“I grew up watching John Hughes’ movies. I loved Clueless and Mean Girls. I like a good teen movie. They’re few and far between though.”
Screenwriter Bert V. Royal (Easy A)
“Remember, any high school movie needs to feature heroes who are intelligent, speak like adults, and are in the 11th or 12th grade.”
Adam Levenberg
The Starter Screenplay
I’m not sure how many screenplays 33-year-old Bert Royal has written, but his first produced script Easy A is getting A’s from critics (87% on Rotten Tomatoes) and A’s from audiences ($56 million in its first two weeks). That kind of success is hard to find for any writer. It’s a well written script* and entertaining movie, but I do wonder if he’s sent roses to Diablo Cody yet because it has Juno fingerprints all over it. (Of course, I hope Cody sent roses to John Hughes before he died in 2009.)
Royal dropped out of the Florida School of the Arts because he said he was the least talented one in the school. He moved to New York and landed some casting gigs. As far as I could find, Royal’s success as a writer began with the off-Broadway play Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead. That landed him an agent and some writing assignments at CBS. According to an interview he did on Jeff Goldsmith’s Podcast, Royal wrote Easy A as a spec script without any kind of outline, but rather as a “character journey.” The script went out in May of ’08 and sold within days. The $8 million film hit theaters in September 2010.
Royal grew up in Green Cove Springs, Florida (outside of Jacksonville) where interestingly enough he didn’t even attend a high school but was home schooled. (Ever since I produced a TV program on home schooling in 2002 I’ve been telling people that home schoolers are a growing force.)
If Royal’s recent success isn’t enough to make other screenwriters envious, wait until they read this quote:
“I wrote Easy A in five or six days. Once I got on a roll, I wrote this very, very quickly— so I got to about a 110 pages in five or six days and then came back after two weeks and wrote the last nine or 10 pages. I didn’t chain myself to the desk. I’m very loose about that. I sit down when I can make the script better. You know, my father says that I write best when I’m depressed, and I think he might be right. Having written this after the writers strike, that’s probably the most panicked I’ve ever been. I was just sitting in bed with a bottle of wine watching Law & Order: SVU – that was my dark place. So when I was able to finally pry myself up, for whatever reason I was really able to get into the script.”
Bert V. Royal
WGA Interview
If you drive through Green Cove Springs, Florida (pop. around 6,000) there is not much there to make you think “Hollywood”—but that’s Royal’s screenwriting roots, once again proving that talent comes from unusual places.
*The version of the script I read has revisions by the director Will Gluck. Though not officially credited as writer, Royal credits Gluck with bringing a lot to the script.
[…] “I grew up watching John Hughes’ movies. I loved Clueless and Mean Girls. I like a good teen movie. They’re few and far between though.” Screenwriter Bert V. Royal (Easy A) I’m not sure how many screenplays 33-year-old Bert Royal has written, but his first produced script Easy A is getting A’s from critics (87% […] Original Source… […]