Hollywood Ending

He enrolled in a screenwriting class at The Playwrights’ Center and moved in with me. His dedication to his craft was impressive. No matter what he was doing or how late he got home, he ended each day at his Macintosh Classic. Before long, he finished his first film script, The Good Stuff. “It’s my entry into the five-guys-sitting-around-talking genre,” he says. “It’s boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-doesn’t-know-what-in-the-hell-he’s-doing.”

He showed the script to Tom Pope, his instructor at The Playwrights’ Center. Pope literally wrote the book on screenwriting—Good Scripts, Bad Scripts: Learning the Craft of Screenwriting Through 25 of the Best and Worst Films in History—and lives, as Brent says, “the type of life all screenwriters from Minnesota want. He’s well respected in Hollywood, but lives on a lake in town.” Pope loved the script and sent it to his manager in LA. Not long after, a voice on our answering machine invited Brent to the West Coast.

“Since I had this script, I thought when I arrived that someone would meet me at the airport with a bag of money,” Brent says, laughing. Instead, he got a cold floor to crash on, courtesy of an actor friend.

Once Brent moved out to LA, Pope’s manager took him on as a client and helped him get an agent (you need both—managers oversee careers, agents get jobs; both take a cut), but scripts by new writers don’t sell overnight. In need of an income, he went to a familiar place, Barnes & Noble, then leased a studio apartment.

The strength of The Good Stuff script got him meetings with studio execs. But as the weeks turned into months, he felt he was spinning his wheels. He’d hear, “We love your script, we definitely want to make it, but maybe we could”—take your pick—“make the man a woman, the dog a cat, the comedy a drama . . . .” Everything was communicated in cryptic Hollywood doublespeak, which he wasn’t fluent in at the time.

“No one prepares you for how to sell your stuff when you come out here,” he says. “That’s something I’ve learned over the years. I don’t know that I’m a better writer than I was back then, but I’m a better salesman.”

Not all the meetings were a drag. There was the time Brent pitched a book adaptation to Billy Crystal, an experience he shared in an e-mail to friends:

“I was really nervous. I’ve had meetings with big producers and directors before, but none of them was ever Billy Crystal. Unless you are one of a handful of people on the planet, if you are in a room with him you are NOT the funniest person in that room.

I made Billy laugh right away, and that took a lot of pressure off me. He liked the pitch. He asked questions. The Castle Rock exec seemed to like it as well, and that’s even more important because he’s the guy ponying up the cash.

I’m going to incorporate their ideas into a new treatment, and I may have to go through this whole thing again. It’s a pain-in-the-ass process, but I’m feeling confident about it today.

So I guess this is an anticlimactic message—‘It went great! We get to wait some more! Whoo-hoo!’ But that’s how it works. If it happens at all, it happens slowly. And nothing may ever come of the meeting.”