Guns. Money. Iraq. And Then a Screenplay for ‘War Dogs.’

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LOS ANGELES — In 2004, Stephen Chin found himself in a red Jeep Cherokee in the middle of Baghdad, a submachine gun beside him, $220,000 in cash at his feet. The firearm and money weren’t his but belonged to Jack Roe and Brent Balloch, two young entrepreneurs who had gone to Iraq the previous year to start a radio station, among other things. Mr. Chin had traveled to Iraq to buy the rights to their stories, and now the pair were hungry. Stephen, they asked him, can you stay in the car and watch the money while we go get some chicken?

A more prudent guy might not have stuck around, but Mr. Chin did, and his life has not been the same since. A fanatical collector of martial arts film posters (his collection resides in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library) and an Ivy League graduate, Mr. Chin took a circuitous life path — with stops in Toronto, Washington and Hollywood — to get to that place. While in Iraq, he said he saw Saddam Hussein’s pool, which had been commandeered by United States Marines; met armed insurgents; and bribed his way across the Jordan-Iraq border. In the end, he secured the life rights to his new friends and wove many of their experiences — and his — into “I Rock Iraq,” which, in 2007, made Hollywood’s Black List, the industry’s annual compilation of the best unproduced screenplays.

On Friday, Aug. 19, the director Todd Phillips (“The Hangover” trilogy) is releasing “War Dogs,” his own project set in Iraq. Adapted by Mr. Chin from a Rolling Stone article, the film tells the story of two dope-smoking pals from Miami (Jonah Hill and Miles Teller) who became major weapons dealers for the United States military. Mr. Phillips obtained the rights for the story in 2011, and when he went looking for a writer, he immediately thought of Mr. Chin’s unproduced screenplay. He remembered it as “feeling really, really authentic,” he said.

And yet, Mr. Chin said, “when I first met Todd, I don’t think he knew that I had actually been there.”

This wasn’t the only part of Mr. Chin’s curriculum vitae the director didn’t know about. Years before he became a full-time screenwriter, Mr. Chin, who declined to give his age, had been a successful film producer and executive, making deals with Miramax after its merger with Disney, taking meetings with Harvey and Bob Weinstein, and producing indie films in the late ’90s like Larry Clark’s “Another Day in Paradise” and Harmony Korine’s “Gummo.”

“I didn’t know that at all,” Mr. Phillips said, laughing, when told about Mr. Chin’s pre-screenwriting career. “I only know Stephen as a writer. That’s awesome.”

Mr. Chin was here in a Koreatown cafe recently, flipping through photo albums filled with snapshots from his Iraq travels. Sporting black horn-rimmed glasses and a plaid green, short-sleeved shirt, he had stories for each. Amid the images of billowing gas fires and burned-out buildings was a photo of Mr. Chin in the shell of a stripped Ferrari that once belonged to Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein’s eldest son; in another, two men stare none too happily into the camera. Mr. Chin had tried to start a conversation with them at a gas station, until his driver frantically warned him about speaking to “bad men” in Falluja. “I was like, ‘We stopped for gas in Falluja?’” he said.

Mr. Chin would talk to anybody, Mr. Roe recalled. “We’d stop and talk to the military guys, and he also wanted to see what the Iraqis were up to,” he said. “He’d just kind of dig into it with them. He’s a very inquisitive guy.”

As with “I Rock Iraq,” Mr. Chin worked his memories and experiences into “War Dogs.” Like the time truckloads of men chased him and his driver through the Triangle of Death, a region south of Baghdad. “That was really scary,” he remembered.

Mr. Chin was born and raised in Toronto, the son of Chinese immigrants. His parents told him early on that as a minority, he’d have to work twice as hard to get half as far. “They never said to me: ‘You’re our special snowflake! What would you like to do that you would find fulfilling?’” he said. After graduating from Yale, he went to Yale Law. “For them, going to law school and not medical school was almost a failure.”

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A spiritually unsatisfying stint defending accused “insider traders and security fraud guys” at a Washington firm was followed by a brief run in Los Angeles managing the office of a film producer. While waiting for a friend at a movie theater, he struck up a conversation with another filmgoer, who happened to be the producer Cary Woods (“Scream,” “Swingers”). Mr. Woods had a producing deal with Miramax and was looking for a lawyer for his production company. He invited Mr. Chin to a meeting with the Weinsteins. “I had no idea who they were,” he recalled.

Mr. Chin went to work for Mr. Woods as his vice president for business affairs and executive-produced the 1997 art film “Gummo,” a controversial cult hit with a cast composed primarily of nonactors and with scenes of glue sniffing and cat torture. “There was a lot of weird stuff on that one, so I had to talk to Stephen a lot,” said Avy Eschenasy, a lawyer at New Line Cinema, which released the film. “Did you get those kids to sign something? Where did you find those people? He really had his hands full.”

The following year, while serving as producer on “Another Day in Paradise,” Mr. Chin was asked to rewrite the screenplay after financiers nixed the original script. “Larry said to me, ‘You know what these financiers want,” he said. “Just write what they want, and we’ll just throw it all out. I’m just going to improvise everything with the actors anyway.” With the production clock ticking, Mr. Chin wrote the script in 10 days. It was his first screenwriting credit.

His career as a producer was on the rise — he oversaw the big-budget boxing feature “Play It to the Bone” (Woody Harrelson, Antonio Banderas) for Touchstone — but what Mr. Chin really wanted to do was write. For many in Hollywood, the move from executive to creative is, at best, ill-conceived. “I was just like a million other people thinking they could be a writer,” he said. “Particularly if you’ve already been a business person in Hollywood, people think you’re either desperate or deranged.”

One of the first stories he chased was a GQ article about the occupation of Iraq that would form the basis of “I Rock Iraq.” Unable to option it, he lamented to Mr. Eschenasy that some Hollywood big shot would probably beat him to the story. His friend suggested another way. Why not forget about the article and go to Baghdad and get the life rights to Mr. Roe and Mr. Balloch himself?

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So he went, bringing along a note from an HBO executive — who later became his wife, Elaine Chin — saying that he was there to research a project for the network. “That was my only credential,” he said.

“I probably would have felt bad if something had happened to him,” Mr. Eschenasy admitted. “But I’m trying to think back: Did I really mean it, or was I just being flip?”

When Mr. Roe received an email from Mr. Chin saying he would be traveling there, he was skeptical. “I was like, sure, come out,” Mr. Roe said. “I didn’t think he was actually going to come.”

For “War Dogs,” Mr. Chin made research trips to Miami to hang out with David Packouz, one of the arms dealers portrayed in the movie (the other, Efraim Diveroli, was awaiting sentencing on a conspiracy conviction related to arms dealing), and to see their old stamping grounds. Once he talked to Mr. Packouz, he began to understand what drove them both to ditch their staid lives to sell weapons to the United States military. “They could see the huge mansions of the drug lords, the beautiful models on the beach,” Mr. Chin said. “They were dorky yeshiva boys, but they dreamed of being players.”

In other words, they were your classic outsiders desperately, hungrily chasing their version of the American dream. Sort of like a Chinese kid from Toronto whose dad lived above a laundry while growing up, heading to Hollywood to become a screenwriter?

“Yeah, I’m an outsider,” admitted Mr. Chin, who said he is working on a “huge science-fiction tentpole” for Legendary East. “I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t grow up in Beverly Hills. But outsiders have other gifts. You have other insights, by virtue of the fact that you have lived in other worlds.”