Interview [Part 1]: 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.

Today in Part 1, Jason talks about growing up in a movie family and his formal education in film studies:

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.”

Tomorrow in Part 2, Jason discusses how moving to Los Angeles turned out to be a smart decision and the importance of finding mentors to help steer a young writer through the Hollywood minefield.

Jason is repped by CAA and Management 360.

Twitter: @JasonHellerman.

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