The Black List Interview: Jacob Isser
Today on the blog, we chat with Jacob Isser, the writer of HOSERS, which will be given the Black List Live treatment as a part of Fast Company’s Innovation Festival, running November 9–13 in New York City. The live read of HOSERS, a comedy pilot found on the site, will be staged on Monday, November 9 — we’ve got cast announcements coming soon! You can check out a three-page sample of HOSERS here: HOSERS Excerpt
The Past:
What was the first film that had a major impact on your life?
Well, STAR WARS pretty much set the bar. That movie got me right down to my little kid soul. Even today, I get chills just hearing a few notes of the score. But the film I always reference, and the one that probably has more influence on my writing today, would be RAISING ARIZONA. The skewed comic genius of that movie, that incredibly irreverent yet precise world that the Coen Brothers plant us in, is just magical to me.
Was there a single film that made you want to be a screenwriter? How else did the decision to pursue that career evolve?
In a weird way, it was actually GOOD WILL HUNTING. I originally came out to L.A. to be an actor. Somewhere along the line a friend and I decided to write a screenplay to star in, our rationale being that if Matt and Ben could write their own movie and win an Oscar, then we damn well could too. This was incorrect. Suffice it to say, you will not be reading that script anytime soon. Partly because it’s written longhand on a legal pad. But I discovered that writing was a far better fit for me than acting, and I haven’t stopped since. I use a computer now.
The evolution has been the addition of TV. Until recently, I wrote features exclusively and thought of television as a foreign land where I didn’t speak the language. But when I started taking meetings on my last spec, several people told me I had a voice for TV, so I’ve started to explore it. It’s been challenging to scale down my feature instincts, but what’s on TV right now is so rich and inventive and exciting that it’s worth the learning curve. Plus, I wrote with a partner for so long that I used to describe my scriptwriting process as a six-month conversation, so the idea of a writer’s room is kind of perfect for how I like to work.
Most writers have to have “day jobs” in order to stay afloat. What was the strangest job you ever had before becoming a writer?
I don’t know how strange it is, but I had a cool job for a little while, writing music video treatments for a production company. The idea was to come up with a music video concept for the company to use as a pitch tool, so it had to be engaging and visual — good training for the screenplay treatments I write today. They’d send you a song that hadn’t been released yet, maybe with a few guidelines, and you would listen to it and just conjure up music video ideas out of the blue sky. One of my treatments became the video for Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up The Sun,” which I thought was pretty cool — and the closest I’ll ever come to being a rock star.
The Present:
How do you find ideas and how do you choose which ones to work on?
I have absolutely no idea! It’s just something I have to feel my way through each time, and every project seems like I’ve come to it differently. I’ve gotten ideas from news stories, I pull from my own life, I’ve had concepts hit me out of the blue, and I’ve deliberately sat down and decided to write something in a certain vein, then just muscled my way to an idea. I will say that I gravitate towards bigger concepts, and I tend to have a long gestation period for ideas. If I can come back to something after six months and it still seems interesting, there’s a good chance it goes on the short list.
Walk us through a normal day of writing for you. Any special habits to keep the muse happy?
Lots and lots of pacing and swinging a nerf bat. There’s surprisingly little writing, actually. Mostly it’s just me planning out what I’m going to write in painstaking detail, talking out ideas and jokes and obscure, esoteric story problems with my poor wife, bless her patient heart, then kind of sneaking up on my keyboard, banging out a scene, then jumping out of my chair as fast as I can. Once a scene is written, then I can settle in and really go to work revising it into something I feel good about, but I don’t like rough drafts, so I sort of have to trick myself into writing that first pass.
Which films are keeping you inspired at the moment?
Honestly? HOT TUB TIME MACHINE. I don’t even know if I can explain it — something about the freewheeling balls-to-the-wall absurdity of that movie just gets to me in exactly the right way. Also anything Paul Feig is doing. Also David Wain. And there’s a ton of great TV that gets me fired up, from SILICON VALLEY to PORTLANDIA to HOUSE OF CARDS to THE GOLDBERGS to BLACKISH. I read a lot of scripts too — some of my favorite and most influential scripts are the unproduced ones. There’s a lot of inspiration out there, is my point.
The Future:
If you could make one film, with no restrictions in place, what would that film be?
Is this a trick question? Mine, obviously. Any of them would be fine, but if we’re picking just one, I’ll go with the script I sold to Sony with my former partner, a really fun, slightly Kaufmanesque supernatural comedy called DANNY GRAVES’ MAN CAVE. On the TV side, it would definitely be the project I’m working on now — a broad serialized comedy with dark crime elements that I’m really excited about.
What would you be doing if you weren’t a writer?
Going outside occasionally?
Dinner with three of your favorite writers and/or filmmakers, dead or alive. Who’s coming to dinner? Who picks up the check?
William Goldman — I got an early and delightful introduction to the business by reading his books. The fact that he’s written several of my all-time favorite movies doesn’t hurt.
Greg Daniels and Michael Schur — every pilot I write, I’m just trying to make it as good as PARKS & RECREATION.
Steven Spielberg — this is on the advice of a majority of my relatives, who told me I should call him up when I got to L.A. Certainly he would want to hear from me, as we are both Jewish, they said.
The Black List:
How did you first hear about The Black List?
Through DoneDealPro and Deadline. I’ve always loved Franklin’s end-of-year Black List, and so I followed this site from the beginning.
Since using The Black List, how has your career been impacted?
The Black List has been great in terms of exposure. I’ve had my work downloaded a lot, I’ve been able to get reads by mentioning that a script did well on the site, and now for the first time, I’ll get to see something of mine performed — the Black List is hosting a live reading and panel discussion with my pilot HOSERS at the Skirball Center in New York this November, as part of the 2015 Innovation Fest. Franklin also referred me to Nikki Finke, who published one of my short stories on her showbiz fiction website, HollywoodDementia.com. I’m very grateful for everything the site has done.
Any tips for writers interested in the site?
All I can tell you is how I use it, so your mileage may vary. For me, the Black List has been most helpful as a rough gauge of how effectively my work is landing. Particularly with comedy, I want to know that someone who doesn’t know me is going to get my jokes, I want to know that I didn’t miss a glaring plot or logic hole, and I want to know that my intentions with the script are coming across. I’ve been fortunate to have my work well-reviewed on the site, so a secondary strategy for me is to try and push my scripts onto the top lists — which my manager and I can then use as a selling point to promote the script. There’s so much hesitation in this industry, just to have an endorsement like the Black List goes a long way in reassuring people that a project has been vetted. It’s like prequalifying for a loan.
