Scotty Landes: Screenwriter, Ma & Workaholics

Scotty Landes has written his way through every corner of comedy and genre. Workaholics, Adam Devine’s House Party, Ma, The Machine, Messy, Deadcon. He builds stories by locking the audience to a point of view early, then stripping out anything that doesn’t earn its place. Most of what he does never shows up on screen. It’s in the references he updates, the dialogue he reshapes, and the scenes he cuts before anyone knows they were there. We talked about tone, structure, and the moves that keep a story honest once the pages start shifting.

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When you’re locking tone on a story that leans funny but still carries real tension, what’s the first choice you make that everything else depends on?

My tone is based on my main character. I know the genre I’m writing when I start the ideation process, but the specific tone comes from my main character’s point of view. If the audience responds to that character, they’ll accept the tone as a natural element of the story.

What’s a structural move you set early that most viewers never notice but the whole script quietly rests on?

This sounds obvious, but if the audience doesn’t understand who they care about and what they are trying to achieve, they get bored or feel indifferent. Immediately setting up the world and the character in a way the viewer can understand is the first step for the movies that I write. I don’t try to fool anyone right out of the gate. I set it all up in the first ten pages: this is who the story is about, this is the journey they’re setting out on, and you can emotionally relate to the stakes they’re stepping into.

When a character starts drifting either too broad or too internal, how do you decide which direction to pull them without breaking the story you’ve built?

Dialogue is the fix for both of these problems. If they’re too much, it’s probably in their dialogue. If they’re internal, it’s up to the other characters to describe the character through statements, not questions. The worst thing a writer can do is have a bunch of characters asking one character what is wrong with them. Pulling back on broad dialogue and adding more insight with dialogue solves both problems. Screenplays aren’t for the reader, they’re for the watcher. I never attempt to impress the reader with the action or description. I try to entertain the viewer with dialogue and conflict.

What’s a moment from one of your projects where a small behind the scenes adjustment changed the entire sequence for the audience?

This is a difficult question for features because of the amount of editing and improvisation that happens during production. I rewrote the rom com When We First Met so the lead actors thought the main characters were cooler and more relatable. The initial script was excellent, but the references felt a little old and dated. I went through the entire script and changed the details and the references to be more contemporary, more of the zeitgeist, and the movie was greenlit after my pass. Every script that relies on references or trends needs a pass to bring it into the present, and I'm always happy when I get those jobs.

When you’re deep in rewrites, what’s your signal that a scene is pretending to work instead of actually working?

When a scene doesn’t need to exist, it’s time to pull it out. I’ve noticed there’s always one scene in my first draft that gets completely cut from my second draft. It usually happens in Act One, but I’ve also found them in the first half of Act Two. Basically, I just tell myself, or I’m told, “Get into it faster.” A two-page scene that doesn’t propel the plot forward is usually the first one I cut. In the outline or first draft they seem so important for context or exposition, but more often than not, they can disappear and the audience never senses anything was missing. The first step with a scene that feels like it’s pretending to be something is to ask yourself, “Can I just cut it completely?” The answer is usually "YES!"

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When Scotty talks about writing, he isn’t talking about tricks or polish. He’s talking about the choices that lock the viewer to a character and clear out anything that doesn’t earn its place. For him, the invisible work is in the dialogue, the updates no one sees, and the scenes that quietly disappear so the story can move.

Learn more about Scotty at:

• IMDb

• LinkedIn