This is a transcript of the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers. 

Joe Mefford: Hi, my name is Joe Mefford from Final Draft and I'm speaking today with screenwriter Larry Brenner. In 2010, Larry was the third place winner in the Final Draft Big Break Screenwriting Contest for his original screenplay Flesh and Blood. That screenplay was retitled Bethlehem and was included in the 2011 Black List as the top unproduced screenplay. Bethlehem was then purchased by Universal Pictures where it's now in development. In 2012, Larry was hired to adapt the bestselling novel Angelology into a script. That film is being co-produced by Sony Pictures and Will Smith’s production company Overbrook Entertainment. And finally, in early 2013, Brenner sold a pitch to Walt Disney Pictures for a script titled Labyrinth. So Larry, when you first sent your screenplay to the Big Break Contest in 2010, did you ever think that three years later you would have sold that script, sold a pitch and been hired to adapt a bestselling novel into a screenplay?

Larry Brenner: Never in a million years, no. No, I did not. That was a big surprise, yes.

Joe Mefford: Well, congratulations.

Larry Brenner: Thank you.

Joe Mefford: You just sold a pitch to Walt Disney Pictures. The story is called Labyrinth and it's been described in various websites as the story of a princess who must save her father by navigating a dangerous labyrinth. Now, some commoners online have said this sounds like the 1986 film of the same name starring David Bowie, but you're here to set the record straight.

Larry Brenner: It has absolutely nothing to do with that movie. It is based off of more traditional mythological stories. Yes, it has nothing to do with that, although I respect that film very greatly.

Joe Mefford: Is there anything else you can tell us about the story or are we going to go with that from there?

Larry Brenner: No, I think that’s about all that I can say about the story other than the fact that more details will be released later.

Joe Mefford: Okay, so we won't see David Bowie?

Larry Brenner: I can't comment on casting but I think it would be very confusing if we did.

Joe Mefford: [Laughs] Alright. So now that you've sold the pitch, what are the next steps for you as a writer?

Larry Brenner: Well, the next step is to make sure that everybody is happy with all aspects of the treatment, and then once everybody is happy with every single beat, start writing the script.

Joe Mefford: You sold this pitch to Disney.

Larry Brenner: Yes.

Joe Mefford: Were they specifically looking for pitch ideas from you or did you have this idea for Labyrinth and took it around to different companies besides Disney?

Larry Brenner: So what happened with this is I had been working with Jim Whitaker at Whitaker Entertainment on developing something else with Disney, an assignment that he had gone out with, and we had been working on that for some time and that project is still in development, but in the meantime Jim said to me, “You know, people at Disney are very happy with the work that you've done. I'm very happy with the work that you've done. Would you want to sit down and come up with something to pitch to Disney that’s your own?” And I don't think I've ever been asked a better question in my entire life. I didn't really have to think about that one too hard. Yes, yes, I would very much love to do that.

So they were looking for some things, and of course I’m looking…there are a number of stories that I've always been very interested in, and I am obsessed with mythology, that’s very important to me, and so I was looking for things that come from that to send to Disney. And I had made a list and Jim had taken a look at my list and we had discussed them, and the favorite thing that I had on my list was also the favorite thing that independently Jim said, “This is the one that’s most interesting to me.” And I said, “This is the one that’s most interesting to me,” and yeah, so that’s how that came about.

Joe Mefford: So Disney came back to you and said, “We like what you've done. We think you're talented and we want you to come up with some ideas for us and pitch them to us.”

Larry Brenner: Yeah. I mean, you know, a lot of the time it's not about the job that you're going for at that particular moment. It's about the next job or building a relationship, and Jim and I have built up a really strong relationship and I built up a strong relationship with other people there, and his team, Adam and Elizabeth, are amazing, and it was a joy to have the opportunity to develop something for them.

Joe Mefford: So other than the obvious difference, what is the difference between selling a pitch and selling a finished screenplay?

Larry Brenner: Well, the big difference of course, you know, when you've done a finished screenplay, I think, you know, you love the things that you write, and once you've written them it becomes…obviously, revision, revision is always something that you're going to do with the screenplay, but if someone were to approach you and say, “Oh, let's make a major change,” your first reaction is going to be to be defensive and be like, “No, but I love that. That’s my baby.”

And here there was really the opportunity to say, “I can create a story that is the product that you want to buy. I can make something that you want. You let me know what you want, I'm going to figure out a way to tell a story that I'm happy with that also delivers on what you want.” I mean, there are different processes but…processes? Processes? Yes. But I wouldn't say that one is necessarily better from the other from a creative aspect. It's, you know, just different.

Joe Mefford: So you sold this pitch already having had some success as a screenwriter. Do you think you could have sold this pitch if you hadn't already proved that you knew how to write a script?

Larry Brenner: I don't know that it would have had the meeting in the first place if I hadn't proved that I could write a script. I'm very, very fortunate for the opportunities that have come my way in the last few years. Opportunity is harder to come by than talent.

Joe Mefford: That’s very good advice. Now, in 2010, just about three years ago, you entered the Big Break Contest and you won third prize with a script titled Flesh and Blood. What is the story there?

Larry Brenner: Okay, so the story there is I'd entered the Final Draft Big Break Competition. I think this was my third or fourth time entering it in consecutive years. And I entered a ton of contests. I didn't really have access to agents or managers or people who could read my work, so I felt that contests were the way to go. And I've built up an account on Withoutabox, which is amazing, and I sent out to contests where I felt that the contest was worth winning.

One of the things about it, about the Final Draft Big Break Competition, is they release in waves how far you've gotten, whether you're a semifinalist, whether you're the top hundred, top 35, top 10. I'd gotten to the semifinals, and I'd gotten into semifinals with other contests. It's a great validation. I think I didn't believe there was a chance that I would be one of the winners until we got to the top 10, and when we got to the top 10 I was pretty much hitting Refresh on that Internet webpage which announces where you are I think roughly every 15 minutes, and then it was like top five and I went up to like every five minutes, and probably time better spent writing. But I was super-excited, and then the top three get to go to Los Angeles and I really wanted to be in the top three.

And I was, and so I flew out there and, you know, my expectations were still that I would do out there for a weekend, it would be a really good story, and then I would go back and, you know, maybe a nice thing for the résumé, a nice award that they'd given me, and I would go back and everything would more or less be the same except I'd have like a little bit of bragging rights. And yeah, really, really went above and beyond my expectations with what happened.

Joe Mefford: What are some of the differences between Big Break Screenwriting Contest and some of the other contests that you might have entered and what are some advice that you would give people who are thinking of entering screenwriting contests going forward?

Larry Brenner: I think a lot of the time there are contests where the potential rewards are not as great as with Big Break. I think there are probably a handful of contests where the rewards are potentially as good. I think there are some contests where they charge…if there's a contest and they charge you a 50-dollar entry fee and you have the opportunity to win, if you're the winner, a hundred dollars, then, you know, really? I think they only need three people to enter that contest and they're happy. And you know, you really have to say to yourself, “For the entry fee that I'm paying, what is the potential payoff? Is it going to be significant?”

And really, money is not the thing that you really want. You know, I'm lying. You really, really want money long-term, but from the contest, to get money, that is not the real prize. The real prize is access and opportunity, and one of the big things with Big Break is the further along you go, the more people who are actually in the industry who are reading your script, and even if you don’t win, that in itself is a reward.

Joe Mefford: Well, that’s great. You mentioned that you had entered Big Break three or four times…

Larry Brenner: Yes.

Joe Mefford: …before you got third prize, and so how many scripts had you written before you wrote Flesh and Blood?

Larry Brenner: Well, I was primarily a playwright. I wrote a lot of stage plays. So I had written less screenplays, but half a dozen at that point, half a dozen, and then I wrote Flesh and Blood.

Joe Mefford: What gave you the idea for Flesh and Blood?

Larry Brenner: Okay, I am a hardcore nerd, hardcore, I mean, pretty much everything on the stereotype. I play Dungeons and Dragons. I own all of the Star Wars movies and I've watched them with director’s commentary. It's really hard to find a place in which—I have comic books. I have 15,000 comic books organized in terms of when they came out so I can read them looking at the broader chronology of what’s going on in the respective comic book universes. I mean, I am hardcore nerd and I have always wondered, what would you do if a vampire promised to protect you from zombies? Would you let him bite from you? I think that’s a universal…I mean, doesn’t everybody ask that question at some point? Yeah, you'll always have to have an answer for yourself, and the answer for me of course was yes, I would rather be…

[Laughs] But…so it had been a story in the back of my mind and I hadn't intended to tell it actually when I started to write Flesh and Blood. What I wanted to tell the story of was the idea of a world in which everyone was gone, everyone was dead, and the only person still alive was a vampire. He was all that was left of the human race and he was walking around the world. And I think I wrote about three pages of that draft before I realized, “Hmm, with nobody else in the world, there's not a lot of conflict here and not a lot of dialogue here, and frankly this is bleak and depressing and is deadening my soul.” So I started thinking to myself, “He needs to connect to other people and those other people need to have a reason to have him around,” and as I started thinking about solutions I was like, “Oh, yeah, because this is the screenplay that I've always wanted to write my entire life, right. Okay, so that’s the solution.”

Joe Mefford: Flesh and Blood was renamed later or retitled to Bethlehem. Was there a particular reason why it was renamed?

Larry Brenner: Because I believe there are roughly one million projects titled Flesh and Blood, so it was considered better to come up with a better name.

Joe Mefford: And how did you choose Bethlehem?

Larry Brenner: Palak Patel came up with that name, actually. I credit where it's due and it's a fantastic name. One of the last places where humanity lives is Bethlehem. We were hoping they live there anyway. So that's where they're trying to get to.

Joe Mefford: Now, you mentioned you had already been a produced playwright. What is your playwriting experience and how does that help you write screenplays?

Larry Brenner: Playwriting is very different from screenwriting but it's very much related. In playwriting, when you're writing characters’ dialogue, because of the nature of playwriting and you don’t have the advantage of the close-up and going really in deep, you really have to have them talking about their feelings a lot. The audience is a distance away. So you're more likely in playwriting to say…to really just have these big, big explosions and outbursts and yelling. And in screenwriting you can do so much more with less. You can do so much more with showing in terms of visually. Not that I'm saying that in playwriting you don’t show rather than tell, you should always be showing rather than telling, but the tools are different. In a play, you could have two characters talking, having a conversation. That could be a two-hour play. It's really hard to do that in a movie, to have one sustained conversation for two hours. Now, the rules are very different.

Joe Mefford: Okay. Would you recommend screenwriters writing for the stage as an exercise or…

Larry Brenner: Absolutely.

Joe Mefford: …should they watch more plays, see more plays, learn more about theatre?

Larry Brenner: Absolutely. You know, it's important to understand why things work for one medium and don’t work for the other. I think it should definitely be tried. And of course, the other advantage, especially for aspiring screenwriters, to writing stage plays, it’s much easier to produce your own plays, get actors together and get a performance with an audience there, and then focus group that audience to develop your writing early on. I'm not saying it can't be done with film, of course it can be done with film, but it's easier with playwriting to workshop and rehearse.

Joe Mefford: Okay. So after you got third prize in the Big Break Contest, did you already have an agent representation then? At what point did you actually have an agent or a manager contact you and say, “I want to help you become a professional writer?”

Larry Brenner: I had neither a manager nor an agent at that point. That evening at the Big Break Competition I met Mitch Solomon, who eventually shortly thereafter became my manager. We'd had a conversation. But there were people who came out and they were like, “Oh…” you know, I mean because let's face it, I have a deal, so it's a good time for a manager to seek me out. But Mitch was very, very clearly…I liked him a lot. He was level-headed. He was a straight shooter. What I particularly liked was he was clearly a fan of the work, and of course that’s going to be important, but I got the sense from Mitch that he wasn’t going to be someone who told me what I wanted to hear, that he was going to be someone who told me what I needed to hear, and for me that was really important and I'm really happy with the decision that I made because that’s exactly who he is.

Joe Mefford: Okay. After the Big Break Contest your script Flesh and Blood, now renamed Bethlehem, was included in the 2011 Black List. For our listeners who don't know what is The Black List, it is an annual compilation among industry insiders and development execs of the most liked screenplays that are currently unproduced. It is a big, big deal and aspiring screenwriters should search The Black List on Google or Bing to learn more. Now, Larry, how did you first find out that your script was on The Black List?

Larry Brenner: I found out when The Black List came out. I was surprised. It was not something that I had expected. There had been people who had said to me, “Oh, there's a chance that it'll be on The Black List this year,” but I didn't know that for a fact till it actually happened.

Joe Mefford: Well, I should mention that it wasn’t just on The Black List but it was near the top. So when the list was released, what happened next? Did your phone start ringing off the hook? Did your agent start contacting you more regularly?

Larry Brenner: You know, I have an amazing agent, Martin Spencer, who’s at Resolution. He is really good about being in touch with me. So I think immediately it was more work for Martin and Mitch because everyone went through them before talking to me, but yes, it definitely got me attention. There's no question about that and, I mean, it was pretty amazing.

Joe Mefford: In the summer of 2012, Bethlehem was picked up by Universal Pictures. What has been your involvement? Have you had to do rewrites? How has the experience been compared to your expectations?

Larry Brenner: Well, my expectations, I still don't know how to manage expectations. My expectations have been exceeded so many times I don't know how to have expectations anymore. But yes, I'm doing a rewrite on it for them. The movie has become a bigger movie than I originally envisioned it being, partly because when I wrote it I never thought in my wildest dreams it would be picked up by Universal or by any major studio. So, you know, I had written a smaller movie; I hadn't written a Hollywood movie. So yes, I'm doing rewrites on it.

And the process, I've been pleased with the process. I think I had some nervousness that in some way the integrity of the script would be damaged or someone would say to me like, “And what if there are dinosaurs now?” or something along those lines that would make me wince, but that hasn’t happened. The things that people have wanted, generally speaking, they’ve made the script better. I'm very pleased with how it's working.

Joe Mefford: Okay. So after Bethlehem was on The Black List and you started to be recognized as an up-and-coming writer, you were hired by Sony Pictures and Will Smith’s production company Overbrook Entertainment to adapt the bestselling novel Angelology. What is that story about and how did you get that job?

Larry Brenner: So Angelology, the book on Angelology is the story of a young woman who discovers this world in which the Nephilim, a half-angel/half-human race, has put themselves at the top that in our world they're really at the top and no one knows that they're at the top and how she reacts to that. So that came about…that was actually the very first assignment that had ever come my way, and I was not the only person who was trying for that assignment. And I read the book, and there was a lot that I liked about the book.

One of the things when you're doing an assignment is or when you're reading a book for an assignment, there are things that work about it as a book that don’t necessarily work for the film. There's a lot of storytelling in Angelology and the stories are great and it works great that way as a book, but then if you would have a sequence in the movie where someone stops and tells a story for 20 to 30 minutes, it's not going to work the same way there. So really it was about finding a way to tell the story of Angelology and the important parts of that story in a way that would still be compelling when it switches from one media to another.

And so I had come up with a take and I spoke to Franklin Leonard and Brad Simpson about this, and I gave them my take and they said to me, “You know, this take is really outside of the box. No one has said this.” And I said, “Well, great!” And I'm not sure what outside of the box means, it depends I guess on how far outside of the box you are, but they asked me to continue to develop it and they gave me feedback and we worked on it for a couple of months, and that summer I flew out to LA and I pitched it to Sony and I found out a couple of weeks later that I got it.

Joe Mefford: And where are you at right now with the writing of it?

Larry Brenner: The project is in development. I have turned in a draft and that’s where it is now.

Joe Mefford: So now you're just waiting.

Larry Brenner: Waiting is the hardest part, as they say.

Joe Mefford: Right. [Chuckles] Okay. Well, this is great. So it seems that, you may not want to admit this but you now have a writing career. And I know that you have a family, you have a busy life, you still have a day job, and how has your life changed with all that since you officially started writing, I hate to use the term but for pay?

Larry Brenner: Well, I'm certainly…

Joe Mefford: Not just for love.

Larry Brenner: No. Well, I…but you do write for love because if you don’t love what you're writing, why is that the dream? But how has my life changed? Well, it is a roller coaster. Very exciting opportunities have come my way and that’s very exciting, and the great thing about that being really exciting is at the same time it's very nerve-wracking because you have this amazing opportunity and you don’t want to let go of it for anything, so you get anxious about the fact that… You know, in some ways, it's easier to not be nervous about writing when the opportunities weren't there because I could always say, “Well, I never had the chance.” And now that I have the chance, I sometimes have to worry about not getting it. And then you work really hard to get it and you say, “Oh, and now I have to write it,” and a whole new type of nervousness and excitement happens. So there's a lot going on emotionally and it's exciting, and it's more exciting than it is nerve-wracking. Believe me, I'm not complaining. So on the day-to-day there's a level of excitement that hadn't been there before, certainly.

Joe Mefford: How do you structure your writing? Do you have a daily writing schedule?

Larry Brenner: I try to write every day and I usually succeed at writing every day. I mean, sometimes there are days where I have to remember I'm a dad and I'm a husband and I have responsibilities to them and I have responsibilities to my students, but I write every day.

Joe Mefford: Well, we know you use Final Draft. Do you have any other writing tools or techniques you want to share with the people listening in?

Larry Brenner: Well, the most important thing I would say is even if what you are writing is absolute garbage, keep writing it, you can always delete it later. There are days where…I said I'm writing every day – there are days where the stuff that I'm writing is not particularly good. But that’s what Delete buttons are for, and actually you really shouldn't delete it, you should just put it into a file to not look at for a while. But you keep writing and then you get to a point where you're generating something that you're really happy and excited to and you find yourself at this point where you don’t want to stop writing when the time is up, and that's how you know that you're in the zone.

Joe Mefford: When you're approaching an initial idea or a concept, do you structure, do you outline? How do you take notes?

Larry Brenner: I always outline. I always outline. My outlines don’t always go the way that I expect them to go when I'm done outlining, but it's really important to have a sense of where your story is going. The worst thing that…I mean, so many times you get writer’s block because you don’t have a blueprint of where things want to go, or you find yourself fighting your characters, which you can still have that problem even if you're using an outline, but outlining helps. It lets you know throughout the entire process that yes, you have a plan, you know where you're going with it. I definitely am a fan of it.

Joe Mefford: At some point in your writing, do you ask anyone for feedback? And if you do, who do you ask and when do you ask for the feedback?

Larry Brenner: It depends on the project. When I am writing and I'm writing for myself…I went to a graduate program and I got my MFA in writing at Spalding University, and the people who I went there with were incredibly, incredibly talented and I respect their opinions greatly. And really, they're just some of the greatest people I've ever met, so we're constantly in contact and a lot of the times we'll share stuff with each other. They gave me feedback throughout my entire time in graduate school and I trust them. Of course, now I have my manager and my agent and I get a lot of feedback from them. And they are your partners, your collaborators. You should be talking to them regularly. So that is helpful as well. And of course, my wife who, you know, she gets to read everything first because, you know.

Joe Mefford: So Larry, we know you got your MFA in Creative Writing with a focus on playwriting at Spalding University. Many of our customers out there ask us whether or not they should attend a film school or a writing program, and I'm just wondering what advice you have for people who might be thinking about making that decision.

Larry Brenner: I think what really separates people in terms of writing is an appreciation for the craft, the craft of writing. I think there's a lot of people out there who when you tell them that you're a writer they go, “Oh, you're a writer? Well, I can do that. Just give me a computer, I'll type something up,” but there are things to learn about writing, there are things to learn about characters and dialogue and structure, and I absolutely believe that getting an education in creative writing makes you a stronger writer.

The program that I went to, Spalding University, which is in Louisville, Kentucky, was particularly good for me. It was a low residency program. If you're not familiar with low residency programs, you go there for a period of nine to 12 days, you're taking classes, you're meeting other students, you're working with mentors, and then you go off, you get assigned a mentor, and your job is from wherever you are to be writing and sending your work to a mentor, getting critiques from that mentor, and writing more. And for me, that was what was really important. It was really important for me to be writing all the time. You can take a screenwriting class and only have to write like a couple of pages if you take the wrong class because screenwriting classes are very often, you know, you write something, everybody sits around and comments on one person that day, depending on the size of that class. You may have two or three days in the course of the semester that are devoted to you, if you're lucky.

The low residency program worked for me because I was always writing, I was always needing to meet deadlines, I was always getting fantastic feedback and immediately jumping back into writing. So I would say that make sure that you're in a program that emphasizes you creating output, you generating work.

Joe Mefford: You're a New-York-based writer and you've obviously done pretty well so far. Do you think at any point you'll need to move to Los Angeles or has that not been a problem for you so far?

Larry Brenner: It's something that’s come up. I've done pretty well still staying at New York, and what’s really important is my family being happy and access to my extended family, and that I have in New York, but you also don’t say no to opportunity when it comes. So as long as I can make this work from New York, it's going to work from New York. At the point where I feel like I'm saying no to opportunity, that's when the decision really needs to be revisited.

Joe Mefford: Do you ever want to move beyond writing into directing or producing or anything else?

Larry Brenner: I have tremendous respect for directing as a craft and the producers that I've worked with, but those are not things that…I feel like directing is a different craft than writing and I don't know that craft, and I would need to learn a lot before I could even think about it and it's not even on my radar.

Joe Mefford: Three years ago, you were like thousands of other Final Draft users out there. You wrote a script with no guarantees, you entered it into the Big Break Screenwriting Contest, and you got third prize. Now you've sold a script, been hired to adapt one, and you've sold a pitch. What advice do you have for that writer out there who is where you were three years ago?

Larry Brenner: You know, there are some stock answers to this and one of them of course is keep writing, but what I found with a lot of people who write, is they write a lot but they don't take the risk of sending it out. I'm a firm believer in competition…how could I not be a firm believer in competitions based on my story? But you need to take the risk of putting the work out there and getting it rejected. It will get rejected even if it's fantastic. Not everything goes to everyone’s tastes.

I would also say I feel like a lot of people spend a great deal of time focusing on, “How do I get an agent? How do I get a manager?” and I understand that because I didn't… when people say to me, “How did you get an agent? How did you get a manager?” I can't really tell them how it happened, it just happened when it needed to happen, and no one likes hearing that answer. But every second that you're spending working on getting an agent, working on getting a manager, is a second you're not spending writing. And if you write good material and you send it out there into the world, that should be your focus. That should be your focus more than getting the representation.

Joe Mefford: Okay, that’s great advice. Well, I want to thank our guest screenwriter, Larry Brenner, for sharing his experience with us. We certainly wish him the best of luck. This is Joe Mefford with Final Draft thanking you for listening to this interview. Please visit our website at finaldraft.com for more information on our software and services.