Lew with Francis Ford Coppola

Hunter encourages students to enter contests.

“Screenwriting competitions are very fair game and one of the best ways to get paid attention to. Bill (Schreiber) will probably tell you the best part of it is he got an agent,” said Hunter. Agents allow screenwriters to hurdle “the wall” between them and getting their work read.

Jim Christensen’s story is similar to Schreiber’s — his This Old Porch won an Omaha Film Festival screenwriting award. His My Triple X Wife caught the eye of North Sea Films, the Omaha company whose president, Dana Altman, co-produced Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still starring Oscar-winners Martin Landau and Ellen Burstyn. North Sea’s optioned Christensen’s script. Christensen is screenwriting fulltime.

Hunter knows their hunger.

“I had been for like four or five years telling writers how to write and never having made a living as a writer myself. It bothered me a lot because I really didn’t think I had the cachet. I mean, it’s very, very alarming to give notes to Paddy Chafesky, who I idolized, or Neil Simon.”

Ray Bradbury, whom he was working with on a project, told Hunter he should try it. Hunter left ABC, making a pact with his first wife that if he didn’t make it in a year he’d find a job. Fifty-one weeks later none of six screenplays had sold.

Tapped out and with a family to support, he was about to go to work at Forest Lawn cemetery. He was to monitor corpses, laying them down if they rose during rigor mortis. He’d done it at an uncle’s funeral home in Guide Rock, and again to pay for college.

The day before he was to start, Aaron Spelling called to say he would buy Hunter’s script, The Glass Hammer, which became If Tomorrow Comes.


“You’re all storytellers,” he says to students. “Stories, they’re all around you, and as writers it’s up to you to see them.”

That Hunter is a member of the Writers Guild of America whose scripts have made money is reason enough for wannabes to flock to him. And as a veteran instructor at UCLA, his ex-students include many successful writers-directors, Nebraska’s Oscar-winning Alexander Payne among them.

“Isn’t Lew Hunter a trip?” Payne said about his old prof.

Hunter travels the world giving workshops. He answers faxes, emails, letters and phone calls each day from writers looking for answers. He advises, he cajoles, he steers, often ending his responses with his trademark tag line — “Write on!”
 

Hunter’s an enabler.

“There’s no mystery to screenwriting,” he says.

Suggest writing can’t be taught and he’ll tell you, “Bullshit!,” before adding, “What I can’t teach you is talent ... perseverance ... the burn — the way to get it done.” But he can stroke your ego and stoke your fires.

“We’re all here to support each other,” he tells dreamers. “You have to get your chops ... your legs ... your foundation, and these two weeks are very much a big part of your foundation if you’re going to believe. I want to encourage you all to reach for the stars.”

The afflicted get their fix from Lew Hunter, the dream catcher.