Interview [Part 2]: Geoff LaTulippe
One of the more active and colorful voices in the online screenwriting community is Geoff LaTulippe. Writer of the 2010 romantic comedy Going the Distance, starring Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, Geoff also has a blog, is co-host (along with Scott Beggs) of the popular Broken Projector podcast, and is quite active on Twitter (@DrGMLaTulippe).
Geoff and I had a wide-ranging back and forth via email about his background, the development and production of Going the Distance, and the craft of screenwriting.
Today in Part 2, Geoff discusses how he broke into Hollywood as a script reader and the genesis of his spec script Going the Distance:
Scott: At some point, you moved to Los Angeles and worked as a script reader for several years. How did that happen and what was that experience like?
Geoff: I had been floating ever since college, thinking that I needed to save up X amount of dollars to move to LA “just in case something happened”. I languished trying to do that. Then one day, as I was working in chemical lawn care, I’d had my fill.
I’d had an offer from Luke Ryan, then the Story Editor in charge of readers at New Line Cinema, that if I wanted to move to LA and read scripts, the option was open to me. I had NO idea how both legitimate and miraculous this offer was, so I waffled on it for months longer than I should have. Luke and I knew each other from an online screenwriters’ message board back on the old Yahoo! Groups, and he really took me under his wing as he started in the industry. I bet you couldn’t count on twelve hands the number of careers in movies Luke has had a major hand in, and I’m definitely one of them.
So in April 2004 I quit my lawn care job on a Monday, and came to LA that Saturday. Then I read scripts until I sold my own script in 2008.
Scott: Every writer I’ve ever talked to who had a stint as a script reader has told me it was an invaluable learning experience. What are some key things you learned from your time as a script reader?
Geoff: Is there a word stronger than invaluable? For myself, I would use the word “essential”. Outside of some classes at JMU and reading scripts on my own, being a reader WAS my education as a screenwriter.
By leaps and bounds, the most important thing you learn as a reader is what separates a bad script from a good script and a good script from a great script. I read probably 5000 scripts in my four and a half years as a reader, and I absorbed everything I could consciously and God knows how much subconsciously. The bad scripts drill into your head the things you should NOT do to the point where now, if I’m making big mistake in my writing, I’ll catch it before I’ve cemented it. It’s almost muscle memory. “No no, don’t do that there. That sucks and you know it.”
With great scripts it’s always far more abstract — there’s a feeling you get, like you sense it worming its way into your system. My first week on the job as a reader I read an Aaron Sorkin script, THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION. Even though it was early and even though I knew well who Sorkin was, there was this sense of, “This is it. Right here. This is the apex of talent.” And I rarely got that excited about a script again.
Side note: I Reluctant Passed on THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION, because I was terrified that Recommending it would have cost me my job if the exec hadn’t liked it. Luckily, the exec ignored me and they bought the script. I hope Mr. Sorkin has forgiven me.
I’ve said over and over and over and over again that aspiring screenwriters don’t need to spend money on books and contests and all that crap when it comes to their “education”. They just need to read a ton of scripts, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and then write and write and write. I am living proof of that.
Scott: Let’s talk about the movie Going the Distance which made the Black List in 2008 and was produced as a movie in 2010 starring Justin Long, Drew Barrymore and a slew of great comic actors in supporting roles. Here’s the logline from the movie’s IMDB page:
“A romantic comedy centered on a guy and a gal who try to keep their love alive as they shuttle back and forth between New York and San Francisco to see one another.”
What was the genesis of the idea?
Geoff: This is one of those stories where the Who You Know was just as, if not more, important than the What You Know.
Executive Producer Dave Neustadter was one of the first people I met in LA, and we were instafriends. As it happened, in mid-2007, Dave got out of a long-term long-distance relationship with his best friend from high school. One night, sitting around drinking beers, he said, “You should write this script. There’s so much to be mined from this concept. I have a billion entertaining stories.” At the time, I was actually reading so many scripts that I’d abandoned all hope of writing one of my own. But Dave and I hashed out a rough idea, and I combined my own relationship failures with his, and in Summer 2008, I finished it. We spent a weekend deleting and rearranging and streamlining, and then he gave it to Richard Brener that Monday. On Wednesday it sold.
Scott: I’ve read where you said you wrote the script in 3 days, but over a period of several months. Could you walk us through the first draft process?
Geoff: When I first sat down, I had an opening sequence in mind — watching the two leads break up with significant others and then charting the fallout from the immediate aftermath of that when they met each other. From there everything snowballed, and all of a sudden I looked up and I’d written 30 pages.
I walked away from it for a bit, but kept going back and reading it every now and then just to convince myself that I was on the right track. I really felt like I was. And I was about to write more…and the writers’ strike happened.
Now a lot of people aren’t going to believe this, and I can’t blame them, but: it was suggested to me at the time that, though I wasn’t in the WGA, I would be one day. And one thing I could do in support of my future guild brothers and sisters was not work on any projects I had going until the strike was over. So I didn’t. And then, when the strike ended, I immediately picked GOING THE DISTANCE back up, got onto a streak, and wrote another 30 pages in one night.
Then I walked away from it again — mostly because I was very busy reading again, but also because, frankly, I had the luxury to let it breathe a little. Then, one night in July 2008, I was reading one of the worst scripts I’d ever gotten my hands on. It was infuriatingly bad, and I remember throwing it across my living room (literally) and thinking to myself, “It’s time to stop reading other writers’ scripts and finish your own.” That was in the early evening. By 6AM the next morning, I had finished the script, motivated by completely unearned confidence and a primal loathing of bad writing.
I then sent it to Dave with a message that read something like, “I don’t know what the fuck this is. I’m sorry.” And then he called me later in the day — he thought it was great. We went to work finishing it that weekend. And the next week it sold. It’s a batshit crazy story that I’m unbelievably lucky to be able to tell.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Geoff talks about the two lead characters in Going the Distance: Garrett and Erin, and how they came to be played by Justin Long and Drew Barrymore.
For Part 1, go here.
Geoff is repped by WME.
Twitter: @DrGMLaTulippe.
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