Writer in residence

Chicagoan Steve Conrad refuses to play by the rules.

Here’s a story: A Midwestern boy dreams of being a screenwriter. He churns out scripts, hoping one will catch the interest of someone, anyone, with the power to green-light a film. One project, with literary values and real human themes, actually gets made, but then a decade passes without luck. Finally, lightning strikes again; a very famous actor and an equally famous director get interested in one of the writer’s screenplays. It’s a reasonable success. A second script catches the eye of another big-name actor, and this film does better with the critics and at the box office. The writer gets a chance to direct one of his own scripts. A classic Hollywood story, which you can imagine the screenwriter telling from the deck of his house in the Hollywood hills while sipping a glass of white wine.

It’s Steve Conrad’s story, with a catch: He didn’t move to Hollywood. He still lives in Chicago, and he’s telling the story over a beer at the Charleston, a neighborhood bar in Bucktown, where he seems totally at home. After early success with Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993), he toiled for years until Gore Verbinski and Nicolas Cage picked up The Weather Man. Then Will Smith got interested in Conrad’s script The Pursuit of Happyness. The next thing you know, Conrad was directing The Promotion, a gentle comedy (or is it a tragedy?) he wrote about two supermarket employees competing to be named manager of a new store.

A more predictable person would have moved to Hollywood years ago to chase the dream, but Conrad is not that person. He’s refreshingly blunt about the way Hollywood works. “The argument for moving to L.A. is to have a creative network of people,” he muses. “But that implies that the creative network of people are going to look out for you when times aren’t good. That’s a myth. It’s a network of studio people who won’t touch you because you’re ‘cold,’ and to work with you is not easy. The true myth, that I recognized as a grown man, is that you can never be helped by another grown male. So I decided, fuck it. I’ll just live in Chicago and I’ll be with my actual friends.”

Conrad likes to take the conversation to a higher level but always grounds his thoughts in everyday life. He’s the kind of guy you want to sit with in a bar, kicking around life’s big questions. Like many people in film, he can talk with ease about filmmakers, but in the course of talking to us, he also mentions Ayn Rand (dismissively), Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (respectfully), Nelson Algren (Conrad wrote a so-far unproduced script from one of Algren’s novels), the housing crisis, the limitations of genre in screenwriting, and the lives of quiet desperation lived by regular people.

Though the plot outline makes The Promotion sound like a broad comedy of humiliation (rivals set out to destroy each other; high jinks ensue), the twist in The Promotion is that both the affable Doug (Seann William Scott) and his rival, Canadian import Richard (John C. Reilly), are nice guys, and their rivalry does not devolve into slapstick. Instead, they seem like potential friends set against each other by economic realities—both are trying to get by in hard times. “They are both C students for sure—just like I was in large part,” Conrad notes. “They both want the same thing; they want to do well by loved ones. The fight that they are fighting is the fight of most peoples’ lives—in my estimation anyway—which is to improve the circumstances of your life somewhat.”

Conrad isn’t interested in writing to a genre formula. “The balls-out, ‘this is only funny and we have no other objectives’ comedy—yeah, I can’t do that,” he admits with a wry smile. “I’ve had a couple things that I’ve had a little bit of a genre problem with.”

Conrad believes that comedy for its own sake is less interesting than something with real stakes. “I know that part of what I consider most hard in life I also find very funny: the cosmic challenges we all face, how little we actually control despite our very best efforts, all of the millions of things that can confound us, get in your way, test your mettle.”

Conversation with Conrad goes down easy; he’s talkative without ever being boring. At one point, after an intriguing five-minute response to a question, he catches himself: “God, that was a long-winded answer. I’ve only had one beer, too.” We’d happily sit down again for another.

The Promotion is in theaters now.

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