![]() Money Talks was a box office success and featured high profile actors like Charlie Sheen and Chris Tucker. Sokolow and Cohen wrote their first script for a movie called Money Talks, and their second for one called The Wooden Policeman. The two decided to focus their energy on “buddy stories,” a type of story arc in which two characters are thrown together by circumstance, share a common goal but have different ways of achieving it, and need to find trust in order to work together. In the ‘90s, Sokolow began working with his writing partner Joel Cohen, forming a pair that went on to write several highly successful films. ![]() Alec and his writing partner Joel Cohen (right) He used to envy friends who found great success in their 20s, but as he entered his 30s, Sokolow realized that the struggle is what motivated him to work so hard in the long run. “I call it my eight years of abject comic failure,” Sokolow said, “but it was then that I learned how to be a writer.” Sokolow explained that screenwriters are “trying to exist in a marketplace where no one cares what they want,” but that rejection taught him some of the most formative lessons of his career. The next several years were more challenging than Sokolow expected. However, Sokolow craved something more, a life of creativity, and it was then that he realized his vision for his future: he was to pursue a career in entertainment.Īt the age of 23, Sokolow successfully completed his first screenplay, and by 24, he was hired as a segment producer on The Late Show, a job that brought him to the holy land of the entertainment industry: Los Angeles. He even went so far as to apply and gain acceptance to law schools. “I couldn’t get enough of it,” he said.Īfter graduating in 1985, convention came knocking in all directions, with friends and family members persuading him to pursue a more traditional line of work. He attended college at the University of Pennsylvania and majored in communications, though he discovered that film classes captured most of his time and attention. “I wanted to leap onto the screen of every movie I saw,” Sokolow said. Sokolow’s foray into the industry came in the form of teenage summer jobs as a production assistant. These unique circumstances filled Sokolow’s adolescence with movie screenings, trips to production sets, Broadway openings, book parties, and intellectual conversation, which were essential ingredients in his later decision to become a screenwriter. Antiwar protestors that became household names, like the Chicago 7’s Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary, were common faces in the Sokolow home and good friends of Mel. Sokolow’s father, Mel, a first-generation Eastern European, was “a larger than life” figure, a professional basketball player, and an active member in the 1960s counterculture movement. Within five years, she was a high-powered executive in the industry and well on her way to making a name for the Sokolow clan. When they decided to send their children to private school, Sokolow’s mother, Diane, quit her part-time job and earned a spot in the Warner Bros literary department. His parents, both professionals in the entertainment industry, met through their work in television and raised their three children, Alec and his brother and sister, with the philosophy that life is meant to be lived. Arguably Sokolow’s most widely-known work, Toy Story, played a significant role in shaping the man he is today and the career he set out to have but, as it goes for most screenwriters, this film is just a single part of Sokolow’s own, greater story, a script that continues to write itself each day.īorn in 1965 and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in an apartment overlooking Central Park, Sokolow was privy to experiences that for most, only come with age and a little bit of luck. Today, it is hard to come across a person who has not seen the animated film Toy Story, and even more challenging to find someone who has seen it and not adored it. For Alec Sokolow, whose childhood was “nothing short of magical,” it was only natural to grow up with a dream to create magic for others. Modern psychologists contend that one’s childhood often determines the path he leads in life: his career, passions, relationships with others. ![]()
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