How I Learned The Hardest Lesson of My Screenwriting Career

At the top of 2024, I had the best idea I've ever had for a screenplay. We were coming out of the strike, and it felt like every fire I started in 2023 had been put out over the six months we were out of work.

I entered the strike on a TV show and with a movie I thought a studio was about to shoot, and I left it as a guy with nothing, who knew he needed another spec to remind the town I existed.

So, I sat down to brainstorm a few ideas, and after a ton of brainstorming, I kept coming back to the least commercial one. But it was also my noisiest.

After pitching it to my manager, he was surprisingly in on it. He felt like it WAS commercial, and that the growing fervor across America might make it even more commercial by the time I was finished.

That's when I decided to write my masterpiece, a script called THE CURE FOR MALE LONELINESS, and I learned one of the hardest and most annoying lessons of my career.

Let's dive in.

'John Wick' CREDIT: Lionsgate

What Was The Idea?

I 'm not sure if you remember January 2024, but the world was in crisis...as a crisis that's still going on. I had the idea of taking the male loneliness epidemic and writing a really dramatic movie about characters dealing with having no friends as adults.

Here's the logline: a disillusioned veteran teams up with a disgruntled park ranger to assassinate a tech billionaire, but the complexities of their mission force them to confront the true meaning of justice and friendship.

The basic gist of the movie is that two guys plan to assassinate a billionaire, whom they feel threatens the American way of life. It takes place in rural Pennsylvania, with their plot being to kill him when he makes a speech, and it involves a few MAJOR TWISTS along the way.

I would put them here, but I still have hopes people will read this thing...someday.

It's a tribute to the great guy cry movies of the 1970s, and I felt like it was a spec that truly showed who I was as a writer.

It took me most of 2024 to finish this movie, and when I was done, my circle of mentors and friends told me it was the best script I had written. And the best part? My reps agreed.

We decided to take the script out right around July 4th, 2024...but since people were on vacation, we waited a week and went out with it on the 12th...

Then, on July 13th, 2024, the unthinkable happened...

A guy in rural Pennsylvania got on a roof with a rifle and shot at a billionaire he thought was ruining the country and the American way of life.

Yes, we sent my spec wide on the weekend when Trump was almost assassinated.

Well, I got a lot of calls the following week, mostly from people freaking out. We pulled the script totally back and waited the news cycle out. But then we had the election, and things got chaotic again.

By the time that died down. I called my rep and begged him to take the script out. I was working on other ideas, but I was so proud of the script, and I was terrified that my best work might just sit as a lonely PDF on my computer.

So yeah, we took it out to show a few people before the holidays and get the taste of the town. We sent it out on December 1st.

And then on December 4, 2024...Luigi Mangione killed the CEO of United Healthcare.

I got a lot more incoming calls, but none of them were the kind of calls you wanted. And none of the people had actually read the script.

Yes, all this really happened.

I was basically calling down God's hand every time I tried to show someone this screenplay.

So I stopped.

'Heat' CREDIT: Warner Bros. Pictures

The Hardest Lesson of My Career

I've never tried to write a movie that felt ripped from the headlines. My whole philosophy has always been to just write a story about what you're dealing with emotionally and hope it resonates. It's how I dealt with a friend's death in Shovel Buddies and how I got Himbo on the Black List.

To me, that's the only way to write a spec. If you try to chase trends or cheat the system, the reader can tell. And the story will go nowhere.

You need to stand before the audience naked, and be as vulnerable as you can be.

That's what I thought I was doing with The Cure For Male Loneliness, and it might be what I accomplished.

It's hard to tell without multiple reads.

Was I a failure? And did writing this script waste my time? Should I have chased something more commercial?

Maybe I should have just done something normal and not a weird idea.

What the hell was I supposed to learn from all this?

'Good Will Hunting' Credit: Miramax

You Can't Change the World

At the end of the day, the hardest lessons I had to learn in my career are that you are not in control of anything outside of what you put on the page, and maybe how you react to failure.

I cannot change the world. I can't even change the local news.

All I can do is write the spec I believe in and hope it resonates with the people that matter. And if it doesn't, even if that's for the dumbest reasons and worst luck imaginable, all I can do is start to write the next one.

In short, there is no way to change the world, so start a new screenplay.

I am really proud of my work on The Cure For Male Loneliness. It's a feather in my cap that my rep can bring up when someone complains about Elon, or Trump, or Zuckerberg, or Bezos, or anyone else who makes American citizens feel marginalized based on money and power.

Even though it's not the script that changed my life, or even got me 100 meetings, or 10 (I think I'm at 9, reach out!), it got me to prove what I could do on the page to myself. It helped me understand some story beats I do not think I would have mastered without it.

And it certified in my mind that I was going about my career the right way. I was spending time on what mattered: being vulnerable and writing what I think resonates matters.

Even if it resonated so much that people wound up dying in real life...which is still weird. And awful.

For what it's worth, I think my script has an ending that reflects the America I want to live in, and the kind of man I would like to be.

If you want to read it, you can call my manager. I think it would shock him.

But if you just do one thing after reading this, I hope it's that you put yourself out there with your work. And that if it doesn't connect, you continue to do so.

Summing It All Up

You can't change what's happening in the world; all you can control is what you put on the page.

So if something works, great. And if it doesn't or gets derailed by the news, pivot and keep writing.

It's a marathon.

Let me know what you think in the comments.