Glenn Gers: Screenwriter, Director, Fiction Writer, YouTube Eminence

"You need to be really good when luck arrives. Which means work on the work."

Next week, Wednesday, March 13, 6:30-9:30 PM CT, I’ll be teaching an online flash fiction course for the Writers’ League of Texas. More information & registration details here.

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In October 2021, at the CineStory Foundation’s annual feature retreat in Idyllwild, California, Glenn Gers was one of the mentors who advised and taught the 31 junior screenwriters who had made the cut for the retreat via the screenplay competition CineStory hosts each year. (CineStory also hosts a TV pilot competition, which includes a separate retreat experience.)

At our retreat, Glenn was incredibly knowledgeable and thoughtful about the industry and likewise generous with his advice and encouragement. We’ve kept in touch, and I’ve since learned that he’s writing a novel and also hosts a popular YouTube channel, Writing for Screens, that focuses on the art of screenwriting and making a life in a mercurial industry. I hope you’ll check out his channel - Glenn’s episodes are always engaging and informative.

In our interview below, he shares so many insights that I know I’ll be thinking about for a long while.

Glenn Gers

Christine/Bookish: You've been a screenwriter for over 25 years - how did you get started in the industry? I've heard many industry people say that success as a screenwriter relies heavily on connections and networking - can you comment on this too?

Glenn Gers: The story of how I got into the industry isn’t very helpful to anyone now, because the industry I got into is long gone, and every artist’s path will be different anyway. You have to figure out what it is you love to do, and what you can do (financially, emotionally, etc) -- and what the business wants done. Then you have to negotiate all that (those things rarely get along)...within the reality of your life. 

But since you asked: when I was growing up, consuming art and trying to make art were my primary solutions to overwhelming anxiety. (That hasn’t changed much, actually.) So I drew and painted, made radio plays on a cassette recorder and silent movies on Super8 film. I tried to write novels. I wrote and even acted in plays in high school and college.

Upon being forced out into the real world, I wanted to work in theater, write novels and make movies. It was at the beginning of an era of huge spec screenplay sales -- so I figured: focus on screenwriting because it will pay so much it will support my plays and novels. (Spoiler: even after I was making money at screenwriting, the nonstop pressure to keep a career alive meant I never wrote another play or novel.)

I had a lot of privileges, going in: I was a well-educated upper-middle-class Jewish guy with supportive parents in New York City in the 1980s. I’m comfortable writing in a bunch of different commercially-viable genres. Indie film was happening, and screenwriting was a hot business but not that many people were doing it. I was prolific and worked on writing every single day. I got an agent with my first script.

Even with all of that going for me, it still took me 12 years to make a living as a writer. Twelve years working mostly as an office temp, writing more scripts and having meetings and doing cheap indie projects. 

I was talented, hard-working and had all those advantages -- yet it was still incredibly hard and very much a matter of chance that I began to make a living as a writer.

I cannot emphasize enough the issue of chance here. 

For example, I got to show my first script to an agent because I was doing script-coverage for an indie-film producer who knew an agent. I got the script-coverage gig because the producer bought a book at a bookstore where my mom was working. So the who-you-know in this case was my mom.

On the day he walked into that bookstore, the producer happened to be starting a deal with some Wall Street money to finance an indie-film company, so he needed a reader and could pay. If I had met him a few months before: no job. If I met him a year later, when the company had fallen apart: no job.

My first script was loved but ultimately rejected by a large number of people and companies for ten years. Then one of those people happened to get a job that let her show it to a star -- who liked it, and all of a sudden a script that had been rejected for ten years was worth a big option and writing deal. 

(That script never got made. It continued to win me fans in the business for another ten years: people who couldn’t get that script made, but hired me for other writing jobs.)

Connections and introductions DO matter -- but once you get your foot in the door, that foot has to be attached to something that people in the business think will make them money. My foot was attached to an inept-but-interesting script. I rewrote it many times during those ten years.

The main lesson: you need to be really good when luck arrives. Which means work on the work. No one can stop you from doing that. Make stuff. Create. Then you have to make yourself available to luck: you have to keep writing things and showing them to people, on the off-chance you cross paths with someone well-financed who likes your writing...which is the definition of luck for a screenwriter. 

So my short answer (too late for that!!) to the implied question of “How do you break into the art business?” is: Work on being good at the art. Create stuff, and show it to whoever you can. And make a life that will let you do those two things, over and over and over, even if you’re not getting paid.

Do what you can, as who you are, with what you have, right now...over and over and over.

A recent Writing for Screens episode

CS: You created a very successful YouTube channel (Writing for Screens) where you regularly provide craft and career advice to aspiring screenwriters. I see there are now over 400 videos on your channel - what was the spark that led to its creation?

GG: There were a couple of sparks. One is that I just really love teaching. If there’s a subject I have feelings about, I love talking about it.

The other spark is that I had to teach myself screenwriting. When I started, the only how-to books available were Syd Field’s Screenplay and William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade. So, over the years I would write down anything I figured out, sort of like an affirmation or advice-to-self, and because it helped me absorb whatever it was. 

Even once I was working in the industry, I was still learning a lot, trying to figure out the rules and realities. I always wrote it down, in the hope it would help me remember it or see it more clearly. 

So I had a lot of thoughts about writing, scribbled down haphazardly.

Add to that spark this fuel: while I was working as a screenwriter, the screenwriting-teaching business became a thing. So now there were hundreds of books and classes. Over the years I tried to read some, and I really didn’t think any were truly helpful. I feel bad saying that -- and I do think it’s useful to read or watch as many different “how to” things as possible, because in each one there will be some little trick or insight you CAN use. You have to figure out what helps you, and take that, and disregard the rest.

So I felt like I had something different to say. That’s always a big motivation for me.

And finally: most writers turn to teaching when they can’t make enough money by writing. Whenever writing work slowed down, I would scout out the teaching world.  To prepare for the inevitable. 

I am a big believer in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. 

So I taught some classes here and there over the years, which forced me to organize those haphazard thoughts, and made me feel more determined than ever to try to teach...uniquely.

And the final spark was: in fall 2019, I did some teaching sessions at the Austin Film Festival. I met a lot of writers, and a lot of writing teachers.  And I felt like I had something to say, which no one else seemed to be saying. I was 60 years old, retirement was looming. I decided to figure out a form of teaching that I would feel good about doing.

An excerpt from Glenn's novel-in-progress

I had been watching a lot of YouTube, because I had written and directed a low-budget indie thriller about a YouTuber called Like.Share.Follow (which has been buried by HBO/Cinemax so feel free to watch it for free on YouTube, it’s there!) I felt like I could reach more people, all over the world, by making videos instead of writing a book.  Also, books are hard.

So I decided to do this bold, original thing by teaching on YouTube, but then while I was setting up the channel, COVID hit and everyone started teaching everything online. But at least I’d spent some months preparing to teach on video, so I had figured out my style.

It has been supremely fun and satisfying. I’m really happy doing it, and proud of the work. I really like doing things DIY. Is it less-professional than it might be? Definitely. But it’s me, and it’s mine, and I say what I believe to be true -- and that’s the whole point as far as I’m concerned.

CS: I know you're working on a novel - what have you found to be the most interesting (and perhaps most challenging) aspect of writing prose instead of scripts?

GG: The biggest challenge is trying to forget the language of screens (or film or cinema or whatever you want to call it). 

Screen language is a complex art, made up of composition and motion and editing, acting, lighting, production design, sound and even location scouting. Writing a script, you’re counting on -- and trying to imply -- all of those things.

But in a novel, all you have is words on a page. 

That gives you an astonishing amount of control. You steer the reader’s mind through the feelings, the actions, the weather, the smells, everything. 

But that can get overwhelming. I want to put everything in. 

So I am trying to use what I learned about filmmaking to guide my writing process: it’s all about choices. You can capture a moment many ways. There isn’t a right way or a wrong way -- but you DO have to choose. That’s, for me, the definition of making art: making choices, out of your instincts and experiences and world.

At least my decades of screenwriting -- and, lately, teaching -- have made me (IMHO) a good storyteller. I know what the story is. I know how it is made up of actions and insights. I outline enough to feel confident how each step of the path will move and unfold. 

And 25 years of professional screenwriting have actually given me a competence in constructing sentences and paragraphs. I have gotten good at that. I write a nice sentence. 

But I was afraid I didn’t have a voice. Screenwriting has really one basic voice. In novels, there are way too many possible literary voices, and I loved them all. I like a lot of very different writers. And only recently have I realized: my voice is the one that comes out of me. I don’t have to figure it out: I just have to figure out the scene, the sentence, the moment -- and write stuff down. My instincts, my aesthetics, will guide how I shape it. And that is my voice. I just have to write something I like.

And since I grew up before VHS or DVD or streaming existed, I spent a lot of time reading. The “language of words” was my first language. It feels like I am returning to my long-lost childhood home (which is admittedly neglected and in need to some maintenance.) 

The thing I love about prose is: the history of the art is so long and rich that really anything goes. There is no “three act structure” or “standard form.” It’s a huge toolbox, or toy box, and I get such a kick out of not worrying about budget or what the industry wants this week. 

Of course, there are trends and layers of gatekeepers in publishing too.  But if they don’t like it -- I’ll publish it myself.

The cost and effort of DIY publishing are minor compared to DIY filmmaking. 

I know (from reading other posts here on Bookish) that you struggle with the idea of being a writer who self-publishes, or of being taken on by a publisher so small that it might as well be self-publishing. I figure: what the hell. It’s pretty damn cool that I can put something out and reach an audience, no matter how small. It’s like making ceramics and selling them at a street fair, or doing a play in a little grungy off-off-off-Broadway theater. 

Very few artists make a living from their art. The most painful lesson I learned in my career was: making a living at your art usually turns your art into your day-job. It’s the greatest day-job I ever had -- but it was a job. Professional screenwriting is an enormous mountain of compromises and postponements of dreams. I learned a lot, and got to develop my craft, and it could be incredibly exciting and fun when it wasn’t agonizing and soul-crushing. 

But working an art-job is not the same as being paid for your art. Being paid for your art is incredibly rare. Mostly you are paid to be an art employee, using your artistic abilities in the service of art-businesses and (if you’re lucky) other artists (who, if you’re lucky, are not assholes.)

I do wish more people in the business talked about that.

It’s kind of a miracle that we are in a moment when an artist can, technologically, create and distribute their art the way they want -- no one can stop you. I just wish I was younger. I would like to do a lot more DIY stuff.

CS: Would you share with us a little about your novel?

GG: It’s the story of a romantic triangle involving a criminal drifter, an avant-garde painter and the heiress to a department store fortune in New York in the 1930s and 40s. 

The New York art scene of that time was on the edge of creating abstract expressionism and shaking up everyone’s definition of art, but they hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Those ideas, more than the historical figures involved, are central to the book.

It’s structured in four sections, each of which is a notebook, in which the drifter has written his memoirs. The text of those four notebooks are interwoven with five brief sections that describe the fate of the notebooks, after they are discovered in an abandoned shack in the woods in New Mexico during the early 1990s.

It’s about art and love.

CS: What are some of the books and films that inspired you to become a writer?

GG: When I was 11 or 12, I stumbled on an article by Ian Fleming in an old magazine: “How To Write a Thriller.”  Before that, I simply wanted to live in books. The article made me realize that someone wrote those books, and that the closest I was going to get to being James Bond was writing James Bond. 

Around the same time, I read Harriet the Spy. It changed my life. It had all the magic of stories, but it was about the world I lived in. (Sort of: I didn’t have a nanny.) The sharp edgy observation, the humor, the empathy: I understood it was possible to use fiction not just to escape from life, but also to engage with it.

Likewise, around the same time, The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. But I also got deep into P.G. Wodehouse, and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and its sequels. And the 1930s New Yorker humorists - Thurber, Benchley, Perelman. In high school I remember being strongly influenced by William Goldman’s novels, especially Marathon Man. Michael Crichton’s early mystery thrillers.  The End of the Affair and Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Rabbit Run, by John Updike. The Great Gatsby, which I didn’t fully understand but really loved. Endless Love, by Scott Spencer. The Hitchcock/Truffaut interview book. Theater, especially Company and Follies, by Sondheim. Sleuth, by Anthony Shaffer. The early plays of Neil Simon.

Movies that inspired me early on were equally eclectic: Charade, The Apartment, Casablanca, The Guns of Navarone, Butch Cassidy and yhe Sundance Kid, Klute, Two for the Road, The Manchurian Candidate, Little Big Man, Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Play It Again, Sam, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Day for Night, The Taking of Pelham 123, All That Jazz, O Lucky Man. And especially two little-known films, Joan Micklin Silver’s Between The Lines and a quirky 1973 comedy-thriller called Slither. That’s all before video rentals and the 1980s indie movement that started as I was getting out of college, and a whole lot of new influences piled up very fast.