CAREER

Ryan Shrime On “Please Don’t Die, Robert Berman”

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As part of Creative Screenwriting Magazine’s commitment to showcasing screenwriting talent, we’re interviewing Ryan Shrime. He was listed as one of ISA’s Top 25 Screenwriters to Watch. Let’s see his musings on his evolution as a screenwriter.

Describe your unique personal and professional background and the specific project that attracted ISA interest?

I was born and raised in Dallas, TX, the youngest child of Lebanese immigrants. My parents came to Texas during the Lebanese civil war with the intention of moving back in a year or so. One never expects wars to go on as long as they do, I guess, so I was born there [Dallas], and over 40 years later, it’s still home. Well, insofar as home is where your mom is. I had a pretty normal childhood, I guess, for an Arab kid growing up in Texas going to a tiny (my graduating class was 27 kids), all-boys, a Catholic school run by Hungarian monks.

I was four years old when E.T. was released. When I left theater I knew that was I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I wanted to make movies. For most of my life, that meant being an actor. So when I started getting into more trouble at school, and my form master (my school ran on a European system of forms, rather than grades) told my mother that we needed to manage my “exuberance”, she enrolled me in an “acting” camp.

It wasn’t an acting camp at all, but a show choir camp. So, at 14, I found myself singing in malls, which wasn’t quite the trajectory I had imagined for my life. But singing led to dancing, which led to musicals, and by the time I graduated from high school, my acting career was underway. With a four-year detour to study Economics at Harvard—because I got in and how could I say no?

Shortly after moving to NY, I hopped on board producing the NY Arab-American Comedy Festival and started my own Middle Eastern Comedy Festival when I moved to LA, in 2008. Hungry for sketches, I started writing my own, and I haven’t stopped writing since. I entered my screenplay, Please Don’t Die, Robert Berman, in the Emerging Screenwriters Competition in 2018, and it was through my success in the competition that I linked up with the ISA.

Why did you decide to become a screenwriter above all other careers?

I’ve actually never made that decision. Acting is still an equal love for me. I guess I’m more interested in telling stories than focusing on one particular medium/career through which to do so. I’m currently outlining a novel, exploring the seeds for a graphic novel series, and acting every chance I get. I’m even designing a board game. I love screenwriting, and movies have been such an integral piece of my artistic development, but I’m learning more and more that rather than assume every idea must culminate in a screenplay, the story ideas give clues to how they want to be expressed. I find that discovery a thrilling part of my storytelling journey. I’d love to create experiences across different media as an actor, writer, producer, superhero (???) that allow audiences to escape the mundane and live in their imaginations, if even just for a little while.

As artists, we sacrifice security and stability, but we get to live in that imagination, and it’s a blessing to be able to share it, however, it comes out.

What personal qualities do successful screenwriters need to make it?

Discipline and commitment are the first qualities that come to mind. Every screenwriter probably says the same thing, but daily practice is paramount. Waking up and writing every day, even if it’s awful drivel. I think so many times we want to be inspired to create, but really it’s the other way around; we have to create copiously to be inspired. Inspiration can’t grow without regular practice. And those lucky times when inspiration strikes unannounced, if we haven’t developed the practice to express it, it’ll die just as quickly as it appeared.

Commitment also comes in the rewrite(s). As satisfying as it is to write that first CUT/FADE TO BLACK, that’s only the beginning of the process. That first draft is like a sculptor’s slab of marble. The sculpture only emerges after countless, often painful hours of chipping away at a beautiful piece of stone. My first drafts of my screenplays are usually an embarrassing number of pages too long. The writing is in the culling.

Active awareness is also paramount; we never know what’s going to inspire a story. A piece of music, a meal, an awful mistake, a passing comment, anything could be the spark, and it’s our job as storytellers to be vigilant and discover what seed in that experience can be cultivated into a relatable story.

Empathy’s a big one too. We have to empathize with all of our characters. Even the villains. In a way, they’re all part of us or at least different aspects of us. If we’re going to make our characters jump off the page, we have to be able to live with the human condition in all its forms and love it, malformed as it may be sometimes.

Oh, and the ability to be alone for many hours at a time is pretty helpful. I’ve never been part of a TV writers’ room, but I would imagine that even then, after the story’s broken, writing is a pretty solitary endeavor. Whether we’re in our houses or in a coffee shop pretending to ignore the odd looks as our characters work out their arguments through our barely audible muttering, writing can be pretty lonely.

What is your winning script and why did you choose to write it?

My script was born from a t-shirt that I saw. At the time, I was reading (and obsessed with) the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. He was ailing and aging and had recently finished book ten of what was only supposed to be a six-book series, with no end in sight. I was sitting in Union Square in New York, where I lived at the time, and I saw a man with a shirt that read “Please don’t die, Robert Jordan”. Other than the glee of recognizing a kindred spirit-nerd who shared my fear of impending doom, it struck me as a great title for a movie. I didn’t know what to do with it at the time, but I couldn’t let go of the title.

It germinated for a few years as I worked on other projects and I kept asking questions: what happens when an author dies before their story is finished? Who would be most affected by their loss? What would they do to avoid it? Eventually, Please Don’t Die, Roger Berman was born. It follows bullied, fourteen-year-old Clarence Wheeler on his quest to squeeze the finale of Berman’s story out of the old author before he passes and takes the story with him. Though entirely fictitious, the story became very personal to me. My father passed when I was 18.

Growing up as an Arab kid in Dallas, I felt different. I also wasn’t terribly well-adjusted socially until I began to perform, but I was already halfway through my teenage years by that point. Clarence is (barely) dealing with the loss of his father, unable to connect with the world around him. His only lifeline is this fantasy series that lets him escape into a world where he’s a hero. The loss of that story would force him to focus on misfortunes in life that he’s not quite equipped to handle. The catch is, to get the story, he has to handle them. Clarence isn’t me, but he’s totally me, as are all the other characters that began to develop around him. It was in the discovery of his character and his need that the story came to life for me, and I couldn’t not write it anymore.

What did you learn with each draft of your script?

My outlines often have a similar trajectory in how they develop, in that at a certain point I’ll have an incredibly detailed first act and a pretty thorough third act, and my second act will just read… “stuff happens”. While I was able to hammer out a lot of that second act before I began to write the screenplay, the characters’ through-lines still eluded me. It took draft after draft to distill the characters’ needs and wants to actionable behavior. I love the idea of having a solid outline with every objective and motivation and need mapped out beforehand, but sometimes I don’t know what those are, and I have to write my characters into that hole (or meandering lifelessness) before I can figure out how to take them out.

There was also a lot of painful cutting that needed to happen. As I said, I write long, so characters needed to be merged or disappeared entirely, motivations needed to be focused; each draft was essentially bringing everything back to Clarence and his journey: how does this moment/character/event help/hurt him in his journey, and how can I put the screws to him a little bit more to reveal/change his character through behavior.

The film also contains two stories-within-the-story: the literal story of Berman’s novels, and Clarence’s imagination. The former I wrote as animated sequences in the film, while the latter blends animation into Clarence’s heightened reality, creating a hybrid/magical realism. These changed the most between every draft. It took a while to nail down those stories in a way that they evolved from just being superfluous entertainment to becoming an active part of Clarence’s journey by mirroring it, heightening it, or even providing him the insight to break through to the next challenge.

What misconceptions have you discovered about establishing a screenwriting career?

I can’t say that I’ve established a screenwriting career, so I’m probably still steeped in misconceptions! I honestly don’t know the first thing about a career in screenwriting. I just know that I have stories to tell and I love telling them, so I’m hoping to continue connecting with the right people who will indulge my blindly fumbling my way into sharing those stories with the world.

What inspires your imagination?

It could be anything. I’ve always been a daydreamer, so I probably spend more time in my imagination than I ought to, sometimes. But as I answered earlier, it could a piece of music, a smell, a conversation, a novel, a dream (although usually when I wake up and read the half-comatose dream notes they make terrible sense and even more terrible stories). Pacing helps. Walks are great, but there’s nothing like a good back-and-forth pace that really gets stirs my creativity. I can speak more specifically to what stifles my imagination. Strangely, watching films and tv shows, except for in rare cases, tend to suppress my daydreams. I think because they’re complete and packaged entertainment they don’t usually send me off into fantasy.

There’s also something about staring at a screen that dulls me. I also find that much of the thinking I do: about my daily chores, my fears, my internal arguments with other drivers for cutting me off, my internal arguments with myself, you know the drill; those thoughts tend to keep me landlocked. Meditation helps. So do repetitive tasks: washing dishes, bathing, sanding a piece of furniture; those really help to free my brain to be a child again.

Do you have a preferred genre, format or theme you write in?

I don’t really. I think I gravitate to stories and ideas that have a sense of magic to them, whether it’s literal magic or just a sense of awe at the world as it is. I’m a big nerd, so fantasy and science fiction always excite me, but I’ll ride whatever idea comes to me. Having lost my father and being very close to my mother, I’ve found parenthood to be a theme I’ve often explored in my writing. One of these days I’d also love to write a Christmas opus, but I’m not rushing that. In the meantime, I squeeze in Christmas when it’s appropriate, just because it makes me happy. I love underdog stories, redemption stories, unlikely hero stories. I’m probably revealing a lot about my persona, huh?

How do you train and improve your writing craft?

Read and write. I try to read at least a couple screenplays a week, focusing on what I’m drawn to about their dialogue, structure, stage directions. I’m always interested in not only how to make my stories better, but also how to make my scripts more enjoyable to read. But also reading novels and graphic novels helps. So does acting. The cross-training helps a lot. As actors, writers, and directors, we always ask the same questions: What is this scene about? What do the characters want? How do they get it? What do they stand to gain or lose if they succeed or fail? Constantly asking myself those questions as both an actor and a writer helps me improve both crafts in turn.

Do you have any mentors, heroes/ heroines?

Oh. Yeah. Lots. My acting teachers come to mind as some of my most solid screenwriting mentors. Whether they knew/know it or not, they’ve taught me how to tell a story. Words can be important, sure, but acting is all about behavior, especially in film. It’s about the images our behavior creates. The more I mature as a screenwriter, the more I understanding the power of a simple gesture over a monologue.

Heroes? My dad. My mom. All the brave artists that inspire me every day. I couldn’t possibly list them all, but to name a few off the top of my head (in no particular order, and surely missing too many): Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Steven Spielberg, Marilyn Monroe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Aaron Sorkin, J.K. Rowling, Michael Giacchino, Sam Esmail, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Heck, I’m crushing hard on part two of The OA right now, so all the brains behind that crazy wonder. I could write a never-ending list. Maybe that’s why I love this industry so much. Anyone who wakes up every morning, puts on their big kid pants, and dares to create something that they share with the world; that’s inspiring to me. This industry is full of heroes and heroines.

What advice do you have for screenwriters wanting to make next year’s ISA Top 25 list?

Write every day. Read every day. Don’t worry about getting on a list. Finish your stories and share them. Don’t worry about getting them right. In fact, get them wrong first; be messy. If I had to share one specific thing, it’s what I’m focused on right now in my development as a writer: remember that motivated behavior is key. What does your hero do to get what she wants? Write your scenes without any dialogue first, and make them work using only behavior. The words are just icing. We work in a visual medium; the images are what stick with us.

What is something that few people know about you?

Hmmm… I’m an avid woodworker/furniture-maker. I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves at least 60 times as a teenager. My dream job used to be (and still might be) spending a summer working at a Renaissance Faire. I daydream about discovering another planet more than I daydream about anything else. I eventually want a goat. A family would be great, but definitely a goat.

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