Your Stage : HEY! WE ALL HAD TO START SOMEWHERE: an interview with Jim Vines writer of The Perfect Tenant by Howard Casner

HEY! WE ALL HAD TO START SOMEWHERE: an interview with Jim Vines writer of The Perfect Tenant http://ow.ly/R0gv9 Jim Vines—whose parents were both in the film and TV industries—was born in New York City and grew up in Beverly Hills. Jim fell in love with filmmaking at the age of eleven and hasn’t looked back since. After working various jobs in the film industry (grip, stuntman, still photographer), Jim settled into the life of screenwriting in the early 1990s. In 2006 he published Q & A: The Working Screenwriter, which is comprised of interviews with 16 screenwriters. In April 2015 he published his first novel, Luigi’s Chinese Delicatessen. Most recently he has directed and co-written The House at the End of the Drive. 1. What is the name of your first screenplay that was produced, or your first project that was produced, or your first writing assignment? The first script I had produced was The Perfect Tenant. It was a thriller that made its debut on HBO and Cinemax back in 2000. It’s been playing on cable all over the world ever since. 2. Can you tell us a bit about the journey as to how it came about? In 1995 I sent a producer one of my scripts. He liked the script but wasn’t able to do anything with it. He remembered me a year later when he needed a writer to do a rewrite on a thriller script. I did the rewrite for him (basically a page one rewrite) and he submitted the script to a production company he was dealing with. They bought the script soon thereafter. It all happened fairly quickly…more