All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

-James Thurber, writer and cartoonist (1894-1961)


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Richard Krevolin is an award winning author of 16 screenplays, 12 stage plays, and three published books. Two of his screenplays, both adapted from his own stage plays, are now in development: "King Levine" and "Lawrence of Suburbia."

Q: Would you share some experiences about breaking into Hollywood?

A: Hollywood is a funny place in that there are no rules; there is no single way to break through. I've had students at USC that I was convinced were going to break through and they haven't. And others that I didn't think would make it, that have. n terms of my own career, I've been at it for sixteen years now, have had some deals that have gone well, have had some hat have gone poorly. I don't really believe in the big break syndrome. I think everyone is a 20-year overnight success. You get certain openings, but just because things are going well today doesn't mean anyone is going to hire you tomorrow, so it's a onstant battle. I've been with big agents and small agents, big managers and little managers. And I am constantly trying to roduce new material and see what comes of it.

I've learned a few things that might be valuable to others along the way. I love collaborating. I've written with a number of partners. It's wonderful because it eases the loneliness and isolation of writing, but the mistake I've made is working with different partners over the years. As a result, I cannot use any of those scripts as writing samples. People can say, "Maybe the other guy was the genius." If you write with a partner, you'll be seen as a team and you have to stay together as a team.

The other thing is that I get bored easily. So, I've written a lot of romantic comedies, and then an action comedy, and a thriller and a small character driven script. That's been great for me as a writer, but not good for me in terms of my career, because Hollywood is a place of pigeonholes. So, I always urge my students to find what genre they like and be prepared to spend the next ten or twenty years working in that genre, because people are going to want to sign someone and say, "Oh, she's great ith romantic comedies." And they're going to be able to get her work doing romantic comedies and every time there's a romantic comedy, they know to go to her.

Most people really end up getting pigeon-holed. And if you are conscious of that, I would then think that as a writer, you would develop a body of work that is consistently in a certain genre. Every agent that I've ever met has said, "Oh that's great. What else do you have?" So they would want to see two or three screenplays and those should probably all be consistently in one genre.

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