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. To listen to the podcast click here. To listen to other podcasts visit podcasts.finaldraft.com.
Pete D’Alessandro: You’re listening to the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast where we talk to writers about screenwriting and everything else writing related. I'm your host, Pete D’Alessandro and I’m also one of the engineers here at Final Draft.
As I’ve mentioned before here in this podcast, I also work on the IOS app called Final Draft Writer for iPad, but it’s now also available on the iPhone. I’m happy to say that’s out and available today so if you’re listening to this podcast on your iPhone you could actually get your hands on the Final Draft Writer for the iPhone itself. It’s all one app, so if you have the iPad version, you’re going to want to get the iPhone version for free, so take advantage of that.
I’m going to get it started. Our guest today is Frederick Mensch, he wrote Nightingale, which you can now see on HBO and it’s his first produced screenplay. I’m very excited for him and he got a lot of heat off The Black List and blcklst.com. You might have heard Franklin Leonard on an earlier episode of this podcast who is actually the found of The Black List and blcklst.com. Frederick has gotten some success off that site. Frederick, thank you so much for joining us
Frederick Mensch: Thanks for having me
Pete D’Alessandro: So, we’re going to do the three kinds of acts of what happened as you got this screenplay written and then found out it was getting some heat and eventually got produced. But before we get into that stuff, I’d like to know what your writing background is like and when did you actually decide you wanted to be a writer?
Frederick Mensch: Well I’ve been writing for years, I went to film school at NYU back in the late 70’s and graduated in 1980 so I’ve been at this for quite a while. After I graduated from film school, I moved out to Los Angeles immediately after that and lived in LA for six to seven years. I did okay, I was always able to get an agent, had some scripts optioned and people gave me a lot of encouragement, but I was never able to make a living. That got a little discouraging after a while, so I eventually drifted away; I moved back to the Midwest, where I’m from, and kept writing while doing other jobs.I kept writing and circled back to it when it then became more of a priority as I’ve gotten older.
Pete D’Alessandro: So you also founded a site called MovieBytes.com, do you want to talk about that for a minute?
Frederick Mensch: That was one of the things I did to make a living. I had been doing some work as a web developer and I thought this would be an interesting way to combine the two different areas of my life: web development and screenwriting. I noticed at the time there was sort of a gap in information about screenwriting contests. There was no one place that you could go on the web and find all of the information about contests that was out there. So I built a site and put all of that information in one place and put it out there as a little business and sold advertising to contests as another source of revenue, so it became a second kind of income for me.
Pete D’Alessandro: You had this and you had this passion for writing in there so you found this place not only to put your time and your energy but also to provide a service and to make a little money.
Frederick Mensch: Right, absolutely. I think that’s a smart strategy for anyone. There’s sort of an insatiable need for content and people are always looking for stuff to read, do, and watch. It’s a way for people who are on the outside of the business to get on the inside by writing articles or putting together podcasts or interviews with the people they admire.
Pete D’Alessandro: Great. I think one of those other places that the outside gets into Hollywood is The Black List and blcklst.com where you had a great experience from what I understand with Nightingale.
Frederick Mensch: It worked out really well for me. I finished this script and I gave it to my manager. It’s a strange little script and he didn’t know what to do with it, but he had introduced me to some people and I gave the script to one of them who was an executive at a production company that wasn’t exactly doing this kind of film, but he was interested in becoming a producer, so he asked if he could show it around a little bit and I said sure.
He hooked me up with a director, so we were trying to find financing, and this was a different director who ultimately made it. We were out there for about a year trying to set up the film, but it never really came together. So after that, The Black List had just started as a business a year prior and thought this would be a perfect script for that venue.
In some ways, I think it’s the perfect indie script, because it was one character in one location which means it could be made by anybody. Anybody could put their hands on that kind of money, but at the same time it was a very very splashy role, so I felt like we could attract if not a movie star, then somebody who was on the cusp of being a star. And as it turns out, that is what had happened.
I put the script on the site and two days later, I was contacted by Josh Weinstock, the producer who liked the script, and he wasn’t overselling me, he didn’t know what he could do with it, but he asked if he could show it around a little bit and I said sure, so he gave it to the director Elliott Lester who read the script right away and he loved it. So he was on board and said he was going to try to find financing and within a week they had lined up financing and we were ready to go. It was an astonishingly fast turnaround from the time I put the script on The Black List, which was the middle of February to shooting in the middle of June. It was four months later and we were in front of the cameras.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s incredibly fast, and that’s not a typical experience for a great experience.
Frederick Mensch: Right, A lot of things came together and that was by design because I built the parts with one actor and one location. It’s a lot easier to set up a film like that than a much larger one.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure, you don’t have to worry about a lot of people backing out at the last minute or any of that stuff happening.
Frederick Mensch: Right, and that was part of the motivation with writing the script. I had written another script that was called Supreme Ruler that’s a little bit bigger. It’s an indie film, maybe in an idea world, you’ll spend $3-$5 million on it, which is not a huge budget, but it’s in a completely different world than this one was. So we’ve always been able to attract great actors to the material and get a lot of interest in it, but so far we haven’t been able to get the finance together.
That was frustrating to me, because it was a script I’m really proud of and people really respond to it, but we can’t get the commitment from the money people. The money comes in, the money falls out, and it’s a very familiar refrain. I wanted to, to the degree that it’s possible, eliminate that kind of nonsense and make a film that’s so easy to produce. So once in my life my grand strategy paid out and worked.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s really fantastic. Congrats on that.
Frederick Mensch: Thank you.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well designed. Let’s back track in time. So before you get going with the script, this character came to you from another piece you’d written, am I right?
Frederick Mensch: That’s right, I had written some sort of other indie film about a group of compulsive masturbators. It was a 12 step program and the Peter character was sort of an earlier version, he was a different character than what he wound up being. He was a supporting player in that screenplay and he just stuck in my head. His voice and something about him made me know that I just wasn’t through with him; I wanted to write something more about him.
The way the idea came together was I had written that and in my neighborhood, outside of Chicago, there was murder of a man who lived with his mother killed her and it was right in my neighborhood; I walk my dog right past this house all the time so It makes an impression. So I had an idea about writing something like that, and I put this and character together and that’s where the idea came from.
Pete D’Alessandro: So I guess before we get too far into this, we have to let people know that it’s going to be difficult talking about this movie without revealing some spoilers here. So just be prepared for that if you haven’t seen the movie, it might be a good time to watch it. But I wanted to ask, what kind of research you did for this kind of character, because this psychology that he visits just seems so real and familiar in a disturbing way. You can see his aggression and blaming other people as well as his obsession and his rationalization for all of that stuff really seems to ring so true.
Frederick Mensch: Yea, I didn’t actually do any formal research. This is just my observation of the world and what it feels like to be lonely. We’ve all been there at times in our lives and to be in a place when you really want something that you can’t have, and I’ve always joked about this, but it hurts my feelings when people talk about this character being crazy because I relate to him so closely.
Pete D’Alessandro: Completely. I think there are some really great moments in there where he’s on the phone and there are a couple of lines that really struck me as absolutely brilliant where he says “it’s no big deal, I’m just checking up on you.” Clearly to him it is a big deal and he’s lying to himself and trying to rationalize this obsession away.
It was really well done and I think that conversation is what keeps the movie together because there aren’t locations, there aren’t characters, just this guy trying to talk himself through this situation.
Frederick Mensch: Right. It was a challenging film to write for that reason obviously because he doesn’t have anyone else to play off of. At one point in the process I thought I could finance this with a credit card and direct myself. But I think ultimately that would have been a disaster because I’m not a director.
I really got lucky, because Elliott Lester, who came on board, directed the hell out of that film. He really makes it visually interesting and compelling to stay with for 85 minutes and he really does a great job with that. And David (Oyelowo) as well making the character relatable and someone you could watch for 85 minutes without getting really turned off.
Pete D’Alessandro: Right. That’s David Oyelowo. One of the things that really struck me is that it compels that whole way through with so little.
Frederick Mensch: Right.
Pete D’Alessandro: Now before this iteration of it and we see the film finished, can you tell us the earlier versions and some of the things you were trying along the way or the early drafts that didn’t work?
Frederick Mensch: I write without an outline so I pretty much jump in and start writing until something doesn’t work then I go back and I re-write and re-write. So I circle back a thousand times by the time I’m done I have a first draft, but it’s really a fifteenth draft because I’ve gone back so often. And ultimately that is the final script that we shot. Obviously we made some cuts and it shifted around in production and so forth in editing, but it’s pretty much the script I wrote.
Pete D’Alessandro: So what about any conversations in your mind about how you get people to relate to this guy who is going to be a murderer and is essentially suicidal? Is there something you had to do for that?
Frederick Mensch: I didn’t worry about that for a second because the one thing that this character had going for him and the thing that made this script really easy to write was that he is a character that has a much defined objective; there is something that he wants.
He wants this man to come over for dinner and when you have a character who wants something so clearly defined it becomes so easy to write it, because he wants this and you put obstacles in his way and that’s what drama is and I have that very clearly in this script. It became a relatively easy script to write.
Pete D’Alessandro: At some point you finished this up and you have it on The Black List, you said everybody got attached pretty quickly, but can you tell us about those early days; what was going on, what were you doing in that period? Because it’s difficult to imagine that you’re not changing a lot, you’re not re-writing a lot, but I’m sure you were still very involved in this?
Frederick Mensch: Well I was, but I’m in Chicago and the production was in LA. I was exchanging emails constantly with Elliott Lester, the director. He would be asking me things like “What kind of cigarettes does Peter smoke?” “What kind of scotch does he drink?” “Boxers or briefs?” He just asked a ton of questions like that to make the character real for him. Some of that stuff ends up in the movie and some of it doesn’t, but it was interesting to see how his mind works and how he is relating to the material.
They even had a different actor attached for a while then he fell out, I didn’t know that they were going to cast David until very shortly before we started production. The character was not written for an African American character. In my mind he was White, so I was surprised when they hired David. But when I look back at the script why not, it’s pretty much a color blind script. It adds somewhat of an interesting layer to alter the ethnicity like that.
Pete D’Alessandro: So were there changes you had to make at that point?
Frederick Mensch: No. That’s the interesting thing. We changed the character from White to Black and it didn’t change a thing, we just shot the movie. I thought when I was writing the screenplay first, that this would make an interesting stage-play as well. And so when I thought about that I thought that on stage this could be played by any actor: black guy, white guy, could be an Asian actor, could be Hispanic, so on stage I thought we could change ethnicities and never occurred to me that we could do that on film too, but I think anyone who sees the film says “yea, why not?” David is so terrific in the movie.
Pete D’Alessandro: The other thing I read was that you really wrote this to be about loneliness and isolation and I think that really rings true with the finished result of the film.
But you’re coming from this place of starting with making something shoot-able and not having trouble with finance, is that something that came out of your writing process and discovery? Was it that theme that you found along the way?
Frederick Mensch: The two things that I was trying to do came together really nicely. On the one hand, just creatively, I wanted to write about lonelinessl and I felt esthetically to do that I had to eliminate all the other characters from the film it was just this one guy. As the movie reels on, it’ll give you a real since of what that feels like when you just don’t have the other interaction with another human being so I thought esthetically we would approach this particular theme.
And also, I thought we would pragmatically, as a screenwriter get the movie made, it was an awesome, intriguing sales hook. I felt like any actor seeing this who really wants a challenge like David did is going to be intrigued by the process of being alone on the screen for 90 minutes. Can I do that? Can I pull that off?
I think that was a hook for everybody and certainly looking at the review, everybody talks about it. This is a solo piece. It’s not the only solo piece that’s ever been made but it’s one and became a way to stand out in our insanely crowded market place.
Pete D’Alessandro: Who else ended up getting involved or who else did this script get shot out to in regards to that character?
Frederick Mensch: I don’t know if I should say his name, but there was “him” and a number of other actors. I was not very prevue to the casting process, but there was a fair amount of interest in the role.
It’s not a role for Leonardo DiCaprio or someone in that position are going to want to take that risk, but for the next level, for the people who are not quite at that level, it becomes an interesting way to get some attention. This was before David did Selma so we shot this film before Selma although Selma came out first.
Pete D’Alessandro: So this was really a great win. He got all sorts of publicity off of Selma and that brings a little bit more attention to the movie.
Frederick Mensch: Yea. As it turns out it really worked out well for us. He had done Butler prior to our film so his name was out there and people knew who he was, but nowhere near the same level at all as Selma. Once Selma came out he was all over the place.
Pete D’Alessandro: One of the things that I don’t know if you can answer, but was there a moment when the script sold and thought that it was real and happening?
Frederick Mensch: There was no single moment when that happened. When you work on an independent film, it’s not really a fluid thing. Until the checks clear and cameras rolling, nothing ever feels certain. Elliott would be telling me things like, “We got the money” and “We got the actor.” He’s always one of these really positive guys who states thing emphatically and there’s never a doubt in his mind. And to me I always said “We will see about that.” But everything he said was true. We did have the money, we did start shooting in June and it all worked. I was flabbergasted.
Pete D’Alessandro: That almost never happens that way.
Frederick Mensch: No. No it doesn’t. Almost never.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well let’s step back and talk about your process for writing in general. You said you don’t like to outline, where do you like to start?
Frederick Mensch: I am character driven all the way. I just find a character that’s interesting and usually find a relationship that is interesting to me and I like to just see where that goes. I could get away with that because nobody gives a damn what I write.
I’m not living in Hollywood, I’m not working for the studios, but if you were an aspiring screenwriter and not somebody who is making their living doing this, this is one of the great advantages that you have is that you can write any damn thing that you want and too few of us take advantage of that.
We’re all sitting around trying to write movies that have already been written and there’s no point in doing that. That’s not the way to get attention for you. The way to get attention for you as an aspiring writer is to write something that no one else is writing.
Pete D’Alessandro: Absolutely, that’s great advice. What kind of relationships do you end up seeing? Where do you pull those relationships from? Do you see them passing on the street or where does that come from for you?
Frederick Mensch: It comes from all over the place. It could be relationships that I have. From relationships that I have right now to relationships I had going back to high school or college. It’s a funny thing when your mind turns and certain characters stick with you and others don’t I couldn’t say where it comes from, it’s part of the mystery of writing.
Those are some of the things that I enjoy about writing is that even if there was no chance of it getting made, I do it to help me process my experience. It helps me learn something about myself and the way I relate to the world by writing.
Pete D’Alessandro: You mentioned another script you had written and gotten a lot of attention off of and it was well received. Can you talk a little about that and what that’s about?
Frederick Mensch: Yea. It’s called Supreme Ruler that’s an indie satire about a small town go-getter who wants to be elected the Supreme Ruler of his Buffalo lodge so it’s all about that fraternal world of the Moose and the Masons and the Shriners and that whole world which is a fascinating world and hasn’t been explored in film, certainly not in the depth that this film does it. It’s a piece of Americana. It’s a film that I’m really excited about and really hope we can get it made.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s great, well hopefully there’s someone out there listening to this podcast that would make that happen.
Frederick Mensch: We have some great actors. Ron Livingston is attached to star and Minnie Driver. It’s a terrific cast so anyone with a couple million dollars that they don’t know what to do with give us a call.
Pete D’Alessandro: Fantastic. Attaching actors is such an important part of trying to get people excited about your script because it gives so much credibility to what you have written aside from the writing itself. If you’ve been able to do that with other scripts, is there some magic to that and getting people to play that role?
Frederick Mensch: I don’t know what the magic is, but first of all I think it’s crucial especially if you’re writing things that aren’t four quadrant studio pictures like I do. If you’re writing less genre based then the only way you’re going to be commercial or viable on the market place is by attracting interesting actors. Don’t worry so much about making likeable, but make them real, make the people who are full of contradiction and mystery and that gives something for the actor to chew on.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s fantastic. Yea, that gets people excited and seeing someone who has those contradictions is always much more exciting to read about.
Frederick Mensch: Right. That means that they’re not conventionally likeable that you’re used to seeing, but that’s a real trap. You want to make characters that are as real as possible and if you do that then they’ll be more relatable and interesting.
Pete D’Alessandro: So what else are you working on right now? What else are you writing?
Frederick Mensch: Well I’m a guy who likes to write character driven films that are small and it’s becoming apparent to me that television is much more receptive to these stories than films, so for the first time I’m working on a couple television ideas and pilots that I’m working on. It’s just a really exciting time in the television industry right now with the kind of things that HBO is doing and Showtime and some of the other networks. It’s really gold and I’m not the first person to say this honestly, but it’s a golden age and it well suited for the particular writing that I can do and I’m hoping that I can make a little progress in that area.
Pete D’Alessandro: Absolutely, that’s a fantastic observation. What kind of shows are you seeing that you think are inspiring, particularly well-written, that you’re interested in?
Frederick Mensch: The shows that I love are shows like Louie, Girls, Togetherness, Transparent, these shows that are hard to describe what they are, but dramedies I suppose you could say. They’re not exactly comedies and not exactly dramas, but they have similar tone and that’s where I live and that’s one of the things that is surprising to some people in Nightingale, that’s kind of funny. There are moments in that script that have a real dark humor and I love that kind of stuff.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yea, I particularly remember the scene when he’s on the phone impersonating someone else trying to look for Edward. It’s so blatantly transparent but hilarious.
Frederick Mensch: Yea.
Pete D’Alessandro: Do you dabble into the comedy world or just do straight drama or drama level?
Frederick Mensch: It’s all character based stuff. I’m not the kind of guy that writes jokes. I can’t see myself working on a sitcom where every line is a joke. That doesn’t suit me very well. I like humor to grow out of a character and out of the absurdity of that human behavior.
Pete D’Alessandro: One thing that I wanted to ask before we wrap it up is that: is there a specific piece of advice for other writers out there that they should learn from your experience.
Frederick Mensch: I’m a cautionary tale, because I’ve been writing for 35 years and this is the first screenplay I’ve had made so don’t do what I did, that’s for sure. When I first went out to Los Angeles after graduating from film school, I got a lot of recognition in film school for writing, but when I got out to LA I sort of lost my focus because I started writing what I thought the marketplace wanted.
I would talk to people and LA is such a company town, you turn around and can help but bump into someone from the industry and end up talking about scripts and blah blah blah, so I wound up trying alter myself of sensibility to what might sell and it didn’t work. It worked well enough for me because I am a gifted craftsman, if you tell me to write a certain script, I can write it, but it wasn’t in my own voice, I was imitating other people. It’s inauthentic and people can recognize that and that’s why I might be able to option that script or get an agent but I wasn’t able to get those movies made. So it took me longer to learn that lesson than it should have that you can’t write in anyone else’s voice, you really have to forget all of that. For me it meant leaving Los Angeles.
That’s another advantage when nobody gives a damn while you’re writing, is you can live anywhere you want. And when you do live where you want, you can start thinking of stories that are a little outside of what you might think of when you’re in that company town. Don’t worry about what anybody else is doing or what anybody else is writing. Write the stories that are compelling to you and hopefully you could hookup with the people that share that vision and get something done.
Pete D’Alessandro: Fantastic. That was great advice; Frederick, thank you for joining us.
Frederick Mensch: Thank you, it was fun
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