Real life: Hooray for Hollywood! How two Black Country friends cracked Tinseltown. . .

It's a bustling time of year for the film industry, a world five and a half thousand miles away in Tinseltown. At least we thought that's where the magic happened, before we met Bobby Lee Darby.

The 30-year-old scriptwriter may not have earned any Oscar nominations yet, but he is making his mark. Scripts that Bobby has developed alongside college friend Nathan Brookes have been made into big screen movies, earning the pair a great reputation among studios in LA.

What surprised us the most is that neither Bobby nor Nathan live it up in Beverley Hills. They don't write their scripts from an office in downtown LA or pass the Hollywood sign on the way to work every day.

In fact, the pair work their silver screen magic from Dudley, where they both live. It's not exactly La La Land, but it is inspiring action and horror hits worthy of worldwide distribution.

We catch up with Bobby to see just what it takes for a young Brit to make it in the movie world. We've always fancied ourselves as the next Quentin Tarantino. . .

"I've always been interested in films and loved movies," says Bobby when we ask where it all began. "I went to college in Dudley and studied media before going to Wolverhampton University to study video production." We can imagine the comments he would have received when he told the world he wanted to break into Hollywood. Media and video are the kinds of degrees that people never think will ever amount to anything, surely?

"People would say 'you'll end up working in a bank or something'. But I thought, someone's got to do it, so why not me?" It's this kind of confidence and positivity that has led to great things for Bobby. Success, it is clear, is as much a result of perseverance and self-belief as anything else.

"I graduated with a 2:1 in 2006, and I co-wrote my first script with my friend Nathan. I met him at college, he had just graduated and was my lecturer. We were pretty much the same age and became friends. We wrote a script together after I graduated called Slaughter, and it ended up winning a competition."

The competition he talks of is Slamdance Horror Screenplay Festival, and it earned the pair their first taste of Hollywood success. The script was picked up by Maverick, a film company co-founded by Madonna.

"I flew to Utah to pick up my award and all of a sudden things started to escalate – we had no manager, no representation, no contract and a cheque for $10,000! We thought 'oh, this is easy!'. But the film didn't end up going into production so we both got jobs in the industry, Nathan as an editor and I was a runner on a few shows like Most Haunted and Real Deal. I had to get an office job to make ends meet. Even then we were confident that we were going in the right direction. We knew we just had to keep writing, and get a manager and an agent.

"Eventually we wrote a script called Breaking Point and sent it over to a manager in LA. The next day he called to say that he wanted to sign us straight away. He told us that he didn't represent anyone that wasn't in the US, but that the script was so good he didn't even notice until he tried to call that he was ringing an English number. Though the script didn't sell, our second one did – to the WWE Studios."

WWE Studios is an arm of World Wrestling Entertainment – you'll probably remember it as the WWF that created Hulk Hogan. Over the years, the WWE have been putting out action and horror films featuring their big, burly stars, and now Bobby and Nathan were going to be writing them.

"Our agent would receive our scripts and send it out to producers. We had a few misfires, but we sold our first to WWE and though they didn't make it, they did hire us to write others."

The pair were tasked with creating the sequel to See No Evil, along with the film 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown. That one in particular enjoyed success in the US, and it's due to be released in Britain early this year.

"We wrote a movie that they shot late last year called Eliminators. After that, they said to us 'what do you want to make next? If you've got any ideas, we'll make it'." It's quite something to have a studio with that much influence so confident in the two Dudley writers.

"We suggested that they make an action movie shot in London, something they hadn't done before. We didn't expect that they'd agree to it, but they did. It was amazing."

"All the waitresses want to be actresses or writers. When we were there we really had to pinch ourselves. We were going to all the studios pitching for different movies. Our agent and manager were trying to get us on to different projects, so we'd go to studios like Paramount, it was unbelievable.

"We just spent time getting to know producers around town and pitching for projects. We didn't have a clue when we were at uni, so much of the learning came after."

With the knowledge they've gained from being out and about, the pair are sure to dedicate time to visiting universities to share their experiences with future film-makers.

"We've been to a few unis and the students are always really positive and interested. We just tell them the things that you don't learn about the industry and how it works. We give it to them straight, what it's all about. I had a ten-year plan, to leave uni, work on my writing and then simply to sell a script. If that didn't happen, I knew it just wasn't going to happen."

Becoming a successful scriptwriter is hard, and Bobby makes no bones about it. Sometimes, you can spend months and months writing a script for it to come to nothing. There's little point in just working on something because you think it's a good idea, as it may not sell. There are ways of scoping out the best in-roads for that.

"Some of it is luck, but I believe that you make your own luck. What we realised when we got our manager was how you need to watch the market. You need to be up on what producers are looking for, what films are being made and what's in pre-production.

"Our manager told us about various websites that we needed to look at every day so we knew what was happening in the industry. He sends us all the scripts that sell to read, and speaks to all of the producers in Hollywood to find out what they're looking for.

"You have to send the whole script, so it has to be finished if you hope to sell it. The one we sold took around three weeks to finish! The next took about eight months and didn't get anywhere. It's tough, it might sell and it might not. If it doesn't, the next day you have to start over again."

That must be difficult, and many writers must fall by the wayside following a big disappointment. But Bobby and Nathan don't count themselves in that number: "You just have to believe in what you're working on. If you can't believe in it, then how can you expect anyone else to?"

It's a good point. Sometimes even the most sane of calls can be off the mark, as Bobby explains: "When we won the competition, one of the producers we sat down with was talking about a book he had the rights to. He was saying that it was about vampires in a high school, a love story. We said to ourselves 'romantic vampires? At high school? How can they go out in the day? Who is going to watch this?' And then a year later, the Twilight movie came out and it exploded," laughs Bobby.

"Now we look at everything across the board. What books are doing well, what is selling well, what studios are looking to make. It's not that we pick a script and decide to make it, you have to be more savvy about it. Our manager says 'there's no use making hot dogs if everyone wants burgers' and he's right!"

That's an Americanism if ever we heard one. So are the boys hoping to move over to LA in the future?

"We definitely want to go there, we were over for a few months last year. It's beautiful over there but so expensive. My girlfriend is a teacher over here too, so it's not easy to up-sticks and go. I think I've shown that the road from the Black Country to LA isn't as far as you might think, though."

By Kirsty Bosley