Put Up or Shut Up Time

a few stray thoughts before I start posting even less than usual

Feb 13, 2022

This is going to be sort of a loose, impractical talk for a substack called Practical Screenwriting. Tomorrow filming begins on National Anthem, my first picture as a writer-director. My head is (happily, joyously, gratefully) a million different places at once. So forgive the jumble as I try to collect a few thoughts before my journey into a new unknown…

This screenwriting blog has been fairly quiet the last few months. I suspect some of that has to do with this: there’s only so much you can really say about screenwriting. Ultimately, I think formulas and lists and articles of advice are just forms of putting off the work. Aside from the whole magic trick of using your writing to break into a largely closed-off network-for-elites that likes to pretend it’s a meritocracy — aka, the entertainment industry — I think screenwriting is largely two things. First, it’s making something out of nothing. And second, it’s being attentive to what’s there in front of you and to what you need to do to guide what’s currently there to where it actually wants to be.

The most liberating pivot of my screenwriting career was when I switched from thinking my job was to write characters and scenes to realizing that my job was actually to discover what characters and scenes wanted to be. That is, when I stopped irritably clinging to my original intentions in writing a scene or creating a character and started regarding my original intentions as the door through which a new scene or character could enter the world.

There’s a British sort of mystical cult folk-rock singer-songwriter named Bill Fay who I think is a genius. And he calls his process “song-finding” instead of “song-writing.” I think of writing scripts in a similar fashion. It’s scene-finding and character-finding and moments-of-truth-finding. Or at least it is when I’m writing my own original material on spec. Developing with producers or executives is a different ballgame.

But I’m going to focus on working on original material because that’s where my head has been.

Last year I wrote a substack post titled “When Do I Stop Writing Scripts For Free?” Basically, it outlined my strategy in building my career one spec script at a time, with each new spec script — written for free, on my own — designed to be a bridge to carry me to what I wanted the next stage of my career to be.

First bridge/spec script: to go from being an outsider to a working TV writer. (Tangle Eye)

Second bridge/spec script: to go from a working TV writer to a showrunner/creator. (Damnation)

Third bridge/spec script: to go from someone who worked exclusively in TV to someone who worked in both TV and features. (The Olympian)

Fourth bridge/spec script: to go from working screenwriter to writer-director. (National Anthem)

At the time I wrote that post, I’d just finished pitching my script/directing project National Anthem around town. Here’s what I wrote then:

Obviously, I still don’t know how National Anthem is going to turn out. The saying is that any film getting made is a miracle. I’d add, getting an original, non-IP neo-western ensemble film made during a pandemic in 2022 has taken a series of miracles. And for it to turn out as great as I know it can be will take a whole new sequence of miracles going forward. But it’s nice to be in that position.

Here’s a very loose bird’s-eye-view of the steps that led to this miracle happening.

National Anthem really started with another feature script I wrote called The Olympian. Circa 2015, my manager queried me with an idea: he was a former collegiate rower and had always wanted to tell the story of Brad Lewis. In 1984, Lewis mounted an improbable run, going from a blue collar surf punk outsider who was sneered at by the Ivy League rowing establishment to becoming an Olympic gold medalist.

I was intrigued. I love sports movies and this felt like it could be a throwback to the sorts of blue collar underdog pictures I love like The Bad News Bears (my favorite movie of all-time), Rocky, Breaking Away, etc. My manager proposed two different paths: either we pitched the idea (based off of Brad Lewis’ memoir) around town and get me paid up front to write it, or I’d write it for free first, then we’d take our chances with the script in hand.

One path potentially offered immediate financial upside with very little risk (if no one responded to the pitch, I just wouldn’t write it). The other path offered much more risk (months of potentially unpaid work), but more or less unlimited creative freedom.

My thinking process: this was going to be my first real entry into the feature space and I had to make it count. I’d already had a few false starts on my own, writing 30-40 pages and then getting stuck. In fact, I’d even completed an original feature a year or two earlier that I never shared with my reps because it simply wasn’t strong enough. But this was different. The shape of Brad Lewis’ story was already there and it was a longtime passion project for my manager, a pretty influential dude.

Normally, the conventional wisdom is to get paid upfront to write. And for good reason. But I decided to write the script for free first. Mostly it was because I wasn’t writing this script for the paycheck but to open up the world of features for me. And I knew the best way to do that was to write something fully in my own voice, with my sensibility, without it potentially being watered-down or compromised by risk averse stakeholders.

It ended up being the right choice, as writing the script for free allowed me to write it as a sort of spiritual autobiography in disguise. That is, I used the materials of Brad Lewis’ rowing achievement as a way to work out my own issues as a blue collar outsider trying to make it in an elitist competitive space. Plus it let me work out some existential-slash-dad issues. And it was also as a way of dramatizing my own struggles in not letting my maniacal me-vs-the-world sense of self-reliance, focus, and ambition get in the way of being a decent partner to the person I loved. There was quite a bit of there there and by working with just my management company I had room to explore it.

The Olympian ended up becoming a sort of must-read script in a lot of circles and wound up tied for second place on that year’s Black List. But the only reason I could make the decision to write The Olympian for free with just my manager’s feedback was because my TV career was already paying the bills. Or more accurately, my TV career was paying my half of the bills — my wife is a professor at USC, which means my financial obligations are incredibly lessened, which means I’ve been able to make decisions in my screenwriting career based mostly on my creative instincts, which is a luxury very few outsiders or beginners or even mid-careerers enjoy.

But the big takeaway is this: it ended up taking about five years for me to be paid a cent for writing The Olympian, which as of this writing has yet to be made. But that script has paid itself off multiple times already, directly leading to a series of paid writing gigs and working relationships. My oddly autobiographical telling of the Brad Lewis story put me on a lot of industry folks’ radar.

That script laid the groundwork for my later directorial ambitions. But first I had to develop that ambition. Soon after I wrote The Olympian, my original pilot Damnation was ordered to series. I jumped into the showrunner role, though I leaned very heavily on others, particularly director-producer Adam Kane. I’d worked for five seasons as a writer then a writer-producer on Longmire, but showrunning was a whole new level of filmmaking.

I was in charge of hiring not just the writers for the show, but all the department heads and key crew: line producer, producing director, production designer, costume designer, cinematographer, stunt coordinator, editors, casting director, etc. Through trial and error, I soon began to understand the ways in which I could help these departments help me make our show, as I also began to understand ways in which I could hinder them.

I was also ultimately in charge of deciding who to cast in the show via the guidance of our LA and Calgary based casting offices. I had to learn how to trust my instincts and my understanding of how I actually wanted these characters to come to life. Whenever possible, I sat in on the casting sessions, giving notes during auditions and in many ways workshopping scenes with potential cast members.

Obviously, I was also in charge of running the writers’ room, guiding the story-breaking process, giving notes, revising scripts, and fielding and responding to studio/network notes.

But the big revelation for me as a showrunner was two-fold: first, prepping our rotating cast of episode directors; and second, overseeing the editing and post-production process on all our episodes. For the first time, I really began seeing scripts for what they really are: not as bible pages to which the filming process pays tribute, or even as blueprints for the final product, but more as pathways that should lead all participants to discovering the little bits of surprising truth that we can string together in the edit.

All of the sudden, by both prepping directors and refining and/or radically revising their edits of Damnation episodes into my final producer versions (which sometimes included shot-listing specific pickup shots and reshoots and new scenes), the directing role stopped being this mysterious thing to me. It wasn’t some shamanic mystical guru role. It was simply the practical process of finding and enabling the right collaborators, communicating a shared vision, and gathering as much usable-to-inspiring material as possible for the cutting room. In a way, I felt like I was doing a lot of directing already as the showrunner, but via the mediation of the guest directors. Maybe one day I could do it directly myself?

After Damnation was canceled, I re-engaged the classic working screenwriter waltz: vying for paying gigs (and missing out on most of them), developing material with interested parties, scratching out original material on my own. This went on for a year or so, with my awakened directing ambitions (I first wanted to be a writer-director in my teens but tucked that ambition away for a couple decades because it seemed so far-fetched) bubbling under the surface.

All the while, I had a series of images running thru my head: an emotionally neglected white boy who spends all of his time watching old westerns and wandering around outside near an Indian Reservation. Again, this was loosely autobiographical: I grew up in a series of trailers and trailer parks pretty close to the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation in rural Washington state and was pretty much raised on (raised by?) Clint Eastwood and John Wayne movies.

I didn’t have a plot, or even a story. Just a series of images that were floating in my head that I couldn’t shake. I knew if I wrote these images down too soon, they might lose their power. So I let them simmer for probably about nine months (if it’s good enough for nature…) and running the imaginary ever-evolving film in my head over and over again. Then on a family vacation at the end of 2018, I finally wrote these images down. But not as a script. I wrote them down as a shot list for the opening ten to fifteen minutes of a film. Clearly, I was now thinking as a director. I just didn’t know the story yet, nor the path to making it.

After running Damnation, I wasn’t interested in staffing for others. I loved being a showrunner and wanted to run my own circus again. But my manager reached out to see if I’d be interested in joining the writing staff of the second season of The Terror on AMC. He was an executive producer on the show and I’d had a good relationship with the creative execs at the network already. I met with the showrunner Alexander Woo, who seemed like a good guy (he turned out to be a really good guy) and I liked his take: season two would fuse J-horror mythological filmmaking with the historical horror of Japanese-American internment during WWII. We clicked and I joined the show.

In addition to liking Alex and the story and the network, I also told myself this: I’ll devote most of the next year to someone else’s show and that will cover my portion of the family bills and buy me 3-4 months afterwards to just focus on writing my directing script.

An extra side benefit of working on someone else’s show: because I wasn’t overwhelmed with showrunner duties — which usually means concurrently breaking episodes in the writer’s room, giving notes on script outlines, revising finished scripts, taking script notes, prepping the next episode, visiting set during the current episode, editing completed episodes, and mixing/spotting/fine-tuning edited episodes all at the same time while also being the show’s main ambassador to the studio and network — I could focus on developing my skills on set and in post to a degree I couldn’t on Damnation.

After The Terror wrapped in 2019, I wrote the directing project feature script over a couple of months, sharing it with no one but my wife. I originally conceived of it as an anthology film of sorts, with each chapter being my contemporary spin on the sorts of 1970s films that I love so much. A revisionist western chapter focused on the wandering kid (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Little Big Man, etc). A road movie/car culture chapter (Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, etc). A rural crime/action chapter (Charley Varrick, Walking Tall, etc.)

In the process of writing these chapters, I soon came to realize that they could actually fuse together into a single shared plot, which would be told from multiple points of view. What started as a Wild Tales or Mystery Train kind of anthology film transmuted into more of a Robert Altman/PTA shaggy ensemble film, but told in chapters and with a touch of non-linearity at play (per usual, Tarantino is the big obvious elephant in the room I’m trying to downplay here).

My wife thought the road movie chapter didn’t work — it was about a middle-aged guy obsessed with 1970s culture and classic cars who falls in love with a middle-aged woman who has spent the last 20+ years in prison. So I rewrote it. She still thought it didn’t work. So I scrapped those characters and reinvented a whole new chapter, about a diner waitress in small town South Dakota with a stutter who dreams of moving to Nashville to become a country singer, and who joins up with a lonely cowboy who can’t stop asking women to marry him.

This was now my wife’s favorite chapter. Which meant I was ready to share the script. I called it National Anthem because…it just seemed to fit. For me, it gave the script a kind of intrigue that I associated with titles like Nashville and Magnolia and other ensemble stories with big themes in mind. And since the story is my modern reinvention of the Western — for better and worse our primary nation-building mythos — it felt appropriate.

Just before going on vacation at the end of 2019, I sent National Anthem to my reps. I’d already let them know I was writing something for myself, but otherwise I’d kept mum about it. I also sent the script to Alex Saks, a producer who often works with first-time directors and/or projects with out-of-the-box sensibilities. She’s produced Sean Baker’s last two films Red Rocket and The Florida Project, Paul Dano’s debut film Wildlife, Cory Finley’s first film Thoroughbreds, and other cool stuff.

We’d met about four years earlier. She’d been a fan of The Olympian and we met to discuss a different blue collar sports story that ended up being setup elsewhere. But even though we didn’t work together on that project, we’d hit it off well-enough to stay in touch and have the occasional lunch. During one of these lunches, I’d mentioned my directing ambitions and asked if Alex would be interested in reading my script once I’d written a movie I’d want to direct. Thankfully, she was quite interested.

Once I wrote it, Alex read the script a couple of times, then reached out. She loved it. She had just a couple of thoughts (good ones). We decided to join up and try to get it made. My reps had varied reactions to the script: my managers loved it, two of my agents mostly seemed fixated on how violent it was (“for a calm friendly guy you sure do write dark material”), and another of my agents (I have three agents, two managers, and a lawyer on my team: maybe I should be more famous?) thought it was interesting but suspected it was too ambitious to get financed for a first time director, especially since it was an ensemble and not a star-vehicle, and especially since it was a flyover state modern western.

Undaunted, Alex and I went about the business of packaging the script with a cast. This took over a year, but we assembled a very intriguing ensemble and began pitching the project early in 2021. We hooked up with BRON Studios, which has been on a run of very interesting filmmaker-driven projects, including films I loved like Licorice Pizza, The Mule, Joker, and The Green Knight. And as it turned out, as with Alex, I had first gotten on BRON’s radar with The Olympian, which has been very close to going into production a number of times, one of which was with BRON with an Oscar-nominated international filmmaker attached.

As things usually go, a number of our intriguing ensemble players would end up having scheduling conflicts, with only Halsey and Zahn McClarnon of the originally packaged cast still being attached as production begins. After setting up the project, it took nearly another year to have the studio’s production calendar and casting availability to synch up enough to make this announcement:

The script that I first sent to Alex and the script that we begin filming tomorrow are essentially the same story, told in the same way, with essentially the same characters. The opening ten minutes of the film are essentially the same images that I had floating in my head several years ago.

But the script has been revised endlessly in that time, even though Alex and BRON have imposed basically no creative pressures on me. That is, the script has been evolving pretty much exclusively via my hand, but seemingly primarily on its own.

The first evolution was when Alex and I realized that one of the characters would need a better defined arc in order to lure the kind of actress who would help get us financed. I had always conceived of this character as a bit of a surprise — early on, she’s an obstacle in another character’s story, but as the picture unfolds, she becomes more and more of a central figure as we learn more about why she is the way she is. In many ways, she flips from an antagonist to a protagonist.

But in the packaging process, we came to realize that becoming a surprise protagonist wasn’t going to be enough. The character needed a stronger closing grace note to complete her arc in a more emotional way or else it seemed unlikely we’d attract the caliber of performer we were hoping to attract.

As it turned out, this thinking process led me to realize something: I didn’t need to rewrite this character or give her more “likable” traits. Rather, I was simply ending her story one or two beats too early. By staying with her just a little longer, I would be forced to find a new closing grace note to the relationship that was most central to her story. Doing this would force me to extend the story for that other character, too.

Once I found this new ending point, the arcs for both characters became much more resonant, with psychological and emotional throughlines that were much clearer to me now. I went back through their scenes and developed and deepened those throughlines now that I finally fully understood them. The script as a whole was elevated, all via the practical need of making a single character more appealing to potential actresses.

The next revision pass on the script occurred after it was setup with BRON. I hadn’t been to South Dakota for years, so I decided to fly out on my own dime and spend a week simply driving around the state and going down random roads and talking to people and dropping into roadside bars. Ostensibly this was so I could take photographs for production design and costume design, but it also introduced me to details that opened up the script in new ways in terms of mini-themes and motifs.

The next revision pass occurred late last year when myself and our producers and execs from the studio all flew down to New Mexico to do a pre-scouting trip in search of filming locations. Our location scout Eric Maldonado found some incredible locations, some of which didn’t exactly fit was on the page, but were fairly adjacent to those scenes. He’d send pictures of locations like this with the caveat that they didn’t fit a particular scene, but seemed fitting for the world of the film:

In my original script, there were no murals in it, let alone one with graffiti like this. And although finding a location like this was a direct result of Eric’s hard work and creative mindset, I also like to consider such discoveries to be gifts from the movie gods. And since I think it’s bad luck to refuse a gift from the movie gods, I’ve since revised National Anthem so that one of our scenes is now customized to fit this specific location. And that scene is now much, much more interesting for it.

Generally, in prep when you’re faced with finding locations that don’t exactly fit what’s on the page, you have a couple of options. You can reject the location as being wrong. You can try to jam your scene into the location. You can change the scene as a compromised version of your intention. Or, if you love this imperfect-for-the-current-scene location, you can use this location as a new window into your scene to find details and layers and opportunities that you would have otherwise missed.

As it’s probably clear by my framing of the issues, I’m much more in the camp of the last option. In fact, almost every scene in National Anthem has been revised to take advantage of the location we found for it. Sometimes substantially.

This is sort of me patting myself on the back, I know. But I also want to suggest: in my experience, if you can find a way to not be overly defensive about your script in the process of conceiving, writing, prepping, and filming it, you’ll probably also find ways to embrace each interruption or deviation from your intention not as a source of frustration and compromise but as a possible creative opportunity to improve the script.

This includes notes you don’t agree with. This includes ideas from cast or crew that don’t always fit your vision. I’m not saying you should passively go along with them. That would be you abdicating your responsibilities to the story you’re bringing into the world. Which is spiritual poison.

What I’m saying is this: if you can regard these notes and stray ideas and imperfect locations as gifts from the movie gods, or TV gods, then you can openly examine those gifts to see what they could become in your particular hands. Maybe these gifts are actually keys opening doors to something better. Or, maybe they’re just useless ceramic turds or keys to doors that just won’t open. The gods can be tricksters, too. If that’s the case, then you can regard these non-gifts as an opportunity for you to clarify your vision to your collaborators and be reaffirmed in your original intention. It can go either way.

Of course, doing all of this assumes good faith efforts by all involved. And requires good luck. But in my experience, the more I’ve regarded the script as an organism constantly evolving its way to where it wants to be — with my guidance — and the more that I open myself up to gifts from the mercurial movie and TV gods, the more that good faith efforts and general good luck seems to visit upon my projects.

One last stray thought before I wander off into the land of the writer-director to be forever changed (in what way? and for good or ill? I don’t know!): as I go through the shooting script and write notes to myself in regards of how I want to guide my cast, the more that I realize that my most recurring note is “you’re saying these words, but what you’re actually saying is ________.” Like this:

The above is a snapshot of what I mean. The scripted line is simply “Uh huh—.” But what I’ll be encouraging the actress to play is “Mom, I want to stab you in your face with a fork.”

Will it work? I don’t know! That’s the exciting thing. I’ve got a firm idea of how I want the scene to be played. But a decade on TV sets has also taught me that the best thing for me to do is first bring all my powers of attention to watch how it actually plays out in the cast’s hands, because there may be layers and notes hidden away in the scene that I wouldn’t otherwise ever see without their help. My job after that is to protect those unexpected moments and grace notes that feel right and truthful, while directing the cast away from notes that feel off, or untrue. (By the way this sometimes means recognizing when my scripted words and actions are actually getting in our way….)

But I’m trying to set the stage for these performative discoveries by writing dialogue that seems to say one thing while actually meaning something else. This is what Howard Hawks and later Peter Bogdanovich called "three cushion dialogue": "It hits three cushions before it goes in the pocket.” It's dialogue that dances around a message without quite coming out and saying it. It's a character saying "your tie's crooked" but meaning "I'm sorry. I love you."

This kind of dialogue runs throughout my scripts. I think it’s primarily the influence of classic westerns, where characters are almost always super laconic and guarded and therefore sneak big messages into small verbal packages. One of the frustrations of my TV career has been the difficulty of conveying to cast members — via the mediation of a rotating set of directors, sometimes with me literally in a different time zone and even country — exactly what lines in my script are saying what they seem to be saying, and what lines are saying something else completely.

Starting tomorrow, it’ll be up to me to convey all of this myself, directly to my hand-chosen cast. Ever since I first saw Pulp Fiction seven times in the theater as a fat lonely teen living in a small town trailer park — after my first watch I immediately went to the community college library and started reading about film history and theory and started writing my own scripts — I’ve been dreaming about this day arriving.

Now it’s here. It’s put up or shut up time.