Drew Greenberg, ’97

Screenwriter

Drew Z. Greenberg’s journey to Hollywood began in the winter of 1994, when he was supposed to be studying full time for his first-year law school finals. Instead, he decided to write a television script as a study break. Greenberg ’97 had heard that “Star Trek” accepted scripts from writers without an agent. So during the exam period, he wrote a 55-page script. “Studying became a break from writing it,” he recalls.

The Star Trek office at Paramount contacted him six months later, and he was encouraged to visit Los Angeles to pitch story ideas to them.

While his law school classmates were writing materials for law review in their second and third years, Greenberg kept up his script writing. He arrived in L.A. after graduation with two completed scripts.

Today, at 33, he is a writer on the Warner Brothers series, “Smallville.” He landed the job after working on the final years of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Greenberg has also written for Showtime’s “Queer as Folk” and “Firefly” on Fox Television.

Greenberg said he never expected to practice law when he enrolled at Santa Clara. His plan was to go into legislative work or lobbying. Then he wrote that fateful “Star Trek” script.

He says his legal training comes in handy. He uses outline skills he picked up in Civil Procedure to sketch out his scripts before writing them. And he says that critical thinking skills and the ability to see both sides of an argument have also helped.

Hollywood, however, doesn’t reward legal knowledge. Greenberg said one time he was asked to write a script for “Queer as Folk," a show about a group of gay friends in Pittsburgh. He was told to set the framework for a future story on sexual harassment. The SCU grad used his legal knowledge to create what he called “a plausible script.”

Unfortunately, his script did not fare well. “They threw it out,” he said.

These days, Greenberg spends most of his working time in an office building in Burbank, where the writers for “Smallville" hash out story lines. The show is about Clark Kent in high school, before he knows he's Superman. “There’s a lot of emotional conflict about being different in high school,” said Greenberg. He calls it “a really sweet metaphor for what it’s like being in high school, and for being a human being.”

Like crafting an appellate brief, script writing has its own formula. “Smallville’s” 10 writers figure out every scene in an episode, and then turn it into an outline. After two weeks, the outline is given to an individual writer who creates a script.

Greenberg has written two episodes of “Smallville” so far. For “Buffy,” he wrote three scripts a year. “I like the fact that I get to tell stories,” he said. “Dramatic story telling is a good way to affect people.”

Greenberg said he doesn't mind the anonymity that usually comes with being a writer. But he did get a taste of fame when he wrote for “Buffy,” a show that attracted a cult following as it told the story of a young woman fighting evil while trying to find her place in the world. Fans of “Buffy" knew who he was. Web sites were created about him.

“The most notable site was one in which the fan created little clay figures of all the “Buffy" writers-I am not making this up,” he said. “The scary part was that mine actually looks eerily like me-down to its glasses and black-and-white bowling shirt, which I actually own, and my red high tops, which I wear all the time.”

Last summer, he went to a Buffy convention in London at a five-star hotel. Fans paid money to get his autograph, and attend seminars where he spoke.

“I felt like a rock star,” he said. “It’s so the antithesis of why I became a writer, but it was so much fun.”