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Hensley: And you went to college at Notredame?
Roos: Uh-huh. I studied English Literature. They didn’t have a film department when I was there. I started in 1973. Tony Bill who was an actor/producer/director taught a class about the business with Bruce Paltrow. They did a little class—“So you want to be a writer”—and they brought real Hollywood scripts with three holes. We read those and we all wrote scripts. Tony took a look at mine and said definitely you can make a living at this. But, I was really green. I came to Hollywood at twenty-three and I would say “I hear you’re doing a movie. Can I be the writer on it?” It’s a ridiculous question. I thought, well, maybe if they needed words or something on set…I was a total idiot.

Hensley: Those things may seem ridiculous but they took you to the next thing.
Roos: Well they took me to a lot of temp, secretary work. I don’t think they make people that green anymore!

Hensley: What was the first gig you got?
Roos: I believe you have to be ready for your luck, so I had written a lot of spec scripts and one show that I liked that I thought had a sort of queer sensibility was Hart to Hart. So I had written four Hart to Harts. I thought “writing these has been really hard, maybe I should try cinematography.” So I took a cinematography course at a local college and the teacher’s friend happened to be the story editor on Hart to Hart. [The teacher] had that person come it to give a talk and she made me give my scripts to her, and I got a call. Back then—this is 1981—you could make a living writing freelance episodes. Now you have to get on staff. Anyway Hart to Hart gave me assignments. You need to be like water when you’re trying to get in, and go into whatever crack you can. Something will pay off if you’re prepared to take advantage of it.

Hensley: What led you to screenwriting for film?
Roos: I ended up in the eighties working on this show Nightingales about student nurses. There was a student nurses’ aerobic room, a locker-room, a student nurses’ master bathroom, and no rooms for patients, no operating rooms. So I quickly learned that it was about underwear. And I had to be in the hospital and it was like “don’t tell them you work on nightingales, you’ll get bubbles in your line.” We all took it off our credits. I bombed out in TV so I just wrote a spec script for a film and somehow they liked it. Writing specs was the most powerful way to work. I think the people who get trapped in Hollywood are the ones that say “I’m not going to write unless somebody pays me.” You have to develop their stories and once they pay you they own you.

Question from the Audience: I wondered if you could talk about how you develop characters…You have such strong characters.
Roos: Every one of those characters is me and there’s not one thing that they feel or do that I can’t imagine myself feeling or doing. I am a very, very emotional person. Another important thing about characters is that they need to be challenging. The other horrible thing about Hollywood movies is…well take a look at Sandra Bullock—who I love—but how they introduce a Sandra Bullock character is she’s running up the stairs to her apartment with groceries and she’s a little cute, but somehow, men don’t think she’s cute. She comes into her apartment, her phone’s ringing, it might be a date, she drops her groceries and the cat scares her and she manages to pick up the phone and it’s too late, they’ve hung up. And that for [the studios] passes as her character and she’s kind of impulsive and a little insecure. That’s a character? That’s not a character.

Whereas in Happy Endings, the main flaw of the Lisa Kudrow character is that she has sex with her step brother when she was sixteen, she told him she had an abortion, she had the baby in secret, she’s not maternal at all, she’s very shut down, and she’s having an illicit affair with a Mexican masseuse. There’s a lot going on with her. She’s a loner and she’s irritable. It’s a real character with a history and past. So I encourage limited characters, make them flawed, make them un-likeable, because “likeability” is just killing our characters. I advise people, do not make [characters] the dream version of yourself, make them the nightmare version of yourself.

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