“Screenwriter duo hits it big with this summer’s two Bruckheimer films”

LA Times blogger-columnist Patrick Goldstein did a nice feature the other day on the screenwriting duo Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard. They have two movies coming out this summer Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It’s a good read, but let me just excerpt this to highlight two things:

After going to college — Miro went to Stanford and Bernard went to Michigan — they ended up in Los Angeles, where they landed jobs working as assistants for Michael Mann. They credit it as a hugely influential experience, since if you worked for Mann, you not only saw a world-class filmmaker at work but got to read every great script in town. Writing at night and early in the morning before work, they penned “Motor City,” a film noir script set in 1950s Detroit. It sold to George Clooney’s Section 8 production company. It was never made, but it became an important calling card for the duo. 
While they wrote a couple of films that did get made, including the DreamWorks thriller “The Uninvited,” the project that put them on the map was an unproduced adaptation of a Dean King novel called “Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival,” an adventure yarn set in the early 19th century Sahara desert. It not only got the attention of Bruckheimer but earned the duo a gig writing an early draft of Steven Spielberg’s “Tintin.” Bruckheimer was already deep at work on “Prince of Persia,” having commissioned scripts from Jordan Mechner, who had created the video game, as well as Boaz Yakim, who had directed Bruckheimer’s “Remember the Titans.”

1. “Read every script in town.” Where have we heard that mantra before? Oh, right here on GITS. “Read scripts. Watch movies. Write pages.” Again I can not emphasize enough the importance of immersing yourself in the world of movies, and reading scripts is a critically important component in that process.
2. “It became an important calling card.” Even if a spec script doesn’t get produced — and in some cases doesn’t even sell — it can serve the writer as a great writing sample. In fact, if you are enormously passionate about a story that you know is not all that commercial, like Miro & Bernard and their 50s film noir scripts, but you’re convinced it’s a great story and your unique voice as a writer will shine through in the pages, that’s one good reason to give yourself the freedom to pursue a story that is less commercial than you otherwise might choose to write.

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