Ronda Rousey has had a storied career. She’s an Olympian, she’s held countless UFC titles. She’s in the UFC Hall of Fame. She’s a first-class athlete, a legend in her sport… but for me, in my personal opinion, her most badass move has been out of the ring, as a writer and not a fighter. Duana and I have been hyperventilating about this story for the last 24 hours after it was reported yesterday.
Let’s unpack this outstanding example of showing the SH-T out of your work.
Ronda has written two memoirs. Her first book was optioned for development in 2015, but due to corporate restructuring the project never happened and she ended up writing more about her life in her second book. At this point, she was determined to turn both books about her own life into a movie but written by herself. Writing your own memoir(s) and writing a screenplay, however, are two different things.
Per Deadline, here’s how she went about it:
“Rousey was looking to hone her screenwriting skills and was connected with Adam Novak, a veteran executive in WME’s story group that identifies source material on behalf of its clients. Novak, a seasoned veteran who had been with agency for 33 years, would send her scripts for coverage, critiquing her work and providing her with feedback. In the process of covering 30-40 scripts, she learned about screenwriting structure and technique, eventually writing her own screenplay.”
What is “coverage”? Coverage is a little inside baseball and there are other resources you can look up to get a more thorough understanding of coverage but this is basically when studios ask consultants to read through a pile of scripts so that they don’t have to, submit a written analysis of the scripts, and grade them on three marks: pass, consider, or recommend. It’s like a book report, except you yourself don’t get credit for it.
Coverage is critical work in the industry, people doing coverage provide a valuable service. But it is also grunt work, there is no glory in coverage. Interns and assistants have been known to do coverage and while, of course, you can learn so much in the process, which is obviously what Ronda did, it’s also considered junior work in an industry built on hierarchy.
That’s what Ronda Rousey, world champion with all those accolades, was doing for months. She was GRINDING. And it was familiar to her because she would know about training, right? Training from the beginning, building those muscles from the beginning, doing the thankless tasks, repeatedly, and taking correction, and doing it again, and again, and again. She was willing to be coached by this mentor, and she responded to the coaching, to the point where, again per Deadline:
“After months of working in coverage, she was challenged by her long-time WME agents, who have been with her pre-UFC, to write the script about her life, a task she handled all by herself in just seven days, blowing away her agents who couldn’t believe the script was from a first time writer.”
SEVEN DAYS. I mean, this, too, is good storytelling, lol. Because, come on, she didn’t do it in seven days, it was all in her head, taking shape and reshaping, while she was doing all that coverage. But, sure, I can buy that from the time her agents told her to start writing, she polished her eighth draft and waited a week before showing them and now we get to add this to the mythology. I don’t mind this kind of mythology when the foundation is built on old fashioned grunt work. And we have more mythology too. Because there’s more:
“Knowing they had something special, insiders say when the package was taken to the market, the front page of the script was torn off prior to the meeting with Netflix, that way execs went in with no pre-conceived bias and only found out who wrote it after they had finished the script. Execs immediately reached out about who the writer was after reading the script and even after finding out it was Rousey did not take long before putting in an offer.”
Girl, this should be the movie. The tearing off of the front page, keeping the writer’s name a secret, and then revealing that it’s actually her? This is pornographic, an instant Show Your Work orgasm…
Come on!
It’s the moment in the sports movie where the athlete that they all wrote off in act one comes back fitter and faster after secretly training with a jaded retired coach to win the championship – only with writers, LOLOLOLOL.
And it’s the kind of story that writers appreciate. Writers like Duana who’s been screenwriting now for almost 20 years are the ones who will pick up on an industry report like this and zoom in on words like “coverage” because they know that work and what it means. They would recognise Ronda as one of their own. Duana said to me when we were gasping and squealing back and forth about this that:
“You know how many people wouldn’t even humble themselves like that [doing coverage]?”
Especially, when, you know, at this point she was already RONDA ROUSEY, a UFC pioneer. Which makes her a celebrity, and we have all seen how celebrities, in the most vain ways, have taken… ahem… alternative paths to where Ronda is now.
What I love about this is that it’s non-magical. Oftentimes when people talk about writing it’s the story of the inspiration fairy, and the mythology involves a trance experience where you one day just sit down and star dust floats in from the window and sprinkles itself onto your keyboard. Writing is not magical, sometimes (a lot of the time) it’s not even fun, and it does not happen in a dream state. It IS humbling, as Duana said, and it’s repetitive, it’s practice, it’s boring, it’s writing coverage for no credit: reading a script, summarising it, and critiquing it, for no purpose other than to figure out how you would write your own script.
This is why, right out the gate, to announce this deal, she is getting the respect of the cohort she’s now a part of. Ronda Rousey is a WRITER.
