Scott Alexander, writing with Larry Karaszewski, makes biopics about people the form usually skips: a director who could not direct, a prosecutor who had never needed to be liked. He is fond of them without flattering them, and it usually works.
Fi1m perspective
Johnny Depp's Ed Wood stands on a set with no money, no script anyone else believes in and a cast assembled by enthusiasm alone, and he is certain the film is worth making. Twenty-two years later Sarah Paulson's Marcia Clark sits in a Los Angeles courtroom and discovers, to her bewilderment, that being liked is now part of the job. The two have nothing in common except the writers, and the writers' habit: pick someone the world has already made its mind up about, stand close, and decline to look down.
Scott Alexander met Larry Karaszewski at USC, and every credit that matters carries both names, so we will treat them as one writer. Their first produced screenplay was Problem Child (1990), followed by its sequel in 1991; the comedies were criticised at the time as watered down from what they wrote, they were dissatisfied, and we have no way of testing the excuse. Then came Ed Wood (1994), for Tim Burton, and a run of biopics about people no studio would have thought to commission: The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Man on the Moon (1999) for Miloš Forman, Big Eyes (2014) for Burton again, Dolemite Is My Name (2019). In 2016 they created American Crime Story and wrote its first season, on the Simpson trial.
What they do differently is choose a slice. A conventional biopic runs from the cradle to the grave and stops for every milestone; theirs pick a few months and a single question. Ed Wood is about persistence and friendship, and the writing understands how a collaborator with enough enthusiasm can pull other people in behind him, Martin Landau's Bela Lugosi most of all. We went in expecting to laugh at Wood and found ourselves, by the halfway mark, hoping the next take would be the good one, which the film never once suggests it will be. The Simpson season works the same way from a different angle. It is a workplace drama: Clark and Sterling K. Brown's Christopher Darden with a case they think is strong, Bruce Greenwood's Gil Garcetti wanting to be seen winning it, Kenneth Choi's Lance Ito enjoying the cameras more than he should. The trial becomes a job people are trying to do while the country watches.
The cost of that fondness is that it can crowd out the drama. Ed Wood runs long, and the affection sometimes leaves Depp with too little to play beyond the grin. The Simpson season is the one they built and the one that holds; the seasons that followed are, by our reckoning, bolder and lumpier and then weaker. Start with Ed Wood, then the first season of American Crime Story. The next subject will be someone you had not thought deserved a film, and by the end you will have changed your mind about that, if not about them.
Biography
Scott Alexander is an American screenwriter. He frequently collaborates with Larry Karaszewski. Their credits include the screenplay for Ed Wood (1994), directed by Tim Burton.
Alexander was born on 16 June 1963 in Los Angeles, California. He attended the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he met Karaszewski. The pair have written several biopics, among them The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Man on the Moon (1999), Big Eyes (2014) and Dolemite Is My Name (2019). Their other work includes the screenplay for 1408 (2007) and the story for Goosebumps (2015).
