Film Courage: How did you get your first Hollywood writing job? Glenn Gers, Screenwriter: It
was a fluke, a freak occurrence. It was actually a script that I had written 10 years before.
It was my first script and I had gotten an agent with my first script. I'd gotten very
lucky. I knew someone who knew someone who showed it to an agent who picked me up as
their client but they could not get me. There had been a very small option during the 10
years other than that I was office temping and administrative assistanting and doing
some development work for indie companies and I was beginning to think I should stop
because I was actually planning to become a teacher, like maybe a high school teacher
or college teacher if I could because at least I would have summer vacations to write. It
was always what can I do to support my writing that never stopped but the idea of becoming
a screenwriter stopped because I was like why keep beating my head against the wall?
I had written a bunch of scripts, I had an agent. If I wasn't making it maybe I should
quit um but the the first script i had written all of my scripts were well liked by the people
who read them they just were like this is really good we just can't make it for a billion
reasons there's always a billion reasons why people can't do things um but a an independent
producer who really loved one of my scripts and i had done some rewrites with her um her
name was mae wathridge and she um took a job at tribeca films when it was just starting
and um she had to say that she was stopping her independent career and going to work for
tribeca but she had the opportunity uh she met with someone who works with billy crystal
who was looking to work with de niro on uh what turned out to be analyzed this eventually
after i failed them um but they they were looking to work together and may slipped them
my script and they loved it and they said this this would work very well and so all
of a sudden tribeca had to pick me up as like oh i guess we'll pick up his script to take
so all of a sudden from being about to quit i was working with big hollywood stars and
my agent lisa calamaro arranged a fabulous option and first step deal and all of a sudden
i didn't have to work temp for a year while i did rewrites on that project which went
so fast downhill and died completely and the um they wanted changes that i didn't know
how to make and i had worked for 10 years learning how to write what was in my head
and i had never learned about the part of hollywood writing where somebody says change
that that wasn't even on my radar and this was a long time ago this was in the late 1980s
it just never occurred to me that like someone would say as they did it was the story was
about a divorcing couple a couple who had gotten divorced and remarried and um divorced
again and over political differences and then the guy gets involved in espionage and politics
and things and so their divorce the topic of their divorce becomes the subject of the
thriller and so it was sort of a thriller romantic comedy and the note was can you take
out the divorce and and it was a completely legitimate note in one way if you were a flexible
hollywood writer who understood how to rethink things there are ways to do that and i actually
did that later on another script where i took out what i considered the center of the story
at the time i had never had that question raised and i tried so hard i i was just like
i got to do this this is my big break and i'm blowing it um but i couldn't i wrote an
entire script i've actually it's the only thing i've ever written that i have never
looked at since it's 30 years now i wrote it i literally cried through much of the writing
like i was a basket case because i was writing something that i didn't know what the center
was because for me the center of this story the reason that everyone was doing something
was because of this couple trying to get back together when you take that out all you've
got is a bunch of people chasing each other in funny ways but still wasn't enough to make
a scene i wrote a script i have no idea if it's readable but i got immediately fired
uh the script went on on the shelf and they hired new writers and for three years they
held on to it and niro and crystal wisely moved on did analyze this it was a good choice
on their part um and at the end of that three years i got my script back which was cool
because i had been well paid to let them have it for three years i had never seen any of
the rewrites that were done after i did it so therefore i was i was allowed to take everything
i had done that was my property the script i the draft i done for them was their property
because they paid me for it but the option was over and i just started sending it out
again and i so many people loved it and got so close to production so many times but what
it taught me was the thing that i thought writing was about which is you imagine stuff
and you get it down as good as you can and then they pay you and they make it that's
not how the industry works the industry works that you do all that stuff and then you start
to collaborate with other people and if you can't do that part if you can't learn how
to use those same creative skills on demand for things you may not think are great then
they'll find someone who can does that sound depressing it's not meant to it's meant to
it's meant to say learn the mechanics of the business so that you can do the job that's
that's the message i hope is being sent there is that there is the magic of creativity and
then there's the magic of being skilled and knowing how to do the job no matter what gets
thrown at you well i think it's very important that you bring up that story because so many
ideas of something sound great and then when you learn what they actually are it's much
much different so that's just fascinating so it was a year that you had to rewrite that
or that was a year process it was a year of actually this is it's a funny story so i'll
tell it uh it's embarrassing um i got once i took out the center of the story i didn't
know what the story would be and i what i do is that when i don't know what i'm going
to write i just riff i think of everything i can i brainstorm it could be this it could
be that you know we're on a submarine it could be the submarine's at the bottom of the sea
it could be at the submarine got moved to dry land where you know everything i can possibly
think i try and get it down on paper there's no such thing as a bad idea until you've figured
out what you're trying to accomplish with it anything's possible so i had this huge
list of possibilities of this story and i didn't know which one they wanted and i was
writing for them so um i made it into a board game i actually i was working as an office
temp still so i had access to like a laminating machine everything and i made a board and
it was like it was like the game of life where you go along a path but this had like multiple
branching paths for each story and and i tried to lay out all the different story outlines
as a board game with like cards like if you pick this you go in this tray it was the most
elaborate creative stupid thing i've ever done and i brought it to billy crystal i got
an appointment i flew to los angeles i gave it to him and i said this is your story outline
i don't know which one you want and he was really gracious about it and he was he was
great he was like you know well now i have something to put on the wall of my office
but now we actually have to write the script after work and he gave me advice and i worked
on it and i did a draft and it was all fine but that was how little i understood the job
the job by the way is making choices the point is when i when you lay out the 15 000 possible
stories you have to make a choice everything is a choice every choice has a price you have
to learn to get comfortable with making choices over and over and over again everything in
creative work is i'm going to choose this and not that if i choose this that means that
i can't have a happy ending if i choose this it means i can't talk about communism versus
capitalism you know whatever it is that you want to do it's a choice and when you make
that choice certain things fall away but other things become stronger that's the creative
process and everyone gets very afraid of that what if i make the wrong choice the coolest
thing is whatever a writer is to get comfortable with you know what it's a choice i'm gonna
make it i make it judging i know that the producers want this well no more choice that's
what i'm doing if you don't know for sure you change you take the choice and you follow
that path you're gambling maybe it'll work maybe it won't but it's better to make the
choice and be creative and try and find your solutions than to try and do both that's the
one thing you can't do got to make a choice and you have to live with the price when they
asked you to take out which what was the center of the story which is the couple getting divorced
and getting back together did they didn't tell you what to replace it with they didn't
know when people give you notes they don't know how to fix it they they just like you
know that seems seems a little wrong or sometimes they'll know how to fix it but it's not what
you thought would be like you might have a better one it doesn't matter what matters
is that everyone is going to see things differently and most notes are this isn't working not
do this if they would do this then it's like i'll do that most notes are that's not making
sense or that's too slow or that's too fast but how you actually solve it that's your
task and so for you that was so new it never occurred to me it was you know people didn't
know that much about screenwriting in the late 80s early 90s like it wasn't as much
of a thing people didn't do it as much as they do now now everybody writes scripts um
and frankly everyone should because now everyone can make them um but at the time the experience
of being a professional writer was not very well known um there were only a handful of
books and in fact the first time i came to la um i was my agent had come out and she
had set me up with meetings and everyone said to me your work is good you could work here
if you moved here um but you would be have to get used to writing things that didn't
get made because at the time that was how development worked they would develop 50 scripts
and make one which meant 49 writers were writing a script that was going to be put on a drawer
never seen again and they would be highly paid and they would be well respected and
maybe one of them would get lucky at one of your scripts would would hit but you never
knew some people had a full career never getting anything made and that blew my mind i was
like i'm not going to work a whole year on a script and not have anyone see it which
of course that's the business that's the job but at the time i didn't know i had no clue
and it took me a while to process that and to recognize that as a day job goes pretty
cool you learn a lot on it and you get paid to do the thing you love but it may get put
on the shelf you may never see it again when you came back to them with other ideas which
could be the center of the story did they not like it or that was the board game all
right this is the the process by which this happens is that the people who are in charge
like if you're a star or a director and you're supervising writers you know that you're not
a writer and so you just try to guide them as some are better than others and it's it's
the writer's job to translate the notes that's part of being a professional screenwriter
is recognizing that people are going to tell you stuff and you have to figure out what
i believe is you have to figure out how to turn it into scenes everything about screenwriting
is how to think in scenes if you can figure out how to make a scene out of an idea or
a desire or whatever it is that somebody says then you can be a professional writer and
um so very often the people in charge will say like honestly you know i know what end
result i want but i don't know how to get there that's your job um so that was a lot
of the notes were like that and in fact i said i said here's the thing when it really
comes down to it there's a big there's a binary choice there's a this or that you know is
it this ending or that ending and the note was well could it be both
what are you going to do so eventually i just chose i actually think this board game is
kind of cool but it was great i wish i don't know if i have a copy of it i think i gave
him the only copy that's kind of a neat idea i mean if someone had the time to make the
board game that that would be yeah absolutely no i mean essentially it's create your own
story which is now a completely legitimate creative project you know you could you can
you know digitally you can make a story that you could do that with i think it's called
a video game you know and um so i just was decades ahead of my there you go i should
have been designing games.
Question For The Viewers: What did you like about this video?