Ned Benson: Split Script Scores Singular Success

Ned Benson’s “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” was a big risk gone right. It was his first feature film and it was broken up into two parts: “Him” and “Her,” showing both sides of a failing marriage, the couple played by Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy. 

Despite its unusual format, it was a hit at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival and spawned a bidding war, with the Weinstein Co. finally acquiring its rights, reportedly for more than $3 million. But for Benson, who started working on the idea eight years ago, getting people to bet on such an unusual concept wasn’t easy.

“It was extremely difficult,” he says of pitching both parts, which he also directed. “We got a ton of passes and a ton of people pressuring me to turn it into one film. 

“Ultimately, it’s just about perseverance and thinking that the concept was interesting enough to try.”

Next he’s adapting Danny Wallace’s “Charlotte Street” and Steve Martin’s “Object of Beauty,” and will write and produce “Too,” with his producing partner Cassandra Kulukundis. — Alex Stedman

Age: 36

Reps: UTA; Lawyers: Alan Grodin, Weintraub Tobin

Inspirations: Paddy Chayefsky, Paul Thomas Anderson

Lucinda Coxon: Surviving Cinematic Disaster, Unscathed

Some writers would have ankled the film biz following a disastrous foray into the industry, but not Lucinda Coxon. 

The playwright’s first movie, “Lily and the Secret Planting,” collapsed halfway through production in 2001 when star Winona Ryder was invalided out of the film. “I think it remains the biggest insurance case in British film history,” Coxon says. “It was an extraordinary baptism of fire in terms of filmmaking.” The brutal experience taught Coxon not to count her chickens before they hatch. 

Her writing process consists of two extremes: either procrastinating or working furiously to ensure that the first draft is also the final. “I’m like a dog that has to do a lot of circling around and reads before it lies down so I do a great deal of not working until I work,” she says. “But once it starts, it’s a pretty full-on process.” 

Coxon most recently collaborated with Guillermo del Toro on “Crimson Peak” and adapted David Ebershoff’s novel “The Danish Girl,” with Nicole Kidman set to star and produce. — Maane Khatchatourian

Age: 50

Reps: Bob Bookman, Paradigm; Julia Kreitman, The Agency

Inspirations: Her daughter, Bretia

Andrew Dodge: Comedy Purge Prompted ‘Bad Words

Andrew Dodge has always had the writer’s itch. But for a long time, he kept that to himself. 

Over a 15-year career as a story editor at Columbia Pictures, he honed his sense for scripts that sell, all the while flexing his own scribbling muscle.

“I wanted to get all the bad comedy out of my system before I shared it with the town, but I still wanted to stay close to the business,” he says. “And there was no better place to do that than the story department of a major studio.”

Finally ready to take the plunge, Dodge made his feature debut with “Bad Words” which earned high praise at the Toronto Film Fest. The foul-mouthed spelling bee comedy stars Jason Bateman, who also makes his directorial debut. Next up, Dodge is tackling a “hard R” comedy for Paramount; Peter Dinklage is attached to star as a man who tells people he is a leprechaun.

“When I was approached for it, I had to be cool as ice,” he said. “But inside I was screaming and doing backflips. I think Peter Dinklage is the next big thing. And the fact that he was comfortable tackling the world perception of his size — it’s honest.”  — Allegra Tepper

Age: 39

Reps: UTA; Jeff Silver, Fourth Floor Prods. Lawyers: Tara Kole, Gang Tyre; Manger: Jeff Silver, Fourth Floor Productions

Inspirations: Elmore Leonard, Harold Ramis and John Hughes

Kieran Fitzgerald: Learning to Love Hollywood’s Circus

Though his parents are film producers Michael and Kathy Fitzgerald (“Under the Volcano”), Kieran Fitzgerald didn’t originally set out to work in the business. “But sometimes when you’re born into the circus, the thing is to learn to love the circus. And I did,” Fitzgerald says.

The past couple years have been a nonstop circus for Fitzgerald, who’s spec script “Bambi”— about the life of CIA operative Luis Posada — attracted the industry’s attention and helped land him representation at CAA.

Fitzgerald co-wrote “The Homesman” with fellow Harvard graduate Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed. He has adapted both the novel “The Tiger” and the BBC movie “The Day Britain Stopped.” Then there’s “Stellar Wind,” the code name for a top secret adaptation of a novel he co-wrote with Oliver Stone.

But don’t expect Fitzgerald to go Hollywood anytime soon — when not staying with his brother in West Hollywood working, he resides in Austin, Texas. “I like living around people who have very different and radical views than your own; I find it invigorating,” he says. “On the coast, sometimes conversations feel like echo chambers.” — Jenelle Riley

Age: 33

Reps: John Garvey and Stuart Manashil, CAA; Lawyer: Penelope Glass

Inspirations: W.B. Yeats, George Orwell, Costa-Gavras, Andrei Tarkovsky

Morgan Davis Foehl: Former Editor Splices His Dream

Morgan Davis Foehl’s endgame always involved screenwriting, he just took an unusual route to get there. 

After graduating from Emerson College, the aspiring scribe found himself getting steady work in the film industry, not as a writer but as an assistant editor on projects ranging from the “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” pilot to “Rescue Me” and the Adam Sandler hit “Click.”

“All those years spent in edit bays have been a huge influence on the way I approach screenwriting,” Foehl says. “If I find myself scripting a passage I know any editor worth his or her salt would cut around because it’s not serving the story, then I know it actually doesn’t belong in the script to begin with.”

Foehl recently signed on to adapt EA’s enormously successful videogame trilogy “Mass Effect,” and just last month closed a deal for his action-thriller “The Asset,” to be set up by Fox with Scott Free producing. Yet he’ll make his actual screenwriting debut next year, with a still-untitled cyber-thriller he wrote for Legendary and director Michael Mann, which shot earlier this year.

“It’s been surreal the past year that with all of the projects I’ve worked on — some paid, most not — the first thing of mine that’s actually been produced is Michael Mann’s next movie,” he says. “It’s like winning the lottery after years of playing. It doesn’t feel real.” — Andrew Barker

Age: 32

Reps: Mike Esola and Roger Green, WME; Jessica Jordan, Wirehouse Entertainment; Lawyers: Karl Austen, Jackoway Tyerman

Inspirations: Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, Tony Gilroy, Terrence Malick, Ben Hecht

Jennifer Lee: Disney Toons Make Childhood Dream Come True

The thunderbolt hit Jennifer Lee in a meeting at Random House, of all places, and revealed to her that she wanted to be a screnwriter.  She was in her late 20s and established as an art director for the publishing house. She’d been writing in her free time “but nothing jelled,” she says. 

Then, she says, “I was in a very funny meeting, and I wrote the scene of the meeting, and that was it. I wrote a whole screenplay in about a month from that.” That led to her attending Columbia Film School.

Lee had grown up dreaming of being a Disney animator but never pursued animation until her friend Phil Johnston, who had been writing “Wreck-It Ralph,” asked her to move to L.A. and take over writing the picture, because he had another commitment. She took to it at once, and Disney asked to stay on to work on the script for “Frozen,” then become co-director. 

While she’s well ensconced in animation, her live-action screenplay “The Roundup” is in development at Appian Way.

“(Animation) is the most satisfying creative thing I’ve been a part of. But the live action side of me is there and I don’t want to shy away from it. Screenwriting is the thing I go to. That’s the thing I always want to be doing.” — David S. Cohen

Age: 42

Reps: Chris Till, CAA; Rich Freeman, Code Entertainment; Lawyers: Andrew Hurwitz, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz 

Inspirations: Billy Wilder, Nora and Delia Ephron, William Goldman, James Schamus, Eric Roth, Atom Egoyan

Barbara Marshall: ‘Genre Girl’ Develops Thick Skin

“My agent calls me her creepy girl. I’m totally healthy, I swear. But a good plague just makes me happy. I like anything with zombies, vampires, apocalypses. … That’s my happy zone.”

So says Barbara Marshall, screenwriter for Lionsgate’s upcoming “The Exorcism Diaries,” quickly and effectively delineating her areas of expertise. An Austin, Texas, native,  Marshall cut her teeth as a staff writer for NBC’s “Terra Nova.” 

“After I saw ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ I just sort of freaked out, and I told my agent, ‘You have to get me into TV somehow,’ ” she says.

While writing for the Steven Spielberg-produced series, Marshall was cooking away on her 2012 Black List script “Peste,” which recently sold to IM Global. She also sold her TV pilot “Getaway Girls,” though she acknowledges the series is “pretty much dead now.” Watching a beloved project die in development is, of course, an occupational hazard in the screenwriting trade, and one for which Marshall has her own appropriately macabre metaphor.

“Things you write can become your babies, and you have to write them knowing that you might have to give away your baby to someone else, or that it might not even live to grow up,” she says. “But you do develop a really thick skin.”  — Andrew Barker

Age: 35

Reps: Debbie Deuble Hill & Lee Dinstman, APA; Ava Jamshidi,  Industry Entertainment; Lawyer: Kevin Kelly, Gendler & Kelly

Inspirations: The Dardenne brothers, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Danny Boyle

Elan Mastai: ‘F Word’ Scribe Pays Attention to Salesmen

Elan Mastai is grateful to those anonymous folks who voted his script into the Black List. “The F Word,” directed by Michael Dowse and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, opened at the Toronto Film Festival and has been bought by CBS Films.

“On many levels male and female relationships haven’t changed, and on many levels they have changed a lot. It was interesting to take my experiences, thoughts and comic observations about that kind of dynamic and tell the story that takes place right now.”

The producers, David Gross, Jesse Shapira and Jeff Arkiss, brought it to the director, Dowse.   

Mastai worked at the Toronto fest sales office after graduating from Queen’s U. in Kingston, Ontario. “It made me realize you have to think from the beginning, even when the idea is conceived: Who is going to want to see this movie.”

Other projects include “So Into You” and “Get Over It” at Paramount, “First Kiss” at Warners and “The Greatest Gift” at Overbrook. “I’m trying to get my stuff up there on the shelf with the best of them,” he says. — Shalini Dore

Age: 38

Reps: Frank Wuliger and Greg Pedicin, Gersh; Lawyers: Karl Austin, Jackoway, Tyerman 

Inspirations: Woody Allen, Preston Sturges

Michael Mitnick: Electrifying Script Switched on Scribe’s Career

Ask grizzled Hollywood figures for some realpolitik advice on breaking into screenwriting, and chances are they’ll jump straight to the following: Find a niche, and stay in your lane. For genre- and media-crossing breakout scribe Michael Mitnick, those are the first rules to ignore. 

Already a well-established playwright, Mitnick first attracted Hollywood attention with his 2011 Black List script “The Current War,” based on the tussles between rival electrical pioneers Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. 

He’s set to make his screenwriting debut with the Weinstein Co.’s adaptation of dystopian young adult lit classic “The Giver.” And he should soon be making his full Broadway debut as well, as librettist for the “Animal House” musical. (He’s also an accomplished songwriter, and initially aspired to become a film composer.)

“I worry a lot about being put in one position, being called just a screenwriter, or just a playwright, or just a composer,” Mitnick says. “Because each one feeds the next. Every time I come off of a screenplay, the next play I write is a lot more visual, and the dialogue is a lot quicker. And then after writing a play and thinking, ‘Wow, it’s difficult to keep three people going for two hours on one set,’ it’s really freeing to go and write a screenplay where I can have 900 different locations … at least on the first draft.” — Andrew Barker

Age: 30

Reps: Jordan Cerf, Simon Faber and Derek Zasky, WME; Manager: Jeff Silver; Lawyers: Jim Gilio, Sloane Offer 

Inspirations: The Coen brothers

Jonathan Tropper: Gothamite Rocks Character-Driven Tales

Writing, novelist-turned-screenwriter Jonathan Tropper confesses, was his second love. He would rather have been a rock star.

“I’m a self-taught piano player,” says the 43-year-old Bronx native. “I played in a bunch of bands and discovered I couldn’t really create my own music. Or I could, but it was quite bad. This is my fallback position.”

He attended Yeshiva U., moved to Israel for a couple of years, then went to NYU, aiming to become a novelist, not a screenwriter. The first of his six published novels came in 2000. From his second book onward, each was optioned by a studio. But he soon learned how hard it was to get character-driven stories made at a studio. None of his stories were greenlit.

“I had never even seen a screenplay,” he says of his early days, but as he saw his projects stall, he asked if he could try adapting them, “Of course nobody let me,” he says, so he let the option expire on his “The Book of Joe” and wrote his own script version. That landed him some assignments. 

Now he’s adapting his novel “One Last Thing Before I Go,”  and J.J Abrams producing. He’s also writing the Untitled Kodachrome project for Shawn Levy, who is also in post the feature version of Tropper’s book adaptation “This Is Where I Leave You.” He’s also turning “Harvey” into a screenplay for producer Don Gregory.  — David S. Cohen

Age: 43

Reps: UTA; Tobin Babst. Kaplan Perrone. Lawyers: Fred Toczek, Felker Toczek 

Inspirations: Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen, Cameron Crowe