Last March, Sammy Warshaw read NO THRONE ROOM — a contained sci-fi spec of mine — and gave me half an hour. He didn't line-edit and he didn't hand me a checklist. He said the same thing four different ways until it landed: one point of view, one location, and the thing they can't see as your engine.
Here's the honest part. Taking that note meant throwing out a draft I liked. Multiple perspectives, a whole valley, a bigger canvas. What came back was two people in a bunker — and it's a better film by every measure that matters.
I don't think I would have found that on my own. Not at the level I was writing at then.
Sammy's credits run through HAPPY DEATH DAY, UPGRADE, HALLOWEEN, and SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2. Franchise scale, legacy IP, decades of platforms behind it. And what he told me was: one room, two people, contain it. I've been thinking about that all year.
Sammy is doing a Script Breakdown on OBSESSION tomorrow — Wednesday, August 5th, 4 PM PT / 7 PM ET — hosted by John Mezes. It's a Writers' Room event. If you want to hear how a producer actually reads a script, the structural instinct underneath the notes, that's the hour.
(Writers' Room access: stage32.com/writers-room)
