Peg Board

Sam Harper ’74 at his home in
Tivoli, New York
Sam Harper ’74 Rookie of the Year
The definition of the term “longsuffering”
has rarely had a more powerful
illustration than the 108-year championship
drought experienced by fans
of Major League Baseball’s Chicago
Cubs. One of those fans is Sam Harper
’74, a New York native who moved to
Chicago at age 10 and grew up a diehard
Cubs fan. Although the Cubs’ 2016
World Series victory may have rendered
“long-suffering” inapt, a more appropriate
descriptor might be “prophet,”
because Sam actually “foretold” of a
Cubs championship in the screenplay
he wrote for 1993’s Rookie of the Year.
In the film, a Little League bench rider
suffers an arm injury that results in an
uncanny ability to throw a baseball at
blinding speed, resulting in a contract
with the Cubs and a World Series
victory. The first original screenplay he
ever wrote, the film made him something
of a “Rookie of the Year” himself.
Sam took his first steps toward the
big screen when he joined Darrow as
a sophomore in 1972 and cultivated his
love for writing. “I was a shy kid from a
large family, so it was not unusual for me
to escape to a quiet room and write in
my journal,” he said. Having attended
public schools, as well as more rigid
“coat and tie” private schools, he found
at Darrow the ideal mix of academic
and creative stimuli, complemented
by the grounding structure of activities
like Hands-to-Work and the collective
support of teachers and mentors such
as Bob McCannon, Herb Lape, and Mike
Clarke, who spent time with him and
encouraged his development as a writer.
“My senior project was writing four
creative short stories, and my Hands-to-
Work job senior year was putting together
the weekly newsletter with Jane Feldman
’74 and Kemp Parker ’74, so I was writing
a lot,” he said. “It was Bob McCannon
who pulled me aside one day and said,
‘You really need to pursue your writing
because there’s something there.’”
After Darrow, he attended Colorado
College, where he majored first in
English and then in history. Though the
School had no film program, a teacher
who taught a course on history as seen
through movies suggested screenwriting
as a possible career for the
confirmed movie addict. Before that,
though, he tried his hand as a writer
for Advertising Age. “There was an
editor there who just cut my writing to
ribbons, but it was so helpful. It was the
best schooling I ever got in writing,” he
said. The subject matter, on the other
hand, was extremely boring. “I had the
chewing gum beat, the cigarette beat,
and the sporting goods beat. After
three years, I was dying to do something
more creative.”
While visiting his older sister, who
had moved to Los Angeles to pursue
an acting career, he met an agent friend
of hers who encouraged him to move
west and pursue screenwriting. “I had
been writing creatively in New York but
couldn’t get any traction. So I saved
what money I had and quit. I moved
to L.A. in 1981 and started out reading
scripts and writing synopses and
criticism for studios. They paid me $15
a script and $25 per book. I was just
barely getting by but I was still writing
my own creative stuff on the side.”
Sam’s first paying studio job arrived
in 1987 with a film called Revenge of the
Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, for which he
wrote a version of the script. “I didn’t get
credited on it, but the experience was
fantastic. I was able to quit my other job
and things began to pick up. I was getting
one script deal a year.” While working in
script development, rewriting scripts that
“might or might not get made,” he wrote
Rookie of the Year in 1991, which became
a major release in 1993.
In 1997, in the midst of a career slump,
he wrote a romantic comedy titled Just
Married, which was based on his 1985
honeymoon with his wife, Anna McDonnell.
The film released in 2003, starring
Brittany Murphy and Ashton Kutcher.
“I felt like I was back in it,” Sam said of
the box office success.
DARROW SCHOOL 19