Dispatch from The Quest: Meet Brandon Cohen

Over the course of the 24 weeks I will be working with the writers in “The Quest,” I will be posting ‘dispatches’ from them to the GITS community. There are several reasons for this, the main one being educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers.

I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.

Today I would like to introduce Brandon Cohen.

Brandon Cohen was born and raised in New York City. He claims it was a lot like “Gossip Girl” if you substituted the hot girls and drugs for his brother and XBOX. He got his BA in Economics from Vanderbilt University in 2008. Upon graduation, he got a job working in the non-scripted department at William Morris Endeavor, and parlayed that into a job working in Program Development at the cable network truTV. He recently decided to leave his job at truTV to focus on comedy writing full time. In addition to comedy, he enjoys 90s music, watching cops arrest drunks, dogs, videos of people falling down, karaoke, complaining, all beach sports, people watching, and any restaurant/bar on a roof. He currently resides in NYC, and often lies awake at night wondering if Frankie Muniz will ever make a comeback.

Here is Brandon’s first dispatch from his Quest experience:

It was a little over two months ago that I sat down with my parents and told them “I’m going to quit my job next week to become a comedy writer.” While they were definitely taken aback, I think that based on the gravity with which I presented the news, they were just happy to find out that nobody was pregnant (…yet). Still, it wasn’t an easy conversation to have, and it definitely came out of left field for them; they had no idea about my aspirations. At that point, their only exposure to my writing career was when my Dad tried to help me get a finance internship while I was in college. After an interview with a firm, the interviewer told me she was a big fan of comedy and would love to read an article I wrote for my college’s satirical newspaper. I sent her the article, and didn’t hear anything about it until three weeks later, when my Dad called me in a huff after hearing that I sent the interviewer a “dirty email.” Apparently, she wasn’t a fan of comedy in which the first sentence to the article made an anal sex joke. Oh well. I never thought finance was for me anyway.

So, my parents were extremely supportive from the get go, but like any parents, their gut reaction was “so…what’s your plan?” As much as I had one in my head –write spec after spec after spec, land a manager, get hired to write some jokes for the Oscars, hit it off with Mila Kunis backstage, land a gig as a staff writer at SNL, split time between my NYC West Village brownstone and Mila’s Malibu home, sell one of my film specs, quit SNL to focus on movie writing, ditch Mila for a younger more impressionable starlet, so on and so forth — I didn’t really have a specific plan about how this was going to go down. I already had a couple of specs under my belt, and thought that if I could focus on writing full time, it would allow me to generate more content, and also light a fire under my ass. The longer I stayed at my day job, the more I felt that it was a now or never situation. I decided to go with now.

I quit my job, and as luck would have it, the week I quit Scott posted this. I was never someone who believed in fate, unless you count every time I had prolonged eye contact with a hot girl on the street and thought she was “the one”, but I couldn’t help but feel this was a sign. I submitted my two best loglines, and continued working on other projects every day, and by “other projects,” I mean refreshing Go Into the Story every seven minutes until the announcement. And here I am.

It took me two years to work up the courage to quit my job, and I kept waiting for there to be some big event that would allow me to quit. Eventually, I realized that it was never coming, and I decided to create my own event. Things won’t start to happen unless you make them happen. I’m talking as if I’ve just won an Oscar and everything has worked out swimmingly for me. I’m obviously at the very beginning of this journey, and who knows how this will end for me, but what I do know is that regardless of what happens, twenty years from now when Mila Kunis and I are in the midst of working out our divorce settlement, I’ll at least be able to say that I gave it my best shot.

If you have any questions or comments for Brandon, feel free to post them in comments.

Tomorrow: The beginning of a series of reflections from the Questers about story concepts.

For background on “Go Into The Story: The Quest,” go here and here.

Comment Archive