How I got that job

“any helpful suggestions? tips? ways to break into the business and the usual fodder?” — kornleaf 

For those interested, here is the complete tale of how I went from nameless obscurity to b-list screenwriter.

In 1988 I was an occasionally-produced playwright living in Brooklyn. I knew that I would never be taken seriously as a playwright unless I got produced in Manhattan somewhere. But how, I wondered, could I let theater people in Manhattan know about my work? I had no money and I knew no one.

I thought, okay: what I need is a kind of theatrical work that requires no sets, no light cues, no sound cues, no director, no producer and no actors.

Given those restrictions, I chose monologues. I had a number of monologues I’d written as audition pieces for actor friends in Brooklyn and I pulled a few more from the stack of unproduced plays I had sitting around. The pieces, for whatever reason, usually involved a character describing some traumatic urban event.

At that time there were a number of theaters and “performance spaces” south of 14th Street, including Home, Funambules (later Nada), Gusto House, Dixon Place and the Knitting Factory. All of these spaces had late-night “variety shows,” where almost anyone could perform for five minutes. Pretty much all you’d have to do is come to one of the evenings, find out who was in charge of booking them, and ask to be put on the list for the next week. Sometimes the person in charge would ask you to submit material but very rarely was I denied a booking because of that. It was five minutes of time during a late-night show, what was at stake?

So I got on at Dixon Place and Funambules. I chose strong pieces that were guaranteed to get a reaction, often with me performing with as much force and intensity as I could muster. The important thing was that I wanted to be clear. I didn’t want anyone in the audience to wonder what was going on; I made sure that, whatever else happened, whether they loved it or hated it, I had their attention for five minutes. They might like the piece or they might hate it, but they weren’t going to be unclear on what I was saying.

The audience for these shows was usually other performance artists and theater folk, so it wasn’t long before word spread that I was worth watching for five minutes and I had little trouble getting booked on the rest of the downtown circuit. Within a year I was getting my own solo late-night shows, where I would perform an hour or so of these monologues.

A small sample of the dozens of flyers I made to advertise my solo shows, and the professionally-made program for my off-Broadway solo show.

One of my first solo shows was at Home, and went very well. After the show, the artistic director of the space congratulated me and asked me if I had any plays that I thought would be good for the space.

And yes, I did. I had a play I had just finished that afternoon, One Neck, about a serial killer who crashes a Long Island dinner party. I handed the script for One Neck to the guy and before long (if you count 3 years as “before long”) One Neck was produced off-Broadway.

Three cards for different presentations of One Neck.  The first featured both James Urbaniak and Steven Rattazzi, the second featured future-Emmy-winner Camryn Manheim and the off-Broadway production featured future Tony-and-Emmy-winner Allison Janney.

One Neck was not a huge financial success but it was popular enough and well-reviewed enough to get a little attention from movie people. A producer asked me to adapt it into a screenplay, which went nowhere for a long time, except that it eventually ended up on the desk of another movie producer, who asked me to work on a screenplay he had, a romantic comedy set in the Hamptons. I had never written a romantic comedy before, but as long as someone was asking me to write a screenplay I was happy to be paid to learn.

I wrote many drafts of that romantic comedy script and when the producer felt it was done, he sent if off to CAA. CAA brought it to the attention of one Warren Beatty, who decided, out of the blue, to make it his next movie.

Now then, remember, I was still an obscure, downtown playwright in New York. The fact that Warren Beatty was interested in my script made me news in the world of script sales in Hollywood.

An executive at Dreamworks, Nina Jacobson, read my script (which eventually became the one of the biggest mega-bombs of all time, Town and Country, without my name on it) and asked to meet with me when she was in New York talking to new writers. I pitched her an idea for a movie about a cat that saves the world from a nuclear disaster (“Die Hard with a cat” was my four-word headline pitch) and while she didn’t buy that idea, she was amused enough to offer me a job working on what she described as “an animated film about talking ants.”  The ant movie was, apparently, a low-enough priority for the studio that they were willing to take a chance on a writer who had never had a movie produced before.

There are two lessons to be learned here. 

The first is, produce yourself.  Make something and get it out there, any way you can.  The advent of the internet makes this easier than ever.  You can work from your own home for free.

The second is, an agent will not necessarily help you.  While I did get an agent as a result of One Neck‘s success, everything that happened in this story happened in spite of, not because of that agent’s work on my behalf.