Schulman
When the COVID pandemic struck in 2020, it shut down most of the economy – hitting the movie industry especially hard as more than 80 productions temporarily shuttered and cinemas were forced to close their doors.
A Motion Picture Association report found worldwide 2020 theatrical revenues dropped to $12 billion, a $30.3 billion decrease from the previous year, while U.S. theatrical entertainment revenue fell from $11.4 billion in 2019 to $2 billion in 2020.
So how did Academy Award-winning screenwriter Tom Schulman, a Nashville native and Vanderbilt graduate, handle that unexpected downtime?
“I made a movie during COVID. I raised some money and made an independent film called ‘Double Down South.’ It will be released in January and will probably be in Nashville for a month or so, depending on how it does. So that’s that was my experience,” says Schulman, who will be one of six featured speakers at Saturday’s Script-Com, a free webinar about the craft and business of screenwriting. It is sponsored by the Tennessee Screenwriting Association in affiliation with the Tennessee Entertainment Commission.
Schulman won the 1990 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with “Dead Poets Society.” The 1989 coming-of-age movie, made for $16.4 million, grossed more than $95.8 million in the U.S. and Canada, and more than $235 million worldwide. He also scored big at the box office with 1989’s “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” and 1991’s “What About Bob?” along with 1997’s “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag” and 2004’s “Welcome to Mooseport.”
And now it’s “Double Down South,” which Schulman both wrote and directed. Starring Kim Coates (“Van Helsing,” “Sons of Anarchy”) and Lili Simmons (“Ray Donovan,” “Westworld”), Schulman’s con game thriller examines the world of illegal high-stakes keno pool gambling.
The movie has screened at numerous film festivals, winning Best Feature at the Omaha Film Festival and Cordillera International Film Festival. Eddie Harrison of film-authority.com calls it “… a rough, tough confidence-thriller that delivers on tension and tells an engrossing tale about a sport you probably didn’t know existed.”
Much like “Dead Poets Society” was partly based on his Montgomery Bell Academy experiences and the Robin Williams character, teacher John Keating, was based on Schulman’s inspirational MBA teacher Samuel Pickering, Schulman in his director’s statement on the movie’s website says he grew up in this dark world in Nashville.
Script-Com 2023
Saturday, December 2
10 a.m.-5 p.m.
A free webinar, Script-Com 2023 will feature speakers from the worlds of screenwriting, literary management and entertainment law:
• Tom Schulman – Academy Award winning screenwriter/producer/director
(Dead Poets Society, What About Bob?, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag and more.)
• Terri Emerson – screenwriter, producer, (Bernie the Dolphin, Bernie the Dolphin 2)
• Dana Weissman – director of programs for the WGA East
• Anita Modak-Truran – entertainment law, producer, director
• Ella Douglas – literary manager for screenwriters and TV writers
• Barb Doyon – producer, writer and coverage expert
Information/registration
“In my youth, I frequented pool halls filled with thugs and delinquents who played a unique and highly skilled game of pool called keno, which involved the rapid doubling of bets, and was so insidious from a gambling perspective that it was banned in most states,” Schulman writes. “… I hope that the journeys of the characters in this movie, struggling against oppressive forces, can in some way inspire audiences and encourage a long overdue national conversation about race, misogyny, and hate.”
Audiences are slowly returning to theaters after COVID and the recent strikes by writers, actors and directors, an upward trend that Schulman hopes continues.
“(COVID) had a sort of catastrophic effect on the box office for quite a while and the movie business essentially shut down for I would say close to a year,” Schulman says. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to recover. I think the box office is slowly coming back. There’s some optimism in Hollywood that people will start going to theaters again.”
He points to the record-breaking success of “Barbie” and other films, he says major film studios have had to make big changes during the COVID and strike setbacks.
“Now that COVID’s not rampaging, people will take the risk of being part of the crowd to watch a movie,” Schulman says. “I think the companies that were making streaming content like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, I think what we learned during the strike was that they overproduced content. So there’s likely going to be a paring back of the number of television series that those companies make. I think they were making almost 500 series at the height of production right before COVID hit.
“So many productions had to stop and go on hold for such a long time. I think those companies are sort of retooling their business plans and decided that they’ve got too many shows and are diluting the market to the point where … new streaming services like Paramount+ and even Disney+ are having trouble getting enough subscribers to justify the costs.
“Regardless, it is a kind of cutting back of content and production to let the market sort of catch up with all the content that they’ve still got waiting to go out.”
Schulman was on the Writers Guild negotiating team for the historic 148-day strike which ended on Sept. 27. The writers signed a three-year agreement after winning concessions over pay, residuals and the use of artificial intelligence in screenwriting.
“Look, if AI ever gets better than us writers, then that would be the last contract the Writers Guild ever makes and then we’ll all be out of work,” Schulman says with a laugh. “But right now, AI’s not as good as human beings and the companies have decided they’re not going to try to use it, at least in the next three years, to write screenplays.”