Warning: Despite the meteoric rise of the screenwriters into today’s post— time, talent, money and grunt work are still necessary ingredients. And as the informercials proclaim: *Results May Vary.
The Players:
The Duffer Brothers (Matt and Ross) are identical twins from Durham, North Carolina. Born in 1984 and influenced by 80s movies E.T. and Poltergeist, they began making short films on Hi8 video cameras as kids and went to film school at Chapman University in California. They made their debut feature film with the 78-minute horror thriller Hidden in 2015. In 2016 their Stranger Things series became a Netflix sensation. It looks like the fifth and final season of Stranger Things will become available some time in 2024.
Michael Waldron was born in 1987 and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia and went to Pepperdine University for his MFA in screenwriting. He worked as a writer on various TV projects and in 2022 was the sole credited writer on the Marvel hit film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. (The $200 million film directed by Sam Raimi has made just under a billion dollars worldwide.)
So between Waldron and the writing team of The Duffer Brothers is there something we can point to help explain how some writers from the south with no film or tv connections found off the chart success in Hollywood? In the past few days I happened hear them talk about their creative journeys and I think there are a couple similarities.
Here’s an exchange between Matt and Ross from lesson 15 (”Getting to the Pitch”) from their MasterClass.
Matt: What do you do if you don’t have connections? We didn’t have connections. We were going to film school out here [in Southern California] at Chapman University in Orange County. We were close-ish to LA. We knew we needed to make connections. We knew we needed to meet people who were making stuff within the industry. And throughout the summer, even throughout the year we interned. There’s two of us—again that’s the advantage of having two people. But you can do it yourself obviously. We divided and conquered. We did every internship we could find, and we met as many people as we could. I mean it’s not the most fun thing in the world—these internships.
Ross: In our case, it was work to get college credit. And so you might ask, ’Ok, I found an internship and so what do I do? Do I just hand this brilliant script I’ve written to someone in the company and they’re going to read it and they’re going to get me an agent?’ It’s also not that simple. What you really need to do, as Matt is saying, is you got to put in the work. We made copies of scripts. We fetched coffees. I delivered presents to people. I did Christmas stuff. Some of the time I was given a fun task—‘Read this script and let me know what you think.’ And you do. And you slowly start to earn people’s trust.
One of the companies Ross worked for was Appian Way and one of his bosses was Franklin Leonard. After ”nine, ten months”—NINE, TEN MONTHS—he asked Leonard if he’d read a script of theirs. He did and liked it enough to pass it on to some agents. After some meetings that is how Matt and Ross got their agent. Ross adds, ”It’s still going to take time. It was a couple of years of interning and working before we were even able to get our script in the hand of someone who knew an agent, much less meet an agent. It is a process and it is going to take some time.”
The second success story comes from a great podcast interview of Waldron by John August at Scriptnotes (Episode 555), ”Marveling with Michael Waldron”:
Michael : I went to Pepperdine. They have a screenwriting MFA program, which was great for me. I fell under the tutelage of some really amazing mentors, a guy named Chris Chluess, who was the showrunner of Night Court for a long time, Emmy-winning writer and just a genius, and Sheryl Anderson, who’s the creator/showrunner, Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. I had some great professors. Before, I just knew how to write some jokes and some funny, stupid stuff. They really taught me how to write scripts. From there, I was fortunate enough to land an internship on the first season of Rick and Morty. That was really, really lucky. I was a huge fan of Dan Harmon, because I love Community, even when I was back in Georgia. . . . The cool thing about Pepperdine was it was very practical. It was based on just writing pilots, specs. Each semester, you were creating an original piece of work. I had that very difficult process demystified for me very early on, where I was like, ‘Okay, I know how to write a pilot and create a world.’ . . . I wrote the first draft of Heels, my show on Starz, in a class at Pepperdine. It was very, very helpful for me, because I was just finishing stuff
Through a buddy at Pepperdine he also got an opportunity to do an internship on the first season of Rick and Morty. His next opportunity was a writer’s PA on Community. He was working ”insane hours” for low pay (but getting decent overtime) doing things like getting food for the writers (lunch, dinner, snacks, coffees, and midnight snacks). He called it a nightmare, but you sense that while he was paying his dues, he also knew he was in the game. And he was learning from Dan Harmon and his team of writers.
Michael: It really was a blast, but that was a grind. I don’t know, there were like 13 writers that season. It was Season 5 of a network show, 13 or 14 writers. They had assistants. Each coffee order was a double decker, two boxes. I just remember trudging across Paramount with all that. I was getting lunches, getting meals and everything, but I asked Dan if when I wasn’t doing that, if I could sit in the writers’ room and just listen and learn. He was great, and he let me.
It took a couple of years of knowing Harmon when he felt he’d earned the opportunity to cash in some chips and ask Harmon if he’d read a pilot he’d written. (He was later hired as a producer/writer on Harmon’s Rick and Morty where he won an Emmy.) In 2015 or 2016, Paramount Television optioned Heels. And fast forward to 2020—just ten years removed from getting his undergraduate degree at Georgia— and he spent 2 1/2 years in London working on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And he’s attached to write a Star Wars film. What a ride!
The irony is now that Waldron is a hot Hollywood screenwriter, he is back living and working in Atlanta, Georgia where he grew up. He’s the creator the Disney+ Marvel series Loki. Which begs the question—would a 22-year-old Waldron living in Atlanta today still go the Hollywood route? Obviously, the route he took worked out well for him—as it did for The Duffer Brothers. But the landscape and economy has changed in the last 10-15 years. Heck the movie industry has changed greatly in just the last two years. The cost of living in Los Angeles has skyrocketed since the beginning of the pandemic. Film school hasn’t gotten any cheaper. And, help me out, what’s the drive from Malibu (where Pepperdine located) or Orange (where Chapman is located) take time and gas-wise to get to Hollywood or Burbank to intern on a show or with a production company? An hour, two hours one way?
The phenomenal success of The Duffer Brothers and Waldron is to be celebrated and appreciated. Learn from their tenacity, but be careful trying to duplicate those exact steps.
P.S. Let me close by crunching a few numbers.
Chapman’s website has undergraduate tuition at $30K and estimates another $11k-15K on housing, so with basic meals the full sticker price for Chapman comes in around $50K per year or $200K for four years. ($400K if your twin brother or sister goes to school with you.) Obviously, scholarships, grants, and other things can bring that cost down. At Pepperdine’s Seaver College Graduate Program their two year MFA in screenwriting degree comes in at an estimated $53,840 per year or just over $107,000. Consider the cost of any college/degree if you don’t have massive scholarships, grants, or financial support from family. But keep writing—that’s basically free.
Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles
Screenwriting from Iowa 