Hollywood Breakthrough: Marshall Herskovitz

The Wrap has a feature called “Hollywood Breakthrough,” where people who work in the entertainment industry describe how they got their big break. At present, there are five featured screenwriters, perfect for a five-part series, one per day this week.

Today’s featured writer is Marshall Herskovitz. His credits include TV series “thirtysomething”, “My So-Called Life”, and “Once and Again”, and movies Legends of the Fall (1994), Traffic (2000), I Am Sam (2001), and The Last Samurai (2003). Here is an excerpt:

After I graduated from Brandeis, I took all the money I had in the world, which was $5,000, and I made a short film. I made every mistake you could possibly make. It was a total disaster as a piece of work, and yet, you know, it was ambitious in some way.

It took me a year to finish it, and in 1975 at the age of 23, I moved to California with every intention of being instantly hailed as the next great director. Of course, I literally couldn’t get anyone to look at it. In those days, all you could do was go through the Yellow Pages and try every production company — they all said no.

So I ended up begging my father to help me out, so I could attend the American Film Institute. It really changed my life. I was there as what they call a directing fellow, and my classmate was Ed Zwick — that’s where we met. It was his first day, and we became best friends. I got my first job as a writer while I was still at AFI through contacts I made there, so it was a classic Hollywood story. It’s all about who you know.

I began by going from show to show, barely making a living, writing other people’s episodes — which I didn’t think I was particularly good at. It made me miserable. I felt that I was gonna go nowhere and that I had to show the world my own voice. And so I made a decision that I was not gonna do that anymore. I would just stop, and I would sit down and write a spec script that would be mine, that it would show the world what I could do. The result, a year later, was “Special Bulletin.”

That decision was what made everything happen after that. In fact, when we went to pitch “Special Bulletin,” if I had said I’d only written episodic, they would never have allowed me to write that script. The fact that I had a longform script to show them, which they loved, enabled me to do that job. So it was a decision to gamble everything on my own that enabled that opportunity to take place.

So much of what translates into success in the entertainment business boils down to this formula: Talent + Timing + Connections = Success. At AFI, Herskovitz met Ed Zwick and they’ve been writing and producing partners ever since.

For more about how Marshall Herskovitz broke into Hollywood, go here.