Profile On Screenwriter Steven DeKnight (Part 1)

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Steven DeKnight:

Steven DeKnight first got his start in television on the anthology series on MTV called Undressed, closely followed by the supernatural-fantasy TV show Angel and Smallville. He’s also known for the historical epic Spartacus and his dalliance in the Marvel world with the action-packed grit of Daredevil. The prolific screenwriter shared his thoughts on what led him to writing and his enduring career with Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

“I’m a child of the mid-60s. I was born in 1965 and I graduated in high school in 1984. When I was growing up, my mom and dad were… what I could best describe as free spirits,” explains DeKnight. The writer recalls that, as a child of the 70s and 80s, his parents would take him and his brother to drive-in theaters (look it up). “We would go to the drive-in and see a double feature, a triple feature, and my parents had no filter whatsoever about what they took us to.” So, at a relatively young age, he was exposed to hard, R-rated exploitation films, Kung-Fu movies, spaghetti westerns and he naturally fell in love with the movies.

Steven grew up in Millville, South Jersey, a town built around a glass factory and didn’t even have a movie theater. “I’d have to ride my bike a half-hour to the next town to watch a movie. Every Saturday afternoon, beaming in from Philadelphia, there was this presenter Dr. Shock (Joseph Zawislak). His schtick was kind of like a grandpa who looked like Dracula. And he would present a double feature of old horror or sci-fi movies. on TV.”

Despite his early exposure to B-grade horror and science fiction films, Steven wasn’t immediately drawn to writing. “Originally I was enamored by Willis O’Brien, who was the stop motion guy who did King Kong and then the amazing Ray Harryhousen who was the father of stop motion animation.” Animation piqued his interest, but he didn’t have any access to animators who could nurture that interest. Then, DeKnight turned his attention to horror makeup effects.  “I was just blown away by masters like Dick Smith, Rob Bottin and Rick Baker,” recalls Steven, “I remember the first time I came across Rick Baker was in an issue of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine and it was just a picture of him as a teenager doing makeup with somebody who had a compound fracture on his arm with a bone poking out.” Sadly, this career option was also dashed since DeKnight didn’t have any access to special effects makeup artists in Millville.

But Millville did have a high school which Steven attended. “I fell into acting in high school and I really loved it. So I went to college in Santa Cruz, California to study it.” He pursued that passion for two years before realizing he wasn’t Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. But he knew a career in the entertainment industry beckoned him.

From Film Watcher To Film Writer

In his next career pivot, Steven DeKnight started writing plays. “All the plays I wrote were much more cinematic in nature because that’s what I had grown up with. So I ended up going to UCLA to their playwriting graduate program and I stuck around for an extra year to go through the screenwriting program. I caught the bug. I really wanted to write movies.”

He decided on a career in film writing. He wrote one spec feature after another that nobody wanted. He grew frustrated by the industry disinterest. Still, he persisted.

“I fell backwards into TV through a friend of mine who was doing production work on a show called Undressed. It was a half hour teen sex comedy. It was the brainchild of Roland Joffé, the director of The Killing Fields and The Mission. Each episode was divided into three sections – high school, college and post college. And it was three different stories that bounced back and forth about some sexual situation or sexual mores.”

Steven DeKnight had a long and convoluted lead-in period to reach this career milestone, so he generated many story ideas along the way waiting to be written. “Usually when I have an idea for something original it it percolates for years until I have time to get around to it. During those years of thinking about it, occasionally making notes, the question comes up organically if this a movie or a TV show. Would it be better as a short story or a graphic novel? There’s a shaking out period. I’m not one of those writers that has an idea today and a week later has a script. I like things to gel. So, there’s always a backlog of ideas,” says DeKnight.

There are always a few dormant ideas and passion projects in the pipeline. The screenwriter balances these out with paid assignments. “One of the longest-gestating ones is I had, is this idea for a 1940s Raymond Chandler-esque, hard-boiled detective who specializes in unusual, supernatural cases. Nothing really groundbreaking about that idea, but I love Raymond Chandler short stories, especially those kind of Murder, My Sweet, two-fisted, tough guy, gumshoe movies. And I’m finally doing that as a graphic novel which should be out in the next year or two. I had the idea about 30 years ago and it just percolated and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Then I realized it was too expensive for TV and probably too expensive for features without existing IP. But I just wanted to tell that story,” he continues.

Steve also mentions that the comic book and graphic novel IP feeding frenzy by the studios may be waning. “Now, it’s short stories. My managers at Anonymous Content always send me a packet of stuff every week of short stories that are available. I always respond to what I would like to see and what I’m interested in, and, if that was half a good idea, I say ‘There might be a path here to make this something.’” He jokes that, on occasion, if he doesn’t respond instantly, the short story rights are already snatched up in a bidding war.

These alternative literary forms may be an avenue to re-engineer them into tangible IP before adapting them back into feature films or television shows. DeKnight is also working on a graphic novel version of his B-grade horror feature that he can’t currently see raising studio interest. “Once the studios have something physical to hold in their hands they’re more likely to do something with it.” This is in stark contrast to the heady days of decades ago where a writer might pitch an idea in two sentences and studios would provide development support for it.

Trends, Cycles and Audience

Trends, fads, and audience are nothing new in Hollywood. Cycles are here to stay. “It’s the same thing that happened in the 1950s where the studios were pouring all of this money into big budget musicals and westerns that the audience didn’t want to see anymore. And the studio system kind of collapsed… and out of that came Scorsese, Coppola, and Lucas.”

The current studio model relies heavily on $200 million+ tentpole movies, which need to earn at least $1.5 billion at the box office to be profitable. Aside from putting far too much pressure on the opening weekend which can run for ups to five days – Wednesday through Sunday, “everybody wants the big giant movie that’s a franchise machine and people are tired of them. I love superhero movies. I want something else.” Perhaps a return to the more rational studio system of spreading risk across $10 – $20 million movies is recommended?

Then there are the inimical shortened cinema to streaming windows which cannibalize the box office.  Why might a film goer visit a cinema when they can stream a new release in the comfort of their own home. “It’s like they had a machine that printed money and decided to take a hammer to it,” declares DeKnight in frustration.