Actors/ writers
They follow a new script for success
THE EAST
(OPENS FRIDAY)
“You have to crack the story orally at first,” says star/writer Marling, who, with Zal Batmanglij, created a story about an anarchist group that “decides to hold the CEO of (an oil) company accountable and goes and creates an oil spill at his East Hampton summer home estate.”
Alexander Skarsgard read the story over a weekend and immediately asked to meet the duo.
Marling ’s personal story “is so interesting to me: being valedictorian, going to Wall Street and working at Goldman Sachs. A brilliant career in front of her, tons of money,” says Skarsgard, who plays Benji, a de facto leader of the group who lives a freegan lifestyle while plotting “jams” against companies. “And then just leaving that behind to move to L.A. and then being a young, beautiful blond girl in L.A. It’s not easy if you want to get good parts. So she was like, I’ll just write it myself.”
The next frontier for Marling, who also has won acclaim in films by others, including Arbitrage, is a script about sex that refrains from being voyeuristic. “The hardest thing as a writer is to try to write things that don’t seem to exist yet,” she says. “And this is a problem, I think, a lot for women. You’re trying to write women you haven’t read in a novel or seen in a film. You may have met them in real life, but you haven’t seen them translated yet. And then your job is to try and be the translator.”
THIS IS THE END
(JUNE 12)
“I’m not, luckily, one of those actors who has to wait around for a good script to show up and then hope that someone lets me do it,” says Seth Rogen, star and co-writer (with Evan Goldberg). “It’s really nice because I get to be in the exact type of movie that I would want to go see just as a fan.”
Hired more than a decade ago by Apatow to write for Freaks and
Geeks, Rogen and Goldberg have parlayed their own brand of buddy comedies into box-office success with films such as Superbad (which grossed $170 million worldwide) and 2011’s Green Lantern ($227 million). Made for roughly $30 million, This
Is the End’s party-infused end-of-theworld imagining comes at a relative bargain, given its use of special effects. Yet despite past success, the pair say it was still difficult to sell this original script. In it, James Franco, Jonah Hill and Jay Baruchel break the fourth wall and play heightened versions of themselves, while horned monsters stomp about, food dwindles, and egos inflate.
“The giant movies that swallow up money are getting bigger and crazier, and all the other movies are kind of shrinking, it seems,” Goldberg says. For This Is the End, “we put together such a big presentation, and even still, we were fighting hand and foot, clawing our way up a mountain of worry from every studio because our concept was kind of strange.”
THE WAY, WAY BACK
(JULY 5)
Audiences will finally get a peek at the coming-of-age story that earned Nat Faxon and Jim Rash the job of adapting The Descendants for director Alexander Payne (which earned the duo Oscars in 2012).
The Way, Way Back hit the notes Payne was looking for: drama woven seamlessly with comedy.
Rash and Faxon, who met while writing sketches with the improv group the Groundlings alongside Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy, wrote the story “over one summer,” Faxon says. As the script began to circulate in Hollywood, offers for other jobs poured in. But they hit pause.
“You’re provided with all this lowhanging fruit,” Rash says. “We sort of had to be honest with ourselves and say whether we could connect to that. And I think that’s what led us to
The Descendants, because we sort of went away from that and went to the smaller movie that spoke to us.”
IN A WORLD ...
(AUG. 9)
Selling a script differs wildly from auditioning, says writer/director/star Lake Bell. “When you’re pushing yourself forward for a role, you go through very simple linear tactics. You are not in control of it. You just get a phone call that says, ‘ You have an audition for X.’ You then study for X, audition for X and either have to audition 12 times and you just don’t get it — or you get it.’’ But Bell kept her cards close to the vest when writing a story about “these omniscient voices in commercials and radio and television and movie trailers that are telling us what to feel. I didn’t want to tell anyone that I had a script until I had a script. I never wanted to be an actress that was secretly writing a screenplay, because I felt that in itself was such a cliché.”