Ron Bass: A Legendary Screenwriter's Resilience Amidst a Writers' Strike
Ron Bass is one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of the craft. An Oscar Award winning writer and producer (Rain Man,Dangerous Minds, Soul Surfer), he has enjoyed a fruitful career for over four decades and his movies have amassed close to three billion dollars at the box office.
His creativity and genius has altered the trajectory of traditional genres. For example, penning My Best Friend’s Wedding on spec (meaning he was not paid in advance for the script as was customary for a writer in his position. He wrote on spec because of his passion for the subject) changed the perception of the female protagonist in a romantic comedy. Julia Roberts’ Jules was selfish, deceitful, and manipulative in her schemes to steal the groom from his beloved, but at the same time, she sympathetic and relatable, the anti heroine we loved in spite of our conceptions. That movie still resonates today.
Ron has always written strong female characters, most recently, Jane Austen’s Persuasion for Netflix. The Dakota Johnson vehicle was number one in several territories and was also unusual in the way the protagonist speaks her internal thoughts straight to camera. While this method of narration is common in other movies, it’s rarely seen in period pieces, making Ron’s take on the classic English novel fresh and innovative.
Not only did Ron pen The Joy Luck Club with Amy Tan, they are currently working on a sequel, a Joy Luck Club 2 if you will where now the characters are grandmothers, mothers, and daughters so as to expand to three generations of the beloved novel’s original premise.
I have the great fortune of writing my own project with Ron. Along the lines of The Joy Luck Club, Rummy Karma tells the story of four Indian mothers living in Los Angeles and all of the emotional and mental baggage they have brought with them from India as they navigate their lives as mothers and lovers while being true to their cultural ideals. While moving forward with this project we had been developing for over a decade, we are currently challenged by not being able to pursue anything to do with this project while our guild, The Writers’ Guild of America, strikes for better and more compensatory terms for every scribe looking for employment. I had the chance to ask Ron a few questions from his perspective as he has been working through writers’ strikes since the 1980s and here are some of his thoughts.
When asked if this strike has tempered his passion for his craft, he adamantly said no. As a former employee for seven years of his production company, I know he didn’t call it Predawn Productions for nothing. Many a morning I was awakened by the whirr of the fax machine, which meant Ron was sending pages he had recently written. Hey, give me a break! It was the early 2000s and some writers were far more tactile in their approach. He liked to write by hand, have the pages transcribed, and his employees like myself appreciated the opportunity to hold a page from a script in, wait for it, my HAND where I could put pen to paper for edits as opposed to everything being done online. But, I digress, as I usually do…
Anyway, Ron is as passionate and timeless as ever. He’s writing spec scripts, he’s honing his craft. And while he, like everybody else in Tinsel Town, has no idea how long this will last, even though it’s predicted to go into 2024, he reminds other writers that this wasn’t a lock out; this was an elective strike by the union. While a drastic measure, it means voices need to be heard. Does that mean there are negotiations currently? Not really, but that’s almost to be expected. His advice to other writers is to find a day job. He did. He was an entertainment attorney and he would write nights and weekends and every free moment he had with the belief and passion that one day he could give up his profession as a lawyer to write full time. But, practicality is a must in the current climate and while people should not get deterred statistically by how many people make it, they need to still be practical. Write passionately! But, sustain yourself with something else until the tides change for both the scribe and the industry.
The business right now is broken, but my hope is that it’s not broken irretrievably. Streamers are a consideration that isn’t going away and even with the box office success of movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer, there are still miles to go for recovery at the box office. Ron mentioned the phrase “reasonable chance to go” in reference to spec scripts and movie ideas. I’ve been in this business for a long time and the odds still feel to me as they always did. Yes, we need to think about the challenges of AI and the shrunken concept of the writers’ room for episodic television, but there are still new approaches to telling stories. Take, for example, David Dobrik. Granted his days of the four minute 20 second blogs are a thing of the past, but he parlayed his camera, phone and friends into a cottage industry, which made him a mini celebrity and his vlogs small movies. He took that success and worked on television shows and specials for Discovery. Those options weren’t around when I was coming of age in this industry.
Maybe the point is just as Ron Bass forged a fantastic career for himself, maybe, moving forward, writers are going to have to get creative. Amazon may have replaced brick and mortar in how we shopped for books initially and everything currently, but I’m still wholly convinced they are going to need real people who write reel stories if Amazon Studios will succeed long term.
And to that, I say, write and right on day 86 of this strike….