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The LAT profiles Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, whose involvement with Clint Eastwood's tone poem to mood lighting and bloody tongues has propelled him to screenwriting It-Boy status. Haggis' rise is your typical Hollywood up-from-humble-beginnings story, in which a hardscrabble go-getter with big dreams somehow beats the odds of making hundreds of thousands of dollars writing for television to eventually earn millions as an Oscar-nominated movie scribe. As is common in these Alger-quality tales, a mentor passes on some words of wisdom, scales fall from eyes, and an epiphany occurs:

It took Haggis years to establish himself in television — his first produced script was an episode of "The Love Boat." He also wrote for "Diff'rent Strokes" and "The Facts of Life." "I was a really bad writer for a long time," he admits. The first script he took pride in was for "thirtysomething." After Marshall Herskovitz, the show's co-creator, read the script, he asked Haggis, "What's it about? What are you writing about from your life that has some meaning?"

Haggis remembers thinking, "Oh, you're supposed to do that?" He began creating shows that had substance, though the ones he cared about the most rarely lasted more than a season. The only show he was involved with that became a big hit was "Walker, Texas Ranger."

During the long process of getting "Crash" and "Million Dollar Baby" made, Haggis often woke up in a cold sweat, thinking, "I can't have it say on my tombstone, 'Here lies Paul Haggis, the guy who helped get "Walker, Texas Ranger" on CBS.' "

Oh, how we can laugh about the Love Boat days! Before we forget, there was also a Near Death Experience (a Porsche-jacking, no less) that inspired a feverish night at the typewriter that eventually resulted in an upcoming Don Cheadle movie. To think that Haggis picked himself up by his thirysomething bootstraps...it's utterly inspirational. Do you think that the cappuccino machine conked out that fateful night? No, no, don't even toy with the idea. He's just a man, after all.