REELot Exclusive with Writer JEFFREY PORRO
February 13, 2008—New York, NY John Contrubis
Thanks to an artificially prolonged adolescence (I spent more than seven years in graduate school), I was almost 30 before I started learning one of life’s most important lessons: being talented is important, but sometimes who you know is what really matters. Learning that lesson helped my very first movie project get sold, and then (finally) produced. My introduction to this fact of life came shortly after I finished grad school and went to Washington, DC with a newly minted international relations PhD in hand. I walked into the offices of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, expecting to be welcomed with open arms. Instead, I was politely told that they received ten resume’s a week from PhDs, so “We’ll keep you on file.” I knew what that meant—no matter how glittering my credentials might be, I didn’t have a shot. But I did start to wonder how the staffers who somehow got jobs on the committee got in the door.
Fast forward about 15 years. Over time I came to understand that, in a city filled with super bright accomplished people, having a good resume or good publications or good references was not enough. To get people to notice all the attributes your mother is so proud of, you had to have connections. You had to build a network of people who not only knew your strengths but also had the clout to bring you to the attention of someone who might actually pay you.
I was hit over the head with this lesson when I became a freelance editor and writer in the early 1990s. I would do a good job on a newsletter or speech and then sit around waiting for the phone to ring. Didn’t happen. I had to take a crash course in how to market myself, how to build the connections I needed to find clients.
Like just about every freelance writer I know, my secret ambition was to write fiction. I tried some novels that didn’t go anywhere. And then, in the mid-1990s, I decided to give Hollywood a try. A little research quickly showed me that Hollywood was like DC, only more so: staggering numbers of hugely talented and accomplished people were desperately struggling to get noticed by the tiny number of people who could give them work.
As the Internet developed, it was all to easy to find sites featuring heart rending stories of very talented writers who had written terrific screenplays that either didn’t get read, or didn’t get sold, or didn’t get made. So, though I had a couple of ideas for screenplays, I realized I wasn’t ever going to get any farther with them than I did with the Foreign Relations committee, unless…..
The good news was I went to grad school at UCLA. While there I decided to take karate. Since that at the tail end of the 1960s, my notion was that I’d learn what I needed to protect myself from the rednecks who shot Peter Fonda at the end of Easy Rider. It turned out that most of the instructors at this dojo were those rednecks, with one big exception: a brown belt named Bob Eisele.
Bob was a pretty scary looking guy in those days. Not that tall, but a real fireplug of a build, capped by body builder arms and shoulders. As it turned out, he and I were just about the only guys in the place who read books, went to serious movies, talked politics and liked Jimi Hendrix.
So we became good buddies, in and out of the dojo. Bob was a fine arts major, writing plays. We hung out a lot, ingested various chemicals, bemoaned the struggle to find the right woman, listened to music—basically bonded through the whole 60s thing.
We stayed good friends even after I moved to DC. Bob made his way up the Hollywood food chain, teaching writing at community college, getting a play writing grant, writing for “episodic” TV, becoming a producer for a couple shows, and writing some TV movies.
In short, I was blessed. By the time I had a couple ideas for screenplays, my friendship with Bob also meant I had a connection to Hollywood, a network of one.
Plus Bob is absolutely honest and a good judge of ideas. He told me the first couple projects I brought him weren’t promising. Then, I read about this champion debate team from tiny Wiley College, a black college in the Jim Crow south. I did some more research, decided the story could be a film, and went to Bob. He liked it a lot, and together we did more research, including interviewing surviving team members. Then we put together a treatment.
Bob had a great track record and had worked with Harpo, so they agreed to meet with us. We went in together to do a pitch, and …..we made the sale: Bob got a contract to write the script.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m very proud of the treatment we put together. But I’m absolutely convinced no producer would have spent 3 seconds looking at it without the right connections.
As exciting as the sale was, our real dream was to see “The Great Debaters” get made. Bob wrote a dynamite, inspiring script. But, as you might expect, the path from that script to production was anything but smooth, and took almost a decade. At times it looked like the project was dead. At other times it looked like the movie would get made from somebody else’s draft (and without my name on it.)
When Denzel Washington, who knew Bob, read his screenplay and liked it, we knew we finally had a chance to get it made. Though other drafts were written, Denzel always came back to Bob’s script. .
I know that throughout the process we had talent going for us, especially the excellence of Bob’s script. But my very first film project would never have seen the light of day, if I hadn’t taken karate and learned how important it is to connect with the right people at the right time.