TV Talk: Former Shaler Area High School student’s screenplay the basis for ‘Escape the Field’ movie

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

Often we hear stories of twentysomethings who catch a break and land starring roles in TV and film just a few years out of college.

But many times, it takes longer to make Hollywood dreams come true — sometimes much longer.

For Joshua Dobkin, 43, the path from pitch to premiere for the screenplay he wrote with college friend Sean Wathen took more than a decade. But now that movie, “Escape the Field,” has seen the light of day.

Distributed by Lionsgate, the 88-minute, R-rated “Escape the Field” is playing in theaters in some major cities (though not in Pittsburgh) and streaming everywhere via cable on-demand (including on Comcast) and on VOD platforms (iTunes, Amazon, etc.).

Dobkin, a Wheeling, W.Va., native who attended Shaler Area High School, used his dad’s camcorder to make “awful VHS movies” in the North Hills when he was in middle school.

Wathen was making backyard movies at the same time. They met a few years later when studying film at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Fla.

Their idea for “Escape the Field” was hatched on a traffic-filled drive back from the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con to Los Angeles, where they had both moved to.

“Sean had made some movies in his backyard, and the neighboring property was all cornfield — and he had always wanted to do something about a cornfield,” recalled Dobkin, who had a similar experience when visiting a friend’s camp in Erie that was next to a cornfield. “If you walked a couple of feet into it and turned around, you will be lost. Parents always told stories of, ‘Do not go into that cornfield because someone did that 10 years ago and never came back.’ ”

The friends started riffing: What cornfield-set story could they tell? Who are the characters and how did they get into the cornfield?

A few days later, Wathen brought up the notion again and the friends started getting ideas down on paper.

Hundreds of drafts, character name changes, an almost-sale of the script in 2009, a real sale years later (to the company run by Steve Mnuchin before he became Treasury secretary in the Trump administration; his wife, Louise Linton, is credited as an executive producer on “Escape the Field”) and one pandemic later, the movie they originally titled just “The Field” is now available nationwide.

Made at a low budget — less than $2 million — this thriller stars Shane West (“ER”), Theo Rossi (“Sons of Anarchy”) and Jordan Claire Robbins (“The Umbrella Academy”).

“Escape the Field”was shot outside Toronto mid- pandemic in 2020 and follows an assortment of characters who awaken in a cornfield with no idea how they got there. They try to escape together and discover symbols and clues reminiscent of the Dharma Initiative on TV’s “Lost.”

Directed by Emerson Moore, who did a rewrite on Dobkin’s and Wathen’s script, “Escape the Field” delivers tension and suspense, develops several of its characters and introduces some intriguing “Lost”-like mysteries (that it never resolves).

“Sean and I were really into ‘Lost’ at that point (when we conceived the idea),” Dobkin said. “That was a big jumping-off point. I would say the movie is a hybrid of ‘Lost’ meets [the 1997 Canadian sci-fi horror movie] ‘Cube.’ ”

In the 15 years it took to get “Escape the Field” made, Dobkin has worked in the art department on TV shows (“Scrubs,” “Our Flag Means Death”) and movies (the upcoming “Thor: Love and Thunder”).

It wasn’t an easy road to a Hollywood career. Dobkin’s interest in TV/film production was piqued after he saw the 1998 indie flick “Clay Pigeons” starring Vince Vaughn and directed by David Dobkin. He asked his father if he was related to the director and his dad said, yes, the film director is a distant relative.

“If there’s a Dobkin out there, then there must be a chance for me to actually do this thing,” Joshua Dobkin recalled thinking.

During film school, he reached out to David Dobkin to pick his brain about how one gets a job in Hollywood. He only got as far as David Dobkin’s assistant, who stayed in touch. The two eventually met after Joshua moved to Los Angeles. Although he eventually spoke by phone with David Dobkin in an attempt to set up a coffee meeting, the director declined the invitation after his 2005 hit film “Wedding Crashers.”

“He just flat-out told me, ‘Everybody’s knocking on my door for something so I have to be really careful of who I let in, and I can’t provide any help at this time,’ ” Joshua Dobkin recalled. “That was a big reality check. My insider info didn’t pan out. But I’d still like to meet him someday.”

He started sending out his resume to all the productions he could find, finally getting a break as a production assistant on CBS’s 2002-09 drama “Without a Trace,” flying back to California early from a Christmas 2005 visit home to Pittsburgh. After that, he landed in the office at “Scrubs” and then moved on to the “Scrubs” art department as a coordinator.

He took a break from art department work to try to move more into the writers’ realm as a writer’s production assistant for two seasons on The CW’s 2012-16 drama “Beauty and the Beast,” hoping it might lead to writing work. But the pay was less, and he had a hefty mortgage and returned to art department work.

“(Working as a writer’s assistant) had put such a big dent into our finances,” Dobkin said. “We were gonna go belly-up if I hadn’t jumped right back to the art department.”

Dobkin is currently an art director on the remake of the 1992 movie “White Men Can’t Jump.”

“I would love to make a movie in the ’Burgh,” Dobkin says. “I’ve tried to work on movies in Pittsburgh, and it never pans out.”

Although he has no scripts in active development and anticipates because of “Escape the Field” he may get pigeonholed in a thriller/horror writer category as Hollywood is wont to do, Dobkin does have a Pittsburgh-set passion project script titled “Streets of Grey.”

“The dream cast would be — though it’ll never happen — Billy Gardell, Michael Keaton and Joe Manganiello,” Dobkin says. “It’s very, very much (in the vein of the 2011 Ryan Gosling movie) ‘Drive.’ If I could make a Yinzer version of ‘Drive,’ that is what it would be.”