writer Greg Russo was not some hotshot 20-something who rolled into Hollywood and made waves off a film-school short. When he graduated from Vassar College in the early 2000s, he shipped off to Hoboken, New Jersey, where he worked as a Manhattan headhunter by day and wrote at night. Russo describes it as “the most soulless occupation imaginable,” but it afforded him the chance to eventually upend his life at 27, move to Los Angeles, and start pitching scripts. Luckily, headhunters can pitch anything.
So Russo pitched thrillers. He understood the fundamentals of tension and character, and he could write at any scale. His first big studio sale was a Hitchcockian two-hander set in an elevator. Eventually, New Line Cinema hired him to sequelize the disaster movie