“If someone can talk you out of it, you should definitely quit”

Edited for length and clarity.

Where are we as an industry?

Edward Ricourt: This town has always been tough. It’s always had different challenges.

I went to NYU, moved out here, and ran smack into the strike before the last strike. And it always seems to be that fight.

But right now there’s a feeling of existential crisis. Where are we going with AI? Where is the writer’s place in this new world? And even politically — what stories can we tell and not tell without some weird ramification coming our way?

So it’s tricky. But the fight is the fight. We all know that if we could be doing something easier, we’d do it. We’d make our moms and dads happier and go to law school.

I sat right there in 2007 and 2008, just like you, trying to navigate the problems of that time. There’s no easy way to slip through this. You make a thousand sacrifices. I’ve had a thousand conversations with my wife — can we do this? Can we get by another month?

There are no wrong answers. Know the game, know the field, do your best work, keep your head down, and believe in the things you believed in when you were at home watching E.T.

This is just the next wave we have to get through. Writers are built for that.

Zak Penn: For the individual, there’s plenty of opportunity. It’s always been really difficult, so it continues to be really difficult.

The good news, if you’re sitting in this audience wondering whether you’re going to make it: if someone can talk you out of it, you should definitely quit. And if they can’t talk you out of it, you’re probably going to succeed — because it’s more a war of attrition than anything else.

That said, I’ve been doing this thirty-five years and the business is as broken as I’ve ever seen it. The companies have really screwed up their own profit motivations and their own ability to define success. They’re chasing Wall Street valuation and it isn’t working out for them.

When a company can’t define how it plans to make a profit — when the strategy is we’re just hoping Wall Street thinks we’re a tech company — that’s not good.

But movies are doing very well for a change. So that’s a nice upside. Sorry to be a bummer.

Jenna Milly: My first manager gave me advice I still use. When you’re writing and sending out a script and you want to call your manager every day to ask whether anyone’s read it — he said: the only thing you can control is the writing.

So control that. Let everything else go. And that goes for the business side too. You can create opportunity for yourself. Come to a conference like this, network, make moments where you can get your writing out there — instead of falling into the pit of is anyone going to read this, will they ever respond, did I write this for nothing. All the demons.

What about AI?

Edward Ricourt: The genie’s out of the box. AI is here.

Where my mind goes is how it can be useful to us as a pitching tool. My daughter uses programmes that make art. We could bring illustrations to the worlds we’re building and use them in a pitch. They’re trying to take a little power from us — we can use that power ourselves to sell our stuff.

But there definitely need to be stronger guardrails. And on the studio side it feels like: let’s not be too quick with guardrails, because we may see some profit potential down the corner.

Zak Penn: I’m less worried about the effect on writers than on the other parts of the industry, particularly production. It’s already affected the storyboard industry and it’ll continue to.

The day AI writes a better movie than a person, we can all sit here and say we have to pass legislation — but then we’ll be watching movies written by AI and we’ll have to tell a different type of story.

I don’t see that happening, because with all the AI tools I’ve been using — and I’ve been using a lot — whoever writes the best prompts is best at creating. On my last project I made a deck using Midjourney and other tools, and my friend who directs wrote much better prompts than I did, because he knows angles and lenses.

So it ends up being exactly the same thing: who can express themselves better.

As a writer, what are you doing? You’re not writing words that appear on screen. People don’t come to the theatre and read your screenplay. You’re writing a blueprint for what will eventually become the screenplay that eventually gets shot.

And part of why you go to a Quentin Tarantino movie is that Tarantino made it. If someone said, we’ve done a facsimile of a Tarantino movie, I don’t think it would be as successful. Knowing there’s a person on the other end is part of what makes a story appeal to us.

By the time AI has caught up with pure creativity, we’ll have bigger problems.

Jenna Milly: I think of the sewing machine. When it came out, people stopped sewing by hand. Yes, it can make a really fast pair of trousers — but what do those trousers look like? How different can they be? How do you put your art into what you’re making and then use the machine to help you make it?

Zoom or in person?

Jenna Milly: I hate it.

Zak Penn: I usually put my foot down and won’t do it. Happy to have a meeting on Zoom, but if I have to pitch an idea and I can’t gauge the room —

Comedy is terrible over Zoom. And the delay makes everyone crazy. Running a writers’ room on Zoom, everyone ended up with migraines. We realised we had to stop after ninety minutes and take an hour’s break.

It’s great for a lot of things. It’s just not good for pitching. Or brainstorming. Or anything where you have to gauge the other person’s reaction.

I wish I could tell you it made committee meetings less painful. It makes them more painful.

Edward Ricourt: I’m going to disagree, because I love Zoom. I was built for that moment.

Before the pandemic I’d walk into a room with my cards, trying to get off book, trying to remember all my beats in order — and then they’d have a question and I’d lose my place.

On Zoom I have a cheat sheet just off screen. I’ve got my visuals, my whole thing laid out, my music cues. I’ve sold more things on Zoom than I ever did in person, because it gave me the confidence I wasn’t going to forget anything. All I had to bring was my energy.

It is weird when you say and scene and everybody’s on mute and nobody responds. That’s disconcerting.

But I can do five in a day and get back to my writing. And if an eleven o’clock pitch was weird, I can make edits and improve it by the two o’clock.

Kiwi Smith: A writer friend of mine, Will McCormack, says he feels fine taking his laptop into pitches and half reading off the screen — because it gives the vibe of I’m too busy to memorise anything. I’m just going to tell you the story.

If you memorise too much, does it feel like a frozen, codified thing that can’t be interrupted?

Jenna Milly: It’s easier to improvise in person. If you see their energy drop you can skip a few things or combine them on the spot. That’s hard on Zoom.

How do you pitch?

Zak Penn: My wife was a studio executive for years, so I’m acutely aware of how boring it is to hear other people’s pitches. I’m always thinking: I must be boring these people that loudly. So what can I do?

The older I get, the shorter my pitches are. I’ll say — I’m going to break this down for you, this is the movie I’m going to write, and if you have questions I’ll sit here all day and answer them.

Lead with the material that’s most exciting. If I were pitching Ready Player One I wouldn’t start with the plot, it’s too complicated. I’d say: let me tell you about the Oasis.

Then take them to the middle of the second act and stop. Nobody ever passes by saying that was fascinating, but I didn’t hear enough detail. They say: could you tell us more about what happens in act two?

Leave them wanting more.

And the converse — if these people don’t want it, I want out of the room as fast as possible. Give them the opportunity to say no. If they’re going to say no, let them say it quickly and go home.

Eric Robinson: Pitching is incredibly performative. You can go in with a great story and not sell it because you’re a boring pitcher. How do you prepare for that?

Zak Penn: Take an improv class. If you’re not a good public speaker, take a class in public speaking, or do it online. My kids learn everything from YouTube, so you can too.

My wife used to teach at UCLA and there was a section on pitching, so I’d come in and demonstrate. I’d stand up and say: there’s a man, and his name is Jack. Now here’s the thing —

And then stop. And everyone’s looking at me.

And I’d say: that’s pretty much what you have to do. Grab people’s attention while you’re talking, one way or another. That’s the most important thing you can do in a meeting.

Kiwi Smith: How did you develop your visual presentation skills? The sophistication of what you have to present visually keeps levelling up.

Zak Penn: I hired really smart people who are better than me at it. That’s literally the end of my advice. Every assistant I’ve had has been better than the last one at it. I’ve got my kids on it sometimes.

Edward Ricourt: Don’t sleep on writers’ groups. Your circle, the people you went to school with. I’ll ask what’s a good app for this, and they’re out there doing it, so they’ll make recommendations.

Spec or pitch?

Jenna Milly: I like to spec it, because then I fully understand the story. I’ve sold one pitch in the room — that was an outline, and it was very exciting, and then I left going: oh, now I have to write this.

Kiwi Smith: I tend not to write on spec. Maybe I’m not that fast. I write ten or fifteen drafts before I want to show anyone, so it takes four or five months to have something I’m proud of.

So I get caught in the trap of well, I could pitch this — and that takes as long as writing the spec.

Honestly I’m in a state of confusion, because every week my manager says just found out pitches aren’t selling. Then someone else says pitches are selling. Then specs are hot. I can’t keep up.

Zak Penn: It depends where you are in your career.

I’m a big believer that my job is to write a good script. It’s not to get the movie made. It’s not to get the show made. If people buy it, fantastic. If they want to make it, better. If they make it, that’s a home run. And if it’s successful, you should shut up about it.

Early on, the advantage of specs — and I wrote a lot of them — is showing people the kind of writer you are.

But here’s the pitfall of pitching. However great your pitch is, that’s inversely proportional to how excited they’ll be by the first draft. It’s always better in your head. It’s always better when someone tells you an idea than slogging through a whole screenplay. They get excited, they wait six months, they read it, and they go: this is fine.

Edward Ricourt: It can depend on the thing. If it’s well-known IP, you can go in and say — you loved this in the eighties, here’s why we tell it now, and here’s why I’m the writer, because it’s in my bones. That can be enough.

But then there’s Now You See Me. I’d go on generals and they’d ask what I was working on, and I’d say I’m doing this thing with magicians.

Stop. I don’t do magicians. What else you got?

And I thought: okay. You don’t see what I see. You’re thinking eighties cheesy magicians. I wanted to do something different.

So that spec was me saying: this is the vision you’re not getting.

Do you chase open assignments?

Zak Penn: Earlier in my career, absolutely — we went up for every assignment we thought we had a chance at. That’s how you get work.

Funny thing is people say to me, I never knew you wrote comedies. My first scripts were Last Action Hero, PCU, Antz. All I did was write comedy. Then I wrote a couple of Marvel movies and apparently I can’t write a comedy any more.

Edward Ricourt: I stay away from cattle calls. If my agent says Sony’s looking for writers, my first question is: how many people are going in?

Kiwi Smith: And they lie. They say a handful. They mean forty-seven.

Edward Ricourt: Sometimes those pitches are mining expeditions. They don’t plan to pull the trigger, they’re fact-finding — and you’re doing all that work.

It comes down to the best use of your time. I’m writing this spec, and I’m going to put it away for a month to work on a pitch that’s over in ten minutes and then I throw it away. Going on those forty-seven-person cattle calls is life-draining.

Kiwi Smith: And then they ask you back to do more of their notes, and you go back again, and you can spend months.

Clearly this has just happened to me. No, I did not get the job. I’m bitter.

It’s a reboot of Troop Beverly Hills. I would f*cking kill to do that movie.

How do you take notes?

Zak Penn: Here’s what I’ve learned, and I didn’t used to be this way.

First, before the notes meeting, ask whether there’s a reason they haven’t sent you the notes to read first. Because if they send them first, it’s a far more productive meeting. Then it’s: I’ve read your notes, I agree with eighty per cent of them, here are the five I have questions about. That puts the onus back on them.

Early in my career people would give notes and I’d sit there and say — let me explain to you why that’s wrong, let me go through every sequel of every movie in this genre and explain why the first-act climax shouldn’t be X.

That worked for getting some jobs. It also drove people nuts and made them not like me.

What I do now is listen as much as possible, write it all down, and say: interesting. Interesting thinking. I’ll think about that. Got all your notes — anything else? All right, I’ll get back to you with my thoughts.

Because what’s the point of a meeting where people debate their notes with you? Are these your notes or not?

I joke about the union of notes versus the intersection of notes. Most of the time you’re getting every single person’s notes compiled into one giant mess, some of which contradict each other — rather than what it should be, which is: what do we all agree on?

Most of the time the people giving notes would be better off saying: something’s not working. I have some thoughts but I’m not sure. That’s what we’re paying you for. Go do it.

And believe it or not, some producers and executives work that way.

Steven Spielberg’s strategy is that he says, oh my God, this was fantastic, I loved it — and he tells you all the great things. And then: I have a few things I want to run by you.

And by that point you’re thinking, wow, he really loved it, this is awesome.

And then you actually look at the few things and it’s exactly as many notes as anyone else gives. It’s a lot of notes. The difference is you feel positively about it. So you think: I don’t want to let Steven Spielberg down.

Which is a lesson if you’re the one giving notes. If you make someone feel bad about what they’ve written, you will not get a good result. They’ve proven it with coaching. Negative reinforcement doesn’t work. If you try to train a dog with negative reinforcement, it doesn’t work. Same with writers. We’re just like children and dogs.

Edward Ricourt: Execs need to learn a language. Writers have a language.

And I like notes in advance. I don’t want we’re going to set a meeting in two weeks and I’m going to punch you in the face — be ready.

Because writers have been up till two in the morning, juggling all these things, trying to give our daughter and our wife time. And when somebody rips that out with a note, we need to go through the five stages of grief. We need the they didn’t get this, they didn’t get that. We need to process it so we can get to the other side, get to that phone call, and be ready to work — not still carrying all that crap.

You take a shower, you walk the dog, and you go: yeah, I could figure this out.

But I need that time between when you tell me and when I see you on a Zoom.

Zak Penn: There’s nothing more satisfying than getting on a notes call where they’ve sent the notes in advance and you can say: yeah, they’re good notes, I can do them.

And everyone goes, well, what about — and I say, nope. It’s all good. Unless you want to talk me out of something.

It freaks them out. They say but we really had a problem with — and I say, yes, I read the notes, you had a problem with the second act, we’ve got it.

A huge amount of time is wasted in Hollywood on meetings where you theoretically discuss what the problems are with a screenplay.

And I always tell people: you don’t need the preamble paragraph that always reads the same. We think you’ve done an amazing job and blah blah blah — and starting on page one, we do not like the script. That’s pointless. Just list your notes and tell us what you think.

Kiwi Smith: So when I get those emails before the call, I thought I was supposed to respond to each thing. And you’re telling me I can just go — got your notes, cool, they make sense?

Zak Penn: Here’s the real secret. Just don’t do the ones you don’t agree with, and see if they care when you hand in the next draft.

Kiwi Smith: Thank God I made it today.

What’s your process?

Jenna Milly: It takes a long time to figure out what works for you individually. If someone had told me at the start — figure out your best time of day, how much you can do, and embrace your own process — it would have saved a lot of time.

I write first thing. I do a Hemingway, four or five hours. I can’t be productive after that. Then I have lunch and reread.

Maybe ten pages a day. I reread as I go, so I can’t do a vomit draft. I hear people say they wrote a script in a weekend. That’s not me.

Zak Penn: I can write a lot in a day if I know what I’m doing.

One of my first writing partners was Mike White. We’d split pages — you do this fifteen, I’ll do the next fifteen. And he’d come in Monday and say: I wrote the first forty, and I also wrote this script over the weekend.

And the script was The Good Girl. This was way before he was successful. I used to tell people, Mike’s the best writer you’ll ever find. Now he’s the king of the world, so I was proven right.

I have terrible writing habits. It depends entirely on how much pressure is on me. About ten years ago a studio needed a script written in eight days from scratch. They called and I looked at the idea and said, I can do that. And I did.

Was there Adderall involved? No. There was a lot of coffee. It was something where I really understood the structure — and once you understand the structure, and the pressure is off every scene being perfect, you can bomb through it.

But I don’t think that’s how the best writing gets done. There are people like Mike who can write an original idea fresh out of their heads. Don’t ever compare yourself to them. It’ll make you sick.

Edward Ricourt: I save the writing for when there’s nothing else left to do in the house. Workout first — the family’s gone, headphones on, I go on the Peloton, and my brain starts warming up on what I left the night before. I can’t just jump in.

Then I write from nine or ten till four or five, with breaks, with lunch, with procrastinating.

And when my family comes home the computer shuts off and I’m Dad. I’m the husband. I want to be present. Then when everybody’s asleep I might come back and recap.

I’m slower with features. TV I write really fast, because of the outline process — the outline is so detailed I could hand it to anyone on this panel and they could write it. So I can do a TV episode in five or seven days.

Do you still use screenwriting books?

Zak Penn: I don’t have books open in front of me when I write. I’d have to close them and put them away.

But Save the Cat Goes to the Movies is essentially a breakdown of films and their structure, and that’s genuinely helpful. A great shortcut.

And here’s my parting thought. One thing that still shocks me about Hollywood is that people will say we’re doing this movie, and you say, oh, that sounds like a horror movie — and they say no, no, this is PG-13.

And you say, really? Because it’s about flesh-eating zombies tearing people apart.

You’d be shocked how often the question what movie do you think you’re making hasn’t been vetted. Forget originality — do you think you’re making Aliens, or When Harry Met Sally?

Same is true for me. Whatever I’ve said the movie is going to be, I sit and try to work it out. Free Guy was a good example. Is this supposed to be Elf, or is it something else?

Anything that works for you, you should use. Anyone who tells you not to listen to Robert McKee — if it helps you write, use whatever you want. Some of those books are very reductive, but sometimes a pure breakdown of here’s the inciting incident is exactly what you need to know whether you’re on the right track.

Jenna Milly: I do the same — I pick a movie. If I’m writing an all-night caper I’ll look at Adventures in Babysitting and ask, where is she at forty minutes? Does she lose the car? Does she lose her phone? Can I give my character that experience?

I use the eight-sequence structure. I find that easier than Save the Cat. Also I don’t want to get in trouble, but I’m confused by the end of the Save the Cat outline. All is lost, and then everything’s lost, and then everything’s still lost. I get confused about how to execute that.

Kiwi Smith: I watch movies in the genre and pause them and do an insane personal outline of what the movie is. It takes six hours to watch the film. Transcribing it helps me get it into my DNA.

Zak Penn: That’s how we wrote Last Action Hero. We watched every shi*ty action movie from the eighties and filled in questionnaires. Who’s the second most evil bad guy? Who dies last? Is it personal, and when does it become personal?

Watching a lot of movies feels like cheating at first. But often you watch one and think — this is really instructive, and I’m not going to do any of this. Which is a lot better than trying to make up your own rules from scratch.

Edward Ricourt: I have the Joseph Campbell books. But my real education came from reading the work of other writers.

I found Yale’s list of the hundred top plays and sought them out. I’d sit in the corner of the Shakespeare bookshop in New York and read them for pacing, for style.

With films you see a film by Scorsese — that’s their voice. But I wanted to know what our voice is. So I read scripts. When the Black List comes out I tell my agent to send me all of it, and I spend the winter break seeing what’s resonating, which voices this industry is raising up, and how I can bring that into my own voice.

You all have a voice. Hone it. Perfect it.

Someone read a draft of mine once and said: I don’t see any of your sauce in this. And I went — oh. Voice.

So I started really thinking about it. What am I selling? Aaron Sorkin is selling something. What’s that thing I want to get?

Keep perfecting your voice, and keep navigating these crazy waves. Like I said — I was sitting right there. I just had a dream, and first and last month’s rent, and conversations about whether we could get by on one Jetta.

It’s a grind and it’s scary and it’s a tightrope. But it’s worth it. You can get to the other side and find that community.

If you make someone feel bad about what they’ve written, you will not get a good result.

Zak Penn speaking on stage at State of the Story, Writers Guild Theater, Los Angeles