Tom Shepherd
Tom came to LA with the dream of being a waiter to the stars. It was going great until his nasty script writing habit turned into a full- time job.
Originally from Minnesota, Tom studied writing and literature at Bard College. But it wasn’t until moving to Los Angeles and breathing movie air that he became obsessed with screenplays and how to write them. Eventually, this obsession helped him prove that old adage — “It can happen to anyone!”
In 2013, he placed on the Blacklist for his screenplay, HEY, STELLA!, which tells the story of how Marlon Brando used his tortured relationship with his mother to win the part of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire and forever change acting.
Since then, he’s written scripts for a bunch of great producers and directors.
Of these projects, he most enjoys his period, action driven scripts, Capone (WB & Tom Hardy) and Agatha Christie (Sony), and his adaptation of Matt Helm (Paramount/Amblin), Dean Martin’s spy spoof that inspired Austin Powers.
In 2020, he received his first produced credit for Dolittle, a family adventure movie. This afforded him the opportunity to see the legendary Pinewood Studios in England turned into a pirate town he made up while sitting in crosstown traffic.
For a guy who lost out on his table waiting dream, it was a pretty epic consolation prize.
Based in LA, Tom and his wife are parents to a pandemic baby who grows at roughly the same pace that Robin Williams did in the seminal film Jack. When not feeding his sumo child, he tries his darndest to keep his scripts one clever step ahead of GPT-4 and Silicon Valley’s legion of AI content bots.
Testimonials
Tom is new to Script Anatomy, so testimonials will be coming soon!