Writing was the rare Hollywood vocation that never had to shut down, but A-list scribes including Damon Lindelof and Courtney Kemp describe a different reality: "I've written less in the last year than I have my entire career."
One time, Michael Green, the screenwriter of Logan and Blade Runner 2049, was road-tripping when, 100 miles in, he realized he'd been driving in second gear the whole time. To him, that's what it feels like trying to write scripts during a pandemic. "It's not that your engine can't do it, but you're spending a lot of energy, and it's certainly not as efficient," he says. "I've written less in the last year than I have in my entire career."
It's a sentiment echoed by a host of other writers, who, like nearly everyone else fortunate enough to transition to remote work this past year, have had to find creative ways to maintain their pre-COVID-19 productivity. Before the pandemic, Hollywood's scribes would have killed to have the world stop for a time — finally, a chance to write that spec! — but few are emerging with a fistful of scripts. "We've all dreamed of having six months to work on whatever we want," says Green. "But I don't know anyone who wrote the spec they were dying to."
Instead, several screenwriters say they've struggled to get into the right headspace. "When lockdown first started, everything stopped in me creatively," says Russian Doll co-creator Leslye Headland, who is penning a new Star Wars series for Disney+. Despite converting a closet on the second floor of her Brooklyn apartment into an office to give herself a dedicated workspace, she didn't find a cure for her writer's block until a friend recommended Cal Newport's book Deep Work, and she learned about the Pomodoro Technique, a method in which you write in 25-minute increments punctured by five-minute breaks. It reinvigorated her writing.
The practice offered her structure, something in short supply lately, and is the closest she’s gotten to mimicking her pre-quarantine schedule, where she’d often have pockets of time to write between her directing and producing duties. Now that she’s settled into a rhythm, she’s found she’s more adventurous with her writing, especially since she’s not barreling toward a production date. “It still feels like we’re in a phase where we’re not exactly sure what the new normal is, so I’m more willing to pitch something that’s left of center and let my imagination flow as opposed to trying to hedge it in order to make a deadline,” she says. “It ceases to be about, ‘How can I make something happen?’ and it’s more like, ‘What could happen?’”
Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof has had a similar experience. Coming off the success of his HBO show, he made the conscious decision to not showrun. "I wanted to take a step back and be a fairy godfather, flapping my wings at varying altitudes depending on how much I was needed,” he says. So, the recent Emmy winner spent the quarantine developing new, top-secret projects with a set of collaborators he's barely met in person. ("I don't even remember how tall he is,” he says of one, “but I know every detail of the room that he's sitting in.”) Of course, Lindelof would much rather be hashing out ideas in a physical writers room than on extended Zooms and FaceTime calls. “The process is not ideal,” he says, noting he feels slowed down.
But, like Headland, he's found a silver lining. For those in the development stage, deadlines have grown more nebulous as studios wrestle with a production backlog. As Lindelof puts it, if shows and films were planes on a runway, there's already a slew of them full of passengers ready to take off — so he can get in line and take his time building his. “I do feel the benefit of going much deeper and doing more world-building and being free to go down roads that you might have to turn around and walk back to where you came from again,” he says. Still, if the pandemic has clarified anything for him, it’s that he’s a highly social animal who writes best in collaboration with others: “If I find myself in a sort of real Will Forte-Last Man on Earth situation, there will be no writing.”
Among the many scribes who say they've found it impossible to write in solitude is Vida creator Tanya Saracho. “I spent six months creatively frozen in L.A. and needed to change the air I was breathing,” says the showrunner, who has a development deal with UCP. So in the fall, Saracho bought a one-way ticket to the U.K., where she spent five months bouncing around to different AirBNBs in London, writing at coffee shops and her friend’s recording studio. She returned to the States in January with a pilot script about a Mexican girl who goes to London and falls in love with a British folk musician. Says Saracho, “Turns out I just needed to leave the continent.”
Not everyone has suffered from a lack of inspiration during the quarantine. "It's actually been a rich creative time," says Little Fires Everywhere's Liz Tigelaar, who adds that she's appreciated the opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate her development slate. Her outlook might have something to do with the fact that she's spent much of the pandemic in a minivan with her publicist wife and 5-year-old son, driving across the country east to west three times and north to south twice. "As a writer, so much of your life infuses your work, so just broadening our world has helped me creatively so much," she says.
That doesn’t mean it’s always been easy to find the time or the place to churn out scripts. In order to finish a movie she'd been working on, she holed up in her mother-in-law’s beach condo for two weeks while in Florida on one of their cross-country trips. “I lived like a 20-year-old boy, eating turkey burgers and not doing the laundry and wearing the same clothes and just writing,” she says, noting that the pandemic has completely upended her usual writing routine. “To really dive in now, you have to kind of let go of your life and go somewhere where you won’t be distracted — and I feel like I didn’t use to have to do that.”
Writers with young kids at home say that juggling the demands of parenting with remote work has been the hardest part. Power creator Courtney Kemp, for instance, tries to do most of her writing on the weeks when she doesn't have custody of her daughter so that she can be fully devoted to her when she's around. Green and his wife, Amber Noizumi, who are making the Netflix animated series Blue Eye Samari together, take turns stepping away from their writing to make their two preteens lunch. “A pitch meeting interrupted by a kid a year ago would have led to the end of screen use for life and now not a meeting goes by where someone doesn’t take a moment to provide a snack for, answer a question for or just check in on a kid," he says.
Kids are regularly making appearances on "Zoom rooms," the virtual iteration of writers rooms that some have come to love and others hate. Shows that were in the middle of their season when COVID hit at least had the benefit of the writers already knowing one another and an established workflow. Such was the case with The Handmaid's Tale, which stopped their physical writers room on a Friday and started a Zoom room on a Monday. "It went smoothly, but in some ways we were a special case," says showrunner Bruce Miller. "It'd be hard to start that cold."
Most writers who've had to start new rooms during this time say it's been draining. "A couple hours in, I'm exhausted," says Headland. "When you're in a physical room, you're feeding off people's energy." Kemp, who's had a handful of rooms going during the pandemic, says that while she has appreciated the ability to jump back and forth with just a few clicks, the positives end there. “A Zoom room is not a substitute for a writers room,” she says. “You just don’t get the same chemistry. It’s harder to pay attention. I found myself pulling stories sometimes out of people because they were so worn out. I know that there will be people who feel like, ‘Oh, this is a better way to do it.’ It’s not.”
One Day at a Time’s Gloria Calderón Kellett, who started up a Zoom room for a new Amazon show of hers during the quarantine, won’t argue it’s not more tiring. “The energy is definitely zapped,” she says. But at the same time, she acknowledges some advantages. She has a New York-based writer on her staff for the first time, and she’s admittedly blown away by apps like Miro, an online whiteboard: "The story breaking has gone much more fluidly than I thought.” And when it comes to Zoom pitches, she’s all in. Selling a movie to HBO Max during the quarantine without having to drive around L.A. was game-changing. “If I’m going wide with a movie, I want to do just it on Zoom,” she says.
How writers rooms will be forever changed is up for debate. For well-oiled machines like The Handmaid's Tale, a Zoom room will likely continue to be a part of the process. In fact, Miller is toying with the idea of having three days in the office and two at home, with some longer stretches of remote work built in from time to time. But not everyone is as thrilled about the prospect of a new Zoom normal. Says Lindelof, "It terrifies me that we may be moving in a direction where I don't get to sit in a room with other people, eat junk food and talk about what was on TV last night for two hours before we actually work."
A version of this story first appeared in the March 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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Despite Solitude, Lockdown Wasn't A Creative Boon for Screenwriters - Hollywood Reporter
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