First Person: From the Screenwriters Lab

By D.W. Harper

At my first meeting at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, I saw that the title of my screenplay, Dreamland, was circled, and creative advisor Zach Sklar had scrawled “I love the title!” next to it. I guess it hadn’t occurred to me in a long time, but I suddenly thought to myself “hey, I love the title too,” and then, more or less all at once, realized the Lab wasn’t going to be how I imagined it, at all. I was more used to industry pitch meetings that began with questions like “what’s this weird title mean?” (the script is about the guy that bombed the Oklahoma City Building, after all) and then went downhill from there.

I’m not sure how I imagined it going: maybe 14 people with long white beards (women included) possibly wearing gowns, holding up score cards? Something as ludicrous, probably. Certainly not, “I love the title!” Definitely not Zach Sklar – who more or less is the one person in the world I would have wanted look at my screenplay – talking to me with genuine excitement about what was actually good and bad about the script.

It was after breakfast, and Zach and I were sitting at one of the tables, the bright light bouncing off the snow outside making it seem much earlier than it was. Across from us, Allison Anders was talking to Adam Bhala Lough about his new project, I think maybe David Veloz was talking with Vald Lazar at another table. Someone else was over by the fireplace. Ski jackets and scarves were everywhere. It was a great room to be in.

So it was my first meeting of the workshop, and I spent the first ten minutes feeling goofily self conscious. After that, I got on task and starting listening to everything Zach had to say; some of the most incisive, respectful, and useful things that have ever been said about my script. I did a lot of talking too, probably more than I should have. But Zach clearly got it – the good and the bad. I got really excited and wanted to talk for hours, and that’s what happened, miraculously, in every meeting.

The advisors are all people who understand that whatever it is that makes a good movie is always a moving target. And as much wisdom and experience as they brought to bear, they also brought a very real humility to the task of helping me with my screenplay, and that’s what was so completely radical about the experience. I went on to meet with Howard Rodman, Craig Lucas, Naomi Foner, David Veloz, and Frank Pierson, and all of them focused on my particular project and its particular life, its needs, its possibilities, appreciating the work and approaching the re-write with the simple sense that we were somehow in this together. Outside of my writing partners and film collective, I hadn’t expected to ever enjoy that kind of community.

I met the other advisors, too. . .at dinner, at screenings, at drinks. I yelled at Guillermo Arriaga for claiming that, “America is a meritocracy,” and I was yelled at by Frank Pierson for my rather economical first film.I talked about music some - but not nearly enough - with Allison Anders... And hanging out with the other Fellows was as much a privilege, and as edifying, as any of the formal meetings. These are the people who will make the movies that I will love, and I hope to make a movie they will love – and that sense of fraternity is, now that I think of it, maybe one of the best things I took from Lab.

Now, I don’t like these kinds of things – wrap-up letters from the club retreat, concert reviews, party reports, whatnot - they’re so often problematic, and rarely do justice to the event, nor, do they usually serve any clear purpose past self-congratulation. But, smiling, here goes: I have say how enormously happy I am that the workshop truly was, above all, about the work and about making a community. I am profoundly grateful to Michelle and Matthew and Michael and Ilyse and Alesia and everyone else who worked so hard to provide this amazing environment for good honest work and community to grow. Community is so rare to come by, and it is only through the vision and sweat of people like Michelle that community is ever forged.

I returned to my life and my ten dozen commitments and the great scrambling mess of trying to get my next movie made feeling very different, not simply because of the support, the direction and advice, the connections made. But because, most of all, of the great counter-example that the workshop represents to the film business as usual. We’re in this thing together, after all.

D.W. Harper was in residence at the January Screenwriters Lab to develop Dreamland, his current feature film project which looks into the heart and mind of Timothy McVeigh.