I met screenwriter Jason Nutt (@jaynutt303) in my Orange County writer’s group right after I graduated from UCLA’s MFA screenwriting program. I’ll be honest, what I liked most about him at first were the homemade cupcakes his wife made and sent along to every meeting. I believe there were pies involved too.

I soon grew to appreciate his insights during our critique sessions as well. Also, watching Jay churn through drafts of scenes and whole scripts, watching him do whatever it took to get to the good stuff, was a lesson in tempering the ego, rolling up the sleeves and getting to work. It’s really no surprise that he should be the first of our now-defunct group to break out.

And he’s breaking out in a big way. His first film, Balls to the Wall, has sold more advanced tickets for tonight’s premiere at the Newport Beach Film Festival than any film in the festival’s history. Directed by Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris, Balls is the story of a guy forced to secretly moonlight as an exotic dancer in order to pay for his extravagant wedding.

Jay was kind enough to answer a few questions via email before the premiere:

Who is Jason Nutt and how did he come to be a screenwriter? How would you characterize a “Jason Nutt” screenplay?

Jason Nutt is an amiable knucklehead from New Jersey who was born with an unfortunate last name (alas, not a pseudonym). He grew up on the standard ‘80s diet of Lucas and Spielberg but actually decided to become a filmmaker after seeing John Carpenter’s Halloween when he was twelve. For whatever reason, there was something about that movie that made me say to myself, “This is what I want to do with my life. I’m going to write and direct my own movies and scare the shit out of people.” So naturally, flash forward twentysomething years and my first produced credit is a goofy comedy about a male stripper.

In between those two milestones, I majored in Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo with a concentration on film; I wrote and directed a spectacularly inept senior project that made me realize that maybe I should just stick to writing screenplays and let somebody else actually make the movie; I failed to get into any of the major graduate screenwriting programs, received my undergrad diploma and wondered if my life was over; and after a lost year living with my parents, I moved out to Los Angeles at the age of 23 and enrolled in the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting. And so my 14-year slog to this moment began.

I don’t know how I’d characterize a “Jason Nutt” screenplay. I guess they usually center around a well-meaning idiot who finds himself in over his head in some absurd situation and does his best to stay afloat, a description that I just realized sort of characterizes my life as well. At least the well-meaning idiot part.

I’m always interested in how the writing process works for each individual writer. Can you describe your writing routines and rituals, and also talk about your writing environment?

Well, my writing routines and rituals were pretty much blown to hell when my wife gave birth to our daughter almost three years ago. Since then I’ve learned to basically write whatever I can, whenever my can – at five in the morning, during my lunch break at my day job, ten o’clock at night, you name it. I’ve sort of trained myself to get as much done as I can in the time that I’ve got, figuring that even a semi-coherent handwritten page of dialogue that I can revise later is better than nothing at all. I’ve technically got an office in our house, but I never actually write there; I usually set up my laptop in our kitchen or pull out a spiral notebook and write on the floor while my kid colors next to me.

Everyone basically is on their own when it comes to learning the craft of screenwriting. Can you trace your own education in the craft? What was helpful? What lead you down the wrong path?

My education pretty much began when my dad bought me Syd Field’s Selling a Screenplay: The Screenwriter’s Guide to Hollywood for Christmas shortly after my Halloween epiphany. I then picked up the other Field books and Lew Hunter and Richard Walter’s respective screenwriting tomes. I think I checked Michael Hauge’s first book out of the library and Xeroxed the pages about script formatting. And that was about it; not too many screenwriting books out there in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. At college I would buy scripts at those giant poster sales that would occasionally take place in the student union. The Media Study department didn’t really have a formal screenwriting class, but I did take an independent study with an English professor in which I learned exactly nothing but at least got the chance to write my first feature-length script for credit. Basically I was completely self-taught until I met the writer Tim Albaugh, my instructor at UCLA, who forced me to unlearn various bad writing habits and showed me how you should properly structure and write a screenplay. If it weren’t for Tim, I would never have made it this far in the business. I guarantee it.

You have achieved what is essentially the goal of every aspiring screenwriter. The film you wrote is premiering on the Big Screen tonight. What’s it feel like to have a dream come true? Is it completely surreal, or has this become just one more step in a long journey?

When I stop to think about it, it really does feel completely surreal, but it’s been such a long process that it usually doesn’t seem as monumental as it should. I came up with the idea for the movie in the fall of 2004, I finished writing the script in the summer of 2005, it was optioned in 2008, purchased and shot in 2010 and now in 2011 the finished film is finally making its debut. The whole thing seemed to unfold in such slow motion that I never seriously believed it would ever happen until the very first day of filming, and even then I wasn’t sure.

I’ll never forget when I got the check for the script sale. It arrived via Fedex at the post office box we rent; I signed for the envelope, returned to the car, opened the envelope and my wife and I sat there for a moment, staring at the check in my hand. And all I could think was, “Huh.” It wasn’t until later when I realized, Idiot, you basically just won the lottery. So yeah, pretty weird.

Those of us who weren’t lucky enough to be born here in Southern California face the difficult task of deciding if and when to make the move to Hollywood. As someone who began about as far away geographically from Hollywood as you can get, please talk a bit about how you reached the tipping point of knowing it was time to make the big move.

I always knew that I would end up out here in Southern California. I learned pretty early on that Lucas and Carpenter went to USC, so that was always the dream. There was always the film industry in New York City; given my Scorsese obsession at the time, that kind of made sense, but Manhattan scared me — I feared I’d take the wrong subway one day and never see the sun again. And after four years of brutal Buffalo winters, I was ready for an environment in which I wouldn’t have to help dig somebody’s car out of a snowbank every time we wanted to go to the supermarket.

But grad school didn’t happen and I wasn’t sure what the next move to make would be. As I mentioned before, after graduation I was living back home with my folks – in the basement, which seemed weirdly appropriate – and at some point I heard about UCLA’s Professional Program. I realized that not only might this be a good on-ramp to getting into the MFA program, but if nothing else it would be a good excuse to move out west. The notion of just emigrating to L.A. without any kind of game plan was overwhelming, but if I had a class as my anchor, things seemed slightly more doable. So I worked nights in the local cable station, saved up my money, got a loan from my grandmother, convinced a buddy to accompany me on the drive across the country and pulled out of my parents’ driveway in August of 1997. I’ve been a west coast resident since the day I finally pulled into Westwood.

Is having a rep essential to selling a screenplay? You made a tough call at one point to let go of your manager and fly solo. What advice to you have, looking back on your own experience, for those who seek representation? Would you have done anything differently?

I’ve had two managers and I don’t regret either experience. It was the second manager who submitted my script to Fortress Features, who optioned it and ultimately got the movie made. That manager and I did part ways shortly thereafter; it was the right decision for a number of reasons but we’d had a pretty good run. Early on, he did open many doors for me.

I know people sell scripts and land assignments without reps, but I don’t know how they do it. In my experience, having an agent or manager in your corner is absolutely essential. It’s ridiculously hard to find somebody, of course; I’m in the middle of it right now. As for what I’d do differently, this time around I’m trying to sign with somebody who really gets who I am as writer. That sounds stupid and obvious and kind of like saying, “I’d like to date a girl with arms and legs”, but all too often you’ll meet a manager who’s interested in you as the potential writer of movies that they want you to write, rather than what you’re personally interested in. It kind of flattering, but at this point I’d rather write one of my own ideas on spec than spend 3-6 months on somebody else’s. Unless somebody else’s idea is a slam dunk that’s going to sell for seven figures in which case, oh, okay.

Thanks to social networking sites, blogs, Wikipedia and IMDb, screenwriters are no longer the shadow-dwellers they once were. How prepared are you for fame in the digital age? You’ve dipped your toe in the waters of Twitter, and done some blogging. Will social media play a role for you as a writer?

I’d prefer that it wouldn’t, but I suspect social media is just one of those things that I need to get used to, like middle age or traffic on the 405. I’ll continue to be dragged, kicking and screaming — or maybe just bitching and moaning — into the 21^st century. Damn it.

Balls to the Wall, like many screenplays, took an indirect path to the Big Screen. Can you give us a brief chronology of the journey, from that first spark of an idea and including the twists and turns and surprises you encountered along the way?

Well, like I mentioned earlier, I had the idea in 2004 – I’d just gotten engaged to my then-girlfriend and the glow of “hey, we’re gonna get married!” had just worn off, replaced by the dread of “hey, we gotta figure out how to pay for this shit!” One day, while we were trying to sort things out, I joked that I could moonlight as a stripper and my fiancée said, “That would actually be a funny movie. You should write that.” Slow learner that I am, I replied, “Why the hell would I want to do that? I can’t write a movie about a male stripper.” And I moved on to whatever other dumbass script idea I was toying with at the time. A couple of months later, though, I started taking notes on the stripper story – ideas just sort of came to me, and before I knew it, I had an outline that I shared with my writing group. Then I was suddenly writing the script, then it was done, then I was revising it. At no point did I ever say, “Yes! This is the script that will help me break in!” It just sort of happened.

I’d made a friend at a production company via an earlier script. I gave him a draft of the stripper script – then titled WEDDING RINGS AND G-STRINGS – and he passed it on to a friend of his, the manager who then signed me. In the fall of 2005 he went out with the spec and everybody passed. I got a couple of meetings, one production company gave me some notes that I incorporated, but that was it. I had a dead spec on my hands. I moved on, wrote another spec that almost sold, tried to keep things moving. In the spring of 2007 my manager submitted WEDDING RINGS as a writing sample to Brett Forbes and Patrick Rizzotti of Fortress Features. I met with them to discuss a project they needed a writer on, but during the meeting, they mentioned that they could see WEDDING RINGS being made with a certain actor. Pretty soon we were in regular contact about my script and before I knew it, they were developing it with me and shopping the project around under a few different titles – though they didn’t officially option the script until a year later.

What happened from there could fill a book and I won’t bore you with the details. (These are just about the only details I don’t seem to be boring you with.) But actors came and went, potential directors came and went, co-producers came and went, but Brett and Patrick stuck with my stupid script, clinging to it like a couple of pit bulls chomping down on somebody’s leg. Much to their credit, they wouldn’t let go, and in the spring of 2009 they somehow got the script to Penelope Spheeris, who was interested. The four of us began intensely developing the script – I can’t tell you how many drafts I churned out over that summer and fall. They found independent financing, assembled a cast and crew and the production company finally purchased my script in March of 2010, shortly before shooting. They made the movie and here we are.

Since the movie is an indie, we don’t currently have a distributor in place. The financier has recently been screening the movie for various distribution companies and hopefully things will come together soon. Maybe a positive reaction at the Newport Beach Film Festival will help. We’ll see.

Probably few screenplays make it to the screen unchanged. What are your thoughts on the final product and how does it compare to your original intent?

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out – even though many of the details have changed, for better or worse it’s essentially the movie that I envisioned when I came up with the original story. Penelope, Patrick and Brett were amazing collaborators; there were definitely some bumps in the road and there are a few things in the movie that I would have done differently, but that’s par for the course. And many times, somebody would give me a note that I initially resisted, then later realized would actually work really well. For the notes that I really didn’t care for but was outvoted on, I made it my mission to try to implement them in a way that would please everybody without making me want to blow my brains out.

Working with Penelope was like film school. Even if this movie had died in development, at least I could have walked away with what she’d taught me about scene economy and pacing and writing for a low budget. Despite the occasional frustration, it was a really incredible learning experience.

Most of us don’t get to choose when lightning strikes. When your writing career suddenly gained traction, you had a day job and a family to juggle in addition to your writing duties. How did you manage?

It was really difficult sometimes. Not only did we have a newborn at home, I’d just started a new day job around the same time my daughter was born. Juggling work, the movie and the insanity of parenting was occasionally rough. The script money was great, but not enough for me to write full time – and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since I didn’t get paid until right before production began. My wife knew how much this meant to me and was incredibly supportive, but only up to a point; listening to me have a script conference on my phone as we walked through Disneyland was not her idea of a Kodak moment. I don’t think she ever expected the endless phone calls and endless rewrites, especially in the few months leading up to production. She began referring to the director as my “other wife.”

On the one hand, I was totally living the dream and loving it – I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. On the other hand, it was totally not what I imagined writing a movie would be like. There was a lot of delicate time management involved, and sometimes things would just go kaflooey at once. But whatever – I was lucky to have such problems!

In what ways did you get pushed outside of your comfort zone in the course of seeing this movie to fruition and how did you handle that?

Learning the art of collaboration and compromise was the biggest obstacle. It was no longer my script – it was OUR script. And then when it was optioned and bought, it was THEIR script. And if I wanted the movie to be made, I had to learn to play along and play nice. I’m a pretty mellow guy to begin with, so it wasn’t that hard, but it was the first time that I had someone telling me what to do and I had no choice but to make it work. So yeah, I guess becoming a professional writer was one of the ways that I was pushed outside of my comfort zone.

What has been your low-point in the whole writing journey so far? How did you survive it, and how do you handle the darker days in general?

So many low points, so little time… I guess my all-time low point was around 2003-2004, when I decided to give up on writing. I was in a bad spot personally to begin with – it was before I’d met the woman who would become my wife and my job situation was tenuous. I was unhappy with my writing – there was one screenplay in particular that I just kept rewriting and rewriting because I felt obligated to make it work for some reason. And it sucked. And I realized that if I wasn’t enjoying the act of writing, then why was I even bothering? So I stopped. That was it. I was done.

… At least until I started writing again a couple of months later. And that was when I realized that I couldn’t stop. As cheeseball as it sounds, I suddenly understood that being a screenwriter was who I was. I deep-sixed the lousy screenplay – it wasn’t like Wonder Boys when the manuscript goes fluttering away in the wind, but it might as well have been. And things somehow got better in my writing and my life.

As for how I handle the darker days now, I suspect I’m still the same old hand-wringing neurotic. The difference now is that I’m a hand-wringing neurotic who has been through enough to know that nothing is permanent, not even failure. For every blown opportunity, there’s always going to be a new one as long as you’re willing to look out for it. Also, I have my wife to keep things in perspective for me, call me on my bullshit and occasionally hold my hand when it really is warranted. And she’s an amazing baker; funny how things seem less dire after a couple of freshly baked cookies.

What’s next for screenwriter Jason Nutt? What does the future hold for you?

Excellent question. Right now I just want to get through the rewrite of my latest spec, land a kick-ass agent and/or manager and try to make writing my full-time gig. In the immediate future I’ll probably read this over and wonder why I tried to answer your questions at one in the morning. Sorry for babbling. Who the hell do I think I am, Robert Towne?!