Though he’s never met or worked with the actor, Abrams likes to say, “I write Tom Cruise movies.” If the scribe has a particular brand he wants to be associated with, he says it’s “populist entertainment but done at the highest level.” He points to how a film like “Risky Business” elevated the 1980s sex comedy or how “A Few Good Men” was a superior courtroom drama, and how those scripts “featured insanely quotable lines.”
The latter film certainly shares some DNA with Abrams’ script for “Juror #2,” a gripping courtroom thriller starring Nicholas Hoult and directed by none other than Clint Eastwood. Though Abrams has been a working writer for some time, it was that 2024 film that helped put him on the map.
“I’m so just thrilled that Clint believed in me enough to keep me on the whole time,” notes Abrams, acknowledging how screenplays can morph and change hands during production. “Working with him was a dream come true.”
Like Cruise, Abrams can’t be pigeonholed. He wrote the book for the Huey Lewis musical “The Heart of Rock and Roll,” which debuted on Broadway last year, and his current slate includes “Duchess,” a relationship thriller for Netflix, and “In the Pocket” for Amazon/MGM, which he describes as an “NFL movie in the spirit of ‘Jerry Maguire.’” He’s also reteaming with “Juror” studio WB on “The Bodyguard,” a reboot of the 1992 classic but focusing on a “younger, less-established pop star.” Sam Wrench, who directed “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” is set to direct.
Abrams is a film fan at heart and can quote several Aaron Sorkin scripts verbatim.
In fact, he referenced the final speech in “The American President” in his wedding vows. “At the end I said, ‘My name is Jonathan Abrams, and I AM your husband.’”
— Jenelle Riley
Reps Agency CAA; Management Mosaic; Legal: McKuin Frankel & Whitehead
Influences His wife, Tom Cruise movies, Andrew Shepherd, Huey Lewis
An Emmy-winning writer for her work on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” who has also written for hits like “Ted Lasso” and “Shrinking,” Black is set to make her screenwriting debut with a pair of wildly different projects: the horror sequel “Ma 2” and the rom-com “Accidentally Married.”
The latter will star Black as “a super-Type A bride who goes on her Vegas bachelorette party and finds herself accidently married to a very hot stripper,” Black says. Damon Wayans Jr. is attached to play said stripper. The project came about when Black was approached by “rom-com queen” Aline Brosh McKenna.
While “Ma 2” is still being written, those who saw the first film might wonder how the titular character is returning. All Black can say is, “It’s a sequel.” She does add that she’s a long-time horror fan and “all thanks to Jordan Peele for making people believe that comedy writers can write horror!”
Black came to writing by way of performing, and while attending the PhD program at Northwestern University found herself in Chicago, home of the legendary Second City. “I started taking classes there just for something to do on weekends, and that’s why I started writing,” she notes. “You have to write to get on stage.”
She both wrote and appeared on “Full Frontal” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show” before being hired for the second season of “Ted Lasso,” where, on her first day, she argued with showrunner Bill Lawerence. “I told the showrunner he was wrong,” she says with a laugh. “But I guess he forgave me because he’s given me my next three jobs.”
— Jenelle Riley
Reps Agency: UTA; Management: Mosaic; Legal: Yorn Levine Barnes Krintzman Rubenstein Kohner Endlich, Goodell & Gellman
Influences Her family, Shonda Rhimes, Kevin Williamson
In the spring of 2024, word leaked out that Robert Pattinson had attached himself to Evans’ secretive script “How to Save a Marriage” and, suddenly, his reps were flooded with interest from studios around town. Then Sony stepped up with a big offer — said to be in the seven-figure range — and gave Evans 24 hours to decide. “People started bidding on it before we were ready, and it very quickly kind of accelerated, and the numbers kept going up,” recalls Evans. “I think we got the first sort of big offer on a day when my wife had just gone on a plane. I was like, ‘I don’t know how to make this decision without you.’” Sony won, and Zoe Kravitz is attached to direct.
Evans came out of college with aspirations to be a playwright and wound up with a healthy career as an associate director on Broadway. Then he collaborated with director Jon Saunders on a series of animated Lego shorts for Warner Bros., and they subsequently sold a Lego feature script. In 2017, Evans solo-penned time travel script “The Gate,” which landed on the Black List and launched his career as a screenwriter for hire.
“I wrote the ‘Monopoly’ movie and did a ‘Space Invaders’ take, and sold a couple things to Disney and sort of worked in that big family space for a while,” says Evans. To date, none of them have been produced. Evans was itching to do something more original, and when the WGA strike hit in 2023, he reevaluated his professional priorities and decided it was time to make a change with an original spec script, resulting in “How to Save a Marriage.”
“I really enjoyed working in that [family] space, but it was never really what my playwright voice was, which was a little kooky or a little more experimental,” he says.
— Todd Longwell
Reps Agency: UTA; Management Entertainment 360; Legal The Nord Group;
Influences The Coen brothers, Charlie Kaufman, Ingmar Bergman
While he’s come to love it, screenwriting was technically Everett’s third choice. He originally set out to be in front of the camera — he was a child actor in Japan — but after moving to Utah at the age of 6,
he and his friends began to make their own movies. “I would act, and they’d run the camera,” he recalls. “But at some point, I realized there were specific shots and moves I wanted, so I became a director. And the writing came as a byproduct of that.”
In 2017, he heard about an unpublished book called “The Traveler” by Joseph Eckert, about a man who jumps forward in time. He adapted it on spec and it was optioned in late 2019. Shortly thereafter it made the Black List. While production was delayed due to the pandemic and the usual Hollywood studio shuffles, that script “opened every single door for me.” And it’s now at Paramount, with “Minari” director Lee Isaac Chung set to direct.
In the meantime, his friend Jake Van Wagoner had a small budget and wanted to make something “Spielbergian,” so Everett scripted the 2023 indie “Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kind of Left Out,” whose title pretty much sums up the movie. “A lot of times, it has to start with the title because that sells the movie. And this communicated the tone, that it had aliens, and really explained itself,” Everett admits.
He’s also penned an original samurai Western set in the John Wick universe, saying “that’s probably as much as I can say.” In additon, he’s set to make his feature directorial debut with “Akiya,” about a Japanese American woman who buys an abandoned house in Japan to fix up, only to discover it’s haunted. He describes it as “if Studio Ghibli made ‘The Conjuring.’” He actually purchased the titular home in Japan to shoot in, but so far, no ghosts. “Just some of the biggest spiders I’ve ever seen.”
— Jenelle Riley
Reps Agency: WME; Management Writ Large; Legal Jackoway Austen;
Influences Miyazaki Hayao, Robert Zemeckis, Bong Joon Ho
When Hill completed her first script, “The Housewife,” it transformed her life. She left behind the entry-level jobs she had been working – from serving as assistant for actor-director Olivia Wilde to interning for Participant Media – and became a screenwriter-for-hire, writing or rewriting a dozen scripts. But, for the longest, none of them got a greenlight, leaving her in a gilded, only-in-showbiz purgatory. Finally, “The Housewife” went before the cameras in May, and she became a produced screenwriter. “In some ways I feel sort of in the thick of my career and the other way like this exciting thing is just starting,” muses Hill.
“The Housewife” is a thriller about a New York Time reporter (Tye Sheridan) in 1964 who, while investigating a New Jersey man he suspects is a former Nazi officer (Luke Evans), becomes obsessed with his mysterious wife (Naomi Watts). “It’s based on a true story, and when I read about it, I just had this full body reaction, like I have to write that movie,” says Hill. “It confronted me with some questions I didn’t know the answer to. Do we ever fully know someone else? Do we ever fully know ourselves? Is evil a bug of the human condition or feature? I would literally wake up with nightmares until this was finished.”
The script made the Black List in 2016, bringing it to the attention of producers Robbie Brenner (“Barbie”) and Kevin McKeon (“Call Jane”). “We met and they said, ‘We’re going to make this movie’ and they kept their promise,” she says. “It was just a long journey.”
The journey included assignments to adapt the Richard N. Goodwin play “The Hinge of the World” and a rewrite of the HBO Max feature “Alone,” about the journalist who uncovered the Pentagon’s UFO program. “I feel really proud that [“The Housewife”] was strong enough to keep everyone committed for so long,” says Hill, who is also scripting the upcoming sci fi drama “Zygote,” with Jennifer Garner attached to star. “And it was 100% worth the wait.”
–Todd Longwell
Reps: Agency: UTA; Management: Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment; Legal: Hansen, Jacobsen, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren, Richman, Rush, Keller, Gellman, Meigs & Fox
Influences: Todd Field, Eric Roth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
After meeting at university, screenwriters Jimenez and McMechan began their partnership with a shared love for comedy and of exploring the messy side of womanhood. Soon after their first script got into the Sundance Feature Lab, they were discovered by fellow screenwriter Nicole Perlman, who approached them with the early stages of an idea she was beginning to produce: Sony Animation and Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters.”
“We had never done animation before, and we didn’t know anything about K-pop. We were writing a lot of raunchier stuff, but it turns out that that was like exactly what [co-director] Maggie [Kang] had been looking for, with our friendship and us being young girls,” says McMechan. Since the film’s release, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, becoming Netflix’s most-watched film of all time, while its songs broke records on Billboard 200.
With a screenplay that is female-centered and packs a punch, Jimenez and McMechan have found the outpouring of love and support from multiple generations of women who identify with the characters to help further open the doorway for the next generation of female screenwriters like themselves. “It feels really nice that you can write something in your true voice and have it be appreciated by an audience,” says Jimenez. “A lot of times, some people don’t love our voice because it’s a bit more aggressive than other female voices that we see in animation. You can be yourself, and everyone will like it.”
After stepping into the world of dazzling fight sequences, the pair will soon embark on another chaotic adventure, set to take place in the Wild West. They are also working on an original series with Legendary attached called “A Really Bad Person.” While the two venture into new genres, one thing will always remain: their determination to continue telling stories that they hope audiences will be able to feel seen. “We love tackling different genres and inserting ourselves into these worlds,” said Jimenez. “We’re curious girls at the end of the day and just want to write stuff that is fun
to us.”
— Leia Mendoza
Reps Agency: Verve; Management: Mosaic; Legal: Brecheen, Feldman, Breimer, Silver & Thompson
Influences The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, Brett Baer and Dave Finkel
In the last calendar year, Kolodney went from working at the L.A. Zoo to walking the red carpets at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. “Dead Man’s Wire,” directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Bill Skarsgård, has also opened the door for another project that he penned and plans to direct, “Josephine the Blanket.”
“There’s that age-old quote, that overnight success takes about 10 years,” he says with a laugh.
He graduated from USC film school in 2015 and spent the last decade “grinding, being broke and racking up credit card debt and eating Top Ramen.” “Dead Man’s Wire,” which was bought by distributor Row K Entertainment, is based on the true tale of Tony Kiritsis, who, in 1977, took his mortgage banker hostage and became sort of a folk hero. The screenplay balances the drama of the situation with absurd humor.
“Gus Van Zant and Bill Skarsgård understood the tone; they understood that tricky tightrope walk,” he says.
He credits his mother for his love of movies. “I remember her movie collection, and this two-VHS set of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia,’ and watching that when I was, like, 9 or 10 years old,” says the Santa Clarita native, who also credits his two years at College of the Canyons, the local community college, with helping him hone his love of storytelling.
Kolodney takes film history seriously, and is a voracious reader — a huge influence on his writing. His inspirations are also titanic: “I wrote it down: William Goldman, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Haruki Murakami, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Elia Kazan, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson, Vince Gilligan, Sally Menke, Larry David, Martin Scorsese, the Lonely Island/Good Neighbor stuff, Jordan Peele, Gus Van Zandt, Steven Soderbergh, Sidney Lumet, Max Bemis, Sean Baker, Francis Ford Coppola, David Fincher, Tina Fey, David O. Russell, Charlie Kaufman, Judd Apatow, Sydney Lumet, Lorne Michaels, Michael Mann, William Friedkin, Bong Joon Ho — almost done! — Sean Baker, Ryan Coogler, John Watson, who was a professor that I had at USC and was a big mentor of mine, Conan O’Brien, Stanley Kubrick and Werner Herzog.” — Carole Horst
Reps Agency Verve; Management Mosaic In the last calendar year, Kolodney went from working at the L.A. Zoo to walking the red carpets at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. “Dead Man’s Wire,” directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Bill Skarsgård, has also opened the door for another project that he penned and plans to direct, “Josephine the Blanket.”
“There’s that age-old quote, that overnight success takes about 10 years,” he says with a laugh.
He graduated from USC film school in 2015 and spent the last decade “grinding, being broke and racking up credit card debt and eating Top Ramen.” “Dead Man’s Wire,” which was bought by distributor Row K Entertainment, is based on the true tale of Tony Kiritsis, who, in 1977, took his mortgage banker hostage and became sort of a folk hero. The screenplay balances the drama of the situation with absurd humor.
“Gus Van Zant and Bill Skarsgård understood the tone; they understood that tricky tightrope walk,” he says.
He credits his mother for his love of movies. “I remember her movie collection, and this two-VHS set of Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Magnolia,’ and watching that when I was, like, 9 or 10 years old,” says the Santa Clarita native, who also credits his two years at College of the Canyons, the local community college, with helping him hone his love of storytelling.
Kolodney takes film history seriously, and is a voracious reader — a huge influence on his writing. His inspirations are also titanic: “I wrote it down: William Goldman, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Haruki Murakami, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Elia Kazan, Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson, Vince Gilligan, Sally Menke, Larry David, Martin Scorsese, the Lonely Island/Good Neighbor stuff, Jordan Peele, Gus Van Zandt, Steven Soderbergh, Sidney Lumet, Max Bemis, Sean Baker, Francis Ford Coppola, David Fincher, Tina Fey, David O. Russell, Charlie Kaufman, Judd Apatow, Sydney Lumet, Lorne Michaels, Michael Mann, William Friedkin, Bong Joon Ho — almost done! — Sean Baker, Ryan Coogler, John Watson, who was a professor that I had at USC and was a big mentor of mine, Conan O’Brien, Stanley Kubrick and Werner Herzog.”
— Carole Horst
Reps Agency Verve; Management: Mosaic; Legal: Fox Rothschild
Influences See above
When Nogueira started to expand her career from acting (“The Michael J. Fox Show” and “The Vampire Diaries”) into writing in the mid-2010s, she saw herself focusing on dialogue-driven dramas and romantic comedies. “I’m not the first person that has entered Hollywood saying, ‘And then they will anoint me Nora Ephron,’” she says with a laugh.
Instead, her 2016 Off Broadway debut as a playwright, “Empathitrax” — about a struggling couple that take a pill that allows them to feel each other’s emotions — sent Nogueira on a different path altogether.
“Everyone read it as a genre script,” she says. “So I started getting called in to pitch on world-building fantasy and futuristic sci-fi.” One such meeting was with executives at DC Studios, who handed her a collection of comic books written by Tom King about Superman’s cousin, Kara Zor-El — better known as Supergirl.
While Nogueira doesn’t regularly read comic books, she is a big fan of superhero movies — but Supergirl hadn’t ever quite made sense to her. “She watched Krypton completely be destroyed,” Nogueira says. “I was always like, ‘I can’t get my head around the version of the character that is so sunny.’” King’s “rougher and grittier and edgier and funnier” approach, by contrast, leaned into Kara’s past. “When I read it, I was like, ‘There she is,’” she says.
“Supergirl,” directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Milly Alcock as Kara, will be Nogueira’s first produced feature screenplay when it debuts in June 2026, and she’s already working for DC on adaptations of “Wonder Woman” and “Teen Titans.” She’s also thrilled to finally have sold a romantic comedy script to New Line Cinema, written with her friend Sas Goldberg; DC’s Peter Safran is producing with John Rickard and Alex Saks. “It’s such a nice palate cleanser,” she says. “There are no aliens, no explosions and nobody gets beat up!”
— Adam B. Vary
Reps Agency: CAA; Management: Howard Green Entertainment; Legal: GGSSC
Influences Nora Ephron, Charlie Kaufman, James L. Brooks, “Jaws” and “Terminator 2”
Shattuck never took a screenwriting class while studying English at Cornell University, and he admits that he feels like somebody who’s “fallen sideways into a screenwriting career” after the theatrical release of his self-adaption of “The History of Sound,” which premiered at Cannes and stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.
“I’m really excited to see the film out in the world, and I’m really excited to be a part of it, but I slightly feel like a moon orbiting the planet that is the film,” Shattuck says. “If I were to draw out a metaphor, it would be that I’m watching it from a close distance.”
Shattuck started writing short stories at research stations when he was involved in ornithological work at Cornell, where he graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 2008. But the creative juices started flowing as a self-described “young emo boy” who wrote nature poems and spent his evenings after school walking out onto the fields of his home in Massachusetts.
“There’s no way I would have started to write short stories if I had an iPhone and internet connection,” Shattuck says. “Because writing is just too hard; it takes too much concentration.”
Shattuck now finds himself bouncing between the film and literary world. His writing has already caught the attention of names like Ben Stiller, who asked him if he wanted to adapt the novel “The Lost Airman: A True Story of Escape From Nazi-Occupied France,” a searing World War II drama.
“What I love about historical fiction is that you can really strip everything down and create sort of a dark, minimalist qual-
ity where there’s people gathered around a lantern or candle,” Shattuck says. “I said to Ben [Stiller], ‘I’d be happy to write this, but it is going to be the most un-war like war movie you could possibly have.’”
— Matt Minton
Reps Agency: UTA; Management: Entertainment 360; Legal: Ziffren Brittenham
Influences Paul Harding, Marilynne Robinson, Andrea Barrett, Jane Campion, Alice Rohrwacher, Terrence Malick
“I didn’t study screenwriting at all. I was an economics student and thought I was going to get an economics PhD,” says Singh, who has recently penned scripts for industry heavyweights Robert Pattinson (“Primetime”) and Daniel Kaluuya (a Spider-Punk spinoff.)
Singh turned to writing as an escape from reality, using it to help him make sense of the world and current events. “When I write, I’m just trying to understand what I believe in and sort through the noise of the world to come out with something truthful or rooted in humanity,” he explains.
He is both writer and executive producer on A24’s forthcoming film “Primetime,” which stars Pattinson and is helmed by Lance Oppenheim. This marks his first scripted film, and among all his projects this year, this story of a crime journalist is the most impactful for him. With “Primetime” nearly in his rearview, Singh has already started on his next project: co-writing the script that expands the “Spider-Verse” universe. He will work alongside Kaluuya, who previously voiced a character in the animated sequel “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.”
Working with Pattinson and Kaluuya up close has given Singh a front-row seat to what it means to be dedicated to the craft, which is one of the many lessons that have stayed with him. “They’re excited by the creative process, and it makes me happy to see people who have been in the business for so long not to be super jaded,” he says.
As Singh continues to rise in Hollywood, he says his hope for the industry is to take more risks with storytelling. “I want Hollywood to feel dangerous again,” he says. “You make something that’s a risk. All of a sudden, people believe in it, and it becomes a viable product. Then, they can go out and make more projects that feel scary or dangerous and can be huge successes. I believe that. I think audiences really
crave it.”
— Giana Levy
Reps Agency: WME; Management: Untitled Entertainment; Legal: Ziffren Brittenham
Influences Paddy Chayefsky
