Jack El-Hai on Writing for the Silver Screen

This November, the movie Nuremberg, based on the 2013 nonfiction book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” by ASJA member and past-president Jack El-Hai, will be playing in a theater near you. 

Since the news broke, many ASJA members and other writers have asked the same question: How do I do that?

“They’ve asked me what they can do to make their work more interesting to people who make movies and TV series and podcasts,” El-Hai says. 

Here are four tips he offers for writing eye-catching stories–plus a bonus tip for how to handle your business if Hollywood comes a’  knockin’.

1. Own your work. 

“Keep your copyright,” El-Hai stresses. Especially for narrative journalism,.  “You must not let publishers own your work.” 

In 2023, El-Hai co-led an ASJA webinar on contracts, along with fellow ASJA member Ellen Ryan and attorney Joseph Perry. ASJA offers resources on contracts and copyright, including templates and tools.

2. Leverage your (limited) power. 

Performance rights agents can be very difficult to get, warns El-Hai, much more difficult than a literary agent. If someone wants to option your published work, he says, use that as your opportunity to get a performance rights agent.

3. Think in twos. 

“This experience has encouraged me to find stories with central characters in pairs,” El-Hai says. In “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” the central pair is in the title, Douglas Kelly (the psychiatrist) and Hermann Göring (the Nazi). “They make a good pair because there’s a lot of conflict between them.”

El-Hai also profiled a pair – a surgeon and his patient – in “The Face in the Mirror,” a 2025 book about the first face transplant at the Mayo Clinic. His current work-in-progress also has a duo front and center. 

“I’ve often thought about how this experience has affected what stories I choose to write about going ahead,” he says. “I’ve learned that I like writing stories with central characters in pairs.

4. Write like the movies. 

If you want someone to imagine your story on screen, write so they can see it. “Write stories that are constructed in scenes that move, that readers can visualize,” El-Hai says. Writing cinematically leads to better narrative nonfiction. 

He recommends emphasizing action over dialogue and description, paraphrasing quotes, which he says can remove readers from the immediacy of the story, and doing away with prologues, prefaces, introductions and “all forms of throat-clearing at the start of a work.” 

“Start with the story,” El-Hai says.

5. Write what you love, not what you think will get you a film contract. 

El-Hai does not advise writers to target Hollywood, as doing so can lead to lowest-common-denominator stories that aren’t actually engrossing to you, the writer. 

Instead, he regularly reviews his work to remember what he enjoyed doing, then aims to write more stories that will satisfy him, not what he thinks might make some imagined audience happy. 

“It’s all about being true to my own interests, not the perceived needs of someone else,” he says. “When I produce stories that enrapture me, (they are more likely to) ensnare others, including producers. That’s a kind of selfishness I embrace.”

And besides, he asks, what’s the point of writing a story you don’t like? “Our time among the living is too limited, and the odds of attracting serious attention from Hollywood is too remote.”

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Holly Leber Simmons is the editor of the ASJA Weekly. She is a content marketing writer now, but in her newspaper days Holly reviewed movies for print and video, among many other topics.