Alec Roth grew up in Hollywood — the son of screenwriter Eric Roth, watching his father adapt books into films from a home office — and he’s now doing the same thing from his own side of the table. In this Author Hour conversation with Lex Statzer, Alec talks about what it actually takes to turn a book into a movie, why he believes “great intellectual property, your stories, they win the day, no matter what,” and how a Scribe author’s book landed on his desk and is now becoming a feature film.

That book is Candler Cook’s From Underdog to Bulldog, the true story of a walk-on’s improbable journey through big-time college football. Alec explains what made it “the modern Rudy,” why he was drawn to the passion baked into the material, and how he and Candler navigated the delicate work of adapting one person’s real story into a film — “I wanted to make sure that he felt he was telling the story he wants to tell.”

Along the way, Alec is candid about the parts of the creative life that every author will recognize: the doubt, the rejection, and the “soft yes” that never materializes. His advice is to believe in the material and keep going — “there’s no one you can’t reach out to.”

He’s especially bullish on books as the best raw material for film (“hundreds of pages… you get this world that you get to play off of”), and he closes with an open invitation: if you’re an author with a story, reach out — he’d love to read it and see if it belongs on the silver screen.