I was lucky. I was thirty by the time
Gefährliche Freundin (1986) came along, so I pretty much already had my voice. I avoided the pitfalls of the rewrite business, and I moved back as soon as I could to New York and continued to write spec scripts. But I've taught film at NYU enough that I see promising screenwriters take the three-picture deal with Disney, and they just disappear after two years of intense grinding and studio manipulation, notes, and people kicking the shit out of them. Before they know what's going on, they have no voice left - if they ever had one to begin with. Or their nascent kind of voice that attracted the studios and producers in the first place gets stomped right out of them.
