Starting a screenwriting career outside of LA (or New York, or London)

John August features non-L.A. based writers who broke into the business.

From JohnAugust.com:

In episode 267 of Scriptnotes, we shared stories from screenwriters who managed to build careers while living outside of Los Angeles, New York or London.

We then did a follow-up post featuring tales from several more writers.

In the weeks since, even more stories have come in. Here’s a sampling.

Lynelle: I was writing and directing short films while living in St. Louis, MO. I did a two week summer film program in Missouri for women only. The program was run by a lovely gentleman and Missouri native named, Ken LaZebnik, who has worked as a TV writer.

I kept in contact with Ken over the years and when a position on the writing staff for the tv show ARMY WIVES opened up, he contacted me. He’d previously written on the show. Ken thought I’d be a good fit because I was prior military. I was living just outside of St. Louis when I hit send on some writing samples to Ken. He, in turn, forwarded the samples to the showrunner of ARMY WIVES and after I flew out to LA using frequent flier miles to meet with the showrunner, I got hired onto the show.

It was a Cinderella story. After ARMY WIVES was cancelled, I went on to work for a small zombie apocalypse show on SyFy called Z NATION.

But here’s the caveat to my Cinderella story. I hadn’t spent years in Los Angeles prior to getting staffed. I hadn’t been an assistant anywhere. I hadn’t been all over town on the water bottle tour. Nobody knew who I was so that makes getting subsequent jobs more difficult.

My agent was unable to get me any meetings so that’s when I decided to attend UCLA to get my MFA in Screenwriting. One, to further hone my craft but two, to make connections that I simply didn’t have because I was literally plucked from obscurity.

I’ve chosen to split my time between LA and St. Louis for my own personal sanity. I’m just not an LA person and probably never will be. Every individual must decide what’s right for them.

And one from a previous blog post:

Isaac in Portland, OR: I graduated long ago with an MA in Film Studies but decided soon after that what I really wanted was to become was a novelist. I pursued that for a number of years, getting five books published, but none that were successful enough to keep me from simultaneously working various day jobs. My first real exposure to the movie industry came when one of my books, Tokyo Suckerpunch, was optioned, first by Fox Searchlight and later by Sony. Talking to folks who worked on it and reading various scripts that emerged from its long development process de-mystified screenwriting a bit for me. I started reading every script I could get my hands on, thinking maybe this was something I could do one day.

I wrote the requisite terrible first script that I showed to maybe two people before burying it. The next script I finished I uploaded to the Black List site. That one attracted the attention of a manager. The next one went out and won a few fans around town. I flew to LA for some generals. The script after that was eventually optioned by an independent production company.

My manager encouraged me to come up with some TV ideas. I was wrestling with a sci-fi pilot for months when I decided to take a break and from that and write this crazy idea that had been germinating in my head for a long time — a Michael Jackson biopic told from the perspective of his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles.

That script blew up in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Within a couple weeks of BUBBLES hitting the town, I was back in LA for a whirlwind water bottle tour — meetings with execs, producers, agents, directors (the experience underscored what you often tell listeners about finding an agent — when you’re ready for one, they will find you). The script ended up atop the 2015 Black List and eventually sold.

I’ve been steadily working since, though given that I’m less than two years into my career as a professional screenwriter, it remains to be seen whether I can maintain any kind of career longevity living outside LA. Moving there is not really an option for me at the moment — I have two young children and love living in Portland. But I spend a week in LA about every three months and my reps understand that if something comes up and I have to hop on a plane tomorrow, I’ll be there. I spend a lot of time on Skype and on the phone, but so far being at a geographic remove hasn’t hurt me in any way that I’m aware of (major caveat: all my work so far has been in features rather than TV). I’ve been told by more than one exec that I’m lucky because writing features is maybe the one job in the industry where you can live pretty much anywhere.

I know and have talked with both Lynelle and Isaac, and they along with plenty of other writers have managed to break into the movie business and sustain careers while not living in Los Angeles. As noted by many of the respondents in John’s two posts, this pertain only to screenwriting. If you want to work as a TV writer, you MUST move to L.A. or, depending on the type of series you’re developing, perhaps NYC.

That said, most screenwriters I have interviewed or know personally recommend writers relocate to Los Angeles. It’s not necessary, but there are advantages, and you can read my thoughts on the issue here.

How about you? Have you thought about moving to L.A. to pursue your screenwriting career? What are the pros and cons as far as you’re concerned? Or have you achieved some measure of success while living outside the 405–10–101–110 bubble?

Go here to read my interview with Isaac Adamson, who wrote “Bubbles”, the #1-rated screenplay on the 2015 Black List.