Go Into The Story Interview: Jason Mark Hellerman

My conversation with the 2013 Black List screenwriter.

Jason Mark Hellerman wrote the script “Shovel Buddies” which made the 2013 Black List, was produced, and had its world premiere at the South By Southwest Festival. It has a compelling plot: “Over 24 hours, four teenage friends try to complete the “Shovel List” (a will/bucket list) left for them by their best friend before he died of Leukemia”.

I loved the script and reached out to Jason for an interview. We ended up talking for 90 minutes, an excellent conversation covering a lot of territory. I think aspiring screenwriters will find Jason’s insights particularly relevant as we got into quite a bit of depth about his process of being outside the business to inside it.

Scott: In our email exchanges, you wrote, “When I taught grad school, your blog was required reading.” Is that true?

Jason: It’s true. I went to graduate school at Boston University for screenwriting and the professor I worked with, I think it was John Bernstein, the first time I was introduced to him, he said, “I make everyone read this.” I was like, “I don’t know what this is.”

All of his students he taught, undergrad and grad, Go Into The Story was a big thing. It was, “Here you go. Here’s your homework, writing scripts, reading these books,” but also read this blog because it’s access to professional screenwriters. It’s better to get your information from word of mouth than from books that were written fifteen years ago.

Scott: I’m glad to hear that because it’s one of the reasons I started the blog in the first place, to provide that kind of proximity to what’s actually going in the business. But let’s back up here, get some perspective on how you wound your way into teaching at grad school and writing your Black List script “Shovel Buddies”. You grew up in Pennsylvania. Were you always a movie guy?

Jason: My dad is a huge movie buff, a huge Hitchcock fan. I was watching Rope from a very young age and Psycho and, obviously, all the classics. It was something we all bonded over. My mom would work at night a lot of times and my dad would do his thing. I have a twin brother and we were both very into movies.

We would rent VHS tapes and when my mom would leave, it would be man movies, like Terminator and Three Days of the Condor. My dad would say, “Look, your mom’s not interested in these, but I am and I want to pass this on to you, so here you go.”

We would have like a ball, just watching these movies with my dad and really getting into them. My brother and I got really entrenched in the stories, ’80s movies, Back to the Future and Spielberg. But even in obscure movies, Metropolis was one of our favorites growing up. So it was a fun, kind of challenging and great time.

Scott: How did you find your way into writing?

Jason: Growing up, both my parents were very into reading. We would go to the library and their deal was if we took out three books in the library, we could also rent one VHS tape. I would pick out three books and the way they’d check on is for reading them is we’d write something up, a book report.

Eventually, I went to them and said, “You know what, I’m not a big fan of writing book reports. I’ll read the books. I like reading, but can I write my own stories instead,” and I started writing my own stories at six.

I think the first one that we have is called “Harry and the Hairy People”. I would just write them and they’d be like two or three pages.

A lot of times, they’d star kids from the neighborhood. My parents would be in them and the villains would be my teachers, but they had this weird act structure. Ever since then, writing was always something I did on the side. I did it in high school. I thought maybe I’d go into journalism for college, but when the time rolled around, I was scared. I was terrified of writing.

I applied to all these different colleges, all for writing, I got in and then, I applied to one college, University of Delaware, for physical therapy and sports medicine. I got in there, too, and I was like, “You know what, I’m just going to be a doctor. I’ll be like Michael Crichton. I’ll write on the side, but I should probably be a doctor.”

I made it at University of Delaware for one week. I called my dad and I said, “Hey, you know how you wanted me to be a doctor and everybody was really stoked about me being a doctor?” He says, “Yes.” I said, “I don’t want to do that anymore. I think I’m going to drop out,” and like the crazy, supportive parent, he was like, “OK, I’ll come and get you.” He drove, we talked about and we called my mom and she said, “Look, if you’re not happy there, why don’t you just follow your dreams?”

Both my parents were really supportive. So, I withdrew from Delaware and I wound up applying to Penn State. At Penn State it was, “Look, we’ll take him late. He can just pick up where we left off.” That was at the beginning of me focusing my career towards writing and taking the big leap.

Scott: First of all, I can imagine that, basically, any person reading this interview would say, “Why can’t I have parents like that?”

Jason: I’m super lucky. Both my parents went to college and weren’t sure what they were going to do with their lives, then figured it out along the way. They were both the first people, the second people in their families to go to college. I think just having that privilege, they knew that I was going to be paying the bills, and that I was going to go into massive student debt.

Their attitude was, “Look, if you’re going to be paying thousands of dollars, do what you want to do. Don’t pay thousands of dollars for stuff you’re not interested in.” That was a nice launching period for me, and I think having their support is honestly what got me to where I am now. If I didn’t have it, I think I probably would have quit much earlier.

Scott: So you go to Penn State, you major in Film and Television production, and have a minor in English. Were you learning screenwriting there, or did you just wait until you went to BU and got the MFA in screenwriting?

Jason: I think a little bit of both. I learned a lot just about structure at Penn State. I had some amazing professors who had concentrations more in documentary and experimental film, and I had other professors who were making movies, but on a much smaller scale. They were shooting features that were $20,000, not necessarily Mumblecore, but things you could just shoot in your back yard.

I loved them and thought what they did was interesting. They really encouraged me. “Look. If you want to write Hollywood movies, movies you would see at art theater and not necessarily just release straight to DVD, then you need to learn how to do that somewhere.”

Penn State, at least at the time, didn’t have any feature writing courses. It was just theory, documentary, experimental, and writing the short film.

I had a great set of professors who told me, “Look. We can’t teach you everything, nor do we think anyone can, but we know that there are schools out there that will teach you how to write features.”

Sure enough, two professors I had there had gone to Boston University and gotten their Masters there. Granted they’d gone in production, but they said, “Look. We went to BU, we loved it, maybe you should apply there.” I did and I was accepted for screenwriting, and I was thinking, “If you went and it worked out for you, I might as well give it a shot.”

Scott: So you move to LA. What next?

Jason: Boston University has this great extension program. They call it Boston University in Los Angeles and, basically, what they do is they set you up with two internships and they let you ‑‑ of course, you have to pay for it ‑‑ they let you pay for this university a certain amount of money to say that you’re still in school, even though you’ve graduated, and then you can intern.

I interned for the TV show “Mad Men,” and I also interned at Scott Free, Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company.

Scott: What did you do with that?

Jason: I did “Mad Men”, it was great, and I learned a ton about research and just honestly the stress and the amount of work that goes in the producing an hour of television. It was really inspiring.

At Scott Free, what was great was I was interning there, learning about coverage, learning a ton about features and I became really close with the president at the time who was Michael Costigan. He was leaving to open his own production company and he was backlogged with work. I said, “Look. I can help you move some boxes, if you want.”

He was so generous. “We can use all the help we can get. If you’re free after Christmas, when we come back from the break and I’m opening my own place, maybe you could help.”

One day, I was stocking a moving van, moving some scripts. The next day, I had unloaded the boxes in his new office, and I was unpacking all of these uncovered screenplays, and he was sitting there at his desk saying, “Oh, my God. We’re going to have to read all of these.” I said, “I can write coverage. I can read them.”

He goes, “Great. Let’s do that. I can give you a month’s worth of work, and we’ll go from there.”

That month quickly became a year. I parlayed that back into his assistant lineup. I was like, “I could answer phones while I read.” Then he wound up hiring more people. I just sort of got to be the first in the door, from moving boxes, to reading scripts, to writing coverage, to answering his phones, to sitting in on development meetings. I really got the full sense of what it takes to be an assistant in Hollywood, what it takes to be a top-of-your-game producer, which is the most invaluable information I could ever have come across.

Scott: People ask, “Do I have to move to LA in order to make it in the business?” There are some things which can’t happen unless you’re there.

Jason: You can get a PDF anywhere. You can get on a call and talk to anybody anywhere. Case in point, this conversation. But you cannot sit next to Michael Costigan, producer of Prometheus, American Gangster and Brokeback Mountain unless you’re in L.A. One on one wisdom, whether it’s driving him to the airport and listening in on roll calls, and how he deals with things, or just watching him sit across from an A‑list writer‑director, seeing what gets them enthusiastic and parlaying that into doing a project together. Those are the tips and tricks.

It’s not even you sitting there and telling me it, it’s just something I get to view. It’s something I will always be grateful for. He kids, he’s like, “Put me in your memoir.”

It was, for me, the “kid stays in the picture” moment, just sitting with him. I’m doing these things and really understanding what Hollywood is, what the game you play is, which is be nice to everybody, but really loving only certain people.

For me, I was very, very lucky, blessed, whatever you want to call it, that Michael took me under his wing and exposed me to a plethora of different people. It has helped just knowing people Michael works with or even Zac Roth who went to BU. Roth Films is huge.

Having that connection so that later, when I have an agent, and he’s like, “Oh, I’m going to send it over there. I’m going to sweeten the deal by saying, ‘Hey, this kid went to BU just like you.’”

Also, I met Bruce Feirstein, who wrote the Bond movies in the ’90s and Tomorrow Never Dies and Golden Eye and The World is Not Enough.

He went to BU. I had a professor at BU who hooked us up via email. He’s been a great confidante and support system. A source of encouragement when the times weren’t great with “Shovel Buddies,” when I’m getting weird notes from people I’m not sure I want to sign with, he was a really great sounding board, someone who had been there professionally, who had worked at the top, who was willing to give me ten minutes, which is, sometimes, all I really needed to explain how to not get taken advantage of, what I’m owed for certain treatments and different things like that.

Scott: You’re speaking to the importance of finding those mentors who can help steer you through some of the booby traps out there…

Jason: If I didn’t have Michael or Bruce or all of my old professors in my life… These are people who know so much more than me, who have sat through it and then be like, “Here is a mistake I made. Don’t make this one.” They taught me invaluable lessons about humility but also how to deal with all sorts of personalities, then also going the extra mile to expose me to all sorts of personalities, so I know what it’s actually like. Again, those are things you cannot get outside of the industry.

Scott: So at this point, working for Michael, you’re writing scripts?

Jason: Yeah, I’m getting up very early in the morning and staying up very late at night. My Saturdays and Sundays are just kissed goodbye. I sit in a coffee shop, and I write and write and write. I was in one writing group, but then I’d wind up having to stay late at work, so I had to drop out of that one. I started another one, then I started bouncing ideas off random people.

Michael would give me 10 minutes on Fridays to pitch him loglines. He would say, “Nope, bad, bad, bad, nope, that’s good, try that.” Just utilizing the time I had. I knew coming out here I wanted to be a writer. That’s true for a lot of people. They come out here wanting to do one thing, then maybe find out they love development.

I work closely with a friend right now, who came out here thinking he wanted to write sitcoms, but he’s so obsessed with development. He’s like, “This is so much more fun to me.” For me, it was always writing. I knew that if I stopped for a little while, that I would never start again.

Scott: I’ve read that the inspiration for “Shovel Buddies”, you had some friends who had died from leukemia, and so there’s a personal connection. How did the actual idea of moving from that to a concept for a story evolve?

Jason: It’s two‑fold. I always wanted to write a coming‑of‑age story. I was on the plane to Boston University, writing down my ideas, with these big hopeful eyes, like “Oh, my God, this is going to be my mark. This is what I’m going to do.”

I was obsessed with this thing called “Sammy’s Place”. Growing up, a girl in my neighborhood died. She was six years old, and her parents built this place in the woods, near my house, called Sammy’s Place. It was an outdoor amphitheater where you could go and watch shows and listen to nature. That was what they did to commemorate her.

Because it was in the woods, and no one went, it wound up being the breaking grounds for my brother, my friends and I where we’d sip our first beer, smoke our first cigarettes, and bring girls there. It wound up being this coming‑of‑age place where the best things in our lives happened. I always knew that was supposed to be a story, and it was supposed to be a place.

In college, I had a wonderful mentor named Arnold Markley. He was an English professor, and he was the first person to put it in my brain that I could be a screenwriter. Before that, I was writing really long short stories, not quite novellas but they were long.

He sat me down one day and said, “Look, Jason, no one’s going to pay you to write op‑ed pieces. You’re funny, and you like to create characters. Have you thought about writing movies?” I was like, “No, I haven’t thought about anything. I’m a sophomore in college. I’ve thought about doing your homework, and I’ve thought about the girl that’s sitting next to me,” but I really didn’t have an idea about what to do.

He said, “I want to introduce you to the film faculty. I want you to meet some people. Maybe, you could even be a scholar, maybe get your doctorate in film,” blah, blah, blah. He was amazing, and he was wonderful. He’d stay late, and he’d read anything I’d give to him.

When I was a junior in college, he sent out an email one day. “I’ve been diagnosed with leukemia. I’m going to be in treatment, and we’re going to try and do the bone marrow stuff.” Over the next year and a half, he struggled. He retired from teaching, then came back, then retired again.

Then, one day, I remember walking across the campus at Penn State. This was right when Facebook had sort of taken off. I’m trying to remember, like 2008 or 2009, and I remember seeing a Facebook post that said, “We lost a great person today. RIP, Arnold.”

I thought, “How many people do you know named Arnold?” I was like, “What the fuck?” My mom was working for Penn State at the time. She called me. “Mom, what happened?” She said, “You guys were really close. Arnold passed away this morning.” I just remember being shocked and broken.

I didn’t even get to say thank you. I didn’t even know where his advice was going to take me. It stuck with me, and it stuck with me for a long time.

I went to grad school. I tried to write “Sammy’s Place.” It didn’t work the way I wanted it to, which no screenplay ever does, first one out, and I was a little bitter. It was really about having a mentor who died. In this one, Sammy was still a kid and he died. It was more about a mentor relationship than anything else.

I couldn’t crack it, but I knew something was there. I knew the idea of being a shovel buddy, which is taking your friend’s stuff that they don’t want anyone to see like his porno mags, his cigarettes. I knew that was a strong concept, and that’s something other people get.

I sat on the story, and I wrote three other scripts. Because the universe is kind of awful sometimes, I went to grad school. I sat on “Shovel Buddies.” I was moving to LA, and I found out that one of the kids I went to Penn State with, who was a source of inspiration for me — his name was Michael Chobot, he was nominated for two Emmys in sound design — he called and said, “Hey, man, I have leukemia.” I said, “What? How’s that possible? That’s not a real thing. You’re 25 years old. You’re an ultra marathon runner. You worked on The Blind Side in sound design. You worked on a Pokemon movie in sound design. You were one of the youngest members of the union.”

Mike moved to New York without fear, lived on a mattress in Coney Island, lived off 35‑cent hot dogs, and did the night shift sound editing and kept getting promoted. He was everybody’s litmus test that you could make it in the business because no one was as driven as him.

Hearing that he was dying really fucked with my head. He and I wound up talking a lot because he was getting chemo at night, and I was in Los Angeles. He would send me some screenplay ideas. I’d sort of rift on them because he knew I wanted to be a writer. He had nothing to do because he was sort of being quarantined because when you have leukemia you’re susceptible to diseases, so he’s shut out.

I would send him DVDs as I would come across screeners and stuff like that. Please don’t sue me, MPAA. I would send him all the Oscar screeners, and we’d talk.

One day, he stopped answering my texts. I had just mailed him Fruitvale. This was recently. I sent it to him, and I got an email from his sister: “I’m not sure if you heard, but Mike died yesterday morning.” I couldn’t afford the flight home, so I missed the funeral.

When Arnold died, I was your typical 21‑year‑old. Open a bottle of Jameson, let’s get drunk, and let’s forget about it. But when Mike died, because he had the same dream as me, and because I felt like he acted on that dream and he deserved that dream to come true, maybe more so than anybody I’ve ever met, and he wasn’t going to get it, I felt like I owed it to him not to be an asshole and get drunk.

I owed it to him just to write it down and to keep writing it down. So, I reopened “Shovel Buddies”, and just kept writing. I wrote the parent characters into it who didn’t exist anymore, and I wrote the emotional parts of it, the parts where the kids are upset and crying. I just wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote.

Every time I’d be pissed, or upset, or I’d realize how expensive Los Angeles is and how I can’t afford anything, or if I’d get a parking ticket or a traffic ticket, or I’d be at work until eleven at night. Anything that I wanted to complain about that I thought, “Man, this fucking sucks,” I would just sit and write “Shovel Buddies”.

I guess it worked. Looking back, it shocks me that it worked. I just took every sort of frustration I was feeling and put it into that script.

Scott: That’s an amazing story. I’m obviously sorry for those losses, but you’re doing what you can do to honor them.

Jason: Exactly. I’d print out “Shovel Buddies” at work, and I’d write on top of every page, “How do you honor Sammy?” because that was, I guess, the goal of the script. In my brain, it was the only way I could honor Mike, the only way I could honor Arnold was to write this, was to make it the best script because if the world’s going to be unfair, I need to seize the unfairness and talk about it.

That, to me, was the lesson I learned from both of them drying, and from growing up at a place like “Sammy’s Place”, was how unfair the world was going to be, and how much I wanted to right the wrongs of the world.

Scott: I always tell my students and blog readers, too, “Whatever idea you come up with, no matter how commercially viable you think it is, make sure it’s something you’re passionate about, something you have an emotional resonance with, a connection to.” I think it’s probably safe to say, at least your experience with “Shovel Buddies”, you would agree with that.

Jason: Absolutely. If you’re not writing about something that makes you uncomfortable to talk out with other people, if you’re not writing about something that is so much of your soul that you don’t want to share it with people because you’re afraid they’re going to judge you, then you’re not writing about shit.

It’s completely worthless if you don’t feel some sort of hesitation that you’re, like, naked in front of other people with what you’re doing it, then it’s not going to matter. I think you have to attack every story. Again, whether it’s We’re the Millers or whatever. That idea that it’s got to have at least some part of the struggles we all understand and are afraid of.

Scott: Let’s dig into the story here because now that you’ve given me this background, it’s really interesting to consider the draft I read, I can see even more connections there. Here’s a logline: “A group of teens set out to honor their deceased friend by putting his corpse in his favorite Philadelphia Eagles jersey, but get caught in a night full of mayhem as their plan unravels.”

Let’s get your impressions of the key characters in the story. First, there’s the deceased, Sammy Harlow, a 16‑year‑old boy. When we meet him, he’s a corpse in a casket. One of the interesting things you do with this story is you create all this whirlwind of action and activity around Sammy and, in some respects, on behalf of Sammy. Yet, we only know a minimal amount about his personality, in part because he’s dead. He can’t speak for himself or act. Was that always your intention? He’s kind of a cipher in a way.

Jason: Yeah. I was fascinated by The Big Chill and the idea that Kevin Costner is the dead body.

Scott: Alex, yeah.

Jason: Yeah. The Big Chill was always something that, growing up, was the R‑rated movie I could watch with my parents. It always blew me away because everyone knows Kevin Costner, at least I did, at that point, the movie came out, but we don’t know anything about Alex except what everyone’s talking about and a short flashback sequence in the beginning of the movie.

That always stuck with me. That girl who died in my neighborhood, Sammy, I didn’t know anything about her, but growing up with Sammy’s Place, I knew everything I needed to know. I knew she had parents who were willing to put up some sort of weird thing for her.

I knew that that, to them, was living life to the fullest so everything that would go on in Sammy’s Place for me would be that sort of compilation of living life to the fullest. I just kind of riffed on that. “You know what? Sammy should be a character that we never get to talk to.”

It was always that way from the first draft. We never had a flashback hearing Sammy. We never heard his voice. I just thought there’s a kind of mystique to not being able to talk to him I think puts you in the seat of the viewer. I’ve always thought that way.

I got a lot of feedback early on, of how frustrated that people were that they couldn’t hear from Sammy, and I loved it. I was like, “Great, because that’s how frustrated I am when I can’t tell my friends that I love them and I wouldn’t be anyone without them.” I think if that’s causing anyone to feel something, it’s the perfect thing for me.

Scott: By the way, I’m guessing that this Sammy’s Place, that’s The Hole you have in the script.

Jason: Yes. In the script I called it The Hole, but Sammy’s Place is a literal hole in the ground with a brick wall around it and a cement foundation where we used to just go and hang out, where no one could see in and see what you’re doing. I took that and realized I couldn’t have the hole and have Sammy’s Place, so I went from there.

Scott: Let’s talk about the protagonist. He’s Jimmy Gibbons. He’s 16. I have a theory about what’s going on with him in relation to Sammy. You pretty much specify it at one point, but I’m curious to hear your take on some of the key dynamics going on for this character in his relationship to Sammy, Sammy’s death, and the whole shovel list thing.

Jason: My best friend is named Jimmy. My twin brother is named Dan. I just thought about the dynamic we had growing up. In this sense, in the story I told, I always felt like I was Sammy, no voice but watching everything. I always thought about what would happen in our friendship. If one of us disappeared, would we all still be friends?

For me, Jimmy was the popular friend. He was Sammy’s best friend. Dan knew it. Dan would always know he was Jimmy’s best friend and couldn’t do anything about it.

I wanted to test what those limits are. In this case, it was Jimmy’s sexual attraction and having sex with Kate, Sammy’s sister, but also what Sammy perceived as neglect, which is, “Hey, Dude, I’m your best friend.” That bros before hoes mentality. No matter who you like, I’m supposed to come first, which is a selfish mentality.

Sammy had thought about it. Regardless of his cancer, he should have known, “Look, if my best friend is happy, I should be happy too.” When you’re 17, no one thinks altruistically. It’s all about me, and it’s all about now. I wanted that humanizing factor of Sammy.

He was a selfish kid, but he was a selfish with an unfair disease. Jimmy was dealing with the guilt that he couldn’t make…If Sammy’s make-a-wish was that Jimmy was around for the last days, Jimmy wasn’t. You can’t turn back time, and you can’t do that. That was important for me.

Scott: You’ve got Sammy, the corpse, who is an active part of plot as it turns out. You’ve got Jimmy, his best friend who has multiple layers of things going on in terms of his commitment to what they go and do. You’ve got Dan, who is number two in the pecking order in terms of his relationship to Sammy. Dan’s got a lot of edge. Even though he’s younger than Jimmy, he at least ostensibly appears to be more worldly, he smokes, and he’s into the harder kind of pornography and whatnot.

Then Kate, who is the younger sister of Sammy. Into this mix, there’s Lump. Where did that character come from in your story crafting process? What’s the function of that character?

Jason: Lump was my favorite character I’ve ever written in anything. I’m writing something new now and I’m like, “I wish there was a Lump in this.” I had said earlier, I grew up with a twin brother, my brother Dan, and we had to share everything growing up. We share our birthdays. We share our gifts a lot of times. I’m very lucky. I’m short and he’s tall, so we didn’t have to share too many clothes.

Growing up and going to the same schools, it’s tough when you have those mixed friend groups. Whose friend is this guy? Is he your friend or your brother’s friend? There’s no possession. You can be both our friends.

For me, the character of Lump is every feeling I’ve ever had and every feeling my brother’s ever had, about being left out, about me getting invited to someone’s birthday party in seventh grade and him being like, “I’m friends with that guy. Why am I not invited?” Me not getting to go on the road trips in high school. “I’m friends with them and not going.”

It’s that compilation of feelings but just stuck, because, as a twin, we both had younger brother syndrome a lot of times, where it’s like being left out or feeling like you’re not recognized. We since had our heart‑to‑heart and gotten over it, but those were always fears of mine.

I was like, “My brother was going to have friends that he was closer to than I was close to him.” That spoken bromance but it’s even more effective in brothers. “God, if I died, I would want my brother there above anyone else.” I definitely hoped he would want that.

I wrote Lump from that sense of desperation. If my brother was in a car accident and had one phone call to make, I’d desperately want it to be to me. He’s married now, so it probably should be to his wife. There’s part of me that would hope, “If he had a breath left, he would dial my number.”

Scott: One final character we should consider, that’s Ted Harlow, who is Sammy and Kate’s father, and as it turns out, is the local chief of police. I thought that was a really great instinct on your part because with this character, you’re combining two kinds of energy ‑‑ grief and the law.

He not only provides conflict in terms of the plot because he ends up pursuing the group as they go on this quixotic journey, what he should be doing as a law enforcement officer. But what does he need to do as a father> When did you hit on that idea of making the father the chief of police?

Jason: I always had someone in the police chasing them. It wasn’t always Ted. There was always someone on their tail. Very early on, maybe the second or third draft, there was always a Ted character. The Ted character would disappear, and he was the character who gets hit on the head and put in the trunk.

All the feedback I got from people was like, “It’s just weird, because Ted has no closure.” When the curtains come up, Ted is in a trunk and knows that his son has disappeared. I thought, “Yeah, that’s awful. What an awful, awful feeling.”

I went back. What if Ted didn’t get hit in the head and put in a trunk? What if he’s not the one that pulls them over?” Instead, I wrote that scene, I replaced it. Instead of Ted, I put in a cop. I was like, “Oh, if he’s to drive around and doesn’t get them and some other random cop does, where would he go next?”

It evolved from a need to close Ted’s story, but he was always a cop, because I always thought that was a fun thing, but he was never involved in a chase.

As soon as I got him involved in a chase, it was the biggest breath of fresh air because it was the first time I was like, “Oh, my God, the story is coming together. Now, I can have him do this. Now, maybe it would be cool if he’s there in the end.”

It’s something I caught early on. I have the necessity to close some emotional holes that I knew still existed.

Scott: I love that story. I have these screenwriting principles I teach. One is: Character equals Function. That speaks to it right there because you’re saying, “Look, you got to do something with the parents to have some closure here.” You’re talking that sense of emotional function. By following that thread, you end up with a much more active and vibrant character in Ted.

Frankly, you’ve got a couple of twists with this character. He could have so easily been a cliché, but he does some really surprising things, especially at the end.

Jason: I originally said, I always knew I wanted Sammy’s parents to understand what happened. I wrote so many drafts and gave it so many people, for fresh eyes who said, “This is great, but I have kids. I would be so upset.” Just the necessity of wanting someone to say, “I would want that for my kid. Why am I not working out?”

Honestly, I have to credit that closure to talking to my friend Mike on the phone before he died and had to saying, “I would want whatever happens.”

Mike was cremated. He was like, “God, I hope nobody fights over where my ashes should go.” I thought it was such a crazy thing that he was wise, smart enough to them, be afraid that he’s the eldest. Not that it would devastate his family if he went away, but he was, “Oh, God, if I die, I wouldn’t want an argument to be about where I will spread.”

I thought, “What a selfless idea.” Ted’s pursuit comes from that selfless idea of, “How do I get the parents on board? How do I get them really to sign off on this?” Because no one would sign off on it. If you went to Ted and you’re like, “Look, we’re going to do this.” He would say no, but it’s going to be taking that kid that never got to be a kid and proving that was a kid, and that’s all the parents really wanted.

Look, I wrote “Shovel Buddies” sixty times. You probably read draft sixty, I just finished my 65th to turn into the director. It really has come a long way, a lot of errors and as many trials as anyone was willing to let me have.

Scott: Speaking of your creative process, you’ve got this interesting opening scene. Jimmy and Lump on their bicycles and they go up to this hill and they look in there as Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia as they set off the charges to blow it up. As you’re going through Act One here, “That’s a nice little metaphor.” The death of this boy, Sammy, the death of the stadium, but then later on, the stadium takes on a greater significance.

Do you remember how early on in the process this idea of Veterans Stadium and that whole thing emerged?

Jason: From draft two. Draft one starts in the house. I was always obsessed about starting a movie Fade In on the casket. It just like this immediate abrupt thing. That’s page three now. I wrote the first draft, it was 71 pages long.

It started at the casket, and it ends…There is a ton missing. Ted didn’t exist. There is no parents storyline. They robbed a 7‑Eleven. It was crazy. I had started it in the casket. At the end, I had to mention that they went and saw Veterans Stadium blow up. I rewrite it. I was like, “What, stupid? Why don’t we ever see that? That would be cool.”

Draft two, I literally wrote it and it hasn’t changed since, then we go right to the original beginning.

Scott: There is a bit of a slippery slope feel to the narrative of the first 40 pages or so, with regard to Jimmy and the others, they do this tiny thing, which leads to a bigger thing, which leads to an even bigger thing. That all flows. Then at some point, there is this really huge choice they have to make, which is, “We’re going to take this corpse, right?”

At that point, you as a writer know you’ve got to get total buy‑in from a reader, that these characters would do this. How hard was that to manage and massage all those details? You felt like this makes sense, these characters would do this.

Jason: It’s two‑fold. I’m writing people I know. Like I said, I’m writing my brother, I’m writing my best friend. I’m writing a girl who’s we’re friends with, and I’m writing Lump, who essentially is me or my fear of what I would’ve become.

Like I said, my parents supported me. They let me make my own mistakes and I made a lot of them.

I thought, look, I’m willing to believe and the audience is willing to believe, these guys are willing to do a very small stupid thing, which is, after they find the will, after they clean out his room, which I would argue is a smart thing to do. The stupid thing is that moment when they’re like, “Let’s go back to his parents and see if they’ll let us do this. They’re bereft, but yeah, this is a good time to bug them.”

I thought, “You know what, when you say no to a kid, they’re just going to do it anyway.” I was like, “If people were willing to buy that they’re going to break into this house, then we’ve got them half the way there.”

It just took a lot of finessing from the point they break into the house to the point they get the jersey that people… I would show little percentage of pages to people at a time where they’d be like, “Yeah, I totally believe they’d do that. I totally believe they’d do that.”

For the majority of the time, the feedback I was getting from people was they bought all the way to breaking into the funeral home. Then they’re like, “Oh, man, that’s a little weird.” When they have to get his body out. I thought, “I can build the weirdness. Maybe they’ll believe it.”

It honestly took, like I said, 65 times for me to just to sit around, playing with what was said ‑‑ the way they’d open the casket, the way they’d take the body.

What would be the reasoning? It really took maybe 10 or 15 drafts to get the idea that the coffin he was in would be cremated. Then once I knew the coffin was gone, a lot more people, like I had say…60 percent of the people I talk to were really going to make the jump that they’d take it, knowing that they couldn’t leave the body with the coffin gone.

Once I had that, then it was just the way they’d portrayed the actions, the conversation Jimmy has with a dead Sammy in the freezer. That was a later addition which calmed people a little bit. There was a room in that script to understand the love between these two guys and his willingness to do anything.

The entire last 40 pages of the script is about Jimmy’s losing his mind. He has absolutely gone insane and takes the body, we’re along for that psycho trip. If your best friend died and you felt like it was your fault, or at least partially your fault, that he died sad or you feared that you died sad, then that’s all the implication to drive you nuts.

I figured, if people are willing to buy that Jimmy is now insane, then he can start doing insane things.

Scott: All the characters have got multiple layers of things going on, push and pull motivations. Jimmy has to confront some pretty harsh truths. First, about his real motivations for trying to fulfill Sammy this thing. Of course, that is tied very much to his guilt which becomes clear.

Second, where his little brother fits in terms of Jimmy’s priorities. You deal with that whole issue that you explained earlier about being left out and making a priority essentially to do something with somebody whose dad is opposed to taking care of somebody who’s hurt law and was alive.

Third, you add this other thing I thought was so interesting, which was Sammy is almost speaking from beyond the grave and setting them on this whole mission, in a way.

Jason: Yeah, it’s the selfishness of Sammy. Again, this is something we touched on earlier. I wanted Sammy to have that multi-dimension of not being the Christ child. It starts in the script with him having the porn, and having the drugs, and having the Booze into the bean or gateway into it. Also, he was making a list of demands.

For me, it was thinking about, “Oh, my God, if I died, what would I want people to do in my honor?” It’s that sort of crazy “I want this, and maybe people will then think of me this way.” It’s the…I don’t know. It’s Sammy wanting to almost be the popular kid in high school. “I want to be buried in this jersey. People will talk about my legend forever.” That not forward thinking is what drives his friends to criminality.

It all comes from wanting Sammy to seem like a real kid. If you told a real kid they were going to die, they would want something. That’s what the Hebrew’s make-a-wish is. I’m totally not against make-a-wish, I think it’s amazing.

I wanted to tell the sad version of what that wish would turn out to be if it wasn’t granted by a benevolent organization, if you had to grant the wish posthumously.

Scott: When you were in the MFA program at Boston University, did you ever imagine you’d write two lines of dialogues like this? “Kate, what are we going to do with the body?” “Danny, which one?”

Jason: It’s so weird to me, still. I’ve wanted to do a dead body movie since Penn State. I wrote a dead body movie, and it just didn’t work. It was a goofy one. It didn’t matter.

I knew it didn’t matter because I never wanted to rewrite it. I wrote it and I was like, “This blows. I don’t want to work on it.” I couldn’t figure out why. It took writing some other scripts to get that what we talked about earlier… if you don’t love it, if it’s not about something.

This script [“Shovel Buddies’], for me, was a bereavement.

This is my letter to the fallen comrades, the people who I thought deserved it more than me and didn’t get there, not because they fucked up, but because the world took them away.

I always came back to that. I thought, “That’s the story where it has to be…” I set out to write that story. I remember pitching it in class and people asked, “Is it funny?” I’m like, “No, it’s really sad.” They’d say, “We’re not going to laugh at that.” I’m like, “I know, because this is not going to be funny.”

I remember writing the opening pages and having people say, “We’re laughing way too much. There’s a dead kid.” I was, “It’ll work. I promise you it’ll work. I’ll just spend enough time to make it work.” I was so manic about it. I knew it had to work.

Scott: That dovetails right into the next question. You’ve got a really interesting mix of tones here, even genres. There’s a drama. You’re dealing with death and loss. It’s got some action with some chase scenes. It’s funny, sometimes a very angry kind of humor.

How did you land on the precise tone you did?

Jason: I was conscious of it. Here’s the deal. I wrote it, and it was the angriest first 10 drafts of anything I’d ever done. All the feedback I got was, “Wow, Jason, do you want a hug?” Anyways, it was mad. There was vitriol. You think Dan is bad now? He was poison.

It was everything that I was frustrated with. Then it was paring that back. When they say, “Don’t send an angry email at night.” It was like that. I had written the angriest script that I sent to people at night that they’re all, “Whoa, tone it back.”

I looked at it, then I started writing a love story. It was a love story between two friends, but I had to write that love story only using the words in this angry email. It became an exercise for me.

Like we talked about, I love all kinds of movies, there’s not a particular genre I don’t like. For me, it was just sitting there, knowing that this had to be funny, because life is funny and because when both my friends died, there was a lot more I laughed at than I thought I would.

But I also knew that I had to cry, because when my friends died, there was a lot more I cried at than I thought I would, and just knowing that I wanted there to be equal parts laughter and crying.

I think taking that anger and actually self‑examining it and fleshing it out into different feelings was probably the best thing for me.

Scott: So this incredible process, 60 drafts of this script, what did you do to get the script noticed?

Jason: I was out here, working for Michael Costigan. I wrote the original “Shovel Buddies” draft in four days. Legitimately four days. I had outlined it, but I just sat up and wrote it and wrote it and wrote it and wrote it. I knew I needed to get noticed. I knew I needed to get read. People were reading different scripts I had and saying, “Oh, these are good.”

I had met with a couple of producers off a different script I wrote that they read and were like, “This is funny. What else do you have?” Then, they didn’t like anything else I had and it was, “OK, good luck.”

The Black List website had just debuted in October and while I was at Scott Free, I remember bringing water to a kid in the waiting room and he was so young. He was my age and I asked the assistant, “Who’s that guy?”

They were like, “Oh, that’s the guy that wrote ‘McCarthy’”.

Scott: Justin Kremer?

Jason: Yeah, and they said, “It was off the Black List website.” I said, “No shit.” I saw him in the waiting room and I thought, “I want to be that guy. I’m interning here. I want to be the guy in the waiting room. How do I get to there?”

I went home. I went to the Black List website. I said, “Fuck it. Why not? Why not? I’m already so deep in student loans.” Putting money on the credit card for screenwriting, to me, felt so much more logical than anything else.

So I loaded up a different script, not “Shovel Buddies”, a script I wrote called “Nativity Knock‑Off.” I loaded it up there and I left it up for three months and I got a lot of really mixed reviews.

It sort of broke my heart and there was, what I thought at the time, was my best written script and I was like, “Damn it, why don’t people love this?” I got really upset one night and I took down “Nativity Knock‑Off” and put up “Shovel Buddies”.

I was so nervous to put up “Shovel Buddies” because of the pure emotion. Whereas, “Nativity” was jokes and more of a comedy, but that was pure, raw, upset emotion.

I put it up there and the first responses I got were great. I don’t know if people, the readers, if they’re familiar with the Black List website, you can host your script on there and then you pay for individual readers to rate your script one through 10.

I paid for three readers to rate “Shovel Buddies” right off the bat and with “Nativity”, had gotten bunches of sixes and sevens, which, I guess, are good, but not great. But with “Shovel Buddies”, I got nines. I got three nines to start out. Immediately I started getting more downloads.

I made the front page of the Black List website. I felt really good and I was getting emails from managers. “Let’s meet. Let’s talk.” I went and met with the managers, but we just didn’t jive.

They were nice or they had different ideas or they’d be like, “Hey, this script is too sad, man. Maybe, the kid could really be alive. Maybe, they can use a defibrillator at the end. They shock, he’s back to life.”

I’m like, “No, that’s not at all what I want to do.” I just left it up there [on the Black List site]. Then October 2013 rolled around and I got this email from Franklin Leonard and Terry [Huang]. They were like, “Hey, Jason, we love ‘Shovel Buddies’. It’s really cool that you’ve got,” I probably had 75 or 80 downloads, and ratings.

A lot of times, I’d either be getting nines or I’d been getting fives. I would think, “That’s weird.” They were like, “We love how polarizing it is and people on the site, they either really like it or they just don’t like it. We’re going to start doing a script of the month thing, a script of the week,” or whatever it was at the time. I think it’s two weeks long.

They said, “We’d like you to be the first one. Would you like to participate?” I was like, “Yes, thanks. More than anything, yes.”

I emailed them, said, “Yes, it’s amazing.” They sent me this guy who would draw a poster for it, which was cool. We did all that jazz. He drew the poster. I was super stoked.

It goes up on a Tuesday and, of course, I was at work. I’m rolling calls and I’m really busy. Michael [Costigan] had just had one of his assistants who quit, so I’m back on his desk answering phones. I hadn’t been in a while, so you’re very rusty. I’m rolling with big time agents and other producers. I’m having a very stressful day, but I’m doing OK.

Then the script goes live. My cell phone just starts ringing, and rings and rings and rings. I’m getting all these calls and voicemails. You’ve got six voicemails and you’ve got whatever. Then, I guess through the power of Linkedin and Google, people started figuring out where I was working.

They started calling Michael’s line and emailing him, “Hey, that assistant you’ve got. I think he wrote a script and it’s pretty popular.” Michael called me in his office and was like, “What did you do?” I said, “Hey, remember that script we talked about a while ago?” Michael had read “Shovel Buddies” and really loved it. We had made this sort of pact between men. He was like, “Look, buster, ask me for a year and I’ll help you for a lifetime.” And I was like, “Yes, sir.” Whatever.

At this point, he had given me everything, every opportunity. He had paid my rent. He had been amazing, like a movie father figure to me.

He said, “OK, let’s make a list.” We sat there, and I played all the voicemails through. We looked at all the emails, made a list of everyone who called me. He said, “Look, take the next week, go to breakfast with all these people, one by one, and let’s circle back at my house on Friday night and pick.” I was like, “OK, great.”

He helped me filter out who he thought would be good for me, and who he thought wouldn’t, and who he thought, “These people won’t return your calls.” He was just great about that.

Then I went and met with all these managers, and I settled on Dean [Sneider] and Ali [Itri] at Management 360. People are always like, “Why did you pick them above everybody else?”

A, they were the first ones to call me, which meant a lot, and, B, it was because I told them, “Look, I work for Michael Costigan. He’s graciously allowed me to have breakfast with people, but I don’t know when I can meet you because he has a call at 9:00 AM, I have to dial him in.”

They said, “We’ll meet you at 7:00 AM, at Nate & Al’s,” and I was like, “Seriously?” They were, “Yeah, we’ll meet you there.” I got there at 7:00 AM, and they were already outside waiting for me. I didn’t have to wait for them.

They were upfront about their plans and what they liked about the script. It wasn’t like they heard it was hot. They had read it. They each had personal stories about it. It meant a lot, so I signed with them.

I signed with CAA the next week, with Allie Trussman and Matt Martin and John Garvey, who were the same deal. Not only were they among the first, but they had a personal connection to what I did. Also what I thought was a logical, “Hey, Jason, we think you write a lot like this person. Do you like these movies? This is what we’re going to do to get a director. This is what we’re going to do to help you next.”

Again, I sat with my mentors and people I talked to. “How do you pick?” They said, “Look, if you feel good about, that’s all of it. That’s a hundred percent. CAA is a name that everybody recognizes, but if you sit across from these people who are going to be your agents and going to be your managers, and you like them and you’re laughing with them and they get your jokes, and you think they’re actually laughing at your jokes, then that’s it. We can’t teach you anything more than that.”

That was it. That was in October, and my life has been a whirlwind since then.

Scott: I’m looking at a tweet from December 16th, 2013, at 1:07 PM from the Black List “Shovel Buddies” by Jason Mark Hellerman, Black List 2013, what was that like?

Jason: It was surreal. I’ve followed the Black List since it was a thing. I have a news piece from my dad from 2007, whenever he first realized it. It was, “Hey isn’t this cool? Maybe someday you’ll be on there,” and I was.

To me, it was this weird sense of fulfillment. “Hey, Jason you’ve done a lot of dumb things. You got through them.” I want to go back to Jason standing in the hallway, dialing his dad’s phone number as he decides he’s going to quit being a doctor, and be, “It’s the best decision you’ll ever make. You were right. Don’t be afraid of what you’re supposed to do. Don’t be afraid of anyone who’s going to say, ‘You’re never going to get a job out there, man. You’re going to be making 20 grand the rest of your life. You’re going to be doing this. A writer’s one in a million.’”

For me, the moment that went out, knowing that I had made it to a goal that I had set for myself, seven years prior, was like this giant rush of “OK, time to get down to it. Great, I did it once. Now let’s do it again.”

It was nice hearing people liked “Shovel Buddies.” I’m sure students will get this, because I got this. For the longest time “Shovel Buddies” was a PDF on the Internet that I wasn’t sure anybody was reading. For a longer time before that, it was a PDF on my laptop that nobody had read.

Knowing that people had read it, not only read it but also liked it, and not only liked it, but were willing to tell other people they liked it, changed the game for me. Writers notoriously lack self‑confidence, and that was like going on a date with Kate Upton.

I was blown away. I was, “Oh, my God. You like me.” Insert Sally Field quote here. I was just shock, awe, and flattery. I felt like I had made everybody proud. Michael was able to roll calls that day and be like, “Did you see my assistant, Black List.” Plus, rolls my calls, plus, helped me out at home.

My parents got to put it on their Facebook page with their four friends.

It was cool. My girlfriend said, “I’m proud of you.” I was, “Oh, I did something, something that wasn’t just a PDF on my laptop.” That’s all it really takes. That’s all any writer ever wants to hear.

Scott: You’ve written a 65th draft of the script and it’s going out to directors. Is that right?

Jason: Yeah. It’s out to directors, we’ve had a lot of interest. Here’s what I added. One of the big things that I had been trying to do, but ran out of time was Susan, Ted’s wife. I was never happy that Susan gets the cop out ending of, “Well, let’s not tell mom.”

I always thought about that, and I had time over Christmas to be with my own mom, and to really talk with her about everything, about life and big decisions. I thought, “Damn, if that happened to me, I’d want my mom to know where I was.”

I just wasn’t satisfied anymore that Susan was going to spend the rest of her life thinking her kid was in an urn that someone handed to them. I went back, much as I did with Ted. I sat and I added six scenes with Susan.

Here’s Susan’s journey by herself. She leaves to get some air. The kids break in, they take the thing, Ted goes. When Susan gets back to the house no one’s there, and she’s, “Oh, where are people?”

She doesn’t want to be there alone, so she sets off on her own journey through the night, which brings her to a convenience store to pick up Sammy’s favorite snack. It takes her downtown to get a cheese steak, where she has a very late night 3:00 AM cheese steak with a very famous person.

Then in the end, it brings her to a stoplight in a minivan, where Ted is sitting in his beaten cop car, in his pajamas, and she pulls up next to him, and says, “What the hell are you doing here? Where’s our daughter?” Spoiler, it takes her to the stadium, so that everyone can say goodbye. I sat for a long time and I looked at it.

Like I said, I talked to my mom and I knew you can’t Bogart a goodbye from a parent. That’s one thing. I had to be mature with “Shovel Buddies” to understand that there was a mature theme to it. If my parents were going to sit and watch this movie, they would want to say goodbye to me, and how much I’d want them to be able too.

That’s the addition of Susan. Everything else is the same. What happens at the end is that Susan pulls up in her minivan after the kids have dropped the body and they’re smoking. They’re, “How do you want to get home.” Susan and Ted pull up in the minivan and we end with all of them in this minivan, and they start laughing.

That to me was the ultimate full circle. We all start crying with a situation like that.

I thought that night, those events, and what happens to Susan, Ted, Kate, Jenny, Dan, and Lump the only way you could end is laughing, because if they ended crying it would be different movie. They end driving on this highway, Ted makes a joke, and everyone just laughs. They laugh and laugh and laugh, and we fade out on that.

cott: Let’s jump to some craft questions. How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength and commercial viability of the screenplay specifically, a spec script.

Jason: Commercial viability, yes. I think specs get noticed because people think they can make money from them. That’s the way Hollywood goes. I also think, look, if nothing comes from “Shovel Buddies”, we don’t get the director, and it doesn’t get made, what’s cool for me is that it’s a movie that maybe a studio wouldn’t have the courage to make, but everyone has the courage to read.

The most important thing is to have a story that everyone connects to, whether it’s dark or whether it’s commercial. As long as you get people talking about it.

I hearken back to a lesson I learned about, there’s a screenwriter called Cinco Paul, and he wrote The Lorax and a bunch of other movies, but his first spec which sold for a lot of money was called “Band of Gold”, and it was about a guy who, this is going to get a little blue, but he fingers a prostitute and loses his wedding ring.

And the rest of the night is him trying to find this wedding ring before he has to get home to his wife. And I always thought, obviously that movie wasn’t made, but it’s the noisiest concept.

It got enough people talking that it started his career. I think, when a spec goes out, it doesn’t always have to be a good story, commercial assured. But you need to get a conversation piece.

The nicest tweet I ever got was a random person when the Black List came out, she had one tweet about the Black List. “This is great, the Black List is out. I want to see “Shovel Buddies” and I don’t know what the hell that is.” And I was like “Awesome, great!” That’s all it took, just the title.

Scott: You said you’ve got a lot of ideas you’re working on. How do you come up with story concepts?

Jason: A lot of times, it’s what I’m dealing with in my personal life, but it’s what I want to talk about, but I’m too afraid to. Or I love movies and I love media. I’ll watch a movie and I’ll be like “You know what? How come they don’t make it like that anymore?” or “What happened to that?”

I’ll riff on what my version of that would be, and see if I can come up with anything original. I’m working on a ghostlike high school coming of age love story now. And honestly it’s because I wanted to do a teenage love story, but also I wanted to do a horror movie, and I knew I didn’t have time to write two things. So what if you fell in love with a ghost? And I just started writing it.

Scott: How about prep writing? What aspects of prep do you tend to devote most of the time to?

Jason: Characterization, to me, is the most important. All the characters in “Shovel Buddies” have not changed since the original time I wrote them in my notebook. Like, Dan was always the angry, smoking, weird kid with a vendetta. Kate was always the sort of jilted sister who didn’t feel like, who felt like she got back seated.

I like to come up with characters, but for me it’s always like what the logline is. I always start with a logline. Like I said, for this recent thing, it’s like “What if the girl you wanted to be with was the only one you couldn’t… because she’s a ghost.”

For this one, it’s like “What if you had to solve her murder?” For “Shovel Buddies,” it was like “What if my friend died and I needed to do something to honor him, but along the way I accidentally stole his dead body?”

I come up with those big concepts, and I think the story writes itself from the logline I’ve written. And a lot of times, that logline will change. In fact, most times. The original logline for “Shovel Buddies” had them planning to dig Sammy up to take him to Veteran’s Stadium, that was their plan.

And they had a map, and they were scouting out the cemetery. But it didn’t work, and that was never going to work. So I write down what I want the story to be about, and then I let the story dictate itself. But I always try to stick with the same characters. I think, if I figure out who the people are, then I need to figure out what they’ll be going through.

Scott: Speaking of characters, how do you go about developing them?

Jason: This brings me to the outlining. I love outlines, but I write rough document style outlines. Where it’s like, in the first act, I want all this stuff to happen. I have detailed bios of all the characters, and I think about what they need to get over because so much of movies is what these people are going through.

I let the set pieces, the emotions, dictate themselves in the story for that. So for “Shovel Buddies,” it’s like Jimmy needs to get over Sammy, OK. That’s fine. Or get over his own guilt about Sammy, how do we do that? Well, make him feel more guilty. How do we make him feel more guilty? We rub it in his face. How do we rub it in his face? So it’s like that.

I do that, but I write 15 page outlines. Most of them are around 15, I’ve never written longer than 15. Sometimes they’re as short as seven pages, but then I write the script from that. And I’m a big believer in you have to have a script to have a rewrite, so I really try and dive right in.

Even if it’s a really awful, like I said, 70 page first draft, I try to get something down because I love adding just as much I love subtracting. So, the first draft for “Shovel Buddies” doesn’t really exist anymore except for that opening casket scene, like a paragraph. And everything else was added, but I’m a firm believer in writing the script, and letting your character be in the script and figuring out where the need to go from that.

Scott: How about dialogue? How do you find your character’s voices?

Jason: You have to listen. I think this is the earbud generation, and what I did in Boston and what I do here is, when you have to build public transportation, I put my earbuds in but I don’t turn any music on. And you find the people next to you say whatever they want, because they just assume you can’t hear anything, and you get to hear some crazy stuff.

But I also listen in the grocery store. I spend a lot of time in Trader Joe’s just hearing people. It’s part listening, but it’s also part knowing who those people are. I’m not a good actor, but when I’m writing, I get to act like Dan, I get to act like Jimmy, I get to act like Kate.

I always think if I were an actor, this was what I would want to say. So if you can imagine those people, I’m a big believer in that sort of Robert Rodriguez, “Close your eyes and watch the movie in your head.” And I try and do that, and I close my eyes and I think about what they would say.

And it just sort of, I don’t want to say it just comes to me, because that sounds arrogant, but I have a 17 year old girl cousin. I think about all the shit she says, and I think about all the witty things I wish I could say, but I didn’t say while I was in high school. And I write down a lot of interesting things people say to me, and I try to just weave that all together.

Scott: How about theme? How important is that to you? Do you start with themes, or do they arise in the context of writing the story?

Jason: For me, “Shovel Buddies,” when I got into it, I knew it was about friends who died. I lost another one along the way. So I usually try and start with a theme. Like the thing I’m writing now, the theme is it’s “Be your own person.” That’s a weird thing, it’s how do I define myself? Am I really defined by my parents, or am I defined by my actions? What’s my self definition?

So I try to start with a broad stroke like that, and then whittle it down. I think there’s never one theme in any movie, there’s always multiple themes. I think the themes dictate the characters. I like to have an overarching thing, but I go back to Aesop’s fables, and great allegories. You know what? “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is not really about lying. So I try and simplify it as much as I can. Don’t lie, great. How can I tell a story about not lying that’s not about wolves? I guess something bad should happen if you lie. Maybe it’s telling about how a tiny lie winds up a bigger lie.

Yeah, I think theme is super important, but I let myself find what I’m afraid to talk about, and I let my fears and my own inhibitions dictate the theme of what I need to get off my chest.

Scott: What do you think about when you’re writing a scene? Do you have any specific goals in mind?

Jason: You have to make every scene really hard on the characters in it. It can’t ever be easy. I always think about what’s the most uncomfortable our main character can be. It’s either a car chase or it’s dropping your dead friend in cement. Very early on in “Shovel Buddies,” I knew that Sammy had to float, because it would be too easy to drop a man and have them sink.

I think, how can I make it excruciatingly painful for our main characters, because that’s where the drama, and a lot of times the comedy comes from.

Scott: I was going to mention that earlier. Because one thing I’ve noticed, I’m a huge Pixar fan, and they layer one complication after another, after another, after another. They are just pros at that. And that scene where you have them go to get the Eagles jersey, and put it on Sammy’s body, it’s like you have one problem after another emerge.

I guess that answers the question. You’re conscious of that. You’re trying to think of complications.

Jason: At some point, with that scene, I almost was afraid I went too far. Sometimes I am still wary, but I also know it’s kind of like when you’re rushing to do things.

This all comes from being an assistant out here. God, nothing is ever easy. I had set up a room the other week for Michael to have a conference in, and he, last split‑second is like “You know what? I want to be in this other room.” And the other room is not set up, and I’m running to get stuff, and of course, the door is locked because why would the door ever be locked?

And as soon as I get the door open, I dropped the coffee cups and they break, and now I’m cleaning the coffee cups as he’s walking towards me with an A‑list actress and I’m like “Oh my God, nothing could be easier.” And I go to get out the back door of the room and that’s locked.

So I have this awkward moment where he walks in the room, and I’ve got shards of coffee and I’m covered in cream, and this actress is like “Oh, honey.” Looking at me and I’m like a deer in the headlights, and I thought that’s the way it happens out here, and that’s the way being an assistant is. I think that’s the way life is, so I try to take that, one of the worst things that could happen.

I try to write scripts where there are no unlocked doors, you know? No one drives through a traffic‑free town. There have to be problems. Otherwise, your story would be over in five pages. “Well, we went, the door was unlocked, we grabbed Sammy, we put them in the jersey, we slid him in the thing, everything is great, his parents are happy.” I think it’s making all of those problems just be there.

Scott: You write some very entertaining scene description in “Shovel Buddies,” so let me ask you, what are the keys to good action writing?

Jason: So in October, I read my thousandth script out here since I moved. A thousand scripts. A lot of them are bad, and the ones that are really good stick out my mind. Not because of characters, not because of whatever, but because of the way that they wrote the action. And I think we take action for granted as screenwriters.

I love the James Elroy novels. He’s so about what’s going on, and the dirty cement and the way the steam rises. I always thought it’s a lot easier for me to visualize things when people make it sexy to visualize.

For me, I don’t write much in action, but what I write, I want everybody to be able to picture it. And I want them to picture it the way I’m picture it. So I try to be really short and specific, but also playful in a way, where I know someone’s reading it, and I don’t want them to be bored. I’m never 100% self confident that I’m going to win them on dialogue and scenery, so a lot of times I want to know what I’m doing with the action.

I’m, “Hey, this is where we’re going now. This is where you should be looking.” Direct the eyes. I don’t ever want the reader to be like, “I wonder what’s happening in this corner of the room.” No, look at the corner that I’m telling you to look at. This is why you should be looking there. Try to go with that.

Scott: For someone who’s written approximately 65 drafts of a script, you seem like the perfect person to ask. So you finish a first draft, you’re faced with a rewriting process, what’s that like for you? What are some keys?

Jason: Relief. Nothing is better than having a first draft. Not the best idea you’ve ever had, not writing the first scene, not writing a piece of dialogue, not writing the middle. Typing FADE OUT is the best feeling in the world because you now know that you have the block of marble, and you have to trust your Michelangelo hands.

I love rewriting. I think we live and die on the rewrite. I just finished a spec this week that I sent to my team, and I got the notes today.

They were like, “Oh!” Sometimes it sounds harsh. Sometimes you’re worried about it, but I said, “Oh, my God. You guys have given me the scalpel. You’ve given me the rock hammer.” Then I’m going to start chiseling away. What’s that great line in Shawshank? “We thought it would take Andy Dufresne 100 years to break out of here, but it only took him 18.”

That’s the way I feel. I’m always shocked myself at how much I learn writing the first draft, then how much more I learn writing two through 10, how much crazier I get when you get to 20, and how fine‑tuned you can get.

It’s building a car. You have to rev the engine. You have to take it around the track a couple of times, like break it in a little bit. I think the way I prepare for a rewrite is I try and rewrite one thing at a time. This new thing I’m writing, I’m going to focus on one character the next time I go through the whole thing.

I’m just going to make it the best possible thing for this girl. I’m going to go through and just rewrite this girl. Then I’ll print that, and I’ll look at it. I’ll be like, “OK. Well, with the changes to her, what changes should I make to this?” I go through, and I always make sure to just have one directive because if you rewrite with a mish‑mash, I don’t think you’re ever going to get it.

You get one thing perfect at a time, and they’ll all start evening themselves out.

Scott: I remember interviewing Ava DuVernay, and she said that in this one script she had seven primary characters. She wrote individual drafts focusing on each one of those characters in a sense similar to what you were just talking about.

Jason: Exactly. I don’t write drafts on different people, but I write tweaks on different people. I did so many drafts just for Kate in “Shovel Buddies”. I think it really worked well.

Scott: What’s your actual writing process like?

Jason: I’m an afternoon writer. I go to a coffee shop in LA, Graffiti Cafe. It’s way too expensive, but everyone’s super sweet and nice. I sit there, and they play great ambient music where no one can bother you. I just sit, and I look at my outline. I have my outline in Word, and I open it next to my Final Draft. I try to write until I exhaust myself, and then I go back and rewrite that.

Some days I’ll do 20 pages, and some days I’ll do two. It’s really just getting through the sludge. Like I said, for me the most important thing is getting that first draft, so I just build to a first draft. I try to get the first draft as fast as possible, because I think that’s the only way to know what you’re missing. It’s like build the house and then figure out where the rooms are supposed to go.

Scott: A final question and it’s an inevitable one: What advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?

Jason: Get a mentor. Get someone who knows more than you and trust that person. If you can get that, you’re ahead of the game.

Apart from that, the number one piece of advice: Be gracious. People are going to read your scripts. You can’t be like, “Oh, they’re wrong. I won’t ask them again.” You have to at least understand that part of them is probably right. No audience is alike. If you get a lot of people that say everything’s great, you’re asking the wrong people. I think it will take long, but find a group that you trust. I’ve assembled a “writing avengers” group. It’s other friends who are writers, and we all sit together on Saturdays.

It becomes almost like a work‑out team, where we’ll all writing at the same time. We all take the same break. We all refill coffee at the same time, but those are the people I can trust to tear me a new one. I’ll still love them because I’m going to tear them a new one, and they’ll still love me. When you find that group you trust, do not sway from them. Don’t think you’re smarter than them.

Listen to notes. That’s really important. Listen to notes with an open mind. Not every note you get is brilliant, but if six people say the same thing like, “Oh, this lacks depth.” “Hey, Kate’s getting slut‑shamed a lot. We should really fix that.” If everyone says that, it’s like, “Hey. Guess what, Jason? Kate’s getting slut‑shamed too much, and maybe you should make her a real person.”

I’m not going to be like, “I’m the greatest at writing women.” You have to listen to those things. I won’t always say majority rules, but if 9 out of 10 people give you the same note, you should definitely take a look at it. Maybe don’t do everything they say, but it definitely means people are bumping on something like that.

For my interviews with dozens of other Black List writers, go here.