“Rookie screenwriter finds the right mentor: Clint Eastwood”
Don’t know how I missed this Patrick Goldstein article (11/26/2008):
If it’s true that Clint Eastwood is hanging up his acting shoes with “Gran Torino,” he couldn’t have offered us a nicer swan song. Directing himself, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a crusty retired assembly plant worker who, recently widowed, seems peeved at just about everyone in the world. He’s totally exasperated by his family (“There’s nothing anyone can do that won’t disappoint the old man — it’s inevitable” says one of his sons) and unleashes a fusillade of paint-blistering racial invective on all the Hmong immigrants and people of color who live in his dilapidated neighborhood. I don’t want to tell too much about the story, except to say that Eastwood manages to offer us a final reprise of his legendary Dirty Harry character and a heartfelt portrait of human redemption, all in the same film.
The script was so well crafted and understated (and the credits went by so fast) that after seeing the picture, I immediately called Bill Gerber, one of the film’s producers, to find out which one of the many A-list screenwriters who must always be knocking down Eastwood’s door had penned the story. “Are you sitting down?” Gerber asked. He had quite a surprise. The writer, Nick Schenk, who lives in Minnesota, had never sold a feature script in his life. In fact, the only writing work Schenk had done was for “BoDog Fight,” a mixed martial arts TV show, a game show called “Let’s Bowl” and some comedy sketches collected in a DVD called “Factory Accident Sex.” (“That title doesn’t exactly help my career, does it?” Schenk jokes.)
Okay, so Schenk is a first-timer. But wait, the story gets better:
Schenk says he wrote the script, using a pen and a pad of paper, sitting at night in a bar called Grumpy’s in northeast Minneapolis. It was a good release for Schenk, who was holding down a series of day jobs, driving a fruit truck and doing construction work. “I just scribbled away every night,” he told me. “The bartender there is a friend, so sometimes I’d ask him questions about where I was going with the story as I was writing. When it came, the words just came. One night, I knocked off 25 pages right there in the bar.”
Schenk shares story credit with Dave Johannson, another Minnesota guy who’s a good friend of Schenk’s younger brother. When I naively asked if Dave was also a screenwriter, Schenk laughed. “Not exactly,” he said. “Dave sells furnaces for the gas company.”
His co-writer is a guy who sells furnaces for a living. But wait — the story gets even better:
Schenk managed to get the script to two younger producers, Jenette Kahn and Adam Richman, who optioned the story with their own money. Schenk says everyone they took the script to passed. They finally got the script to Gerber, a veteran producer and one-time Warner Bros. production chief who had worked on a number of Eastwood films. Gerber gave the script to Eastwood, who read it and simply said, “I’m doing it.”
If the script had been bought by a studio or nearly any other big star, before anyone could blink an eye, the studio would’ve brought in a veteran writer to do a rewrite or a polish, figuring that a first-time writer couldn’t possibly have the craft or sophistication to flesh out a vehicle for a star of Eastwood’s stature. But Eastwood operates differently. “He didn’t change a single word,” said Schenk. “When I met him just before they were going to shoot, I had three tiny changes I wanted to make, but when I mentioned them to Clint, he said, ‘I dunno, I kind of like the script just the way it is.”
If this doesn’t give you hope of breaking in as a screenwriter, nothing will.
Schenk is now repped at CAA — and presumably writing another spec script longhand at Grumpy’s in Minnesota.
UPDATE: Scott who hosts the fine blog Screenwriting from Iowa, posted this in comments:
Last year I did a shoot up in Minneapolis and I stopped by Grumpy’s bar to celebrate Nick’s success by having a PBR. I have a photo of the bar on my blog (http://wp.me/paP6U-1ny)—and just so you know, it’s not to be confused with Grumpy’s in downtown Minneapolis.
An odd fact is that Nick wrote that script only about ten miles away from the Starbucks/Target where Diablo Cody wrote much of her Oscar-winning “Juno” script. Photo of that here:
I keep telling people there are good things happening here in the Midwest.
Here’s the aforementioned photo of Grumpy’s — home of Gran Torino.
