Producer William Sherak P’27 Inspires Filmmaking Class
Class drop-ins by entertainment-industry experts are a regular occurrence at Millbrook School. Broadway playwrights hold writing workshops, renowned photographers visit photography class, and successful artists offer pointers in painting class. The latest luminary to stop by is Millbrook parent William Sherak P’27, a Hollywood producer who kindly spent a class block with Alex Pearson’s Introduction to Filmmaking class.
Sherak is the co-chief executive officer at Project X Entertainment. He’s been working on the production side of the film and TV industry since the late 1990’s and is known for projects like Netflix series The Night Agent, several of the Scream franchise offerings, Fountain of Youth, Ready or Not, and the upcoming Nuremberg.
Ahead of his visit, Sherak shared an early version of the script for the horror/comedy Ready or Not with the class. Students read the script and then watched the movie in preparation for discussing what it takes to turn paper screenplays into visual blockbusters.
After a quick round of introductions, Sherak and the students dove headlong into a conversation on how Ready or Not evolved from the original screenplay to the final on-screen product. Students commented on the drastically different endings presented in the first draft of the script and the movie. In reply, Sherak explained how he and his team made the decision to flip the protagonist to the antagonist, creating a movie with a more uplifting ending than the writers first intended. “When that script came in, we read it, we loved the idea of somebody having to play a game to join a family, but the movie had no hope,” he elucidated. “… It is the idea that the bad guy wins. That’s not a world I enjoy telling stories in. The genius of my job is that I can say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to things.”
Sherak’s explanation of why the script morphed into the end product segued perfectly into a breakdown of what a producer does and how movies in general get made. Throughout the writing process, he reads the script at least 50 times as it goes through up to 30 revisions, and he spends hundreds of hours making notes on and discussing each draft. Then, after months in production, he watches the movie dozens of times during the editing phase. All in all, producers like Sherak can spend several years working on a single film. Investing so much time and energy on a project he’s not interested in isn’t really an option. “I can’t watch a movie with no hope 40 times. I have no interest. So, for me it’s purely a function of what I enjoy doing,” he said. “… It’s no different than a class you like or don’t like, right? When you like a class or like a subject, you’ll put more work in than you do for other classes.”
Choosing to exclusively tell stories with hope is a personal preference Sherak developed by reading hundreds of scripts a month when he started out as a production assistant. Future producers in the class, he explained, will develop their own storytelling preferences—perhaps even a preference for stories featuring bad-guy protagonists—and hone their discernment for good writing as they work their way up through Hollywood’s apprentice-style system.
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Emphasizing the collaborative nature of filmmaking, Sherak advised students to find a group of peers who tell good stories and stick with them. “I look at the movies I’ve made, and I’ve worked with the same directors five, six times; I’ve worked with the same writers a dozen times. We were a class of people that came up together,” he said. “… Find a class of people that you want to collaborate with for a long period of time. You will make each other better. ... It is a very collaborative medium, and you want to grow up with people that you would like to collaborate with and surround yourself with people you think tell good stories.”
Another topic that came up during the class was major changes the film industry is currently facing. Sherak offered a mostly positive take on the subject, highlighting the way barriers to entry are lowering, allowing more creatives to tell more and more specific stories that simply aren’t commercially feasible nowadays. While he enjoys telling commercially successful stories, he admitted there are projects he wants to make just for art’s sake that he doesn’t expect to ever get on-screen. That won’t be a problem in the near future, though, as the cost to make quality content decreases, more distribution platforms emerge, and artificial intelligence inevitably becomes integral to the filmmaking process. Also, he expects globalization to open even more creative opportunities.
“The path is a little grayer right now, in terms of how you get there, just because the options are brand new, but you will have more options,” he explained. “… The other thing is that stories can be told from any point of view around the globe today... It’s not just the US story being sent to the whole world; we’re starting to see stories from all around the world penetrating everywhere, so who you can collaborate with and how you can collaborate is also really interesting.”
Mr. Pearson’s pupils left class equipped with a deeper understanding of the film & television industry and inspired to continue exploring storytelling in all its forms. They’ll have another chance to pick Sherak’s brain later in October, when he returns to give the Millbrook community an early viewing of Nuremberg before it hits theaters on November 7.
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