The Screenwriter’s Character Arc: Interviewing Chris Sey and Phil Stark
Los Angeles is swarming with aspiring or former actors. Ask your waiter, your Uber driver, or your personal trainer why they first moved to LA, and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you they were pursuing an acting career. Ask your therapist, however, and you may hear something entirely different.
Phil Stark and Chris Sey wrote movies for decades before becoming therapists. Both had a natural interest in screenwriting that led them to Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world. Phil moved directly after graduating college and found his first paid gig a few years after, before going on to write the cult-classic Dude, Where’s My Car as well as on That ‘70s Show. For Chris, best known for Hell Fest and Haul Out the Holly: Lit Up, creative writing had always been an interest, but it wasn’t until nearly a decade after college that he professionalized it. Within two years, he found himself with a manager and guild membership, along with a plethora of pitch meetings for rewrites and reboots of various horrors and thrillers. “It kinda felt like there wasn’t gonna be a limit to the success,” he recalled.
Following the 2007 Writers’ Strike, however, the industry underwent seismic changes. Syndication transformed with the advent of streaming and the explosion of intellectual property (IP) films, as exemplified by the MCU. The middle and lower echelons of screenwriters were squeezed out because streaming reduced television staffs, and IP films were reserved for Hollywood’s most respected writers. For guys like Chris and Phil, the work seemed to dry up. “I didn’t have the clout to get any traction,” Chris noted. But it hadn’t always been like this. “There used to be a ton of fat in the business,” he added, “but it also kept a lot of people working.” Prior to the strike, networks would buy shows that didn’t necessarily reach production, but provided guild-minimum wages for working writers. After the strike, these sorts of guarantees seemed to dissipate.
Aside from financial issues, both Chris and Phil found writing becoming less and less enjoyable, directly conflicting with the very reason they pursued it. Grappling with the inauthenticity of his work, Chris found himself constantly deciding between payment and pride: “The commercial aspect of it you feel like you’re selling your soul, and the less commercial aspect of it you’re screaming into the wilderness.” As for Phil, his passion for screenwriting simply faded. He burned out pitching TV shows and pilots, and it became frustrating trying to keep up with the desires and expectations of networks. “I spent 10, 15, 20 years doing something that was always my goal,” he explained, but eventually he started asking himself, “Is this really my goal? Do I still enjoy doing this?” With more difficulty, less money, and less agency, screenwriting lost its spark. “It was really unsatisfying, it became really unsatisfying,” lamented Chris.
As time went on, Phil and Chris gradually accepted that a career change was imminent. Because the film industry generally gravitates to younger creatives, working would only become more difficult. “I just did the calculation: I’m gonna be a less desirable entity as a writer… the older I get,” considered Chris. Retrospectively employing his psychology expertise, Phil even cites the midlife crisis, and how people commonly reassess their position in their forties and fifties as their goals and priorities shift. For him, things really changed when he was presented with the opportunity to pitch a deck to investors and potentially even be a showrunner, something he’d always seen as “the holy grail” of screenwriting. But by that point, the motivation was gone. “I gotta say, I half-assed it,” Phil remarked, and he decided, “Maybe I don’t want to do this anymore.” As for Chris, the change came in 2020 when he co-founded Dine-11, a nonprofit that partnered with chefs and restaurants to feed healthcare workers across LA amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. “Writing felt very selfish,” he contemplated. “It felt really craven and commercial, so that’s a stupid nut to crack, and it's kind of selfish.” He found his experiences doing charity work far more fulfilling than writing: “The whole process made me feel better than any kind of writing made me feel.” To him, that was a signal that change was necessary.
Beyond their own experiences in therapy, both Chris and Phil mention a lifelong gravitation towards examining people as a catalyst for their interest in psychology—something that may have even sparked their initial interest in writing. Phil recognized a connection between screenwriting and therapy when he taught a class on writing pilots and noticed a common theme across his students’ writing: personal stories about the struggles of being an aspiring screenwriter. Phil took the opportunity to investigate the emotions of his students through the characters they crafted. As he described, “The most amazing characters are us specifically as individuals and therapy is about helping a person navigate their own pilot script.” In a sense, Chris believes he’d spent his life therapizing, whether that be within his family, working as a bartender in Philadelphia, or, like Phil, writing scripts. Becoming a therapist was a way to channel his desire for personal stories into the act of helping people. He reflected, “I’m not doing this so that the world thinks I’m important. I’m doing this so that I can be of importance to the world.”
Chris (left) and Phil (right)