Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (“Prisoners”)

“Just focus on the writing and everything else will fall into place.”
Aaron Guzikowski

While the name Aaron Guzikowski may not roll off the tongue as easy as saying Diablo Cody,  there are similarities between the two screenwriters . Cody is a writer with Chicago/Iowa City/Minneapolis roots who worked a regular (non-creative) job at an advertising agency until her writing got the attention of a Hollywood insider. Guzikowski is a writer from the greater Boston area (Brockton), who had been living in Brooklyn, NY and working a regular (non-creative) job in advertising until his writing got the attention of a Hollywood insider.

Both had been writing since their youth and followed that path through college. Cody studied media studies at the University of Iowa and Guzikowski studied art and film at the Pratt Institute. Cody’s Juno made The Black List before it got produced and became a well reviewed movie and a box office hit—and she won an Academy Award for the script. Guzikowski’s Prisoners also made The Black List, and though just released in theaters it has been well reviewed and is on its way to being a box office hit. (It finished #1 at the box office this past weekend.) Time will tell about any Academy Awards.

One of the big differences between the two writers is Cody was discovered while writing a blog, while Guzikowski via an old school query letter sent in the mail. Cody says she wrote the first draft of Juno in six weeks, and Guzikowski said he took two years to write Prisoners. Regardless, if you’re looking for contemporary success stories of screenwriters who were once living outside of L.A. and working regular day jobs then Cody and Guzikowski (one female, one male) are as solid  examples as you can find.

And they both did it not by writing a great script but by writing material that had a voice and connected them with people inside Hollywood who could help develop that voice. The great scripts and the great movies—and the big money— came later.

“[Guzikowski] finished the screenplay for Prisoners while working at an ad agency in New York – getting up at 5 a.m. to write most workdays, penning his thoughts whenever he could at work, then coming home again to write.”
Maria Papadopoulos
The Enterprise

Back in 2009, I wrote the post called The Breakfast Club for Writers where I pointed out how Elmore Leonard, John Grisham, and Ron Bass all once got up at 5 AM to write before their day jobs. So I guess Guzikowski’s in the club.

But the real take away from Guzikowski is the commitment to craft.

“When it comes to submissions, the only thing you want to stand out is the writing, so it pays to adhere to industry standards. As for competition, there’s not much point thinking about it. Just concentrate on the story you’re trying to tell….I signed with my manager first (through a query letter), worked with him for two years developing Prisoners, then after I completed it, I signed with my agent. You don’t really need an agent until you have something that’s ready for market. In terms of how hard it was, working on the script was the hard part, and if you pay enough dues on that end, then securing representation — even without having previously sold anything — becomes a lot easier.”
Aaron Guzikowski
2009 Q&A/Limite Magazine

P.S. The Boston area sure has a solid history of producing excellent screenwriters.

Related Posts:
The 99% Focus Rule (Tip #70)
The Idea is King (Focus not writing the great script, but the “right script”)
Screenwriting from Massachusetts
Will Simmons’ Road to Hollywood (Black List writer who was delivering pizzas in Boston a few years ago.)
Writing “Good Will Hunting” These former no-name writers won an Academy Award for their first produced screenplay.

Scott W. Smith

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“The Godfather” Meets “Big Wednesday”

“Charlie don’t surf.”
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Apocalypse Now
Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius

Hightower Beach
©2013 Scott W. Smith

This morning I took the above photo and decided to make it a challenge to use it as a springboard for a new post. How could I take a sunrise surfer shot and tie it into something useful about screenwriting? Well, to make a long story short I found an interview with Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius talking about Apocalypse Now that they collaborated on together.  I found the You Tube video on a website that is somewhat new to me called Cinephilia and Beyond . The site is a tremendous resource and I believe originates from a filmmaker in Zagreb, Croatia. On Twitter @LaFamiliaFilm. (I see a “Screenwriting from Croatia” post forming.)

So all the way from Croatia via a turn in Satellite Beach, Florida here’s an interview between the filmmaker who made the quintessential Mafia film (The Godfather) and the one who made the quintessential surfer film (Big Wednesday) talking about how they made Apocalypse Now, how George Lucas was the original director on the project, and how the now classic film had a rocky start out of the gate.

“When the movie first came out it was very dicey which way it was going to go. And I really had my life realy based on it— I’d financed it, and it was starting to get a negative buzz. It had gotten horrible reviews. I remember the reviewer Frank Rich wrote in his review, ‘This is the greatest disaster in all of fifty years of Hollywood’..my feelings were so hurt by this pronouncement.”
Francis Ford Coppola

If you’ve never seen Apocalypse Now, definitely put it on your list of films to watch/study. (Will it help add emphasis if I you knew that last year Quentin Tarantino put it on his list of Top 12 Films of All Time?)

“[Robert Duvall] came to me and he wanted to know what all those surfing terms were. Exactly what they were. He wanted to go down to Malibu and look at surfers—see how they walked around, what they did. He wanted to know when he talked about a cutback that he knew what a cutback was.”
John Milius

P.S. File this one under odd connections: In the interview Coppola talks about going to UCLA at the same time as did Jim Morrison of The Doors. Music from the Doors is played in Apocalypse Now. Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida just a few miles from where I took the above photo of the surfer that started this post in the first place. Apocalypse Now came out when I was a senior in high school and it was by far the most transformational movie experience of my then 18 year existence. And the scene where The Doors’ song The End plays is still mesmerizing (even on You Tube).

Related Posts:
Writing “The Godfather (take 1)
Postcard #22 (Kelly Slater Statue)
Jack Kerouac in Orlando
Surf Movie History 101
Kelly Slater on the Digital Revolution
Off Screen Quote #12 (Kelly Slater)
“Take a Risk”—Coppola

Scott W. Smith

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From Ann Arbor to Smallville (David S. Goyer)

“Nowadays with the internet and all these other tools I don’t know that it’s entirely necessary to go to film school.”
Screenwriter and USC grad David S. Goyer (Man of Steel)
The Dialogue interview with Mike De Luca

Pyramids at Giza (Photo by Wilhem Joys Anderson/CC)

Screenwriter David S. Goyer was born in 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan and (I think) attended Michigan State before going to film school at USC. His first produced feature screenplay was Death Warrant in 1990 and since then he’s written more than 15 produced screenplays including Blade, Batman Begins, and Man of Steel. He’s also written three novels, several TV programs, and worked as a consultant on the video game Call of Duty. He has a website and blog at davidsgoyer.com. Last year he was asked if he had any advice on how to prepare for a career in writing/filmmaking:

“There’s no one tried and true path into film.  There are a number of good film schools — USC, UCLA, NYU, Columbia, Pasadena’s Art Center (Zack Snyder went there, among others).  But film school isn’t a requirement. There are tons of good books about writing and film.  Screenwriting programs like Final Draft.  And a host of screenplays available for download on the web.  Digital film-making is relatively cheap. In the end, there’s no substitute for doing the work.  Just know that the top of the pyramid is tiny.  Depressingly, only a small percentage of WGA members actually make a good living as screen or television writers.  And that number is dwindling.  So if you want to pursue this career, make sure you’ve got the fortitude for it!”
Producer/writer/director David S. Goyer
Questions and Answers

I’m on the tail end of writing three ebooks (beginning, middle, and end) culled from the best of the 1,500 posts on this blog. Goyer is a great example of someone who rose out of the Midwest and made his mark in Hollywood. And while he’s absolutely correct that the top of the pyramid is tiny, the pyramid is much bigger than it used to be. (And actually, there are multiple pyramids now. Can’t play in the NFL or the NBA? That’s okay there are other professional leagues around the world. ) This blog celebrates the various nooks and crannies of the world where screenwriters come from, but it’s also a voice for telling people there is room below the top of the pyramid to work in production and have your stories told—improve your skills—and make a living.

Filmmakers in days of old learned their trade making B-movies, today we have You Tube and webisodes. Go create knowing that everyone who is at that top of the pyramid started out at the bottom of the pyramid—no, they started not even on the pyramid. They just stared at it from afar.   When Goyer was a high school student had his eyes set on a career as a homicide investigator. But like that adopted kid from Smallville, Kansas that he wrote about in Man Of Steel they were both destined for Hollywood.

P.S. Speaking of alternative ways of getting your film made, I thought I’d tell you about a Kickstarter project by a reader of this blog. Right now writer/director Jonathan Ade has 241 backers and $27,107 raised but needs to hit $33,000 in the next 59 hours or he gets nothing. (Sounds like a log line right?) The film Lay in Wait has an intriguing log line:

A married woman in an extramarital affair must find her wedding ring in the woods before the sun sets.

The film will star Elizabeth Olin (Killing Season) and is being executive produced by actor Lucas Neff (Raising Hope). Check out Ade’s project at Kickstarter.

Related posts:

Screenwriting from Michigan
How Much Do Screenwriters Make?
How to Get Started Working in Production
Screenwriter’s Work Ethic (Tip #2)
The 99% Focus Rule (Tip #70)
“Don’t try and compete with Hollywood.”—Ed Burns

Scott W. Smith

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Jailbait, Rejection & Screenwriter Mark Boal’s Start

“I started out in newspapers, went on to narrative nonfiction magazine articles in the late 90’s, and then began trying my hand at screenwriting…In 2002, Kathryn Bigelow optioned a piece I did called ‘Jailbait.’ It became a short-lived TV show on Fox that she directed. That was really my introduction to television and film. Then I continued on the dual track I’m on now, trying to merge the two disciplines. This really started with The Hurt Locker, which was based on reporting, and continued with Zero Dark Thirty.”
Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker)
Interview with Rob Feld
The Hurt Locker: The Shooting Script 

Here’s a link to Boal’s article Jailbait which got the attention of Bigelow.

P.S. Back in 1995 Boal graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio where he majored in philosophy. In this 2010 talk at the school Boal told students, “You have to be willing to get your teeth kicked in continually before you achieve even a modicum of success. And once you achieve that you have to be willing to put up with a bunch of rejection before you can get anywhere.” (I don’t get too much criticism from this blog, but when it comes it’s usually in the form of, “you make this sound too hard to do.” I think Boal’s quote and Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg‘s similar quote—“Don’t give up. You’re going to get kicked in the teeth. A lot. Learn to take a hit, then pick yourself up off the floor. Resilience is the true key to success.”—pretty much sum it up.

BTW—Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, All the Presidents Men) graduated from Oberlin College with an English degree.

Related post:
Screenwriting Quote #126 (Mark Boal) Boal proves you don’t have to go to film school, but you do have to learn from others. (And it’s a bonus if those others are Oscar-winner Paul Haggis and Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow. The key is to write something good enough to get you in the room with that kind of talent.)
Hitchcock Loved The Hurt Locker
Screenwriter’s Work Ethic (tip#2)
First screenplay=9 Oscar Nominations
Beatles, King, Cody & 10,000 Hours
The 99% Focus Rule (Tip #70)

Scott W. Smith

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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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