Welcome back to 5AM StoryTalk’s podcast, my friends — a place to talk about stories in all their forms, the craft that goes into them, and the role that art plays in our lives. Today we’re going to be discussing how I broke into the Hollywood film/TV industry and how I learned to trust myself in a business where nobody knows anything, but everybody insists they know everything.
Put another way: I’m going to tell you about my first script sale, how it almost didn’t happen because of some questionable advice I received from my reps, and what the experience taught me about how to pursue my dreams of becoming a produced screenwriter – which I achieved a few years later when a TV series I created, “Dracula”, premiered on NBC and Sky (though that turned into a bit of a shitshow, which you can read more about here).
The best way to enjoy this free conversation is to tap on the podcast play button right now and just listen to it in all its incredibly intimate detail. If you prefer to read, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered; scroll down to the article below.
First, I want to say, yes, this is an interview podcast, but I’m a one-person show here. I’m also a full-time screenwriter and novelist with multiple projects on my plate at the moment. There’s just no way I can sit down for 90-minute interviews with four to five guests every month, edit these chats, and share them with you while also taking care of my other obligations and, of course, spending time with my beautiful family.
Every three to five episodes, I’m going to instead share with you my thoughts on arts and culture, most typically my thoughts on screenwriting, writing fiction, and storytelling in general. These will often come to you in the form of war stories, because I have a lot of those after nearly 20 years as a professional artist.
My hope is that these one-on-one conversations with you will provide you with some intimate, no-bullshit access into what a life in the arts is like. If you’re an aspiring screenwriter or novelist, I expect there will be a lot here for you to learn from this – but especially if you’re a screenwriter or hoping to become one sometime in the future. I know I wish someone had told me some of what I’m going to be telling you about here back when I was starting out.
Now, let’s dive in…
The time period is 2009.
It was my fourth year in California — I grew up in Michigan — and I lived in an apartment with my then-girlfriend Lindsay Devlin, who eventually went on to marry me and become a produced screenwriter, too.
I’ve tried to do the math here, looking back at what records I have, and collectively we were in about $150,000 of debt from university loans and credit card balances we’d racked up trying to survive this silly artist’s quest we’d committed ourselves to.
Everything was kind of terrible at this point in our lives, but also kind of wonderful when I think back on it today. Hollywood was still a land of possibilities, before the streamers, before the tech bros, before the Dark Times. These possibilities, the chance of something amazing and transformative happening, is probably what got us by. I know it’s what got me by.
I wanted nothing than to write films and novels, which is pretty much all I did all day long in between making .10 to .25 cents a word as a freelance arts journalist for the many alt-weeklies that made up Village Voice Media and Times-Shamrock Syndicate.
I was 33 at this point, and I think I’d written somewhere in the vicinity of 200 screenplays and short stories and two novels trying to find my voice as an artist.
That wasn’t going so well. While who I really wanted to be was Todd Haynes or Steven Soderberg, finding reps who would rep these kinds of scripts from me had proven futile. Either I wasn’t there yet as a writer or, more likely when I look back, I was attempting to pursue the kind of stories I should’ve been trying to get made in a more independent space.
You don’t go to Hollywood to become an indie filmmaker, I mean.
But my passion for cinema was much broader than smaller, intimate stories. Like all of us, I’d grown up on the films of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and James Cameron.
I’d also grown up a voracious reader who especially loved 19th century literature. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is but one example, which I’d later turn into that shitshow of a TV series I mentioned earlier.
Another is King Solomon’s Mines, the H. Rider Haggard action-adventure novel published in 1885. To demonstrate my commercial instincts, I decided to write a Lawrence Kasdan-esque take on the novel, drawing a bit of inspiration from the 1950 film adaptation Spielberg was also a big fan of, I knew.
Listen, it’s a problematic novel in the context of history. It’s a piece of romantic colonial fiction that centers a white colonist in an African story. But what I tried to do was approach it from a place of antagonism to that cultural mythology, with Allan Quatermain, the protagonist, as disgusted with the British Empire as I am and constantly trying to defer his role to other smarter allies such as the African warrior — secretly a prince — he’s on this adventure with.
The script, which was called Quatermain, didn’t please the agent who had agreed to hip pocket me — which is a term for repping someone without actually fully committing to repping them.
The next reps I found loved the script, though, and so I quickly signed with them. They sent the project out a few weeks later, with half a dozen different producers attached to produce it, but we never managed to sell it – as happened a lot even back then.
The goal, in my mind, hadn’t been to sell it anyway – though that would’ve been amazing. No, the real goal was to introduce myself to the town.
I tell new screenwriters this all the time. You’re not writing that first script to make six figures against seven in a huge bidding war. That rarely happens. No, it’s to wow a rep and then wow the town – Hollywood, I mean.
You need fans, people to advocate for you, to take all those other ideas you have and turn them into work. Because you can’t become a professional screenwriter without help – a lot more than just reps, trust me.
The good news is, that’s exactly what Quatermain had done – it had made me boatloads of fans.
Because of what I’d done with King Solomon’s Mines, reimagining it as I had, creative executives around Hollywood kept asking me to similarly reimagine other classic books for them.
After Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009) became a huge hit and the Pirates of the Caribbean crossed a billion dollars at the box office, everyone wanted their own period action franchise, and I was going to give it to them…I hoped.
I’m a fiend for these characters and stories, so it came naturally, I should add. It wasn’t bandwagon-jumping for me, trying to cash in on the moment. I was approaching them from a place of sincerity and love.
One idea in particular really excited me. It was inspired by my love of the 1924 and 1940 The Thief of Bagdad films and based on some virtually untapped “source material” that hadn’t produced significant films in more than half a century.
That source material was the One Thousand and One Nights — or, as it was rendered in its first English translation, Arabian Nights — mythology.
Yes, I know Aladdin (1992) had been made by then, but, at the time, it was only an animated film and only one corner of a vast universe of stories. There were still 1,000 more nights, remember.
This is what I was thinking about when one of my new fans — a young exec who has gone on to rise through the ranks in Hollywood (I’ve never stopped being proud of them!) — asked me what I was working on.
I gave them a 10-second pitch that is, to this day, the most succinct, most effective pitch I’ve ever come up with. Here goes:
“It’s called Thieves of Bagdad, and it’s about the greatest thieves and scoundrels of Arabian Nights assembling in Ocean’s Eleven fashion to pull off the biggest heist of their career.”
The exec’s face changed, doing this sort of lighting up thing you usually only see in cartoons. They then immediately dragged me into their boss’s office to pitch the boss, too.
They both loved it.
Encouraged by their reaction, I took this idea to my reps to ask their advice on next steps. I mean, should we share it with other producers – try to get some competing interest? Should I just go with these producers and pitch it wide with them? Should I spec in a month and take it out to the town to hopefully create a competitive situation?
This is when my anxiety began to skyrocket.
My pitch elicited divided opinions from my reps, which at this point includes both agents and managers.
One half of my team said, “That’s a great fucking idea!” and encouraged me to pitch it.
The other repeatedly argued it was a waste of my time.
The concern was that Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time would soon be released. Nobody wanted another “desert movie”, or so I was told.
Ignoring how offensive I found such a description, I pointed out this wasn’t a “desert movie”, that Arabian Nights also takes place in lush, colorful environs across Africa, Asia, and islands of the Indian Ocean and South Pacific.
“Great,” they said…except a Tarzan movie was already in development. Nobody, they insisted, would want “another jungle movie”.
I was advised to abandon the project altogether as not worth my time.
But I was young and overconfident, despite no real experience, so I agreed to work with the producers anyway.
That’s when the miracle every young writer hopes for happened. We pitched this idea to one of Hollywood’s major studios, and I sold it in the room.
Really, it was that easy.
I was suddenly a professional screenwriter.
I called my parents, who thought I was wasting my time in Hollywood. They were divorced, but I insisted they get on a conference call together because they needed to hear this together. Only later did I realize they probably thought I was calling to tell them something terrible, like I had knocked someone up or I had terminal cancer.
Instead, I told them I’d sold my first script.
They cried, I cried.
The deal closed at Writers Guild of America minimum for a feature, which at the time was roughly $90,000 USD. I always feel it’s important to make clear to people how much of earnings like this writers get to keep.
In my case, I had agents who took 10%. I had managers who took 10%. I had lawyers who took 5%. And the WGA took another 1.5% for membership dues. This is all before taxes, which, because I lived in LA, included federal, state, and city taxes.
By the time it was done, I got to keep a little more than half of that.
But hey, who cares, right? I was a professional screenwriter and I’d just paid off all of my credit card debt and some 20% of my school loans.
I mean, I was otherwise completely fucking broke, but, hey, small potatoes in the big scheme of things, right?
At this point, I had to reckon with a new problem: two of my reps had advised me not to pursue the project that I just sold in the room.
You almost never sell projects in the room, but this is how undeniable the idea was in that period action-adventure zeitgeist. Ocean’s Eleven meets Pirates of the Caribbean in the world of Arabian Nights was just a great, great idea.
I wish I had 100 more like it. Hell, I wish I had three more like it.
I talked over the situation with every professional writer I knew, as well as my other team of reps, trying to find peace with the god-awful advice I’d been given.
But it just proved impossible. I knew, no matter what else happened in the future, I would never trust their advice again. I would always second-guess them.
There was only one thing to do.
So, I called them up, my voice shaking — I am not a confrontational person, I’m not good at shit like this — and slowly got out that while I thanked them for their eight months of collaboration, we needed to part ways.
Which is how we come to the lesson of this screenwriting essay.
In an industry where nobody knows anything, but everybody insists they know everything—
All you have are your creative instincts.
That’s literally what you’re banking on in Hollywood, that your instincts are strong enough for others to hurl money at you to live your dream.
This doesn’t mean you’ll always be right.
Many of us are not.
Many of us are also not meant to make it in this business, despite our dreams.
But the only way you will succeed in the long run, as far as I’m concerned, is to self-nurture your own voice and narrative instincts.
Nobody knows what kind of a writer you want to be better than you do.
It’s not always easy to find reps who “get” you, who care about what you want to do, but it’s much worse to be stuck with reps who constantly tell you the writer you want to be is the wrong kind of writer.
By the way, I went on to pitch two other projects these reps told me were not winning ideas. I sold both of them — one of them again in the room.
In the end, trusting my gut — my own creative instincts — was the absolutely right call.
I’ll wrap this screenwriting tale up with a little postscript of sorts.
I made one of my most enduring friendships in Hollywood because of Thieves of Bagdad. Marc Guggenheim, the creator of the CW’s “Arrow" and “Legends of Tomorrow”, was hired to rewrite my script.
He took me out to dinner to talk about the project — BBQ in the Valley, I still remember it well — and became one of my most consistent voices of wisdom in the business, always there when I need it, which means something truly great came of the project other than launching my career and income.
Because Thieves of Bagdad never got made, as you may have guessed.
This is another lesson the experience of selling it taught me: most of the real long-term gains in this business are human ones.
Never forget the people you meet will be around a lot longer than the cash you make.
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