Interview (Part 2): Anthony Grieco (2015 Nicholl Winner)

Anthony Grieco wrote the original screenplay “Best Sellers” which won a 2015 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently Anthony and I had an excellent phone conversation in which we covered a lot of territory, his background and how he got into writing, a deep analysis of “Best Sellers”, and a discussion about the writing craft.

Today in Part 2, Anthony discusses the inspiration for “Best Sellers” and talks about how he would have made a key change to the movie Spotlight:

Scott: You had a funny comment when you stepped up to the podium at the Nicholl ceremony after Billy Ray made that wonderful introduction. You said something like, “Wow, I’ve never heard anything that good come out of my writers’ group.”

Anthony: For the most part, they’re terrible actors. One of my best friends in the group is Mario Moreno, and he is the worst of the lot. Everything he reads lands with a thud and I’m like, “Really, is it that bad?” If Mario can make it sing, you’re probably onto something. But, all exaggerations aside, the group has been essential to my growth as a writer. It’s creating this perpetual deadline for me. Every Tuesday I’m trying to bring in 10 to 15 pages. The best version of those shitty pages. You’re allowed to fail, you’re allowed to experiment, see if it works, see if it resonates.

Scott: Circling back to Billy Ray again. He had that great quote from Paddy Chayefsky, which is “I’d like to tell young writers not to think about writing as art but to think about it as work.”

Anthony: It is. He was right about that. His whole analogy of how a mechanic doesn’t go to Starbucks to wait for his muse. I thought that’s very interesting. I’m not a very big believer in writer’s block.

If I’m stuck, I look for different ways to conquer what might be stumping me. I basically have a set list of questions that bump me into moving forward. Am I emotionally tracking my lead correctly? Is a scene lying properly on the spine of the story? Does it have any DNA that’s connected to the theme I’m trying to explore? Etc., etc.

Scott: Let’s jump back to the script that got you into the position where you’re in that whole Nicholl universe. The script, of course, is called Best Sellers. For readers who don’t know it, here’s a synopsis.

“Best Sellers tracks an editor, a young editor, Lucy, joining a veteran, drunkard author, Harris, on his book tour in an effort to save the publishing house bequeathed by her father.”

What was the inspiration for the story?

Anthony: It was pretty simple. I’ve always loved the literary world. I’ve always loved movies like Dead Poets Society and Wonder Boys. They’re my cozies. One day, I was reading an article about John Hughes in “Vanity Fair” magazine and how it’s rumored that he had all these screenplays in a vault that Hollywood could never get their hands on. Then I started thinking about Salinger and how he’s rumored to have manuscripts stashed away. I thought there was probably an agent or publisher pulling their hair out going, “I could really use some of those right now.” That sparked a “what if?” moment. What if someone like Salinger needed money and the great recluse was forced to come out of hiding and go on a book tour? And what if he was more like Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski? That seemed ripe for potential conflict.

Then I started thinking about it from the perspective of the possible publisher/editor and I thought, “How do I put these two forces at odds with each other?”

What I always do, before I start writing, I ask myself, “What is this about? Why do I want to explore this? What do I want to say with this story?” I start guessing that my “Salinger” is probably afraid that he’s never going to live up to Catcher in the Rye.

That he’s never going to be able to do that again. It’s so amazing, so big, it can’t be reproduced or trumped. I thought maybe there’s an element of, am I a fraud? Did I get lucky once? Then I’m thinking to myself, if Lucy’s my lead, how does her greatest fear tie into that?

I read a book during the course of this thought process called Max Perkins, Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg.

It was interesting to learn about the relationships Max Perkins had with all his writers. Many were insecure and terrified and he had to help shape their stories, their visions, and even their personal lives in order to get results.

I wondered, what if Lucy’s father was a Max Perkins type and she had to live in his shadow once he left her the publishing house? This was the connective tissue I was looking for. Both my characters feel like frauds.

Lastly, I always ask myself, does this theme tap into something everybody can identify with?

Is this theme true for a lawyer? A plumber? A screenwriter? You know, when someone phones you and says, “Congratulations, you’re a Nicholl fellow,” you’re excited and then your next thought is, “Shit, now I have to write good screenplays all the time.”

There’s that initial wave of, can you live up to other people’s expectations? Or do you feel like you got lucky? I feel most of us can identify with that.

Scott: To try and tap into that universal point of emotional connection. The idea of, can you live up to expectations?

Which really, you talk about the shared background between Harris, who’s this late 60s, as you described him, this ferocious alpha male, now moving into the winter of his discontent.

He’s a writer who wrote this book 40 years ago that caused quite a stir but since then has not been heard from and then the person who’s inherited this publishing company, Lucy, who’s a young woman, let’s see how you described her.

“She was standing in a lectern right below Joseph’s image. Her father’s image. This lionized character in terms of editors and whatnot. Late 20s, whip smart, elegant and ambitious.”

These two quite different people and yet you talk about the shared background.

Both of them have this thing going on. Can I live up to the expectations? Am I a fraud? The universality of that. We all have that. We all wear these masks. We all put on this persona like, “Yeah, we can do that.” But can we?

Anthony: I think this is one of the reasons people enjoy reading the script or have given me favorable feedback.

There is something that they connect to emotionally. I think that’s what we’re in the business of doing. I do script consulting on the side. Through The Writers Store primarily, and I keep stressing that to the writers I work with. Some write really smart scripts, but if I’m left doing more thinking than feeling, then it has failed to do its job.

Scott: That reminds me. I was reading about Christopher Nolan and Inception, how he started that project because he wanted to do a heist movie and he came up with this idea of going inside some person’s mind, that whole inception idea.

But he was never satisfied and then he set it aside and it wasn’t until he came up with this idea of Cobb wanting to get back to his children.

He saw the emotional core of it, that he finally found his way into it emotionally so he could write that script. He set it aside. It took him ten years to write it. He didn’t work on it constantly. He set it aside. I think that speaks to what you’re talking about.

Anthony: It’s absolutely true. We’re all entitled to opinions, of course but I’m a big believer in story over plot. I feel like the plot is simply an obstacle course that a character must maneuver through in order to tell us their story — their inner journey.

It’s about tapping into a universal truth. Something we identify with emotionally.

I’m trying to catch up on all these films that are nominated and the ones that resonate with me, that stay with me for days, are the ones that stir something within. They feel like these onions, where you can continue to pull back the layers days after you’ve seen them.

For instance, the film Room connected with me and forced me to consider its message.

Was there some strange level of comfort the mother had in controlling her child’s environment that she lost when forced to share him with the outside world? You think to yourself, “She thought she was the child’s lifeline but really the child was her lifeline.”

It’s all these interesting thoughts, and when I watch Spotlight, I don’t have those kind of provoking thoughts or emotions. It’s a really well-made film but it leaves me somewhat empty. I’m not walking away asking questions about the human condition.

Scott: Tom McCarthy made a conscious choice to really limit the level of what we know about the characters.

Anthony: There was a moment in that movie where one of the characters realizes that one of the priests is a neighbor. He runs and he sees the house and he comes back and he puts that note on the fridge door. That was really the only moment when I thought, “I’m connected to this movie.” It was primal and personal. I got that.

Scott: That’s about 75 minutes into the movie.

Anthony: I thought, how much more interesting would a movie like that have been if Ruffalo was abused as a child by a priest and now he’s forced to investigate this story. Now, I know it’s a true story, and you can only take so many liberties, but I always ask myself when I get to act two, “How is this the worst thing that could happen to my character?”

Tomorrow in Part 3, Anthony describes what he was thinking in working with the two lead characters in Best Sellers.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Anthony is repped by Paradigm and Aperture Entertainment.

Twitter: @SwimCharlieSwim.