Interview (Part 1): Elizabeth Chomko (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Elizabeth Chomko wrote the original screenplay “What They Had” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently I had the opportunity to chat with Elizabeth about her background as a writer and her award-winning screenplay.

Today in Part 1, Elizabeth talks about her background growing up in the Midwest and how her interest in acting transitioned her into writing:

Scott Myers: When I was reading your script “What They Had,” which won the 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, I was struck by how authentic its Midwestern feel is, the sensibilities of the characters, their dialect, their accents. Sure enough, come to find out you grew up in Chicago and Wisconsin. I was wondering if we start off with what was it like growing up into your adolescence in the Midwest?

Elizabeth Chomko: It was terrific, I love the Midwest. I was born in Chicago, then moved to Minnesota briefly, and then back to a suburb of Chicago. When I was about 7, my parents bought a vacation property in rural Wisconsin.

My mother and two sisters and I spent a lot of time in Wisconsin — the weekends, every summer. My dad worked a lot, traveled a lot, so he really only came up on holidays. Our time there became this sort of celebration of womanness — my mom’s female cousin would come with her kids or her friends would come with their daughters. It was always the wives up there, a community of women raising children — lots of girls — together. It was a very special time for me and my sisters. I think that experience had a big influence on my creative sensibility, the stories I’m interested in telling, the characters I’m interested in exploring.

Also, my mom — she denies this now, but she was very picky about the content she exposed us to. We didn’t have a TV up in Wisconsin. We spent the days putting on shows, creating imaginary worlds. And reading. I was an avid reader.

The movies we did watch — they were usually female-protagonistic. Anne of Green Gables, Julie Andrews musicals, The Red Shoes, Judy Garland, Norma Rae… I don’t think this was intentional on my mom’s part, I think she just put us in front of the stuff that she liked, the stories she could relate to. They showed us the women we could someday become. I wanted to be an Anne Shirley, a Norma Rae, a problem like Maria.

Anyway, to answer your original question — yes, the Midwest has a very specific culture and sensibility. I moved from there when I was about 14. We moved around quite a bit after that, so the Midwest still has my heart and feels the most like home.

Scott: You attended American University?

Elizabeth: I did, yes.

Scott: You got degrees in theatre and also philosophy, a specialty in gender studies.

Elizabeth: Yes. The gender studies wasn’t really intentional. It sort of found me. Philosophy is such a broad subject…it’s everything. It’s everything since the beginning of the written word. Every professor with a Philosophy 101 course has to figure out where to start and which thinkers to teach in order to funnel the millennia of philosophy into one semester.

My Philosophy 101 class was taught by a wonderful professor who became my mentor. Her focus was feminist philosophy and race and gender studies, so she threaded her philosophy 101 syllabus through the themes of Love and Desire. She started with Plato’s Symposium — a party where they all sat around and got wasted and talked about love — and we tracked Love and Desire up through Hegel and Rousseau to Simone de Beauvoir and into modern thinkers and morality of the family.

It was a perfect fit for me, as I, like we both said, “grew up in such a female-centric world.” I started to make sense of the dynamics I’d been observing around me since I was a kid, the things I was interested in and related to. I always had an obsession with the why of things. Philosophy gave me answers — but it also opened my mind to a slew of other questions I think I’ll always be trying to answer with my work and with my life.

Scott: It sounds like the acting bug came pretty naturally. If you don’t have a TV and you’re up in Wisconsin…

Elizabeth: Yep.

Scott: …You’re out there making up stories and acting with your friends.

Elizabeth: Definitely. And my mom enrolled us in dance classes early, we were always involved in the show choirs and musical theater stuff in middle school. I was always creative, doing art, playing the piano. I felt called to be a storyteller.

Scott: After you graduated from American University, how did you go about pursuing your interest in acting?

Elizabeth: It’s kind of funny. I started as a theater major, and I went abroad to study acting at a conservatory when I was a sophomore. But I didn’t exactly fit with the actors around me. It never felt like acting was exactly where I belonged. I came back from the acting conservatory thinking I wasn’t an actor at all, that I wanted to go to law school, and that’s why I ended up jumping into philosophy. I read that philosophy majors did well in the LSATs.

But I fell head over heels for philosophy. When I finished undergrad I was considering pursuing a PhD. And while I was deliberating — still living in DC — I found myself involved with this marvelous theatre company. I got a role in one of their plays, and that propelled me into the DC theater scene, which is an awesome community. They have a ton of theaters, union and non-union, doing wonderful stuff. It made me want to stay in the creative world rather than academia.

I spent a couple of years working a lot as an actor there and waiting tables. But I knew that there was a glass ceiling for the arts in DC. So it was either New York or LA.

And, ironically, in getting my theater degree, I had to do all these “Fundamental of Acting” courses, I think there were five or six. One of them was “Acting for the Camera.” I was so convinced that I would never, ever act for the camera. I had this idiot snobbery about actors who made their living doing commercials. So I convinced the department to let me swap it for playwriting.

Then, not two years later, I’m moving to LA to pursue acting for the camera, hoping it would pay the bills so I could write plays. The first victory I celebrated was landing a commercial agent.

God laughs when you make a plan I guess.

Scott: While you are acting, you are writing at the same time, both plays and essays.

Elizabeth: Yes. I’ve been writing since I was really little. My much older cousin gave me a journal for Christmas one year, when I was maybe seven. I was like, “What are you supposed to do with it?” She said, “You just write in it.” I said “Write what?” She said, “Whatever you want. You just write.”

So I wrote. Dear diary stuff, things that happened, my feelings, little stories, little drawings. And when my family started moving around, I journaled constantly. It was a lonely time, we were moving almost every year, I went to four different high schools. My journal became my companion, my best friend. When I was lonely, I would write. When I didn’t understand, I would write. That’s the relationship I think I’ve always had to writing — I write to feel better, to understand, to soothe my obsession with the why of things.

I started writing short plays in college. And when I moved to LA, I started writing creatively all the time — plays, essays, short stories. As an actor in Los Angeles, you have a lot of downtime. There’s a lot of heartbreak. And even when you are working, when you’re first starting out so little of what you’re working on is nurturing your soul or feeding the hunger that called you there to begin with.

I wrote because I needed to. I wrote because I loved it. There was never any agenda with it. It wasn’t about a career, it wasn’t about getting anyone to read it. I wrote because it felt wrong not to.

Scott: When did you start to think about writing movies?

Elizabeth: About a year into LA life. I was in this actors’ workshop where we did both acting and writing. I think all newcomers in Hollywood these days are encouraged to create their own content. It’s the only way you have any modicum of control.

So we wrote scenes in this workshop. I brought in this scene, and the wonderful Mara Casey who ran the workshop said to me, “You know, I like these characters. You could write a whole movie about these people. If you do, we’ll dedicate a whole workshop day to doing a reading of your script and giving you feedback.”

I was like, “wow, great,” very excited and flattered that she saw something in me worth encouraging. I decided to write the best screenplay ever. I didn’t want to let her down.

And then I totally procrastinated, I was freaked out by it, all the pressure I put on it. I wrote it all in the two days before it was due — 100 pages or something, I just threw it together, wrote whatever felt like it would come next. This is really why deadlines are so great — they force you to just get something down. It’s always crappy but you have to start crappy.

I liked writing it, I liked all the possibilities in the medium, how it felt like playwriting but with visual art and music and way more sets. So I kept dabbling in screenwriting in between plays and essays and short stories and a third of a novel. And then I was graced with the idea for the story of “What They Had” and it had to be a movie.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Elizabeth talks about what inspired her to write “What They Had”.

Here is video of Elizabeth’s acceptance speech at the Nicholl Award ceremony:

Elizabeth is repped by ICM Partners and MXN Entertainment.

Twitter: @elizabethchomko.