Better Off Ted) always wanted to do and the
sale of his first feature script, The Escort, proves
he can bring laughs to screens of any size.
playing in one of the most beautiful sandy
playgrounds on the planet. That was where
Justin Adler found himself the summer after
his first year of college,
blissfully unaware that the
writing bug was about to
bite him.
bizarre sight. "They found
me on the couch scribbling
a story I was writing and re-
alized that I hadn't even left
the house the entire day
and this was island para-
dise," Adler recalls. "I was in
a place where everyone
should have been outside,
having the time of their lives and I was in-
side writing a story."
write in the "voice" of a fellow classmate.
When the stories were read aloud for the
class, Adler had a revelation. "When I read
mine, people started laughing so hard they
were crying," he says. "It was such a great
feeling! Definitely an epiphany for me."
movies. What he got instead was a job as an
assistant on HBO's The Larry Sanders Show,
which, for Adler, became a graduate writing
program of sorts. Wanting to find a way into
this new world, Adler wrote a Larry Sanders
spec and handed it to some of the show's writ-
ers, who loved it and in turn passed it to their
agents. Several of them contacted Adler, who
decided to sign with a talented, young agent
named Aaron Kaplan (who would later head
the William Morris Agency's TV department).
last Adler was getting paid to make people
laugh and even got to work under the cre-
feature film writing continued to play in the
background.
tuses -- "I would only get through outlining
something or a first draft" -- but he became
the victim of his own success as he contin-
ued to write and produce various shows,
even landing an overall deal with ABC-Dis-
strike changed the land-
scape of TV production and
Kaplan left William Morris
to form his own manage-
ment company, Kapital En-
tertainment.
agent Julien Thuan enthu-
siastically encouraged Adler
to write a movie. And while
Adler insists that his former
agency had always been
supportive of his desire to
was finally ready take the leap, so much so
that he refused an opportunity to staff on a
new TV show. Instead, Adler focused his cre-
ative energies on writing his feature. After
pitching a few things to Thuan, Alder says
the two settled on an idea that would be-
come The Escort -- the story of an irrespon-
sible male flight attendant who is forced to
escort an angry 14-year-old boy on a road
trip to Boston after their plane is grounded
for engine trouble.
laws with his wife and daughter. As he drove,
an Amtrak train passed him by and he
thought, "Would it be possible to send our
daughter down to visit her grandparents
without us? How would you even do that?
Can you put a kid on a train by herself?"
his own parents and thought a story about a
flight attendant stuck escorting a kid cross-
country (à la John Hughes' Planes, Trains &
Automobiles) might make for an entertaining
film. "I thought there was something in an
flight attendant, and this kid that seemed re-
ally interesting to me," Adler relates.
tendant with questions, Adler sat down and
spent the next several months whipping the
idea into feature film shape, finishing the
script in December of this past year. Kaplan
and Thuan both gave Adler some notes, as
did his wife (who is also a screenwriter) and
a close friend. After assimilating the feed-
back, Adler rewrote the script. Once the
rewrite was ready, Thuan felt it was better to
hold onto it until after the Sundance Film
Festival ended so everyone could be back in
town and available to respond.
get the script to. Initially, they considered tar-
geting an actor to make the spec more mar-
ketable, but it was decided that attaching a
star wasn't really necessary. "We realized,"
Adler says, "that one of the strengths of the
script was that it could work for a lot of dif-
ferent comedy guys right now." So they de-
cided to circulate the script widely. And while
Adler was somewhat unfamiliar with the
whole spec sale process -- "I was still learn-
ing what `territories' were," Adler admits (an
industry term for studios/buyers) -- he really
appreciated having a rep who really con-
vinced people that this was a script they
should read.
dios stepping up to make an offer with Tom
McNulty (Date Night) attached to produce.
Adler could not have been more pleased and
knows that his background in television paid
off in a feature kind of way. "Having been in
TV so long, I think I gave people a script that
maybe was a little farther along than a lot of
specs that come out, in terms of how pol-
ished it was," he says. "I think people re-
sponded to that as much as they responded
to the idea." To Adler, the secret to writing
is... writing. "To be good at anything, you
have to do it and do it a lot. The sheer vol-
ume of writing you do in television is exer-
cising your writing muscles and that can
only help you."
laughs out of a tough spec market with The Escort