How ‘Sierra Burgess is a Loser’ Writer Lindsey Beer Became Hollywood’s Hottest Commodity

The first feature film she’s ever written isn’t even out yet, but Lindsey Beer is one of the most in-demand screenwriters working today. And don’t worry, you can see it tomorrow on Netflix, it’s called Sierra Burgess is a Loser, and chances are, you’re going to love it.

She’s following up the teen rom-com with scripts for 2019’s Chaos Walking (starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley) and Masters of the Universe, as well as The Kingkiller Chronicle (produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda) and a Dungeons & Dragons movie due out in 2021. Essentially, this woman is VERY busy, and it all started with a script she wrote six years ago.

The Sierra Burgess script was one of the first Beer had written and the very first one she sold, and was inspired by both her love for the classic Cyrano de Bergerac story, and her determination to right the wrongs of a super shitty performance of it. “I had just moved to LA to become a screenwriter and I had the good fortune of seeing a terrible, terrible production of Cyrano in Santa Monica,” Beer told Decider. “While it was one of the worst productions of a play I’ve ever seen, it reminded me how much I loved the Cyrano story.” Beer first read Cyrano in her high school AP French class and totally nailed a test about it, so much so that her teacher attached a copy of it to her college recommendation.

Beer notes that the less than stellar production, “Just got me thinking that it hadn’t been retold in a big way since Roxanne, and the themes of the story were so fitting for a high school movie. It just felt like if you gender swapped it, the themes were even more relevant given that women tend to fall under even higher scrutiny for looks. Also, given technology and catfishing and everything that goes on with online dating these days, it felt like the story was just ripe for retelling.” And so it was up to her to retell it.

Sierra Burgess is a Loser stars Shannon Purser, formerly known as Barb from Stranger Things, as a dynamic human female teen, in that she can be both confident in herself, her skills, and her unique traits, and also feel self-conscious about her looks, her chances of getting into college, and her general place in the world. When Jamey (Noah Centineo), the adorable football player from a rival school texts her, believing she’s actually cheerleader Veronica (Kristine Froseth), Sierra doesn’t correct him and instead begins a phone relationship, making a series of increasingly poor decisions as they get to know, and subsequently fall for each other.

But it’s the way their courtship is portrayed on-screen, and on their phone screens, that will undoubtedly make you feel giddy inside. Beer wrote the script in the style that viewers would see (and in turn, feel) what the characters were texting on their phone, rather than having the texts pop up on-screen. And while the decision was only briefly discussed once they were in production, Beer said, “The overall vibe of the movie is a little more grounded and it felt not of the cloth of the movie to have it pop up. We wanted to be there in the moment with Sierra and Jamey and make it feel more like it did to the characters.”

Beer went on to admit that, “There is so much of my authentic teen angst reappropriated into this movie, so to see it come to life kind of breaks my brain a little,” and cites the scenes with Sierra and her parents (played by Lea Thompson and Alan Ruck) as the ones that hit closest to home, as the characters were inspired by her own parents. But it’s perhaps a scene where Purser puts her singing skills on display that really touched Beer. “I put a lot of my life into this movie, even to the point that the song ‘Sunflower’ is something that I wrote in high school. I keep telling my producer, it’s not quite sinking in, I don’t get it. And every time I see an article about it or I saw a song from our soundtrack on an iTunes playlist, I’m like, what the hell is that?”

The feelings were flowing at the film’s premiere last week, where Beer recalled, “The whole thing really was crazy and emotional, watching it come to life. My agent was sitting next to me and he is definitely not an emotional person, almost to a fault, and he was just crying through the whole thing because he knows me so well and it was just so funny.” She’ll watch it again with loved ones this weekend as she’s planning a big viewing party with family to celebrate the release, and notes why after working in the industry for so many years, this one feels especially surreal. “I have other movies that I have written on, that I have credits on, that are more like Transformers and these giant movies that did not come out of my brain, and for some reason that just felt like no big deal. But for this, a small movie that completely exists because of something I wrote,” well, she can only describe the experience of it finally being available for audiences around the world as “so, so weird.”

And, an experience that could be repeated. The thirst for a sequel is already brewing, as she teased that she would even give the Jamey character a last name voted on by fans. After Centineo and Purser shared that tweet, there are plans in place for an official voting form to launch this weekend and determine the last name, should the film come back for another installment. And the chances of that happening? Beer can only say, “The producers and the cast and everybody involved on our side would love a sequel. I think Netflix doesn’t make decisions on sequels until about a month out from launch date and they base it off of performance, so it’s really up to all the viewers out there to decide if we get a sequel.”

From her perspective, she acknowledges that Netflix as a company is certainly “buying up more rom-coms and they are buying up more things in the YA space too. It seems to be two niches that they are really owning.” The proof lies in Beer’s social media which has been flooded with fans anticipating Sierra Burgess days and even weeks before it’s released, which she says, “To have that reach of Netflix is just crazy, and to be able to tap into that market, these kind of forgot about movies is really special and exciting.”

It’s also quite unexpected, at least on Beer’s part. With the success of June’s rom-com Set It Up and fellow teen flicks The Kissing Booth and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, all released within the past four months, Netflix is being credited for the resurgence of the entire genre. “We had no idea that they were planning this kind of summer of love thing. They bought our movie [in January of 2017] and said it would be coming out in September because their algorithm told them that was a good time for them to launch it. But they said nothing about how they were amassing this rom-com empire and had a strategy for releasing them all at the same time. That was a huge surprise to us as well as the world, but it has been a delight to watch.”

As far as Beer’s involvement in more rom-coms, she said, “I would love to do more in the Sierra world. In terms of other rom-coms, it would just have to be the right thing and probably have to come from my brain so I had a personal connection to it, but it’s something that I know a lot of people want to see.”

For now, she’s got a lot going on. While Sierra is her first feature where she is the sole screenwriter, she credits being a part of the Transformers writers room as the job that catapulted her career to where it is today. She joined the Transformers writing team in 2015 along with Christina Hodson and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and as Beer explained, they “were the only three women in the room and we were, in a way, affirmative actioned in there. They originally didn’t have any women in the room and got a bunch of flack for it and before the room started they were like, okay we are gonna put women in it, where are we gonna find women to handle a PR crisis.” Of course, while it was a great opportunity for Beer and her peers, that doesn’t mean it didn’t come without some crude criticism. “When the news broke out, there were a bunch of really mean comments on the articles, to the point of one person saying that we were there to give the real writers blow jobs.”

Of course, instead of giving brain, the women were using theirs to contribute some of the best ideas for the project. “I don’t want to brag, but the women ended up being the stars of the room. It took so many people by surprise and the word of mouth spread so wide and that’s kind of what launched all of our careers to the next level and made people be like, oh women can write these big male-driven fantasy spectacles just as well as men can.”

Now, with her first feature being released on Netflix this week and a handful of projects scheduled for theatrical releases over the next half a decade, Beer reflects on her place in the system as both a talented commodity, who also happens to be a woman. “It’s a double-edged sword. I definitely notice it every day and every meeting and there are opportunities I get because I am a woman and there are opportunities I am shut out of because I am a woman and you just kind of take what you can get and fight every day, [knowing] that you have to be twice as smart and work twice as hard and push twice as much.”

It’s only fitting that one of the highlights of her position now is fueled and supported by friends dealing with the same thing, a similar theme which can be found in Sierra Burgess. “I’ve found a community of amazing women. We lean on each other because we are all writers in the same genre, and instead of competing with each other we have become friends that help each other through everything. We have all submitted the same scripts and worked on the same projects and we are a good resource for each other.”

What Beer has already learned in her career, one that is just now blossoming to its full potential, is that Hollywood needs to “empower more writers and allow them to stay on throughout the process,” of making a film. She attributes the success of her own film to this, saying, “I think that Sierra is a real testament to what happens when there is just one writer on a project. You have one authorial voice and a cohesion and an authenticity.”

And as Beer reflects upon her own experience on the eve of the film’s release, she said, “A lesson I’ve learned for myself is just how gratifying making movies of any size is. I do tend to write these movies on a larger scale, their heroism is kind of larger than life. I find it special to be able to work on a project where, I think Sierra is very heroic but on a more human, grounded scale and it’s important to tell those stories too.”

It’s pretty likely that Netflix as a distributor, and humans and viewers, are on board with Beer’s other takeaway throughout the process, but she encourages people to “Celebrate what we call ‘girly’ movies. I don’t know that they are necessarily girly movies, but they tend to be disregarded more and not taken as seriously as the more masculine-driven fare. Movies like this, coming of age stories, they have such important messages and such important themes beyond just making people happy and smile, they can make people think and feel and laugh and cry.” And if Beer is penning the script, that’s a guarantee.

Where to watch Sierra Burgess is a Loser