Veteran screenwriter Jay Wolpert spoke to students at Free State High School on Thursday.

Jay Wolpert didn’t start writing movies until after he’d spent years working in Hollywood as a producer. But he calls his late-in-life career change “unbelievably rewarding.”

A group of film, drama and creative writing students at Free State High School assembled Thursday to interact with Wolpert. The Los Angeles-based writer is best known for his screenplays for “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” and 2002’s “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“I explained to the students that I was not a rich kid — I grew up in Brooklyn,” he says. “I wanted these guys to know that there is no, ‘What’s happening in Hollywood will never be for me.’ Because I felt that way.”

Scott Smith, who teaches film at Free State, invited Wolpert to speak to the students. The pair actually met years ago during a trail ride excursion in Arizona.

“He’s a master storyteller for the ages. He just enthralls you,” says Smith, who considers Wolpert a mentor.

Wolpert discussed aspects of working within the Hollywood system with the high-schoolers, including the different sets of expectations when adapting films into novels.

“You can’t be too reverential or you’ll be too frightened of it,” he says, citing his own familiarity with Alexandre Dumas’ “Monte Cristo.” “You got two hours for a 600-page book that has nine villains. Everybody wears a sword and nobody uses one. None of that is going to service your crowd.”

Wolpert came to prominence in the industry as the producer of the revamped “The Price is Right” with Bob Barker, which he helmed between 1972 and 1978. During that stretch he hired an assistant named Nancy Meyers, who later went on to direct pictures such as “Something’s Gotta Give.” He ran into her decades later, and she asked him why he wasn’t writing.

“She said, ‘If you ever have an idea, come to me,'” he recalls.

He took her up on the offer. Since then, he’s written a dozen screenplays, two of which have been produced, and a third (based on William Tell) “keeps threatening to get made.”

Wolpert is currently involved with another adaptation.

He says, “I tell people that I’m not trying to film the book, I’m trying to make a movie.”