By Lisa Horan.
<div id="attachment_12849" style="width: 160px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-12849" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-12849" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Leah-Yananton-headshot-150x150.jpg" alt="Leah Yananton" width="150" height="150" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Leah-Yananton-headshot-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Leah-Yananton-headshot-250x250.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Leah-Yananton-headshot-50x50.jpg 50w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Leah-Yananton-headshot.jpg 440w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" />Leah Yananton</div>
Lust. Greed. Selfishness. Immorality.
It isn’t hard to find stories that center on some of society’s greatest ills, while sidestepping the negative consequences that inevitably result. Filmmaker Leah Yananton wasn’t interested in creating a film that celebrates decadence.
On the contrary, Yananton’s Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie, emphasizes the dark side of moral failures and one woman’s journey through brokenness and to a path back to the integrity that was destroyed as a result of her own poor choices.
As it turns out, writing the screenplay and realizing her dream of producing the film became a nine-year journey that would nearly bring Yananton to her own breaking point.
<div id="attachment_12846" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-12846" class="size-full wp-image-12846" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me.jpg" alt="Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie</div>
Step 1: Experience
Sophie, the central character of Surviving Me, (portrayed by Christine Ryndak) is a college junior struggling to navigate through a volatile social scene that is defined by hyper-sexuality and unscrupulous behavior. She isn’t a bad person. She actually means well, but her morals become compromised as she allows cultural pressures, her own self-centered desires, and insecurities to severely impair her moral compass. The consequences are devastating.
From fabricating an unfavorable story about her parents to overcome a financial aid crisis, to engaging in a love affair with her married poetry professor (played by Fredric Lehne) – at the expense of his kind wife (played by Mira Furlan) and Sophie’s adoring boyfriend (played by Vincent Piazza)– Sophie’s choices produce consequences she isn’t prepared to handle. “My goal was to identify the true cost of bad decisions and to show that, if you behave the way the world wants you to behave, everyone loses,” explains Yananton.
While the original idea for the story came to Yananton in a dream, she drew upon what she was witnessing around her – at Columbia University and society – to write the script. The time was post-9/11, and Yananton describes the environment she found herself in as chaotic and confusing.
“I felt like everyone had lost themselves, and I had fallen into the River Styx,” she explains. “Girls who called themselves feminists, weren’t acting in their best interest sexually. People were hurting themselves and each other under this banner of liberation.” Writing became a way for Yananton to fight for boundaries and assert her own ideals on integrity. 
<div id="attachment_12841" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-12841" class="size-full wp-image-12841" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-4.jpg" alt="Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-4.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-4-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-4-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-4-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie</div>
Step 2: Surrender
Her greatest fight, however, would be the one she had with herself, as she had to take drastic measures to ensure that her ideas made it onto the page. “Even though I was excited about the story, I was extremely antsy during the writing process and found it very difficult to sit in one place to get my thoughts down,” says Yananton.
Her radical solution: tying herself to a chair with a clothesline to prevent herself from getting distracted and getting up too often. “I basically had to seat belt myself to the chair and set a timer for 20 minute increments so I wouldn’t get up so much,” she explains.
As passionate as Yananton was about the story, her less than accommodating living situation also fueled her desire to complete the screenplay. “My writing desk was a hodge-podge sculpture of broken closet storage shelves with exposed staples that I had held up with a file cabinet and cinder blocks, and the view from the window of my roach-infested New York City apartment was a 6 inch-wide sliver of sky. Needless to say, I was determined to write my way out of my surroundings,” explains Yananton, with a chuckle.
<div id="attachment_12843" style="width: 237px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-12843" class="size-medium wp-image-12843" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-1-227x300.jpg" alt="Sketchbook for Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie" width="227" height="300" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-1-227x300.jpg 227w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-1-113x150.jpg 113w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-1-132x175.jpg 132w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-1-440x583.jpg 440w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-1.jpg 679w" sizes="(max-width: 227px) 100vw, 227px" />Excerpt from a sketchbook for Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie</div>
Though radical, the strategy worked, and Yananton was able to complete a first draft in three months.  Then, she put her script through test after test, acting scenes out herself and with other actors, creating collages of her visions for the story, drawing out a web of different causes and effects in her sketchbook, writing the story from different character perspectives, and trying out multiple endings.
Not only did the process help Yananton to identify the emotional through-line of the story, but also uncover just as much about herself as a writer as the characters she had created. “One of the most important revelations for me as a writer was the need to get outside of myself, and that was only possible when I opened the door in my mind and heart to surrender control,” she says.
“Sometimes a story can take the writer on a very unexpected (and thrilling) journey because the story has a life of its own. I believe that my role as a writer was to be a humble servant to the story. I found it was only when I surrendered control that I was able to allow the script to find its own light and truly find my characters, and they told me what they wanted to do.”
<div id="attachment_12845" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-12845" class="size-full wp-image-12845" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-3.jpg" alt="Sketchbook for Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-3.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-3-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-3-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-sketch-3-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Excerpt from a sketchbook for Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie</div>
Step 3: Toil
Yananton didn’t have anyone to surrender control to during the filmmaking process. Instead, she had to find a way to balance the multiple roles she had taken on – writer, director, producer, actor. “There were definitely times I asked myself, ‘What have I had gotten myself into?’” recollects Yananton. “I knew I wanted to write and direct, but my screenwriting professor told me that if I really wanted to learn how to write, I’d have to learn how to act.” Yananton followed suit by attending a part-time conservatory program over the next three years at the Neighborhood Playhouse and used what she had learned to dive headfirst into the role of Kiera, Sophie’s wild, overly-promiscuous friend.
Then, Yananton spent what she describes as two solid years of “obsessing” over the film and its every facet. She workshopped the script at NYC’s prestigious “Our Workshop East” after begging Artistic Director Lenore DeKoven to be a part of it. She practiced shooting test scenes with actors and discussed at length with DP, Larry Engel how she wanted the film to look. She became consumed with raising money and finding investors.
The burden of identifying financial backers for the film became the biggest challenge for Yananton to overcome. Like the character she had created, Yananton found herself navigating through Dante’s Inferno, as she had to find a way to finish the film in spite of setbacks in financing, scheduling, and post production. “The film had become my baby, and I had to fight with everything I had to get it completed,” says Yananton, who was able to secure a job as a fitting model after moving to LA to help her stay afloat financially. “I didn’t mean to be as ambitious as I wound up being, but I grew a lot through the process, and I’m grateful for the journey and the incredibly immersive experience it was.”
<div id="attachment_12840" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-12840" class="size-full wp-image-12840" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-2.jpg" alt="Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie" width="600" height="375" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-2.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-2-150x94.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-2-250x156.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/surviving-me-2-500x313.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Christine Ryndak as Sophie and Vincent Piazza as Jimmy in Surviving Me: The Nine Circles of Sophie</div>
Step 4: Fulfillment
Albeit grueling, the journey ultimately led Yananton to a “dream come true” experience when the film celebrated its world premiere at the Hollywood Film Festival. “I was incredibly honored because the mission of the Hollywood Film Festival is to recognize films that have messages with a social impact, so the fact that they recognized the message of my movie was amazing,” says Yananton.
She was also incredibly gratified by the audience’s response to the film. “They laughed at parts that I had hoped they would laugh at, and gasped at parts they should have gasped at,” says Yananton. “I thought, OK, I can die now!”
Especially moving to Yananton was the way the film resonated with people who represented different backgrounds, races, and ages, who expressed how the story “spoke to their souls”.  “I’ve been through some tough shit, and I wanted to talk about it and give my interpretation of the college experience,” says Yananton. “It’s not pretty, but it does tell a story about shedding childish behavior and taking responsibility for actions.
The thing was, I had worked in isolation for so long, I didn’t really know how the film would be received, so the fact that these people – who weren’t family members or friends – heard what I was trying to say and got it, added years back to my life. Everything I went through became worth it at that moment. ”
At this moment, Yananton no longer uses that homemade closet storage shelf desk to craft her stories. The desk in her LA apartment is, instead, an old vintage 1950s kitchen table that she pulled out of dumpster. “I guess I will always thrive on a little artistic chaos,” she admits, “but, I have a cat now who keeps me in check, so at least I don’t have to tie myself to a chair any more to get my stories written.”

Tying Yourself to a Chair: Writing Surviving Me

By Lisa Horan.
<div id="attachment_11934" style="width: 160px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/JLHeadshot.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-11934" class="wp-image-11934 size-thumbnail" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/JLHeadshot-150x150.jpg" alt="Jefery Levy" width="150" height="150" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/JLHeadshot-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/JLHeadshot-250x250.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/JLHeadshot-50x50.jpg 50w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/JLHeadshot-500x500.jpg 500w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/JLHeadshot.jpg 709w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /></a>Jefery Levy</div>
&nbsp;
A film about diaries. That’s what Writer/Director Jefery Levy had his mind set on doing when he started searching for a diary that was public domain and had the substance and heart worthy of being transformed into a film. Instead of a diary, however, he stumbled upon a novel about diaries – the diaries of an aging husband and his younger wife and their dark, twisted sexual relationship. He knew he had found something special, but he didn’t realize at the time that The Key would become the “most unique project” he’s done to date.
And Levy has three decades’ worth of projects to compare his experience to. He first entered the Hollywood film scene in 1984 when he co-penned the classic horror-comedy, Ghoulies with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001942/?ref_=tt_ov_dr">Luca Bercovici</a>. Since then, he has assembled an impressive list of TV directing (CSI, Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs) and screenwriting (Invincible, S.F.W., Rockula) credits.
But The Key is something wholly different. “As a director, I was looking for something that would enable me to use a fine arts photography approach and free me from having to record dialogue on set,” explains Levy. His goal was to focus solely on creating images, which would provide him the flexibility to work the script around what he shot and edited.
“I had this vision in my head of how I wanted the film to be, but, honestly, I didn’t know if it was going to work or not,” says Levy. “The process of making this film was unlike anything I had ever done.”
<div id="attachment_11824" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-11824" class="size-full wp-image-11824" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ghoulies.jpg" alt="Ghoulies" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ghoulies.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ghoulies-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ghoulies-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ghoulies-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Ghoulies</div>
This process involved Levy writing a very long, full working script, as opposed to an outline and working in a backwards sort of approach to the filmmaking process. “I gave the script, along with handheld recorders, to my actors (David Arquette and Bai Ling) and asked them to read all of their dialogue into the recorders at their leisure – while they were at home or at a coffee shop or wherever,” explains Levy. The recordings were transcribed, and what resulted was a three hour long script.
“We knew we’d have to cut it down by two-thirds, but we shot the script – this time with no dialogue.” After Levy put the scenes together, he cut the film down, created a brand new script, and wrote new VO dialogue for the actors. “It was a very unique process. The actors actually got to see the film and themselves in it while they were recording their voice overs, and that’s where the real ‘acting’ was done,” he explains. “Both David and Bai told me it was an amazing experience for them – like nothing they had ever done – and I have to say, their performances are pretty fantastic.”
<div id="attachment_11995" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-6.png"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-11995" class="wp-image-11995 size-full" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-6.png" alt="" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-6.png 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-6-150x85.png 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-6-250x141.png 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-6-500x282.png 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>The Key</div>
Visual Artistry with a Deeper Purpose
The visual quality of The Key is equally fantastic. Driven by intense images, the film is a concoction of Levy’s vision of creating the look and feel of a dream that had been captured in images, buried in the ground, and then later found and dug up. This vision wasn’t solely based on reaching an extraordinary aesthetic objective, but also to vividly depict the film’s underlying theme of aging and mortality. To best communicate his very detailed vision, Levy developed an intricate visual manual, much like the one Francis Ford Coppola had once used for one of his films. “I had worked with Sophia Coppola on a film, and I knew that Francis had made an in-depth visual guide to capture his vision for Dracula, and I thought it would be helpful to the crew to do the same for The Key.”
Levy’s 300-page “visual bible” was filled with visual references, from photos he had taken, to photos he had found, to artwork he had experimented with, to one artist’s renderings of aging.
It was Levy’s intent that the images would visually represent the marked arc of the film’s main character, played by David Arquette. “David’s character is not only losing his health, but he’s going insane more and more throughout the film,” explains Levy. To represent this self-destructive character arc, Levy gives the film a proportionately arcing destructive quality, applying a more destroyed, battered look to it as the movie progresses.
<div id="attachment_11826" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-11826" class="size-full wp-image-11826" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-1.jpg" alt="David Arquette as Jack in The Key (2014)" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-1.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-1-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-1-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/the-key-1-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />David Arquette as Jack in The Key (2014)</div>
While the overall result of Levy’s deliberate efforts is both stunning and palpable, reaching that visual plateau was challenging. “Since there was no dialogue and we shot the film out of order and the actors only shot together for about a week, I had to take copious notes to keep track of what part of the arc the actors were in and what their emotion was supposed to be at that point in the film,” says Levy. “That was probably the most difficult aspect of the process – keeping track of the story arcs in each scene.”
Challenging or not, the film’s images are impressively rich. Surprisingly, its major motion picture quality was not achieved at a high end studio; it took Levy and three additional editors nine months to edit the film from his home-based editing suite, which consisted of a laptop, a desktop, and Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.
<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-11823" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/adobe.jpg" alt="adobe" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/adobe.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/adobe-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/adobe-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/adobe-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />
Solace in Screenwriting
While Levy is most known for his success in network TV, directing shows like Profiler, Sliders, Monk, and Rescue Me, his heart has always been in film. “I got my start in screenwriting and prefer writing features to writing for TV,” says Levy. “I’ve worked in the business for a long time and tried my hand at writing for TV shows, but I never seemed to get into that world for some reason – maybe it’s because it’s more of a group thing, and I’m more of a solitary person,” he admits.
In fact, Levy attributes an introverted personality and a passion for paperbacks for driving him into the writing world. “I was a weird kid who loved books and read all the time,” explains Levy, who says losing himself in books and music was what got through a rough childhood. Writing would become the crux of his adult life.
After receiving his undergraduate degree in poetry from UCLA, he went on to film school at the university, and, at the age of 18, co-wrote Ghoulies, sold a handful of other screenplays, and was accepted into the Writers Guild.
In spite of his obvious talent, however, after S.F.W. in 1994, for one reason or another, circumstances prevented his films from being made. The screenplay he had written for the then-dating Sandra Bullock and Tate Donovan, for instance, got shelved because the couple broke up. Not long after, the film he had adapted from a novel and spent five years trying to get John Cusak and then unknown Cameron Diaz to star in was just about to go into production when Cusak decided he wanted to direct the film and Diaz blew up in Something About Mary, so the film was never made.
He was writing consistently, but for a long stretch, his screenplays never made it from the paper to the big screen and he spent the majority of his time in the director’s chair. Invincible, his last produced screenplay (co-written with Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, creators and executive producers of Chicago Fire for Dick Wolf) is perhaps the most fitting title for Levy, who never stopped writing or aspiring to get his films made. Instead, he tapped into his own inventiveness and technological advances in filmmaking to bring his stories to life.
<div id="attachment_11828" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-11828" class="size-full wp-image-11828" src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/invincible.jpg" alt="Byron Mann as Michael Fu in Invincible (2001)" width="600" height="338" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/invincible.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/invincible-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/invincible-250x141.jpg 250w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/invincible-500x282.jpg 500w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />Byron Mann as Michael Fu in Invincible (2001)</div>
And he’s got more stories to tell. In addition to The Key, he recently completed Me, a film about a washed up actress who sells a show about her delusional friend to reality TV. He’s also in the midst of a brand new film project, which is expected to go into production in 2016.
While Levy may not again take on a project quite as unique as The Key, his body of work is proof that whatever the project, it will be creatively stimulating and cleverly. Like Ghoulies, perhaps it will even become an unexpected classic.

The Key? No Dialogue on Set

by Lisa Horan
Born in the Ozarks, Longmire writer Tony Tost was always convinced that a career as a TV writer was nothing more than a pipedream. After all, that was just not the kind of opportunity that presented itself to people who grew up in places like he did—from the Ozarks to a nearly abandoned mining town in Washington State. Still, after coming to the realization that working at the local pickle factory just wasn’t his thing, his passion for writing blossomed during his studies at Green River Community College in Auburn, WA. After attending community college, Tost moved back to the Ozarks to study at the College of the Ozarks, feeding his writing appetite by studying poetry and theater. Though his pen was scribing stanzas, his heart longed to write screenplays. “I really wanted to go to film school, but I just didn’t know how to go from the Ozarks to California,” says Tost.  So instead of packing up for the West Coast after graduating, he headed to the University of Arkansas to work towards his MFA in Poetry.
<div id="attachment_5055" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tony-Tost.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5055" class="size-full wp-image-5055" alt="Tony Tost" src="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tony-Tost.jpg" width="600" height="450" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tony-Tost.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tony-Tost-150x112.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tony-Tost-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tony-Tost-75x55.jpg 75w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Tony-Tost-185x140.jpg 185w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>Tony Tost</div>
Poetry suited Tost. He started publishing poetry books and was honored with a Walt Whitman Award for Invisible Bride in 2004. Still, something was missing, and he wasn’t convinced he had found his calling. Taking the road more traveled by, Tost moved on to Duke University for a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. But in spite of his accomplishments and obvious gifts, he was always reminded of where he had come from. “On my first day as a Ph.D. student, I was at a meet and greet and one of the professors asked me what college I had come from. When I told him I had graduated from a school called College of the Ozarks, he literally turned around and walked away and never talked to me again,” says Tost. “It was a reminder that I came from place where people had anonymous jobs that made you invisible to everyone, and even if you knew you were intelligent and had certain powers of expression, you just got used to people not valuing you.”
Fortunately, Tost’s experience made him more determined than ever to prove himself. And gave him a revelation. “I was getting bored with poetry, so I began branching out and taking on other forms of writing,” says Tost. One of his first forays outside of the poetry realm was a book about Johnny Cash titled American Recordings. The experience was a turning point in Tost’s career. “I enjoyed writing the book so much that it got me thinking about doing more popular forms. Plus, while I had landed a pretty nice professor job at the University of Washington, I was desperately looking for a way out of academia,” said Tost. Nic Pizzolatto had just the solution.
A friend Tost met while studying at the University of Arkansas, Nic Pizzolatto had written a novel that had been optioned for a screenplay and several scripts that demonstrated such talent that he quickly landed an agent and moved to Los Angeles. During a visit, Pizzolatto told Tost how much more he enjoyed screenwriting than working in academia. He encouraged Tost to write screenplays. “Nic&#8217;s not the type to heap praise on anyone. To be honest, I think he mostly helped me out of loyalty,” says Tost. Pizzolatto’s intuition proved spot on. Tost’s first pilot script landed agents Jill Gillett and Sylvie Rabineau at RWSG Agency and manager Guymon Casady at Management 360 and generated a number of meetings with producers. The one with Longmire Executive Producers/Creators Greer Shephard, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny clicked, and he was offered a freelance writing job on the first season of the show.  Ironically, his first Hollywood writing gig wouldn’t be in spite of where he had come from, but rather, because of it. 
<div id="attachment_5056" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/368.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5056" class="size-full wp-image-5056" alt="Greer Shephard, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny's Longmire" src="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/368.jpg" width="600" height="257" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/368.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/368-150x64.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/368-300x128.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>Greer Shephard, Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny&#8217;s Longmire</div>
<h3>It’s About the Journey, Not the Short Cuts</h3>
As A&amp;E’s highest rated scripted drama for 2012, Longmire is set in the fictional town of Absaroka, Wyoming, and follows the life and experiences of the town’s sheriff, Walt Longmire. Walt, who is still coping with the loss of his wife, brushes off his pain—at least on the surface—so he can focus on investigating major crimes that are taking place in his town week after week. For Tost, the plot and setting couldn’t have been a more perfect match. “Most of the things that I write tend to be based on the male psyche, and from the perspective of someone who’s come from a small, blue collar town with some kind of violence in the air. Usually, my characters are people who are from the world they’re living in but not totally of that world, and that kind of theme shows up in the way they handle situations in their lives,” says Tost. As it turns out, that’s a common through-line in Longmire. “I think a big part of the reason I seemed appealing as a writer for the show was my upbringing in the Ozarks and my ability to draw from elements and worlds that people who jumped right from an Ivy League school to Hollywood just wouldn’t have access to,” Tost agreed.
Even after Tost landed the Longmire job, he remained an outsider to the process—at least from a geographical perspective. He and his wife, now in Seattle, packed up their belongings once again. But rather than moving to Los Angeles, they headed to Ann Arbor, MI, where his wife had been hired as a college professor. That meant a two-thousand mile separation between Tost and the center of the TV industry. Not only did he not live in Hollywood, but he had gotten his foot in the door with one industry contact and a spec pilot. He had broken all the rules on breaking in as a TV writer without knowing it.
Destiny had its way with Tost, but hadn’t taken him on a straight path. “A part of me wishes that I would have jumped right into screenwriting, but, creatively, I’m glad I took the detour into poetry because it really served my screenwriting career. Poetry is linking emotions through images to create an emotional sense of the world, and in a lot of ways, a good screenplay is based on linking images that interact to create their own emotional world and reality, so there’s a real similarity between the two genres,” says Tost. “I did have to fight with the fact that I hadn’t taken the shorter path, though,” he admits.
<div id="attachment_5057" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_202_04112013_AH_0145.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5057" class="size-full wp-image-5057" alt=" Robert Taylor and Katee Sackhoff in Longmire" src="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_202_04112013_AH_0145.jpg" width="600" height="399" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_202_04112013_AH_0145.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_202_04112013_AH_0145-150x99.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_202_04112013_AH_0145-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>Robert Taylor and Katee Sackhoff in Longmire</div>
<h3>Writer’s Challenge: Taking on Genre Transition</h3>
Tost also had to fight the doubts that had waged a war in his mind about his ability to become a part of the TV writing world. When Pizzolatto had suggested he try his hand at screenwriting, Tost felt hamstrung because of his background. Fortunately, Pizzolatto impressed upon Tost a lesson that every writer should take to heart: good writing is good writing.
“Nic told me that Hollywood didn&#8217;t want to shut out good writers. In fact, he said producers had an insatiable appetite for good writers, regardless of where they had come from, and he told me not to worry about connections and mingling and networking, but just put everything I had into writing an amazing pilot. I set my mind on writing one fantastic work that was not cynical and that was not trying to anticipate what people wanted, and told myself that’s what was going to get the right people interested,” Toth remembered.
Still, in spite of the “one fantastic work” he had successfully created, the transition from poetry to screenwriting wasn’t devoid of challenges. “There’s an art to constructing a well told, interesting mystery, and I had to learn how to construct one in a way that wasn’t cheap and cynical, but that embraced the genre and mode of storytelling.  It took me awhile to develop a facility for voice, character and dialogue, and I also had to and become competent in balancing the episodic story with serialized elements. Interweaving both the crime of the week with long-term stories is an art-form, but it’s become a lot easier for me this season.”
<div id="attachment_5058" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_206_20130523_UC_0291.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5058" class="size-full wp-image-5058" alt="Longmire" src="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_206_20130523_UC_0291.jpg" width="600" height="399" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_206_20130523_UC_0291.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_206_20130523_UC_0291-150x99.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_206_20130523_UC_0291-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>Longmire</div>
In addition, Tost’s poetry was meant to be read silently, which was definitely a strong contrast from the requirements he faced as a screenwriter. “The works that I had written weren’t connected to the mouth as much as they were the silent voice, but Longmire is obviously much different. I’m learning how to find delight in language and develop language that both hits the ear in an interesting way and is true to the characters that it’s coming from,” says Tost.
And let’s not forget about the high stakes associated with writing for episodic TV, a stark contrast from Tost’s experience inside the poetry bubble. “When you’re writing for TV, you know that there is going to be an audience. In poetry, you hope someone down the line will find your poems and read them, but the truth is, the audience for poetry has really disappeared, and a lot of the time, it’s only poets that read poetry. It’s a self-sustaining ecosystem,” says Tost. The stakes were exaggerated by the fact that Longmire represented Tost’s first foray into TV, and, as a result, he felt a tremendous amount of pressure to measure up. “During the first season, I just wanted to make sure the executive producers knew that they had hired the right person, and I just wanted to write well enough to keep my job,” laughs Tost. Couple this with the fact that Tost didn’t have the luxury of hopping in his car and having a face to face with the powers that be on a regular basis, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for writer’s apprehension. “There was definitely an element of anxiety associated with not being in LA and not being around the producers and the other writers. I did have times where I knew they were in the middle of producing and editing a show that I had written, and I was sitting in my office in Ann Arbor starting to feel insecure because I hadn’t heard anything from them. I think the distance and not being in the same time zone definitely amplified the anxiety,” remembers Tost.
<div id="attachment_5059" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_107_UC_05232012_0021.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5059" class="size-full wp-image-5059" alt="Longmire" src="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_107_UC_05232012_0021.jpg" width="600" height="399" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_107_UC_05232012_0021.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_107_UC_05232012_0021-150x99.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_107_UC_05232012_0021-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>Longmire</div>
Thankfully, the collaborative nature of TV writing tempered most of that anxiety. Unlike his solo experiences with poetry, writing for Longmire enabled Tost to collaborate with a team of other writers and producers. Tost would fly to LA for two weeks and be in a room with the executive producers all day, breaking down and creating a story scene-by-scene and act-by-act. Then he would fly home and write a one to two page story about the episode and the characters. “This process works so well because it starts from a collaborative place, and everything is not completely on my shoulders. I like the fact that there are other filters that my writing has to pass through, and I love seeing scenes that I’ve written that I thought were just so-so jump off the page because of the way they are acted or directed. Knowing that I’m surrounded by talented professionals and that my writing doesn’t have to carry everything is comforting,” says Tost.
Tost also found the more immediate connection with viewers a refreshing change from poetry. “One of the major philosophical differences in writing for TV is that you know there’s going to be an audience for your work, and the great thing about that is, I can actually speak to people and connect with them through my writing. With poetry, I just had to rely on a wild hope that someday, 50 years after my death, my poems and I would be discovered and I’d be able to connect with people then,” says Tost.
Tost’s connection to the Longmire viewership is already strong. One of his most gratifying moments as a TV writer was the response he received from viewers on his episode “Dog Soldier”— about a mythical Cheyenne figure. “There’s a scene in the episode in which the main character accepts the mythical figure, the dog soldier, as a real thing but also uses it as a weapon to play on the imagination and guilt of someone who he wants to confess of a crime. It was a tough scene to write, but I was really proud of how it turned out. I’ve gotten emails from people who have told me they haven’t seen anything like it in other shows, and that it helped to provide a dimension to the main character that they had never seen before. That’s been really gratifying,” says Tost.
<div id="attachment_5060" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_105_UC_05092012_0130.jpg"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5060" class="size-full wp-image-5060" alt="Longmire" src="http://192.254.190.185/~erikpsc/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_105_UC_05092012_0130.jpg" width="600" height="399" srcset="https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_105_UC_05092012_0130.jpg 600w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_105_UC_05092012_0130-150x99.jpg 150w, https://www.creativescreenwriting.com/cswcms/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/LM_105_UC_05092012_0130-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a>Longmire</div>
A July move to Los Angeles makes Tost an official member of the Hollywood writer’s club. The writer who was once snubbed because of his background isn’t being looked down upon any longer. Far from it. In addition to writing four episodes of Longmire this season, Tost recently sold an original pilot to Showtime. The show centers on a family that runs a trucking operation and truck stop that is partially legitimate and partially a front for a criminal business.  It’s setting… the Ozarks. Poetic justice, oh so sweet.

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Longmire writer Tony Tost

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