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I WASN'T A CREATIVE WRITER
in my
teens or my college years. I loved movies and
I had a very active imagination but I never re-
ally wrote. A friend of mine moved out to LA
to be a screenwriter and he was telling me
about how that worked. It was in the early
'90s when young kids would sell spec scripts
for $1 million. My friend was like, "You know
you write a movie script and you can make a
million dollars," making it sound that easy.
He was playing that lottery and I said, "Wow,
that's interesting to me!"
He would send me the scripts he was writ-
ing and they weren't any good, but I would
read them and learn the format and give him
my opinions: "I wouldn't end it like this; I
would end it like that." And just off that, he
said, "Wow, you're pretty good at this. You
should come out here with me." And I did. I
moved to LA, took a class at UCLA Extension,
wrote a few scripts with this friend, and then
he was out of the business because he was
never really a writer.
By then I was hooked and had to teach
myself the whole thing. I read books and
took classes on screenwriting. I also had to
teach myself the English language. I was not
a real writer. I wasn't good at essays. I wasn't
a good student. So I took vocabulary and
grammar courses, and did anything and
everything I could to continually arm myself
with the tools I needed to become a screen-
writer. I was self-taught in my early twenties
and I wrote script after script after script.
Those years were kind of my minor
leagues when I taught myself the fundamen-
tals of writing. At that point, I was absolutely
hooked and became better with each script
and eventually became a professional.
Yet it was frustrating on
the business end, because
you're young and expecting
riches and working hard
and getting rejected. But
that's it. That is the process.
And if you can't survive
that, you'll never make it.
That process and that frus-
tration taught me how to be
a professional, which I did-
n't know at the time.
My career went in stages.
Those five years in the '90s
were the stage of being brand
new and working on the
craft. Then there were the
early professional years,
which were more frustrating
than anything because I had
gotten an agent, I had sold a
thing or two, but nothing
ever really cooked. I got re-
placed on every project and I
never really made that much
money. So I had enough rope
to hang myself with; plus, I
was getting older. That sec-
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creativescreenwriting January/February 2011
I
WHY WRITE
E D I T E D B Y
SEAN KENNELLY
For
Allan Loeb
(21, The Switch), working with director
Ron Howard on his latest film, The Dilemma, was like
pitching a complete game. Yet Loeb admits that he
wouldn't even be on the mound if it weren't for some
frustrating years that changed the way he played.
Allan Loeb