By Matthew Wade Reynolds.

Once upon a time, a young aspiring writer fresh out of college could write a letter to a television producer, asking for advice. Not only would he hear back, but he might just have lunch waiting for him at a venerable Los Angeles deli, with a handful of the producer’s friends eagerly awaiting to see what he’d written, and offer suggestions – not to mention a job!

It may seem like a fairy tale, but screenwriter Rob Edwards specializes in fairy tales, and after that lucky break, he would go on to write on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and The Princess & The Frog – both stories of fish out of water, just like he once was – a wide-eyed kid from Detroit trying to make his way in Hollywood.

But it’s not all luck – when asked what he had to offer, Rob was ready with not just one script, but several. In this interview, the prolific film and television writer elaborates on how he went from getting coffee to writing scripts, why Final Draft and cell phone cameras make things too easy and how he made sure he was ready when his big moment arrived. Will you be?

You were a writer on A Different World (NBC, 1987-93) In Living Color (Fox, 1990-94) and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (NBC, 1990-96) – they were mainstream hit shows with predominantly African American but that nobody even seemed to notice, which seems rarer today.

I was just telling stories from one own life. In Fresh Prince, I was that kid, going from the city to this preppy environment, Cranbrooks Schools. I kept finding tons of people who had the exact same experience. It didn’t matter that the character we were telling it through was black. What mattered was that the story we were telling was true.

What kind of exposure to film did you have growing up?

I’m from Detroit originally and there was a movie theater about a block and a half away from my house. My friends and I, when we were 10 years old, would get together and walk down to this theater, every week, and watch see whatever was there. Of course at the time in Detroit it was all the Fred “The Hammer” Williamson movies, Bruce Lee stuff, Pam Grier.

Looking back on your shows, and others produced by the prolific team of Carsey-Werner Productions, what’s striking is how natural they feel, not forced, manic or over-written.

A lot of what they were saying was, “No jokes, just real people in real situations, and those real situations will be funny.” Not sitcom style, three jokes per page. We did a similar thing on the show Roc (Fox, 1991-94). We were live – the problem was if people didn’t laugh at a joke on live TV So what we had to do was just write behavior, attitude, and trust that the audience would laugh, give them places to laugh – if they were so inclined (laughs).

What was it like to write for someone as talented as Will Smith? This was early in his career, was there a moment you saw that he was destined for superstardom?

I saw it right off the bat, I saw it in the pilot. You’re always looking for someone with spark, who looks like he can get away with stuff. He had the ability to play the serious along with the jokes.

There was one episode where Richard Roundtree (Shaft) was a guest character, and Will is dating his daughter. The daughter tells Will she likes rough guys from the ‘hood, and the father likes buttoned-down preppies from Bel Air Academy. And so Will had to do this thing where he had to turn – while dancing with the girl he had to be one way and when talking to Richard Roundtree he had to do the other. It was split-second timing, he had to go back and forth between the two characterizations. I’ll bet if you had a hundred actors just two of them could have pulled it off, and Will just slam-dunked it. It was an early episode and we realized, we could do anything with this guy.

Some go into writing to escape a humdrum existence, others grow up in a creative environment. But your father was a doctor while your mother was a research chemist. How does a writer emerge from that household?

I was actually encouraged to become a doctor. I had to come up with a great excuse not to be one – part of it was explaining to my father that laugher was the best medicine!

Was there something to their disciplined approach?

If I came home and said this movie was good, my parents would turn to me and say “Why?” What makes it good? How do you quantify a good movie or a bad movie? They need evidence to back it up, three good examples, backed up by a summation and then something that proves the opposite.

Screenwriting, a lot of it – when you’re in the weeds trying to figure it out – is mathematical. It’s about solving puzzles. In that way, I really thank my parents for having those dinner conversations.

Still, there was a time when schools really didn’t offer any kind of film studies. You were on your own.

I went to Cranbrooks Schools, in Michigan. It was a boarding school, which emphasized art and there was a huge theater department there. I wrote a bunch of short stories when I was in high school, I had a comic strip. On weekends I made movies.

But I don’t think they knew quite what to do with it. They had a teacher who didn’t really know much about film, and he said, “Yeah, sure go ahead. Make a movie.” And I made this really cute film, Team, about a selfish basketball player who hogs the ball and in the end the team decides to not pass him the ball to teach him a lesson. A lot of my friends were basketball players, I got a bunch of team uniforms, got the coach to lend us a hand.

It came out pretty good – for a 16 or 17-year-old kid. I wound up in the same student festivals with some others who went on to become really phenomenal filmmakers. I had top billing over Sam Raimi! I think it was alphabetical…

It’s impressive because the technology then didn’t lend itself to spontaneity.

It was impossible. Nobody told you how to frame a shot, how to do lighting. I think there was one book on independent filmmaking. Super 8 cameras were kind of strange, you couldn’t watch it immediately; you had to wait weeks and weeks before you saw anything. I think I had a cassette tape recorder for sound.

But I’m old school in just about every way you can be. I write on three-by-five cards, on paper, then I type that, and last but not least I type it into Final Draft. I think at a certain point it gets too easy. You can sit down and start typing a script on Final Draft and have it look beautiful – and have it be meaningless.

New writers need to really look at the tools and say, some of them are making things so easy that I’m not thinking.

From there you went on to study film at Syracuse College. How did you make the leap to Hollywood?

I wrote this letter to (M*A*S*H Executive Producer) Thad Mumford, and I asked him, what would he tell his 17-year-old self? And he gave me great advice: read everything you can, read as many biographies as you can, and get out to Hollywood as soon as you can.

In the biographies, I found that all these guys had all been stand-up, so while I was doing that, he was talking me up to guys in Hollywood. So when I came out I had a nice soft landing. They got me this job at M-T-M (Mary Tyler Moore Productions) working basically in the soda department – the Soda Distribution Department. (laughs)

But once you got on the lot, once you can get past the guards, you’re golden. I made my rounds and said, “Here’s your sodas, and here’s my spec. Both are equally refreshing!”

Two guys went out to lunch one day and both had shows that had gotten picked up, and one of them said, “Hey I think I’m going to hire the soda guy as one of my writers, his spec is really funny,” and the other says, “Hey I was going to do the same thing.” They both kind of raced back to their offices and called me.

All that without an agent!

I didn’t have an agent. They both called their agents and had them call me. Once you do that – it just lit up, and everyone was saying, “Who are you and why are you in play?” (laughs). I was just this guy making 200 bucks a week delivering sodas and next I was meeting all the major partners at all the major agencies.

A good portion of people who are successful run their own shop. The agents are partners in it, but they don’t get all the work. If anything, the client is bringing in 50 percent of it.

And the thing is, once you’ve broken in, you’re still not done. You have to break in again, every couple years, sometimes every year or two or three times a year.

They say it’s about being in the right place at the right time, but you have to know what place is right, what time is right.

On The Princess and the Frog, (2009) I had worked with Ron Clements and John Musker before on Treasure Planet, (2002) and they had this great movie that was right in my strike zone. But we were just talking about it, and I said I know just what I would do with it and they said, “Great, how soon can you come over?” I started working and the agent kind of caught up with me.

It’s almost like the old studio system. You have a bunch of guys who speak your language.

The Princess and the Frog was essentially the first Disney animated film to feature an African American in the leading role. Did you feel any pressure with that historical import?

There were two things. I have a bunch of friends who are film theorists and then I have my writing friends.

I like that you drew a distinction.

They’re in very different worlds! So I sent this email to a friend who is a professor at Syracuse. I said, “Hey I’m up for this movie, and I was wondering if you would tell people and ask them for input. The emails came back in three categories.

One I discarded right away, which was “Don’t make the movie. Disney has no standing to make this movie because of past whatever.” But any corporation that has been around for a while has the same exact history – Coca-Cola, Ford, if you were around in the early ‘20s and ‘30s you probably had some politically incorrect things on your record.

Others said, instead of making it about an imaginary princess, it should be based on a real princess, who dug the first well in Africa or something like that. And I thought, boy that would not be fun at all! I’m just a ham and egg guy from Detroit, those movies I wouldn’t watch myself.

But then I got like 30 emails that said, “I’ve got a daughter, and I’ve been praying for this movie all my life and no matter what you do, just please make a good movie.” And that was the thing I took to heart. All you can do is make your own favorite movie. (Frequent Pixar director) Andrew Stanton once said, “Be a filmgoer first, and a filmmaker second.”

You’ve developed a rare screenwriting website, which is free to users. How did that come about?

They always say you have to know somebody in Hollywood. When I first came to Los Angeles, I would go to Art’s Deli – that was a place writers lived – and people would read my script. They were generous with their time.

When I got to that point, when I had 20 or 30 years on me, I looked around and I just didn’t see it. I didn’t see the writers at Art’s, didn’t see that many mentoring things going on.

A key storytelling concept you mention is Heart, Head and Hand. Or maybe that’s out of order.

They can be in any order!

Where did it come from?

I’ve seen it used in music, in art and painting. It’s a universal artistic concept in how to make good art good.

Heart is what you bring to it – things that make you cry, or laugh, that you’re entertained by. For me, I like anything about fathers and sons.

Head is the innovative idea that moves the artwork forward. Maybe you’re combining genres, or you have a different spin on something. Like in Memento – what if we tell it backward?

And then Hand is your craftsmanship. That it’s timed out right, that the action works.

If you Heart and Head, but no Hand, then you have a good idea but you’re telling it poorly.

If you have Hand and Head, but no Heart, then it could be a great idea, but no one’s going to connect to it.

If you have Heart and Hand, then there’s no new idea to it. We’ve seen it before.

You need a balance of all three.

What’s the most common mistake you see in new writers?

People don’t realize how technical a script is. They’ll just start writing. The first scene will be 12 pages long or longer. There are questions they haven’t answered: Do you know what needs to be in this section of the movie? What’s expected to be there? It’s helpful to find another movie that is a structural cousin of the one you’re working on.

For The Princess and the Frog we relied heavily on It Happened One Night (1931). But we reversed the roles: we made Tiana the Clark Gable part and Prince Naveen was Claudette Colbert. There was a wonderful way that movie went from beat to beat with the love story. It got us out of a ton of jams.

What advice would you give your new 17-year-old self, which reflects the way the world or business has changed since your arrival?

Make a YouTube video. Right now we’re in this really wonderful era when you can get the attention of anybody on YouTube. The studio heads are watching, everybody sends clips along to everyone else. If you’ve got some web series on that is different, everyone is going to see it. You don’t need to have a million copies of your screenplay in your trunk.

It’s the same as getting a job before an agent. Prove that you can do it. Find some people who can actually act. Show that you can make five minutes of the most fantastic movie in the world.

Eventually somebody is going to hear your song and you’ll be off to the races.

Rob Edward’s website can be found at www.robedwards.net