If you’ve been pursuing screenwriting these past few years, chances are you’ve heard of Dan Fogelman. WHY should you have heard of Dan Fogelman? Only because for one stretch there in 2010, he sold two scripts and one pitch for a total of 7 million dollars. In other words, he is the embodiment of the screenwriting dream. It started with his 2.5 million dollar sale for Crazy, Stupid, Love, was followed by a 3 million dollar sale for Imagine (a movie he’ll make his directing debut on) and ended with a “Political Jerry Maguire” pitch that sold for 2 million. I’ve read almost all of Dan’s scripts, and as he says later in the interview, he has an amazing ability to write readable scripts. This weekend yet ANOTHER one of Dan’s scripts is being released, Last Vegas. He was cool enough to hop on the phone and answer a few questions I’ve had about that amazing stretch he had.
SS: Hi Dan, how are you?
DF: I’m doing well, thanks.
SS: Now I know you’re busy working on your first directorial effort, Imagine, so I thought I’d jump into the questions right away and maximize our time. There’s a lot I’d like to ask.
DF: That’s great. Works for me.
SS: Back in 2010, you had that amazing streak of spec sales. But before we go there, I was interested in how you got started. What was the first script you sold?
DF: My first script didn’t sell, but it did get me my agents. I was 26, maybe twelve years ago, decided I’d take a crack at screenwriting and had a buddy who actually now runs my company… I wrote a script, like a Wonder Years style script about my bar mitzvah, figured a Jewish agent would read it and identify with it and yeah, that was basically the plot. So I bought myself Final Draft. I had never studied screenwriting or anything and wrote it and handed it to my buddy and had no idea if it was any good. I thought I’d pass it on to a few people and it all happened very quickly. He had a manager at his company who’s now a gigantic manager and my manager to this day and she read it and all of a sudden I had agents and everything just started from there. The script never sold. But it got me my first job, which was at Pixar.
SS: You were able to get into the industry off your FIRST written screenplay??
DF: Yeah, I was very lucky. I got very lucky.
SS: Wow, that’s amazing. Now when you look back at the script now, how do you feel about it? Do you feel it was up to snuff?
DF: I haven’t looked at it in a long time – I really loved it and I’ve taken elements from it and it was very VO heavy, very “Daniel Stern,” looking back on his childhood. I’ve taken a lot of characters and used them for a lot of TV shows or elements for funny scenes. I think it probably holds up. I once had a meeting with Hans Zimmerman about it, to produce it, and I remember he had a very heavy German accent and he said, “It’s very funny script, I’ve always thought the Jews were so funny.”
SS: That sounds like Hans. Now regarding getting that job at Pixar. That was writing the Cars movie, right? That must’ve been a HUGE deal. I mean, the bigger production companies rarely hand out assignment work to anyone who isn’t super-proven. What did you say in that room to get that job? What was your pitch?
DF: I believe a bunch of up-and-coming writers were up to do it. It was more Pixar’s model at the time – and they may still do this – they bring in writers who can shape and reshape the story over a long period of time, as opposed to paying a ton of money for a big writer. That might’ve been why I got the job. You go up there and you don’t know anything about the film so it’s not like I was going in there to pitch a take – They just said it needed to be a movie about cars and that’s kind of all I knew – cars that ‘come to life.’ So they put you in a room where John Lasseter and others were and I benefited from not knowing anything about the business, I was relaxed, so I kinda bullshit it for half an hour. And I got home and they called and said ‘We want to offer you a job where, for 2 weeks, you move up to San Francisco.” 2 weeks eventually became 2 months and, in the end, I stayed there for a year and a half. I got along with everyone. It was a real starting point for my career. John Lasseter, he’s an amazing guy. He was a real mentor to me – having never studied screenwriting or film, it was like going to college for a year.
SS: Flash-forward a bit, and you start selling all these spec scripts. All for a lot of money. I remember it was a really big moment in the screenwriting community because it allowed writers to dream about that huge sale again. What do you think was the reason for those scripts selling for so much? Did you learn anything from that or know why it happened?
DF: What I learned was that, I work best as a spec writer. I’m not gonna do a book adaptation or if someone comes to you with an idea or an actor – taking that risk of writing something someone might not want after spending all that time on it. Crazy Stupid Love was kind of a game changer for me. At the time I’d written these scripts that were taking so much time to get through the system (The Guilt Trip and Last Vegas), and they just weren’t coming together- the scripts were there, people liked them, but they weren’t moving. And so I decided to go out and write something without any obligations, something where I didn’t have to please anyone, and that was Crazy Stupid Love. I wrote it very quickly. I have a little cabin up in Joshua Tree and I wrote it very quickly and I sent it to my agent and manager and said, “Here, I wrote this on spec and I think it’s good” and here I was, half-picturing Steve Carell in the lead and within a week my agent had gotten it to Steve Carell, who, as fate had it, wanted to do this exact kind of movie next. So he wanted to come onto it and help produce it and so they bought it and we were literally shooting the movie months after. It never happens like that. It had the right people – that was an anomaly how it happened, all of it. But Steve’s attachment was obviously the main reason why the script sold for so much. And then when that happened, my other projects started moving through the system a lot faster.
SS: Okay, so when you move into a script like Last Vegas, obviously The Hangover did well and this puts a new spin on the Vegas trip – do you ever think about marketing when you write a script or do you just write what you love?
DF: The thing is, I wrote Last Vegas before The Hangover, and while I was writing it, The Hangover came out and I actually thought, ‘Oh this’ll never get made now.’ It takes movies so long to get made that it’s the nature of the beast that you’ll write a movie, it doesn’t get made right away, something similar gets made in the meantime, then your movie comes out, and it looks like you wrote it because of this other movie. That’s one of the crazy things about the business.
SS: Okay, last question. And I’m asking this one for the readers of the site. Pretend you’re 15 years younger and were still an amateur screenwriter. You have what you consider to be a good script. How would you go about trying to sell it?
DF: Ooh, that’s a good question. I mean, on my iPad right now are 17,000 emails from friends, family friends, all of who have screenplays they’d like me to read. My advice is – and this is going to sound bad – but my advice is, “I wouldn’t want to do this.” I tell them if you’ve got something else in your life, something that you like just as much as screenwriting, I would choose that over screenwriting. It’s a brutal existence, and it’s so rare that it pays off. But, if people come back after that and say, “No, screenwriting is the only thing I wanna do,” and they have a script, I usually say, “You just gotta bombard people.” I mean the truth is, there are SO many scripts out there. You know this as well as anyone. And anyone can get a computer and buy Final Draft. More people think they can be a screenwriter or a writer than think they can be a professional baseball player. And you can tell by 5 pages whether it’s going to work or not – and you get emails about the premise and how it’s nothing that’s ever been seen before, but 9 times out of 10, your first script isn’t going to sell. But if you can work at it and get good and write something that really connects with people, you can start a career. I mean I don’t know if I’m good, or great, but I have a weird ability to write readable scripts. I don’t know if that makes me a genius, but it’s a skill. You gotta work hard and develop that skill and then, when you have something worthy, you have to bombard the world with it.
Having said that, it’s important to know that everyone’s story of how they made it is different. I haven’t met anyone who’s come into this the exact same way. So as long as you continue to get better at this skill and look for opportunities to break in, the hope is that sooner or later, you’ll be successful.
SS: Alright, Dan. Thank you for taking some time to help out Scriptshadow Nation. Good luck this weekend with Last Vegas and good luck with finishing Imagine.
DF: Thank you, Carson. I enjoyed it.
Post-interview thoughts: Wow! Dan broke through on his VERY FIRST SCRIPT. And here I’m always telling you that that can’t be done. I suppose we can add one more member to the exception list. Also fascinating to hear that Pixar likes to bring in inexperienced writers (who have potential) to write their movies. For a studio known as having the best-written movies in the business, there’s gotta be a lesson there. I know one thing I keep hearing a lot is that producers love young hungry writers because they’ll work like crazy for them. They’ll write a hundred drafts if they need to. Whereas older established writers come with big quotes and a lot more attitude. So maybe that plays into it. Anyway, it was a blast to talk to Dan and get at least a little bit of insight into how those big sales come together. I wish I had more time to really get into the details of all that but I hear directing a film takes a lot of time so I guess I’ll let Dan off the hook. And of course, go see Last Vegas!!!☺
