Success Stories: Doug Eboch
Douglas J. Eboch’s first success in Hollywood was the kind every writer dreams of: a college assignment turned into a script that became his first sale, attracted a major star, got a green light at a studio and was made into the hit movie Sweet Home Alabama. It still holds the record for biggest September opening ever and ended up grossing $128 million domestically. But Doug was hardly an overnight success.
He came to Los Angeles from Juneau, Alaska to attend USC’s film school as a production major. After graduation, he spent a year in grueling low level production jobs on cheap music videos and syndicated TV shows. After tiring of that, he returned to USC’s Graduate Screenwriting Program where he wrote the Sweet Home Alabama script as his Master’s thesis. After graduation, the script earned him many meetings but no agent or sale. He then did what every aspiring screenwriter does if they want to be successful: he wrote more scripts.
One of those scripts, Overload, won the Scriptwriters Network’s Carl Sautter screenwriting award. “The contest was unlike any other,” Doug says. “Not only were there significantly valuable prizes, but the Network worked like crazy to line up reads. I made a lot of useful contacts through Scriptwriters Network.” Eventually, Doug signed with an agent who got his thesis script to Original Films and the rest is history. A seven- year history. That’s how long it took from Original’s first reading of the script to the movie coming out in theaters.
Along the way, Doug co-wrote and directed the independent festival hit, Party at Sam’s, which a Variety review called a “pleasant comedy” with “funny dialogue and a good pace.” More recently, he’s written and directed the short films, The 24 Year-Old Virgin, Date Night and Alien News Break. He has also written sketches for the stage comedy group Prank Monkeys and his children’s Christmas play, Sleepover at the Stables, has been performed by hundreds of schools, churches and children’s theaters. And of course he continues to write screenplays for a variety of producers as he waits for his second studio movie to get that elusive green light.