On May 12, 2011, I posted this:

CBS Films acquires action thriller spec script “Inside the Machine” from writer Marc Maurino. Per Deadline:

Maurino is repped by UTA and Circle of Confusion.

Marc and I got in touch with each other, and he kindly agreed to do an interview with me. Here is Part 1:

SM: Here’s an interesting way to start our discussion. It’s an excerpt from a blog post you wrote dated September 19, 2010, a little over a year ago:

I’m attending IFW [Independent Film Week] with my feature script Inside the Machine, in the Emerging Narrative section, which is for scripts at the nascent stage, typically, like mine, without a producer or any financing attached. Inside the Machine is a character driven crime drama about an undercover federal agent wrestling with family issues and personal responsibility while investigating a prison gang doing cartel robberies on the Texas/Mexico border. As my earlier post indicated, I’m looking for a creative producer to jump on board with me and shepherd the project through production and distribution; I’m also looking for a talent manager that can help me grow my career towards writing and directing on assignment. I’m also looking forward to just steeping in five days of the indie film world.

Cut to May 12, 2011 when CBS Films made a preemptive offer to buy Inside the Machine. How often do you look back on those simple set of facts – starting out with a script-in-progress and no representation to a spec script sale to a Hollywood studio – and wonder, “How did that happen?”

MM: Sometimes I have a little whiplash! To be honest, there’s less “how did that happen?” and more gratitude and a recognition that I have been unbelievably lucky. I believe that luck favors those who are prepared, and I was prepared; and I was consciously considering and owning every step of the process, so it’s less “how” and more “thank you!”

SM: So let’s backtrack. When did you first become interested in filmmaking?

MM: I generally tie my love for filmmaking back to reading an article about Spike Lee in Time magazine around the time DO THE RIGHT THING came out. I already had a deep love for movies, which was mostly instilled by my father, who took me and my siblings to the movies all the times as a kid, and was (and is) a big movie lover, with great taste in movies. But reading about Spike and this new idea of “independent filmmaking” was my personal revolution that made me say “I want to be an independent filmmaker.” This was 1989, I was pretty young, and indie film as we’ve come to know it was pretty young, too.

I cut out that article about Spike—put his picture on my wall, which I can still see—he was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey and swinging a baseball bat—and I proceeded to read everything I could find about him. And everything I could find about independent film. Which quickly lead to articles about (and seeing movies by) everyone from Jean Luc Godard to Francois Truffaut to (in the next few years) Todd Haynes, Richard Linklater, etc.

I had been raised on the greats of the late seventies and eighties—JAWS, ET, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, etc.—but reading about Spike Lee was the first thing that made film seem both accessible and … edgy, and political, and perhaps with a greater meaning than a Hollywood popcorn approach. And in my teens, the appeal of an edgy, contrarian, anti-authoritarian approach to anything, but especially art, was right up my alley.

So by the time I finished high school and went off to college, I had it in my head: I was going to be a filmmaker.

So to my dad, and to Spike Lee: thanks, guys!

SM: You have written and directed several self-financed short films. What did that experience teach you as a storyteller? Has there been any direct payoff from creating those short films or has it primarily been about what you learned benefiting you and your ability to conceive and write strong narratives?

MM: As a storyteller, the biggest, most profound, and deepest lesson is also the simplest: Less is more. I like to tell a story about the shooting of TRIGGER FINGER, my first short to get into a festival.

There was a scene between a mother and son, and she was yearning to keep him home before he ran off with his friends, so she offered to make him a sandwich. I wrote it; we rehearsed it; we shot it; and in the rough assembly, my editor and I looked at each other and were like, Oh, my God! They’re talking about a sandwich for what seems like two minutes! And now they’re talking about potato chips! And pickles…oh, please, make it stop!!!

I’m kidding a little, but the scene was horribly overwritten, and I was stuck in my editor’s studio as these characters had started a scene which we needed to keep; and needed to get to the end, which again was narratively important; but for an exchange of maybe six or eight lines, there was no conflict, no new information, no narrative thrust; and yet, on paper and even in rehearsal and shooting, it had sounded natural, it made sense, and it wasn’t until we saw it in front of us, on a screen in a dark room, that it became clear that it was way too much.

My wonderful editor found a brilliant way to get us out of the scene using some Super 8 flashback imagery that became a running motif throughout, and I vowed to be BRUTAL about cutting stuff thereafter.

For me, that’s not a lesson that any book or teacher or whatever could have taught me—it was my actors, saying my words, in my film, in my editors’ studio, on a screen, that made me realize—CUT, CUT, CUT, and cut some more.

And the reason for this is that a living, breathing actor brings so much to your words—he or she embodies so much just by standing there—that part of the magic and wonder that a great actor brings to a script is that he or she just sells so much of what you’ve written with her eyes, with his physical carriage, with the way in which they carry themselves, their looks—until you’ve worked with an actor on your own material, you might not have an explicit appreciation for what an incredible amount of gravitas and power they bring to a scene—BEFORE they’ve started spouting your incredible dialogue!

There are probably a dozen other lessons I learned explicitly about writing (not to mention directing and producing) from making these shorts. I advocate that every aspiring writer try to shoot a little something tiny—my later shorts cost quite a bit, but we all know that shorts can be made for $200 in a single day, and that’s how I made my first two, and I learned an immense amount from them as well.

And I should add: in my next short, though I cut a heck of a lot before we shot, we still lost huge chunks of scenes (and even whole scenes) in the edit. It’s a constant learning process, though I will say by the time I finished INSIDE THE MACHINE, it was quite lean.

And the direct payoff, besides writing strong narratives (and especially tight dialogue) has been the opportunity to go to film festivals and to meet other filmmakers, both at my level and people way above me, who have become industry contacts, folks willing to look at my work and support me in the business.

SM: When did you start learning about the craft of screenwriting and how did you go about educating yourself? Have there been any particular books, teachers or online resources that you have found to be particularly helpful in learning the craft?

MM: The first book I got was, of course, Screenplay by Syd Field, probably shortly after I read that Spike Lee article. Since then, I got another twenty or thirty books or so. I’ve read them all; I’ve learned from every single one of them. But for me, the four single biggest resources to becoming a professional screenwriter were: Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat; the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting; reading hundreds of scripts; and writing tens of thousands of pages in my life (thousands in journals, hundreds in school and professional reports, hundreds in short fiction, and hundreds in screenplay format.)

Save the Cat: After reading dozens of books on screenwriting, and writing hundreds of pages of never-finished specs, unproduced shorts, and shorts that I directed, Save the Cat was the first book that I feel really broke down, for me, everything structural that needs to happen in the first act; the wildly important beats of the second act, including, in my opinion, the all-important midpoint; and the architecture of the third act. There are certainly places where Save the Cat is formulaic or a little paint-by-numbers, but rest his soul, Blake Snyder codified the basic story beats in a way with clarity and explanation that really spoke to me, and which none of the other books I had read did.

UCLA: I got that book right before I started the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting, which is a 30 week course and which hews, in its instruction of structure, closely to the BSBS (Blake Snyder Beat Sheet.) In the UCLA PPS, you “meet” online via Skype with an instructor and a small class (mine was six students) once a week for three hours.

The first ten weeks are spent doing a logline, 2 page treatment, step outline, and first act; the next brick of ten weeks, with the same instructor, you finish that script (about ten pages a week); and the third brick of ten weeks you write another script. Each week also includes video lectures, readings, and the class time includes discussion and peer review. It was in the first two bricks that I wrote INSIDE THE MACHINE, and because being part of the class enforces accountability and discipline, I was able for the first time in my life to write and complete a feature length script.

It certainly wasn’t the first time I tried; my hard drive is littered with the husks of many, many unfinished feature scripts, and many short scripts. But I think that the combination of discipline and a straightforward architecture of script-building that the course instilled are what made the difference for me.

And to this day, the tools I learned in that course still form the way I write my scripts and prep my takes/pitches for assignments, from starting with a two pager, writing character bios, building a beat sheet and step outline, etc.

Reading scripts: I can’t overemphasize the importance of reading screenplays. I’ve read hundreds, from classics, to scripts for films I want to see, to movies I’ve seen. I particularly like reading contemporary scripts that are selling or getting heat in the marketplace, and for years I’ve always read several of the Black List scripts to get a sense of what style and content is getting attention in the industry.

If you’re an aspiring screenwriter, the Black List is mostly composed of your peers—obviously not Aaron Sorkin, but most of those scripts are emerging writers, and seeing what your peers are doing, and how they’re doing it, is invaluable if Hollywood is your destination.

However directing indie film was always my destination, and still is, in many ways, but I always had it in mind that a good route to directing is through breaking into Hollywood as a writer; so I’ve always paid attention to commercial work just as much as I have to the annual crop out of Sundance or the writers and directors profiled each year in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Face of Independent Film.

Writing: And finally, just writing. Writing screenplays especially, but the act of putting words down on paper, whether in a journal, as part of The Artist’s Way practice of morning pages, in professional work, in blogs, in journalism—wherever I can find an outlet for expressing myself in the written word, I do it. I keep a journal, I brainstorm ideas in writing, I write hundreds of pages of professional reports (on my day job) a year, and I occasionally blog for Filmmaker Magazine and have written short fiction over the years—in addition to screenwriting. Screenwriting for me is like an athlete playing his or her sport of choice; but every athlete cross-trains, and goes to the gym, runs, lifts, does yoga, stretches, etc. Writing and reading everything and anything possible are the screenwriter’s equivalent of every non-football thing someone like Tom Brady does.

What’s your takeaway from Marc’s observations? Is there one thing in particular you can zero in on as a key to learning the craft?

Tomorrow: Part 2 of my interview with screenwriter Marc Maurino.

UPDATE: Got this note from Marc in comments:

Thanks for reading and commenting, guys. I’ll be checking out the comments all week and am available to answer any questions if anyone wants to ask anything.

Marc’s interview runs every day this week Monday-Friday, so if you have any questions, I’d be sure to take him up on his very generous offer. Your chance to interface directly with someone who wrote a spec script and sold it, thereby breaking into the business.