Today we’d like to introduce you to Travis Opgenorth
Hi Travis, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I grew up just outside of Sheboygan Falls, WI. It’s a small town. Back then, I think it had a population of around 6,000 people. I graduated high school not sure I wanted to go to college, but my mom was sure, so I went. While in college, I spent several semesters undeclared. I always loved writing, but I never saw that as a viable career path. At the time, I was attending a small college that was surrounded by farm fields and nearly twenty miles away from the nearest city. While I was there, they offered a one-off screenwriting class. I took it, fell in love, and transferred to a school with a dedicated film and TV department. My parents were skeptical but supportive. I did my time, graduated, skipped my graduation ceremony to pack my car, and left for Los Angeles the next day with $5,000 in my bank account. I worked two unpaid internships for six months before getting my first paying job as a PA on an unscripted home renovation TV show. But, I was determined to be a screenwriter, so I kept writing and I started entering my scripts into contests and showing them to anyone who read them.
My scripts started winning contests. After placing at the top of several contests in back-to-back years, those contest organizers began introducing me to producers they knew. A few of those introductions led to general meetings, which led to script options. At one point I had five scripts that were optioned and two that were written on assignment.
I recently sold my first feature script called Day of Reckoning to ESX Productions. They’re currently shooting in Georgia, and press releases for that should be coming out soon. I’ve got a graphic novel called Kingdom of God that will be hitting shelves in 2025. And I’ve got two other features set up with Biscuit Filmworks and Eclectic Pictures.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Haha. I’m an overnight success twenty years in the making. My resiliency is probably one of my most defining traits.
I never had an influential network of alumni that I could rely on for help after graduating. The one alumni I knew was working on Fear Factor at the time, and he helped me get that unpaid internship in the development office of a reality TV production company. Through that, I got that first paid PA gig on a show called Makeover Mamas. I was hanging drywall, painting ceilings, and installing hardwood floors—all things I could’ve been doing back in Wisconsin for more money while paying hundreds less in rent. It was incredibly disheartening, but I wanted to be a screenwriter, so I kept working fifty to sixty hours a week on those exhausting PA jobs while making sure I also wrote at least ten hours a week.
That was 2003. Over the next fifteen years, I had almost 20 scripts finish as finalists or better in 70 contests. I’d been a Nicholl Fellowship Semifinalist. I was a PAGE Awards Finalist, and those got me some attention from managers and agents but no one signed me on as a client. I signed a couple of shopping agreements with producers, but none of that turned into anything either, and none of it was paying any bills.
In 2018 I won the Cinestory Feature Fellowship grand prize. That was amazing. $10,000 and a year of wonderful mentorship. I could finally pay a few bills with that money, and I got great insight to advance my writing and my career. A few months later, I had a purchase offer for Day of Reckoning, and I began talks with the production company to settle that deal. It wasn’t more than a few weeks after that when I was contacted by a producer at Eclectic Pictures who had read one of my scripts called Ranger Creed years earlier. They were in the market for an ensemble action script and based on Ranger Creed, they wanted to know if I had what they were looking for. I didn’t, but I sent them an action-thriller I wrote called Distortion. It had recently taken second place in a contest and gained the attention of Steven de Souza (Die Hard, Commando), and he graciously offered to workshop it with me.
Eclectic Pictures read Distortion, and a week later offered me an option for it. Around the same time, I was approached by a producer to write a script for him. He had life rights to an amazing true story and he had just made an award-winning feature film. I was excited about the opportunity, so I wrote the script on spec and waited. The producer loved the script, but he couldn’t get any traction with it and it sat idle. Shortly after that, the producer who wanted Day of Reckoning decided to go with another project, and they released the script back to me.
All the momentum I had fell apart, and a few months later, my (now ex) wife filed for divorce. I was emotionally devastated.
I spent the next few months living in my friend’s spare room. As I put my personal life back together, I optioned a script called Iron Maiden, and this was a legit, real-money-on-the-table option from a production company that quickly got a VFX company on board and things were moving forward. That was the spring of 2019. In September 2019, I landed another writing assignment, and this time it was a paid assignment. This producer had connections to A-list talent and he loved my pitch on a true-life story. While I was working on that script, I optioned Day of Reckoning in November 2019 to another company that was excited about it and eager to take it into production the following summer.
When 2020 started, I had options on Distortion, Iron Maiden, and Day of Reckoning, and both scripts I’d written on assignment were now in talks to attach directors. After seventeen years of hard work, hustle, and sacrifice, I was on the verge of seeing all of that pay off… and then COVID came along. Between May and July of 2020, all five of those production companies canceled their plans for my scripts. By the end of July, I was emotionally devastated again.
Over the next two years, I kept writing and I kept pushing those scripts that were already finished. Eclectic Pictures managed to bring things back together for Distortion and things were moving forward again. I had new interest in Day of Reckoning, and I was busy at work adapting my TV pilot Kingdom of God into a graphic novel for a producer with a publisher lined up.
Cut to—summer of 2023. Distortion had a director attached, an A-list actress was about to sign on, and Kingdom of God was ready for publishing. Then, SAG/AFTRA went on strike. Distortion’s production schedule was thrown into disarray and postponed indefinitely. Kingdom of God’s publisher imploded a few months later leaving it in limbo. The universe was clearly against me or it was trying to tell me something and I wasn’t listening. I just kept writing.
Toward the end of 2023, I had a producer approach me. He had also read Ranger Creed seven years earlier, the same script the Ecelectic Producer read that led to their optioning Distortion. This new producer asked if I’d consider updating it and sending him a new draft. I was interested, so I wrote the draft. After a few rounds of notes, I turned it into something he felt he could sell. That new version of Ranger Creed is now with Biscuit Filmworks. Then, this past September, five years to the month after my first offer for Day of Reckoning, ESX Productions bought it and put it into production. Distortion is still moving forward with Eclectic Pictures, and Kingdom of God has found a new publisher and will be out next year. Hopefully, this time things will finally come together and 2025 will be my year, if not, I’ll keep writing and keep pushing forward.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Most of my scripts fall into the action-thriller genre. Day of Reckoning, Distortion, Ranger Creed, Iron Maiden were all action-thrillers. Iron Maiden was based on a true story from WWII. I love learning about history so that one was fun for me. The two scripts I wrote on assignment, The Benghazi 6 and Bath, MI, were based on true stories, and Kingdom of God is inspired by the historical events surrounding the origins of Christianity.
The Whisperers, a supernatural thriller, is one of my personal favorites. Also loosely inspired by true events, it’s about a detective obsessed with debunking spiritual physics but he meets his match in a pair of psychic sisters, and the more he struggles to debunk them, the more it drives him insane. I wrote it during the pandemic and it was incredibly therapeutic for me.
Whether it’s the underdog crew of a WWII tank, an aging CIA agent trying to reconnect with her estranged daughter while on the run from the agency she once served, a pair of sisters out for vengeance against the man who destroyed their lives, or a father determined to bring his Ranger son home from a warzone, they all have a family dynamic at the core. I think, at some level, each of my scripts is a love letter to members of my own family; my parents, my sisters, my son, and my daughter.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Ha. Luck. (sigh). I would say the pandemic wiping out my slate of films in 2020 was bad luck. And then the SAG/AFTRA strike did it to me a second time, also bad luck. But I’ve had good luck too. It’s no small stroke of luck to win a screenplay contest once, let alone as many times as I have. The right judge has to read your script in the right frame of mind and give it the right score to advance it. And then I’ve been lucky to have worked with people that are genuinely good people. My mentors in this industry have been good people. Most of the producers who took on my scripts were genuinely good people with good intentions. That certainly doesn’t always happen in this industry. And I’ve also been lucky to have found incredibly supportive friends who have kept me inspired and held out hope for me when I couldn’t see any reason to be hopeful myself.
So much of what we aspire to, and whether or not we reach those goals, comes down to luck. I think that having that realization has made it easier for me to handle all those countless rejections. There are so many things I can’t control, so I focus on the things I can control to make sure I’m ready when good luck comes my way.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.northwordent.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tjofthenorth/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/travis.opgenorth
