Writer learns the business of Hollywood
ALUMNI | Will Fetters did what most business administration majors do when they finish college: He became a Hollywood screenwriter.
Fetters, BE ’03, has gone on to pen the script for Remember Me, a 2010 romantic drama starring Robert Pattinson, of Twilight fame, and Emilie De Ravin, who rose to prominence on the television show Lost. The script, Fetters says, sprang from some personal experiences.
“It originally started as I was going through that existential crisis, trying to figure out who I am, that kind of thing,” he says. “I had kind of a lot of issues that I wanted to work out personally and then more broadly with the Sept. 11 elements of it.”
At first, he says, he didn’t know whether he wanted to explore these issues in a book or an essay form, but he definitely knew that he had to deal with them through the written word.
Inspiration comes in many forms, and for Fetters, that inspiration came from a run-in with the law, specifically a verbal confrontation with a Newark Police officer after friends of Fetters’ were involved in a fight on Main Street. He credits that altercation as “the inciting incident that really got me thinking about [telling the story] as a movie, and it just kind of all flowed from there.”
The next step was writing the script, which he describes as an “arduous” process.
“I kind of had to teach myself how to do it,” he says. “I didn’t study writing—I studied finance and political science—and I never really thought of it as a viable career path. The hardest thing about it wasn’t necessarily finding material; it’s finding material that is relevant to the story and fits your characters.”
The script took years to write, requiring a number of drafts before Fetters arrived at the finished product. He says he realizes now that he won’t have five years to write every movie script, and the writing of Remember Me really helped him learn to streamline his work.
“Every job you do, every script you write, you try to learn some things and get better,” he says. “You never stop learning, and you never stop trying to find ways to improve.”
Making the transition from a business student to a Hollywood screenwriter is not one that Fetters believes he would have made had it not been for the help of some of his professors at the University. He particularly singles out political science Prof. James Magee, with whom he still keeps in touch and describes as “just a really special professor.”
“He was the first guy who ever told me that I could write,” Fetters says. He calls UD “a great experience [that] was formative in my life” and says even the memory of the encounter with police is positive because of where it eventually led him.
Fetters is currently working on a draft for an upcoming movie, The Lucky One, in addition to A Star Is Born for Warner Brothers and a memoir he is adapting, Crazy for the Storm.
He says he still sometimes can’t wrap his head around the path that led him to his profession: “I wake up some days and go to work here, and I wonder how exactly I got here. I never would have imagined that this would be my job.”
