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Reveling in a stretch of road called success

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Special to The Times

As recently as three weeks ago, Kyle Ward was just another assistant at DreamWorks. Until he sold his first screenplay, “Fiasco Heights,” to Universal Pictures for Michael Bay to produce. Four days after that, Creative Artists Agency signed him as a client. Last Thursday, Lionsgate hired the 27-year-old to adapt “Kane & Lynch,” a video game launching in September about two death row escapees.

And then Saturday night he strode into Guy’s Bar on Beverly Boulevard straight into the excited embrace of a handful of industry strivers who were throwing a celebratory party in his honor.

Such is the trajectory of young Hollywood -- “young” signifying both literal age and those freshly minted on the successful side of the industry scale. A seminal moment like this is really something to witness. At Guy’s, a sea of former agency and studio assistants, once-struggling writers and first-time producers, having gotten their initial taste of power, money and recognition -- either firsthand or vicariously -- were now licking their lips, suffused with the warm rush of the momentum of success and hungry for more.

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For now, Ward is the chosen one. An action thriller envisioned in the highly stylized format of “Sin City” and “300,” “Fiasco Heights” tracks an infamous hit man and a failed private-eye through a fictional city as they seek a woman with a mysterious and valuable briefcase.

Ward originally built the world of “Fiasco Heights” into a pilot script for a proposed TV series, but when industry friends suggested that it would make a great film, he condensed all the character arcs into a feature script. Ward, drawing from a childhood spent watching classic noirs such as “The Maltese Falcon” and “Double Indemnity,” describes his creation as “like a film noir on speed.”

“My inspiration was to take everything I remember characteristically about a film noir and just turn it on its head and have fun with it,” he said.

A bopping DJ spun lounge mixes of “99 Luftballons” and “True” through the dim bar while a hundred more chattering celebrators crowded outside under heat lamps. They patted each other on the back, talked up their ambitions and promoted their friends hyperbolically: “Meet the sexiest man in Hollywood”; “new production company, but we’ve got money behind us”; “Have you met the funniest guy in Hollywood?” There was no sense of fear or tenuousness or the fleeting nature of this moment, as wonderful as it was for Ward, who had long since melted into the mass of partygoers.

Ward started in the DreamWorks story department nearly three years ago and ultimately became an assistant to executive Mark Sourian. Although he had come to L.A. to become a writer, and continued to work on his screenplays during whatever pockets of time he could find, Ward had since committed to an executive development track. He was preparing to start a new round of job interviews a few weeks ago when heat started around “Fiasco Heights.”

“These past few weeks have just been a whirlwind,” Ward said. “It’s like having a goal and being on the road to that goal, working hard every day, just blood and sweat to get there, and all of a sudden you find yourself on a completely different road. And it’s funny that that’s the road that you initially started out on.”

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Well, it’s a road with some gigantic hidden potholes. But for this glorious moment, at least, it looks like a gorgeous stretch of highway with no curves, no cops and no other cars.

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Good thing she kept at ‘Daley’

When writer-director Hilary Brougher’s “Stephanie Daley” screened at Sundance in 2006 and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, it was the surprising and satisfying culmination of a 10-year journey that may have felt like the longest pregnancy of all time.

In “Stephanie Daley,” which opens Friday, Amber Tamblyn plays -- or, more accurately, lives inside -- the titular 16-year-old girl who is accused of drowning her newborn in a restroom stall despite claiming that she didn’t know she was with child. A pregnant forensic psychologist (Tilda Swinton) slowly excavates the buried truths of both Stephanie’s and her own painful pasts.

In terms of the worthiness of her script, which covers the complicated and generally unexplored contradictions of the internal lives of mothers-to-be, Brougher could relate. She struggled with ambivalence as she initially developed the idea in the late ‘90s.

“I had a lot of doubts as to whether I was up to writing a naturalistic drama and as to whether this was a story anybody would care about,” said Brougher, who studied film at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and wrote and directed her first movie, “The Sticky Fingers of Time,” in 1997. “Maybe there was a reason there were no movies about it.”

But Brougher ultimately found some peace -- and some crucial structural changes -- when she workshopped her intense and moving screenplay at the Sundance Institute’s screenwriting lab in 2001. As a fellow at the weeklong lab, Brougher met with two advisors each day -- such as Howard A. Rodman (“Joe Gould’s Secret”), Naomi Foner-Gyllenhaal (“Bee Season”) and John August (“Big Fish”) -- for a few hours each, in which they provided criticism and feedback.

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“Once you get to the lab, you really can’t turn back,” Brougher said. “Because it’s not just this thing that you’re doing at home at night in the dark. It’s this thing that really sharp minds and big hearts have supported and invested their time in, and that does make a difference.”

After the screenwriting lab, Brougher went to the Sundance directing lab and then became pregnant with twins, which explains why it took her a few more years to pull “Stephanie Daley” together. And then, in 2006, she found herself back at Sundance receiving the coveted screenplay award.

“It was extra satisfying in light of this project, specifically because I thought about throwing it away so many times,” Brougher said. “It’s a nice reminder that the next time that I try and get brave, it can work out. It can be worth it.”

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Talking about rejection, on ‘Pass!’

“Tenacity can be learned,” said Peter Hanson with quiet conviction.

This could easily serve as the promotional logline of Hanson’s work in progress, “Pass! Screenwriters on Surviving Hollywood Rejection,” a kind of oral history of woe that he is compiling with fellow Hollywood trench-mate Paul Herman. The two struggling screenwriters have been collecting the war stories of working scribes and videotaping interviews for a planned companion documentary.

“What we wanted to do is identify the skills that writers develop in order to persevere,” said Hanson, who is also an author (“Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel”) and documentary filmmaker (“Every Pixel Tells a Story”).

“Some writers get through on talent. Some writers get through on salesmanship. Some writers get through on connections. But the common thread seems to be that they don’t give up. Since the odds are stacked against writers at every stage, it takes an unusual sort of tenacity to sustain belief in yourself,” he said.

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So far, writers as diverse as Steven E. de Souza (“Die Hard”), John Carpenter (“Halloween”), Ronald Shusett (“Total Recall”), Guinevere Turner (“The Notorious Bettie Page”), Stephen Susco (“The Grudge”) and Larry Cohen (“Phone Booth”) have shared their more troublesome professional experiences and how they made the best use of their personalities and talents to overcome them.

Though Hanson and Herman have received their own share of no’s from potential subjects -- one writer-director begged off, saying that those stories are too painful to recount -- let’s just say that there’s been no shortage of material.

Hanson claims that their subjects have been enthusiastic about discussing a topic both universal in nature and essential for success yet mostly ignored by the ocean of screenwriting books and Writers Guild seminars available to writers who are both unseasoned and highly successful. (Information on the project can be viewed at www.passtalk.com.)

It remains to be seen whether there’s an eager audience, since wannabe writers could find the insider stories of “constant adversity and degradation” as depressing as they are inspiring.

“This project is all about turning negatives into positives,” Hanson said. “If 90% of what Hollywood gives you is rejection, if you can’t find some way to turn that into a positive in your life, then you’re going to be crushed by this business and you’re going to quit.”

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Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. Please e-mail any tips or comments to fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.

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