nineteenquestions

Interviewed by Chloe Rose

Rob Ulin graduated from Harvard College in 1984, where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon.  He got his first job in show business writing for TV producer Norman Lear.  He went on to write for the Jim Henson-produced TV show Dinosaurs. and was later  head writer and executive producer for the hit comedy Roseanne.  He has also been a co-executive producer on Malcolm in the Middle and The Middle.

When I was five, I travelled to Los Angeles with my family to visit Rob Ulin—my Uncle Rob, who at that time was working on Malcolm in the Middle. Too young to understand the complicated machine that was a full-scale production, my most distinctive memory of that visit is of the famous “candy cupboard”: a room brimming with every candy bar in the known universe and reserved for the writing team on Malcolm. I was immediately convinced that writing was a worthy career.

Only years later would my passion for screenwriting grow beyond my love for skittles, and the questions I want to ask my Uncle Rob are no longer limited to “how many of these Starbursts can I take home with me?”

Based on your years of experience, what top five (or two or ten) pieces of advice would you have for someone looking to make a go of it as a screenwriter?

Look for valid, constructive criticism of your writing, and then don’t take it personally or be hurt by it.  Don’t give your screenplay to someone hoping they will just tell you how wonderful it is.  Give it with the hope that they will see something wrong that you didn’t notice that will open up your mind to new possibilities. 

Always be nice to people.

Learn everyone’s name.

Read your favourite screenplays or TV scripts and try to figure out why you like them so much.  It’s not just that they have the best jokes.  Map out the structure of your favourite scripts or shows.  Write scene-by-scene outlines of them.  You will be surprised at the ingenuity of the structure when it is laid out in front of you.

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Interviewed by Hannah van Dijk

Jason Rothenberg is a screenwriter and television producer, best known for developing the hit CW series “The Hundred,” the story of one hundred teenagers who are sent back to earth after a nuclear apocalypse drives the human race into space. Jason serves as both show runner and executive producer, splitting his time between the writing room and set.

Though he’s based in LA, I managed to catch Jason on set in Vancouver, during the filming of the show’s second season finale, only a few days after being renewed for a third season.

When we first meet, Jason is standing in the middle of video village, a collection of monitors and coveted canvas chairs, each bearing the show’s logo and a name. On one side of us is a simple bedroom filled with replica paintings – art preserved during the apocalypse – around which a handful of actors in full combat gear are rehearsing for their upcoming scene. Behind us the dining room, complete with plates of half eaten food, waits patiently for the final sequence that will be shot later this afternoon. If not for the network of electrical cords covering the floor, or the constant background noise of radio chatter, you might believe we really are standing in the heart of Mount Weather, a giant post-apocalyptic fortress and one of the show’s central locations this season. As a fan, I certainly want to.

It strikes me, as I follow Jason off set (the great stone walls sadly revealed to be nothing but plywood and steel cables on the outside), that everything in this world – the blood-soaked extras lined up for the washrooms, the wardrobe department full of skeleton hands and futuristic guerilla armor – has come out of Jason’s head.

During our interview and on set, Jason is remarkably friendly, telling stories and joking with the crew, putting me at ease almost immediately. Towards the end of the day he passes around an iPad displaying a fan’s recap of the most recent episode (which he reads and retweets most weeks). As the executive producer on set, he is constantly interacting with the actors and director, editing dialogue or making notes for post-production. But despite the rush of activity around him, he finds time in between takes to chat with me about his career as a writer and what it’s like to work in television today.

Tell us a little about how you got to where you are as a writer/creator in television.

I always knew I could write, like from the earliest school years. But I didn’t know how to have a job as a writer. I didn’t know what kind of writing I wanted to do. After I graduated, I literally came down to I was either going to write books or screenplays – I had never even read a screenplay before. I looked at them and the screenplay was this thick and the book was this thick, and I was like “Eh, I can write a screenplay more quickly.” Little did I know it’s like haiku, y’know? The length doesn’t make it any easier. So I started writing scripts, and I got lucky pretty quickly. My first script got me an agent, which almost never happens, and eventually it was optioned for no money, but it was a good calling card. Three hundred people in the industry read the script because of my agent and then—I had nothing else. No scripts, no other ideas, no idea what I wanted to write yet, I didn’t really have a voice as a writer. So my agent fired me – or “dropped” me – but that was okay, because then I started to work my way up.

Slowly but surely I got a job as an assistant to a producer, and I met people who were working, developing movies with him, and at some point I probably told one of them that I was a writer and he read something of mine and liked it. So this particular sleazy producer hired me to write a martial arts movie, which was weird because I knew nothing about martial arts. It didn’t matter because he said, “Just get to the fight scenes, and when you get to a fight scene just write fight scene, and we’ll figure it out.” So the script, instead of a hundred and ten pages – it was like 25 pages and 8 fight scenes. The movie never got made of course. But they paid me $8,000, which was a lot of money. Someone was paying me to write. That was kind of cool.

And then I met a guy who was a real legitimate producer. And he hired me to write something for another $8000, but it was a good story, and that script got me another agent and that ultimately found its way to Jodie Foster, and Jodie optioned it, and then developed it for a while and she decided to put it in what they call “turnaround.” I could resell it, essentially, and that script turned out to be my first sale as a screenwriter.

That was like – I don’t want to tell you how much money – I had like $60 in the bank and the next day I had sold a script for seven figures. It was a good day. I thought that that was it. I thought that that was the mountain. You know, I’d been climbing this mountain; it’d been six years from the day I landed in LA to that day. And I thought that was the dream you know? I was going to sell a script, I was going to be a working writer. I never thought I’d sell a script for that much money. Anyway I looked around and I was like “Now what?” And I realized there was just another mountain. I got to the top of this mountain, and I looked up, and oh my god, I still had so far to climb after that. And no one was giving me anything, so I still had to pitch and figure out what I wanted to do.

The script sale and that job were the beginning of fifteen years of nonstop work on huge movies. But nothing got made for those fifteen years. Not because the scripts weren’t good—some of these scripts I wrote I still think are good—but for one reason or another they just don’t happen.

I was making quite a lot of money doing that, because a screenwriter makes his money for the writing not for getting the shit made. So I was getting money, but I wasn’t getting anything shot. I didn’t know how to make a film, I didn’t know how to make a show. I didn’t know anything really.

And then I said okay, well, I’m going to start writing for television. And because I had that feature career I was able to just come right in to television as an executive producer, as someone pitching to the studios. They were interested in what I had to say because I had a name already in the feature side.

I got a pilot made five years ago, and then I wrote a couple that didn’t get made, for Warner Brothers, and then the book proposal of The Hundred came my way and obviously, now we’re going into season three.

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