“I had no idea what I was going to do after college, so I followed a girl I liked out to California.”
Scott Rosenberg (Boston University grad)
Screenwriter and Massachusetts native Scott Rosenberg over the years has written an eclectic mix of films including indie films (Beautiful Girls), big budget Hollywood action films (Con Air), and the cult classic (High Fidelity). He is also the creator of the current TV show Happy Town.
Rosenberg’s journey to Hollywood success was the long and winding road type of success. He began writing poems in grade school and continued writing all the way through to the creative writing program at Boston University. After moving to LA he began writing screenplays while he worked “every crappy job” that came his way.
Then he decided to go to film school and may be the only person who attended the big three film schools; USC, UCLA & NYU. He settled on the writing program at UCLA and placed third in the Samuel Goldwyn Award. After all that schooling you think then he’d be on the fast track.
“I wrote 10 scripts before I got my first agent, wrote another two before my first sale and another three before anything got made. That’s the most important advise I could give anyone starting out: Write a lot of scripts…I look back at all these 10 scripts I wrote and they suck. Sure, they have moments of great stuff, but who am I at age 22 to think I’m going to write the Great American Screenplay? It’s just wrong. I didn’t have the life experience and I was just learning to crawl, learning my process…The thing I’m most proud of in my process is that I was always writing. When people talk to me about ‘paying your dues’ and I think about those lean years when I had no money, I was sharing a room, sleeping on a mattresses on the floor, driving the worst car, working in the worst jobs, it didn’t feel like I was paying my dues. I was still living my life, going to the movies and having a girlfriend and watching sports, and all of a sudden, I look back at those years and I realize I was living like an animal. But there was a kind of innocence to that time that I long for.”
Scott Rosenberg
The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters
Karl Iglesias
pages 212-213
Related post: Screenwriting from Massachusetts
