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BONUS: Joe Ricci on How to Write a Hallmark Movie · The Daily Writer

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the special weekend edition of the Daily Writer Podcast.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thrilled to bring you this bonus interview with Joe Ricci, who you've probably already heard from in the main episode on writing for television and theater that we did yesterday.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: So if you haven't yet listened to that interview, I encourage you to go back and check it out because you get a really great sense of Joe's background.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we talk about a lot of cool things on that episode as well.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, a couple of days before we recorded that conversation, I watched the Hallmark movie that he wrote in The Key of Love, and I had a lot of questions that I wasn't able to get to in our main conversation.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: So on this bonus episode, I get to dive into all my geeky questions about story structure and the specifics of writing for the Hallmark channel because they have a very specific way that they tell stories.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if you love movies and storytelling, which, I mean, let's be honest, who doesn't love all that awesome stuff?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: If you love those things, I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So here's my bonus interview with Joe Ricci.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Joe, thanks for sticking around for the bonus episode.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is something I'm going to start doing on my show.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, you're the first one.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for being kind of the guinea pig for this.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I actually stole this idea from a friend of mine who does little short bonus episodes.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of this is I have the main interview, and then for the bonus, it's typically something where I really want to dive into for just a few minutes something, one very specific aspect of the guest's work or creative life or write writing that I really have some questions about.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: So in this case, I'd really love to explore for just a few minutes how to write a Hallmark movie, because I know that Hallmark movies are different than other kinds of movies for various reasons.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: But first of all, if you can take a second and walk us through the development process for your movie in the Key of Love, how did you get involved with the Hallmark channel and where did you get this idea for the movie?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, so that's it.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very roundabout way that I got involved with Hallmark.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: A friend of mine, Kevin Duda, who I worked with 20 years ago, was a friend of mine.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we've been sort of in touch throughout the years.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: He was coming to me to direct a Christmas musical.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when he sent me the script and I read it, I thought, you know what, this could actually be a movie.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so we had lunch, we talked about it.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time, we were thinking that this piece might be right for Hallmark.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he was doing, he was an actor in Beautiful, the Carol King musical on Broadway.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the person who was playing the lead, one of her best friends, happened to be uh a producer at Hallmark, the vice president.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was that.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, You should call she said, You should call her.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So he picked up the phone, he called her.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: She answered the phone, which he says, I never do, I never pick up numbers I don't know.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: They hit it off immediately.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: He went to LA, he pitched her.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, That's not really our thing, but if you have other ideas, so he's like, I want to do a wedding singer who can't find love herself.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's where that idea started.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we had a composer, lyricist, Julie Foldesai, who wrote the music.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we started together as a group, sort of hammering out a story.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: We hammered out a story, we sent it to the to our producer over at Hallmark.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: She hated it.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: So she sent it back, says, Nope.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So then um we were getting ready to kind of do this process over again.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And quite frankly, I I just went rogue and I rewrote the whole pitch and sent it to them and said, What do you think of this?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that became in the key of love.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: So then the the actual workings of how you get green lit is the first thing you send is a six to nine sentence description of the movie, a pitch.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: That goes into their system, and from that they decide who they want to go to the next step.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: The next step is a three to five page narrative, just straight narrative of the movie.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Once that gets greenlit, then you go to a 10 to 15 page narrative of the movie.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Once that gets greenlit, then you take your first pass at the at the spec script with the teleplay.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then from there, once they green lit green light that now you have a creative producer who comes on board, director who comes on board, and now there's a lot of different cooks in the kitchen.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you're getting input from a lot of different people.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: It gets put on the filming schedule, and then they film it.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of a quick overview of how that came about for me and some of how Hallmark works.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: And this is working with a production company, not with Hallmark directly, or is this you're working with Hallmark directly the whole time?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: It depends.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: They do it a couple different ways.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: They have because they make they do over a hundred original films a year.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of like so crazy.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So some of it is handled by outside production companies, some are completely developed outside and brought in, some are developed in-house and then farmed out to a production company.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: So they have a lot of different ways that they handle it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now I have heard, I don't know if this is actually true, but I've it's the famous thing, you know.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: I read this on the internet, which means it's of course true.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, I have heard and read that there are specific story beats that every Hallmark movie needs to hit.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is that true?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And and if so, how do you how do you take something that most people would think is rigid?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you hit those beats or hit those story points while still maintaining something that is not exactly like other Hallmark movies out there?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's not specific beats.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: They do have rules at Hallmark.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: One of the biggest is that you need to watch a Hallmark movie with your eight-year-old niece and your 88-year-old grandmother, and everybody in between.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: So they do have things that are rules.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um one of them is uh the romance is the A storyline.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Always the lead is a woman in her late 20s, mid-30s, late 30s, somewhere in that range.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's the demographic.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what you're writing for.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: The B story is whatever that kind of other conflict is.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so those are kind of the big rules.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: But and this is a story I love to tell because uh originally in In the Key of Love, uh Jake, who originally I had written him to be have a fear of boats and water.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so when he was coming over to the island on that tiny little boat, she saw him through the camera, like sweating and nervous.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when the when the boat docks, he runs for dry land.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I also had another moment where he was asking if she still sings, and she goes, Oh, yeah, I have this, I have this gig every morning at 7 a.m.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: in my sh at a club called my shower.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's really it's small, but you know, I get all the free shampoo I want.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: So when I this was in the pitch, and what the notes came back was for him, sh the the the note was I know it's silly, but hallmark men don't sweat.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then with the joke about the shower, yeah, and with the joke about the shower, she's like, You you can't say she's in the shower.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's too sexual.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So my mantra was Hallmark, where the men don't sweat and the women don't shower.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So that became, you know, so there are things like that that you don't even think about because I mean, and it makes sense, like the non-sweating is because they never want their um their actors to feel to look stupid, yeah.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And with something like that, it could go either way, you know.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but in this particular piece, it was a plot point that ended up getting cut, which was there was originally shots of him having to go back to the island on a tiny speedboat once he got off the island and had to come back around.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something that they actually cut, and there's a little bit of a logic jump at the end of the movie where you're like, Oh, wait, how did that happen?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's because that moment was was removed at the end.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of goes back to what I said earlier where you don't own you don't own your screenplay, yeah.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: In any in any scenario, not just Hallmark, but when they buy your screenplay, unless you have you know editing final edit in your in your contract, which as a writer doesn't usually happen.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, so that's that's that.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is it strange whenever you see the finished product to think, okay, I envisioned this setting, these characters in a specific way in my head?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Then you're seeing the actual finished movie.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Is that a is what is that like emotionally?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a mixture of wow, that's different, or wow, that's awesome?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: How do you process something emotionally when you're seeing it visualized by all these actors and cinematographers and so forth?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: When in when you've lived this thing in your head for so long.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a couple things.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: One, I was very lucky to get to visit the set.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: They don't let the writers on set because of exactly what you just described.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna they have to change stuff.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because you get to the location.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Wait, he can't run up.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So he's just he's got to come out of the house.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Just the logistics.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Or a line's not working on set, they have to change lines on the fly.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: So they rewrite stuff.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know what, try this, say this instead.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or why don't you improvise this?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Just kind of talk to each other here.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's not anything you wrote.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I got to visit the set and got to see kind of the amazing talent that was in the piece, the the production values.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: The the day I visited um was the the lake scene with the boat where the boat tips over.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I got to see that whole.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: We filmed until you know four in the morning.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And um it was it was just beautiful to get to see it all.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most amazing things when you talk about you you make something up in your head and then you see it is the wedding trolley.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: The trolley that was a trolley car converted into drive, you know, to drive on land with flat.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: They just made it, and I was like, that's amazing, it's so amazing.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Look at that, yeah.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, so it was good.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: There were a couple times when I saw the finished movie where I did have that moment where I I kind of bristled a little, went, I didn't write that.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's not what I wrote.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And there was, you know, there's stuff that happens that because you don't have such a close relationship with everybody on the creative staff who's making the movie, they may not understand why you wrote something.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And for example, something I don't want to kind of get into it, but there was something that was changed that when I heard it made absolutely no sense because I had gone through painstaking effort to set up this whole chain of events, right?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right, and then they just changed the last domino of that thing, and I went, wait, no, that's not okay.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: But they did an amazing job.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Claire, who directed it, is just she's amazing.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: She's amazing.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Something that I really, really enjoyed about this movie, and you know, I don't watch Hallmark movies like on a daily basis.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: My wife she loves Hallmark Channel, it's on constantly.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I can't say how this compares to every other Hallmark movie, but one of the things that I really really loved about In The Key of Love and that really impressed me from a story standpoint was how the main character didn't just and what I'm sorry, what was the main character's name, the female lead um the story?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm blanking out on what her name is.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I am too because I'm I have these other two plays in my head.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's Jake, and she's it's not Hallmark.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm blanking out anyway.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, normally in in a Hallmark movie, and I'm I'm kind of speaking from a little bit of ignorance, but maybe not, I don't know.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Normally I think of okay, this character has a story arc.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Typically, the the guy in the story doesn't to me doesn't seem to have a major character arc.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: He's kind of like the force for change who's changing the the the female lead.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: But in your story, both of them had a character arc, they both had changes, and the um the main character's grandmother, she had a story arc, her assistant had a story arc that was like these multiple things, and the way that they all converged in the story.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: I honestly I finished the movie and I loved it.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: My overwhelming thought was how in the world did he write all this to where it made sense?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: How do you plant these seeds in the first act that pay off in the third act?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like it just seems like such a complicated process of making sure all these things fit together like a puzzle.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is that basically what it's like writing one of these movies where you have all these things that have to converge?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yes, and no, it depends.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on the actual story itself.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, like I said earlier, the main story, the A story is the romance, which hopefully the B story will interact with that.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um usually what's what was a little different from other Hallmark movies is usually not usually a lot a lot of times in the Hallmark movies, the B story for the lead female will be caused by the male, the lead male.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay, and then they have to reconcile that particular thing.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and because at its at its core, Hallmark movies are are are rom coms.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but just with the with the because normally the rom com the romance is there, but it's not necessarily always the A story.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is always the A story.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and if anybody, this is just a random pitch.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reading this book called Writing the Romantic Comedy by Billy Murnitt.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful, wonderful book.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was researching some stuff and came across it, and it's just it's a wonderful book.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know him, but so and I get no kickbacks from the sales of the book.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, so what ends up happening is with this particular thing, when you write the the short pitch and then you have to start expanding it.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that I will say about Hallmark is it's a nine act structure.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: The reason it's nine acts is because those are where the commercial breaks hit.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: The first act is usually about 25 to 30 pages, then each subsequent is about 10.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you have a half hour to basically hook your audience and then you dole out the remainder in chunks of basically 10 to 15 minute chunks to get to the total of eight uh 90 minutes.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: That is fascinating.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: That is so fascinating.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So what you end up having to do, because if the commercial comes and they're not hooked, they change the channel.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to make sure that each of those act breaks has some sort of hook, has some sort of not necessarily a cliffhanger, but a cliffhanger.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that you want to see how that's going to resolve.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Does that make you?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't go ahead.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say that's one of the hardest things of this particular uh format is making sure that the act outs, they're called act outs, are strong enough to hold an interest of a viewer.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Does that do those in any way correspond to something like the hero's journey or traditional three-act structure?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: Not it's kind of its own, its own animal to some degree.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's not, I mean, there is you can look at it as a as a three-act structure because if you look at the first two acts and the last two acts is acts one and three, and then the five in the middle is act two.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, you just have to make sure that as you're as you're creating these these dips and valleys and peaks in the story, that you have to make sure they land on a particular page count.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when I was doing, when I was one of my first drafts, when we had a solid draft, and it went, they have what's called weekend reading for the all the executives, and they give them the scripts that are you know greenlit.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And there were two elements that my executive did not like, had to cut them, and they were major story beats, and so I had to take them out and figure out something else.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what's funny was is I had the right page count, 109 pages.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was going, I'm like, oh, we have it.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: I never took out the one scene.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when I took out that scene, my page count dropped and I was I was missing like eight pages.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to go back and figure out, okay, what can happen here?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: How can we how can we design this story?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's very fluid.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I love it.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Especially the part about the, I know this is gonna sound so the part about the mayor, you know, the mayor is also the um what's the word?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: He's the one who marries them as well.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, oh, the town judge, and then they go back and they get his flowers later.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: I just I just love that.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the first 10 minutes of the movie, I'm going, okay, how is that gonna pay off?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: How's that gonna pay off?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the one of the very first shots is it's panning across her room, and you see a box marked Nashville.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I know that's gonna come into the story later, I just don't know how.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really curious to see how that's gonna play into it.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I really, really enjoyed this.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, credit to Claire, the director, because that opening sequence was like that Nashville.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, while we had the Nashville box and it was introduced, like how she how she introduced it was all her and the cinematographer.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was great.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, she did a great job.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, final question here, and then I'll wrap this up.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: If someone is listening to this, they're an average, ordinary person, maybe they uh write nonfiction books, they do other kinds of stuff, but they are really intrigued by writing a Hallmark movie, but they have no connections, they they have no idea where to start.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Where does an average everyday person start if they want to do something like this?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: I hate to give this answer.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: I honestly, I honestly don't know because it for me, it just became it's just was it was people connections that ended up hooking me up with Hallmark.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would if it's something that you wanted to do, A, make sure you love, love, love Hallmark.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm I'm a huge rom-com fan, so I love romantic comedy.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: So this was a very easy thing for me to do.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um meaning get involved, you know, yeah, drink the Hallmark Kool-Aid and be like, woo.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I would look and see what production companies, if you go onto IMDB, you could see which production companies are producing the Hallmark movies, and then see if you can make any contacts in LinkedIn that way, would be something that I would suggest.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: Makes a lot of sense.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, but again, if you don't have if you're not writing and you don't have an agent who can pitch you, then it's sort of it's sort of haphazard.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're kind of hosed in in a way.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but the thing is, if you know, here's the thing too, because of the way social media works and all the online stuff, you know, if you if you have an idea for a Hallmark movie and you have a friend who wants to be a cinematographer, get some people to film it and make like a little Hallmark trailer and put it on your YouTube video, your YouTube channel or whatever, and you never know.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: As long as you're for me, I always tell people, look, as long as you're loving the process, as long as you enjoy kind of digging around in that world, it's that's great because you're having a great time.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you're doing this because, oh, I want to get this and I want to make a million dollars and I want to do this, you're the motivation is wrong.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna burn before you and you're gonna be miserable while you're doing it.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Life's too short, man.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just do something you love.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: But it's isn't the answer when you say I don't know.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: To me, that's the most beautiful answer possible.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because that because that means that it's not just about having a good idea, it's about the relationships, it's about the tenacity and the persistence of okay, I want to achieve this goal and I'm gonna figure out a way to make it happen.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna add so much value to my friends and relationships on my network that ultimately I this maybe this will happen if I'm good enough and if I persist enough and if I serve people well enough.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, that's the best answer possible.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm just gonna throw in a few stories here at the end because you never know where you're gonna get a job.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Never know how it's going to happen.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: When I decided I wanted to start directing, I went to a Christmas party, was talking to somebody that I didn't know.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: She's like, What do you do?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I'm a director.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, I'm looking for a director.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we met, we talked through her script, and I ended up directing her one-woman show.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's so cool.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And another quick story: I was auditioning for uh Jesus and Jesus Christ Superstar at a theater in uh in Rhode Island.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: I went in, I did my audition.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was gone maybe a half hour.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: I get a call from my agents.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: They want you to come in and sing Gethsemane again.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's this really high, really long song.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I show up, I walk in, I'm like, hi, they said they wanted me to see me see me again.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: She goes, Yeah, what's your name?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: I tell her.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then this guy comes bursting in behind me, goes, So I'm I'm supposed to sing again or something.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And she goes, Well, he's actually here before you.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And he huffs, and I go, No, no, you know what?
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Go ahead.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can go first.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: So he goes in.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, the woman, the monitor who was just sitting at the table outside, goes into the room, and the director goes, So we're down to these two guys.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it was me and this other guy.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: And she goes, He was a jerk, he was nice.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: I love well, you're gonna be working with, you know, especially in a theater production, you're working with people so closely that man, I can't imagine you would want to you despite whatever level of talent they have, yeah.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want to work with a jerk.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Who do I want to spend eight hours in a in a room with every day?
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: You you you want to like them.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I love there's so many times I just love my actors, I just love them, you know.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then when you don't, you don't use them anymore.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: All right, one last story.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: So a friend of mine wrote this play, and I cast it for a table read because he wanted to hear it out loud.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was directing it, and one of the actors I didn't know.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we sent him the script, he was recommended, perfect type, good actor.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Halfway through the play, he realized his character was gay and just shut off.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like he never read it beforehand, didn't read the play before coming.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'll never use him again.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's insane.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it happens all the time.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: People show up and have not read the play that they're about to read.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not in I'm not in the theater world really, but uh that sounds insane.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and not how you would do it at all.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there are times people get get cast or fired on films at a table read.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: They come in, they do the table read with the cast, and if they're not good, gone.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess it moves so fast, you know, you have to make these make these millions of decisions if you're if you have a production going.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And yep.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the moral of the story is be nice and be prepared.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my goodness.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great way to yes, absolutely.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Joe, this has been an absolute blast.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate you sticking around for this bonus conversation.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I I love all this stuff.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, probably what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna figure out a way to rent in the key of love online.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, I could probably just buy a Blu-ray or DVD of it somewhere.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I need to go back and do a story analysis of it because I want to really dig into how did you plant these things?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm super intrigued by this stuff.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I I just love it.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: I really do, really do.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thanks, man.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this has been a blast, so thanks again for doing this.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, anytime, my friend, anytime.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, thanks so much.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Ken.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, hey, I hope you enjoyed that.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, I want to thank Joe for taking time out of his busy schedule to do this conversation.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was an absolute blast, and I hope that there are a few things that you have learned from this interview that you can take and apply to your next writing project.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see you in the next episode.