Q&A: Screenwriter Stan Chervin (“Moneyball”), Part 2

Stan Chervin is one of the credited writers on the screenplay for the movie Moneyball along with Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. In the second part of my Q&A with Chervin, he discusses how he transitioned into screenwriting and a number of movie projects he’s written:

When and how did you realize you wanted to be a screenwriter? How did you make that transition?

When I was living in New York and working in theatre, because my focus was on directing and running a theatre, I did not write plays. I started writing almost by accident after I’d been in New York for almost four years as a result of two different random events.

The first was one year I threw a “Murder Party.” It was a party based on the parlor game “Murder”: I invited 30 people and assigned each of them a “character” to play — I wrote up long, detailed character descriptions, which were included in the invitation; they were also given the name of another guest at the party that they wanted to murder — the “murder” was done by winking at them. The trick was to “murder” your assigned victim without anyone seeing you, and to do it before you yourself got murdered.

The party was a big success and Tom Picard, a friend of mine and a stage manager I’d worked with on several shows, suggested it would make a great play. He and I collaborated on a play.

It was the first thing I ever wrote and I never looked back. I was so enamored of writing, I enjoyed it so much, and it was something I could do alone, without needing actors, a stage, a play and money, that I almost immediately gave up my goal of directing or running a theatre

I was helped along by Gail Berman, a friend of mine who was then a Broadway producer. I’d known Gail for years, and had worked for her in various capacities as a reader, when one day she said to me, “You should read this.” It was Leslie Dixon’s screenplay for Outrageous Fortune. It was the first screenplay I’d ever read and, more importantly, it was the first screenplay I read that had the same quality, inventiveness, and brilliant writing as many of the plays from the world I’d been working in for years. It opened my eyes to the possibility of screenwriting being on par with working in the theatre. Soon after that, Gail had an idea for a TV movie (back when they made them) and asked Tom and I to write a treatment for her to use to sell it. Gail never sold it, but by then the process of writing for the screen had me hooked. I began to focus all my energy on writing.

In a San Francisco magazine article about the movie Moneyball, there is this quote:

“It turns out, a true baseball story isn’t even what sold Sony Pictures, the movie’s production company, on the project; it was the personal element that writer Stan Chervin brought to the material in 2004. Chervin belongs to a literary species unique to Hollywood. (In the spirit of full disclosure: I went to school with Chervin at UC Berkeley.) A talented writer, he has made a good living penning numerous scripts over the course of two decades, and his particular knack for developing and pitching material was exactly what was needed to get Moneyball rolling. Yet the movie will be his first actual credit.”

There’s a lot to unpack, so let’s start with this: What are some of the script projects you’ve written over the years that have yet to be produced? How common is it for a screenwriter to write multiple projects over the course of many years before landing a first writing credit?

Baseball runs through a lot of my career. The first screenplay I was ever paid to write was an adaptation of the W.P. Kinsella short story, The Dixon Cornbelt League. I still feel its one of the best things I ever wrote, combining much of the American “magic realism” that made Field of Dreams, based on another Kinsella work, so successful; I’m hoping the success of Moneyball may revive interest in Dixon Cornbelt League.

The first major project I set up off a pitch was an adaptation of Around in The World in 80 Days which I wrote for Warners. Ours was not the only version in development and we eventually lost the race to the version which was made with Steve Coogan.

The first script I ever wrote for a major star was an adaptation of Nicholas Dawidoff’s book, The Catcher Was A Spy, which is the story of Moe Berg, a professional baseball player for 17 seasons who joined the O.S.S. during World War II and became the leading spy tracking the Nazi development of the nuclear bomb. I set it up at Warner Brothers with George Clooney attached to star and to produce.

Most recently, I wrote Puckface, a comedy I wrote for New Line that’s based on the life of Sean Avery, a hockey player who leads the NHL in penalty minutes, but LOVES fashion so much he took a job as an unpaid intern at Vogue magazine.

As to how many writers have been in my position of working non-stop for almost 20 years without a produced credit, it’s sort of a “Are you still beating your wife?” kind of question. It was certainly not a goal I set out for myself. Part of the problem is the sort of material I’ve been attracted to as a writer has never been the broad, high-concept kind of material, but more complex, smaller, and quirkier stories. It is very hard to get a movie made these days and even harder for a studio to stick with the same writer throughout the entire process. I suspect that as fewer movies get made, and the studios feel compelled to rely on a shorter and shorter list of writers, the potential exists for the numbers of writers like myself to expand.

For Part 1 of the Q&A, go here.

Tomorrow: Moneyball.

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