“Making a movie is easy: A 3‐step process that worked for ‘Prisoners’”
Yesterday in Hollywood Journal, there was a first-person essay from Adam Kolbrenner, co-founder of Madhouse Entertainment, a literary management and production company based in Century City, CA, about the long journey from concept to screen for the movie Prisoners. In the piece, Kolbrenner provides a good take on the manager-writer relationship. Here is an excerpt:
It all started with a query letter from an unrepresented screenwriter named Aaron Guzikowski. A hard letter … in an envelope. With a stamp! Not a blind email or submission through a website. A letter.
I picked up the letter and quite liked that this writer had an odd last name and lived in Brooklyn, NY. I love Brooklyn. So, I called him and he sent me his first script, which I read and called him again to say I can’t sell it. But, he can write, that voice was there. So we agreed we would work on a new idea for a film that we can develop together. This might take a few tries, but we’ll get there.
Several months later, a PDF one page movie idea arrives in my inbox. The story for a movie called Prisoners. In a flu-induced haze, Guzikowski came up with an idea for a movie. To be sure, the bones of this idea are what evolved into the final production, but we began an epic journey at this point. Guzikowski in Brooklyn, and our literary management and production company Madhouse Entertainment in Beverly Hills. As literary managers, we develop material, so, we assumed this would be a normal process.
Guzikowski had a soulless job in Manhattan. He’d commute from Brooklyn in utter misery each day to an advertising firm where he focused on stuffing envelopes with those inserts you get in your mail from banks and car dealerships. We spoke and emailed thousands of times. We never met in person. We would be giving notes to Guzikowski and he’d actually be standing inside the company supply closet, which doubled as his writers room. There would be a knock at the door, and he would hand off supplies to employees who gave him a look as if to say “people are not supposed to be handing me pens from a closet” and he would shut the door without offering an explanation. We went through draft after draft of the screenplay. While most screenwriters would throw their hands up and declare “I’m done, send it out” Guzikowski never wavered in his belief that this process was working and he stuck with this arduous process.
This went on for over 2 years. And in 2009, we had a finished screenplay.
Read the rest of the essay here as it’s well worth your time.
If you are a writer trying to break into Hollywood, this is the type of thing you need to wrap your head around — the sheer amount of time and hard work often required by both writer and manager, each in their respective roles, to get a script ready to go to market. In the case of Guzikowski and the script for Prisoners, it was 2 years and multiple drafts. And that was before it got set up. I have read somewhere that Guzikowski wrote 40 drafts of this script. I will try to confirm that with him as I’ve got an interview with him in the works.
Believe it or not, this is what you want as a writer. A working relationship with a manager who gets your voice, believes in your talent, puts in the time and commitment to work with you, not just to get your script into decent shape, but make it great — even if it takes 2 years and 40 drafts. That type of work is your best bet to get a movie produced and land you a bunch of gigs based off that success and the power of your words on paper.
Prisoners, which was sneaked at Telluride and played at Toronto, has been getting strong reviews (check out this one in Forbes). Here’s the trailer:
Looks like a smart thriller with substance. The movie opens this weekend.
For an interview I did with Kolbrenner, go here.
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