Danny Strong on How to Write Smart Scripts | Danny Strong | Big Think

Danny Strong on How to Write Smart Scripts

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Danny Strong talks about politics as subject matter and how he wrote and sold a smart script in Hollywood.

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Danny Strong:

Danny Strong is best known for the five years he played Jonathan Levenson on the landmark television series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for which he was named "One of the top ten scene stealer's on television" by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is also widely recognized for his four seasons as Doyle on "Gilmore Girls" and for his starring role opposite Amanda Bynes in the teen comedy "Sydney White." His script Recount, an HBO original film about the 2000 election debacle in Florida, was voted number one on the 2007 Black List, an annual list of the years top screenplays as determined by Hollywood development executives. Danny was named by Variety magazine as one of their "Top Ten Screenwriters to Watch" for 2007.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How politically informed are you?

Danny Strong: I’m not a junkie, but I’m pretty well informed, you know. I mean, I read a few articles everyday. I go to the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post. I figure two different sides. And I like to go to the Washington Post, just different, you know, but just a few articles everyday. I don’t know what bills are about to be passed and where the votes are at that point on that particular afternoon. But I also really enjoy political films. And I like to read non-fiction books on these events. You know, when I had seen “Stuff Happens”, I had read a number of books that clearly the playwright had use, the Woodward books, Richard Clark’s book, Suskind’s book. And so seeing how he had turned these books that I had read into a riveting piece of drama, was I think part of my mindset in wanting to do something like that. And that’s what I ended up doing on “Recount.” I ended up turning the leading books on the recount into a piece of drama.

Question: Is there a bias against smart scripts in Hollywood?

Danny Strong: I don’t think there is, because people went insane over the script in Hollywood. They loved it. I think smart scripts are hard to write, but they’re also, it’s hard to have a script with intelligent ideas that function as a movie, that is actually entertaining. And people were very excited about this script in Hollywood, because it was entertaining. And it’s got to do that first, because that’s what movies are. If you want an intellectual discourse on a subject matter, read a book on it. But movies are characters seeking goals, and when a smart script comes around people, like I said, to this script, everyone wanted to meet with me and talk with me about it. We had so many amazing, amazing directors that wanted to do it, which is very rare for an HBO movie of this budget. We had people fighting over it that direct 60, 70 to 200 million dollar studio movies, and the budget for our film was 14 million dollars. It ended up being 15 million, which is amazing what Jay Roach did with that budget. I mean, just the fact that we had Jay Roach as the director, who is one of the most sought after directors in Hollywood. He’s one of the most successful. Actors love him, and a dirty little secret about making a movie is you have to get some movie stars in it. That’s one of the keys to getting any movie made.

Topic: Describe your research process.

Danny Strong: So I get home. Why don’t we just start that. I drive home. I get home. I go online. I actually hit pay dirt pretty quickly because John Dean of Watergate fame had become obsessed with the recount. So he had written a story for Salon.com reviewing every book that he had read on the recount. There was this story in which there were 20 books with a little synopsis of every book. I mean, it couldn’t have been more helpful to me. And there were two books in particular that talked about the ground wars, how the lawyers fought the ground wars. And I immediately thought, okay, well if there’s a movie, that’s the movie, the lawyers fighting the ground wars. So I ordered the two books, Jeffrey Toobin’s “Too Close to Call”, “The Accidental President” by David Kaplan. Read those two books.

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