Steven Conrad spent most of the past nine months in LA and New York editing and mixing sound for his directorial debut, a locally produced comedy called The Promotion, but he can’t stop obsessing. “I thought of something this morning that I want to shoot,” he says. “John C. Reilly’s character putting out a storage room fire with his bare hands. I really want to see John put out a fire. I drew up a little budget. I could do it for 3,000 bucks.” But as a writer-director Conrad doesn’t have the same freedom as when he was just turning out scripts: “Writing, you can just keep making stuff up. Filming, you have finite resources—at some point you have to stop.”
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Conrad, who’s 39, has known since he was a kid in Fort Lauderdale that he wanted to become a filmmaker. “I remember watching Life of Brian with my father and I could see that it really moved him,” he says. “I realized that you could write about important things in an electric way.” After studying briefly at Florida State University, he transferred to Northwestern, where he majored in English. Outside the classroom, he got involved with Chicago Filmmakers and made some shorts.
In 1990, while he was a senior in college, Conrad adapted into a screenplay a short story he wrote for a creative writing class about an odd couple of lonely older men and sent it out cold to agents in Hollywood. Within the year he landed an agent, who got the script to producer Todd Black (Class Act, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot), who passed it along to Randa Haines (Children of a Lesser God). After she signed on to direct, Warner Brothers greenlit the project. Conrad was just 21.
In 2000 Todd Black introduced Conrad to Chicago producer Steven A. Jones (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Wild Things), who helped him put together the short film, Lawrence Melm. “I just wanted to shoot something really badly and try directing on for size. I was just lucky to find people to help me do it.”
Conrad wrote The Promotion, his lightest script, while The Pursuit of Happyness was still in production. After one expired option, it was taken over by Jones and former Pariah exec Jessika Borsiczky Goyer. Scott was cast in the lead, and the Weinsteins put up the $6.5 million budget. Conrad finally had his first feature-length directorial vehicle. “The budget was small enough that they could trust a first-time director with it,” he explains. “It was either gonna be me or nobody.”
