McDermott is one of the writers of “Eagle Eye,” the current
hit action film. Previously he was an executive at Fox and Dreamworks. Then he
had a near-death experience and switched to being a writer (in my view, being a
writer in Hollywood is a near-death experience in itself, but that’s a
different story). He was the first writer on “Eagle Eye,” but not the only
one. He says, “You can’t take it personally. The paradox of Hollywood is that
if a studio gets a script they really like, the first thing they do is hire
some other writer to rewrite it. It stings a little, but that’s the nature of
the business. If they didn’t like the script, they wouldn’t be rewriting it; it
would just be sitting on the shelf.” The jealousy, he explained, comes from the fact that most
executives want to work in a creative capacity but the higher up the ladder
they get, the less involved they are in the creative process. (For guidance in how to write for TV and film, as well as books and articles, get "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available via Amazon and other online and retails outlets.)
In an article in the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Goldstein
writes, “Dan McDermott has actually admitted the ugly truth, the secret that
screenwriters everywhere have always firmly suspected—executives are envious of
writers!”