What the F*** Was I Thinking?
A How-Not-To For Screenwriters
by
Dirk Blackman
Embedded Files
I did it so you don't have to
Hi. I'm Dirk. I'm a screenwriter. Been at it 30 years now. I'm also a college teacher. When I'm not strewing wisdom at the feet of my students, I like to tell them screenwriting war stories. They love 'em, the bloodier the better.
Anyway, I'm in class one day, going on about how I screwed up something or other, and some kid says, "what would you have done differently?" Lightbulb moment!
This book is my answer.
If you didn't get it from the title, this is what the book is about: I thumbed through my long and reasonably successful career and picked out a bunch of moments where I screwed the pooch. But then I rewrote my life to reflect what I should have done. Example: I agreed to defer a $150,000 payment on a project to get it made. It got made; but I never got my money.
Rewrite! "No thanks, can't defer."
Yeah, there's a lot more detail and self-flagellation, but you get the idea. My hope is that I humorously and with inordinate self-deprecation help young creatives navigate the early parts of their careers by avoiding my mistakes (or maybe even copying my successes!)
In short, this book is filled with things I wish someone had told me.
The preface to What The F**k Was I Thinking? is below. If it intrigues you and you want to go further down this rabbit hole, plug in your email below and we'll let you know the minute it's out. I won't sell your info. Pinky promise.
Here're some projects I've worked on.
You know, so you can see if you'd care what I think.
Savager (2025). Graphic novel to be published March, 2025 by Panick Entertainment.
Shade (2025). Indy feature. In development w/co-writer and director M.J. Bassett.
Adjunct Professor (2011-present)
WGA Arbiter (2000 to present)
Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020). Produced Film. Warner Bros.
Delivered (2020). Produced Film. Hulu/Blumhouse. Also Executive Producer.
EditFest London (2013-2020). Produced a major editing conference for the American Cinema Editors.
N-Strike. Pilot script for Hasbro Television based on the Nerf toy line.
Transformers Film Series. Uncredited.
Conan 2: A Witch Shall Be Born. Script. Millennium.
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009). Produced film. Screen Gems.
Outlander (2009). Produced film. The Weinstein Co. Also executive producer.
Iron Fist. Script. Marvel/Artisan
Buncha' panels. Comic-con, that sort of thing.
Preface
I did not sleep with Gal Gadot.
That wasn’t me you read about, sailing around the Cap d’Antibes with George and Amal.
I did not take Leo for 50 large at Hold ‘em.
However… that was me taking my first lunch meeting with a producer at Fatburger and being pitched a job rewriting a Malaysian soft-core screenplay circumspectly titled “Sex Farm.”
That was me watching the producer’s newly-restored Karman Ghia spontaneously combust on El Camino Drive.
That was me guzzling Snapples served to me at different times by Gene Simmons and Jackie Chan in their homes. Gene handed it to me politely from his fridge; Jackie zipped the open bottle across a long table into my hand without spilling a drop.
That was me accepting a brick of cash for an off-book job in Hong Kong.
That was me looking up from the script I was writing to see a mountain lion staring at me through the open kitchen door.
That was me gaping at the Predator in Stan Winston’s studio.
That was me watching my boss at the talent agency assassinate his New York counterpart by ‘accidentally’ letting it slip that the counterpart was booking a comedian client on the side and skimming the commission.
That was me surrounded by three adult actresses at Vivid Video’s AFM booth and dropping my Diet Coke in slow motion as my fingers mysteriously stopped working. I can still hear them giggle when the can hit my foot.
But this is not a mem-wahhh. I want to be very clear about that, because honestly I haven’t had the kind of career that would warrant a fucking memoir. (Which I referred to in a screenplay as a Coffee Table Book of the Soul.) In short, I can be a pretentious ass – I legendarily sported a British accent in film school - but memoirs are next-level assholery.
So why listen to me? I guess my first answer is ‘don’t.’ Most people can’t learn from other peoples’ experiences. They have to lick the frozen streetlamp themselves or boil the chicken in Nyquil on their way to TikTok fame. But if you are the kind who can take a little advice here and there, or who likes to peek behind the curtain a bit, grab a seat. I’m a middle-class screenwriter who has made a living for 25+ years in Hollywood. This is an achievement. It makes me good, lucky, and stupid.
Good, because, well you have to be, to last that long.
Lucky, because, well, you have to be, to last that long.
And stupid… because following your bliss in Hollywood is like staging Swan Lake in a minefield.
(And here’s what a genre writer is: having come up with that absurd image and played it from different angles in the sticky-floored second-run theater in my mind, I’m presently wondering how I can work it into a script.)
EXT. KHESAN PENINSULA - RICE PADDY – NIGHT
A slim figure glides athletically through the muddy lakeshore, unseen by the patrolling VC. He turns, moonlight unveiling the face of a young MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOFF. The only thing between him and freedom is a flock of sleeping SWANS. He slides the AK’s safety down and -
So what is this thing you’re considering buying for yourself or for your child who is contemplating a career in screenwriting? Or perhaps for your parents who have no fucking idea what you’re doing or why it’s so hard.
I guess it’s a self-help book:
Here’s some stuff you shouldn’t do; here’s some stuff you should.
Here’s some of the bad that can happen; here’s some of the good.
Wow. That rhymed. Gonna get that needlepointed on a pillow, plop it next to this Hollywood-themed beauty:
I think the first inkling of this book came as a needle punctured the surface of my eyeball.
Although enjoyable to imagine, I was not in some jungle hell undergoing torture, nor in the cobwebbed basement of a ravenous ophthalmophage. I was in the Retina Institute receiving treatment for a burst blood vessel in the back of my eye. Such occurrences are treated medicaevally via the insertion of a hypodermic needle into the eye for the delivery of a $5000 miracle drug. Though my eye had been comfortably numbed, and I was floating on Valium’s serene sea, I was still able to feel the needle slide through the tissue.
Let me share that one more time: I could feel the needle slide into my eyeball.
Somewhere along the needle’s journey (through my eyeball) - between microbouts of despair, horror, fear, and anger – it occurred to me to wonder why I was here.
I knew the immediate cause. High blood pressure. But why so high? Did I have my parents to blame, gifting me the faulty DNA that also cursed me with the curly hair that crushed my childhood? Was it the writer’s legendarily torpid lifestyle, broken only by cat-fail videos and forays into Wordle? Or was it the superabundancy of cheeseburgers tossed back with careless gusto over time? (“…and a Diet Coke,” he said piously.)
Possibly. Or was it something else…
Was it the 25 years I’ve spent working in Hollywood?
Let’s consider that possibility:
High stress : ✔
Lack of stability: ✔
Constant rejection: ✔
Financial worries: ✔
Constant self-doubt: ✔
Lack of positive reinforcement ✔
Mandatory ass-kissing ✔
Unpaid work ✔
Underpaid work ✔
Overpaid work followed by huge tax bill ✔
Keeping true feelings in check ✔
As I write these things down, I try to recall why I left behind the tomatoes and sweet corn of New Jersey. Why Hollywood? Why screenwriting? Certainly there are jobs with fewer checkmarks. Drug mule. Fluffer. Congressional page.
The answer is simple. I love film. Screw that. I love movies, good and bad. And that’s a problem. Because Hollywood teems with people who know a great truth: Love is Leverage. They understand that those who love movies will do anything to get them made. Forget drugs, sex and sycophancy. That’s a Tuesday brunch. I’m talking something far worse. People who love movies will work for free. And feel lucky to do it. I’m put in mind of the moment in Doubt in which Viola Davis talks about her son’s molestation by a priest. And horror of horrors, she’s grateful for it, because at least one person has shown him kindness. Substitute ‘screenwriter’ for ‘little boy’ and you’ve just about got it.
But this alone was not why I had a scimitar aimed at my eye jelly.
It was all the vexations that had come between those giddy Sundays as a child flipping the full-page film ads in the New York Times in my golden childhood and thumbing the pages of an old Sports Illustrated in the geriatrically-engorged waiting room of the Retina Institute.
Things like:
· The producer who told me no one likes ‘hat movies.’
· The lawyer who told me not to compromise because ‘we could get it all.’
· The production company that decided not to pay me for six months.
· The phone that didn’t ring.
· The agent(s) who simply didn’t give a damn.
· The day Robert Downey Jr. was arrested – just after a producer made a seven figure offer for him to be in a film I wrote.
· The manager who ghosted me - twice.
· The executive who told me the Paris research trip was cancelled – the night before I was to leave.
· The executive who loved my ideas so much she handed them to her own client to write rather than pay me to do it.
· The so-rich-he-could-buy Malta producer who stole five months of my work and pumped them into the script for his billion-dollar franchise.
· The day I lost $150,000.
· The day I lost $500,000.
Kapow! A vein blows and I can’t see out of part of my eye. If this were a movie, my loss of sight would be accompanied by clarity of vision. All I got was a five-digit bill.
These incidents could remain the stuff of a hundred nightmares, the staple of a thousand bitch-fests. After all, every writer, every person who’s ever cared enough about movies to work for free, who’s ever watched his dreams spun into someone else’s gold, every one of these people has stories like that.
But as it happens, in addition to writing, I teach screenwriting to college kids. They’re the next generation of writers who’ll stare down the shark eyes of those who will profit from their talent. From time to time I tell them my stories of things that went sideways. They love war stories in much the same way people slow down at crash sites. The bloodier the better. ("All that wreckage but I'm still alive...") But then someone asked me a question after one of my tales: What would you do differently?
Cue HMI.
This book contains those answers. It’s not a guide to writing, nor procuring representation. It’s a handbook of practical tips for screenwriters. Things to avoid, things to do.
It could save your career, your marriage, your bank account. Possibly all of them, as they are often an unsightly menage a trois.
About the title: the original one was ‘Oops,’ said the Mohel: Making the Cut in Hollywood.’ (Or Tips for Budding Screenwriters.) I was assured that that wouldn’t fly, because not everyone knows what a mohel is. But I really like the metaphor, so fuck it. I’m gonna use it. You see, a mohel is the knife man at a bris, the Jewish circumcision ritual. You can imagine that “oops, I slipped’ is not the phrase you want to hear from the guy with a knife at your son’s matzoh balls.
The title reminds me that Hollywood is stuffed with pricks and schmucks. Isn’t it odd that words for ‘penis’ mean anything from a shithead to a moron? (“Um, no,’ said every woman, ever.)
The title is also a warning that not all mistakes can be fixed. (“Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg, I’ve got some difficult news…”)
In goy that means, Shit Happens.
This book is designed to help you avoid some of the shit… and let you know that even if you can’t, things can still work out. Think of it as slowing down to watch Dirk's car wrecks and surviving.
A final word, on partners. I’ve worked with four different writing partners over the years, as well as by myself. I don’t refer to them by name, nor do I mention them in every project in which they were involved. This is not because I want to claim all credit - quite the opposite. The mistakes that follow are mine and mine alone. They have each taught me many things, for which I have great gratitude and respect.
What do you think? Worth a read?
What do you think? Worth a read?
These people think so:
(And yes, they're real, actual people, not AI fans.)
"Blackman is hilarious, heartfelt, and brutally honest. "What the F*** Was I Thinking?" is totally essential for anyone wanting to break into entertainment and a wildly great time for everybody else." - Scarlet S.
"With equal parts humility and humor, Blackman effusively tells stories of how he learned many of the entertainment industry's most important lessons the hard way so you don't have to. It's a must-read for anyone looking to make it in Hollywood." - Nick B., Screenwriter
“I will be gifting this book to my parents as soon as I am able! It brings light to the unique challenges and experiences someone, much like myself, might stumble across in their journey through this very particular industry — an industry they, and many others, know so little about.” - Devyn K.
"I've read plenty of titles claiming to help young people navigate the ins and outs of many things - adulthood, Hollywood, a tumultuous career. Advice is easy enough to give, but what I love about Dirk Blackman's "What the F*** Was I Thinking?" is that he respects you, the reader, enough to tell you that it won't be easy, but gives you the tools he has to make it out of the trenches anyway. I like reading books from folks that clearly believe in the potential of their audience. Therefore, I like Dirk Blackman's writing. If you're looking to get into the film industry through writing - this is a must read." - Alexis K. , Screenwriter
"I appreciate Dirk's recounting for his honesty as he clearly gives a true, unglamorized glimpse into the life and career of a screenwriter; the easy-to-read pacing and structure designed to be easily palatable to the millennial attention span; and the enjoyable personality laced throughout the book that felt like a conversation with my favorite college instructor once more - someone who truly cares about my future." - Scott K, Screenwriter
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