How I Accidentally Wrote a Great Script for Breaking-in

without writing a good pilot for a TV show

Future Hollywood insider Tony Tost

I'm not gonna use this post to go into the full narrative of how I broke in, though I'm sure I'll get around to it at some point since I'm a chronic self-mythologizer who loves to talk about himself. But I will talk a bit about why I think I accidentally wrote a great breaking-in pilot script. Which is quite different from saying that I wrote a script that would make a great TV show. Or even that I wrote a great or good script.

Sometimes I get the impression that people are trying to break-in by writing a professional quality script. Something that approximates the quality of the films and TV shows they enjoy.

My perspective: the industry is flooded with writers who can write a B+ or 8 out of 10 script. Those who can slug and format their scenes correctly and put together a competently structured script largely free of cliches that makes all the right story turns at all the right page numbers.

If that's the kind of writer you're aiming to be, you probably need to have something else going for you in order to break-in. As in, you probably need a strong personal or familial connection to the industry. Or you need a wealth of experience or expertise that is relevant for whatever gig you're trying to get. Or you have to be insanely charming or charismatic. (I'm not insanely charming or charismatic. I'm an aloof but hopefully largely inoffensive hairy bowl of lukewarm water.) But by and large, I don't think merely writing a professional quality script will make anyone stand out from the thousands of other people who can generate such scripts.

That's why I say: if 100 out of 100 industry readers think your script is professional quality, you probably won't break in. But if 3 out of 100 industry readers think your script is the best thing they've read all year, then you've got a really great chance at breaking in. And it doesn't matter what the other 97 readers think.

I think a lot of writers outside the industry seem to assume that they just need to check the right boxes in order to get a pass into the industry from whatever gatekeepers are blocking their way. But in my experience, you don't need the mild approval of disinterested gatekeepers to break in. What you actually need at the start of your career are a couple of genuine true believers to passionately advocate on your behalf.

I broke into the industry with a pilot for an original show I called TANGLE EYE. I uploaded a copy of it here. I didn't go into writing it with this fully-conceived idea of "I'm going to strategically write a script that'll position me as a new hire-able voice in this mysterious far-off industry." I was just trying to write something that felt kinda great and exciting to me.

But I think I did accidentally write a script that was great for the purpose of breaking me in as an outsider. Why do I think my TANGLE EYE pilot was great for this specific, practical purpose?

1. It was a bit unique in subject matter and voice.

2. It had recognizable genre elements and directly emotional beats.

3. Elements of my script fused with my unique (for Hollywood) personal story to make industry people curious about me.

I’ll try to explain each of these points below and why they may be of some help for those looking to write a script that’ll get them meetings and hopefully paying writing gigs.

---

It was a bit unique in subject matter and voice. 

If I was to describe my default writing style, it might be something like "macho lyrical blue collar tonal clusterfuck." I'm a former poet and academic who grew up in a series of trailer parks and who shamelessly adores old school westerns and samurai movies and crime films. I've idealized men like Johnny Cash and Clint Eastwood since early boyhood, but I'm also very fluent in the work of my favorite poets like Emily Dickinson, John Ashbery, and Wallace Stevens. I also have a taste for the darkly absurd and the softly sentimental. And I have an intellectual tendency to view the world through a sort of dirtbag Marxist lens.

All of this simply means: the industry isn't overloaded with people who write like I do. But it does have successful writers who write in a somewhat similar mode. It's not that I have this unprecedented screenwriting voice or anything. If you read my spec scripts (my produced scripts are a different matter — I'm still trying to figure out how to get my voice through the development and production and filming processes and fully onto screen without most of the interesting edges getting sanded off along the way), you'll probably recognize most of my big influences: David Milch, the Coens, Tarantino, Martin McDonagh, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Denis Johnson, PTA. A grossly white sausage party, yes. And fairly expected touchstones for a Gen X straight white dude. Oh well.

But I think what made TANGLE EYE stand out a little was that it was a bit more authentically rural blue collar than most scripts written in a Coens/QT mode. (I set it in and around the abandoned mining town where I grew up in rural Washington state, near the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation.) And maybe it pushed a bit more overtly into its lyrical/poetic/absurdist tonal registers than most scripts written in this mode. My script wasn't one of those blankly ironic or deadpan hipster Tarantino rip-offs that were everywhere in the decade following PULP FICTION. It was more soulful than clever or cool, but it also wasn't a straight up earnest misery porn story.

It's not like I was reinventing the wheel. And I'm sure my script repelled more people than it attracted. Westerns aren't exactly a hot ticket item in Santa Monica. But again, in order to break in, you don't need dozens of industry people to half-heartedly like your script. You need a couple of people to love it.

So for those handful of industry readers who already loved Tarantino/Coen/McDonagh types of scripts, or who just liked old school macho western storytelling with a twist, I think my voice was very welcome. It was pitched in a mode they already liked. But hopefully, it was also just different enough to feel like a fresh variant. If nothing else, my script committed itself to a fairly distinct voice and sensibility.

Why was that good for a breaking-in script? In almost all of my industry meetings, the unspoken question hanging over me as a writer is this: am I someone who the other person can hire in the future to adapt some property they control?

For those who dug my writerly voice in TANGLE EYE, it meant I was potentially someone who they could feel comfortable hiring to adapt some masculine, or muscular, or blue collar source material they controlled. And best case scenario, maybe I was also potentially someone who could perhaps do this with some sensitivity and/or humor and/or intelligence.

My original pilot suggested that I had a defined wheelhouse in terms of content, but it also suggested that I had my own little spin on that content. That ended up being really, really useful for me.

It’s ten years later and I still primarily get sent blue collar Americana stories to possibly adapt. And I think that can ultimately be traced back to the script that I first broke in with and the meetings and conversations that were generated by that script. Luckily for me, blue collar Americana stories are still exactly the kinds of stories I want to be writing.

---

It had recognizable genre elements and directly emotional beats.

The story for TANGLE EYE is extremely elemental. An ex-con named Randall Harris gets a letter from his estranged younger brother Trevor. Trevor has tracked down the man they both blame for a childhood tragedy and he needs Randall's help. Randall arrives in a rural town in Washington state called Tangle Eye, only to find his younger brother freshly murdered. Randall decides to stay in town to figure out what happened and get revenge.

That's the set-up. In my pilot script, Randall Harris essentially plays the same kind of role as the Continental Op in Dashiell Hammet's RED HARVEST, which Akira Kurosawa adapted for Toshiro Mifune's character in YOJIMBO, which Sergio Leone copied for Clint Eastwood's character in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS: a dangerous and seemingly amoral stranger arrives in a corrupt town and starts setting the conflicting parties against each other in order to cleanse that town of its poisons. Again, not reinventing the wheel. I was simply offering a new variant on a time-tested story.

Which is the great thing about working in a genre mode: there's already a pre-existing social contract between the script and the reader. That means there are built-in expectations that you can thrillingly fulfill and/or delightfully fuck around with from the get-go. For me, that meant I could set up and satisfy certain revenge story expectations (there are some cool confrontation scenes and some startling violence) and I could also upend some of those expectations with scenes that are more touching and/or lyrical and/or tonally weird than usual.

Since TANGLE EYE operated in a sort of revenge western mode, I didn't have to do a lot of premise or world-building. I just needed to establish a connection between the two brothers, give them a shared trauma and a big bad to deal with, then have one of the brothers end up getting mysteriously killed. Now I had a revenge story and a mystery going forward.

Just about all of my pilot’s genre beats are big brushstroke ones. Which means they can be pretty direct, visceral, and hopefully emotional. The best scene of my entire pilot script is the first scene in the teaser: in a childhood flashback, the two brothers are abandoned in a camper trailer by their drug-addicted mother, who tells five year old Randall that he's now baby Trevor's protector. After she leaves, Randall has to figure out how to take care of one year old Trevor, even though he's terrified himself. Night falls as the two boys sit at a fold-out table in the camper trailer, eating ice cream for dinner, all while a terrifed five year old Randall assures his baby brother that everything is going to be okay.

As the teaser, it reads like a four page script for a short film. Eight pages later, the dangerous adult Randall arrives in town in the present day to reunite with Trevor and avenge their past, only to find Trevor dead. So by page twelve, we're off to the races. But for a sympathetic reader, by page twelve I’ve also already generated pretty strong emotions with the teaser and the unexpected reveal of Trevor's death. I couldn’t do all of this that quickly if I was trying to reinvent the wheel. I needed the help of the genre itself.

Confession: when I wrote the TANGLE EYE pilot, I had no idea what was going to happen in episode two, let alone the entire first season, let alone the whole series. Even though I didn't know anything about the industry, I realized even back then that my goal wasn't to actually sell my script or get TANGLE EYE made. I was a 35 year old poet and academic living in Seattle who had about 55-60 pages to try and convince some industry people that he existed.

In truth, I think not worrying about setting up a season of TV freed me to just make the pilot into a writing showcase. For better or worse, I simply packed that pilot with as many scenes as I could that showed off what I was best capable of doing at that time: emotional scenes, macho scenes, darkly funny scenes, maybe surprisingly lyrical scenes. As a pilot, it probably did a pretty bad job of setting up the rest of the season’s story lines. But as a writing sample, it worked wonders for me.

Before TANGLE EYE, I'd written a different pilot for a show called THE PINES — basically, me trying to do THE WIRE in the Missouri Ozarks. Beforehand, I planned out in detail an entire season of textured and layered storylines told through multiple POVs. I remember having a note card that had WWDSD written on it hanging above my writing desk: What would David Simon do?

I wrote the pilot. It was a high-minded, textured, thematically-rich snooze fest. Probably not what David Simon would do. (At least not with Ed Burns.) All I was doing in that pilot was establishing characters and story lines that would theoretically pay off in terms of drama and emotion somewhere down the line, in some other imaginary episode. As a writing sample for an unknown outsider, all it demonstrated was that I could introduce characters and a world without making a reader feel any fucking thing in particular in the process.

So I scrapped THE PINES after months of prep, research, and writing and revising. Then I wrote TANGLE EYE in what felt like a mad dash. Two weeks, max. I just decided: I'll tell a modern day Clint Eastwood western — probably my favorite kind of story — set in the town where I grew up. In doing so, I'd tap into all types of family secrets and half-remembered anecdotes and interesting local personalities. I didn't even outline the story ahead of time. I just came up with the Spaghetti revenge western conceit and the two brothers, then wrote it out scene-by-scene, trying to entertain and surprise myself on a page-by-page basis.

I think this ended up being to my advantage simply because it let me write a series of interesting scenes. Well, interesting only if you already dug my kind of voice and this kind of story. But then again, if you weren't interested in my kind of voice or this kind of story, you were never going to hire me anyway.

Working in a genre mode helped me jump right into this story without much throat-clearing or world-buildiing. And it gave me narrative cover to write directly emotional scenes. It also gave industry readers a handle on what kinds of stuff I might be able to adapt or write for them.

As a rule of thumb, when you're breaking in, you probably want to do one of two things in your breaking-in script:

1. Find a unique way to tell a time-tested type of story. (TRUE DETECTIVE, etc)
2. Tell a unique story in a simple, direct voice. (LOST, etc)

As an outsider, if you tell a time-tested story in a simple, direct type of voice, that's probably going to be too boring and familiar to get peoples' attention.

And if you tell a unique story in a unique way, that's probably going to be too frustrating and/or confusing to get people interested.

In TANGLE EYE, I had a slightly unique spin on an old school revenge western. It was set in the modern world, in a weird little Northwest town, and told in a mildly unique voice. That and a whole bunch of good luck and good meetings ended up being enough to break me in.

---

Elements of my script fused with my unique (for Hollywood) personal story to make industry people curious about me.

This might be the biggest one. I did a whole 30 minute video about choosing what to write for your break-in script. It's here:

In essence: if you're an outsider without connections to Hollywood, if you can figure out how to get into rooms, those very things that have been keeping you out of those rooms are going to be the things that industry people will find most interesting about you, once you get into those rooms.

Basically, I didn't think I could have a Hollywood career simply because I grew up in trailer parks in the middle of nowhere. So for most of my adult life, I didn't even try. But once a friend of mine broke in as a TV writer, I did try. And after his agents loved my TANGLE EYE script, I started getting meetings. And when I did, I was surprised to discover that industry people were less interested in talking about TANGLE EYE than to talk about me and my life story. My life story didn't seem all that unique to me, but for a lot of industry people from polite upper class families who are used to talking to other industry people from upper class families, I was a fascinating outlier.

The setting of TANGLE EYE — also, one of the trailers I grew up in

If I hadn't set my pilot script in my blue collar small town, basically casting my script as the story of an imaginary version of myself getting revenge for the death of the current version of myself, then I don't know if I'd had as many people aware, intrigued, and ultimately invested in my story. (Briefly: my biological father was a lifelong criminal who spent much of his short life in prison; my two half-brothers who grew up with him in the Ozarks followed him into lives of crime and imprisonment, with one committing suicide in his 20s — Randall in TANGLE EYE is the version of me that grew up with my biological father in the Ozarks instead of with my mother and ex-cop adoptive dad in Washington state.)

Also, people were intrigued that I came from this blue collar world but still ended up getting a Ph.D. from Duke and becoming a Walt Whitman Award-winning poet. Obviously, my life story is unique to me. But instead of trying to veil my outsider life story, my pilot script doubled-down on it. I think my agents largely convinced industry people to check out my script based on that life story. An executive would later tell me that they were basically told by my agents that one day I crawled out of the Ozarks with like a hatchet in one hand and a copy of ABSALOM! ABSALOM! in the other and after hearing that story the exec was too intrigued not to check me out. (Nice work, agents.)

Because my script was set in the sort of blue collar small town world that I grew up in, and because that background was a big part of what made industry people interested in me anyway, what I accidentally ended up doing was positioning myself as being uniquely poised to tell authentic small town America stories going forward. So if the industry people who liked my script also liked me when we met, I was now on their list whenever they happened to option or control a rural crime story, or a blue collar sports story, or a modern day western.

My pilot script was a natural launching pad in my early meetings for me to talk about my somewhat unique background. And as much as I talked up my pilot script in previous paragraphs, at the start of my career, my background was probably a bigger calling card than my script. As the executive producers of LONGMIRE would later tell me, the main reasons they hired me for their show was because I grew up in a similar world as the show and because I was cheap. In fact, I was their third choice for the position. Choice number one got his own series greenlit, while choice number two got a movie greenlit. So, I was the consolation prize after the consolation prize.

And it was apparently mostly because of my rural blue collar background. Now, I had to write well enough to keep my job on the show — there’s a reason I went from freelancing two episodes in season one to freelancing four episodes in season two, and then ending up getting promoted up to producer — but it was my unusual-for-Hollywood background that really got me the job. And it was the subject matter of my pilot that made that background an essential part of my writerly identity right at the start of things.

I wouldn't write TANGLE EYE now the way I did ten years ago — it could be structured more effectively, and it could definitely do more to set-up future episodes, and it’s probably a little too-enamored with its own voice. But it certainly served its practical purpose. When I wrote it, I was mostly just trying to escape academia by writing a unique-to-me script in a mode of storytelling I loved. In doing so, I unintentionally linked what was unique about my past to what I hoped to be my future: writing the sorts of scripts that you could imagine Clint Eastwood directing and/or starring in.

---

If you're having trouble getting traction with your breaking-in script, I'd consider trying to answer these two questions:

1. What's a genre or archetypal story that you love that you could provide a unique spin on?

2. What are the unique elements of your background and/or identity and/or life experiences that would make industry insiders curious about you?

If you can find a way to write a compelling script that combines the answers to #1 and #2, well….there's no guarantees, of course. Hollywood is not a meritocracy and so much of this shit unfolds according to chance. Remember, I started off gloriously as the runner-up to the runner-up for a freelancer gig on an A&E show that could’ve gone belly-up after season one instead of running for six seasons.

But, if you can combine the answers to those two questions into a compelling script, then chances are you’ll be writing something that’ll get people curious about you and that’ll give you something interesting to talk about once you meet (the story of you). Basically: show off what you can do and show off who you are. I truly believe doing that will help you stand out a lot more than approximating someone else’s idea of current industry standards.