Latest / Next Act with Jeff Ornstein / Steve Maiselson – Founder, YADDA Productions

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Steve Maiselson – Founder, YADDA Productions · Next Act with Jeff Ornstein

• 0:01
  Jeff Ornstein: Hi everyone, and welcome to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein.
• 0:05
  Jeff Ornstein: I am Jeff, and on this show we celebrate people on the cusp of greatness, those building on past successes in some of the curious and inventive and sometimes unexpected ways they have achieved those, and stepping into moments that could define their legacy.
• 0:21
  Jeff Ornstein: We'll talk about current projects, lessons learned, and the extraordinary opportunities ahead.
• 0:26
  Jeff Ornstein: So the best is yet to come.
• 0:29
  Jeff Ornstein: Today's guest is Steven Mazelson, founder of Yada Productions, documentarian, producer, writer, and sag actor, whose career spans film, television, theater, and voiceover.
• 0:40
  Jeff Ornstein: From appearing in projects like Die Hard 2 and The Sopranos to creating a Rosa Parks documentary now housed in the Smithsonian, Steven has spent decades chasing meaningful stories in an industry built on hustle.
• 0:54
  Jeff Ornstein: His journey is one of persistence, reinvention, and believing the best work might yet still be ahead.
• 1:00
  Jeff Ornstein: Welcome.
• 1:01
  Steven Maiselson: Thank you, Jeff.
• 1:02
  Steven Maiselson: It's great to be with you, man.
• 1:04
  Jeff Ornstein: Well, perseverance is the number one good quality that makes a person fit for this industry.
• 1:10
  Jeff Ornstein: So, and obviously you've got it.
• 1:11
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 1:12
  Jeff Ornstein: First, let's so so let's let the uh listeners know a little bit about Yada Productions.
• 1:16
  Jeff Ornstein: Can what can you tell us about that?
• 1:18
  Steven Maiselson: You know, I kind of just started this idea back when I was in Denver.
• 1:22
  Steven Maiselson: I did this um first, really the productions that I started with was with Mile High Cable Vision.
• 1:29
  Steven Maiselson: They offered a program where you go and learn how to use their equipment and you could produce any show you wanted to produce.
• 1:34
  Steven Maiselson: Oh, yeah.
• 1:35
  Steven Maiselson: And so we did that.
• 1:36
  Steven Maiselson: You know, this was like the mid-80s, and cable TV was just really kind of coming up.
• 1:41
  Steven Maiselson: And so there was this whole kind of late night, off the grid.
• 1:45
  Steven Maiselson: There's what, five channels you were watching at that time.
• 1:48
  Steven Maiselson: And so if channel six was on at 1 a.m.
• 1:51
  Steven Maiselson: and they had this, and it's because you got cable TV, then you did that.
• 1:55
  Steven Maiselson: So we started out making a skit comedy thing called disposable TV.
• 2:00
  Steven Maiselson: And it kind of became a cult classic in Denver.
• 2:03
  Steven Maiselson: And people got involved with it, and um, it was just a lot of fun to just let people write their own skit and do their own thing.
• 2:10
  Steven Maiselson: And who cares what it is?
• 2:12
  Steven Maiselson: You can put almost anything up on cable TV at that time.
• 2:16
  Steven Maiselson: They had, you know, censorship things, of course.
• 2:18
  Steven Maiselson: And uh out of that, I then uh created this other let's call it a documentary.
• 2:24
  Steven Maiselson: It's called the Baseball Chautauqua, where Denver was going to get a baseball team, and we were kind of talking it up.
• 2:32
  Steven Maiselson: And I wanted to, I wanted a baseball team for Denver.
• 2:34
  Steven Maiselson: We had the AAA team for many years.
• 2:37
  Steven Maiselson: And it was like, yeah, you know, let me go on a tour around the country and interview people and ask them, what do you think about Denver having a baseball team?
• 2:45
  Steven Maiselson: You know, and I would ask people, what do you think about their color being purple?
• 2:49
  Steven Maiselson: You know, like purple mountains, majesty, get it right.
• 2:52
  Steven Maiselson: There's no purple MLB teams.
• 2:53
  Steven Maiselson: And they would laugh about that and say, whatever.
• 2:56
  Steven Maiselson: But it was a great little thing to put together.
• 2:59
  Steven Maiselson: And, you know, I met a lot of, you know, legendary players and went to ballparks that are now torn down, that set so many records, right?
• 3:08
  Steven Maiselson: And it was just a fun way to kind of uh do the on the road touring kind of thing.
• 3:14
  Jeff Ornstein: Mm-hmm.
• 3:15
  Steven Maiselson: I kind of um felt like there was more to do.
• 3:18
  Steven Maiselson: I moved into doing acting, writing, producing in LA because Denver was just such a small market, and there's just so many things that you can do in that place.
• 3:27
  Steven Maiselson: And if you want to do more things, you have to go to a bigger place.
• 3:31
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 3:31
  Steven Maiselson: And so I lived out there for 10 years, and I just use Yada Productions as my storyline.
• 3:37
  Steven Maiselson: And then, you know, here you're watching Seinfeld, and they're going yada yada yada.
• 3:41
  Steven Maiselson: You're like, well, wait a minute, do I get any royalties for this now?
• 3:44
  Steven Maiselson: My company's been nameless since 1989.
• 3:47
  Steven Maiselson: Right.
• 3:47
  Jeff Ornstein: That was gonna be my question.
• 3:48
  Jeff Ornstein: Was it yada yada yada, or was it an acronym or something?
• 3:51
  Jeff Ornstein: So now you've answered that.
• 3:53
  Steven Maiselson: No, I I've done the etymological research on it, and basically it's just a word that means etc.
• 3:59
  Steven Maiselson: It's just like blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada.
• 4:03
  Steven Maiselson: And it's fun to say.
• 4:04
  Steven Maiselson: And people get a kick out of it when they see it.
• 4:06
  Steven Maiselson: And that makes me smile and makes me laugh.
• 4:09
  Jeff Ornstein: So in LA, you were doing acting and writing and directing and producing, I guess.
• 4:16
  Jeff Ornstein: Did you find that you were better suited towards to one or the other, or did they all hold appeal for you?
• 4:21
  Jeff Ornstein: And are you still are you still doing all of them?
• 4:23
  Steven Maiselson: You know, that's the thing.
• 4:23
  Steven Maiselson: When you're out there in LA, you know, it it's a big hustle, and you're trying to find your niche.
• 4:30
  Steven Maiselson: When you go to acting auditions and Jason Alexander is there, and the guy who plays Jason Alexander's doppelganger is there, and all these other people that you just see over and over again.
• 4:45
  Steven Maiselson: And someone's gonna get that job because they're gonna hire somebody that looks like him.
• 4:50
  Steven Maiselson: And at some point, you might get that job because somebody else is working, or you might get it because you fit it perfectly, and they don't, you know, they're looking for just that thing that you can provide.
• 5:03
  Steven Maiselson: But that's such a slim margin of victory.
• 5:08
  Steven Maiselson: And that business, you know, no, is the thing you have to get used to because you're gonna hear it 90, 95% of the time.
• 5:15
  Steven Maiselson: And you're waiting for the moment that, you know, what direction am I gonna kind of pursue?
• 5:20
  Steven Maiselson: And what have I been doing?
• 5:21
  Steven Maiselson: And here I'm, you know, outriding horses on Dr.
• 5:25
  Steven Maiselson: Quinn Medicine Woman and working on uh, you know, extra jobs here and there, and my agents sending me out.
• 5:33
  Steven Maiselson: They have a model and talent agency.
• 5:35
  Steven Maiselson: So I'm on some photo shoot for someone who wants to take stock footage, and I look like, you know, a businessman downtown with a a five-pound cell phone in my hand.
• 5:45
  Steven Maiselson: And so you just kind of go with the flow and you meet people and you hopefully create something that you know you want to have to move on with.
• 5:53
  Steven Maiselson: Right.
• 5:54
  Steven Maiselson: I was on the Paramount lot for a while.
• 5:56
  Steven Maiselson: I sold like a yellow pages they had on the Paramount lot.
• 6:00
  Steven Maiselson: So you'd go around to businesses and then the people could just open up this book on the Paramount lot and find whatever they needed.
• 6:06
  Steven Maiselson: So you'd made a lot of connections through there, and I met a lot of people through that.
• 6:10
  Steven Maiselson: And I thought, well, I got an idea for a script, and it it comes from uh this story, from this movie, so on.
• 6:17
  Steven Maiselson: So I pieced it all together.
• 6:19
  Steven Maiselson: And just in the work and doing all that and crafting something and saying I finished it, and then putting it in the marketplace.
• 6:28
  Steven Maiselson: I mean, those are victories right there to say that I've accomplished that for myself.
• 6:35
  Steven Maiselson: I did that.
• 6:36
  Steven Maiselson: And, you know, like we were talking, well, you know, here it's 20, 25, 30 years later, from that thing that you wrote.
• 6:44
  Steven Maiselson: It took uh, you know, Sylvester Salone 10, 12 years to go from writing Rocky to making Rocky, you know, uh it takes a long time.
• 6:54
  Steven Maiselson: You hear about people who say, I've had this idea in my head for 20 years.
• 6:59
  Steven Maiselson: Right.
• 7:00
  Steven Maiselson: And they did five or 10 projects to get to that point where they're now working on that project that they were trying to do 20 years ago, like like Richard Lenkladder or somebody like that.
• 7:11
  Jeff Ornstein: Aaron Powell So tell us a little bit about the coffee shop, because the coffee shop was this brain child you had, obviously, when you were working in the on the lots.
• 7:18
  Jeff Ornstein: And can you tell us a little bit about what the storyline was?
• 7:22
  Jeff Ornstein: And and also I'm sure everyone would like to hear about now, 30 years later, it you're sort of thinking that there's a reinvention perhaps in store for it.
• 7:30
  Steven Maiselson: Aaron Powell You know, when something kind of like it's like your child, your baby, and you want to see it nurture and grow and and move on in life and and change and and become a different thing.
• 7:41
  Steven Maiselson: So back then, it was just a story about a coffee shop in Manhattan.
• 7:46
  Steven Maiselson: And then over the decades, how it changes and how like uh there's a different story that happens in each decade.
• 7:53
  Steven Maiselson: And so there's a story that happens in the 60s and the 70s, the 80s, and then of course we got up to the 90s.
• 7:59
  Steven Maiselson: But now that we're, you know, here where we are, there may be additional stories that we want to have take place in this coffee shop that's existed for 60 or 70 years.
• 8:09
  Steven Maiselson: Maybe one person or two people have run the place solo.
• 8:13
  Steven Maiselson: They, you know, talk about, you know, how uh corporate restaurants have just invaded the whole world of their little lunchonette style, people who come in every day, the neighborhood folks.
• 8:26
  Steven Maiselson: And it's really about the stories of what happens to the people who are sitting there, and then the coffee shop in general goes through some changes, a bus runs into it, and yeah, you know, it gets changed around over the decades, too.
• 8:40
  Steven Maiselson: And you know, somebody at October Films, Peter Collin Bach, decided it sounded like a great story.
• 8:47
  Steven Maiselson: And if I made it, they would have the domestic rights.
• 8:51
  Steven Maiselson: They would just start to put it in the theaters for me.
• 8:53
  Steven Maiselson: This is a hard thing to get done, right?
• 8:55
  Steven Maiselson: Yeah, sure.
• 8:55
  Steven Maiselson: You get to sit and call 3,000 theaters and say, Oh, I got this great movie.
• 9:01
  Steven Maiselson: Yeah, right.
• 9:02
  Steven Maiselson: So I started to send it around to agents, and that can be a very difficult task.
• 9:07
  Steven Maiselson: But, you know, now it's all when you speak to people about reading your script or anything, they don't even want to read it.
• 9:15
  Steven Maiselson: And they don't even want you to send it to their agent or their lawyer.
• 9:19
  Steven Maiselson: There's a whole shutdown of the independent voice anymore.
• 9:22
  Steven Maiselson: And that's why a lot of people have just had to do it themselves and find a way to make it on their own.
• 9:28
  Jeff Ornstein: So you know what's really interesting about this concept is that you know, you have the coffee shop, which is a microcosm of the world, right?
• 9:34
  Jeff Ornstein: It's still in the world.
• 9:35
  Jeff Ornstein: But if you did it by decade by decade, I mean there's been some pretty seismic shifts culturally that have gone on, you know, and literally just from the nineties to now, you know?
• 9:45
  Jeff Ornstein: Aaron Powell In fashion and in everything.
• 9:48
  Jeff Ornstein: How people socialize, right?
• 9:51
  Jeff Ornstein: How drugs kind of weave their way into society and then out of society, and you know, and social awareness and the environment.
• 9:58
  Jeff Ornstein: I mean, there's so many things that take precedence and then back into the background.
• 10:02
  Jeff Ornstein: It's very interesting.
• 10:03
  Steven Maiselson: And someone's making a payphone call in the 60s when somebody's on their cell phone in the 90s.
• 10:09
  Jeff Ornstein: So you're like, you're crazy.
• 10:11
  Jeff Ornstein: You're gonna go look for a payphone, you're never gonna find it.
• 10:13
  Jeff Ornstein: So I went into the department.
• 10:14
  Jeff Ornstein: I said, let me use your payphone.
• 10:16
  Jeff Ornstein: So interestingly, though, and I love the fact that this is this passion project that's still sort of harboring a neighborhood in your brain.
• 10:25
  Jeff Ornstein: Now you're thinking about making it into a musical.
• 10:27
  Jeff Ornstein: That's my understanding.
• 10:29
  Steven Maiselson: Well, you know, the person that that I got to, one of the agents out there for um Cheryl Lee Ralph, she was in Dream Girls, she's on Abbott Elementary right now.
• 10:40
  Steven Maiselson: She just won an uh Emmy.
• 10:42
  Steven Maiselson: And so just the way that I've crafted the main character of Thelma in a coffee shop, she just fits it perfectly.
• 10:50
  Steven Maiselson: There's accents involved, dialects.
• 10:52
  Steven Maiselson: She's, you know, she's her own person, and that's really who Cheryl Lee Ralph is.
• 10:58
  Steven Maiselson: And I got a chance to uh meet with Cheryl Lee.
• 11:01
  Steven Maiselson: She had a film festival back in the early 2000s called the Jamaican Film Festival.
• 11:07
  Steven Maiselson: So we went down there, we were trying to rustle up some money, we went met Richard Roundtree, we met, you know, lots of celebrities, and Cheryl Lee could be nothing but wonderful to us, and she's a marvelous person.
• 11:20
  Steven Maiselson: But, you know, I always think that her space is on the stage.
• 11:25
  Steven Maiselson: And then I think, well, you know, Sam Jackson's wife, she's a stage person, you know, Miss Richardson is out there doing, you know, to kill a mockingbird and doing that, and she'd make a great director.
• 11:37
  Steven Maiselson: And there's too many people that are passionate about creating their own music and their own style and having their own voice, like Alicia Keys has done what she's done on Broadway, which no one would ever think that she'd do something like that.
• 11:51
  Steven Maiselson: You know, hey, tell us your life story and put it together with your own music, and it's still running and it's still a great thing.
• 11:59
  Jeff Ornstein: Oh, I can listen to her sing all day long.
• 12:01
  Jeff Ornstein: In your mind, when you think about the coffee shop as a as a musical, do you hear a certain kind of musical vibe?
• 12:08
  Steven Maiselson: Well, I think because of the decades that it runs over, that there's the opportunity to create a whole genre-like situation where if it's the 60s, maybe there's a folk side to it, and you get in the 70s and more of a rock disco theme, you know, and you can go ahead and tailor your music to the decade.
• 12:29
  Jeff Ornstein: Very cool.
• 12:30
  Steven Maiselson: And there's other stuff that I put in it where, you know, in one part of the show, there's a story about I call it the fortune child, and this man meets his daughter after years.
• 12:40
  Steven Maiselson: He doesn't know that she exists, and they get together in the coffee shop and so on.
• 12:44
  Steven Maiselson: And he tells her the reason why she's the fortune child is when she was born, he passed her underneath an elephant three times.
• 12:52
  Steven Maiselson: Because that was the thing to do to bring fortune to the child in his culture.
• 12:57
  Steven Maiselson: So let's bring an elephant on the stage.
• 12:59
  Steven Maiselson: Every show.
• 13:01
  Steven Maiselson: And just have them do that thing.
• 13:03
  Steven Maiselson: Lion King brings an elephant on the show every show.
• 13:06
  Steven Maiselson: It's just not an elephant.
• 13:08
  Jeff Ornstein: I'd like to also for you to speak a bit about this Rosa Parks documentary you made, because I mean, we'll let their listeners know that this is now housed in the Smithsonian.
• 13:18
  Steven Maiselson: Yeah, it's really interesting.
• 13:20
  Jeff Ornstein: That's phenomenal.
• 13:20
  Jeff Ornstein: That's a part of history forever, hopefully.
• 13:23
  Jeff Ornstein: So tell us a little bit about it and what your involvement was.
• 13:25
  Steven Maiselson: And what happened was in the when I was in Denver, I met a a woman who's a makeup artist, and she did makeup on everybody who ran through Denver, every star that came through, every broadcaster.
• 13:37
  Steven Maiselson: She had her own line of makeup, and um, she's pretty well known in the area and throughout the country and would travel around a lot.
• 13:45
  Steven Maiselson: And she had decided, I'm gonna make an educational series to go into the schools.
• 13:50
  Steven Maiselson: It's gonna be just about women and kind of uh women of every decade.
• 13:56
  Steven Maiselson: I'm gonna pick different women and and I'm gonna get interviews with them.
• 14:00
  Steven Maiselson: And for whatever reason, she was able to get an interview with Rosa Parks.
• 14:06
  Steven Maiselson: She drove to Detroit and interviewed her, and she got a guy from CBS to put a camera down, and she had two cameras interviewing her at the same time.
• 14:16
  Steven Maiselson: And she says, Well, can you edit this and and put together a documentary for me out of all this video I got?
• 14:22
  Steven Maiselson: I got all this interview with her, and you know, the audio wasn't all that great.
• 14:27
  Steven Maiselson: We had to really play around with it to get it done right.
• 14:30
  Steven Maiselson: But I did it, and then it just kind of never got off the ground as far as an educational tool.
• 14:38
  Steven Maiselson: She was never able to really continue with an interview process.
• 14:41
  Steven Maiselson: She's like, I want to interview Hillary Clinton next, and I want to interview this woman next.
• 14:45
  Steven Maiselson: And it just didn't move forward.
• 14:47
  Steven Maiselson: But meanwhile, I had all this tape on Rosa Parks.
• 14:51
  Steven Maiselson: I had it on three-quarter inch.
• 14:53
  Steven Maiselson: I had it on, you know, VHS.
• 14:55
  Steven Maiselson: And I'm kind of like, I don't want to put this stuff in a machine.
• 15:00
  Steven Maiselson: I don't want to have to mess it up in any way, but let me give it to a place that I know that it will be safe, that they're gonna use it in a way that other people can take advantage of it.
• 15:12
  Steven Maiselson: You know, I want people to see it, and then if you're a poet like uh Amanda is, you know, you'll hear Rosa Parks' words of answering those questions, and maybe you'll write some poetry out of it, or see her image, and maybe an artist will paint a picture or you know, sculpt something based on that.
• 15:33
  Steven Maiselson: So that's kind of why I wanted to get it out there into that venue.
• 15:37
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 15:38
  Steven Maiselson: So it has a larger access to everyone, and everybody could see it.
• 15:43
  Steven Maiselson: It takes a long time to get through that stuff, though.
• 15:46
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 15:46
  Jeff Ornstein: But she's a great character because you know, today we live in a world where everybody wants to become famous right away on Instagram.
• 15:52
  Jeff Ornstein: Yes, and you know, the everyman and anybody can become famous.
• 15:56
  Jeff Ornstein: And she's someone who became famous, and she was an everywoman, she was just an everywoman.
• 16:01
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 16:01
  Jeff Ornstein: And she made a mark on society and civilization that's still prevalent today.
• 16:06
  Jeff Ornstein: So, but she's the real deal, she's not like the insta celebrity.
• 16:11
  Steven Maiselson: Right.
• 16:11
  Steven Maiselson: And the picture that you see is two days old.
• 16:14
  Steven Maiselson: You know, they take her and they put her on the bus.
• 16:16
  Steven Maiselson: The guy who's the white man who's in the picture with her sitting behind her in the picture is actually from the newspaper.
• 16:25
  Steven Maiselson: And then there's a photographer.
• 16:26
  Steven Maiselson: So that picture that we're all famous, oh, there she is in the bus sitting, and the white man's behind.
• 16:31
  Steven Maiselson: That's a staged photo from days later.
• 16:34
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 16:35
  Steven Maiselson: Nobody ever caught that.
• 16:36
  Steven Maiselson: You know, the woman was getting off at her stop like in three or four blocks.
• 16:40
  Steven Maiselson: What do I need to move for?
• 16:43
  Jeff Ornstein: Right, right.
• 16:44
  Jeff Ornstein: Wow, that's really interesting.
• 16:46
  Jeff Ornstein: So you have another big project I'd like to speak with you a little bit about, which is Sleepwalker Tunnels.
• 16:52
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 16:52
  Jeff Ornstein: Can you tell me a little bit about that?
• 16:54
  Steven Maiselson: What this project is about is um a guy I went to college with, his name is uh Rob Sleepwalker Weisberg.
• 17:03
  Steven Maiselson: He was just an everyday guy, an accountant, worked downtown at the World Trade Centers.
• 17:10
  Steven Maiselson: 9-11 happened.
• 17:12
  Steven Maiselson: He's stuck in the middle of it.
• 17:14
  Steven Maiselson: You know, he's there.
• 17:15
  Steven Maiselson: He's a volunteer fireman, he goes to the fire station.
• 17:18
  Steven Maiselson: What can I do to help?
• 17:20
  Steven Maiselson: Says, just stay here with me.
• 17:23
  Steven Maiselson: Everybody is at this building.
• 17:24
  Steven Maiselson: I need someone just to just even just be here.
• 17:27
  Steven Maiselson: So he did that.
• 17:28
  Steven Maiselson: He was stuck down there for 24 hours or something, got a ferry across to Jersey, finally made his way home out here on Long Island.
• 17:36
  Steven Maiselson: Years later, he's dealing with depression, suicidal tendencies.
• 17:40
  Steven Maiselson: He says, Uh oh, the way I'm gonna get over this is I'm gonna go walk the Appalachian Trail.
• 17:45
  Steven Maiselson: Okay, fine.
• 17:47
  Steven Maiselson: So he tells his wife a story.
• 17:49
  Steven Maiselson: He's going with the whole crew and everything.
• 17:51
  Steven Maiselson: He's not, he's going all alone.
• 17:53
  Steven Maiselson: And now she's all worried about him.
• 17:55
  Steven Maiselson: He goes down there and at a walk in that trail, and he's bringing awareness to his plight in mental health.
• 18:05
  Steven Maiselson: And all of a sudden, media outlets are showing up at the towns where he comes down off of the trail, and they start interviewing with him.
• 18:14
  Steven Maiselson: So he's got all these interviews from different areas, and the guy comes off and he's got the beard down to here, and he's lost all this weight, and he makes it all the way to New Hampshire, and about 350 miles before the end, his ankle is just it's gone.
• 18:29
  Steven Maiselson: There's nothing he can do.
• 18:30
  Steven Maiselson: He he he ends it.
• 18:31
  Steven Maiselson: But it taught him that he wasn't gonna kill himself.
• 18:36
  Jeff Ornstein: Right, right.
• 18:36
  Steven Maiselson: He tells this story where he's walking down part of a you know rocky area, and he's about to take a step, and he's thinking to himself, I better watch out with my next step.
• 18:48
  Steven Maiselson: If I break my ankle, I'm dead up here.
• 18:52
  Steven Maiselson: But for a person who went up there to decide if they were gonna kill themselves or not, what's the difference whether you broke your ankle, fell down, hit your head, and died right there?
• 19:02
  Steven Maiselson: Right.
• 19:02
  Steven Maiselson: If that was your purpose in the first place.
• 19:04
  Steven Maiselson: So he realized that when he was worried about if he'd do that, that he didn't really want to kill himself.
• 19:10
  Steven Maiselson: And that was the switchover for him.
• 19:12
  Jeff Ornstein: I could see a lot of people taking a real interest in this as a film because 9-11 affected so many people so deeply, the sense of violation, a sense of loss, reading the New York Times and where they showcased 15 people every day, and you just, you know, with a little paragraph, you felt you knew these people, and it was very moving.
• 19:31
  Jeff Ornstein: We are of of course, as is my nature, we're over time, but I wanted to ask you one more question.
• 19:35
  Jeff Ornstein: Right, go ahead.
• 19:36
  Jeff Ornstein: Because I loved it.
• 19:37
  Jeff Ornstein: So you describe yourself as part of the 90% who f just fell short.
• 19:41
  Jeff Ornstein: Right.
• 19:42
  Jeff Ornstein: But you're so good natured and you've got so many interesting stories.
• 19:45
  Jeff Ornstein: I mean, what does falling short actually teach you that winning never could?
• 19:50
  Steven Maiselson: Well, I think that we fall short and we win.
• 19:53
  Steven Maiselson: And so we know what happens in both situations for the most part.
• 19:58
  Steven Maiselson: Sometimes we fall short in things that we really want to win.
• 20:02
  Steven Maiselson: Right.
• 20:02
  Steven Maiselson: And other things we win that those were easy wins.
• 20:05
  Steven Maiselson: Right.
• 20:05
  Steven Maiselson: You know, writing a script about Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf and the six months I spent, you know, running around with him and making sure people don't pick him up and start running away with him because he got a thousand dollars in his pocket.
• 20:18
  Steven Maiselson: There's a passion at some point where you decide, well, okay, I'm gonna do that or do this.
• 20:22
  Steven Maiselson: And so that's where it all came down of.
• 20:25
  Jeff Ornstein: Well, I gotta say, I think, you know, I've always believed that being content is the best possible mindset a person can have.
• 20:32
  Jeff Ornstein: And I think you sound like a person who's very content.
• 20:35
  Jeff Ornstein: I mean, you know, whether you whether you make it to the golden crest, you make it near the golden crest, you've learned something from falling from the golden crest.
• 20:42
  Jeff Ornstein: All in all, it sounds to me like you've you're pretty content with all the creative endeavors that you've had.
• 20:47
  Steven Maiselson: We got a foot and a half of snow outside.
• 20:49
  Steven Maiselson: I got my palm trees on.
• 20:54
  Jeff Ornstein: Let's just enjoy it.
• 20:55
  Jeff Ornstein: I have to wrap this up.
• 20:56
  Jeff Ornstein: My producers are giving me the stink eye.
• 20:59
  Jeff Ornstein: It's uh Steven, it's been a pleasure having you on this show, and I wish you good luck.
• 21:03
  Jeff Ornstein: If Coffee Shop should emerge as a musical, I'll be first to buy a ticket.
• 21:07
  Jeff Ornstein: And uh, I'll also be looking for Sleepwalker Tunnels because I think that's that's a story that'll resonate with a lot of big audiences.
• 21:14
  Steven Maiselson: It's coming out soon.
• 21:16
  Jeff Ornstein: Look for it this summer.
• 21:17
  Jeff Ornstein: Okay.
• 21:17
  Jeff Ornstein: Thanks for tuning in to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein.
• 21:21
  Jeff Ornstein: Follow, subscribe, and stay connected to your favorite socials at www.next actpodcast.com.
• 21:28
  Jeff Ornstein: Keep chasing your next act.
• 21:30
  Jeff Ornstein: The best is yet to come.