July 2023

Interview by Zoe Palmer

Graham Jones is an award-winning screenwriter and proud Athenæum member who hails from Greenwich, Connecticut. After studying history at the University of Colorado, he moved to Los Angeles to work as a production assistant in the film industry. There, he began writing screenplays and attending workshops at the University of California, Los Angeles Extension.

Q: Can you please tell me about your journey in the film industry and your background as a writer?

GRAHAM JONES: I wasn’t really a writer and didn’t think I wanted to be a writer until I was going up the chairlift in Aspen with a friend of my parents and said, “I’d like to go to Hollywood, but I’m a history major, not a film major.” They didn’t have film majors in my day. Maybe at University of Southern California, or University of California Los Angeles. My friend said, “History’s a good preparation, you should go do that.”

I was never admitted to UCLA. When I first went to Los Angeles, I applied to all the big film schools, USC, UCLA, American Film Institute, right? After I’d been there for a year or two, I started working for a film director, Peter Markle. He made me what was called a director of development, to read all the scripts he wrote, that his friends wrote, that his agent (Creative Artists Agency) sent over. This was a big deal. You’re 27 and you’re the director of development for a working movie director who’s represented by CAA. It’s a pretty big deal. So after about a year our mailbox was filled with invitations begging me to come to the screening of the work of film students whose class I would’ve been in!

I worked for Peter after working in the mailroom at Walt Disney, and that was no fun, and also helping friends on their student projects, which was fun. Peter said to me, “If you want your dreams to come true in Hollywood, you have to write screenplays.” And I couldn’t. I just wasn’t any good at it. It didn’t happen. But I was around Peter, and I was around screenwriters, and this was, dare I say it, the early to mid 90s. Career instability in Los Angeles, that’s the name of the game there. It’s not Boston, it’s very different. Lots of career instability. I started taking film classes at UCLA.

Fast forward to the writing. I made a little film and it did OK, it won an award, and then the writing just started to come. And it started to come while I was working for Mark Burnett, the reality television guy, who didn’t care about scripts. They humored me and read a couple of them, and then I just started writing.

Q: What are some of your favorite screenplays you’ve written?

GJ: Back when I was a 20-something, I actually wrote this screenplay to make in Boston, but I lost it! So I’m seeing this therapist, saying, “I don’t know where the thing is!” After, I wrote a bunch of scripts and they won a bunch of awards, I found the script I’d lost. It was a hard copy, the digital was long gone. I read it and it’s one of my favorite scripts. I’ve rewritten it a couple times, but it’s never been as good as this version that I barely remember writing.

At this point it was the mid to late 2000s, and I wrote screenplays about George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt and Ulysses Grant, and I wrote a screenplay about equestrian polo. Back then in LA, I was pretty into polo for a couple of years. In a grass field polo team, there are four players. And guess what, there are three Musketeers and D’Artagnan. I read The Three Musketeers, wrote down all the plot points the way Syd Field tells you to. Dumas, he wrote like film. First act, second act, midpoint, climax, end of second act, third act, resolution. That’s the way he wrote. Boom, I turned it into a script about four polo players at a mystical college. It’s really UCLA, but I call it University of Los Angeles. I wrote it around 2005, I wrote it to take place after the First Gulf War. You read these things now and they read like period pieces, which makes me feel like I should have a little walker.

In some ways, I’m the most proud of those scripts, but they’re not my best. My best are the three president scripts I wrote, one each about Washington, Roosevelt, and Grant.

Q: What is your writing process like?

GJ: I used to say the writing process consisted of the right mix of junk food, naptime, and exercise, but I don’t eat junk food anymore. At my age, you can’t eat junk food. So it’s naptime and exercise. I can never write a script in class. I have to have it done first. I would write, and then take the class, and rewrite.

I wrote a novel in second person singular, which we don’t often use in English, but a friend of mine from Paris said it is more common in French. So I wrote that novel, but it’s not published—I couldn’t get anybody interested in it. The process behind that was lots of caffeine, especially in Los Angeles. Taking my laptop, writing around people. That was something I could do then. I’m not sure I could do that now.

So my process is to be alone. I don’t have any writing partners. I don’t want one. I have tons of writing friends. We don’t do this to have a partner. That’s the whole point. We have a production company for a movie. That’s fine. But when somebody wants to be a writing partner, you buy it. You go, “Hand me the check, see you later.”

Q: I noticed on your IMDB page that you’ve also directed and produced and edited some of your own work?

GJ: Yes, my short work, and some of Peter’s stuff I helped develop. I enjoyed that part of the process as sort of a social, exciting thing to do with friends.

Q: Are there any writers or screenwriters whose work you particularly admire?

GJ: A filmmaker named Curtis Hanson. I never met him personally. The guy who wrote LA Confidential, James Ellroy, was my favorite writer. When I was a boy, I read a lot of Tolstoy. I read War and Peace a few times, Anna Karenina. William Goldman was the ghostwriter on a lot of stuff. He’s probably the best screenwriter there is. And these writers in these workshops at UCLA, some really good writers there. And you learned as much from the other writers as you did from the instructor.

Q: How did you first get involved with the Athenæum?

GJ: Dad had some friends that were very involved and I think still are, and a friend of my mother’s and father’s bought my father a membership. Friends got Dad his first Athenæum membership, and a friend gave me mine.

Q: And to close us out, do you have any favorite spots in the library to work or read?

GJ: I like the quiet room on the fifth floor with the vaulted ceilings. Probably the statue of Washington. I also like the portrait of Mrs. Cabot that I think is from 1910 or 1912, the tall thing where she’s got the big hat and the long 1912 style. I think it’s pre-World War I. That’s probably my favorite right now. A lot of my writing has to do with portraits. The first script, the one I lost and then found, was about a guy in Boston being haunted by a ghost that lives in one of his family’s portraits at their house on Beacon Hill.

October 2022

Interview by Kayla Smith

Born and raised on the Jersey Shore, Barb Brouillette graduated cum laude from Columbia International University, with a Bachelor of Science in Logic and Philosophy. For nearly 20 years now she has been a Boston area resident working in the insurance industry by day, pursuing various personal passions by night.

Brouillette has lovingly nurtured the tenet that it’s never too late to explore one’s curiosities, wasting no time in putting them into action. A lifelong learner, seasoned cellist, solo traveler, and designer of themed European experiences, she has recently welcomed feature screenwriting into her world.

Mainly self-educated through books, scripts, movies, and podcasts, Brouillette completed her first screenplay in 18 months, before submitting to various competitions for judge scores and critique notes. She is now in the feedback rewrite stage.

On a cloudy afternoon, tucked away in one of the many private spaces in the Boston Athenæum, we were lucky enough to be able to speak with a member who recently wrote her very first screenplay. As it is with a great number of those who now call the Athenæum a home away from home, Brouillette hadn’t heard of the library until walking by one day with a friend who pointed it out to her. Before the week was over, Barb had joined the ranks of a select group of Bostonians who are brought together not only by the awe-inspiring architecture and design of the building, but also by their deep love and appreciation for reading, learning, and sharing knowledge with others.

Brouillette spent countless hours writing, revising, and rewriting her screenplay within our institution, considering spots like the silent fifth floor and the Art Department to be sacred spaces. When asked to discuss her favorite locations in the library, Brouillette (like many members before her) gave away a few special locations, but kept the most important and well-loved to herself.

“It’s never too late to try something new…”

BARB BROUILLETTE: I started dreaming up some of these ideas long before COVID, but I figured I’d take the opportunity during the quarantine period, which provided a lot of good solitary time to put the project in motion.

A screenplay is meant to be a map…a blueprint. It’s not really meant to be overly flowering narrative, it’s meant to be very succinct in action descriptions, and as much as I love this format it’s not without strict industry guidelines. It has to be a certain number of pages, for each genre, a certain font, a specific format. Even when you can’t be too narrative in your action description, you can still be creative and selective in your word choice and order, so that you’re making suggestions to the camera. You can’t really make camera or lighting suggestions, editing ideas, or music choices in there—that’s for the professionals and they know what they’re doing. I’m just here to tell a story. You can be creative with how you suggest things so that the camera might have a certain focal point.

A screenwriter’s main goal is a tricky one: to give the audience the same vision that you have. The tricky thing is that a script is ultimately meant to be seen and not read, which causes you to approach it differently.

Q: Can you take us through your writing process for this project?

BB: I have never done anything formal before, never done any kind of writing project. This was my first ever. I haven’t taken any classes on it. I’m fully self-educated through books and scripts. It took about 18 months, but it took two things: learning how to write a screenplay, and then after that, actually writing the screenplay.

Maybe the next story I do will be different, but this one is a crime thriller that takes place in Oxford. The main character is a musician whose instrument is being hunted down. She isn’t sure why until the end of the story.

At first I wanted to do this project only for myself, known only to me. The more I got involved, and the more I got attached to my characters, the more interested I was to receive feedback on my script. So, I entered competitions in an attempt to see an unbiased opinion on my work. I just wanted to get judge scores and critique back, wanted to manage my expectations and see where I was.

[When we spoke to Brouillette, she had just gotten her manuscript back from a few different competitions, and with it, feedback.]

“…if we only do what is comfortable, what is life?”

A theme of the script is that living to meet others’ expectations is not living. We have to be our authentic selves, instead of what others want to pressure us into being.

The rewrite process was difficult—there are so many different ways to go about doing a rewrite, and for this project it was better for me to go back and focus on one thing at a time (characterization, storytelling, etc) rather than rushing to put it all together at once.

Q: Why start writing now?

BB: I started the cello at 29 years old…I knew I wasn’t going to be a concert soloist, but I wanted to see how far I could go with it. Doesn’t have to be a big, thriving career, but I’ve played with different orchestras and thoroughly enjoy my time.

This screenplay has been so much work, but I have been having the best time! It’s like putting a puzzle together. I love problem solving.

Q: What are some favorite scripts you’ve read?

BB: Alien, Sideways, and Chinatown are strong examples of what a screenplay should be. They’re well paced, everything has a purpose in the script, they have an even read (the page has a lot of white), succinct action sequences, and there are lovable/relatable characters for the audience to get to know and share some commonalities with.

Q: What are you reading now?

BB: I’m reading Directed By James Burrows—if you’re a fan of Cheers, Friends, Will & Grace, you’re gonna have seen that name hundreds of times. I’ve always had a creative crush on James Burrows…not only is he a genius with what he does and knows how to get the most out of his actors, he is also a very welcoming presence. He is an approachable person who wants to foster a collective effort, which seems an admirable quality for directors.

After writing the screenplay, I feel as though I am a much different viewer of movies and television. I feel as though I’m paying a lot more attention to the credits. I think I just take for granted so much that when we look at a final work, it looks like it just came together so naturally, when really there was so much involved! Big choices, little choices, everything that comes together just makes the end result look effortless. All those little details make a scene impactful (or not).