A Writer’s Journey from Mayflower Hill to Hollywood to Kittybunkport
A celebrated children’s book author and screenwriter, Scott Rothman ’96 discovered his love of writing as a student at Colby
Scott Rothman ’96 draws a direct line between his time as a student at Colby and his career as a writer.
A history major on Mayflower Hill, Rothman wrote his senior thesis about the Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), a racy book written during the latter half of the 16th century. The ancient manuscript is incomplete with missing chapters, so Rothman wrote the final chapters “to finish” the book as his thesis.
“While everyone else was in the computer labs spending weeks, maybe months, on their projects, I wrote the missing chapters relatively quickly—and it was the most fun I ever had. Right then and there, I knew, ‘Maybe I should do this, whatever this is.’ I was halfway decent at it, and, way more important, I really enjoyed it.”
With that revelation as his springboard, Rothman has enjoyed a successful career as a screenwriter, humor writer, writer for theater, and author of children’s books.
He recently published two new children’s books. Warm and Fuzzy is about two friends who go on an adventure and tackle their anxieties with resilience, open minds, and extra toilet paper. Kittybunkport is about a pair of scaredy cats, Chowder and Crackers, who face their fears when they attempt to fix the lighthouse in a famous seaside community in southern coastal Maine.
Penguin Random House published both books this spring.
Rothman, who lives in Connecticut with his wife, Jennifer Dursi Rothman ’96, and their three kids, is also the author of Attack of the Underwear Dragon (Random House) and its sequel Return of the Underwear Dragon, both of which were both National Indie bestsellers and are being developed into a musical kids TV series with bestselling illustrator and frequent collaborator Pete Oswald and Tony Award-winning composer Bill Sherman.
A screenplay he co-wrote about the National Football League, Draft Day, was made into a feature film directed by the late Ivan Reitman and starring Kevin Costner. Rothman also co-wrote the script for the comedy Army of One, starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Larry Charles. In the theater realm, he wrote the book for the musical Todd Vs. The Titanic, which received two productions last summer, including at the Adirondack Theatre Festival.
He traces it all back to Colby. “The connection between me being a writer and Colby is enormous,” he said.
Lessons from Colby
Children’s books came to him by instinct. In middle school, he wrote a book called Dirk’s Bump about a kid who wakes up with a bump on his head and tries to figure out what happened. When he and Jennifer started a family, children’s books became a part of his routine.
“I kind of had forgotten about this kid-book dream until I had kids of my own and started reading kids’ books all the time. That was a moment when I said to myself, ‘Oh right, this is something you have always wanted to do.’”
He failed at first, but found his playful voice with The Attack of the Underwear Dragon, the first manuscript he sold and the linchpin of his career. “I was sure I was going to be amazing at it right away, but I was not. It took way too long and way too many bad drafts to finally get better at it,” he said. “But once I did, I loved it more and more.”
The Attack of the Underwear Dragon is about a kid named Cole, whose wish comes true when he becomes an assistant knight to one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. He learned about medieval knights during a Colby history course taught by Professor of History Larissa Taylor. “That first book would not have happened without her,” he said. “I learned it all from Larissa’s class, and I have told her as much.”
California calling
After graduating from Colby, he moved to San Francisco to work for an advertising agency. The work was boring, and he wasn’t very good at it. But it gave him time to consider his options, and it worked in other ways, too. “That was a real profession that my parents would know and understand,” he said, “so they were happy at least.”
Meanwhile, another Colby friend, Jon Bowden ’95, had also moved to San Francisco, and together they made what Rothman recalled as “a really terrible movie. Really terribly written. By me. But it was a ton of fun.” Motivated by that experience, he decided to get serious about his writing.
‘I kind of had forgotten about this kid-book dream until I had kids of my own and started reading kids’ books all the time. That was a moment when I said to myself, Oh right, this is something you have always wanted to do.’
Scott Rothman ’96
“It was put up or shut up time,” and he enrolled in the M.F.A. program at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University to study dramatic writing. At NYU, he met Rajv Joseph, with whom he collaborated on the script for Draft Day, which landed at the top of the 2012 The Black List and led to a Lionsgate movie starring Costner, Jennifer Garner, and Dennis Leary. The movie was directed by Ivan Reitman, a longtime personal hero of Rothman’s, best known for directing the hit movie Ghostbusters and producing Animal House.
Rothman and Joseph remain friends and are working together again on a movie script about the National Spelling Bee.
A dream come true
Draft Day, he said, was like living a dream.
“We wrote it not to sell it. We wrote it because we are huge football fans. We would get together, talk football, and we put that into a script. The script not only got sold, but it got made. And not only did it get made, but we were allowed to be on set all the time. To have Kevin Costner of all people star in a sports movie that I wrote about a sport that I love, it was a dream come true,” he said, noting that the movie was recently added to Netflix to coincide with the NFL draft. “It’s a big hit with dads on long airplane rides,” he quipped.
Kittybunkport, the new book, is personal. He and his wife are both from New York, and they met at Colby. In doing so, they became the third generation of spouses in his family who met in Maine. The family gathered in Kennebunkport to celebrate his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary.
“We rented a house, and my son, Maxwell, who was 6 at the time, kept mispronouncing Kennebunkport, and he finally just said, ‘They should just call it Kittybunkport.’ I knew immediately there was a story there and that it would be about a town full of cats, on the Maine coast, and that it would involve lobsters, a lighthouse, chowder, and crackers.”
In addition to his ongoing work with Joseph, Rothman has a busy year ahead with six books scheduled for publication, including Judgy Bunny & the Terrible Beach from Sourcebooks and Horizontal Crocodile from Simon & Schuster.
