THE FALL GUYS

In 2011, Zack Stentz and Ashley Edward Miller were the hottest new screenwriting team in Hollywood. Then they disappeared. Eight years later, they tell EMPIRE their cautionary tale; revealing the tough reality of a writer's life Hollywood

- DAN JOLIN

FACEBOOK CAN BE SO cruel. On 8 June, the social-media monster’s memory-dredging algorithm coldly dumped a particularly painful ‘On This Day’ at the top of Zack Stentz’s feed. It was a story the screenwriter had shared eight years earlier, from industry website Deadline. Wrapped around a photo of Stentz and his writing partner, Ashley Edward Miller — all smiles, leaning on an incongruous red telephone box — the article proclaimed them as “Rising Scribes”, whose sudden, recent success with Thor and X-Men: First Class heralded a glorious, A-list career.

The piece detailed all their big in-development projects: a high-budget disaster/ action film for Skydance Productions; a juicy TV pilot for Fox; a cinematic remake of ’80s show The Fall Guy; and a top-secret, major franchise script, also for Fox, mysteriously dubbed the ‘Knight Project’.

As Stentz drily commented in a Twitter thread, “These guys must have been on top of the world and ready to conquer TV and features, right?” Wrong. Not one of those listed projects got in front of a camera, and it was five years before either he or Miller would receive their next credit. “Screenwriting,” Stentz tweeted, “is not for the faint of heart.”

Discovering what happened to them is not so much a matter of asking, “What went wrong?” It is more about scraping away Hollywood’s bright, self-confident veneer to reveal the gnarly reality beneath. “There is a pressure to put out the idea that everything is success and we’re always going from flawless victory to flawless victory,” Stentz tells Empire. “But Hollywood careers are full of peaks and valleys that we rarely share with the rest of the world.” Now, he thinks, it’s time to share.

ACT I: SET-UP