The Scribe Has Spoken

In 1997, the year after writer Todd Farmer moved to Los Angeles from Kentucky in his late-20s, he scored a screenwriting job with producer Sean S Cunningham, the producer of the Friday The 13^th movies. Just three years later, Farmer's script Jason X (released in 2002) was shooting. “I've been told that it takes on average ten years to 'break in', so I got my start a lot quicker than that – but the business has changed,” says Farmer. “Every time you finish a movie now, you're starting at ground zero again.”

After a brief visit to the Gold Coast in 2010 to scout locations for a possible shoot, Farmer is heading back Down Under again this year to the Gold Coast Film Festival in April to share his insider knowledge of Hollywood with Aussie writing talent. Farmer went on to write the My Bloody Valentine remake (2009) and Drive Angry (2011), and most recently worked on several drafts of a script for a planned reboot of the Hellraiser franchise – so his leaning is towards horror, and he says there will always be room for 'new blood' in the genre field.

“When I started, horror was frowned upon and studios looked down their noses at it,” he says. “New Line Cinema and Dimension were the only two studios that did it. Then Scream came out in 1996 and made $100 million, and suddenly every studio had a genre department. Scream ran its course; then you had The Ring, and suddenly there was all these Japanese horrors; then it was torture porn and everybody's ripping off Saw and Hostel; now we've got the found footage movies like Paranormal Activity, and that will run its course too. Then we'll have, say, monster movies.”

With My Bloody Valentine, Farmer and writing partner Patrick Lussier helped kick-start 3D horror with their “shock value, throw-stuff-at-your-face” style. They collaborated again on Drive Angry. “Patrick and I each bring different things to the table,” Farmer says. “We basically collaborate over Gmail chat. I lived about six hours north of LA so we'd write script after script together, just going back and forth. Then when I'd come to town and we'd get in the car together to go pitch an idea, we'd come up with a totally different idea on the drive. And we'd go in and pitch that instead. We've gotten jobs based on that! There's something beautiful about the spontaneity of that – you let your characters lead you.”

Farmer says the one popular misunderstanding about writers is that if they're not at the computer, they're not working. “[Sean S] Cunningham understood this,” Farmer recalls. “When he'd walk into my office I'd often be sitting there with my feet up on the desk and he never bothered me because he knew even though my fingers weren't on the keyboard, I wasn't daydreaming. A lot of people don't understand that. I go to the grocery store, I go to Disneyland, jump in the shower, go for a run – I'm figuring stuff out in my head. Then when I do sit down to write, it comes out fast.”

When Farmer arrives on the Gold Coast he'll be running a two-day screenwriting seminar to steer up to 40 serious screenwriters on the path to 'breaking in'. “What makes it a little more difficult now is that the studios aren't paying as much, and established writers are willing to work for a whole lot less,” he says. “So a new writer's gotta have some tricks up his sleeve. And that's what I'll teach 'em.”