Reader Question: How insane is it for a 46 year-old to try to start a Hollywood writing career?
It’s crazy, but then it’s crazy for ANYONE to expect to break into Hollywood.
Question via Twitter from @russmaloney:
Glib response: About as insane as it is for a 20 year-old. A 25 year-old. Or a 30 year-old. The odds against financial success as a screenwriter or TV writer are long for virtually anyone. Every aspiring writer has got to know that going in. Even if you break into the business, it’s a challenge to build and sustain a career.
That said there is no doubt Hollywood has an age bias, more so for TV, less so for feature films. Part of this is due to the fact that many of the people who work in the development side of things are young themselves… 20s and 30s. Part likely derives from Hollywood’s decades-long obsession with teenagers and the 18–25 year-old target demo. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the people who best understand and can write for that age group are members of that age group, the assumption being that older writers cannot grasp the subtle nuances of what it means to be a young person nowadays.
That’s bull shit, of course. It’s like saying men cannot possibly write authentic female characters, or women cannot write men. That young writers can’t write old characters. That white writers cannot write black characters and vice versa. By this logic, we would have no science fiction movies featuring aliens because none of us could possibly imagine what it’s like to be a member of a species from another planet!
This presumed conventional wisdom flies in the face of the fact that as writers, we believe we should be able to write any character of any race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, and so on.
Research. Imagination. Empathy. It’s what writers do, put ourselves in the shoes of character after character after character, no matter who or what they are.
This is a line of argumentation that doesn’t have a lot cache in Hollywood. However this does: If you write a great script, nothing else matters.
Nothing.
Man. Woman. Old. Young. Christian. Jew. Muslim. Atheist. Straight. Gay. Transgender. Black. White. Asian. Hispanic. Whatever.
If buyers perceive your script to be something they can monetize, they will buy it.
Witness Mickey Fisher. A longtime GITS follower, Mickey had toiled for years on the fringes of the business as a writer, filmmaker, and playwright when he wrote an original TV pilot script called “Extant”. It eventually became a CBS TV series. Here is how Mickey described the actual sale of the script from our July 2014 interview:
The news hit on my 40th birthday, which was on a Wednesday. We were selling the show straight to series on CBS. It was like everything exploded that day. I had hundreds of messages and phone calls from friends and family and people and all the team. It was a great feeling about it.
On his 40th birthday! It could have been his 50th birthday. Or 60th. The fact is Mickey wrote a script that became the focal point of the entire Hollywood development community and sold for big bucks. That’s the power of the written word.
There are other examples. You can read my January 2013 interview with Allan Durand who while in his 60s wrote a Nicholl-winning screenplay that led to a writing assignment. Or my August 2014 interview with Frank DeJohn and David Hedges whose Nicholl-winning screenplay landed them a gig writing a movie for TV. I didn’t ask how old they are, but based upon our conversation, I think it’s safe to say they’re both north of 40.
In fact, this extends to filmmaking in general. Here’s a list of directors who didn’t make their first film until their 30s and 40s including Akira Kurosawa, Ridley Scott, Martin McDonagh, and Ava DuVernay.
Bottom line, any writer has to be completely aware of the long odds against financial success as a TV writer or screenwriter, and to pursue that dream, Russ, you do have to have a bit of insanity floating around in your psyche. But the fact is if you write a great script, no matter what your particular life circumstances — age, gender, race, geography — Hollywood will find you.
GITS readers, what do you think? Please head to comments to provide your thoughts and opinions re Russ’s question. And if you know of other writers who broke into the business after the age of 40, feel free to post their names.
UPDATE: Some interesting comments from readers including two longtime GITS followers John Arends and Debbie Moon, both of whom achieved writing success on the professional front post-40. You may read interviews with them to learn more about their writing paths: John and Debbie.
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