of The Chronicle staff
People with extroverted personalities often seem to get all the attention. But some low-key introverts who prefer to work quietly behind the scenes sometimes find their efforts pay off and they get to bask in the limelight.
Whitefish Bay native Andrew Jacobson is one such introvert. “I don’t have a big personality,” said Jacobson during a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles.
Yet Jacobson has achieved a behind-the-scenes success — and in the highly competitive Hollywood movie industry. He is co-author of a screenplay for the Columbia Pictures film, “Not Another Teen Movie,” released late last year. Most impressively, he accomplished this feat at the young age of 25 shortly after arriving in Hollywood.
Since his success, Jacobson said friends from high school and college have occasionally e-mailed him with comments like, “‘I never would have thought that quiet Andrew would come up with this stuff!’”
The son of Peggy and Tom Jacobson of Whitefish Bay, Jacobson may have been quiet, but he said “I have always had kind of a wry sense of humor. I think in sixth grade we had a poll, and I was [named] the wittiest.”
He began writing screenplays in high school as a hobby, learning the skill by reading “how to” books and other screenplays.
He entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a journalism major, aiming for a career as a broadcast journalist. But after a summer internship with NBC in New York City in 1996, he realized “broadcast journalism wasn’t for me.”
The next summer, he decided to pursue his true love of screenplay writing, landing an internship in Los Angeles to work as a writer’s assistant for the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
“Essentially it was my first introduction to [working on] exactly what I wanted to do,” he said. “It gave me a view of what [writers] do.”
Jacobson also met Adam Epstein, another would-be-screenwriter, from Long Island, in the parking lot of the apartment building where both were living. The two became partners because each felt that the other was going to become successful one day, Jacobson said.
“We both look like we could be in high school,” he quipped. “We try to embrace that [because] I think everybody wants to grab onto the youth thing.”
After finishing his journalism degree at UW-Madison in 1999 (changing his major to film would have required additional years of schooling), Jacobson moved to Los Angeles and began writing with Epstein. Success came quicker than he expected, but only after a lot of hard work.
“We wrote different scripts. We also wrote some TV scripts. We had written a bunch of stuff, but we had to get a manager,” he said.
In fact, Jacobson said having a good manager is “invaluable at the beginning of your career.”
“You have to have those middlemen, otherwise you can’t really work in this town,” he said. “Your manager helps to shape your career. They look out for you, read draft after draft with you. You also have to have an agent … to sell your scripts … and they’ll try to get you jobs.”
Jacobson’s break came about a year later through “Scary Movie” — a successful parody of horror flicks — which gave Jacobson and Epstein the idea for a script to parody teen movies.
Unfortunately, the writers of “Scary Movie” had already sold such a script. But the producers at Columbia didn’t like it, and Jacobson and Epstein were hired to re-write it with “stuff from our original script.”
The script was finished within six weeks. “The movie got a green light from Columbia in November of 2000, and it was in the theaters a year later,” Jacobson said. “As far as I can tell, very few films get made that quickly. I think ten screenplays are sold for every film that is made. We got lucky.”
Jacobson said some Hollywood writers get paid for scripts that aren’t filmed, but when scripts are made into movies, it can be “lucrative.”
Once sold, the writers’ no longer own the screenplay. But “you’ll owe [the company] at least one rewrite. You [might have] to incorporate the things the producers want to change.
Jacobson and Epstein are continuing with their work and are currently writing another comedy for producer Neil Moritz.
Jacobson attributed his success to a little luck, but said, “Ninety percent [of it is] what you write. If it is good, it will find people.”
For now Jacobson said he and his writing partner “are more or less pigeonholed in comedy writing. We are making a big effort to broaden what we write, but I think people still think of us as these teen comedy guys.”
Jacobson isn’t complaining, though, because he is too happy to be “doing literally exactly what I want to be doing.”
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