By Cindy Rinaldi

Hollywood has produced 25 of Cynthia Whitcomb’s screenplays. She has sold more than 70 scripts. A sampling from her prolific body of work includes “Buffalo Girls” (Anjelica Huston, Melanie Griffith), “Selma, Lord, Selma” (Wonderful World of Disney with Mackenzie Astin, Jurnee Smollett, Clifton Powell) and “Guilty Until Proven Innocent” (Martin Sheen, Brendan Fraser). She has been honored with countless awards and prestigious nominations including the Emmy Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Humanitas Award, Paul Selvin Award (WGA) and Cable Ace Award. Her personal story about breaking in both confirms and defies conventional advice.

Q: How did you get your first job as a screenwriter?

A: I had gone to film school at UCLA. I was starting to write frantically. I wrote ten screenplays – feature scripts – before I sold anything. I sent them out to twelve people each. All ten were rejected. I had placed in a writing contest. Agents would actually read me, because I could say I had placed in this writing contest.

My tenth script – still nobody wanted it – but by the tenth one, my writing was actually getting good. It was a good script. It got rejected by everyone. Then I saw a film by Tony Bill, called “Hearts of the West,” which wasn’t a very good script. But it was the same period, same genre and I was really furious that no one would give me a deal, but here was this other script that got made. The guy that produced it was named Tony Bill – he also produced “The Sting.” I figured if he loved that [“Hearts of the West”], he’d probably love my script.

So I called the Producer’s Guild, found his address and drove up there. I was living in Long Beach at the time, sleeping on my parents’ couch, starving and writing. I didn’t realize that everyone goes to lunch in Hollywood from 12:30 – 2:30. So I walked into empty offices – cute offices – but nobody was around. Finally, I wandered back to the kitchen. There was a guy there cleaning up – just a kid. So, I said, “Can I leave my script here?” He goes, “Sure, just leave it anywhere.”

So I just left my script. Six days later, I woke up and my car was stolen. My Volkswagen, I had no insurance, it was my original car, which I’d had since I graduated high school. Six hours later, Tony Bill called. He said, “I loved your script. I want to meet you.”

I had to borrow my mom’s car; had to borrow enough money to buy clothes I could wear to a meeting and go back to Venice. He said he couldn’t make the movie, because he was losing money on “Hearts of the West.”

The script was an adventure about the World Series being fixed in 1919. He said it was very expensive to film something [set] in 1919, because it was hard to get cars and stuff. So, he hired me to write another script. He had a novel and he hired me to dapt it. It got me my agent. It got me into the Writers Guild; it got me my first job. He told everyone that he knew that he had found a good writer. So, by the time I finished working for him, I had another job.

I turned in my last draft to him on a Friday, and by Monday I was working for 20th Century Fox, writing a movie for them. Except for one slow year, I’ve been doing this for a living full-time ever since.

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