Q&A: Aaron Tracy (screenwriter, spec script “Article III”)

Back in February, screenwriter Aaron Tracy sold his spec script “Article III” as noted here. Aaron kindly agreed to do an interview for GITS readers. Here it is:

Let’s start at the beginning. How does someone with a B.A. from Cornell and a M.A. from Yale in English and English literature end up in Hollywood writing movies and TV?

Wait, there are other things you can do with those degrees? Because I’m almost positive the second one only qualifies me for unemployment. While I was in school what I really wanted to do was write plays. Growing up in DC, my dad and I used to take 2 or 3 weekends a year in New York to see good theatre. That’s where I first saw The Real Thing, Cat on Hot Tin Roof, Death of a Salesman and just fell in love with dramatic writing.

But I quickly realized that writing for the stage wasn’t a natural fit for me. Seeing 6 or 7 plays a year couldn’t compete with the number of movies and TV shows I’d watched. My mind kept picturing everything I wrote on a screen. Also, unless your last name is Kushner McDonagh or Stoppard, it’s next to impossible to make a living writing theatre. But in Hollywood, you can actually sorta kinda earn a living as an assistant while working your way up the ladder.

Did you take any screenwriting courses as part of your formal education? If not, how did you facilitate learning the craft of screenwriting (i.e., books read, seminars taken, etc)?

I’ve taken a bunch of theatre courses, but never one for screenwriting. If they existed at my schools, I certainly didn’t know about ’em. But I think the most helpful lesson for a screenwriter is the study of the best dramatic writing, no matter what the medium. I definitely learned more about how to create character and build suspense from studying the plays A Few Good Men and Doubt than from the screenplay books I’ve bought over the years.

What was your first big break that enabled you to start working in the entertainment business?

A few months after moving to LA, I was at dinner with my friend Alex who’s also from D.C. A young lit agent he knew walked by our table and Alex introduced us, telling the agent I’d just moved here to be a writer. The guy must’ve been really hard up because the next day I got an email from him asking to read something. I’d written only one script at that point, so I sent it to him and he dug it. He called me in to CAA for a meeting. I was incredibly nervous. My first Hollywood meeting and it was in the most intimidating location possible. I remember walking into their gargantuan lobby with the 50 foot ceilings and the glass walls and sitting down next to the only other person in the waiting room…Rob Lowe. Strange town.

When the agent brought me into his cubicle, he excitedly told me he wanted to “hip pocket” me, which is even more absurd than it sounds. It’s basically one of those ridiculous Hollywood relationships where an agent likes you enough to try to help, but not enough to actually get you signed by his agency. If he gets you a job, great. If he doesn’t, so it goes.

Luckily, this agent had worked with someone involved in a brand new TV drama called “Killer Instinct,” which had just been picked up by Fox. He got me an interview and I was hired as the Writers Assistant. The show wasn’t destined for success unfortunately. My favorite moment was on the day before we premiered when USA Today wrote, “if you’re looking for the worst show of the new season…look no further!”

We ended up getting canceled after 10 episodes, but it taught me how a show got written. It also introduced me to the showrunner, Ed Zuckerman, who’s been a great mentor to me over the years.

“Article III” is a political-legal thriller with a unique setting — the Supreme Court. What was the source of this idea for you as a movie? Did you start with the concept of a movie centering around the Supreme Court? Or your story’s opening incident, an unusual case of murders taking place on American soil in England? Or perhaps did you begin with your Protagonist Sam, a law clerk for a Supreme Court justice? In other words, could you unpack your initial formative process in developing an overview of the story you ended up writing?

The genesis of the idea was pretty simple — I’d never seen a movie that took place in the Supreme Court before. Which didn’t make a lick of sense to me. There are so many TV shows and movies about law and order, how could there not be a single feature about the pinnacle of America’s legal system? To be totally fair, there was an 80’s Walter Matthau rom-com and a handful of other films like The Pelican Brief where you got to see a scene or two in the Court, but nothing substantial. This seemed like a great opening. I didn’t know what in the world my script would be, but I now knew where it would be.

Your script delves into some fascinating little known aspects of the Supreme Court. For example, they have their own security forces, but their jurisdiction only extends to the actual grounds of the Supreme Court facility in Washington D.C.. How much research did you do about the Supreme Court, how much time did you spend doing that research, and how did you go about doing that research?

Once I decided on the Supreme Court, I cobbled together a bunch of books on the subject and just started reading with no particular agenda. It’s when I got to Woodward and Armstrong’s “The Brethren” that I finally got the idea for what the movie would be about. There are several chapters in there about the little-known society of Supreme Court clerks who basically run their justices’ chambers. Clerks seemed like the perfect subject because no one knows much about what they do even though they hold this rarefied position of power at a very young age.

In terms of overall research, I probably have a stack of books on my desk just shorter than my 2 year-old niece. I also made a couple trips to the actual Courthouse, one of which was with a producer on the project. We were able to arrange an after-hours tour from one of the current clerks. Which was amazing. Standing at the advocate’s lectern opposite those nine empty seats late at night was wild. Best field trip ever.

“Article III” is very much a Protagonist-on-the-run story with Sam finding himself thrust into the middle of a mystery, multiple parties searching for him, and a kidnapping which serves as a ticking clock to keep the pressure on him to figure things out. One movie comparison that comes to mind is Three Days of the Condor. Did that inspire and influence you at all? What other movies did you have in mind as you wrote “Article III”?

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Condor was a huge influence for me. As were those other amazing paranoid thrillers from the mid 70s where Redford and Hoffman kept trying to one-up each other — Condor, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men. To me, those movies are perfect. The trick was not being silenced by them. I try to read lots of screenplays, but never the ones of old movies I love. Reading something like Condor is incredibly depressing because I can see the characters and dialogue and setting so perfectly in my mind that the pages take on an almost omnipotent quality. If you’ve seen the movie a handful of times, the scene on the page will feel absolutely perfect simply because you can’t imagine it unfolding any other way. And that’s a dangerous trap because the stuff that you’re writing will necessarily feel much, much, much less perfect.

In order to get the action rolling in your script, you had to handle a lot of exposition in Act One. How much of a challenge was that for you, how much time did you spend on that, and what tricks of the trade did you use to manage all that exposition?

Just thinking about how many times I’ve rewritten the first 30 pages is totally exhausting. The drawback of setting the movie in a world we’ve never seen on film before is that there’s a lot of explaining to do. Do people know what a Supreme Court clerk actually does? Probably not. I certainly didn’t before reading Woodward’s book.

A writer I love once told me that when he’s having trouble with an Act One, he watches or reads just the first 30 minutes of a few movies to see how they managed it. Watching the whole movie is too distracting, but narrowing it down can be really helpful. An opening is an opening whether it’s Footloose or Four Weddings and a Funeral — everybody has to accomplish a similar checklist. The key is figuring out the most vital information to get across (a good rule of thumb seems to be that if it doesn’t HAVE to be included, then it shouldn’t be) and how to do it in the most dramatic, interesting way. In Article III, I have some very technical but important information discussed while our hero plays basketball against a Justice. It’s a complete cheat, but it lets our hero have fun, showcases his relationship with his mentor, and introduces more of the unique setting (they play on the “highest court in the land” which is what the basketball court on the top floor of the Courthouse is called).

The plot of “Article III” is complex with many twists and turns. Could you describe what your process of plotting this story was like? Did the plot lay out easily for you or was it a real challenge to work out all those details?

Someday a plot will lay out easily for me and it’ll be the best day of my life. I read somewhere that Aaron Sorkin showers and changes clothes whenever he’s stuck. That sounds much healthier than what I do which is mostly just yelling at myself. After the project sold, I re-outlined the script for the producers. On this second go round, I used the sequence method, which I was turned on to by a TV writer friend. It’s fantastic. I’ve sent a bunch of friends to Samuel French to buy Gulino’s book. It works almost like a magic trick the first time you use it. Basically it breaks the entire screenplay into 8 short sequences, each of which has its own three act structure. Sounds like a lot of work, but you save a ton of time on the writing end. And instead of an amorphous, terrifying 60 page second act, you have 4 very manageable 15 page sequences.

Which is not to say that I don’t still go crazy during the plotting stage. My crazy just has a method to it now.

The script has several key characters, each of whom has a distinct, interesting personality. How did you go about developing this particular cast of characters? For example, did you start with Sam, your Protagonist? Or the Supreme Court justice for whom he works? Generally how did your primary characters emerge into being?

Well, thanks for that. I actually do two things. First, I write mini biographies of all the main characters. Sometimes it’s as short as a couple sentences, other times it’s a couple pages. I just freestyle. Where they’re from, hobbies, girlfriends, boyfriends, favorite movies, desert island records… I do this during the outline stage and I find that when I just let my mind wander, I often come up with new plot ideas based on biography.

The second trick is that I simply imagine an actor or friend’s voice for each character as I’m writing. The key for me is to pick a character-actor with an unusual way of delivering lines or a friend with an unusual staccato. The voice always becomes more mainstream in script, so I like to start as weird as possible. Luckily my closest friends have very distinct ways of speaking.

You wrote Article III on spec. How did you decide to do that? How long did it take you from the original conception of the story to delivery of your final draft? How many drafts do you think you wrote?

I appreciate you making it sound like a decision I had to wrestle with. The truth is that I had to write it on spec because no one was going to buy a pitch from me at the time. I’d written my first spec feature the year before. It was a period heist movie about the real-life Chicago counterfeiters who tried to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. They almost pulled it off and ended up being taken down by the Secret Service, which had just been commissioned exclusively to go after counterfeiters. Lincoln was the very first president they protected (even though it was just his body), so the movie is also about the birth and growth of that agency.

I was lucky enough to get a star attached to that script, but we just couldn’t find a big enough director. With a period piece (which is inherently expensive) about a subject that international audiences might not care about, you really need an A-list filmmaker before going to a studio. I was incredibly disappointed that we couldn’t find one, but I took comfort in how many meetings it generated for me and how many of my heroes were reading it for possible attachment (even if they did all pass…)

I pitched Article III to a few of the producers that liked my Lincoln script. We toyed with the idea of going right to a studio, but the economy was down and no one was going to buy this as a pitch. So I went off and wrote it. I probably sent out my 3rd draft to buyers and have since rewritten it a few times for the producers. The whole process has been about 18 months, but I’ve taken several long breaks for a TV show and other pitches and scripts that have come up.

Now the fun part: How did the sale of Article III come down? What, if anything, did you do to celebrate?

A couple friends who were attached to either produce or star in the Lincoln movie started talking to me about an idea for a raunchy family comedy. We worked out a pitch and took it to Route One, an amazing company that was on the same lot as my producer friend. They passed on the idea, but their head of development, Megan, whom I became good friends with, asked me to keep bringing her ideas. When my agents and manager were ready to send out Article III, we made her one of the first four people we sent it to. Two of the four buyers passed, the other two wanted it. One of the best phone calls I’ve ever gotten was when the producer phoned to say he wanted to “take the script off the market.” Route One is a fantastic shop interested in making smart, commercial movies and I completely trust the small team of execs. So I couldn’t have been happier.

I definitely celebrated the sale that night, but I think the euphoria was pretty tempered by the fact that I knew I’d be doing a big rewrite for them starting that week…

Okay, let’s talk more generally about your approach to the craft of screenwriting. Where do you find your stories? How do you come up with story ideas? How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength of a screenplay?

I never know where I’ll read something that will re-spark an interest I forgot I had. Most of my ideas are from reading magazines, newspapers, or non-fiction that touch on subjects I’ve been interested in for years. For instance, I took a seminar on Lincoln in school, but didn’t come up with my screenplay idea til I read a newspaper article about the kidnapping years later. Likewise, I’d always been fascinated by the Supreme Court growing up in D.C., but it took reading a couple non-fiction books about the Court in Los Angeles to make me realize there was a screenplay to be written.

My agent recently asked me to send him 10 ideas for screenplays in the span of a couple weeks. It seemed like a silly exercise because I’ve probably only had about 10 genuinely viable movie ideas in my whole life. But I ended up really liking the exercise because it reminded me not to be so precious with my ideas. Not everything you write has to be your opus. Sometimes it feels like you have to be incredibly careful choosing your topic because it’s going to dominate your life for so many months, but that can lead to serious procrastination. Story concept is unquestionably important to the success of a finished script, but I think far more concepts would lead to great scripts than we give them credit for.

How much time do you spend in prep-writing (i.e., brainstorming, character development, plotting, research, outlining)? Which of the aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time and focus to?

I’m in awe of writers who can just jump into a script without an outline. The problem for me is that I get really attached to scenes I write, so it’s much harder to change course half way through a script if I discover something isn’t working. I’d rather spend many more hours in the outline stage just to try to avoid that situation down the line. Who said about writing that you gotta kill your babies? Someone with much, much stronger will power than me…

What are some of the tools and techniques you use to dig into your characters and develop them?

I once had a playwriting teacher who told a fun story about character. She said the director of Midnight Cowboy simply decided that Jon Voight’s character never received any kind of physical affection from his mother when he was a child. And that’s what informs every moment of his present life: his intense need for physical touch. Makes sense, right? Whether or not it’s true, I’ve always loved that story. I try to find details like that for each of my main characters.

As a talented writer living out the fantasy of literally millions of people, what advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about the craft?

I think if they saw me this morning on my fourth cup of coffee, pacing the floor trying to crack a new thriller concept, the fantasy would be quickly dispelled. I wouldn’t presume to think I have answers others don’t, but I can say one of the most important things for my career has been finding a space to write in. I’m always amazed by people who can get a solid day’s work done in a coffee shop or in their apartments. For me, there’s just too many distractions. And if I have no reason to put on pants in the morning, I get incredibly depressed. I joined this great communal office where everyone has their own work station, the coffee flows all day, and the energy of other professional writers typing away just fills the air. There’s something really motivating about seeing the writers of some of my favorite movies a few desks down doing the same thing I’m doing — drinking coffee, checking email, and just typing. It removes the magic from the process which is a good thing. But wherever you go, I personally think that a quiet, distraction-free space to write in is as important as anything else a screenwriter could possibly possess.

Some background on Aaron:

Aaron Tracy’s most recent screenplay, ARTICLE III, was sold to Route One Films. According to Variety, “story follows a 26-year-old law clerk for an aging Supreme Court justice…who has three days to save the life of his girlfriend when she’s abducted in a plot to sway his boss’s vote.” Aaron wrote episode three of the hit USA series FAIRLY LEGAL. His screenplay, INCIDENT AT OAK RIDGE, based on the true story of the attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body, is currently in development with Ryan Phillippe attached to star. Aaron has sold a pilot to 20th Century Fox and helped write the scripts for the fourth and sixth installments of the best-selling CALL OF DUTY video game franchise. Aaron also worked on the Fox drama series KILLER INSTINCT, and on RUNAWAY for The CW. His writing has won him several honors, including selection as a member of the Warner Bros. Drama Writers Workshop. Aaron had his first play produced in Ithaca, NY and, more recently, at the Westbeth Theater Center in lower Manhattan. A Washington D.C. native, Aaron graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English from Cornell University and with a Master’s degree in English literature from Yale University. He’s represented by CAA, attorney Laurie Megery, and manager Dan Halsted.

Please take a moment to thank Aaron in comments for taking the time to talk about the craft.

And best of luck to you, Aaron!

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