“I didn’t even start writing until I was in graduate school,” says Mark Poirier, “and it took me a really long time to call myself a writer. I thought it sounded pretentious.” Poirier, who has published two novels and two short story collections, says that he'd now best like to think of himself as a short story writer. But when he wrote the script for Smart People, a new movie starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Thomas Haden Church, what he mainly was, was hungry. Poirier had received the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship at Paramount Pictures, but “I kind of applied out of desperation, not out of any passion to write screenplays. I’d been teaching at Portland State, in Oregon, and my contract didn’t get renewed, and I was, like: ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to eat?’ ”
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