Who: Director of 2013 Sundance award-winner “Jungle Fish” and co-director of documentary 61 Bullets (2014); writer and director of 2016 romantic comedy Quaker Oaths.
How did you break in or get your start in screenwriting?
In the eighth grade, I wrote a spec script for Beverly Hills 90210, which didn’t exactly land me in the writers’ room with Darren Star, but it did introduce me to the power of screenwriting.
What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to write?
The hardest project I’ve had to write has been the follow up to Quaker Oaths, which I’m working on now. Quaker Oaths was easy to write because it has a very gimmicky pretense: A couple gets married in the Quaker tradition, where every wedding guest has to sign their marriage certificate, and then years later when they want to get divorced, they have to go to every wedding guest and ask them to cross off their name. That lent itself to a very formulaic screenplay—though I promise we threw some curve balls in there!—which was pretty easy to execute. My second film is proving to be harder to get down on paper, because it doesn’t have such a specific beginning-middle-end already planned out.
What was a major turning point in your career?
I finished college at University of Texas and then got an internship at a post production house, the late, great Match Frame, where I met so many great people that I still work with today. So maybe that initial interview for an unpaid gig duplicating VHS tapes and taking lunch orders was the major turning point I’ll look back on.
1. Jono Matt and Glen Powell 2. Ryan Piers Williams 3. Etta Devine and Gabriel Diani 4. Lena Khan 5. Trey Selman 6. Tracy Oliver 7. Justin Lader and Charlie McDowell 8. Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar 9. Damir Konjicija and Dario Konjicija 10. Juanjo Moscardó Rius 11. Ben Snyder and Ari Issler 12. Kyle Bugg 13. Jimmy Mosqueda 14. Michael Noonan 15. Geeta Malik 16. Josh Barkey 17. Nicholas Verso 18. Minhal Baig 19. Henry Jones 20. Kevin Arbouet 21. Megan Park 22. Wes Brown 23. Louisiana Kreutz 24. Kate Nowlin 25. Elizabeth Guest
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Conspicuous by their absence are such stellar screenplay writers as Buck Henry ("The Graduate"), Robert Downey, Sr. ("Putney Swope"), Penny Lane (Nuts")and Ben and Dan Barnz.
Congratulations to all these writers! Knowing Ben Synder, who has worked with me on a scripts, I want to particularly congratulate him and Ari Lssler for achieving this endeavor in the 'Storyworld' of Cinema!
Spiderwood Productions / Tommy G Warren, Writer, Producer.
Very inspiring stuff. Loved to learn how these guys and gals got their big breaks, especially those who had little to no contact in LA. Sort of inspiring, and it kind of makes you forget, if only for a moment, that many screenwriters work less than minimum wage. There's hope!