I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre. Then in college I became obsessed with film, and wanted to be a part of that. Then after going to the Yale School of Drama in playwriting, I wanted to be a part of both.
At Yale I befriended Wendy Wasserstein, and post Yale I noted that she seemed to be meeting film and TV people at various New York cocktail parties and getting job offers that way. (Her plays didn't hurt either.) So I asked her to start bringing me to some of these parties.
And the first job, which kind of came from these "party" connections (no, HUAC, that's "party" with a small p), was a development deal for the Ladd Company, a screenplay job for me and Wendy jointly, based on a very funny, very short story by Charles McGrath. I remember at the first meeting with "our" Ladd executive, she spoke authoritatively about "when we make the picture," and talked about casting and location. I was young enough (late 20s) that I just assumed if they said they'd make it, they would. Ha, ha-joke's on me.
Most of my Writers Guild jobs have ended up being "development" jobs. On the one hand, I'm grateful to be hired and thrilled to be paid. (And sometimes have needed that pay desperately.) On the other hand, these "development" jobs start to feel positively existential: Sisyphus, pushing the rock of multiple rewrites up the hill endlessly, always to have it come crashing back down.
Then there's the need to "pitch" ideas, which so upsets me. I'm rather lousy at pitching, and am deeply resentful that executives don't seem to know that writing a screenplay and 'pitching' one entertainingly are DIFFERENT talents. Since I also act, sometimes I get over my resentment and commit to the pitch as an acting job. Other times I like to sabotage myself, and go to meetings with unwashed hair and talk with hesitations and doubt in my voice; this always goes over well.
I've had some good experiences too: a PBS teleplay, directed by the gifted and writer friendly Alan Arkin; and a recent (soon to be released) film version of my play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, directed by the gifted and droll writer-director Marshall Brickman and starring the exciting Diane Keaton.
Here's a quirky lucky story from the past: in 1986 I submitted a sketch for a Carol Burnett TV special. It was accepted by her head writers Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon (who, among other things, wrote all those hilarious "Eunice and her horrible family" sketches). And I then got hired to work on staff; which was a lot of fun; and Clair and McMahon were incredibly welcoming to me. My sketch-about an uptight widow accosted at her husband's funeral by a chatty/nutty crazy person-was cast with Carol as the widow and Robin Williams as the (surprise!) crazy person. Though most of the sketch was meant lightly, Carol wanted the ending, where the repressed widow learns to "keen", to register as a genuinely positive emotional ending.
We filmed it three times. The first two times, Robin and Carol did the text pretty much as written; I thought it was very good. The third time, Carol told the audience that Robin warned her he was going to improvise; "God help me," she said.
The sketch was about 6 minutes long; and in the first edit, they combined the "as written" version with the "ad libbed" version. I personally found the result a bit confounding; at one moment, they'd seem to be acting characters in a predicament; other times, they didn't seem to have characters, and Robin's ad-libs, though funny, were much funnier when you knew the original version he was taking off from-which, of course, you didn't.
I was coming to terms with accepting that this mixed version was how it was going to be, when in editing they couldn't make another sketch work; and they suddenly had a whole other 6 minute section to fill. Director Harvey Korman and producers Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey decided to run the sketch twice: the first time acted "straight," and the second time in Robin's ad-lib version, which now was an extremely fun roller coaster, since we now knew what he was riffing off on. My sketch got to work on its own; then Robin's ad libs got to work on their own.
Robin won an Emmy for that special (called Carol and Robin and Whoopi and Carl). And I must say I couldn't have predicted such a happy outcome for my sketch.
And after that it was back to pushing that rock up the hill (though at least under a WGA contract).