Everybody has to start somewhere in show business. In my case, it was the night shift at Warner Bros.
I had answered an ad for a temp job at Warner Bros. Studios, on the actual backlot. The job title was script typist, and the work entailed typing sections of screenplays and teleplays that had been bought or were already in production, putting them into proper industry format, and creating revision drafts for production.
It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds, but working on an actual motion picture lot was pretty awesome.
Another perk—or depending on how you looked at it, challenge—was that I worked the night shift, from 11:00 PM to 8:00 AM, Monday through Friday. On my very first night, I decided to take a nap in the backseat of my car during my half-hour break.
Unfortunately, I slept a little too well and woke up a few hours later!
Luckily for me, I’m a heck of a typist—I average close to 100 words per minute—so all I got was a warning.
My fellow workers had all kinds of Hollywood ambitions. Some wanted to be actors, comedians or singers, while others were perfectly happy just to have a steady job. This was the early ’90s, so there were no cellphones or internet to distract us, and over the years I got my hands on some amazing screenplays—along with more than a few duds.
One screenplay in particular arrived as a literal cut-and-paste job, with strips of typewritten scenes actually pasted onto legal-size pages.
I remember typing one enormous two-page monologue and thinking, This is insane. It’s great—but how the hell is this ever going to get made?
Well, it did.
The script was True Romance.
The writer was a then-unknown Quentin Tarantino.
Over more than thirteen years, I probably typed well over a thousand screenplays, and the experience became an education in itself. Warner Bros. had its own particular formatting requirements, but after spending thousands upon thousands of hours working with scripts, screenplay structure, rhythm, presentation and format became practically hardwired into my subconscious.
If I didn’t instinctively know what a screenplay should look like—or read like—before I started working there, I certainly did by the time I left.
I was also called upon to transcribe completed television shows and films, typing the dialogue verbatim for captioning and other purposes. So I was literally being paid to watch everything from Star Wars: The Clone Wars and The Bachelor to Lethal Weapon.
Not a bad way to make a living.
One of my favorite parts of the job happened during my breaks. I would jog around the empty Warner Bros. backlot, through Western Town, New York Street and later Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls. In those middle-of-the-night hours, there were times when I felt like I was the only person on the entire lot—like the last man on Earth wandering through one abandoned movie world after another.
It was pretty incredible.
As the years went on, co-workers came and went. Eventually, the powers-that-be moved the script department off the main lot and about a mile down Barham Boulevard into an office building. Not long after that, the night shift disappeared too.
The good times were beginning to fade.
Eventually, Warner Bros. and I parted ways.
But those years typing scripts, transcribing shows and absorbing thousands upon thousands of pages became an education I could never have gotten in a classroom. And when Kevin and I began seriously pursuing our own screenwriting careers, everything I had absorbed during those years inevitably came with me.
Long before I became a professional screenwriter, I was learning how screenplays worked—one page at a time.
– Bradley Marcus
Former Warner Bros. Typist