[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Had you ever written a screenplay before Chasing 3000?
Bill Mikita, Screenwriter: No, just my original draft. Well yes I had written that original story The First Step and then I wrote two or three additional screenplays before I went back to write Chasing 3000.
Film Courage: And this goes back…you’ve worked on this film or had worked on it for how many years before it actually came to fruition?
Bill: To become a writer for 15 years, I would fly out and I would take meetings and I would make contacts.
It was interesting I had people tell me (I had a producer tell me) in real time:
You can’t do what you’re doing.
And I said:
I’m sitting in your office in Beverly Hills pitching you my stories. I am doing it.
Film Courage: What was his response?
Bill: Nothing, he was kind of flabbergasted. But the whole idea that I didn’t live in LA at the time. One of my first screenplays because I had my contact at Disney got it to a development person. I got coverage back. In the coverage the person wrote:
This isn’t a bad story but this guy is from Cincinnati, what does he know? If he was really serious, he would be here.
I thought:
But I am serious!
You would read that in books, you would hear that in seminars:
If you’re serious, you’re going to come out here to LA.
But I am serious so I had to overcome that. What I did was my cousin Matt lives in LA. I used his address and I got an LA cell phone.
Film Courage: This is before burner phones?
Bill: Exactly, Hey I live here in LA.
There are people who thought I lived in LA full-time.
I’d say I out illusion the illusionists but that was…you have to. It’s one of the things I tell younger people, sometimes you just have to overcome people’s objections. I had to get around that because I was serious but I couldn’t move there at that moment. How do I create the impression? So I got an LA address and an LA cell phone.
Film Courage: How does an attorney with four children living in the midwest have time to write a screenplay?
Bill: I just made time. I just found time whether it was in the evenings or weekends. I would take a notepad with me. Wherever I stopped writing in my scene the night before, I would take a pad with me and sometimes I would scribble another note so that evening I would go back and revise it but I was very serious about what I did…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
WATCH ‘CHASING 3000’
CONNECT WITH BILL MIKITA
About:
Bill Mikita was born in Steubenville, Ohio, USA. He is a writer and producer, known for Brewer’s Boys, Chasing 3000 (2010) and Medal of Honor: American Heroes. He has been married to Pattie White Mikita since February 25, 1978. They have four children.
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