenager, through college plays, performing Shakespeare in London, and Chekhov on Broadway, to acting in films and Tv shows—there’s more than 25 years of dramatic work that prepared Justin Theroux for this day.

He put in his 10,000 hours (of drama) before becoming a screenwriting rock star.

In getting caught up to Theroux’s recent success, it would be easy for someone to say, “Well, yeah, his uncle is a famous writer,” or “If I had a rich dad….” Which is why I wanted to show the bigger picture. All of this reminds me of a discussion that happened in an acting class I had in L.A. when I was 21 and everyone was talking about Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez getting roles because their dad was Martin Sheen. Visiting casting director Tony Shepherd said, “There are a lot of things that will get your through the door, but you have to stay in the room with your own talent.”

P.S. So does the East-coast raised Theroux have any wisdom for screenwriters living outside L.A.?
“Someone said, ‘Never fly yourself to L.A.  Always let someone else fly you there. ‘ I actually took that advice, and I was in New York a long time. But I ended up having my first ticket bought for me to Los Angeles.”
Justin Theroux
Screenwriting U Interview with Jenna Milly

In otherwords, earn your way to Hollywood. And you might find this helpful from the same interview.

“I think the ability to throw out your own material is really important. Because everyone has an opinion on what you’re going to write. From the studios, to the actors, to the directors, whatever. So you get your sandcastles kicked over a lot, you know? So if you’re going to get your feelings hurt then you should be writing novels—and even then you’ll have an editor who’s going to knock you around. I’m a believer that the more sandcastles you build the better the sandcastles you’ll eventually build.”
Justin Theroux

May we all build better sandcastles.

Update: Before there was Rock of Ages the movie there was Rock of Ages the musical written by Chris D’Arienzo. He graduated from Paw Paw High School about 15 miles from downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’ll see what I can uncover and write about him next week. What’s funny is just a month ago I wrote a post called Kalamafrickin’zoo’s Talent Pool and didn’t have D’Arienzo on that list.

Related Posts:
The Secret to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously)

Thanks for the Plug TomCruise.com (My respone to post on TomCruise.com called Guide for Aspiring Screenwriters Part 1: Story Matters Most When Writing a Screenplay! )

Scott W. Smith

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