Almost Linear

Today I talk with David Diamond, a steadily working, often uncredited, screenwriter! In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover everything from what selling a script looks like IRL, entering the screenwriting world post college, whether grad school for screenwriting is worthwhile, and how ones gets admitted to the WGA.

J: You’re currently teaching at Drexel, but you were in LA prior to that?

D: Correct. I lived in LA for 35 years. I’m from here. I grew up in Center City. I went to NYU. And when I graduated, I moved with friends from there to LA. And I worked for a producer in LA for about a year. And that’s when I decided I wanted to start writing, during that year. Then, because I didn’t want to spend too much money, I stayed here in Philly for a while. Then I moved in with my best friend from high school, who became my writing partner. I moved in with him and continued writing there. Wrote a little bit with him also. And then I moved back to LA. Then I just kept at it. Took about five years. And officially he dropped out of graduate school and moved to LA. Two years later, we sold our first spec script to 20th Century Fox. It was a two-picture deal. And then we were off to the races. After, until relatively recently, we worked pretty constantly, steadily. Mostly sold original ideas. Made several of them. We also did a lot of rewrite work on other movies, many of which got made. And some of which did not get made. That’s sort of the career that we’ve had. Mostly for movie studios. Developing television. We’ve written a lot of TV pilots for different networks and TV studios. Cable network. But that’s pretty much the career we’ve had.

J: Quick side note. Did you go to Tisch for film or screenwriting?

D: I did a cinema studies degree at Tisch. I never actually took a screenwriting class at Tisch. I took a production class. But my degree was… history, theory, criticism. That kind of stuff. Cinema studies is mostly for people who want to have an academic career, that kind of thing, which I never did. Or who wanted to be critics, which I certainly never did. I wanted to be involved creatively. But I was already halfway through. I started in liberal arts. I had no idea I was going to go into this. Then I just discovered in my sophomore year, that all of my friends were in Tisch. Mostly they were either actors or directors. I knew I didn’t want to study acting. I knew I didn’t want to study directing. Film production itself is not my favorite thing. I knew that. But I also knew that I wanted to study film, so I found this cinema studies major. I thought, it will get me studying movies. I’ll be in Tisch, which is the school I want to be in at the university. We’ll see where it goes. It worked out.

In my senior year, I got an internship for a producer in New York. I learned a tremendous amount. That was a great experience. Other people were trying to get internships at Paramount and Warner Brothers, all these big studios. You get an internship like that, and you end up making copies. Real grunt work. That’s not to say there isn’t value in it, there can be, but it doesn’t necessarily give you that much of a deeper understanding of the business. I was working at a little company that no one had ever heard of. But I was working for the guy whose company it was. Secondly, he was super smart. He was really successful at a very young age. He ended up setting up a movie at Fox, so he moved to L.A. to produce this movie. That’s really what got me to L.A. I wanted to go. I had a girlfriend. I wanted to be with her. I said to him, “I want to go to L.A. Do you think there’s any way I can do it?” He said, “let me see what I can do.” He got me a gig. He got me a job.

J: What kind of tasks did that start out with? What duties were you performing assisting this person?

D: That’s a good question. It was a lot of the usual clerical stuff. I was answering the phones. I was keeping his calendar. That kind of stuff. One thing I know that I was supposed to do that I did not do, because I have some executive function challenges, is I was supposed to make sure that his health claims were filed. I never did that stuff. I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t interested in it. I’d get these bills, I would just put them at the bottom of the pile, and not do it. Years later, he was talking about me, saying what a great assistant I was. I said, “Paul, I was a terrible assistant. You enjoyed talking to me, and we had a very nice relationship. Creatively, it was great. You probably are out thousands of dollars. I never filed your health claims. I was terrible.” The other thing that I was doing, and this was the real difference maker, was I was reading stuff for him. I was reading books, plays, and screenplays. Writing samples, submissions, things like that. I would say that he and another guy in the office were the only people there. There were three people who at the company, and me, basically. They taught me how to read.

J: Taught you how to read, meaning?

D: I don’t mean literally, but I would read a script or a book. Then I’d come in, and they’d say, “what was it about?” I’d start saying, “well, it’s about this guy.” I’m telling them the story. If they didn’t interrupt me, I would have been talking for 35 minutes. They’d just stop me and say, “no, no, no. What’s it about? What is it really about? On a deeper level, what is this story addressing? Thematically, what’s it about? What does the character struggle with?” They were trying to gauge, is this something that we’re going to be interested in? Because the events of the story don’t matter if it doesn’t add up to more than just that. That was the idea. I learned how to read screenplays, working for him. Eventually, that’s what I ended up doing when I was in L.A., reading a lot of scripts. When read enough of them, and you write enough of them, eventually you kind of figure out how to do it if you listen carefully.

J: I was also wondering whether you think it’s worthwhile to look into an MFA for something like screenwriting. Because I’ve been looking at Tisch for a long while, but it’s certainly pricey.

D: I think that, generally, the benefit of a master’s degree is that it gives you a professional credential that translates into getting a job. That’s usually why you get a master’s degree, right? I’m going to get a master’s in psychology, and I’m going to work as a psychologist. Or I’m going to get a master’s in English, and I’m going to teach high school language. With an MFA, I think there’s value in it if you want to teach screenwriting. I think if you want to teach screenwriting at a college level, you either need an MFA or you need the practical experience. Or both. So there’s that value. If what you’re interested in is writing screenplays that sell and get made as movies, the MFA, quite honestly, in my opinion, isn’t going to make a difference.

J: Because, ultimately, it’s not the sample.

D: It doesn’t matter. You could write a smart, low-budget horror movie and have a movie in production in 10 months. For that, you don’t need an MFA. Having said that, I have a son who’s graduating Tisch next week, in film and TV. He said, “I want to go to film school.” I called a friend of mine who’s a producer, and I said, “what do you think?” He said something that I think was really true that stayed with me, and I think that it applies to the MFA also, which is, “you don’t go to film school to learn how to make films.” You can do this stuff on your own now, right? I can shoot a movie on this piece of technology, and I can edit it and score it on my laptop, if I want. You go to get grouped. You go to be a part of a cohort of people who are creative and working toward the same goal and you don’t all become successful at the same time, but somebody does, and you’re in each other’s orbit, and you’re a part of a conversation with a group of people. That’s the value of it. I teach at Drexel. I mean, this quarter, mostly I don’t have screenwriting and playwriting students or even film and TV. Still, what I tell them is, this is the beginning, and the people who are in this room, even if you don’t know them, and you’re not friends with them or whatever, but this is your cohort. So we’re going to start a creative conversation here, and this should continue over four years or five years or whatever it is. And as you continue throughout your life, these are your people. That’s really the value. So I think it depends on what your professional aspirations are. In some cases, it won’t help you at all. In other cases, it really might help you. And the other value is, like, okay, Todd Solondz may not still be there, but someone’s going to be. There’s going to be instructors there who are going to be terrific and could be really helpful to you, not necessarily in the way of a connection, but in the way of a mentor. And the other students who are there are going to be people who are really good and really serious, and you become a community. There’s value in that.

And the other thing you can do is you reach out to Todd Solondz, whatever filmmaker you like, and you say, “I was considering applying to this program because of how much I admire your work. I understand you’re not going to be continuing with the program. You’re making a movie.If there’s any role for me to be involved, I’d love to be involved.” Maybe that’s your grad school education.

J: I’d like to hear more about the mechanics of that first script you sold. You said there was a two-picture deal, and Fox bought the spec script. What was it like leading up to that? How did they find it? What were those conversations like when they were considering buying it?

D: My partner and I were writing on spec, like you do, and we wrote a screenplay. We write mostly comedies, like a pretty broad spectrum of comedies, from more broad physical stuff to more like dramedy stuff, character-driven dramedy stuff. So we had written one of the former, a broad comedy. It was called People of Girth, and it was about four angry, obese people who are eating at a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet, and the manager tries to kick them out, and they stage a protest, and they take over the buffet. So we wrote this script – this was in the 90s – we sent it out to a lot of people. I was making a living as a freelance script reader. That’s how I supported myself. There were good weeks and bad weeks. In a good week, you get eight scripts. That was 400 bucks. In a bad week, you get three, and that was 150 bucks, which is not enough. So I was eating macaroni and cheese and Subway sandwiches and working as a script reader, but the benefit of working as a script reader was that I was in touch with a lot of executives, development executives, producers, people like that, who I was reading for, and they liked me because I was good at it because I had learned to read, and I was a pretty good writer. So they liked me. They all would say, “when you write something that you think is ready, you can give it to me, and I’ll take a look at it.” That’s the kind of thing that happens, and that’s the value of good working relationships, but you have to be really careful not to take advantage of them because if you give them a script when it’s too early or you give them a bad script, then that’s the only one they’re going to read. So you have to be careful, but we ended up giving the script to a few people, they liked it, and they said, “okay, I’m going to give it to this agent or that agent…” we ended up going out to like 20 agents with this screenplay, People of Girth.

Everyone passed, except for this one guy who had just left one of the big agencies and gone out on his own to start his own agency. He was looking for clients. He called us up and said, “I read your script, and do you want to have lunch?” And we’re thinking, “let’s go. Right? It’s on.” We go meet him, and he says to us, “I don’t think I can sell your screenplay, but I think that there’s a great fresh voice in the writing, and I think if you guys devote yourself to a more mainstream idea, that you might be able to leapfrog into the mainstream of the business. And if you want to do that, I would be happy to hear some idea and give you feedback.” So it’s a longer story, but the bottom line is, we took him up on it, gave him a bunch of ideas, and we found one that we all agreed could be something. We went away and wrote it, and I will tell you, this is also a longer story, but we had to rewrite it several times. We did it completely wrong. I don’t mean we did it wrong subjectively, like, he didn’t think it was funny enough, or he didn’t think it was this or that. I mean, we did it so wrong. The scene headings were correct, it was mechanically correct. But we were completely inexperienced, even though I’d read so many screenplays. We just did it wrong. Enough so that he had read around two versions, and he just said, “you know what, guys, maybe this isn’t the one.” We were devastated. I mean, it really seemed like, “Damn. Like, we’ve been doing this a long time.” This was supposed to be the opportunity. So we got in the car. We drove to Vegas. We were sitting in the food court at the fashion show mall in Las Vegas, trying to figure out, “how did we get this so wrong?” What we were writing, it was called The Wiz Kid, and it was about a 12-year-old slacker kid who, through a magical device, becomes a genius overnight. And it upsets the expectations of everyone around him, his family members, the school, a girl he likes, everybody. Turns everything upside down. It was a wish-fulfillment, coming-of-age comedy. And we said to ourselves, if Disney was making this movie, what would it look like? Like, how would it unfold? And once we asked the question from the perspective of the buyer, the studio that would actually invest the money to make the movie and market the movie and release the movie, we just figured out the movie in five minutes. We wrote a postcard to this agent from Vegas and said, we’re in Vegas, we figured it out, see you in six weeks. He took the script out on a Tuesday, and by Friday, we had an offer.

J: Wow.

D: That’s how it happened for us. And then, once you sell a screenplay… it’s such a public thing, selling a screenplay. In Hollywood, it’s such a public thing.  You sell a screenplay for six figures, and it’s a two-picture deal. It’s in the trade papers, and everyone knows, and everyone has read it. And even if they didn’t buy it, they still liked it. They understood why someone else bought it. After that, everyone wants to meet with you, and then everyone wants to know what you want to do next, and then your career has started. 

J: Did you see that money? It was six figures that you got paid?

D: The minimum that the deal was worth was $250,000 for both movies, to write both movies. That was the minimum. And if they both got made, it was $750,000, something like that. So we wrote both of them. Neither of them got made. But the second one, it was called Guam Goes to the Moon, we had sold it at Fox, obviously, but then the producer of the movie moved to Paramount and took the project with him. So it ended up at Paramount. That movie almost got made so many times, with so many different directors and actors, even different producers. And we kept being brought on to rewrite the movie. There were a couple other writers who came on and did work too, but even after they did their work, they would hire us to come back and do more work. We worked on that movie for probably 10 years. The movie never got made, but we must have earned a million dollars over the course of 10 years to work on that movie.The third movie we sold got made. That was called The Family Man, with Nicolas Cage. We had done some low-budget indie stuff, but that was our first studio movie that we made.

J: It’s really cool to have you walk me through all this. Do you think what you’re saying reflects how things are nowadays, financially, for screenwriters?

D: It’s a lot different now than it used to be, sadly. It’s not as good for screenwriters as it used to be in many ways. We caught a wave of a really wonderful time when screenplays were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it would happen once, maybe even three times a week. That’s how the business was done. You wrote a script, sold the script. That’s how it worked. It almost never happens now. It’s so unusual. It’s just not the way the business works anymore. If you look at The Writers Guild of America, you can find on their website what the minimums are for feature-length films, low-budget, medium-budget, high-budget, they’re right there, and they’re pretty good. If you sell a spec script where more than one person is interested or there’s talent attached, people pay a premium for that. But to be hired to write something, there are minimums that are negotiated with the Writers Guild. Those are the kinds of things we strike for, and we get them.

J: That’s another thing I wanted to ask about. What does starting the journey of getting into the WGA look like?

D: It’s one of those catch-22s. It seems like it’s impossible until it’s not, because you can’t work for a studio or production company that’s a guild signatory company unless you’re a member of the guild. But you can’t become a member of the guild unless you’ve worked for one of these companies. How does that work? What you do is you write a script on spec, and someone wants to hire you, and in order for them to hire you, you have to be a member of the guild. Well, now the guild is getting an application for membership from someone with a job and a paycheck, from someone who wants to make a contribution to the pension fund and the health fund, and you’re going to be paying dues from the very beginning, and suddenly it’s remarkable how quickly the application is processed.

J: I see. Wild.

D: That’s how it works. We got in because if you write a feature film for a movie studio, that qualifies you for full membership in the writers’ guild.

J: Earlier on, talking about a script, you said pretty emphatically that the way you were doing it was objectively wrong. Could you expand on that?

D: Sure. There was one version of a film we did, it was sort of a dark drama, a be careful what you wish for story, where this kid gets this opportunity that he thinks is good but becomes a curse very quickly. The CIA comes in, they’re suddenly exploiting this kid because he’s a genius, and they want him to work on all this stuff. It was a problem because, first, nobody really wants to see that movie. It’s not really fun. What’s the audience? Kids aren’t going to go see that movie. And the device itself, it’s a magical device. In a movie, you basically can get one thing. An audience will give you one thing, one buy-in, like, “you’re asking me to believe X. Okay, I’ll go with you,” right? But once you do that, you have to live firmly in that world. The choices after that have to be sort of believable. They can’t be completely untethered. The thing that worked about the version that we ultimately did was, yes, he became a genius, but after that, it all took place in the world that this kid lived in. His family, his school, the people in his life. Very inconsistent. Think about when you have an idea, part of having a good idea is having one that someone actually would want to spend money to make and market and distribute. And so if you have an idea, a question to ask is, who makes the movie? And what, you know, what does that look like? If you have an idea for a Blumhouse movie, that’s a certain specific type of movie. And a Warner Brothers movie is another type of movie. It’s sort of good to know what the difference is between these various things. That’s what I meant.

J: Is there anything else you’d like to say to the aspiring screenwriters out there?

D: I mean, it can be fun. It can also be really frustrating. Like life, it’s never perfect. But it’s good to have something that genuinely excites you and interests you. And, you know, if you have something like that, you might as well give it everything you’ve got. I think it says it in my book, like as long as you’re not doing harm to yourself or anyone else, why not? It’s better if you’re able to support yourself with something that you love doing. There’s really nothing better than that. And even if you can’t, it’s better to live a life without regrets. And in terms of grad school, I just think it’s always good to ask, “okay, if I do this, will it put me in a more favorable position in terms of my goals and my aspirations? Will it put me in a more favorable position? And how will it do that? And how much will it cost me?” If it doesn’t cost me anything, well, that’s kind of a no lose situation. But, you know, is it worth going into debt for? It’s usually worth going into debt for medical school because when you graduate medical school, you’re going to be a doctor, right? But when you go to screenwriting school, you don’t know if you’re going to be a working screenwriter. So that doesn’t mean don’t go, but it just means it’s a factor to consider, right? You’ve got to factor it in. And I think it’s a fair question. If you end up applying at NYU or anywhere else, I think it’s a fair question to ask also. Looking forward professionally, how will this put me in a better position? In what way will this put me in a better position professionally? If they can’t make a strong case for it, or if you don’t believe them, don’t go. You know, you don’t need it. I didn’t even do it undergrad. So, you know, you can do your own film school. You know, you can do Jack film school.

For more on David Diamond, be sure to visit his website www.diamondandweissman.com , and check out his book, Bulletproof Screenwriting!

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