Interview (Part 1): Craig Mazin

Craig Mazin is a successful screenwriter in the comedy genre whose movie credits include RocketMan (1997), Scary Movie 3 (2003), Scary Movie 4 (2006), Superhero Movie (2008), The Hangover Part II (2011), Identity Thief (2013) and The Hangover Part III (2013). With fellow screenwriter Ted Elliott, he hosted the informative writing blog “The Artful Writer” from 2004–2011. Currently Craig and screenwriter John August co-host the popular weekly podcast Scriptnotes for which the pair recently celebrated their 100th recording.

I recently spoke with Craig about his background, some of his writing projects, the state of the movie business and the screenwriting craft. Today in Part 1, Craig describes how he found his way into screenwriting:

Scott: Where did you grow up and how did you become a writer?

Craig: I grew up on Staten Island until I was about 13. Then my family moved to Central New Jersey. I went to the same high school as Bruce Springsteen. It’s a pretty blue collar town. Both my parents are public school teachers. It was a very middle class upbringing. Because of that, the notion of pursuing any kind of artistic career was just not really seen as tenable.

By the time I went to college I was on a pretty firm pre‑med path to become a doctor. But soon I realized that I didn’t want that as a career. I also recognized that I was in love with production and the making of media.

I started working on a radio program, a public affairs radio show… This was around 1991, 1990. We were editing this show, this interview program, on quarter-inch audio tape, splicing it with razor blades and blue tape, and I loved it.

Right after college, I had a little bit of money saved up, about $1,400. I had a Corolla, and I drove out to L.A. I didn’t know anybody. I had no connections. It was just me. I called up all the temp agencies and my first job was to type the employee manual at William Morris.

Some secretary had typed it up in the 50s and my job was to type it into Word Perfect. That was a two-day gig. Then the next job I got turned into working at an ad agency that made promos for CBS. I started basically as the file clerk and then worked my way up into being the copywriter.

That turned into a job at Disney working on copy lines for trailers and movie posters. It was at Disney — this was about 1995 — and they were making a ton of movies. They needed material. I had a writing partner at the time. We pitched an idea and we got hired. We wrote it. They made it, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Scott: That was RocketMan, right?

Craig: RocketMan exactly. The screen classic, RocketMan. [laughter]

Scott: Let’s jump back a bit here. You go from thinking pre-med to I’m heading to L.A. — at some point it would seem you caught the entertainment bug. Were you a big fan of movies and TV when you were growing up?

Craig: For sure. I was a fan of what I was a fan of. I’ve never been obsessive about movies or TV. I look around me sometimes and I see people obsessing over movies and TV shows and I just shake my head, because there’s so much more to life. The things that I obsess over are my family. Frankly, I spend more of my time reading non‑fiction than I do watching TV or going to the movies. But the movies that I love mean a lot to me. The shows that I love mean a lot to me. It was never an obsession. I’ve always had a healthy relationship with movies and TV and music and all of that.

Scott: Can you remember some of the movies that inspired you early on?

Craig: Sure. When I was a kid I loved Airplane. That was a movie I saw in 1980. I was nine. I was at summer camp in Brooklyn, which let me tell you, is not a camp. It was summer, but it wasn’t a camp. [laughter] Regardless, the counselors took us all to see Airplane, which you couldn’t get away with today. And it blew my mind. I remember that was when the switch flipped. Prior to that, it was with Star Wars. I mean Star Wars certainly opened my mind to how much I could enjoy a movie. But Airplane was the first movie that made me truly love the idea of film comedy.

The first R-rated film I saw in the theater was Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. I believe that was ’83 I want to say, or something like that. That blew my mind. So there were movies along the way.

Of course as I went on, all the movies that everybody sort of falls in love with I fell in love with. I saw The Godfather when I was 17, and that was, I think, the moment where I realized how tragic and profound film could be.

I was not a film nerd, I was never a film nerd. I’ve always given all movies a fair shake. But in truth, the reason that I have a career making movies is because I love making them. I love making them a lot more than I like seeing them.

Scott: So you come to L.A., you work for a couple days with William Morris. You get an ad agency gig. You’re at Disney doing some work. Where along the way did you learn the chops to write a screenplay?

Craig: I don’t know. I didn’t I guess. [laughs] I didn’t take any classes. I read half of a Syd Field book. I remember that Jon Glickman, who runs MGM now, but who then was my age and a fresh new executive at 24. He was an executive on RocketMan and he said, “You should read Christopher Vogler’s book, The Writer’s Journey, that’s good.” So I read that, and I thought, “OK.” Truthfully, I and my partner, we just wrote it within the rhythm of what we understood we wanted to see. We had an inherent understanding of roughly how the story should ebb and flow, and roughly how the characters should change. But we really didn’t know what we were doing. We learned on the job.

I remember we were in Houston where they shot the film, and we were at a table reading, and when the table reading was done, we were a bit shell shocked cause we realized we just needed to do a lot of work to make things better. And we must have written 60 pages in two days. That was a crazy couple of days in this weird hotel in Houston.

We learned on the job, and it’s a shame that’s there no opportunity to learn on the job anymore. It’s the only way to learn as far as I’m concerned, do it on the job. There’s so many fewer jobs now. It’s a tough business to break into now. It was always tough, but it seems much tougher now.

Scott: Disney was making a lot of movies back then in the late 90's.

Craig: A ton of movies. Between Disney, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, and Miramax, which they owned at the time, there was a year they put out more than a movie a week. And it was all fueled by home videos — VHS and DVD boomed. It was volume basically. If you could make a movie like “RocketMan,” I think for $20 million… if you could make a $20 million movie, you couldn’t lose. So they did.

Scott: You were writing with Greg Erb?

Craig: Yeah.

Scott: And you two did another movie after that — Senseless in 1998.

Craig: I remember we were very young still and the name of the game was just to keep going, going, going. And you come up with ideas, and our manager who represented the Wayans brothers said, “You should come up with idea for them.” So we came with this bunch of ideas and they picked that one and start writing it. I remember we were walking around Greg’s neighborhood, trying to figure the story out, and he said, “Do you think they’ll ever make this movie?”

And I said, “No way. This is the dumbest idea ever.” You know, over my time in the business, I’ve come to believe that there are certain movies that you can’t get made. Then there are other movies you simply can’t stop from being made. It doesn’t always connect to quality or rationality. That was a movie that we just couldn’t stop. It just kept going.

It actually got one of the best reviews that I’ve ever gotten in my life, and I haven’t gotten many good ones. The L.A. Times reviewer, I can’t remember who the guy was, but he loved it. I just remember reading that review, going, “No. No. This isn’t very good.”

Tomorrow in Part 2, Craig discusses two movies he directed and his work in the spoof movie field.

Craig is repped by CAA.

Twitter: @clmazin.

[Originally posted July 29, 2013]