From Sunset Blvd. to Adaptation, Deathtrap to Misery, great movies about writers appeal to writers and shape the public's perception of us. I knew I wanted to be a writer as early as the first grade. Somehow I got sidetracked. In college, I majored in computer science and later worked in the software industry for a long time while dabbling in freelance journalism on the side. Then I saw Mother. It was the first of three movies about writers that reawakened my creative ambitions.

In the 1996 comedy, director and co-writer Albert Brooks plays a moderately successful but blocked sci-fi novelist reexamining his life after his second divorce. Theorizing his problems stem from his relationship with his mother (Debbie Reynolds), he decides to move back in with her to get to the bottom of things. Yes, hilarity ensues. But along the way, he makes an unexpected discovery about his mother's own creative ambitions that answers all his questions. After I was done laughing at the inspired zingers, I contemplated suing Brooks for rummaging around in my subconscious and to make a movie out of all of my own personal demons and insecurities. There are at least ten or twenty beats in the script that could have come from Brooks secretly eavesdropping on actual conversations between me and my mother. It hit really close to home.

The following year, Woody Allen put out the much overlooked Deconstructing Harry, his funniest movie in decades. In it, he, too, plays a blocked, insecure novelist. As the narrative bounced back and forth between the protagonist's "real" life and the thinly veiled -- and hilarious -- fictional version of it he creates in his writings, I found myself relating to Allen's self-referential examination of the writer's psyche. His character's preference for the make believe universe he can control, over the vindictive ex-wives and back-stabbing friends he normally has to put up with, definitely helped draw me back to trying into indulge my muses.

After that, I spent a few years of writing the "bad" first screenplays that you never show anyone and don't count when someone asks you how many screenplays you've written. Then, in 2000, I came across a spellbinding French thriller called With A Friend Like Harry, starring Sergi Lopez (Pan's Labyrinth, Dirty Pretty Things), in which a friendly, chance meeting of two old school chums turns deadly. It all turns out to have something to do with an unfinished sci-fi novel that one of them started writing in high school, then forgot all about it as he grew up and chose a more ordinary life. Let's just say Harry really wanted to know how the novel would end. It was somewhat of a final wakeup call for me to start taking my writing more seriously. I figured, if there's a Harry out there waiting for me to finish my epic, I'd better get busy.

What movies about writers have inspired you to write?

Dan Margules is a sometimes blocked and insecure screenwriter, award-winning filmmaker and a co-founder of San Diego Filmmakers. His short film, Begleiter, is not about a writer, but is available in a Special Edition from Amazon.com or happy-the-dog.com.