I wrote a couple of scripts on spec that didn't get made but got some attention, and I then got offers to write professionally.

What you care about [movie] is whether it's moving you, or whether you're caught up in it.

So it's discouraging and, yet, when you make a movie like Wonder Boys, in a sense it's its own reward, because it does move people, it gets great reviews, and it becomes part of that library of movies that exist out there. As time goes by, it will find its audience.

I can't speak to how Michael [Douglas] approached it in terms of his process.

My very first professional writing credit was on a movie called The Dunwich Horror, and Roger Corman was the executive producer.

The bigger problem still is that it determines in many ways what movies get made in the first place. Because as sources of finance are considering a project, they ask themselves, "Does this lend itself to a simplistic marketing approach which will guarantee a big opening weekend?" As a movie-goer, I think that's tragic, because when you look back at those movies that made us fall in love with movies in the first place, most of them were not high-concept, and most of them would not have "won their weekend."

Put simply, there are many people who want to make movies and very few opportunities for them to do it.