Q&A: Tom Benedek, Part 1
It’s late 1986. I finish writing a spec script called K-9. In January 1987, Universal Pictures buys it for $750K. In February, I move into an office on the lot at Universal Studios. Almost the very first person I meet is a screenwriter who has an office in that building. His name is Tom Benedek and among other things, he wrote the #1-hit movie Cocoon.
Tom and I become friends, and stay in touch over the years. Tom’s son and my oldest son attend the same alternative elementary school in L.A.. When I start to teach screenwriting as a hobby, Tom does as well. When I begin this blog two-and-a-half years ago, I reach out to Tom for advice because he has always been on the front edge of new media, witness his numerous multimedia photographic projects.
While I teach at the Writers Program through UCLA Extension and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tom is teaching at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and in the MFA program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Which has all led to this: Screenwriting Maser Class, where Tom and I will be teaching classes and leading workshops to help participants master the craft of writing scripts.
To give the GITS community a chance to get to know him, I asked Tom some questions about his lengthy and distinguished screenwriting career. I will be sharing his observations each day this week.
You’ve worked in Hollywood as a writer for over 25 years and written nearly 40 projects. Was it your dream from the beginning to become a screenwriter?
I had started out wanting very much to be a “movie director,” but I had always been writing. In high school and college, I wrote poems, plays, short stories. I did feature humor pieces for my high school newspaper and eventually became editor in chief. In college, I started making small films. At that point, though I was still writing a lot, I had decided I wanted to be a cinematographer. So I began study the alchemies of photography. I ended up doing some photojournalism and a lot of more personal photograph in college.
I did my junior year abroad in Paris because I wanted to see as many films as possible. I ended up studying at a small independent film school, Institut de Formation Cinematographique. I studied all aspects of filmmaking and film history there — but nobody wanted me as a cinematographer on their student films. So I decided to become a filmmaker — began directing my own own films which I did camera work myself. In my opinion, the best thing about my student thesis film from my undergraduate days is the cinematography.
After college, it was the beginning of the golden age of the original screenplay. Coppola had broken in as a writer. And I had always written. So I began trying to write feature scripts in earnest — hoping eventually to start directing them. Of course, I am still writing scripts. Although these days, I am seriously moving toward doing some DIY feature filmmaking on my own again, like I did as a student.
Did you study screenwriting at school? After school, how did you augment your knowledge and understanding of the craft?
I never took a screenwriting class. There were none at U. Mass Amherst or any of the five colleges you could take classes at in proximity. And at film school in Paris, there were none actually. I just watched movies. I went to four movies a day with my film student friends in those days. And when I wrote a script, I was basically replicating what I had seen on the screen. I think, at a certain point, I picked up Syd Field’s book. Ah… the midpoint.
I did read as many scripts as I could get my hands on. And I kept watching films — all kinds of films.
How did you break into the business?
I was out here in L.A. — I had all kinds of different jobs. I sold men’s suits, cookware. I became a property manager. I drove a cab for a while. I got married to my lovely wife, Lin. I studied directing at the AFI. And I wrote script after script. I optioned one to a young director named Rick Rosenthal.
He vaulted fences and tore through landscape to get it into the hands of Nick Nolte at his back door. But I was really still at square one for many years. I had an agent. I made an educational film which won an award at a festival, which was a big deal because there were only around 3 film festivals in the US at that time.
The first agent I had was Marty Caan at the William Morris Agency. I would just trawl the town. Walk around and sneak into studios pretending I knew exactly where I was going. I would slip through gates by just appearing to be headed somewhere. And then I would wander the sound stages, try to watch shoots, dare myself to walk into the offices of producers or directors I admired. Usually, I just walked around and had a coffee at the commissary. I would also go to the office buildings where there were producers with my resume and a couple of scripts. And I would call agents, agencies — using the list provided by the WGA and the film production directories.
One day, I called the William Morris Agency (then the biggest — like CAA is now) and asked the receptionist if anybody wanted to read my scripts. Surprisingly, she said ‘yes.’ Three or four big agents had just left — to form what became CAA — so there was this vacuum. William Morris had just promoted these young assistants and they told the person who answered the phone that they were, in fact, looking for scripts. So I sent mine (action adventure — Bangkok) in. And I got a call back eventually. Marty Caan signed me, sent Bangkok everywhere. We never sold it though he did get me a couple of non-guild jobs eventually. It was only because I happened to call William Morris that particular week that my script was read.
I was working on a script called Orange County Red — a thriller about a Russian spy under deep cover, set up as a successful captialist businessman, in Orange County, CA. My brother, Peter, who was an entertainment attorney at that time, loved the script. He wanted to produce it, actually. So he gave it to his premier client of that time, Lawrence Kasdan. This was no small thing, obviously. Kasdan actually liked the script, too. And he gave it a friend of his, Bob Zemeckis. Zemeckis wanted to direct Orange County Red. Kasdan was going to produce it with Peter. But we could not set it up anywhere. I thought I was finally going to break in. But it went nowhere. Zemeckis had directed two movies for Speilberg which were critical successes and he had written 1941, which had turned out to be Spielberg’s only flop at that time. So Zemeckis was really in what they used to call “movie jail” at that time. Six months later, I got a phone call from Bob Zemeckis. He told me he had this project he was attached to as the director at Fox that needed a writer. He asked if I would be interested in working on it. That project was Cocoon. That was the first step of a long and amazing journey with that movie.
Tomorrow more from Tom including projects he worked on with Robert Zemeckis, Larry Kasdan, and Martin Scorcese.
Tom Benedek has written screenplays for Robert Zemeckis, Lawerence Kasdan, Lili Fini Zanuck and Richard Zanuck, David Brown, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, Harold Ramis, Lauren Schuler Donner and Richard Donner, Ray Stark, Brian Grazer, Working Title, Jersey Title, Jersey Film, Chris Blackwell and many others. He wrote the screenplay for Cocoon, Free Willy and other films.
He is a member of the Writers’ Guild of America, West and the Writers’ Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he is a James Gindin Visiting Artist. Tom is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he received a Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration in Film.
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