Interview (Part 2): Alisha Brophy & Scott Miles (2014 Nicholl Winners)
Alisha Brophy and Scott Miles wrote the original screenplay “The United States of Fuckin’ Awesome” which won the duo a 2014 Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting. Alisha, Scott and I had a great interview which I will be rolling out in 6 installments this week.
Today in Part 2, Alisha and Scott discuss what it has been like to write while separated by a few thousand miles and what the origin was for “The United States of Fuckin’ Awesome”:
Myers: What year did you all graduate from UT Austin?
Scott: In 2009.
Myers: So you’ve been writing together since then?
Alisha: Yes.
Myers: Outside of film school, are there other things you’ve done to facilitate your learning of the craft?
Scott: I’ve written and directed short films and web series. I also, and this has probably been more helpful, I started doing web comics on the side. I had a day job at a big company, so I started doing a comic strip making fun of big corporations. A “Dilbert”‑esque thing, but more from the point of view of a sociopathic CEO.
Having to tell jokes in just three panels really made me focus on how to structure jokes and the economy of words, which I definitely think has helped my screenwriting out, as well.
Myers: How about you, Alisha?
Alisha: I taught screenwriting at UT Austin after I graduated, and I found that teaching is one of the best ways to learn because you have to understand a concept thoroughly to be able to teach it to someone else.
And all the pre-writing that your screenwriting teacher insists you do, if you’re the teacher you actually have to do it yourself when it comes to your own projects.
For instance, we are really big outliners. We will outline a project forever.
Myers: Scott, you live in Austin, is that right?
Scott: That’s correct.
Myers: Alisha, you’re in California?
Alisha: Yeah, I’m in Los Angeles.
Myers: How did you make that decision, Alisha, that you needed to go or that you wanted to go? How did that come about?
Alisha: I wanted to be in television. Austin is such a lovely city. But, I realized that I needed to move to Los Angeles and give it a go because if I stayed too much longer in Austin I would never leave. I was very happy there, and would love to get back at some point.
Myers: Yet, you still continued to write together?
Scott: We did. Partly because when we finished our first feature it had a little bit of heat so we were like, “Oh, we should definitely keep writing together,” and it’s snowballed from there to the point where I’m going to be moving out to LA, actually, to continue this further.
Myers: That’ll be an interesting experience. Of course, you’ve had Alisha there to cut a trail for you.
Scott: Exactly. I feel like I’m more fortunate than a lot of people who are just making the jump without that.
Myers: How many scripts have you written together at this point?
Scott: We’ve finished two features and, I think, three or four pilots together. 30 minute, single camera pilots.
Myers: In your Nicholl acceptance speech, you mention an LA writer’s group. What’s the story behind that?
Alisha: Yeah. I made a friend, Nick Scown, at Austin Film Festival, and he lives here in LA. When I moved out, his writer’s group had just lost a person, and they invited me to submit a writing sample and accepted me. Then Scott and I began writing even more together so Scott came into the fold.
Scott: I was grandfathered in. [laughs]
Alisha: It’s very small. There’s only five of us. We won’t let anyone else in because we’ve been giving each other notes for years, and we have our own shorthand within the group. It’s really a lovely thing, and I feel that everyone, as a writer, needs to have this, a place where you can show others your first draft.
We also have this same trust with some of our old UT Austin cohorts. We’ve all graduated years ago yet we still workshop our material with our friend Matt Dunn as if we were still in class together.
Having readers you trust, you can show them the worst things you can put on the page and they still think that you’re amazing, because they see what the project will eventually be, and they give you notes and help you figure out the things that you’re not figuring out on your own.
We’ve been, like I said, doing this for each other for years, and it’s starting to really pay off. In fact, one guy in the group, Matt Murphy, won the Nicholl three years ago with a script that we had workshopped, and then Scott and I won this year. Now the pressure is really on Max Lance, and Nick Scown for next year’s Nicholl.
Myers: [laughs] Let’s move to your movie, the script, “The United States of Fuckin’ Awesome.” Here’s a description of the plot:
“When Thomas Jefferson finishes writing the Declaration of Independence, George Washington and Ben Franklin take him out to celebrate. After a night of debauchery, they realize the document’s missing. If they can’t find it in time for the Continental Congress there won’t be an America.”
I’ve seen the story’s been described as The Hangover meets “Drunk History.” What was your inspiration for this idea?
Scott: The first screenplay that Alisha and I wrote together was an indie feature called “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” looking at the trope of the manic pixie, but from her point of view.
In the third act of one of the early drafts, the manic pixie had, in her quirky way, decided to recreate the American Revolution, and it was big and there were fireworks and horses. But she was also getting her history all wrong, so people like Genghis Khan were showing up. It was historically crazy.
We wrote it and thought, “This does not work. This is horrible,” and completely cut it out of the script. We said, “You just can’t make the American Revolution funny. It doesn’t belong in a comedy.” But then it’s one of those things where, with our personalities, once you say something can’t be done that’s all we want to do —
Alisha: — We were going to figure out how to make the American Revolution funny.
Scott: Right. The big notion of that idea had been rumbling around for a while in our heads, then we just built it up from there. Once we settled on the outrageousness of it like, “Oh, it’s like The Hangover,” then it really started falling into place.
Alisha: Scott is not taking enough credit here. The premise was something that he pitched to me one time and then immediately decided it shouldn’t be done, and I was adamant that we do it. That’s pretty much every project we do. Something where Scott kind of throws his own idea under the bus and then I latch onto it and think it’s the most brilliant thing ever and then insist that we write it.
Scott: Right. It’s like, “A period comedy? No one’s ever going to want to see that,” and then she says, “We must do this.” I need to listen to her more often is the lesson to be learned.
Myers: Alisha said she had that rebellious nature saying, “I’m not going to be a writer. Everybody says I’m going to be a writer.” That rebellious nature actually comes in handy here in your creative side, right?
Scott: Yes, very much.
Myers: I was curious, do either of you remember taking American history classes in school or did you like history or not?
Alisha: My history class was right after lunch so I slept through it.
Scott: I wouldn’t call myself a history buff. I haven’t dived in as deep to be called that, but I do love history quite a bit. I have a memory of my seventh grade history teacher telling us, “Look, there’s a lot of stuff I cannot tell you about the Founding Fathers, but come back when you’ve graduated high school and I will give you all the dirt that I cannot tell you here in middle school.”
Sadly, I never went back and took her up on that, but it always stuck with me that these are actual people with interesting lives that they cannot teach you in school.
Alisha: My father got me hooked on Howard Zinn. That’s basically how I caught up on my history lessons after school. So, when we started writing the first draft of this we realized that we had too many historically accurate, but obscure, history jokes in there.
Scott: Referencing specific battles that had taken place prior to the events in our script, and it was just too nerdy.
Alisha: So, I went to the library and took out a stack of children’s books about the American Revolution. We basically used those books as a litmus test for jokes. That way, we were making sure that joke‑wise everyone would get to enjoy the script and it would be broad and anyone with a fifth grade level of history education could still enjoy the comedy of it.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Alisha and Scott talk about three main characters in their Nicholl winning script: George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
The duo is repped by Paradigm and Circle of Confusion.
Twitter: @alishabrophy, @scottmiles.