First Run Features has acquired North American theatrical rights to Peter Hanson’s “Tales From the Script.” The documentary will open in a limited run March 12 ahead of its April 20 DVD release.

Containing interviews with Shane Black (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”), Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”), William Goldman (“All the President’s Men”), Paul Schrader (“Taxi Driver”) and more, Hanson’s documentary details the lives and work of dozens of Hollywood screenwriters. Hanson’s project includes a companion book, “Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories,” which HarperCollins imprint IT Books will publish January 26.

Here’s the trailer:

“Script” premiered at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January and has since screened at the Austin and Starz Denver fests. Hanson produced through his Grand River Films along with Paul Robert Herman of Jade Tiger Films.

I met Hanson several times at evening Q&As with screenwriters (Billy Ray, Ted Griffin, Scott Rosenberg, Jeff Nathanson, etc.) that I moderated as companion events to a DVD series on screenwriters called “The Dialogue.” This was two-plus years ago, when Hanson was first starting to film these interviews. His ambition was clear then, and this two-pronged “Tales From the Script” project is the impressive result — the guy clearly got access to many of the top screenwriters in the business, past and present.

Allison Anders (“Gas Food Lodging”), John August (“Go”), John Carpenter (“Halloween”), Antwone Fisher (“Antwone Fisher”), David Hayter (“Watchmen”), Bruce Joel Rubin (“Ghost”), Guinevere Turner (“American Psycho”) and David S. Ward (“The Sting”) also appear in Hanson’s documentary.

The 346-page companion book features photo portraits and additional interviews with Mike Binder (“The Upside of Anger”), Nora Ephron (“Julie & Julia”), Robert Mark Kamen (“Taken”), Paul Mazursky (“An Unmarried Woman”) and others.

An author and filmmaker, Hanson also wrote and directed the documentary “Every Pixel Tells a Story” in 2002.

Indie directors have long found endlessly inventive way to get movies made. There was dad’s credit-card approach. There was cast-you-friends-and-family approach. There was, more recently, find-some-Wall-Street-sucker approach.

But now Paul Schrader, who defined some of the best movies of the last generation, has a new idea, and it’s as radical as it is logical: he’s heading east — like, all the way east, to India, where there’s a ready supply of capital and some very open arms. Indies may be a wasteland, but India is a whole different story.

“It’s cold out there,” he told Risky Biz of the U.S. indie market. “I take a good look around and what I see is a barren, barren place — in terms of the financial community, in terms of audiences, in terms of distribution.”

India offers something else, he says — a market that’s still pretty strong, a hankering for talented U.S. directors who want to work on lower-budget, non-franchise fare and a surprising flexibility about reinventing their own conventions.

In fact, Schrader says that all the strictures of Bollywood are falling away — at exactly the same time that those of U.S. independents (casting requirements because of foreign-sales, budget constraints, tonal imperatives) are kicking in more than ever.

It’s either a sign of the apocalypse or a sign of doors-closing-but-windows opening that the U.S. film is faltering while India seems to be flourishing. And there’s no way to know if the movie is a smart bit of pioneering or a more reflexive reaction to find a new home when the old one won’t have you. 

Either way, Schrader opened a few doors when he was part of the inmate revolt that took over the studio asylum in the ’70’s. Here’s hoping he can do it on the other side of a a few oceans thirty years later.