‘Tell Your Kids Don’t Come Here’: Brutal Job Advice from Hollywood Hits Schools

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“Kath, tell your kids don’t come out here.”

“Kath” is University of Pennsylvania screenwriting professor Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve. She recently co-wrote a script with Aline Brosh McKenna (Cruella, Your Place or Mine), has producer’s tags on films such as Piñero and Joe the King, and teaches two screenwriting workshops and a class called “Art and Business of Film” to approximately 40 students. She flew to Los Angeles in February, and while there, met with a number of Penn alumni, the kind of people whom she expects to hire her students once they graduate. 

Van Cleve returned to Philadelphia with that message, but this wasn’t a case of folks pulling up the ladder behind them. The pipeline for new and emerging writers, as my colleague Elaine Low has covered well in her Series Business newsletter, has dried up almost entirely. So Van Cleve and her students have had to consider whether maybe this is good advice. 

For some of the country’s best screenwriting professors — many of whom, like Van Cleave, are still a part of the industry themselves and have devoted a significant portion of their professional energy to bringing up the next crop of writers — they are finding it increasingly difficult to advise their students to pursue the path they themselves took into Hollywood.

When I ask Barry Blaustein, a screenwriting professor at Chapman University and long one of Eddie Murphy’s go-to writers, what advice he gives his students these days, he says, “You tell them if they can do anything else, go do it.”

Even for writers who should develop an appetite for rejection (but perhaps never quite do), these are bracing notes.

I talked to other professors, including UCLA screenwriting professor and Swimming with Sharks writer-director George Huang, as well as recent grads who are calculating what other kinds of fields to pursue while Hollywood, uh, resets. I also evaluate the impact of AI on new jobs, and declining applications.