Interview: Jason Mark Hellerman

One script that received a lot of attention in the 2013 Black List is “Shovel Buddies” by Jason Mark Hellerman (it garnered 22 votes). I was quite struck by the story — “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” — and reached out to talk with Jason about it. 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.

Here are links to the nine installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “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.’”

Part 2: “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.’”

Part 3: “Looking back, it shocks me that it worked. I just took every sort of frustration I was feeling and put it into that script.”

Part 4: “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?’”

Part 5: “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.”

Part 6: “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.”

Part 7: “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.”

Part 8: “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.”

Part 9: “You have to make every scene really hard on the characters in it. It can’t ever be easy.”

Jason is repped by CAA and Management 360.

Twitter: @JasonHellerman.

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