The best lesson screenwriter Stephen Susco (“The Grudge”) got at the USC School of Cinema-Television came during his first day on campus.

Susco met a fellow student who warned him about the career path he was about to take.

“This school will give you the best equipment to master your craft,” the student told him. “But there’s no set path, that if you hit these marks you’ll have a career in Hollywood.” That sobered Susco up to the realities of filmmaking. So he took the student’s other bit of advice - intern at a studio, any studio, ASAP. Susco got a job alphabetizing scripts for Warner Bros. the very next day.

“I read all the scripts while I was alphabetizing them,” he says.

That reading clearly paid off.

Susco’s latest film, the well-reviewed “Red,” opens in select theaters tomorrow (Aug. 8). The thriller stars Brian Cox as an old man whose dog is shot by a trio of unruly neighbors.

His interest in “Red” took hold after reading the novel of the same name by Jack Ketchum.

“They killed the wrong man’s dog … that’s for me,” he says of the book’s tagline, adding the novel wasn’t nearly as pulpy as that line implied.

“I got to the end of it and went back to page one to read it again,” he says of first picking up the book five years ago. He started tracking down the film rights shortly thereafter.

It’s the first of several projects the young screenwriter has in the works.

Visit Movies in Toto tomorrow for part 2 of my interview with screenwriter Stephen Susco.

(Photo: Screenwriter Stephen Susco)

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