No Happy Endings Required

The death of satire, when to kill a scene and how to write a Trump movie (‘Let’s hope it’s not a tragedy’)

- Stephen Galloway

When a very pregnant Allison Schroeder arrived at her first THR Writer Roundtable, she had a confession: Her husband (fellow writer Aaron Brownstein) once told her that their relationship never would have moved past the first date if he hadn’t liked her writing. “I had just done a web musical and it was online,” recalled Schroeder (Hidden Figures), 38. “And before the second date, he watched the whole thing to make sure I wasn’t a terrible hack because he’d decided he could not be with me for the rest of his life if we had to lie to each other about our writing.” Brownstein would have felt comfortable at the Nov. 11 gathering, where his wife was joined by some of the best writers in film: Pedro Almodovar (Julieta), 67; Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals), 55; Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea), 54; Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), 38; and Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water), 47.

Somebody said all writing is autobiography. True or false?

ALLISON SCHROEDER True, to a certain extent. You leave your imprint on every screenplay. I like to bring my take as a woman to all my female characters, and that hopefully makes them a little more layered and complex, certainly with Hidden Figures. I interned at NASA for five years, and I grew up in Cape Canaveral, and my grandfather was an engineer on the Mercury capsule, and my grandmother was a software engineer. I literally grew up playing on the Mercury capsule prototypes. So when this came along, I thought: “Yes, I know this world. I know the smell in the cafeteria of NASA.”