Introduction & Acknowledgements

Once, co-teaching a screenwriting class, we heard a knock on the door. We opened it. Two frantic undergraduate students (is that redundant?) stood in the hall. "Tell us how to collaborate! We have to write a script together, and we don't know how!"

"Hey," we said, "you're interrupting our class."

"It'll just take a minute!"

"You want us to tell you how to collaborate in sixty seconds?"

They nodded.

A ridiculous request. More ridiculous, we tried to answer. We tried to reduce all we'd learned as script partners to a sound bite, little more than a log line.

It would've been great just to hand them a book on the subject, but one hadn't been written. Of the more than two hundred books on the market about writing scripts, not one focused on collaboration (amazing when you consider that many of the most important and successful films of the past and the present have been written by screenwriting pairs, from Billy Wilder's legendary collaborations with Charles Brackett and I. A. L. Diamond to half of the 2001 Academy Award nominees for Best Screenplay).

After class (and two G&Ts), Matt suggested that Claudia make this her next project since she'd recently finished a book about writing short screenplays. When she mentioned this possibility to her husband, he suggested the two of us write it together.

A collaboration about collaboration. It had a nice ring. And Matt loved the idea.

So did our colleagues. One woman, a former assistant to Oliver Stone, told us she'd tried to co-write a screenplay, but the collaboration had fallen apart. "I wish I'd had a book to consult about how to do it," she said. "Or do it better."

Another colleague put it this way: "People are hungry to know how to write creatively with another person, how to bring out the best in each other, how to keep it fair, and make it successful."

We decided to do it, to co-write a book about co-writing scripts, to demystify the process, if that's possible. ("The thing about the creative process," says Marshall Brickman, "is that if you could really demystify it everybody would be doing it and who would fly the planes and run the government? I mean this.") We would write it for those who want to know how to work with a partner and for those who want to know how other script partners work. As William Goldman says in Which Lie Did I Tell? "I think the one thing writers are all interested in is how others do it."

Life, of course, intervened — Matt got a better job and moved to L.A., Claudia continued teaching in Tallahassee, we wrote two screenplays... (Insert calendar pages falling and clock hands spinning.)

A few years later, out of the blue, a grad student, Amy Ellison, knocked on Claudia's office door and asked if she could be her research assistant. Claudia told her about our idea for this book. Not only did Amy augment our research (there was still no book on the subject), she called two friends from Yale, Andrew Reich & Ted Cohen, head writers of Friends, and told them about our project. Andrew Reich said, "This book needs to be written." They agreed to be interviewed. We're grateful to Amy, Andrew, and Ted for providing the jump-start we needed.

Matt flew to Florida, and we retreated to a friend's beach cottage on St. George Island (thank you, Christie Koontz) and wrote a proposal. Our friend, Linda Seger, suggested we send it to Michael Wiese, president of Michael Wiese Productions, and his vice-presidents, Ken Lee and B. J. Markel, who bought the book immediately. We thank Linda and everyone at MWP for their enthusiasm and guidance, and our literary agent, David Hale Smith, for hailing the book and negotiating a collaborative contract.

Linda also helped us build a list of potential interviewees, including Lee & Janet Scott Batchler, Harry & Renee Longstreet, and Carolyn Miller. We added some of our own: Claudia had met Nick Kazan years before when they had plays on the same bill at Actors Theater of Louisville, where she also met her lanky friend, Stuart Hample, who suggested we write his friend Marshall Brickman. Another friend, Goody Cable, had met Larry Gelbart in an Oregon Starbucks and still had his e-mail address. Claudia's daughter, Anne Loomis, put us in touch with a writer at Newsweek who put us in touch with the Farrelly brothers. As a film reviewer for E! Online, Matt worked with James Lewis at mPRm Public Relations, who helped us contact Matt Manfredi & Phil Hay and Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau (thank you, Dan Leonard, for translating their French into English). Matt's friend, Brett Hedlund, put us in touch with Jim Taylor through Taylor's assistant, Kaile Shilling. Matt Danelo at Bumble Ward & Associates facilitated our interview with Brad Anderson.

We requested interviews via phone, e-mail, and fax. The response was overwhelming. Again and again, writers echoed Andrew Reich — "This book needs to be written" — and agreed to talk to us about their own idiosyncratic collaborative process.

The list continued to grow even during our interviews in L.A. Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski suggested we talk to Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone and Ed Solomon and gave us their contact information. When we told Aaron Ruben we'd love to interview Hal Kanter, Ruben asked his wife, Maureen, to bring him the phone. She did — a flimsy, cordless contraption Ruben hated. "Don't we have a real phone?" Maureen laughed and dialed Kanter's number. "Hal!" Ruben said. "I'm talking to you on a toy phone!"

Kanter countered, "That's why you sound so young!"

Hal Kanter, in turn, put us in touch with Fay Kanin.

We scheduled interviews on our way to interviews. Stuck on the 405 (that is redundant), Claudia called the Farrelly brothers' assistant to arrange an interview with them. "Bad news," he said. "They can't do it. They'd love to, but they can't. They're looping Shallow Hal." Assuring him that she understood, Claudia thanked him and turned off her phone.

"You called him 'darling,'" Matt said.

Claudia laughed, "No, I didn't."

"Dahling. Like you're an old-time agent."

"I did not!"

"You did." Matt laughed. "Dahling!"

Writers met us in coffee shops, restaurants, their offices, homes. We drove all over L.A. in Matt's old dusty dented black Mazda pick-up (he'd ordered a new car, but it hadn't been delivered), usually parking the truck out of sight, but when we interviewed Peter Tolan at his home in Pasadena, he buzzed us in the front gate. As we approached Tolan's large, stately house ("the shack," Tolan jokingly calls it), Matt realized there was no way he could hide the hunk of junk he was driving, but he tried — roaring past the front door and tucking the truck between two of Tolan's luxury cars.

In the end, we interviewed nineteen script partners or teams: Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, Brad Anderson, Lee & Janet Scott Batchler, Marshall Brickman, Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau, Larry Gelbart, Fay Kanin, Hal Kanter, Nicholas Kazan, Harry & Renee Longstreet, Matt Manfredi & Phil Hay, Carolyn Miller, Robert Ramsey & Matthew Stone, Andrew Reich & Ted Cohen, Aaron Ruben, Ed Solomon, David Sonnenschein, Jim Taylor, and Peter Tolan. It's a rich sample — TV, film, mainstream, indie, domestic, foreign, friends, lovers, spouses, serial collaborators, career collaborators, and relative newcomers.

Their collaborative credits are listed in our Filmography. Quotations from writers not listed there are from other sources, cited in the Bibliography.

We also interviewed entertainment attorneys Brooke A. Wharton and Eric Weissmann who kindly took the time to give us the skinny about the business side of collaborative writing, as did agents Alan Gasmer, Dave Brown, and Jennifer Good. Thanks, too, to their assistants, especially Allen Goss, and to Matt's friend, Graeme Stone, for putting us in touch with Good and Brown.

And we're grateful to Lise Anderson at the Writers Guild of America, west, for granting permission to reprint the "Writer's Collaboration Agreement," and to Grace Reiner for illuminating the agreement's usefulness and importance.

Additional thanks to: Anne Loomis, for our Web site; Aaron and Maureen Ruben, for the martinis and dinner and pep talks and brunch; Marti Hagen and Elizabeth Wilson of Word Wizards for their help with the transcriptions; Pacific Theatres for giving Matt their old, clunky transcription machine; Matt's Dinner Club for their encouragement as he worked on the book; Mark Litton for loaning us his copy of Session 9; Frank and Mary Ann and the rest of Matt's family for emotional support, and the Bank of Frank and Mystery Gifts, Inc., for financial support; Pat and Mark Sellergren for the R&R in St. Croix; Claudia's "coven" — Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Pamela Ball — for their help with Chapter Two and the title; Dr. Alan Kagan, for keeping Claudia happy, sane, and productive; Claudia's son, Ross Loomis, for the laughs and for guiding us to current research about laughter, and her husband, Ormond Loomis, for his invaluable technical assistance throughout the project, and for suggesting that we co-write the book in the first place.

Above all, we're grateful to the writers we interviewed for their generosity of time and spirit and their candor about the collaborative process. Their experience, insight, advice, and humor are the very heart of this book.

"Yes, I'm saying it out loud. In print," Dennis Palumbo says in Writing from the Inside Out. "Writers are the smartest people in the room. Any room. Anywhere in town."

If we ever doubted that, we don't now.