Today, I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, David Aaron Cohen. David’s been working as a writer in this business for 30 years. The two of us have bonded over our Chicago deep-dish roots and mutual love of tennis, specifically our fascination with the sport’s newest superstar, Carlos Alcaraz. David was able to see him live in Indian Wells a couple of weeks ago. I’m still jealous.
Recently, David told me about a class he’s been wanting to put together forever that focuses on teaching writers something that’s never taught: how to navigate the business side of the industry. We’re not talking about how to write a good logline or how to nail those first 10 pages. We’re talking about how to pitch, how to get an agent, how to sell to streamers, how TV writers rooms work, how to navigate a writing assignment when you’re dealing with four different producers – the kind of stuff we’ve all wished there was a class for. Well, now there finally is.
It’s going to be a 9 part Zoom course, each session being 2 hours long, and it’s definitely going to fill up fast. So you’ll want to register as soon as possible. Sign-up details will be at the bottom of the post.
For those of you who don’t know anything about David, he had a movie released last year called AMERICAN UNDERDOG (a 98% audience rating on RT), has two tv series in development – one with Sony, one with Lionsgate, just finished adapting the international best-seller, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. Going back deeper into his catalog, he co-wrote THE DEVIL’S OWN, starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. He also wrote one of the great sports movies of all time, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.
In order to get a feel for David and what he’s like as a teacher, I asked him to share a few of the biggest lessons he’s learned in the business. But before we get to those, I demanded he tell me (and you) the craziest story he’s ever experienced as a screenwriter.
DAVID AARON COHEN: There have a been a few. LOL. Here’s one. 2017 I get a call from a director friend of mine. He’s been hired to make a 10 million dollar movie with John Travolta. Only catch is, we have to write a script for him to read and sign off on by February 5th. I look at the calendar. It’s January 14th. What the hell? We break the story in 5 days, card it, set our page counts, and work 21 days straight. Deliver it to the producer who gives off the worst vibes. Total hustler. But his check cleared.
Travolta reads and approves the screenplay. Casting happens: Katheryn Winnick, Tom Sizemore (one of his last roles). Pre-production. Shooting in Puerto Rico. I do some rewrites. Jodi, the director (not his real name!), heads off to the island. The day before principal photography starts, the line producer (who’s in cahoots with the shifty producer) announces that instead of the 5 million dollars left in the budget for shooting, there’s only 1.9 million. Have to cut 35% of the script. IN ONE DAY. You can imagine how that turned out. The producer literally STOLE the other 3 million dollars. Against all odds, Jodi kept shooting. Then a hurricane hit Puerto Rico and destroyed all the sets. I kid you not. Somehow, he finished the movie.
I saw bits of it back in L.A. We made a plan to do re-shoots with the contingency budget to make all the plot holes make sense. But the producer had STOLEN that money too. Then he fired the director. Edited the movie himself. Delivered it to the distribution company. I still haven’t gotten drunk enough yet to watch it, although I have read some of the audience reviews. They’re hilariously bad. But here’s the final plot twist. Last summer I log onto Netflix, looking to watch the new Adam Sandler movie HUSTLE, and I see this: “TOP TEN MOVIES STREAMING IN THE U.S.: NUMBER 9 – SPEED KILLS”
As someone once said, “there’s no accounting for taste.” Or chalk it up to a great poster.
CARSON: This is literally my worst nightmare! And yet, my Friday night viewing is set. Did you see what I did there? “Friday Night.” :) Okay, let’s jump into the lessons. Take it away, David!
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DAVID: Thanks, Carson. I want to start by sharing an “Ah-Ha” moment from earlier in my career. It’s something I call…
MAKING MOONSHINE
This is a process critical to every story you ever want to tell. How do you make moonshine? Take your basic still out in the backwoods, fill it with mash. Heat that up with steam. The mash sinks to the bottom, but the vapors that rise are pure alcohol. That’s your job, making those vapors. When they condense back into liquid, you’re drinking moonshine. Which is a really convoluted way of saying, DISTILL YOUR STORY DOWN TO ITS ESSENCE. Distill! Distill! Distill! Put it into the pressure cooker of your heart and soul and guts until those vapors start to rise. All great stories start with essence.
Here’s one example. My big break in Hollywood was getting tapped by director Alan J. Pakula (ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, SOPHIE’S CHOICE, KLUTE, etc.) to adapt a little-known non-fiction book called FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. I wrote a first draft which everyone agreed got the tone right, but little else. I kept going. I was flailing around. Six months passed. The studio panicked and so did I, but Pakula didn’t. He pushed me to dig deeper, to find the essence of the story, to go find the core. We talked. We went back and forth. Is it the coach’s story? The quarterback’s? There was a lot of father/son energy. Maybe that was the key. But none of those ideas provided the throughline we were looking for – the central idea that was bigger than any individual character. Without that idea, all I had was mash.
What does it mean on a story level to heat up the mash? It means being curious. Fearless. Letting go of fixed ideas. And doing the research. I had spent a couple weeks in Odessa a year prior, meeting with the players who were on that 1988 Permian Panthers team. They were three years out of high school, but still haunted by their experience, by the feeling they had let everyone down. I could sense the heat there, when I put myself in their shoes, when I opened my writer’s self to what they were feeling.
I remember the moment it all crystallized. I was sitting in a little anteroom of Pakula’s New York City office, next to a pile of old luggage. And then this sentence kind of hit me, like a download. This is a story about a group of high school football players who carry the hopes and dreams of an entire town on their shoulders. That was it. Moonshine in twenty-five words. I sat down and wrote the draft that became the movie, guided by that idea. It poured out of me in like four weeks because I now knew what FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS was about. What every character was feeling. Go watch it. You’ll see that all the scenes serve that master, that controlling idea, that logline – call it whatever you want. I call it MAKING MOONSHINE.
PITCHING IN THE ZOOM AGE
One of the most critical skill sets you need to master to succeed in our business is the art of the pitch. Great stories CONNECT with people. When pitching, you are the CONNECTOR. Think of it like an electric circuit. The story is the current. You’re the switch. When you flip the switch, that story energy must ELECTRIFY your audience. And I’m not talking about reaching their heads. The jolt of your story has to hit them right in the gut. The solar plexus. First chakra. Does that sound hard? It should. Because it is. But if you’ve done your homework, if you’ve made your moonshine, you’re ready.
Back in the late 80’s when the whole “high concept comedy” idea was dominating Hollywood, I used to laugh and say the opposite is true. ‘High concept’ is just code for the stupidest, low-brow humor – the classic example back then being a five-word pitch: “DANNY DEVITO, ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: TWINS!” But with 30 something years of pitching in the rear-view mirror, I look at that and see genius. It’s like the Michelangelo of Moonshine! Five words that conjure up an entire movie! Twelve syllables that give you that jolt, that laugh, that coin drop moment! You see the poster, the trailer, the whole thing. (FYI TWINS cost 15 million dollars to make in 1988 and grossed over 200 million worldwide.)
But the era of selling one-line pitches is long gone. In today’s marketplace you need to be ready to flip that switch and deliver the one-minute version, the five-minute version, the 15-minute version, and the (rare) 30 minute deep dive. Does that sound hard? It is and it isn’t.
The most important ingredient in a successful pitch is something everyone can deliver. It’s PASSION. Let me take you there. Imagine you just had the most earth-shaking experience of your life. You watched your wife give birth! You lived through an 8.0 earthquake! You were about to drown, and someone saved you! And now, minutes later, you are telling your best friend about it. How would you sound? Breathless, pumped, adrenaline flowing? That is pitch energy! That’s what you’ve got to bring.
Second ingredient: CLARITY. Your passion captures the attention of your audience. It delivers the jolt. Now you need to get in their heads. Not with an overload of information. Just enough to let them know where things are heading. Which is why a big piece of clarity is proper SIGNAGE. Lay out the story with that Carson-esque contest-winning logline, then post the signs that put the doubts to rest: act breaks, character arcs, key plot points. Give your audience the same feeling you get from reading the first pages of a great script. What happens there? You relax and settle in, knowing you are driving down the story highway in good hands.
Ingredient #3: EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE. Because there is a big catch to clarity. There is a ticking time bomb associated with delivering information. The minute it feels dry, perfunctory, logical or any of the above, your car just crashed off that highway. Every beat needs to be soaked in emotion. Cannot emphasize this enough. Your hero isn’t “heartbroken,” she’s CRUSHED. Your villain isn’t a “badass,” he’s KIM JONG-UN ON STEROIDS (Ok, you can probably do better than that). Movies are about emotion. They are about making your audience FEEL. Why are horror movies eternally popular? Because they target the one emotion that everyone can relate to: FEAR. Your pitch MUST BE an emotional experience. So pull out all the stops. Speed up, you slow down, your voice goes high and low. You pause at the moments of suspense. I know what a lot of you are thinking here: “I’m a writer. I’m not an actor.” Well, then go write the script of your pitch. Write it out word for word. Make it passionate, clear and full of emotional language on the page, and then…
Ingredient #4: PRACTICE THE HELL OUT OF IT. Pitch it to your friends. Pitch it to your parents. Pitch it to the postal worker. Get over yourself and your shyness. Pitch it to the mirror. Record it on video. Ask your actor friends for input. LISTEN TO WHAT THEY SAY. If you want to succeed in our highly competitive business, you better be ready to work outside your comfort zone.
And while selling a pitch is fantastic, it isn’t the only positive outcome of pitching. It’s your opportunity to leave a powerful impression on the people in the room. Trust me, they will remember a great pitch. That way, even if they don’t buy it, they are buying into you – your talent, your power to tell a great story. So the next time they’re looking for a writer for something that REMINDS them of you and your pitch, you’re already on their radar. Invited back for a meeting about that pitch-related job.
Here’s how this pays dividends. 2019. I’m out pitching a tv series. I’ve been developing this show over the course of MANY years (so many, I don’t even want to tell you. Okay. I pitched and sold it in 2014 to TNT. It languished. Didn’t go anywhere. Got the rights back. Started pitching it again). The meeting is at Lionsgate. There’s a new set of producers in the room. One of them hears my pitch for the first time. He’s so taken by it, he invites me out to dinner because he wants to pick my brains, to learn how to write and deliver a pitch exactly the way I did. At the end of the same dinner, he asks me if I would be interested in writing a script with him about a football player named Kurt Warner. Three years later (and in the middle of the pandemic, mind you) AMERICAN UNDERDOG is released on 3000 screens. So you never know. Every time you tell a story it is an opportunity on so many different levels, known, unknown and TBD.
At the American Underdog premiere.
THE GREATEST GIFTS ARE NEXT TO THE DEEPEST WOUNDS
This is more of a writing lesson, true for your own life and for your characters. The idea is simple. Where you have been hurt, abused, wounded, jilted or otherwise injured, you bank the intensity of those feelings. Speaking strictly as a writer – those experiences form your personal gold mine. (One of the reasons why heartbreak stories are so popular – no one ever forgets the burning hot emotion around lost or found first love). It follows that the deeper you feel, the better your writing will be. But there are other kinds of gifts located right next to those wounds.
Personal example. I grew up in a house, not unlike a lot of others, where the family rule was don’t say what you really feel. Or even what you actually want. Everything was indirect and convoluted. Here’s my mom (bless her soul) visiting my house at age 65.
That was my mother, telling me she’s hungry. Used to drive me completely crazy. But later that night, I’m putting my daughter to bed. She’s maybe 10 years old and has just spent a few days in the company of her grandmother. Lights are out. I tuck her in. She’s got a question.
I feel this wave of emotion rising in my chest.
My daughter, whose emotional intelligence is light years beyond mine, takes a beat and then says:
I literally started to weep. But that’s not even the point! I realized, afterwards, that the gift my parents gave me, the gift that was located right next to the wound of being born into a household of people tiptoeing around the truth was: I KNEW HOW TO WRITE SUBTEXT. I could write the crap out of scenes where people say one thing but mean another. Which, as you all probably know, is the essence of good dialogue. My parents gifted me with one of the most important tools in a screenwriter’s arsenal. And I thank them for that every day.
So check your wounds. And see if there are gifts waiting for you to harvest. And when writing your characters, consider their own wounds and then, explore what their gifts might be. You’ll find a new depth to their authenticity.
START THINKING LIKE A PRODUCER NOW
We are back in the career guidance category. Let’s call this a cautionary tale. Start thinking like a producer now because I didn’t. I wasted years seeing myself only as a screenwriter. I thought – I’m going to work at my craft, work really hard, be the best damn writer I can be, and that should be enough. And it was enough, the first ten years of my professional career.
In 1995 Pakula called me to come work on THE DEVIL’S OWN, a film that was already in pre-production. Alan was directing. We had the two biggest movie stars in the world attached (Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt), one of the great all-time producers in Larry Gordon (FIELD OF DREAMS). And speaking of Gordons, Gordon Willis, the same guy who shot THE GODFATHER, was our DP! What could go wrong? Well, for one I was rewriting the screenplay from scratch, 60 days before the start of principal photography on a 90-million-dollar film. Larry knew it was an impossible task for a single writer, so he teamed me up with the incomparable Vincent Patrick (THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE).
Vince and I took a script by Kevin Jarre (essentially a story about an IRA terrorist who comes to New York and moves into the basement of an Irish New York City cop), and we turned it into a full-on two-hander. Why? In the original draft the character of Tom O’Meara is kind of a shlubby beat cop with two left feet. When Harrison came on board to play the part (and Sony agreed to his fee), Peter Guber, then president of the studio, famously said: “I’m not paying Harrison Ford 20 million dollars to drop his gun in the middle of a chase scene!” Hence the rewrite. Endless drama ensued, off-screen, not on. Pakula, Vince and I flew out to Harrison’s compound in Wyoming to talk story, then rode Harrison’s Learjet to LA to meet with Brad at the Four Seasons, and then back to New York. It was like shuttle diplomacy, only the arguments weren’t over international geopolitics. More like how many scenes does Brad get versus how many lines does Harrison have? In the end we delivered a script that we were proud of. And the movie kinda works. But I digress.
The point of all that was I was living a good life as a screenwriter. And being young (and stupid) I thought everything would just continue along the same path. I mean when you start flying on the Sony corporate jet to New York (four of us, one stewardess), and the studio puts you up in a four-story brownstone on the upper East side of Manhattan for $20,000 a month, you run the risk of getting spoiled. (Ah, the 90’s!) I got lazy and entitled and adopted the mindset of expecting jobs to come to me instead of creating them. What I should have done was to start looking for material that I liked and optioning it, or partnering with other producers on IP so that when we went out to sell, it would be my project, my package. There would never be a question who was going to write it.
Instead, I burned through precious time chasing the dreaded OWA’s (Open Writing Assignments). The biggest scam in Hollywood. A studio comes up with an idea. Not even fleshed out. (To quote Woody Allen from ANNIE HALL: “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept… and later turn it into an idea.”) But seriously – then they post this idea as an OWA, get ten really talented writers to come in and pitch their take on turning this sow’s ear into a silk purse. Now creating a take like this requires the exact same amount of effort as breaking an original story. But you do it because you believe you will always have the best ideas in the room, and mainly because you’re thinking about the 300k they’re going to pay you to write it. Only problem is the studio is listening to TEN different takes, each of which took that individual writer weeks of hard work to come up with, and then when they choose the other writer who had an inside track on the gig because his or her agent is sleeping with the executive (just kidding! Not!), you are left with BUPKIS, nada, nothing. You don’t own it and you can’t use it because you did it all in service of their ridiculous non-concept.
Which leads me back to the main topic here: BE A PRODUCER. What does that even mean? First (apropos the key ingredient for pitching), go where your PASSION is. Chances are you are already dialed in to certain worlds that you care about. That’s where you’re going to do the best digging. Case in point: I’m a sports fan. Nobody has to remind me to read articles about the Lakers or to watch the Bears games (Carson and I both hail from Chicago and root for the Bears, which is kind of like being members of the same 12 Step Program!). I’ve made a love of sports part of my brand. So in 2020 when the pandemic was raging, I spent even more time scrolling around ESPN.COM. Found myself on this ESPN+ women-in-sports page where there was a video posted about a Paralympic athlete named Oksana Masters. I clicked. It was like seven or eight minutes long, told her story. Childhood in Ukraine, in an orphanage. Being adopted by a single American mom. Footage of Oksana skiing. It wasn’t really that remarkable, when I think about it. But there was something that drew me in, that inexplicable thread that you can’t help but tug… so I tugged.
I ended up on her website. And there was this quote on the masthead that said: “Success, for me, is an everlasting pursuit of that which scares me the most. That’s the place I truly live.” And I thought to myself… THAT IS A STORY. I hunted her down. Got in touch with her sports agent. And then we met, like everyone else during the pandemic, on zoom. We made a connection. And kept talking and talking. And the more of her story I heard, the more convinced I was that it was a viable feature.
Fast forward, it’s two and a half years later. I brought an amazing director on board, who I met because I read an article about her in the LA Times. Sent her an email – the equivalent of a cold call. She answered. Fell in love with Oksana’s story. Turned out they had a shared history of disability, of going through some of the same surgeries when they were both young girls. The director and I bonded, then we wrote a pitch together, honed it, beta-tested it, kept making changes. And now we are out pitching it, in the spirit of CODA meets PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER. I am confident we will set it up.
But the point here is ALL OF THIS IS PRODUCING. Identifying great material that lives in your personal wheelhouse. Going after it. Building relationships. DOING THE LEGWORK! How much money did I have to spend to get the rights to Oksana’s story? I didn’t. I INVESTED in her instead. I spent hours with her on zoom because it mattered to me. Because I saw the potential for telling a story that has never been told before – this fascinating world of elite Paralympic athletes, who make huge sacrifices to be the best in the world at their given sport. The reward is when I go out to pitch the project now, I don’t have to worry about who is going to write it. Or who is going to replace me if I get the gig and the producers are unhappy with my draft. Or who is going to direct it. I am the producer, and the writer. I earned my seat at the table. (And as a bonus, I’ll make more money when the movie gets made.)
All of you have this capacity to discover stories you fall in love with, and to bring them, successfully, to the marketplace. The sooner you start producing, the better.
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CARSON: David’s course will run for nine straight Wednesdays (7-9 pm PST) starting April 26th. Some of the topics he will cover include: breaking into the business, pitching, agents & managers, selling to streamers, acing the development process, navigating writer’s rooms, and much much more. This is a live class, so you’ll have full access, including Q&A time, to learn about the business from a real pro. He will also be bringing in some cool guest speakers to take you deeper into their areas of expertise.
This course is for intermediate writers, writers on the cusp of breaking in, writers who’ve recently secured representation, and writers who have just entered the professional ranks. David has seen every situation in the book and he wants to make sure the next generation of screenwriters don’t fall into the same pitfalls he did. To register, get information on pricing, or to learn more, visit the course website at navigatinghollywood.net. Nobody’s ever taught a class like this so it’s going to fill up fast. There are a limited number of spots available. Register now!
