Rex Pickett

Rex Pickett
Rex Pickett on the set of the film Sideways
Born	Merced, California, United States
Occupation	Screenwriter, novelist, playwright, film director
Language	English
Genre	Fiction, comedy, film, theatre

Rex Pickett is an American novelist and filmmaker best known for his novel Sideways, which was adapted into a 2004 movie of the same name directed by Alexander Payne.

Pickett was born in Merced, California, and grew up in San Diego. He attended the University of California at San Diego where he was a Special Projects major, specializing in contemporary literary and film criticism and creative writing. He graduated summa cum laude, then moved to Los Angeles to attend USC’s Graduate School of Cinema. He dropped out in the early ‘80s and, with his then wife, Barbara Schock, wrote and directed two independent feature films, California Without End and From Hollywood to Deadwood. California Without End was sold to Bavarian Radio Television, a German television station, and From Hollywood to Deadwood to Island Pictures.

Pickett returned to writing, landing a job as a writer on David Fincher’s first feature, Alien 3. In 1998 he wrote the screenplay for My Mother Dreams the Satan's Disciples in New York, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 1999.

In 1995 Pickett began writing novels. His first, a mystery titled La Purisima, didn’t sell. His second was Sideways. Completed in 1999, the novel was submitted to both publishers and film production companies. After 18 rejection letters from publishers, Pickett’s agent pulled it from submission. Film production companies also passed. In late 1999, nearly a year after it had been written, one of the submissions by Pickett’s agent, Jess Taylor, at Endeavor, was to Alexander Payne’s agent, David Lonner at the same agency. Payne’s assistant, Brian Beery, read it, then passed it to Payne who immediately optioned it. Shortly after Payne optioned Sideways it was greenlit by Artisan Entertainment. Emboldened by front page Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter news about the Artisan greenlight, Pickett’s agent at Curtis Brown went back out to publishers in a mass submission, but to no avail. It was rejected by every one of them. Eventually, Payne would put Sideways on hold and go off to make About Schmidt.