If you purchase through our partner links, we get paid for the referral at no additional cost to you! Visit our disclosure page.
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. Sheâs 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 Denverâs Professional Creative Writing graduate program, Western State universityâs MFA, and University of Colorado Denverâs Film department.
Also sheâs 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 âitâs never been a better timeâ 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, âWeâre not curing cancer. Try to have some fun!â because everybody ends up taking all of this stuff so seriously, you know? Thereâs millions upon millions of dollars that eventually come into play, but weâre 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. Itâs 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 itâs just working one on one on a manuscript, and sometimes itâs staging classes. I teach all over Colorado and Iâve gotta tell ya, Iâve 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 Iâm teaching
in Fort Collins, so Iâm based in Denver and Iâll teach in the community
probably once a year. Sometimes itâs TV.
Sometimes itâs web series. Sometimes itâs advance screenwriting. I donât know, Iâve been missing my friends up
in Fort Collins where I moved back to when I first got here from LA and I donât
know, a bunch of people were interested, so I said alright Iâll make the drive.
Iâm happy to do it. Thereâs 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 sheâs does some work for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers as well, so we call it âthe circuit,â 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, âYou know what Colorado really needs is a screenwriting conference,â so we have four different fiction and non-fiction writing conferences but nothing that attends to screenwriting and Iâve been here long enough to know that thereâs enough demand to populate a conference at this point so I thought like the timingâs good. Letâs go ahead and give this a shot, so weâre going to do one day in August. I believe its august 5th. Itâs a Sunday. In fact weâre 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. Weâll 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 thatâs selling, is coming out of Los Angeles. Doesnât mean that you canât get your start somewhere else. Doesnât mean you canât 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 theyâll say, âWhat else do you have?â 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 youâre good enough to
have conversations. Youâre not
necessarily good enough to sell, but you are at least earning your space at the
table and then after that itâs usually another, oh jeez, another five to seven
before youâre 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 theyâll
say, âWhat else do you have?â and then you can trot out another five.
When you option a
screenplay whatâs the average amount of money youâll make?
Zero. People donât
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⊠Thereâs 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 youâre
a newbie, you have no track record, you are not even remotely appealing to the
big dogs, so youâre working with other folks who are like you, theyâre 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 theyâre going to take
your script out and go to get it sold and if you have faith in them and you
like âem 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.
Youâre 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 theyâre
going to work on your behalf to try to get it sold. Thatâs whatâs happening with an option.
What software do you
use to write a screenplay?
Oh Final Draft, industry standard. Spend the money. Itâs worth it⊠If youâre 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 theyâre not feeling like theyâre having to educate you in knowing
how the business works.
Whatâs your favorite
movies?
The one that always comes to mind I love Aliens. I love Aliens unreasonably. Itâs half because itâs an impeccably structured movie. When I was coming up there werenât 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. Iâd go back and watch it at least a couple of times a year. Also Michael Biehn is super pretty, so that doesnât hurt anything. There and aliens and yeah, itâs a good fun movie and Jim Cameron structures about as well as anybody in the business.
Whatâs 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 itâs called. I had done my âsave the catsâ education and, um, I feel like theyâre all having exactly the same conversation. Theyâre 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 itâs 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 theâI canât say itâs 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 Iâve been kind of grouping together in my classes, but they all are kind of doing the same thing. The first half thereâs no plot. Thereâs no plot. You are just hanging out with these people and youâre just sort of experiencing their life with them and youâre 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 itâs character escalation versus plot escalation, so itâs 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 donât know if youâve noticed that. Have you noticed that?
… itâs really important to me that writers do what theyâre supposed to do and the number one thing that theyâre 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 donât really know screenwriting. Theyâre not hiring the people or partnering with the people who are exceptional, you know, who really, really dedicate themselves to the craft! So weâre getting a lot of extremely lackluster, microbudget, by microbudget I mean 50,000 dollars, a 100,000 dollars. Weâre getting just a lot of movies where people are practicing their craft, but theyâre not making things that are marketplace competitive and as a former development executive, as somebody who has been marketplace competitive, itâs really important to me that writers do what theyâre supposed to do and the number one thing that theyâre 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 Iâm president of that organization. Itâs the state chapter of a national organization and the very first thing that I did as development chair was create a contest. Itâs not that we gave a lot of money away to the writer who won itâs 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 itâs going to elevate your next revision, so thatâs 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 youâre 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 youâre 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 somebodyâs 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, theyâre coming at it understanding that thereâs this whole business apparatus behind it that as writers we are a function of the marketplace. Itâs 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. Thatâs another thing that my production partner Art Thomas and I do. What else? Just gathering up whatever. Sometimes I meet a producer and theyâre looking for screenplays you know and Iâll 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 thatâs on the producing side, thatâs on the teaching side and then as a creative Iâve been commissioned to write a screenplay by Main Man Films Art Thomas and I did a bunch of work on that and thatâs now out in the marketplace. Itâs a five to seven million dollar revision thatâs historical. Itâs about Duke Ellington for goodness sakes and weâre being read by some top Hollywood talent because Art knows some people and, ah, again, you know, optioned it for very little money, but thatâs not the point. Art knows folks to kind of build out the team of whoâs going to rally around and get this thing made and then the other big project that Iâm working on, weâre in post on our pilot. This is a docu-series thatâs called Hidden Tigers and probably TV, we might go web series, like we can always go web series, right? Thatâs easy. We wanna take our shot. Weâve got a few people at the networks who are interested in seeing what weâve done with the pilot and what this is about. Thereâs a young woman, a disabled woman named— who I donât 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? Iâm 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⊠Weâre finishing up our pilot on that then weâll take the series out to the marketplace here probably in the next couple of months.
If somebodyâs not fun to work with walk away! Life is too short.
Well, Congratulations!
Thank you. Itâs so fun! Oh my gosh it was so fun. Work with good people. Thatâs the other good piece of advice. If somebodyâs 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, youâre still going to learn a ton about writing. Thereâs a few great writers conferences coming up, so thereâs the Northern Colorado Writerâs Conference. Iâll be there teaching some stuff about TV as well as fiction writing. Iâll be at the Pikeâs Peak Writerâs Conference, shortly after that, thatâs down in Colorado springs and who knows what Iâm teaching there. Itâll be fiction. Itâll be some screenwriting stuff. Iâm 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. Letâs see. The Western State University, Writing the Rockies (2018). This is outstanding, so this is three days. Itâs 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. Heâs considered the show runner of TVâs greatest season of TV ever. It was Simpsonâs I believe season #7 and that was him. That was his work, so heâs the showrunner on The Simpsons. Worked with him last year. Weâve got a new guy coming in named John Bowman, whoâs a TV writer, oh my gosh, dating back into the 90s, like he has touched tons and tons of TV shows, so theyâre 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.
Whatâs 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 theyâve 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 Iâll work on that, so it really depends on what you
need. I do copy editing, so thereâs a
service I do called page notes, where its like 15 to 20 pages of me explaining
whatâs 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 youâre
saying? Are these the right the
adjectives? The right words? Is this
consistent of voice? Thatâs another
really, really big one in books is whether or not youâve designed the right
voice, the right format, to follow the function of what youâre 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/
Thanks for reading “Interview with a Screenwriter!”
Don’t forget to subscribe and follow on Facebook.
ATTENTION SERIOUS INDIE FILMMAKERS – Write, Produce, And Sell Your Film. Click here!
