Part 1 – From How It All Started to the Peaks and Valleys
Joel:
I got into writing screenplays long before I knew it – or knew that writing screenplays was a craft or career. From the time I snuck into my first movie as a teen (from the corrupting influence of non-Mennonite friends), I was hooked. Movies seemed everything that the rural Mennonite world of the early ‘60s was not: loud, brash, colorful, dramatic and emotive. At first, movies also seemed to lack seriousness. Then, just before I left for college, The Graduate hit the silver screen, proving that movies could not only entertain, they could give a voice to your deepest doubts and desires – both being bumper crops for a kid growing up on the cornfield plains of Illinois.
Don:
I wrote stories in elementary, middle and high school. I wrote poetry in college and then stage plays. Compared to poetry, the main advantage to writing stage plays is the experience of being in a room full of people who are watching my work. With poetry, it’s very difficult to sense people’s response to the work.
Joel:
I wrote my first feature screenplay in my late 20’s (ancient in screenwriter years). I was part of a group called Sisters & Brothers. We were committed to bringing the story of our Anabaptist beginnings to life via the film, The Radicals. I knew enough to know that I didn’t know all I needed to know to write a feature, so the group hired a more seasoned writer to work with me. I soon learned that the wrong partnership can be more cutthroat than collaborative. Having lost too many battles, I asked Don Yost to work with me on several disputed scenes. The experience taught me that collaboration can be fulfilling and fruitful. After the film wrapped, I asked Don if he wanted to try a real collaboration. And to his never-ending regret, he did.
Don:
Like Joel, I enjoyed collaborating from virtually the first moment we tried it. In addition to the fun of collaborating, screenplay writing held out the hope of being paid to write. A crasser (and more honest) way of expressing this is that I wanted to be rich and famous.
Joel:
Perhaps my two biggest learning curves as a screenwriter were how to write to form, and how to navigate the Hollywood system. Writing to form simply requires sweat equity. Unlike other forms of writing, screenplays are a time-honored craft where free-form reads “amateurism” to the decision makers. Because hundreds of people have to be able to read and understand your screenplay, it has to follow a highly regimented and recognizable format. This type of learning is more science than art. Figuring out the Hollywood system, where no means no, but yes can mean about anything, is the real art. During our first trip to Hollywood, we thought we had sold two scripts – only to find out later that we had been meeting with low-level assistants who had far exceeded their pay grade.
Don:
I agree. Learning the business of selling screenplays was extremely difficult. We made various trips to L.A. to meet people, to test ideas, and to peddle our wares. Here are some excerpts from my notes regarding one of our more successful trips:
Monday, Feb 21
- Met with our manager. Josh suggested stashing COWS and pitched his own idea about a body switch between an aging rapper and a high school girl.
Tuesday, Feb 22
- Met with Hal Lieberman Company. They have a deal with Sony, started 3 months ago. Sony wants $20-40 million comedies (any kind: family, broad, dark are all okay). Brian liked VILLAGE IDIOT, but thinks the main character should be a CEO rather than the president of the U.S. TO DO: Develop VILLAGE IDIOT with BRIAN.
Wednesday, Feb. 23
- Nickelodeon -- Jenna L., CHEERLEADER pitch with Fernando A. Lose the epilepsy, it’s too much like Disney Channel; find some other secret for the main character. TO DO: March 8th deadline for revised treatment.
- Walden Media -- MR. FRICTION pitch with David C. Walden passed.
Thursday, Feb 24
- Deep River. They are looking for big concept comedy with heart. Liked MR. FRICTION. Suggested that the spray erases personal friction as well as physical friction. TO DO: get back with Michael when we have “cracked the rules for the spray.”
- Terra Firma. – Mary P. wants to be involved in casting BACK TO AFRICA, but hasn’t found time to read the script. Greg made some initial phone calls. Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence and Dave Shappel are out of the running. Greg likes COW, but main character should be the cow, not the guy who loves the cow.
Joel:
Top three best moments. (1) Selling Miracle in Lane 2. No doubt. (2) Having Miracle in Lane 2 get made and Disney throwing a major premiere event at the Directors Guild, where 100 kids with spina bifida joined the normal Hollywood audience (including the guy who would become our agent and negotiate about a dozen sales for us). (3) Selling our first feature to Universal.
Worst moments? My top three. (1) Competing for a pay phone with a guy who had just gotten out of prison (in the era before cell phones). (2) Having one of our favorite scripts at Disney get shelved. (3) Learning that Universal wanted to pay us far less for a feature than we had received from any of our three Disney Channel sales.
Don:
I agree with all of Joel’s best/worst. Maybe we should add a little context to explain why the moment at the pay phone was so bad. It was one of our earlier trips to L.A. We had no agent, so calling from Indiana, we randomly contacted low-level people in the script development departments of more or less low-level production companies. Out of about 50 calls, we might get one meeting. We collected and scheduled about a dozen meetings, but once we were actually on the ground in L.A., some of those meeting got cancelled. Others were a bust. We even got yelled at for wasting people’s time.
With all of our meetings gone and not even a glimmer of a prospect to take home, we still had 24 hours before our plane ride back to Indiana. All we could figure out to do was stand at a pay phone and try cold calling more low-level producers. It felt desperate and hopeless.
Joel:
I once remarked that if you weren’t manic before you started writing screenplays, you would become that way. The lows were extremely low: away from family, in a town that could care less whether you succeed or fail, and usually in the cheapest (read: grungiest) hotel room that Don could find. Having each other for support during those times was the biggest non-writing perk of collaboration.
Part 2 – The Process and Other Pontification
Don:
Of all the forms of writing, I think screenplay writing is the most conducive to co-writing. Poetry, novels and fiction are all forms with words as the end product. Nothing comes between the writer and the reader. Both screenplays and stage plays, on the other hand, are blueprints. They are descriptions of the end result – a movie or a play. In both a movie and a play, a community of artists is responsible for the actual production of the final work of art. However, a screenplay is even more collaborative than a play.
As Joel and I collaborated, we knew that there would be hundreds of other creative people who would be involved with the production. We were less inclined, then, to have to own or be defensive about details.
Joel:
Maybe not defensive enough. I’m not sure if it was our Menno meekness, or our desire to please, but only seldom did we really fight for anything. Not that we didn’t care, or didn’t have conviction, but we knew that ultimately the final decision would rest in the hands of a director and/or producer, and we tried to pick our battles.
The one time we did argue and try to hold our end was the ending to Miracle in Lane 2. We were both certain Justin had to lose that last soap box derby race. If he won, we felt, it would be merely a race victory rather than a life victory. The producer listened patiently, then said: “All right, you write an ending more satisfying than Justin winning the big race after all his health battles, and we’ll film it.” We left the room knowing we would write a Justin victory – in life and in the race.
Don:
One advantage of co-writing is that it allows distance. When Joel finished working on a draft and turned it over to me, I could be more brutal with the rewrite. Many times when I saw that Joel had changed something I was fond of, I could see why he did it, even though I would never have had the courage to attempt the surgery.
Joel:
I should have said that while we didn’t get into vicious battles with producers, we did get into some with each other. Had we been armed, I am sure there would have been twin obits in theGoshen News(though I think I would have been the faster draw). But despite those battles, we knew at our best that a good line or scene would survive the scrutiny of both, and a bad one would not.
Don:
I think co-writing also compelled us to spend more time and energy in planning. We had to communicate our ideas to each other and we had to agree on a plan. When I write on my own, it’s more difficult to muster the discipline to plan well.
Joel:
All writing requires planning, but screenplay writing is all about structure – which is all about planning. Collaboration did two things for me: it forced me to spend time planning (my own tendency was to want to start writing and hope good things happened), and it made what can be the most tedious part of writing fun. I think Don and I agree that collaboration worked best during the planning stage (the inspiration), and was often the most frustrating during the writing and execution (the elaboration).
Don:
I think being Mennonites had a big impact on our work. First off, we looked for ideas that we could care about. Both of us liked ideas that had meaning and heart (feeling). We also liked stories about underdogs, about overlooked or underappreciated people.
Joel:
We did have one theme that ran through all our movies – that of isolated individuals finding each other, coming together, and moving toward community.
Don:
This was not always something we planned, but something that seemed to happen. Several times (maybe not often enough) we passed up offers that went against our values. Finally, I think being Mennonite pushed us toward comedy. Sometimes Mennonites can be overly serious, but I think there’s a strong streak of dark humor running through the veins of the children of Menno Simons.
Joel:
Some downsides to being Mennos: being a bit too passive at times. And, given our didactic nature, to try to put too much emphasis on our dialogue and not enough in the visuals, the context and subtext that make film really work.
Some upsides: patience, pacifism (when you feel like killing your co-writer), and community. I think Don and I enjoyed both the community we experienced, and working with producers and directors – which can be the bane for some writers. It may help that we always (almost) really liked and respected the people we worked with. There likely are idiots in Hollywood, but there are also a lot of really bright and supportive persons who know the art and know their craft.
Part 3 –Miracle in Lane 2
Don:
Miracle in Lane 2 was based on the lives of some friends of ours, Justin Yoder and his family. I remember that we started with a photo and caption that appeared in the Goshen News. The photo was of Justin holding a trophy that he won in a soap box derby race.
I remember how nervous I was (both of us, probably) in asking Myron and Sheila, Justin’s parents, if they wanted to consider the idea of us writing a movie script about their family. We both knew how few movie projects get made and how slim the chances were that anything would come of our idea.
Joel:
This project did not happen by accident. It came after eight years of us writing what we thought Hollywood wanted. I don’t remember all the scripts, but one was a comedy about a man whose life was diminished because his male member was diminished. We thought it was a clever metaphor for something or other. Actually, a lot of people liked it but thought we had taken a quirky idea and Disneyfied it.
Don:
The story of how Miracle in Lane 2 got made illustrates how success in the film business depends a lot on chance. We tried for several years to send the script out and then to work with Sisters & Brothers to self-produce the script. Members of Sisters and Brothers recruited a director and tried a big fundraising campaign. All that effort went nowhere. Finally, someone who knew someone who knew a producer named Beth Polson gave Beth the script.
Joel:
To continue the chain of custody. Beth Polson did most of her work at CBS, and so knew a producer who left CBS and went to work for Disney. He had been bugging her to bring him a script, but she hadn’t seen anything she liked – or that they might like. Disney was burned out on what they called Dead Mom and Dead Dog scripts – they wanted more comedy and less pathos. When Beth Polson brought them this script, they said yes immediately.
And Disney Channel went into almost immediate production. They spent about twice what they normally do for a TV movie – about $5 million – and took the time to fly the producers to Middlebury to get the family right. They got the quilts right, but stuck an American flag in the yard. They hired a great director, came up with a great cast – the second film for Frankie Muniz – and created a film that, for the next several years, became the standard for what a Disney Channel movie should be.
Not that awards mean everything, but it won the Humanitas Prize (which is taken seriously in Hollywood) and a Director’s Guild Award, which is huge.
Don:
Miracle in Lane 2 was a miracle in many ways. We’ve heard other screenplay writers tell horror stories about how the production process ruined their screenplay. I remember how amazed I was the first time we saw the rough version of Miracle in Lane 2. I felt that all the talents of all the people who worked on it made the final product much better than the movie I had seen in my imagination.
In spite of how pleased I was with that first version, I was very worried about showing it to the Yoders. I was especially worried about what Justin’s older brother, Seth, would think. The character of Seth in the movie is the antagonist of the story. I was worried that Seth would be embarrassed by how the movie portrayed him.
The first time the family saw the movie, we watched the tape together on their TV. Seth was very quiet through the whole hour and a half that the movie played. When the movie was over, he turned to his parents and said, “Wow! That really looks like us!”
Joel:
One of the post-production surprises was that, while the character of Justin is the star that drives the movie, Seth is the kid who resonates. Justin never waivers in his drive to win a trophy, but Seth does constant battle with angst. He worries about whether his brother will survive each surgery, is angry that his father won’t affirm his accomplishments because he can’t do the same with Justin, and is wracked with guilt because he shouldn’t feel angry. The Seth character not only resonated with viewers, it came to be used by a number of disability organizations to address the issue of what “normal” kids face when having to “compete” with a sibling who is disabled.
Don:
Really, there are ways in which Miracle in Lane 2 is still my favorite of all the scripts we wrote. I’m very proud of our work and of the fact that we were able to discover the story and to tell it in a way that did it justice.
Joel:
Ditto.
Part 4 -- The Final Miracle
Joel:
Our second Disney Miracle –Full Court Miracle– was also our last film to be produced (to date). When we began our collaboration with our agent, he told us we could expect about a five- year writing window, which is typical for screenplay writers. The writing style that everybody loves eventually becomes yesterday news, and producers move on to look for the next new thing.
Don:
Of course, we didn’t think that would apply to us, but it did.
Joel:
Full Court Miracle was perhaps our most difficult piece. In part, that was because we were being asked to rewrite somebody else’s screenplay. And in part because the story was supposed to be a retelling of the Hanukkah story, though instead of Jewish soldiers battling the overwhelming force of the invading Greeks in the Holy Land, it would be an undersized Jewish basketball team vs. much larger foes (and we assumed much more Gentile) on the basketball court.
Don:
One major problem was that the main character had no problems. Disney wanted an admirable, well adjusted main character with basically wonderful parents. It seemed like every time we suggested a problem for the main character that would make him interesting or give him something to care about, the development people found a reason to vote no. It’s hard to create a story we care about when the main character has everything he needs.
Joel:
Another part of the difficulty was that, as good Anabaptists (though not so good as to decline this script), we kept trying to make this a tale of God’s grace (via the miracle of the long-burning oil) versus the grit. Unfortunately grit makes better conflict than grace.
Don:
I agree that grit makes better conflict than grace, but I can’t remember anything gritty about the original story. Maybe I’m in denial.
Joel:
I guess by “grit” I meant that they wanted a war metaphor. But I agree that, whereas Miracle in Lane 2 had real, nuanced characters, this story seemed to be pre-digested pabulum. Anyhow, it was during one of our story conferences that we had perhaps our oddest Hollywood conversation.
In the room were three Jewish producers, one non-practicing Catholic (who stayed out of the fray), and two meek Mennos. I believe it happened during one of those grace vs. grit moments where they were trying to argue the value of grit, while we were trying to make OT and NT arguments for the fact that God perseveres in spite of our weakness, not because of our strength.
Finally, one of the producers, in exasperation, exclaimed that Christians should be grateful for the Hanukkah story, because if the Maccabees had failed, the Jews would have been exterminated as a people, and Jesus would have not been able to emerge as Messiah 150 years later. There may be an answer to that, but we couldn’t think of it at the moment – and we went on to write one of our least favorite and effective scripts. Which did get made, proving something, but I’m not sure what.
Don:
Maybe we can wrap this up with some sage advice from two creaky old-timers. I’ll start with what already may be clear from our stories so far: This art form is not for the weak -- nor even for the strong on most days.
Joel:
It is sobering to think that we were probably in the upper 5% of successful writers – maybe higher. And even though we made enough money for about a 5- to 6-year stretch to call it a living, we wrote hard and long for about 15 years. I shudder to think how the pay would come out as an hourly rate. But I’m glad we took the shot. And I’m glad Don was willing to let me destroy his life and sanity along with mine. (Kidding.)
Don:
I agree -- that it was worth the shot, not that Joel destroyed my sanity. And while Hollywood is a pretty rough way to make a living as a writer, there are worse ways to spend time. Guantanamo Bay, for example, or Sudoku puzzles. The truth is that writing is never a waste of time. Maybe that’s the final miracle -- somehow the process of putting words to meaning and the act of telling stories is always worth the risk.
Joel:
Almost always.