Truth is stranger than scary movies at this year's Nashville Screenwriters Conference

Nashville isn't often a next stop for movies on their way back from Cannes. So it's a sign of the rising status of the Nashville Screenwriters Conference that this Friday night, only a week after it screened at the world's most prestigious film festival, audiences at The Belcourt will see the same film critics and audiences just watched on the Croissette—almost a year before its scheduled release in 2010.

If anything, The Belcourt's screening of I Love You Phillip Morris should go much better. The film's first screening at Cannes was targeted by striking workers who shut off the theater's power, much to the consternation of writer-directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. Even so, some critics walked away convinced that the category-defying movie—a true-crime-tall-tale-cum-romantic-comedy with Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor—outshone many of the festival's competition entries.

"It was not our goal to do something that hadn't been seen before," says Far Shariat, one of the film's producers, who has family in Nashville and will join Requa and Ficarra in a panel discussion at the Union Station Hotel this weekend. "We just thought, if John, Glenn, [producer] Andrew [Lazar] and I can care about these guys falling in love, not being gay ourselves, why can't other people?"

That kind of confidence—in a potentially off-putting personal project from the authors of Bad Santa—will no doubt come as the stuff that dreams are made of to registrants at the NSC, founded 11 years ago by screenwriter Les Bohem (The Alamo), producer Karen Murphy (This Is Spinal Tap) and CPA/business manager Gary Haber. From Friday through Sunday, aspiring screenwriters will stake out the Union Station lobby, hoping to ask the scribes and producers behind such films as Shrek, Gladiator, Ocean's Eleven, The Lion King, 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, Hustle & Flow, Paul Blart: Mall Cop and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies how to steer their own projects through the chutes and ladders of the marketplace. More to the point: How can you write something that'll sell, yet which won't make you flinch every time your name comes up on the IMDB?

There's the example of Requa and Ficarra, who've known Shariat since the days of their script for the hit children's comedy Cats & Dogs. With I Love You Phillip Morris, a project once reportedly slated for director Gus Van Sant, they were drawn to the bizarre true story of Steven Russell (Carrey), a law-abiding Florida family man who morphed into an outrageous con man and found love in prison with a gay felon (McGregor), only to become a notorious escape artist.

Veteran Texas journalist Steve McVicker (who'll also appear on the NSC panel) told Russell's gonzo yarn in a book that attracted some movie interest. But Shariat, whose credits include the just-canceled NBC series Life, felt the movie pitches concentrated too much on the superficial oddities of Russell's tale—say, his penchant for pulling off brazen escapes on Friday the 13th. He was more intrigued by character details, such as the fact that Russell, a middle child, was given up for adoption while his parents kept his siblings.

Requa and Ficarra (whom Shariat fondly calls "the boys") set out distilling the book's countless bizarre incidents and potential distractions into a script. They did a couple of drafts only for themselves, struggling to find the proper black-comic tone and style while handling real people and situations—the topic of their NSC panel, not coincidentally. Shariat estimates they threw away hundreds of pages before coming up with a draft they liked. The entire process, he says, took five years before the film was ready to shoot. In the end, though, they came away with a movie that even detractors admit is a rare work of daring in a risk-averse climate.

How risk-averse is the movie-making climate? Ask Craig Mazin, one of the writers brought in to rejuvenate the Scary Movie spoof franchise. Scary Movie 3, which Mazin co-wrote, went on to gross $110 million domestically. You would think its blockbuster return on a modest budget would give its creative team more leeway.

"You would think," says Mazin, laughing. Instead, the spoof-movie genre became locked into what the former Writers Guild of America board member describes as "a running commentary on pop culture." Even though he was working with some of the brain trust behind Airplane! and the original Naked Gun, genre spoofs that drew inspiration across decades, the pressure was to narrow the scope to whatever had just left theaters.

"We lost as many of those fights as we won," Mazin says. He lost even more as writer and director of last year's Superhero Movie, which revisited some of the same ground as a low-budget 2000 cult film he directed called The Specials. This time, more money meant less control. "Some parts I adore," he says, "others were compromises."

Perhaps it sounds fitting that Mazin is hosting a high-powered panel on "The Psychological Perils of Screenwriting," covering phobias from deadlines to creative block. But he's hardly a doomsayer about the system. Right now, he says, he's having the time of his life working on "the biggest thing I've ever written," an action-adventure comedy called Game Boys for producer Jerry Bruckheimer.