Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a series of articles profiling alums on the big and small screens.
David Benioff '92 is considered to be one of the hottest young screenwriters in Hollywood with scripts that sell at a price that hovers near $2 million and star some of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood like Brad Pitt ("Troy") and Edward Norton ("The 25th Hour").
Yet, Benioff is leery of the term "famous" when applied to screenwriters like himself who are for the most part not bothered when walking down the street and remain under the radar.
"It's not like I can use my name to get a reservation at a restaurant," Benioff explained. "Most people have not heard of me. It's fine because that's how I like it."
What is perhaps hard to imagine is that this revered and critically acclaimed novelist and screenwriter suffered rejection well before submitting letters to publishers in the hopes of getting his work published.
Benioff muses that he was rejected three times before finally being accepted into a creative writing course at Dartmouth taught by professor Ernest Hebert.
He is quick to point out that the experience was beneficial in terms of preparing him for future rejection as a writer, which included receiving thirty rejections on the same day when he was attempting to sell his second novel.The third novel he wrote, "The 25th Hour," also encountered a significant amount of rejection before finding a publisher and later becoming a major motion-picture directed by Spike Lee with an impressive cast that included Edward Norton, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Rosario Dawson.
More importantly, the initial experience of rejection introduced Benioff to Hebert who has remained a close and cherished friend. Hebert also advised Benioff during his Senior Fellowship project that involved the composition of a novel.Benioff fondly reflects on his Senior Fellowship that afforded him an opportunity to wake up around 1 p.m., eat lunch, read the paper, and then go to his very own office in Baker Library that overlooked the Green.
According to Benioff, the office was probably the best place he has ever written. "The office had large windows overlooking the Green that allowed me to watch the beautiful snowfalls and see people throw snowballs at each other," he said.
It was also at Dartmouth where Benioff wrote a seven-page short story published in Stonefence about two men walking in New York City, one of whom happens to be going to jail the next morning. This short story was later expanded into the novel "The 25th Hour," whose genesis lies in the short story he wrote while a student at Dartmouth.
David Benioff's rather circuitous route into a professional writing career can also be attributed to Hebert. The professor's wide range of job experiences before becoming a writer included a stint as an attendant in an insane asylum and a taxi driver in New Orleans, which convinced Benioff that a writer should have rich and different life experiences to draw from when writing and, thus, imitate Hebert.
As a result, Benioff himself worked as a disc-jockey in Wyoming, a bouncer in San Francisco, a high school teacher in Brooklyn and a freshman composition writer at UC-Irvine before working as a writer full-time. He admits that the combination of these job stints with his graduate studies at Trinity University in Dublin and UC-Irvine has served him very well as a writer.
While he readily admits that he is uneasy giving other writers advice, Benioff does think that students contemplating writing after college should consider taking more than a year off before applying to graduate schools in order to gain life experiences that can potentially enhance the quality of material one writes.
"I applied to grad school one year after I graduated and initially got rejected everywhere," he said. "It's dangerous to be in academia your whole life. You should take as much time as you need before going to grad school."
These days Benioff is quite busy with a hectic writing schedule filled with tight deadlines and often conditions that force him to travel overseas for work.
His adaptation of Homer's epic "The Iliad," entitled "Troy," is currently under production with a cast that includes Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom.
His "spec script" (an original script written on speculation) entitled "Stay" about a Columbia University psychiatrist trying to prevent one of his student patients from committing suicide is also being filmed with a cast that includes Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.
Benioff was also hired to write a screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's acclaimed novel, "For Whom The Bell Tolls." A collection of short stories should be in bookstores next year, seeming to indicate Benioff's continued desire to shuttle between both the literary and film worlds.
What one can readily observe from this impressive body of work is someone who is not concerned with adhering to the standard Hollywood "high-concept" format where a script or film idea can be summed up in one sentence or less. Benioff explained that most of his writing is material that he generated himself, which one could say stands in stark contrast to the high-concept ideas that Benioff himself argues has contributed to the abundance of rather mediocre films currently being made.
Benioff continues by explaining that these popular high concept films are based on pitches that demand a certain salesmanship quality that most writers do not innately possess.
"There is a wide gap between a good pitch man and a good writer. Very few talented writers I know are good salesmen," he said.
Despite his busy schedule, Benioff has managed to stay close to his Dartmouth roots by keeping in touch with friends like Hebert along with a circle of Dartmouth friends that live in the Hollywood area like Gretchen Bruggeman Rush '92, who is also Benioff's lawyer.
Benioff's initial rejection has paved a way to an astounding professional writing career that seems to spell only the beginning of what is to come from this incredibly talented scribe.
No matter what the potential success or disappointment the future may hold it seems certain that Benioff will continue writing. For Benioff, the motivation is simple: "It's the only thing I have an interest in doing."
