Argentina-born Marcelo Mitnik is effusive in his praise for the professors who helped him earn an MFA in screenwriting at UCLA. While the instruction and support Mitnik received was certainly valuable, it was another perk of having matriculated from that university that helped Mitnik get his first paying Job: crafting an English-language remake of the Chilean romantic comedy Pretendiendo, about a beautiful woman who makes herself look ugly in order to repel men and thus put an end to a string of romantic disappointments. Claudio Dabed, the producer and director of the original film, was searching for a writer to take on the remake through the traditional method of taking agency submissions. Frustrated that he was unable to find someone with whom he clicked, Dabed turned to the UCLA film department for help. "I got a message regarding his search through an alumni listserv and submitted my material," recounts Mitnik. Dabed liked Loving and Leaving L.A.,
Mitnik's semi-autobiographical script about a naive actor from Argentina scouring Hollywood in search of a powerful director, and requested a meeting. The two men hit it off, sharing similar comic and cinematic sensibilities. Mitnik pitched his take on how to remake Pretendiendo for American audiences, and he was hired. But Pretending (Pretendiendo's now-Anglicized title) is just the latest step on Mitnik's journey, one that began in Argentina where the writer attended a film school for kids. In his early teens Mitnik would watch four to five movies a week written and directed by the likes of Bergman, Welles, and Woody Alien. "Now that I think about it," Mitnik says of his exposure to such varied films at such an early age, "I realize that this was not only an incredible blessing, but also incredibly strange." Eventually, Mitnik moved to L.A., figuring that "there was clearly a lot to be learned from the industry that puts out 90% of the movies watched worldwide." He set his sights on UCLA, spending three years in the film school's professional and advanced screenwriting programs before beginning work on his MFA. The experience fueled his creativity and demystified the writing process. "Sometimes I wonder whether writers focus on 'process' because we need to turn writing into something more complicated than it really is," he says. "The bottom line is we're not heart surgeons. The hardest part of our job, and the bulk of the process, is to sit down for hours at a time cranking out pages, finishing a draft, realizing what we wrote is pretty shitty, rewriting those shitty pages, finishing a new draft, realizing the 'genius' solutions we had found don't quite work, rewriting again, and doing this enough times until what we had in mind and what's on the page are close enough to stop writing. Or as Hal Ackerman, one of my favorite professors, liked to remind us: 'A script is never finished, only abandoned.'".