You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.
If you can learn to be incredibly passionate about your work without fighting for it just because it's yours, that's a huge thing.
There are a huge amount of people who sell a TV pilot, every year, but most of them never get produced. It's very easy to make a living and never get anything produced.
You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.
Not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system.
The State trained us to make other people's terrible jokes work, which is the other part of the game when you're here.
When somebody would come in with a sketch that was not so good, you figured out in a room how to make that sketch work.
For a living I write stuff that I know is gonna sell to a studio and make a lot of money at the multiplex.
I liked writing, and I loved movies, obsessively loved movies, but I had never made the leap of thinking I would actually come out here and write stuff.
You write a spec, and you pour your heart and soul and life into a spec, and you think that spec is the movie that's going to sell and get made... I've never heard of anybody that happened to. What happens is, you write a spec, people get it, they see your writing, they see you're good, they bring you into their office and they say, "Boy, that spec was really good - we'll never make that in a million years. We have rights to the board game of Monopoly. What do you think about a Monopoly movie?".
Probably your first agent is going to be some guy who also handles dog acts.
