Interview (Part 1): Sam Regnier (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Sam Regnier wrote the original screenplay “Free Agent” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting and has been set up at CBS Films. Recently Sam and I had an excellent phone conversation in which we covered a lot of territory, his background and how he got into writing, a deep analysis of “Free Agent”, and a discussion about the writing craft.

Today in Part 1, we talk about Sam’s background growing up in the Midwest and how he ended up in Los Angeles pursuing his dream of becoming a writer:

Scott Myers: You grew up in the Midwest?

Sam Regnier: Yeah, I grew up in Kansas originally. Overland Park, Kansas.

Scott: In your acceptance speech for the 2015 Nicholl Award, you thank your father for teaching you about work ethic and your mother for teaching you to love story. I was wondering if you could maybe unpack that in terms of how you learned the lessons from each of them when you were growing up.

Sam: My dad was an entrepreneur. He started a bank out of a trailer — like a house trailer — in Kansas. My mom worked there, and they eventually grew it into a regional bank. My dad has always been dedicated to the idea that if you work hard every day that eventually you’re going to get what it is you want.

My mom is an obsessive reader. If she was in the middle of a book, she’d bring it in the car and try and get a paragraph in while she was driving, which isn’t the safest thing in the world, but… [laughter] …it definitely filtered down to my brother and my sister and I. We would go on these road trips to Colorado or Minnesota, and we would go for two hours, three hours, in the car, and nobody would say a word, because my dad’s driving, and the rest of us are reading. That’s the way we grew up.

Scott: And I’m assuming your reading led you into writing…

Sam: Yeah, I started writing pretty young. When I was still in elementary school, I started doing a little bit of fiction. But really, I focused on poetry. I entered a variety of poetry contests starting in middle school, all the way through high school. I did OK.

I focused on writing poetry through high school — then graduation starts sneaking up and I realized — not only did I have no idea what I want to do with most of my life, I didn’t know where I want to go to college, or why I wanted to go there. There were only three things in my life that I was really passionate about: wrestling, photography, and writing.

I figured wrestling probably wasn’t going anywhere. I thought maybe I’d go try to go to University of Iowa for writing — but my uncle, who was a professor at USC, said “Why don’t you come out here, see the school, take the cinema tour.” I took it, and I immediately knew.

Scott: Let’s step back a bit. Do you have ever some books that were particularly influential for you when you’re young?

Sam: The funny thing is I read a lot for volume. In terms of series, we had every “Hardy Boys,” every “Boxcar Children,” every “Encyclopedia Brown,” every “Babysitter’s Club.”

I had the complete works of Sherlock Holmes. I read every one of all of them. I started reading a lot of science fiction, because my brother was into it.

Then after that, my mom’s favorite author is John Irving. I read a lot of John Irving as well. He was also a wrestler when he was a kid, and so I’ve made that connection with him. He has a literary quality to his writing that is very, very beautiful. Those are probably the main literary influences.

Scott: How about movies and TV, any of them from your youth that inspired you?

Sam: I was also a little bit obsessive about watching movies multiple times. I had a group of friends — we were typical high school guys. We didn’t have active social calendars. Every single Friday night that something wasn’t happening, which was a lot of Friday nights, we would watch The Big Lebowski. I don’t even know why. We loved it. I don’t know why we didn’t watch something else. But we probably watched it somewhere between 40 and 50 times when I was in high school. We loved it so much.

The other one that I would watch a lot was The Princess Bride. I watched that a ton of times, and I read the book. I got really into everything that William Goldman wrote before I went to film school or even thought about being a screenwriter, strangely. Then, once I did, I realized, “This is the most famous screenwriter. This works.” I had read Marathon Man and seen the movie, All the President’s Men, Butch Cassidy.

I also loved a lot of character comedies like City Slickers or Tommy Boy — stuff that I’m trying to write now.

Scott: People ask me all the time, “What are some good screenwriting books?” I say, “Adventures in the Screen Trade” by William Goldman. You should start there.”

Sam: The second one is great, too. If you read that one and then “Which Lie Did I Tell: More Adventures in the Screen Trade,” those two together are all you need to start.

Scott: So the University of Southern California School for Cinematic Arts. That was quite a transition from Kansas. You’re not in Kansas anymore, you’re at USC. What was that experience like?

Sam: It is a big transition. LA doesn’t really seem like a real place when you are from Kansas. I wasn’t from the middle of nowhere or even a small town, but you forget when you grow up in Kansas that people live in a place like Los Angeles.

But I got to LA, and at the beginning it’s the same as any college. The best things about it, by far, that the program I was in had 22 screenwriters. And every semester, you had a class with 10 of those people, and you workshop the entire time. Part of the benefit is getting notes from other people. But the bigger part of it is, every week, you’re giving notes to ten other people.

You learn as much or more from helping people through their writing problems as you do from your own, because you’re looking at it from a real perspective. You can see what’s happening. In your own writing you’re way, way too close to it. The problems seem intractable, whereas with other people’s writing, you take a look at it and you’re like, “Oh, no. Lose that character and you’ll be fine and everything will tighten up.”

Scott: You’ll probably remember this. Billy Ray, when he spoke at your Nicholl ceremony, he said that 95 percent of what screenwriters do is solve problems.

It’s really important to develop those critical analytical skills where you can read material, identify the issues, and then come up with solutions. It sounds like that was part of what was going on there for you.

Sam: Absolutely. You need to be able to look at material from a broader perspective, because that’s how every executive is going to look at your material. You need to know what that’s going to be like for them.

Scott: After graduation, you did some internships, but eventually you landed as an assistant at Paramount Pictures.

Sam: I was an assistant there for a little bit. After I graduated, I had done an internship at Morgan Creek Productions and met an executive, Mona Panchal, and she got a job at Paramount a month after I graduated — which worked out great for me.

I really loved working there. Any job like that has a tendency to take over your life, and that’s what it did for me. That’s why I eventually left, because I knew that I wasn’t writing enough — if I was ever going to get good enough to write professionally.

On the flip side, the lessons you learn from being on that side, the buyer side, are so invaluable. I talk to a lot of writers who get really frustrated with being pigeonholed. What I remember from that time is having all this material and all these writers on one side, and then all of our projects on the other side, and trying to figure out how you make connections between all these creative people and all these projects, which is a really difficult problem that I don’t think writers appreciate how hard that can be.

Sometimes, you need to be able to simplify a writer and what it is they do. People say, “I don’t want to be a name on a list.” But if you’re not a name on a list, you’re not going to get any work. If you trying to hire a writer, on some level you need to be able to say, “These people do comedy. These people do drama.”

You you need to understand the logistics sometimes require people to be able to simplify what it is you do. I tried to remember lessons like that from when I was at Paramount.

Tomorrow in Part 2, we start to dig into Sam’s Nicholl winning script “Free Agent”.

Sam is repped by Paradigm and Management SGC.

Twitter: @dadbasic.