by Brock Swinson
Blake Masters is a genuine Hollywood writer. After twenty years of battling his keyboard, he is dangerously close to becoming a household name. A self-proclaimed turtle writer, he continues to chip away at pilot episodes, film adaptations and original content. Masters’ methodical schedule allows for him to write a television episode in two weeks, a pilot in four weeks and a complete film in eight weeks. Writing two to four beats per day, Masters has accumulated a repertoire that consists of two television series with another in pre-production, a blockbuster starring A-listers Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, and a comic book whose story has been marinating for the past twenty years.
There is nothing so intriguing as the thought processes of a man with so many verbal tongues, so many burners on high. Having a summer movie that advertises on every channel and an AMC pilot being filmed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) may sound like a Cinderella story, but it took a decade of unproduced screenplays to lay the foundation for the New England native’s current success. “I started off as film writer,” says Masters. “I was getting nicely paid to write screenplays that didn’t get produced. I did that for about eleven years before I ever dipped my toe in television.”
Blake Masters
Ten-Year Journey
Masters’ initial journey began with a short film. “I sent it to every name I could get my hands on. I didn’t ask for a job, but it got me an informational interview with Sam Raimi’s company. I basically said, ‘Can I come work here for free?’” After some negotiations with Raimi’s staff at Renaissance Pictures, the young writer was allowed to intern one day a week. Thanks to his drive, the internship grew to three days per week. Masters had written two complete screenplays in college, but he trashed those drafts and began working on a new outline. Eventually, he developed a script; co-workers read it and offered suggestions. Raimi’s company agreed to attach their name to his first project, allowing him to obtain an agent.
For the next decade, Masters wrote for scale until he pitched the movie version of Brotherhood, an idea involving an Irish neighborhood in Providence where two brothers—a politician and a gangster—live on opposite sides of the law. “The executive asked, ‘Have you ever thought about it as a TV show?’ Having the courage of the ignorant, I thought, Well it can’t be harder to get a show on the air than to get a movie made. So I said, ‘Sure, let’s make a TV show.” Masters knew he wanted to be on premium cable so he could avoid commercial breaks and be free with his dialogue. After a practice pitch—followed by feedback—at ABC, Masters took his homework to Showtime. The network was unmanned, but Robert Greenblatt had been announced as the new president. “Bob came in with a whole slate of projects including Weeds and a thing called Hate, which probably became Dexter,” recalls Masters. Along with the two ideas generated from Greenblatt, Brotherhood got picked up as a series.
Brotherhood
Showrunner
“On Brotherhood, I got better reviews than I will get for anything in my life. I won a Peabody award our first season and nobody watched the show. Well, not nobody—my mother and five other people,” jokes Masters. “But, everybody in the business of creating good cable television—whether they watched the show or not—knew it was a good show. The fact that it holds up means that I can sell pilot ideas, and I can make a living for the next twenty years… It set me up to be able to sell great cable pilots in a position where network executives are predisposed to want to like my stuff.” Essentially, Masters has earned the ability to get into the room and feels Brotherhood opened the door for him.
Chasing Mentors
When Masters isn’t writing original content, it’s likely that he is studying the works of personal idols such as David Chase, best known as the creator of The Sopranos. “Tony Soprano is the perfect television character,” Masters says. “He is an animal who wants to be a better man. So every week, the journey is: Is he going to be an animal or is he going to be a better man? He can win some and he can lose some, but the dilemma never-ever-ever goes away. It was an absolutely brilliant show done by the best writer I have ever seen… by a wide margin. He’s Faulkner, he’s Dostoevsky. The Sopranos would have been a great series no matter what, but if you put The Sopranos on now, I don’t know if it would get the lightning-in-a-bottle [acceptance it got] and I don’t think [Chase] does either, but we should all be grateful it did. It showed us the potential of what cable television can be. For that, God bless Chris Albrecht and David Chase for leading us up the mountain so we can see the Promised Land.”
David Chase on the set of The Sopranos
“In a show like The Sopranos, there had to be room for you to laugh in order to accept the darkness. You needed to be able to laugh at ‘Paulie Walnuts,’ so that you could accept the darkness of Tony. Without lightness that allows the audience to go into the darkness, the audience will withdraw. If you draw a straight line down into the trench, the audience will not want to go down the hill. But if you make it like a roller coaster where there are some up moments—some victory, some humor—[the] lightness will allow for the audience to engage to go darker. It’s a mistake I made on Brotherhood. We were too relentlessly dark. I think we could have benefited from some more humor.”
The Cowboy Hat
Acknowledging David Chase’s genius and praising the global acceptance of The Sopranos, Masters recalls an instance of his mentor’s work that he still carries with him today. “Anyone who wants to write for television, needs to track down an episode that David Chase wrote of a show called I’ll Fly Away.” As if the show aired the previous night, Masters describes in perfect detail Chase’s storyline for the episode entitled, “The Hat,” that aired in October of 1991. “Set in 1960s Georgia, [the show starred] Sam Waterson as the local district attorney. His wife had gone to a sanitarium and the black housekeeper became the surrogate mother to the children. The staff was Josh Brand (Northern Exposure), David Chase, Barbara Hall, and Henry Bromell, who worked Homicide, Northern, and wrote the best episode of Homeland last year. David wrote an episode [of I’ll Fly Away] about a cowboy hat that is fundamentally what good cable TV writing is,” he says with this Tarantino-telling-a-story type of tone.
I’ll Fly Away
“The story is this: In the South—in 1960—a little white boy gets a cowboy hat,” he begins. “It’s his favorite toy and he loves to play with it. His older sister and brother tease him so he throws down the cowboy hat and says, ‘I don’t want to play with it anymore.’ The black maid says, ‘Well if you don’t want it, can I take it home and give it to my daughter?’ So she takes it home and gives it to her child—who loves it. The little white boy comes back and says, ‘I want my cowboy hat back!’ The decent mom, decent housekeeper, goes to Sam Waterson—the ultimate paragon of decency—and she says, ‘What do I do?’ Sam Waterson, because he’s a white man in the south, says, ‘My son gets his cowboy hat back.’ So the black housekeeper has to go get the cowboy hat and give it back to the white boy. The white boy and the two older kids are fighting in the back of the car on the way to church on Sunday and the hat gets thrown out the window and rolls down the street like the hat in Miller’s Crossing.”
The Hat in Miller’s Crossing
“Without ever saying the word ‘race,’ without ever saying the phrase, ‘power of politics,’ you just described the power of politics in the south—through a cowboy hat… The heartbreak of racial politics of the south for good decent people—not terrible people, good decent people—on how fucked up it was. And it was all about a cowboy hat.” This “small totemic item,” as he describes it, sticks with him in nearly everything he writes. When writers are pitching ideas amongst one another in a writer’s room, the question on Masters’ tongue is always, “What’s the cowboy hat?” “In Brotherhood, we had an episode about who had to pick up the birthday cake—but really it’s about the power in the relationship. That’s good television writing—the smallest possible story with the most emotional stakes. No one has to spew their internal monologue,” he concludes.
2 Guns
Writing 2 Guns
Through relentless work as a television writer and show runner, Masters recently sold his first film, which hits theaters in August 2013. Explaining that the fundamental concept involves the internal dilemmas of the lead character, he acknowledges that while a television character needs unsolvable internal dilemmas, film characters need dilemmas that can be resolved within a journey that takes about two hours. When adapting 2 Guns, Masters dived into the graphic novel to find the opening scene: Two guys are casing a bank and decide to burn down the restaurant across the street because it’s a known cop hangout. “I thought that was gifted,” says Masters. “Within that scene in the book, you set up a variation on the character tension. Here are two people who don’t necessarily like each other, don’t want to work together, but they are working together in this surprising way.”
After accepting the job, Masters began writing worldviews for the two opposing characters. In his terms, worldviews consist of moral codes and an understanding of how the characters define themselves. “Bobby (Denzel Washington) is a character that will do whatever-it-takes and Stig (Mark Wahlberg) is the guy who believes there is a code to right and wrong. So when whatever-it-takes is against things-you-do-and-things-you-don’t-do, there is instant contact [and] the humor comes out of that conflict.” In the scene where the characters have decided to burn down a restaurant because it is across from a bank that they wish to rob, “Bobby says, ‘That’s the tip, that’s what you leave.’ Stig says, ‘No, you have to pay the waitress more because she’s about to be out of a job.’ That conflict in worldview is why the two characters work well on screen.” Masters writes the characters so that they are fundamentally defined within each scene to have oppositional opinions for any given situation. “These guys have different codes and the clash of those codes make them fun to be together,” says Masters.
Click here to read Blake Masters full interview on writing 2 Guns.
Insurrection V3.6 graphic novel
Insurrection V3.6
Upon the theatrical release of 2 Guns, Boom! Comics recently released a sequel to the story entitled 3 Guns, where the additional gun introduces a new character. Masters admits that he would be interested in writing a sequel because he truly enjoyed writing the two characters. While pondering the possibility of writing the sequel, he remembers having favorite scenes from other drafts that didn’t make it into the final movie. “For me, those [deleted] scenes established both the point-of-view of humanity and the humor of these characters. So, when you write for film, often the thing that for you is the lynchpin of understanding everything, when you get in the cutting room, it has to go. And, it hurts like hell, but often it’s the right choice.” Working with premium cable allows him to accept the process of editing and understand just how often great work gets left on the editing room floor.
The relationship between Masters and Boom! led to Insurrection Version 3.6. After adapting 2 Guns, Masters altered his writing process once again to produce dialogue and action sequences for a comic book. “It was interesting to go from screenwriting to writing for a comic book. It was a passion project of mine and an idea I’ve had in my head for twenty years, so I finally just broke down and wrote it. It’s a futuristic Bladerunner/Spartacus kind of thing.” A sci-fi epic, the story delves into the question of what makes us human. Pollution and poverty no longer exist and wars only take place on terra-formed moons on far away planets. The government is not as strong as the corporations and armies are made up of bio-engineered clones, one of which chooses to question his existence and stand up to injustice. Besides writing the comic book, Masters sold the rights to Paramount and is now in the process of writing the film version.
Lasting Work
Masters believes that our ever-expanding pop-culture spends too much time “sucking up noise” to absorb things that are disposable. Knowing that these obsessions eat up days, he only cares about things that will stand the test of time. “There was a period of about four years where [Paris Hilton] sucked up incredible amounts of commercial oxygen,” exclaims Masters. “There are artists out there that are doing something lasting, that ten years from now, we will still be interested in.” Masters occasionally promotes new movies and musicians on his Twitter account, including Jason Isbell, a former member of the Drive-By Truckers. “I bet if you listen to his album now, put it away and listen to it in ten years, you’ll still be interested in the album. It is something that is a cultural permanence.”
With little interest of what is popular, Masters sticks to the fundamentals and only strives to improve and create work that will be lasting. “When you’re a child and you hear stories of Hollywood, you envision grand dinner parties with movies stars and directors and all these fabulous people, but that’s not the writer’s life. I wake up in the morning, I drink two espressos, and I go down to my basement in my pajamas and I make shit up—that’s my job.” Masters understands the daily grind it takes to create lasting work. In his final bit of advice, he once again recalls an episode of The Sopranos: “There is the great episode where Richie gives Tony an ugly coat and Tony doesn’t want to wear the ugly coat. That’s the cowboy hat. Great writing always has a cowboy hat. If you want to learn how to write good cable television, watch that episode. Figure out your cowboy hat—that’s the key. I could not give a better lesson on how to be a good writer than that. That’s why David Chase is better than all of us and always will be.”
Creative Screenwriting also interviewed Masters extensively on writing the feature film 2 Guns. Click here to read it.
