Bring the Funny

by Greg DePaul

  And that usually happens in the first couple months of any writer-agent relationship.

  After that, if there is no success, you are effectively hip-pocketed. After all, they called all their friends and sent them your latest script. But, if they didn’t dig it, the last thing the agents want to do is bring you up again. They’ve learned their lesson.

  The only question remaining is this: Did you learn yours? Or will you stick with the agent as nothing happens in your career for months or years?

  Your only alternative is a new agent, one with different friends who haven’t met you yet. And getting a new agent usually requires providing him or her with a fresh, new script. And that requires you, the comedy screenwriter, to make another pot of coffee, sit your A back down in the C, and get writing. Again.

  Welcome to the life and career of a Hollywood screenwriter. I recommend a Mr. Coffee or a Melita micro-brew with a reusable wire filter.

  The thing to remember about agents is that, for the most part, they are just as desperate and manic as screenwriters. Often, more so. If it’s hard to make a living as a screenwriter, it’s ten times as hard for an agent, who must have ten clients working to make the kind of money her clients make. After all:

  10% × 10 Clients’ Incomes = 100% of the Average Salary of the Average Client

  You may find it satisfying to know that agents get fired all the time—by their agencies and by their clients. Don’t envy or fear them. Just use them.

  Write a great script, make them want you, and use them.

  Managers

  In California, which is pretty much the only state that matters to a comedy screenwriter, the law prohibits agents from producing their clients’ work. Apparently it has something to do with conflict of interest, but invoking ethics when discussing talent agents is like invoking ethics when discussing talent agents.

  Why be a manager?

  Because you are an agent who wants to produce. Otherwise, a manager does pretty much the same job an agent does for a screenwriter.

  There is a belief among many screenwriters that a manager should take a more hands-on approach to representing writing talent than an agent does. Thus, a manager would be sitting down regularly with writer clients, giving them detailed notes on their work and helping them improve their craft. And while that should happen, it rarely does.

  When my manager made the deal to sell Bride Wars to Miramax, he called to tell me what he had done. I was certainly thrilled. That one gig would pay for me to live for three or four years, assuming I didn’t eat out much and stayed away from Vegas. (I didn’t, but that’s another story.) Near the end of the call, he mentioned that he would be attached to executive produce the movie as well. To which I said, “Oh, OK. Cool.”

  What else was I going to say? I needed the sale. Moreover, why should I have stood in his way? He wanted to produce, and his credit cost me nothing.

  Again, the main reason to manage writers is so the manager can produce the client’s work. There is little value in that to the writer. But there is a value to being simultaneously represented by both an agent and a manager. In that case, you pay double the commission, but you may also get double the potential readers for your next script, which is priceless. You may even be able to get your manager and agent to compete for your affection. After all, this is Hollywood, and you’re a writer. You’ll take any little bit of power you can get.

  As with agents, I recommend you give managers no special loyalty. When they have exhausted their list of potential fans of your work, they will drop you into their hip pocket without warning, and you will need to find new representation.

  Now you know.

  Producers

  If you’ve been to film school, you know a producer’s job can be a lot of work. The producer may be corralling actors for the shoot or renting equipment with which to shoot them. The producer may be obtaining necessary permits or staying up nights fiddling with the film’s budget.

  In Hollywood, a producer does none of those things.

  Producer is a title. And that title can mean just about anything. It could mean that the person holding that title was the first person to read and advocate for the script—a very important person indeed. It could also mean that the studio has a deal in which every movie distributed of a certain type or budget automatically lists a certain name in the credits as a producer. I spent three months on the set off a movie I co-wrote, and yet there are two people listed as producers of the film whom I never met. Go figure.

  When a producer acts as an advocate for a writer and helps sell that writer’s script to a studio, the producer is attached to produce. That means, at the very least, that the producer’s name will appear on the movie poster. And that, for a producer, is like getting on base. In a minor-league game. Getting a name on the poster for a hit movie is like hitting a homer in the World Series.

  So producers have a lot at stake. They also have a lot of influence over the scripts for which they advocate. Which means they usually give notes to the writers.

  Are those going to be good notes? Will they help the script?

  Who knows.

  But be realistic; if you want to work with the producer, you’ll take the notes and use them. After all, the producer—like your agent or manager—is essentially an intermediary. The producer stands between you and the buyer, in most cases a studio.

  When I was pitching Bride Wars, I was working with a full house of producers; however, Alan Riche was the wise man among them who pushed me to make smart changes. That’s what great producers bring to the writing—notes that get the movie made. What they bring to the deal is relationships—with executives, other producers, and talent.

  Remember: if you want to write what moves your soul, write a poem. There’s no money in poetry, but you don’t have to take anybody’s notes.

  Everybody Else

  OK, there isn’t anybody else. I mean it. There isn’t.

  If your goal is to break into comedy screenwriting, there’s only you and the industry you must embrace—with all its faults, excruciating humiliations, and exceedingly rare and precious victories.

  That means you pretty much have to do whatever it takes to be an insider. After all, you can move to Los Angeles and still be very much on the outside. Most aspirants are. Los Angeles is a big city spread over a massive space. You can live in Hollywood and feel a hundred miles away from what’s happening on the inside because you don’t know anybody who has broken in. Hell, you can live down the street from Fox or Paramount and, if nobody will return your phone calls, you might as well be in Poughkeepsie.

  So how to pursue your dream of comedy screenwriting and continue to live as a regular person—the kind who has regular friends, works a regular job, and lives a regular life?

  You can’t.

  Regular people don’t break into this business. That has never happened. Manic people break in. Desperate people break in. Insane people …

  The point is that if you want to become a working, professional comedy screenwriter, you need to budget more than a handful of years to the task and dive into every element of the business—the writing, the schmoozing, the abandoning of all pretense that you’re headed for a normal life. That’s all gone now. Drop your civilian boyfriends or girlfriends because they can’t help you. And don’t think they’ll keep you sane; you don’t want to be sane. You’re not headed for sane. You’re headed for Hollywood. Collagen and colonics.

  You are entering a contest in which there are very few winners and many leave broken-hearted. And oh—a contest in which youth is a fleeting advantage. So don’t waste it.

  Here’s a story:

  In college, I was friends—not good friends, mind you, but friends—with a guy who went on to become an A-list comedian and movie star. I won’t name him because it might make me look a tad old. And, as a comedy screenwriter, I cannot afford to look old. But suffice it to say, he’s big.

  When I knew him, he was a young comedian with a bright future
. He was surrounded by a cabal of friends—many of whom went on to become his producing partners, co-writers, directors of his movies, etc. In other words, being a part of his entourage in college paid off big for those who took the time to join up when he was small-time.

  But I didn’t join up. I didn’t make the extra effort to follow him to comedy clubs or hang with him into the late hours. I suppose I could have, but at that time I had no idea I would go on to become a comedy screenwriter.

  However, looking back—I should have. It could have saved me years.

  By the time I decided I wanted to go to Hollywood, my friend was long gone from my friendship circle, and I was forced to break in without his help.

  Now, to be clear—I don’t mean to imply that the people who benefited from being part of his entourage in college were untalented or undeserving. Quite the opposite—that crew went on to make movies that I’ve enjoyed. More power to them.

  But you see where I’m headed. Every opportunity to make friends with someone on the way up should be grabbed while it can be. You can do all the great writing you want, but, without friends on the inside, you’re just, well … on the outside.

  So don’t struggle as I did. Don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be. Take every advantage you can get. Hollywood is not a meritocracy, and the only reliable rules are those that can be inferred from experience. So learn from mine. If you’re headed for comedy screenwriting glory, skip making friends with anybody who cannot help you. The day you give up and leave Hollywood for good is the day you can afford to hang with folks who cannot help you.

  Do I sound a bit cruel? If so, I’m sorry. I’ve just spent a great deal of my life fighting for recognition and a living in a cruel industry. And I’ve had my successes. Which have made me proud.

  But I want you—the comedy screenwriter holding this book—to have it easier that I did.

  Now take the quiz below, read the next chapter, and remember to keep this book very close to where you sit and write every day. I want you to pick it up whenever you need advice. I want to be the voice in your head that keeps you writing. I also want to be thanked very publicly at the Oscars, so don’t forget me, OK?

  Pop Quiz!

  1. To break into the film industry as a comedy screenwriter, you must: A) Sell your soul.

  B) Sleep with the devil.

  C) Take a bath in blood.

  D) Do all of the above, over and over, until you get an agent. From then on, have the agent do it.

  2. Pitching is best done by: A) Noon. People get sleepy after lunch.

  B) Aspiring writers who are too lazy to write.

  C) Herb, who lives in a cardboard box on Ninth Street in Santa Monica. I’m telling you: give your script to Herb and let him pitch it to studio executives. The guy’s a screenwriting savant. That’s why he lives in a box. Trust me: you don’t want people to actually read your script. You want Herb to pitch it.

  D) Screenwriters who are so successful that, frankly, they probably don’t need this book. But, to be clear, they should still buy it so that aspiring writers who visit their Hollywood mansions will see it on their bookshelves and feel inspired … to buy it.

  3. Hip-pocketing is when agents: A) Wear their pants too high.

  B) Give their clients ninety percent of everything they earn. (Sorry, that’s from the agents’ perspective.)

  C) Do everything possible to promote their clients. (OK, actually that’s called agenting.)

  D) Take advantage of naive screenwriters who think they’re being represented.

  4. To break into comedy screenwriting, you must do one thing: A) Become Jewish. Or a Scientologist. Or both.

  B) Sleep with a star, making sure to quote excerpts from your latest spec script during the heights of passion. Stars love that.

  C) Understand the biz.

  D) Write, you fool. You must write and write well. And C helps, too. But most importantly—write.

  5. In Hollywood, producers: A) Do all the grunt work of a production: they keep the budget, manage equipment, make sure everybody shows up on time, etc. In short, they do everything that, in theory, a producer should do.

  B) Are, for our purposes, primarily intermediaries between writers and buyers. Oh, and they get their name on the poster.

  C) OK, the answer is B. There’s no need for a fourth option. It’s B, and I want you to remember that. OK? Now enough of this. Let’s move on to …

  9

  The Life

  There are many paths to success as a comedy screenwriter. Unfortunately, almost all of them go through Hollywood. I’m not just talking about the geographic Hollywood, though the fact that you’ve read all the way to the last chapter of this book tells me that you may be thinking of gassing up your car and heading out there.

  I’m talking about the whole movie industry, which is run by a veritable handful of people. And those people live and work as a herd. If one of them likes you, it’s a solid bet they all will. And if one of them dislikes you … well, as I wrote earlier, it is actually possible to live in Hollywood and be, for all purposes, thousands of miles away from the movie business. In fact, most of the screenwriting population of Hollywood is effectively on the outside, far from connection with any of the players who could help them fulfill their life’s ambition. I know. I’ve been there. In fact, I’ve parked my car and stayed all night.

  Unless you get incredibly lucky, your struggle to break into the biz will take at least a few years, if not a sizable chunk of your life. This book will ideally be one of many you will read—hopefully, more than once—along the way. And while I am not an A-list writer, I have had significant success. I hope you can see the virtue in sacrifice and perseverance, whatever comes your way.

  Of course, I’m just one example of a screenwriter who broke in.

  We comedy screenwriters are an increasingly diverse group. However, there are some constants in our experience. One is that our ranks have no middle class. There are no blue-collar screenwriters. Nobody makes a “decent living” at it. Nobody punches in and out daily, knocking off at 5:30 and not doing a lick of work until they show up the next morning. That never happens.

  And our peculiar profession tends to attract and cultivate certain personality types. Psychologist Dennis Palumbo—a former screenwriter who specializes in treating creative professionals—says screenwriters are “self-loathing narcissists.” I have found this to be true in my own case and in the case of the many screenwriters I have known.

  Let me tell you more about what I know about you, or at least about the person you are trying to become.

  You are a writer, but you are not a true artist—at least not when you are screenwriting. You are above-the-line talent, but you will likely be ignored on the set of any movie you write, if you are even allowed on set. (By way of disclosure, I was banned from the set of Bride Wars, which I wrote. Apparently my presence would have been jarring to the confidence of the writers hired to revise my work. And, yes, the first thing they did was to re-write my character names. They took my “Liz” and transformed her into “Liv.” My “Abby” became “Emma.” I often wonder, Did that take a long weekend or what?)

  I digress. But that’s another thing you ought to know about us screenwriters; we pity ourselves with reckless abandon. Which brings me to the subject of …

  Sacrifice

  Just about all working screenwriters have a story about the days in which they were not working. The day they showed up in Hollywood, laptop in hand, ready to eat the bear.

  For me, Hollywood was a last chance to become somebody and make my mark. Living on the East Coast, I had written songs for a rock band—songs that never made me a dime. I had written freelance articles for the Washington Post—again, you can’t live off that. I was a playwright—no money there.

  But I wanted to earn a living as a writer. So I left the East Coast in a beat-up Toyota Tercel and headed West.

  Los Angeles is n
o paradise for a newcomer. I rented a studio apartment in a bad neighborhood and took a day job. There I was, selling books for a publishing company while toiling away on my scripts at night. My biggest advantage was my unpopularity—without a girlfriend or social life, my nights and weekends were open … for writing.

  I experienced near-constant depression mixed with occasional exhilaration—it was scary, lonely, and, yet, thrilling. I was on my own in a strange land without friends.

  I wrote, but I also researched. Every night I watched three or four movies, which I rented at a mom-and-pop video store just across the street from my apartment on Venice Boulevard. I stayed up late to get it all done and went to work groggy-eyed every morning. I was in my groove—my desperately lonely, hard-typin’ writer’s groove. In fact, I was so caught up in that groove that I paid little attention to my surroundings.

  One night, right before closing, I walked into that mom-and-pop video store to return the movies I had rented the night before and rent some more. I was working my way through the comedy section—determined to watch and diagram every movie they had. And as I stood in the back corner of the store, reading the DVD box for a movie called Eddy and the Cruisers, a guy walked up and put a gun to my head.

  The thief had already robbed the cash register and made the cashier and his girlfriend lie face down on the floor. He had locked the front and back doors of the store, trapping us inside. And now he was demanding that I empty my wallet. I had only spare change and a gum wrapper to give him. With the gun shaking in his hand, he berated me: I’m gonna kill you, motherfucker! KILL YOU!