Wanted to write a little thread about one of my top screenwriting idols, David Peoples. Wrote some of the best movies ever-- BLADE RUNNER, 12 MONKEYS (co-written with his wife Janet), UNFORGIVEN (he got an Oscar nom for that one)-- and yet that's not even why he's so great...

...my first job in The Biz, I was a movie producer's assistant. Old-school guy, produced some very cool movies in the 70s and 80s, knew all those old-school writers, execs & directors, and had a library full of scripts, most of them unproduced, and a lot of them were AMAZING...

...scripts by luminaries like Attanasio, Rascoe, Milius, Wittliff, Mathison, Luedtke, and of course... Dave Peoples. Anyway I spent a lot of time in that office tearing through that script library with a vengeance. But it was Peoples' scripts that really blew my mind.

...It wasn't just that he wrote so cleanly, so tightly, and with such perfect structure. It wasn't just that he wrote with such clarity that I could see each movie blooming in front of me like the most vivid of flowerboxes. He also had a *fearlessness* about his writing...

like he didn't give a fuck if he was being too emotional, or too vicious, or too sexy. He just went for it. He was so bad-ass, he wrote an entire dystopian sci-fi script using the PAST TENSE. If you read or write a lot of scripts... you'll appreciate how *weird* that is...

(it now occurs to me that this is reading like a tribute. He's still alive, and still working, far as I know. LOL. Sorry if that wasn't clear.)

Anyway, of all those random, obscure, wonderful, weird, and fucked-up David Peoples scripts I read in that office (the ones nobody heard of), I'm pretty sure none of them got made. They're lost to time, dust, and history. But holy shit. I really wish you could read them...

I wish *I* could read them again. One of them was called something like "13 PRESIDENTS" (that's the past-tense one) and if anyone has seen it, slide into my DMs. I learned so much from that guy, just from reading him. I probably stole some of his moves, to be honest...

So what's the point of all this? I'm not sure, really, lol. I just really wanted to pay respect to DP. And my advice to any aspiring screenwriter would be: seek out scripts written by people older and wiser than you. Scripts that have no technology or cell phones in them...

Read scripts by writers who had to write on typewriters, or old-ass clunky word processors, without formatting or auto-correct. Those writers sweated it the fuck out in a way none of us can fully appreciate. They are the bedrock. Anyway thanks for listening. <done>