Interview with a Screenwriter

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Listen and read this blog post over on Medium.com/goshdarnblog

Interview recorded in April 2018.

Trai Cartwright is a screenwriter with a 25-year entertainment industry track record.  She’s worn hats as a Hollywood screenwriting consultant, a story development specialist, and has taught screenwriting and film studies as a university professor.

While working in Hollywood, she worked for 20th Century Fox, HBO, Paramount Pictures, New Line Cinema, Universal Studios and Prelude Pictures.  

Currently she teaches at University of Denver’s Professional Creative Writing graduate program, Western State university’s MFA, and University of Colorado Denver’s Film department.

Also she’s currently President and Founding Board Member of Women in Film & Media Colorado and is Co-Producer of Hidden Tigers, a docu-series by Red Unicorn Films (http://www.wearehiddentigers.com)

I first met her at NCWC, Norther Colorado Writer Conference, in Fort Collins in 2015 when she did a class on how “it’s never been a better time” to write scripts for TV due to the explosion of Netflix and Amazon and other web channels  making their own TV programs.  

We talked about some of these things and more when I got the chance to interview her for GoshDarnBlog.com so read on and learn more about Trai.

Interview with a Screenwriter

What was the best advice you ever got from a screenwriter or Hollywood person?

One of my earliest mentors was Peter Saphire who pretty much ruined me for all bosses and mentors afterwards because he was so fantastic.  One of the  very first things he ever told me was this, “We’re not curing cancer.  Try to have some fun!” because everybody ends up taking all of this stuff so seriously, you know?  There’s millions upon millions of dollars that eventually come into play, but we’re still just making movies, so try not to take it so seriously.  Try not take yourself so seriously.  Just try to have some fun.

I decided to take to this utterly useless skillset of mine, this storytelling skillset, and become a teacher…

What is craftwrite.com is all about?

Craftwrite.com is my soul proprietorship.  It’s the company that I run that I started when I got here in Colorado– so I grew up in Colorado, ran away to New York, Chicago, LA.  When I returned there was no film industry, so I decided to take to this utterly useless skillset of mine, this storytelling skillset, and become a teacher and become an editor, so I now work with writers across every medium; screenwriting, TV, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and sometimes it’s just working one on one on a manuscript, and sometimes it’s staging classes.  I teach all over Colorado and I’ve gotta tell ya, I’ve had a really, really, great time with it, but I call the business Craftwrite.

What class did you do today?

This was class #2 of a screenwriting class that I’m teaching in Fort Collins, so I’m based in Denver and I’ll teach in the community probably once a year.  Sometimes it’s TV.  Sometimes it’s web series.  Sometimes it’s advance screenwriting.  I don’t know, I’ve been missing my friends up in Fort Collins where I moved back to when I first got here from LA and I don’t know, a bunch of people were interested, so I said alright I’ll make the drive.  I’m happy to do it.  There’s nine of us and we talked screenplays.

Are you doing  a convention in August (2018)?

Yeah, a woman named Julie Cameron who is a big part of the Colorado romance writers and I believe she’s does some work for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers as well, so we call it “the circuit,” the conference circuit, but you end up teaching on behalf of all of these different organizations and I met her years and years ago and she took some of my screenwriting classes and she said, “You know what Colorado really needs is a screenwriting conference,” so we have four different fiction and non-fiction writing conferences but nothing that attends to screenwriting and I’ve been here long enough to know that there’s enough demand to populate a conference at this point so I thought like the timing’s good. Let’s go ahead and give this a shot, so we’re going to do one day in August.  I believe its august 5^th.  It’s a Sunday.  In fact we’re just about to sit down next week to figure out whether or not we want to put everybody on the same track or if we want to offer a bunch of different classes so you can kind of program your own thing.  We sent out a survey.  The response was tremendous, so we think this will be very nicely attended.  We’ll probably Skype in a couple of folks from LA to talk about the business out there because the truth of it is all the writing is coming, I should say all the writing that’s selling, is coming out of Los Angeles.  Doesn’t mean that you can’t get your start somewhere else.  Doesn’t mean you can’t perfect your skill somewhere else, but to pretend like the industry is not based in Colorado would be silly, so we want to get their perspective and hear about the kinds of things we can be doing here to make us more competitive in the overall picture.

…so the hope is that one of the scripts that you wrote, that is marketplace viable, will sell and then they’ll say, “What else do you have?” and then you can trot out another five.

How many screenplays have you written in your life?

Completed screenplays probably about 25, drafts within that.  Hundreds, hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands.  The general thinking is somewhere around your fifth to seventh screenplay is when you’re good enough to have conversations.  You’re not necessarily good enough to sell, but you are at least earning your space at the table and then after that it’s usually another, oh jeez, another five to seven before you’re actually marketplace competitive.  Where your skills are good enough that you deserve to sell and then after that you are building out your portfolio, so the hope is that one of the scripts that you wrote, that is marketplace viable, will sell and then they’ll say, “What else do you have?” and then you can trot out another five.

When you option a screenplay what’s the average amount of money you’ll make?

Zero.  People don’t make money off of options.  What they get is opportunity, so in Los Angeles if you are working with real deal production companies there is the possibility that you will earn between five and ten thousand off of an option.  A very, very few people actually make that price point… There’s a whole sort of pyramid that happens as you are making your way into the film industry and into a career. Obviously the very first step is optioning something, but the chances are because you’re a newbie, you have no track record, you are not even remotely appealing to the big dogs, so you’re working with other folks who are like you, they’re looking for a great story to tell for very little money, so they come to you and they express their passion, express their enthusiasm.  You love their plan for how they’re going to take your script out and go to get it sold and if you have faith in them and you like ‘em well enough then you go ahead and option it.  Now the WGA and all legal contracts require you to make at least a buck off of it, but for the most part and especially in Colorado, nobody makes money off of options.  You’re lucky if you get a couple of hundred bucks, but again the point is is now you have other people who are excited about your work and they’re going to work on your behalf to try to get it sold.  That’s what’s happening with an option.

What software do you use to write a screenplay?

Oh Final Draft, industry standard.  Spend the money.  It’s worth it… If you’re going to work in this industry you need to pass, which means you need to use the tools, you need to use the terminology, you need to have the craft skillset that everybody else has, so that they’re not feeling like they’re having to educate you in knowing how the business works.

What’s your favorite movies?

The one that always comes to mind I love Aliens.  I love Aliens unreasonably.  It’s half because it’s an impeccably structured movie.  When I was coming up there weren’t a lot of classes.  There were no books.  Alright maybe there was Story, but it was incomprehensible.  We learned structure the old fashioned way.  We watched movies and we broke them down.  Eventually, if you were in the business, if you worked in Los Angeles, you would make the kind of contacts where they would start floating you screenplays, those produced and unproduced, so you can start reading what was industry standard at that time and then you would break them down, so Aliens, honestly, it was my training wheels movie.  It taught me how to structure a movie.  I’d go back and watch it at least a couple of times a year.  Also Michael Biehn is super pretty, so that doesn’t hurt anything.  There and aliens and yeah, it’s a good fun movie and Jim Cameron structures about as well as anybody in the business.

What’s a good book to read on screenwriting?

You know I recently picked up John Truby? The anatomy of Storytelling (The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller).  I think it what it’s called.  I had done my “save the cats” education and, um, I feel like they’re all having exactly the same conversation.  They’re all talking about exactly the same things, which is why you kind of read all of them because they all present it in slightly different ways, so if one book is not making a lot of sense to you go and listen to someone else because maybe their voice makes sense to you, but ultimately it’s exactly the same conversation, but John was doing something different in his book and I really appreciated that.  He was talking about structure from a perspective of activating the secondary characters, so creating plot, based almost solely on this idea that the other character in the sequence is there to be in opposition to the main character, I mean this is the big takeaway for me, and that was just a new way to kind of look at things, so now if you look at some of the Oscar nominated screenplays in some of the—I can’t say it’s a new direction for structure, but it is slightly different.  There was a number of movies that came out that all were behaving the same way so Three Billboards outside Ebbings Missouri is a really good example, and darn if I can come up with the other two that I’ve been kind of grouping together in my classes, but they all are kind of doing the same thing.  The first half there’s no plot.  There’s no plot.  You are just hanging out with these people and you’re just sort of experiencing their life with them and you’re getting to know sort of the diagram of how all the characters are interfacing and then somewhere around the false resolution, the halfway point, you know something disastrous happens, and all of the characters end up escalating the dramatic states, but it’s character escalation versus plot escalation, so it’s not that more diamonds got stolen or more bombs got planted its that more characters are being more vocal and aggressive in being in opposition to our lead.

What are you doing in Colorado?  I know you have some projects going on.

Yeah, so Colorado does not have a film industry, Evan.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed that.  Have you noticed that?

… it’s really important to me that writers do what they’re supposed to do and the number one thing that they’re supposed to do is to write a screenplay that an audience would actually want to see,…

Yeah.

Our film industry is none existent.  Nobody understands development.  Nobody takes development to heart. People are writing screenplays because they want to shoot a movie.  They don’t really know screenwriting.  They’re not hiring the people or partnering with the people who are exceptional, you know, who really, really dedicate themselves to the craft!  So we’re getting a lot of extremely lackluster, microbudget, by microbudget I mean 50,000 dollars, a 100,000 dollars.  We’re getting just a lot of movies where people are practicing their craft, but they’re not making things that are marketplace competitive and as a former development executive, as somebody who has been marketplace competitive, it’s really important to me that writers do what they’re supposed to do and the number one thing that they’re supposed to do is to write a screenplay that an audience would actually want to see, so I do as much as I possibly can to look for opportunities for writers, but to also create opportunities for writers to escalate their skillset.  This looks like lots and lots of things.  This looks like the contest that I run out of Women in Film and Media Colorado.  So I’m president of that organization. It’s the state chapter of a national organization and the very first thing that I did as development chair was create a contest.  It’s not that we gave a lot of money away to the writer who won it’s that we gave producer reads to this person.  We gave them a table read, so hearing your script out loud by professional actors changes your understanding of your text.  Having conversations with producers or agents who can look at it from their perspective is going to change your understanding of your text and it’s going to elevate your next revision, so that’s one example of what I do.  Obviously I teach a ton of classes.  I work one on one a lot.  I do a lot of development in Colorado/  The people who have figured out what it is that I do, they come back to me over and over and over again, because I get them down the road, you know, like you’re going to get there on your own, hopefully, but if you bring in somebody who really deeply understands story and more importantly understands story from a production perspective you’re going to have a much more viable product and yes it is a product and the idea of that liability is not just being worthy of somebody’s 100,000 dollars to shoot but also is it going to get distribution, so getting people into the headset, teaching the business of screenwriting, so that when they do come to their stories, they’re coming at it understanding that there’s this whole business apparatus behind it that as writers we are a function of the marketplace.  It’s very fun to write something on our own.  You can do that in books if you like, but filmmaking is totally like this team thing, and we gotta be part of the teams, we gotta understand what everybody else downflow is expecting of us, so I teach a lot of classes about that.  I teach producers how to produce.  That’s another thing that my production partner Art Thomas and I do.  What else?  Just gathering up whatever. Sometimes I meet a producer and they’re looking for screenplays you know and I’ll point them in certain directions.  I help screenwriters find writers groups together just whatever I can to just keep the wheels turning and to keep people feeling optimistic about what it is that they can get done.  Writers are so lucky.  They can always go home and write.  They can always improve their skills.  The same cannot be said for most everybody else in the food chain, so I like the idea that we get to go and help each other bolster each other up.  We can move faster.  We can elevate faster than almost anybody else in the business, so that’s on the producing side, that’s on the teaching side and then as a creative I’ve been commissioned to write a screenplay by Main Man Films Art Thomas and I did a bunch of work on that and that’s now out in the marketplace.  It’s a five to seven million dollar revision that’s historical.  It’s about Duke Ellington for goodness sakes and we’re being read by some top Hollywood talent because Art knows some people and, ah, again, you know, optioned it for very little money, but that’s not the point.  Art knows folks to kind of build out the team of who’s going to rally around and get this thing made and then the other big project that I’m working on, we’re in post on our pilot.  This is a docu-series that’s called Hidden Tigers and probably TV, we might go web series, like we can always go web series, right?  That’s easy.  We wanna take our shot.  We’ve got a few people at the networks who are interested in seeing what we’ve done with the pilot and what this is about.  There’s a young woman, a disabled woman named— who I don’t know.  She hit a certain age and her life was just not working out the way she hoped it would.  She was very concerned about living the rest of her life as a disabled person and what that was going to do and she started looking around and she realized that there were so, so, so many disabled people who were living big dreams that were accomplishing so many amazing things that their disability just had no limitations on them and she decided, You know what? I’m going to go interview these people! I wanna go model myself after these people! I want to go learn how to be a hidden tiger… We’re finishing up our pilot on that then we’ll take the series out to the marketplace here probably in the next couple of months.

If somebody’s not fun to work with walk away! Life is too short.

Well, Congratulations!

Thank you.  It’s so fun!  Oh my gosh it was so fun.  Work with good people.  That’s the other good piece of advice.  If somebody’s not fun to work with walk away!  Life is too short.

Anything else you want to plug?

(Laughter) That I wanna plug… I think writing classes in general are important for everybody, so even taking fiction classes, even if you only see yourself as a screenwriter, you’re still going to learn a ton about writing.  There’s a few great writers conferences coming up, so there’s the Northern Colorado Writer’s Conference.  I’ll be there teaching some stuff about TV as well as fiction writing.  I’ll be at the Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference, shortly after that, that’s down in Colorado springs and who knows what I’m teaching there.  It’ll be fiction.  It’ll be some screenwriting stuff.  I’m starting to cue up my summer fun, yay!  I get to go back to Comic Con.  I work really hard.  To get to teach at Comic Con, so I can go and hang out with my people.  Let’s see.  The Western State University,  Writing the Rockies (2018).  This is outstanding, so this is three days.  It’s up in the mountains in Gunnison or as I like to call it Crested Butte Adjacent.  Mike Reiss is one of the teachers this year.  He’s considered the show runner of TV’s greatest season of TV ever.  It was Simpson’s I believe season #7 and that was him.  That was his work, so he’s the showrunner on The Simpsons.  Worked with him last year.  We’ve got a new guy coming in named John Bowman, who’s a TV writer, oh my gosh, dating back into the 90s, like he has touched tons and tons of TV shows, so they’re putting kind of a new emphasis on TV, but again all writing has lots of things to teach you, so if you want to spend a few days up at a higher altitude learning from some Los Angeles pros, come check that out.

What’s your fee for 1 on 1 coaching?

So with the 1 on 1 coaching it really, really depends what the writer needs, so I work with writers in all capacities.  Sometimes people bring very nascent story ideas to me and I help them develop it and kind of map it and figure out how to move forward with it.  Sometimes they finish the manuscript, heck, sometimes they’ve had that manuscript read by their writers groups… so they took it as far as they felt like they could and then they bring me in and I’ll work on that, so it really depends on what you need.  I do copy editing, so there’s a service I do called page notes, where its like 15 to 20 pages of me explaining what’s working in your manuscript, the things that need to be looked at harder and then I go through literally line by line by line and I do this for screenplays and teleplays as well and I challenge every single line not just on a copy editing level; so is the grammar correct?  Is the syntax correct?  But also story logic.  Are you clear in what it is that you’re saying?  Are these the right the adjectives?  The right words? Is this consistent of voice?  That’s another really, really big one in books is whether or not you’ve designed the right voice, the right format, to follow the function of what you’re executing.  I love, I love working on completed manuscripts… It depends on what you need, so I would just direct you to my website and you see all the different things that I offer and you can tell me how I can be of service.

Learn more about Trai Cartwright at http://craftwrite.com/

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