They say it can take a while for an artist to hone their craft… but Taylor Sheridan seems to be the exception.
Believe it or not, the creator of Yellowstone and a multitude of other hit TV shows and movies almost always writes on his own. If you are watching something with Taylor Sheridan’s name on it, chances are every single scene and line came right out of his own mind, and no one else’s.
Why does Sheridan insist on working and writing alone? Basically, it came down to Taylor Sheridan having a certain style, and realizing that others can’t easily mimic it. When he eventually gave up his acting career to focus on writing, it was because he knew that those who write their own stories control their own destinies in Hollywood.
He was tired of being treated like a commodity in the industry, and decided he would build himself up to be irreplaceable.
As he explained on a recent episode of Tom McCutcheon’s THE SHOW, Sheridan learned the art of storytelling through his career as a working actor. However, when he started writing his own shows, he didn’t lean on his acting experiences in terms of “what to do.” He actually looked at it as “what not to do,” and started writing in a manor that intentionally veered away from what he had been involved with.
But it might surprise you to find out what his first script was. The movie ‘Sicario’ came out in 2015, the Oscar-nominated ‘Hell or Highwater’ came out in 2016, ‘Wind River’ in 2017, and ‘Yellowstone’ didn’t debut until 2018… but none of those were his first script.
“If I just don’t do what all those people did, it’ll probably be pretty good. So I sat down and I said, ‘I’m gonna write a TV show that I would want to watch.’ So the first thing I ever wrote was the pilot episode of ‘Mayor of Kingstown.’ When I wrote that, I was like, ‘Now I don’t even know what to do. I have some friends… but I didn’t know anyone that could get a script made.'”
Quick side note: those out there that are fans of Mayor of Kingstown and have seen that show’s first episode… crazy to think that’s one of the first ever things that Sheridan came up with.
Taylor went on to say that he sent the Mayor of Kingstown pilot around to a number of people, and even some attorneys that he knew… hoping they’d have some sort of entertainment connection. Sure enough, one attorney that was sent the pilot recognized how good it read, and quickly set out to get it in front of the right people.
Once Sheridan’s work reached Hollywood, he says the “world set on fire,” and he was highly sought after. But before the ball really got rolling, he was given a piece of advice… which led to Sheridan pumping out another high-level piece of writing:
“Then they said, ‘Write a movie. You need a movie as your calling card. It doesn’t matter if it ever gets made, just sit down and write a movie.’ So I wrote ‘Sicario,’ and that thing came together pretty quick. Then I wrote my features and I got those movies made. By then, I had figured out I had a voice that fits in a very specific genre. I’m not gonna worry about being typecast. I’m just gonna dominate that genre.”
Safe to say that worked out tremendously for Taylor Sheridan.
You can hear the Yellowstone creator talk more about his early writing career, and the first ideas he put down on paper, in the interview below:
