Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 677: How to Write for Television, Netflix & Hollywood with Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit

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IFH 677: How to Write for Television, Netflix & Hollywood with Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Indie
• 0:13
  Film Hustle Podcast, Episode number six seventy seven, Pika Pika Ka Chew Broadcasting
• 0:21
  from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where
• 0:25
  we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles
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  of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome,
• 0:35
  Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble
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  host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur
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  How to turn your independent film into a profitable business. It's harder today than
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  filmmaking is the entrepreneurial filmmaker or the film entrepreneur. In Rise of the Film
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  and of course audiobook. If you want to order it, just head
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  over to www dot film bizbook dot com. That's film bizbook dot com.
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  Now, guys, today on the show, we have the writing team of
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  Dan Hernandez and Benji Semite. And Dan and Benji are the creative masterminds behind
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  Pokemon, Detective Pikachu and the New Adams Family Too, among many other things
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  that they've done. They've worked in television for years. They were on one
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  of my favorite shows, One Day at a Time, sixteen hundred Pen and
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  many other shows. And we get into not only what it takes to make
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  it in writing for television and then writing in Hollywood in general. Their story,
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  their journey of getting through breaking through, how it is to work together
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  as a partnership writing other people's characters like with Pikachu and the Adams family,
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  and what it's like running a show because now they've become showrunners of their own
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  show, and much much more. This is an extremely valuable episode for any
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  screenwriters out there who want to know and get inspired by a story and also
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  learn a little bit about the craft and how these guys are able to do
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  what they do. So, without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation
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  with Dan Hernandez and Benji Submit. I'd like to welcome to the show,
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  Dan Hernandez and Benji Summits. How are you guys doing. We're great,
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  all right, all right, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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  Guys. I I I'm so glad that we were just talking beforehand.
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  Um that Dan, you're you're the other Cuban I know. Uh in the
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  business, Um, people always shocked to here like I'm Cuban and they're like,
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  you're Cuban. It's always fascinating. When I'm on set, I'll just
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  start busting out from Spanish and people are like, what is going on?
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  Well, yeah, it's it's sometimes it thinks people by a surprise or you
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  know, I think that, um, you know, there's more, there's
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  there's quite a there's more of us that I think people realize. Cuban.
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  Yes, Phil Lord is Cuban. Um. Oh yeah, there's a bunch.
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  Yeah, there's there's you know, we're kind of well infiltrate slowly listen.
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  Yeah, no matter no matter where you are in the world, there's
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  always We're everywhere. Like I was in Germany, like a friend of mine
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  was in German. It's like they just walked by. It's like, is
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  that salsa music? And there was a full blown salsa club right in the
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  middle of Berlin or something like that. So we are, we are everywhere
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  and infiltrating I like that word, infiltrating the business a little by little.
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  Um, So, guys, first, foremost, how did you two meet
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  and how did you guys get started in the business, because you've been pretty
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  much working together almost the entire time, right, Yeah, yeah, we
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  you know, we went to college together. We met in college. We
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  went to Brown in Rhode Island, and you know, we started we started
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  working on like plays and stuff in theater together and uh, and yeah,
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  I mean it's we've been together ever since of you know, it's been we
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  graduated over fifteen years ago now, and yeah, just keep writing the other.
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  Yeah, you can't seem to shake each other. I've tried to get
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  rid of them, but I can't. Yeah, I've had many times.
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  I actually didn't mean to wear this shirt today. I just dropped my daughter
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  off at preschool and I just grabbed the first one. But it wasn't pre
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  meditated. But yeah, we did meet it brown and we uh, yeah,
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  we just really quickly realized that we had a shared taste, I guess
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  for the things that we liked and the things that we didn't like. And
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  I think so often having that taste is the first step toward the successful partnership.
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  And so once we had that sort of foundation, it just we started
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  working on some theater things together, we started working on some writing projects together,
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  and we just never stopped. We just kept going. It goes.
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  So really there's two thousand and six. Yeah, so what was that thing
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  that spark sparked it for each of you to be in this ridiculous business?
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  I mean, to be in this business. I grew up in La so
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  I've always been sort of surrounded by and tangentially touching it. And you know,
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  like my mom has written some things, my dad has worked in entertainment
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  in various ways, and so it was always a part of my life.
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  And you know, I love movies, I love TV, and you know,
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  I think I think I always knew I wanted to do something with you
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  know, like a lot of people that grew up in LA, so many
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  of them are just like I want nothing to do with Like so many of
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  my friends that I grew up with do not live in LA anymore. But
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  I was just like, I love it here, I want to be here,
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  I want to keep doing this. So uh yeah, it was it
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  was an easy decision for me. My path is a little more secuitous because
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  I'm from Fort Laurida, Florida. Originally stop okay, stop stop it.
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  I'm from Fort Lardale, Florida. Really, I was raised in my in
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  the Fort Lardale area, and I we could we could talk. I mean,
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  I went, I was originally it was in Sunrise, but then I
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  was born in Plantation. My parents, my parents are still I just I
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  literally just got back from Fort Lauderdale. So I'm sorry, guys, everyone
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  listening. I apologize. It's rare enough to see a Cuban. It's rare
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  enough to meet another Cuban in the business, let alone another one from Fort
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  Lauderdale, Florida. I was actually, I mean, when you meet a
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  Cuban, they're from South Florida. I know, it's very rare to even
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  meet a Cuban from South Florida. Right, I grew up in actually I
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  grew up in Cross Brings in Market. Okay, sure, Like you know,
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  I say Fort Lauderdale because because it's yeah, you know, like depending
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  on who we're talking to here, it's like I'm from Miami. I always
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  say Miami. I just say I'm from Miami because it's like for a Laida,
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  isn't that where the spring Break movies were for shot like in eighty five?
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  Probably you had a cruise that left there once. Yeah, you know,
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  but right the Venice of America, it's the Venice of them America.
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  Wow, I've never heard that. Yeah, that is true. That is
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  their nick name. If you look on like the you know, like the
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  city staff are Dan's just shaking his head. He's like, can we just
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  move it along? Coming from the Venice of America. I never could have
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  imagined myself in the movie because I thought I would be on a I don't
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  know, like a glass bottom tour boat and then something. But um,
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  I always loved writing, and I always loved performing and acting, and so
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  brown I did a ton of um theater, you know, a lot of
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  performance, a lot of writing, and I always was interested in TV writing
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  and movie writing. But it felt like something amorphous that Yeah, it didn't
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  feel like an actual career. It felt like it's sort of intellectually. I
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  thought to Icsel, well, I guess that's something that people do, but
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  how do you even begin to pursue that? Who are the people to pursue
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  that? And then when I met Benji, I realized anybody could do it.
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  Honestly, it was actually meeting Benji and becoming us runs with him that
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  changes trajectory of my life. Because for Benji, who was more more familiar
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  with La because it's my home town, like it's sure the big scary place
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  that it is for so many people, I could sort of break down for
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  Dan and be like, no, just come to La, like we'll go,
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  well, we can crash at my mom's house and uh, and we
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  did, and we sure. Meeting Benji, who had a more practical knowledge
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  of like how do you even begin to pursue a profession of TV a movie
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  writer? That really made me feel comfortable to give it a shot. And
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  that was the beginning of that journey. Now you guys were involved in the
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  project that's very dear to my heart, which is one day at a time.
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  We'll be right back after a word from our spawn, sir. And
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  now back to the show, which it is. It was. It was
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  sad to see it go. I was a huge fan of it and uh
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  again going back to the whole Cuban vibe that that they made him Cuban and
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  they put him in Uh okay, where's at Echo Park? Uh? And
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  which is like it's like the venice of of of la but I think exactly
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  Echo Parks, the Echo Park of la Um. But it was it was
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  such a it was such a fun show. How did you guys get involved
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  with that show? Yeah? So, I mean the the show runner of
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  that show co show runner was Mike Royce, who great talented writer from you
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  know for years and years and years and and we our first job at Staff
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  Fighters was on another show that he ran sixteen hundred Pen and so we hit
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  it off with him. We had a great time working with him. It
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  was really that was an amazing show to work on, all the writers like,
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  it was just such a great writer's room for a first show. And
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  then, you know, fast forward a few years later, Mike got paired
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  up with with Gloria calder On Kellett, who we didn't know, but they
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  were working on this yet Cuban American show together and Mike. When they started
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  staffing the show, Mike was like, I know a great Cuban that we
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  can stab on the show, and in his friend and a guy and his
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  friend. Yes, Spennie's Benji's an honorary Cuban, but yeah, I think
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  that. Because we'd had a good expert with Mike on six hundred Pen,
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  he asked us if we would be interested in coming in on one day at
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  a time. I was particularly interested because it felt right that on sub level
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  for me, that I should be on the ground floor of a big Cuban
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  show, maybe the only Cuban show that you know, I had seen in
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  a while. And I was really you know, Gloria and I ended up
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  being the only Cubans on the staff. There were other Latino people, but
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  we were the Cubans on the staff for the first two seasons, and then
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  in the third season, Janine Brito joined us, who's amazing. Half Cuban,
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  half Icelandic. How does that happen? Pretty good? But for the
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  first two seasons, it was just Gloria and me, and I felt like
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  part of what my contribution was was trying to bring versabilitude and authenticity to the
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  stories that we were telling. And we did realize that and you probably know
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  this better than anyone. You know, Cuban growing up in Los Angeles or
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  San Diego has a very different experience from the Cuban growing up in Miami or
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  Fort Laudn. Obviously we all started in you know, the same spot in
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  the Caribbean. But you know that just aspora has it just lead, it
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  yields different experiences. And so I think that I was sort of the East
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  Coast representative of what that experience was, and I tried to and you know,
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  my it so happens that my family, like the family one at a
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  time, is extremely liberal, which is sort of atypical. So I did
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  feel like there was but not all of them, but my direct family,
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  So I felt very close to the Alvarez family in that sense, which I
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  did think it was. It was it was really interesting to write a Cuban
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  family that was progressive and that was working on issues and really trying to like
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  work out where they landed on a bunch of topics that were tough and and
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  not always obvious to talk about. So I'm really proud of the work that
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  we did on that show, and I was really happy, And of course
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  the opportunity to work with Norman Lear was a huge I mean, I mean,
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  what a gift that was. So, I mean, so there was
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  something. I mean, I saw every episode and I remember watching it.
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  I'm like, my god, this is very much like a throwback to the
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  eighties and nineties when they would do the the deep episode, the episode that
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  tackles something deep, like you wouldn't see that with a lot of the current
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  day, even things in the last decade, you wouldn't see those kind of
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  like tackling like racism and tackling like really tough things that shouldn't really be in
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  a in a thirty minute comedy. But you guys did How was it like
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  doing like how was it like trying to Was that like in the beginning,
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  like you guys like, no, no, we're gonna do this old school,
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  We're gonna we're gonna tackle things that aren't being tackled. You know.
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  I think partially it was you know, when you know this show that's coming
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  original from the mind of Norman Lear and you know he's still there for this
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  new version and like that was I mean for decades and decades and decades,
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  like that was such an important part of his work on TV. Like he
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  had he was responsible for so many amazing sitcoms that were more than just silly
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  jokes and gags and things like extremely funny, but you know, actually using
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  the medium to you know, try and yeah, give a lesson in something,
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  you try to do some good with with what we're doing. And so
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  that was sort of a guiding principle and ethos. It was important for Mike
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  and Gloria as well and all of the writers to try and carry that legacy
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  forward and and sort of do a classic you know, multi caam sitcom with
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  the live audience that really you know it it was like putting on a play
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  every week, honestly, and yeah, it's just a great experience. Ye
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  using the template that Norman had established over the course of his illustrious career and
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  really trying to not shy away from that and not being worried that it would
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  come off as old fashioned or something that was that was important to all of
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  us to try to capture and to try to live up to what is the
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  modern interpretation of that, And because it was this Cuban family, to say,
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  well, there's a bunch of stories within this mode of storytelling that we
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  haven't seen before, because it's it's just different culture. It's culturally specific now
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  in a way that we just haven't seen a lot of these stories told through
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  that Norman Lear and Lens and that was that was what we really tried to
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  do, and I feel we were pretty successful most of the time. What
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  was the I mean, you're working with obviously a living legend. What was
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  it? What was the biggest lesson you took away from work with Norman m
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  It's a great question. Norman was. I mean, Norman is a big
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  believer in if you get the right person for the role, that there's a
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  lot of trust that needs to happen between the writers and the actors, and
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  and that's why he's pretty rigorous about his his audition process, and he's pretty
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  rigorous about if he doesn't think that their actor has the spark of what he
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  really is looking for, even if it's a good performer or a famous performer,
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  he doesn't. He's not interested in that. He can't, he doesn't,
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  he doesn't engage with that. He really is thinking about what is the
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  part? What am I trying to accomplish? What is that spark that I
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  see in this performer? Well, it's yeah, it's it's finding the actor
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  that can that can transform that what's on the page to the next level where
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  like, you know, you could have the best script ever, but if
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  the actor doesn't click with like it's it's just not a matter. And that
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  may sound fastal on some level like you should get a good actor for part.
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  I guess what I'm trying to say is it's beyond it's beyond town.
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  It's it's like an almost indescribable, a spiritual connection to the part that he
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  really I think that that's why in the in his you know, the four
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  I was gonna say the old days, but it sounds, you know,
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  too ancient. But in his in the past, Norman often went to Broadway
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  to look for performers who could carry a dramatic load as well as a comedic
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  load, and Justina Machado was a broader performer. She's an amazing I mean,
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  she's an amazing actress. I mean, is Red writ a living legend.
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  He got you know, all of that. So and then you have
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  someone like Stephen Toblaski, who is just's just such a professional and such a
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  craftsman and such a technician and so thoughtful in the way he does everything,
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  and the whole cast and you know, I mean Isabella Marcel, Like you
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  know, Isabella has not gone on to start her own show, so there
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  clearly was something there. And of course you're now stepping into the role of
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  Schneider, you know that was that was And so in order to kind of
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  get the alchemy right, Norman really put an emphasis on chemistry and that sort
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  of it factor that that you know, over the course of decades he can
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  recognize I think in a way that other people, you know, we'd all
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  be so lucky to work long enough to be able to discern that in someone
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  based on an audition, because sometimes these audition tapes the best, you know,
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  not every not the best actors shine on a on a video. Right,
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  we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
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  to the show, you know. And so sometimes it's going beyond the audition
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  tape itself for the performance on the audition and seeing some quality or some move
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  or some physicality that feels right. And Norman is amazing identifying those things.
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  It's it's really something we really try to take away from worrying with him.
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  Yeah, and and Norman's still at it, man, I mean he just
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  h He's got projects left and right. Still, he's still getting things developed,
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  still getting things produced. How how old is he he's almost one hundred.
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  I mean he's but he's an actual genius. I mean that that's the
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  thing that that you meet a lot of smart people in your life, and
• 20:55
  you meet many talented people, but the amount of actual genius level people that
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  you encounters is pretty small, I would say, in this life. And
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  so when you do encounter it, it's like, oh, right, this
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  is an actual person. This is a person that is exceptional. There's no
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  one that knows more about TV comedy that probably will ever live, I would
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  go, So I would venture to say, yeah, No, I mean
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  he's been through it all from the beginning. We were talking to him,
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  and you know, he was talking about how like he when he went to
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  college, like he was like studying radio and they heard rumors of this thing
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  called TV that was gonna come out, and then like so then he started
• 21:42
  doing that and he's still doing that and yeah, like it's just talking to
• 21:51
  him is unlike anyone else we've ever Yeah, it's not. There's no accomfortable
• 21:56
  person because he's seeing it all. Truly, he was there. He's the
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  oracle. He's the oracle. He's the he's the oracle. But he also
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  knew every single person. You know. You can say, hey, Norman,
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  tell us about you ever meet Orson Welles and he's like, yeah,
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  a matter of fact, I did meet Orson Welles and here's my you know,
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  like that, here's my Orson Wells story. Yeah. I mean,
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  and you could say that he's still so sharp and remembers all of these things
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  and like, yeah, he goes to work every day and he just he
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  lives for this stuff, and like that's it's really I just started watching,
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  Yeah, I just started watching the Rita Morano documentary on Netflix the other day
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  and and she was just talking about um, oh my god, uh that,
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  oh god, Marlon Brandon, thank you Marlon Brando. And like she's
• 22:42
  like, oh yeah, this and that and this, and you're just in
• 22:45
  there like what us, you know, how many beings that one day at
• 22:52
  a time, it's just her regaling us with stories of all that. And
• 22:56
  Rita is also a genius. I mean, yes, that's I mean,
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  we've we've been a few performers in our time that I think are the transcendent
• 23:06
  talent is so remarkable that it's actually kind of breathtaking to see it expressed,
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  and Rita is one of them. We were fortunate enough to work with Robin
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  Williams briefly, and that even in the week or however many days it was
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  that we worked with Robin, it was like, oh, that's why Robin
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  Williams is Robin Wills, because what he's capable of doing is so beyond anything
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  that we've ever seen, even even on a show that wasn't ultimately a hid
• 23:36
  but that didn't change the watching his craftsmanship, watching the way he approached a
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  scene, watching away he even approached a take in between take. You know,
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  So what Benji and I have tried to do throughout our career is is
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  try to take those lessons from these really really talented people, genius level with
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  people, and take you know, fifteen percent of that as a lesson for
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  ourselves going forward and in our own works. We can No. I wanted
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  to go back real quick. What was the what was that breakthrough? What
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  was that thing? Because I'm assuming you guys didn't just say hey, we're
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  going to start writing and then the money just started. Boatloads of money started
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  coming in and opportunities started flying in. That's the way it works in Hollywood.
• 24:18
  You say you're a writer, and then opportunities just show up, right,
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  That's the way it works. Yeah, no, no, we uh
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  yeah no, it was just a whole lot of the hustle. Uh you
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  know. We we were out here in LA and we were sort of focusing
• 24:38
  on at first just like writing features. And you know, we got you
• 24:47
  know, a small agent to finally read one of our things, and he
• 24:52
  sent it to a few places, and we you know, pretty soon after
• 24:56
  graduate, like in the first couple of years, like we we option to
• 25:00
  feature and we're like, oh, this is the thing. If suddenly it's
• 25:03
  gonna get me. But now that all fell apart, and then like there
• 25:08
  was another like we got hired to write like the straight to the DVD movie
• 25:15
  that never got made, and you know, but like this is when we're
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  you know, twenty five, and any any gig sounds like a great gig,
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  and then you know, and so yeah, we sort of thought like,
• 25:30
  oh, everything's happening, but then no, nothing was happening. And
• 25:33
  so then we were like, well, let's keep doing movies, but let's
• 25:37
  also try doing TV because that's this whole other side of the industry that we
• 25:41
  love that's here. Uh So we started writing some pilots and and those started
• 25:48
  going around and eventually we started getting some attention there. But again, like
• 25:52
  it wasn't overnight overnight thing, like even once we started getting to the point
• 25:56
  of like having showrun our meetings, like we weren't getting the jobs yet,
• 26:02
  like we were just like we were suddenly at a place where like, oh,
• 26:07
  yeah, we're doing show run our meetings now. And you know,
• 26:11
  that went on for a like we met on dozens of shows or like a
• 26:14
  dozen shows probably before we got our first staff job on on sixteen hundred pen.
• 26:18
  Yeah, I think that, you know, I think there were a
• 26:21
  couple of things going on. I think that we were fortunate to get a
• 26:26
  small agent when we first started out, but you also do realize why these
• 26:34
  big agencies are the big agencies, and that you know that there is an
• 26:38
  access issue, so that it is a bit of an uphill struggle. But
• 26:41
  on the other hand, our first agent did an amazing job of getting us
• 26:45
  read places we probably would not have been read, just through hustle and through
• 26:52
  tenaciousness, and and I think it helped that because I'm Cuban, we qualified
• 26:59
  for a lot of these diverse to do positions on these shows, and so
• 27:02
  we were ended up getting read by a lot of places that I think probably
• 27:04
  wouldn't have read writers at our level otherwise, which was really great for us
• 27:10
  because people did start to see there was something there. Even if we weren't
• 27:15
  quite ready to get some of these jobs, there was enough promise that people
• 27:19
  did take the meeting with us, and we did get in rooms with really
• 27:23
  high level people that we probably at a pretty young age. It still took
• 27:29
  a long time to end some luck to get that first gig, but I
• 27:34
  think it was all now and looking back on it, and I occasionally meet
• 27:38
  people who are sort of in similar situations now and looking back on it,
• 27:42
  when you have twelve show owner meetings, that is a sign that something is
• 27:47
  right in what you're doing. Even if those meetings don't ultimately end in a
• 27:51
  job. You can sort of say, Okay, this seems to be pointing
• 27:55
  the way towards eventually hopefully someone is going to say yes. But in the
• 28:00
  moment, it felt more like Wisan was saying, yes, we keep having
• 28:03
  these near I'm pretty, I'm pretty enough, Why doesn't anybody want to date
• 28:07
  me? Yeah? You know, I chose that we're you know, like
• 28:11
  winning Emmy's the next year. I was like, we could have wanted Emmie.
• 28:18
  So it was disappointing at the time, and but it forced us to
• 28:22
  continue to refine what we were doing. It can force us to, you
• 28:26
  know, work harder on our material because we did feel like we were knocking
• 28:30
  on the door, and because we had made the rounds and all these people
• 28:37
  we're luck played a part is I went to high school with Josh Gad,
• 28:40
  the actor, and he is a friend and he was very close I also
• 28:47
  my wife went to the same high school and she actually was closer with him.
• 28:51
  He was a senior when we're a freshman. So she was great friends
• 28:53
  with him. One of my best friends was great friends with him, and
• 28:56
  when we moved out here, we were able to connected. We became friendly
• 29:00
  and Josh said, this is before anything. Josh said, well, you
• 29:04
  know, if I ever get a TV show, I want you guys to
• 29:07
  work on it. And we said okay, yeah, sure, sure.
• 29:11
  And then he went to New York and he did a show called Book of
• 29:15
  Mormon, and then he got on me for Tony, which he should have
• 29:21
  won in my opinion, and then he came back and he had a show
• 29:25
  and it was like, hey, guys, I want you to read for
• 29:27
  my show. So that wasn't but even that wasn't wouldn't have been enough.
• 29:33
  But like all of the other meetings that we had had on other shows,
• 29:37
  it got us on the you know, radar, on the radar of the
• 29:41
  NBC executives that were in charge of the knew who we were. Like it
• 29:47
  was it was sort of like all the stars aligning. So it was it
• 29:49
  was preparation. It was luck. It was hard work. We'll be right
• 29:55
  back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. It
• 30:03
  was timing all of those things. And that's why I often say to younger
• 30:07
  writers or artists, no one's journey can really be replicated. It's not it's
• 30:14
  not possible because if you ask any writers or hey, how did you get
• 30:18
  your big break? You're going to hear a crazy, roundabout, shaggy dogtail
• 30:22
  of yeah, well I knew a guy who did a thing, and then
• 30:26
  oh I met a guy or I was an assistant and then I did you
• 30:30
  know. It's just it's not everyone so different. Yeah, right, right,
• 30:36
  that's how our story came about and how we got that first game.
• 30:38
  Yeah, and for everyone listening, just because you knew Josh, that's no
• 30:41
  guarantee you would have gotten too. If you guys were just working at In
• 30:44
  and Out and Josh said, hey, I want you guys to be a
• 30:45
  writer, that probably wouldn't have worked out, you guys, fat because we
• 30:49
  knew Josh. There was actually some hesitancy, right other uh, like from
• 30:56
  the show runner and the creator, like they didn't want necessarily to have like
• 31:02
  the actors buddies like in the writer's room dictating what the actors should and shouldn't
• 31:07
  do. Yeah, like right, so we sort of had. It was
• 31:11
  kind of an uphill battle with and well, you know, we learned a
• 31:15
  lesson, an important Hollywood lesson, which is our agent at the time said,
• 31:19
  you're getting this meeting with the other gravers of the show, it's just
• 31:23
  a formality. And what we've learned is that anytime anyone tells you something it's
• 31:27
  just a formality, it means it is not a formality catering on the edge
• 31:34
  of disaster. So I'm very I have a spidy sense for that phrase.
• 31:41
  Now anytime someone tells me it's a formality or it's a layup, I'm like,
• 31:45
  oh, okay. That I also think, you know, like some
• 31:48
  of the some of the failed show run our meetings from when we were younger
• 31:53
  gave us the tools to know how to then handle that meeting. That's that
• 31:57
  formality meeting where like some of the questions thrown at us we actually were prepared
• 32:05
  for in a way that we weren't when we were twenty five. Yea,
• 32:07
  And so it's sort of like, yeah, looking back at it, it's
• 32:10
  like every moment of our journey like helped, there was a reason that happened,
• 32:15
  and it's yeah, it's sometimes it is making a decision to learn something
• 32:22
  you know. So we would occasionally being at the beginning to show run meetings
• 32:24
  where they would ask you a question like what would you change about the show
• 32:29
  or what's the worst part of the show, And I think the natural inflination,
• 32:32
  especially when you're young, is to equivocate and be like, no,
• 32:36
  it's fine, you know no girl, People says he do you feel like
• 32:38
  you as like a baby writer? Like what, how are you going to
• 32:44
  tell a show runner how to like fix their show or you know what the
• 32:47
  issues are? But like they they don't want to hire a baby writer that
• 32:52
  just tells them that they're right. They want to hire someone who is going
• 32:57
  to give ideas to make the show better. Yeah, And so after that
• 33:00
  happened a few times, we together made a decision that it was like,
• 33:07
  if anyone ever asked us a question like what is the worst part of the
• 33:09
  show or what would you change about the show, We're going to be completely
• 33:13
  honest the next time that this comes up. And it so happens that that
• 33:16
  question was one of the sort of major questions in the sixteen hundred pound interview,
• 33:22
  and we just were honest and ultimately approved to be the thing that got
• 33:24
  us the job. So sometimes it is sort of discerning, Okay, what
• 33:30
  is there a lesson to be taken here? What did we do wrong?
• 33:35
  You know? But when Greg Daniels and make Sure ask you like, hey,
• 33:37
  what's the worst part of Parks and rec and you're like, when you're
• 33:43
  twenty five, it's hard to be like, well, let me tell you.
• 33:45
  Greg Daniels and Mark share that's we just weren't there emotionally. And I
• 33:51
  think that if, if you know, going through that experience really prepared us
• 33:55
  for the future and helped set. The one thing I'm always fascinated about is
• 34:01
  because I've never been in a writer's room, because I've never done television in
• 34:05
  that way, how do you break an episode? Like, what is the
• 34:08
  process in the writer's room to breaking an episode? I mean, it varies
• 34:15
  between show which a show showrunner to the showrunner, but I would say the
• 34:22
  the sort of most common way that it's done is, you know, we
• 34:27
  have big discussions. Those first few weeks of a writer's room is really just
• 34:30
  talking, like getting to know each other and our personal stories, you know,
• 34:36
  personal stories that may relate to what the show is about, getting to
• 34:40
  know just talking about who our characters are this or that, and slowly,
• 34:45
  through those discussions, episode ideas start to come up. We're like, oh,
• 34:49
  yeah, it'd be funny there was an episode where this happens, you
• 34:52
  know, like one day at a time. The first episode we wrote is
• 34:54
  the one where where she was on hold for the entire episode yeah about the
• 35:00
  BA and it's like, oh, on hold, And it's like just a
• 35:02
  moment of like, oh, it would be funny to do an episode where
• 35:05
  she's on hold the other the whole time, and everyone's like, yeah,
• 35:07
  that sounds funny. Put her on the board. And so you sort of
• 35:09
  have like a list of ideas of episodes, and it's up to the showrunner
• 35:15
  then to be like all right, all right, now let's actually talk about
• 35:20
  that episode. And then it becomes more of a discussion of like, okay,
• 35:24
  well, what's going to happen in that episode, start to arc it
• 35:28
  out in loose terms, and you know, just with the group slowly filling
• 35:31
  it out to the point where it's like you sort of have an idea pretty
• 35:36
  much seen by seeing what the episode is, what the act breaks are,
• 35:39
  and at that point the writer who's been assigned to do that episode actually goes
• 35:45
  off to start writing an outline, but much of the you know, yeah,
• 35:51
  the breaking of the story just happens in a sort of natural way with
• 35:53
  the whole group. Yeah, And I think sometimes you may think that you've
• 36:00
  got a great idea for an episode. Of course of conversation, you find
• 36:06
  it evolves into something slightly tangential or just an element of your initial idea survives
• 36:13
  or becomes the springboard toward what the episode is really about. And so you
• 36:17
  have to have a little bit of openness to changing things and not being prescriptive
• 36:22
  about Yeah, you can't be too attached to anything when you're going into these
• 36:28
  discussions, Like it really is just like, let the discussion take us where
• 36:34
  it has to go. And and a good gel runner can sort of,
• 36:39
  you know, find that line of of you know, too freewheeling a discussion
• 36:45
  versus like keeping some sort of shape of like where we're going not losing sight
• 36:50
  at the episode and sort of a whole freewheeling thing. And now that we're
• 36:54
  show runners, you know, you also have to be disious and saying this
• 37:01
  is really funny, but it doesn't sell on our characters, right, Just
• 37:05
  a really cool idea, but where do you go from there? Right,
• 37:09
  are there another actual story turn beats for it to sustain an entire episode or
• 37:15
  is this really just like a gap? So yeah, does it link up
• 37:22
  thematically with the other stories that you're telling, because normally in an episode,
• 37:25
  you're you're you know, you usually have an A story and a B story
• 37:29
  sometimes or or or if it's like, you know, this idea is good,
• 37:32
  it's not a whole episode. Oh what about that other episode idea that
• 37:36
  was on the board. Maybe we can combine them together into one episode together,
• 37:39
  So like it's yeah, you sort of just have to be aware of
• 37:45
  like everything that's been said in the room, and you know, be willing
• 37:50
  to steer it in certain directions if things it could be quite technical, really,
• 37:55
  I mean I think that the maybe is something that people don't It's hard
• 38:00
  to understand how technical it can be unless you're actually sitting in a room and
• 38:05
  seeing how how the episodes are put together, because there are certain things that
• 38:08
  you need, you know, the inciting incident, the activates really strong and
• 38:15
  all of the you know that there is a formula and you can mess with
• 38:17
  the formula, but basically the formula is the formula and understanding sort of what
• 38:28
  is the bedrock of an episode of television that allows you to go off in
• 38:34
  different directions or or to do something different in order to subvert that expectation in
• 38:39
  a way that's that's unexpected. But the core of it really isn't that different
• 38:45
  than what Norman was doing or what they were doing in you know, at
• 38:51
  Costello or something like. It really is. It's it's especially yeah, in
• 38:57
  comedy things, the things that make people have always been the same and like
• 39:01
  you could you update it, you modernize it, but at the court it's
• 39:06
  the same stuff. Right you look at you look at you know, the
• 39:09
  Three Stooges. I still crack up. I mean anytime someone gets smacked in
• 39:14
  the head with a with a wrench and there's no actual bodily harm, right,
• 39:19
  it's funny, the banana slipping on a banana peal, funny. Farts,
• 39:23
  farts, funny something. I think there's just something innate in the human
• 39:29
  character that certain things amuse us. And I think also one thing that I
• 39:35
  find helpful, and maybe this is just the way that my brain works is
• 39:38
  I I couldn't tell you, like the quadratic equation, I couldn't tell you
• 39:45
  the chemical bonds of sodium. But I can tell you what happened in a
• 39:52
  random episode of The Three Stooges, you know, some bit that they did
• 39:59
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the
• 40:06
  show. Or I can tell you some random line from an obscure movie that
• 40:13
  and so a lot of times I'll say we need a bit like this.
• 40:16
  We need a moment like Groucho singing hello, I must be going, you
• 40:22
  know, we need something that captures the spirit of those things. So it's
• 40:27
  almost there's a shorthand that I think of, which is, Okay, we
• 40:31
  need something that plays the role of this communic moment, or this emotional moment,
• 40:37
  or you know, an emotional moment within the craziness that really lands.
• 40:43
  I think often references before, but you know, when Wayne and Garth and
• 40:46
  Wayne's world are lying on the top of Garth's car looking at the stars and
• 40:50
  Garth's whistling the star Trek tune, it's actually a really beautiful, quiet moment
• 40:53
  within the craziness of that story. But it's actually one of the most important
• 40:59
  moment to the movie because you see their hopes and dreams of these guys and
• 41:02
  it's not I mean, yeah, there are jokes in it, but they're
• 41:05
  actually really speaking their truth in that moment, and so sometimes you say,
• 41:08
  okay, we need like a Wayne in Darth moment that's specific to our show,
• 41:13
  but captures the feeling and the spirit of, oh, this person is
• 41:16
  speaking their truth. They're st they're strugglings or something that they probably aren't going
• 41:22
  to achieve, and we really want them to achieve it even though it's unlikely.
• 41:25
  And so that those are almost like the component parts that you then try
• 41:30
  to build it that. I don't know if everybody does it that way,
• 41:31
  but that's on my yeah, which is which is really interesting because I found
• 41:37
  that a lot of bad comedy doesn't understand that there has to be a human
• 41:39
  story underneath. Like you watch Coming to America, he really is looking for
• 41:45
  love. I mean, there's a lot of craziness that happens along the way
• 41:47
  that's super funny, but there's that thing that's driving the story where it's not
• 41:52
  just gag after gag after then then you're basically doing Saturday Night Live. You're
• 41:55
  just doing you know, skit skit, skits gets git where a lot of
• 41:59
  fo is that fair? Yeah, one hundred percent you need to, you
• 42:05
  know, have that core emotion that you can connect to as an audience Termber
• 42:10
  or else. Yeah, you're just watching silly stuff, which can sometimes be
• 42:15
  funny, but to sustain you for a long period of time, especially like
• 42:20
  when you're going into a movie, like you can't last hours without having something
• 42:27
  to connect to emotionally. And I think it's it's it's something that I do
• 42:31
  think you refine over time. I think that the tendency for young comedy brothers
• 42:37
  is to just focus on funny and gags being being as outrageous as possible,
• 42:43
  and there is value in that. But now having done a lot of things,
• 42:50
  written a lot of things, it's much more clear that the things that
• 42:53
  sometimes it's seeing things that don't work and seeing things that do work really are
• 43:00
  illuminating. So the things that I feel that have been the most successful that
• 43:04
  we've written all core emotion that's very poignant or very moving or aspirational or whatever,
• 43:14
  that there is some real emotional stakes that is the best that just supports
• 43:21
  it allows you to be as crazy as you want to be because you care.
• 43:24
  If you don't care, then everything is just a wash. It's all
• 43:29
  at the same sort of vomb right, Like you look at something like Borat
• 43:34
  and you know, Borat was obviously very like outrageous and it went over the
• 43:38
  in my opinion, might have gone over the top a little bit too much
• 43:40
  of some of those things. But there's still that emotional thing. There's a
• 43:46
  thing that's driving Boar, Like you feel for Borat when he's trying to to
• 43:51
  to kidnap Pamela Anderson us why But there's there's so much emotion and depth to
• 43:59
  the Sasha's performance that like a it was if it was an actor that was
• 44:07
  not doing that, like, oh yeah, people would turn it off in
• 44:10
  five a minute. This is discussing. This is terrible, this is stupid,
• 44:16
  But like you can't help but care about this guy because everything he's still
• 44:22
  he's coming from it earn his place, yes, and he's so hard and
• 44:24
  there's a real emotional thing where you're just like, oh, like I get
• 44:29
  what he wants. I agree with him. I want him to get that
• 44:30
  he's just going about it in a wrong play and he's not just like doing
• 44:37
  this stuff just to provoke reaction on it forgives a lot of bad behavior and
• 44:42
  that's I think been true of comedy from you know, time immemorial, but
• 44:46
  I mean even something like there's another version of it, which is like canny
• 44:52
  powers and he's found him down where he's doing really bad things. He's saying
• 44:55
  really bad things. But because Danny McBride as a performer or he's so he's
• 45:02
  just like an open wound. He's just so it's so obvious that he's emotionally
• 45:10
  fragile and broken that you see the the genesis of all of the pain and
• 45:20
  all of the behaviors that are that are generating out of this person that is
• 45:23
  doing all this stuff. But you, on some level you're like, oh,
• 45:27
  but he's he's not a bad person really, he's just so insecure and
• 45:35
  so traumatized by whatever is in his past that he is now expressing it in
• 45:42
  this way that is of course in appropriate and very funny. But you know,
• 45:45
  not every performer has that thing. Um and writing can help with that
• 45:52
  sometimes, but there are certain of special performers who you're kind of just on
• 45:57
  their side even when they're doing bad stuff. And so often it's because they
• 46:01
  give you a glimpse into a different They give your glimpse into an interiority humanity.
• 46:07
  Yeah, humanity. Vanity is there even if they couldn't express it as
• 46:12
  a character themselves. You see it, you recognize it from what it is,
• 46:15
  which is vulnerability, which is pain, which is humiliation, which is
• 46:19
  whatever. And those are really powerful emotions thereways will be a visceral emotion if
• 46:23
  you were if you were to read a lot of it. Yeah, like
• 46:28
  like Danny McBride Kenny power like that those lines on paper. If you're just
• 46:32
  reading the script, you're like, I don't know about this character, like,
• 46:37
  but then you see a performer who can translate it to the next level.
• 46:44
  And so it is an interesting thing. Uh. You know when we
• 46:47
  talk to writers that are still trying to to, you know, find success,
• 46:54
  it's like you can't you can't always right. Even though you can't always
• 47:00
  write that character like you know it, sometimes it takes an actor to make
• 47:06
  that happen. And so like even if you see in your head or you
• 47:09
  feel like you know, like I know in my head that when an actor
• 47:14
  does it this way, you'll see the emotion behind these lines. But like
• 47:17
  these are the lines. But if it's like a spec script that is just
• 47:21
  like going out to the town, like people cannot read it the way with
• 47:25
  the delivery that's necessarily in your head. And so you know, it is
• 47:30
  a complicated thing where like sometimes people are like, well, how come I
• 47:34
  can't write like that in my script? And then like this one went on
• 47:37
  to be successful. Uh, you know, but you know there's all these
• 47:39
  rules of what I can write. It's like you just sort of happen,
• 47:43
  like, yeah, there are different rules for different stages of writing. And
• 47:47
  when you're first starting out, like you need to write something that a wide
• 47:54
  audience is able to read it and and see what you're trying to do.
• 48:01
  That doesn't necessarily mean you have to pander. It just means that it has
• 48:05
  to be written clearly, right. I suspect that if you read the script
• 48:09
  of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Time, you would be like, just as
• 48:14
  amazing, it's brilliant, even though it's really weird. But I think the
• 48:17
  reason you might feel that way on the page is because it's very clear what's
• 48:22
  happening. Happening is super articulated, it's super explained. You get it.
• 48:27
  It is illustrated, and the emotion that it's dealing with is universal to every
• 48:32
  Almost every single person has experienced that exact emotion and so it's not to say
• 48:37
  so that's an example of it is super specific, and obviously it's in his
• 48:43
  brilliant voice, Charlie Faffman, but what he's actually writing about was actually expressing
• 48:49
  is something that anybody could understand. I wish I could just forget about this
• 48:53
  person, right, And it's so visceral and it's so human that it's it
• 49:00
  does so much work for you because you don't have to go far feel to
• 49:07
  imagine what that feels like. And so it sells so much of the the
• 49:10
  idiosyncratic things about that movie. And you know, obviously you see it performed
• 49:15
  and it's even better, right, And that movie is so crazy that if
• 49:19
  it didn't have that, that that connection, that emotional thread that we could
• 49:22
  all connect to quickly, you to be lost because it's a hard movie to
• 49:27
  it is a hard movie to follow, but it isn't a hard movie to
• 49:29
  follow at the same time. But if you didn't have that, you would
• 49:31
  you would literally be you would be lost, I think, And I think
• 49:36
  that that's where some of Charlie cofforts other like Syenecticy in New York, you
• 49:39
  know, I think is a much I like that movie, and I thought
• 49:44
  it was really cool, but it is a more heady and sort of intellectual
• 49:49
  experience that is a little bit harder to digest, I think for someone that's
• 49:55
  not really focused on it. And right, we'll be right back after a
• 50:02
  word from our sponsor and now back to the show A season to judgest it
• 50:12
  because you're kind of going with this writer, whereas even something like adaptation it's
• 50:19
  very oh yeah. But again, the heavy emotionality of that movie is actually
• 50:24
  pretty love scessible and it's really well articulated. And so so that's what I
• 50:30
  think vegie means, which is like, if you are going to write something
• 50:35
  really weird, you let people in, find the way that that people are
• 50:39
  let in by that piece of material and will really shine. So which which
• 50:45
  brings me to Pokemon Detective Pikachu. Brilliant title. Well, yes, of
• 50:53
  course I'll take it Sunshine, and then let's bring it back to Pikachu.
• 51:01
  No. So when I first like, I think to eternal Sunshine that has
• 51:07
  Pokemon, and it would be that's true. It is true, it is,
• 51:10
  it is, it is the eternal Sunshine of the Pokemon universe. There's
• 51:16
  a question, absolutely no question. I was not guiding principle. So did
• 51:22
  you guys it was that an original spect? Would you guys brought in on
• 51:25
  that? How did you guys get involved with the project? So, you
• 51:29
  know, that's one where we had We had actually worked with the producers on
• 51:37
  a different movie like a year or so prior um and it's one of those
• 51:43
  things where like, it's the movie we were doing before, was the great
• 51:47
  movie. We're really excited about it. Uh, one of the my favorite
• 51:52
  scripts that we've written. It seemed like, oh, this is gonna get
• 51:54
  produced. It was gearing up, we were talking casting, and then you
• 52:00
  know, we get a call one day like, oh, actually the producers
• 52:04
  are leaving for another studio. So the whole all their projects are dying,
• 52:07
  this one included, so it was like another one. It was the biggest
• 52:13
  disappointment of our career and it felt like a huge failure. But when we
• 52:19
  look back now, it's like, oh no, that was a key turning
• 52:22
  point for us because we wrote the script with these producers. They loved working
• 52:28
  with us. It was a great process. And then you know, yeah,
• 52:32
  they they took a job for another studio, Like okay, you know,
• 52:37
  there's a good opportunity for them, Like, you can't blame them for
• 52:39
  that, and it's unfortunate that the project died, but they liked us and
• 52:44
  they wanted to work with us again. And so a year later, when
• 52:46
  suddenly they're developing Detective Pikachu, We're now on the list of writers that they
• 52:53
  want to bring in. You know, they're sort of like, who are
• 52:57
  the who are the biggest nerds we know? And that was so like the
• 53:02
  actual concept of Detective Pikachu it was based off. It was actually a video
• 53:07
  game. It was at the time we wrote the movie, the Detective Pikachu
• 53:12
  game was only available in Japan on the Nintendo DS, so like it wasn't
• 53:19
  even in English. We had like a rough translation of the game script.
• 53:22
  But yeah, like they brought us in because we're nerds who knew about Pokemon.
• 53:31
  Uh yeah, you know, yeah, I think that what was helpful
• 53:36
  for us is we were maybe a little bit too old to be in the
• 53:43
  full craze of the first generation of Pokemon. We were in high school,
• 53:47
  were in high school and at first, but we were also young enough to
• 53:51
  be totally familiar with it and to play the games and to have opinions about
• 53:58
  the world to have Pokemon that we like to be pretty familiar with, at
• 54:02
  least the first few generations of Pokemon. Now there's multiple generations, you know,
• 54:07
  a thousand you know, like a thousand pokemons, so you and you
• 54:12
  know, if you meet a little kid, they could rattle off every single
• 54:14
  one. You know that that took a little bit of training up for us.
• 54:19
  But at least for the original few generations, we knew them pretty well
• 54:24
  and we're familiar with them. And so I think that one advantage that we
• 54:28
  had going into that project is we had opinions. We had you said,
• 54:32
  you know, no, we should use this Pokemon because he's funny, or
• 54:37
  this Pokemon has more of a cinematic personality as opposed to one that maybe is
• 54:43
  cooler in design or in principle, but doesn't really have a defined voice that
• 54:50
  is going to translate to a movie. Was the was the was the meme
• 54:53
  guy original Pokemon? The Mime? Is that an original? So he yet
• 54:58
  mister Mime is a fo on, not a very popular Pokemon, shocking because
• 55:04
  he's weird to be sort of a teal of the other Pokemon. But the
• 55:08
  things that made him kind of weird and unpopular actually were exactly the things that
• 55:15
  we needed for the movie because mister min had a way of expressing himself that
• 55:22
  some of the other Pokemon didn't. You could actually have a human conversation with
• 55:24
  mister Mime as opposed to But also it was you know, there was an
• 55:30
  element of like choosing which Pokemon were the most cinematic, Like from that we
• 55:37
  could one that we could fill the movie right when we're telling it in our
• 55:40
  detective story, right, you know, you're gonna want to have an interrogation
• 55:45
  scene. And I think it was the director Rob who was like, wouldn't
• 55:49
  it be funny to do an interrogation scene with the mind Pokemon and pan't Hook
• 55:54
  And we were like yeah, and so uh you know then of course when
• 55:59
  we were writing that scene, uh you know, this was us being like,
• 56:06
  all right, well, how are you going to get answers from a
• 56:09
  from a mine POKEMONL can we mine torturing him? And it's one of the
• 56:15
  thing. So that's like, of every crazy idea that we had when we
• 56:22
  were writing that movie, that was definitely one of the craziest ones. And
• 56:25
  that was when we were like, for sure they're cutting this, Like there's
• 56:29
  no way to say in the movie. And you know, not only did
• 56:36
  the stay in it was like the trailer moment, it was it. We
• 56:39
  were pretty surprised, we were we were like, wow, that made it
• 56:44
  all the way through every every draft. So I think that was an example
• 56:49
  of just having some familiarity, having having an approach into this world that is,
• 56:58
  you know, obviously very popular, but for people that are didn't grow
• 57:01
  up with it or who are kids, it's how do you let those people
• 57:05
  in on this world this while and how do you make it equally satisfying for
• 57:10
  hardcore fans? But also no idea the other I mean, the other challenge
• 57:16
  was that it's like, yeah, we had to make it satisfying for random
• 57:21
  people in the general public who didn't know anything about Pokemon, but making it
• 57:25
  satisfying for Pokemon fans was also nerve wracking because this was a different kind of
• 57:31
  Pokemon. So, like, you know, when we were set out to
• 57:35
  write it, like the Pokemon Company was you know pretty clear, like you
• 57:40
  know, in this world of Frying City, like there's no trainers, there's
• 57:45
  no battles, there's no pokem balls, sort of like all of the defining
• 57:50
  characteristics of what makes a Pokemon story, you know, so like when they
• 57:54
  were like, okay, yeah, so do Pokemon but with no poke balls,
• 57:59
  and it's just like it's almost like doing Star Wars with no Force,
• 58:02
  no lightsabers, no lightsabers, none of that, no Jedi. Just like,
• 58:07
  so you're kind of and so what do we do here? You know?
• 58:13
  So it was it was a little scary when we first yeah, sat
• 58:16
  down, were like, do do the fans actually want this? Uh?
• 58:22
  You know what they like so many of them probably just want to see the
• 58:24
  classic Pokemon story of ash like fold in a movie, like what is different
• 58:30
  kind of movie that we can tell? But it actually, you know,
• 58:34
  as we were writing it, it became kind of freeing that we didn't have
• 58:38
  to, you know, rely on decades worth of backstory and you know,
• 58:45
  worry about like well, if we can pay this character this way, it'll
• 58:47
  make people angry. You know, like the normal problems of adaptation didn't really
• 58:53
  apply apply because yeah, it was like it was its own side universe where
• 59:01
  you know, yes, it's part of the world and like it's all of
• 59:05
  the Pokemon preachers that people love, but able to see a different spin of
• 59:10
  it was springing. Ultimately, which is not something that we expected to begin
• 59:15
  with. And it was a good lesson that sometimes maybe it is better to
• 59:22
  sort of explore a pocket of the world that hasn't been explored before, rather
• 59:25
  than go and tell a story that has been told over and over and over
• 59:31
  and over again that everyone has their own emotional connection to and our own expectation
• 59:36
  of how that story should be told and what's important to highlight in a story
• 59:40
  like that. And so that was a good lesson for us and something that
• 59:45
  we're going to try to take forward. Yeah, it's kind of like,
• 59:49
  you know, seeing the Orchis or Spider Man. I'm like, guys,
• 59:51
  we on the h Spiderman was created, We on the how Batman was created.
• 59:52
  We don't we don't need this anymore. Let's move it along. We'll
• 59:58
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 1:00:05
  show. But which I think part of the reasons why Spider Verse was such
• 1:00:09
  a revelation because let's get weird, let's explore, let's be ham, let's
• 1:00:15
  get spiderham in there, you know, And I think that that's what it
• 1:00:19
  calls. I mean, in addition to the visuals, which are stunning,
• 1:00:21
  but just from a story point of view, it was it was didn't feel
• 1:00:25
  the need to tell that story again. It really was able to range for
• 1:00:30
  a feel from where any other Spider Man story had had gone before. And
• 1:00:35
  I think that that's what made it feel so fresh. That's what made it
• 1:00:37
  feel so funny to have serious Spider Man next to Spiderham. It seems like
• 1:00:43
  it shouldn't work, but we think the speed of the film, it's perfect.
• 1:00:46
  It works brilliantly, it was. So that's that's a good example of
• 1:00:53
  Okay, let's tell a different kind of Spiderman story. And I think that
• 1:00:55
  that's a good challenge for anyone setting out to adapt. You know, something
• 1:01:01
  that is a pre existing piece of material or characters that were familiar with,
• 1:01:07
  even if it's not ip per se like Pokemon, Star Wars, whatever,
• 1:01:14
  but even if it's The Green Night, you know, ye, something that
• 1:01:17
  has existed for centuries, how do you tell that story in a way that
• 1:01:23
  is modern, that is fresh? And those are those are the stories that
• 1:01:30
  you know that there's something about the story that works to begin with, because
• 1:01:34
  it's still with us after hundreds of years. And in some of these cases,
• 1:01:38
  Robin Hood so now it's okay, what do we what do we do
• 1:01:44
  with this thing? How do we explore something that hasn't been explored before him?
• 1:01:47
  And those are exciting moments as a screenwriter. I think, now,
• 1:01:51
  did you did you work with Ron Reynolds? Was he involved at all in
• 1:01:53
  the writing process of because I know he wasn't a deadpool a bull bunch.
• 1:01:58
  Yeah, so he at the stage where we were writing at the very beginning,
• 1:02:04
  he wasn't involved, Like we didn't We weren't even writing for voice,
• 1:02:07
  just like we were just sort of creating this character and writing the movie.
• 1:02:12
  And you know, it was after they had that final script and they brought
• 1:02:17
  him on board, Like yeah, I mean I think you know, Ryan
• 1:02:22
  goes into the recording booth and he's so brilliantly funny that I saw clients Chase
• 1:02:27
  and so like, yeah, we were watching the movie and we're like,
• 1:02:29
  we didn't write that joke, but I love it. So yeah. I
• 1:02:31
  think that when you worked with Ryan and someone who he is so quick and
• 1:02:37
  so funny and has a great writing voice himself, you know, he's able
• 1:02:43
  to come up with this material that really works for himself, and not every
• 1:02:47
  actor is able to to do that as he can imagine. But but he
• 1:02:53
  is, He's able to say I'm gonna try this or I'm gonna try so
• 1:02:58
  yeah, I don't know, just he knows. He knows what, you
• 1:03:00
  know, what works, what works for him and the kind of things that
• 1:03:04
  he thinks they're funny, which so happens that most people just date it.
• 1:03:09
  Yeah, so we were really fortunate made us look good a lot of the
• 1:03:14
  time when he would say something really funny and we like, we didn't write
• 1:03:15
  that, but we'll take credit credit. But but I think, you know,
• 1:03:22
  the part that I'm proud about is that we wrote a character that he
• 1:03:25
  really liked and that he felt like he could The foundation was there so that
• 1:03:31
  he could then run with it and do his thing, which is what you
• 1:03:36
  want and right and and coming from the world of TV where everything is collaborative,
• 1:03:40
  like we don't have that sort of same preciousness that maybe other feature writers
• 1:03:45
  might have, Like that's not the exact word I had, where like you
• 1:03:49
  know, on One Day at a Time or any other sitcom we've written on
• 1:03:52
  Like we've got jokes in every episode, not just the ones with our names
• 1:03:55
  on them, and you know, the ones with our names on them,
• 1:03:59
  and everyone else from the writing staff has jokes in there too. It's like
• 1:04:02
  it is a collaborative thing, and we like that. It's been useful to
• 1:04:06
  have that foundation in writing movies because you just have to be flexible and you
• 1:04:13
  have to not be like no. It's especially in these big sort of IP
• 1:04:19
  driven movie like There's There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen for that,
• 1:04:23
  Like that's just the nature. These are corporate owned properties, like There's.
• 1:04:30
  They they they're bigger than just you the writer of the movies. So
• 1:04:36
  you know, how do you navigate with them that? How do you try
• 1:04:41
  to make everybody I feel confident that you know what you're doing, yeah,
• 1:04:47
  that you have an opinion. You know. I think it's easy sometimes in
• 1:04:49
  those situations to say whatever you guys want, but sometimes it's actually more beneficial
• 1:04:55
  to a project as the writer just say, well, hold on, let's
• 1:04:58
  slow down for a second. Here is why we decided to do it this
• 1:05:00
  way, and to have a really good thought out reason. And sometimes people
• 1:05:05
  go, oh, you know what, you're right or oh, you're right.
• 1:05:08
  I didn't think about it that way, and so um, these big
• 1:05:12
  projects gain a momentum of their own and sometimes it's hard to see the forest
• 1:05:16
  for the trees. But we were fortunate the Pokemon ended up turning out as
• 1:05:20
  good as it did because we love it. And then you also jumped on
• 1:05:24
  another big property, which was Adam's Family, which is a huge you know,
• 1:05:29
  it's been around forever and so many people know that. I mean,
• 1:05:30
  everyone knows the song, everybody knows the characters. Might. By the way,
• 1:05:35
  my daughter's obsessed with Adam's Family right now, like they're obsessed, obsessed
• 1:05:40
  with it. And I told them, like, you know, there's like
• 1:05:42
  there's live action movies. She's like they're like what, They're like, there's
• 1:05:47
  live action, Like, yes, we'll get the love of actions as well.
• 1:05:49
  How do you like I mean that thing, I mean that property.
• 1:05:53
  Those stories I mean have been told again and again and told well in other
• 1:05:58
  films. I had very sun Field on the show a while ago, and
• 1:06:01
  we talked about like he never how he had to deal with adams family the
• 1:06:05
  first one. So how did you guys approach, you know, telling the
• 1:06:10
  story of the second, the animated version. Well, I think that similar
• 1:06:14
  leads to Pokemon. You know, we had a really we had a real
• 1:06:18
  sense of these characters. Sure, I think that in the case of the
• 1:06:23
  Animal family, love and the deep perfection of love for those characters. And
• 1:06:26
  I think because of those live action movies and going back and watching the old
• 1:06:29
  shows and the old reading the old strips even but I think that when you
• 1:06:33
  have characters like the Adams family, unlike a Pikachu whose personality can only be
• 1:06:40
  so defined, right, each of them is extremely defined and have it for
• 1:06:45
  decades. Yeah, it made the writing like it's rare too, a structure
• 1:06:54
  starting a fifth where right, you instantly on day one know exactly the voice
• 1:06:59
  that everyone in characters and like one kind of jokes they would say, well,
• 1:07:02
  like what's a good going at joke? What's a good moortation joke?
• 1:07:05
  We didn't have to create any of that, Like that is set in stone.
• 1:07:09
  We know people, you know, people know and love these characters.
• 1:07:13
  We just have to do justice to those voices. Right, So I think
• 1:07:15
  that you know, the Adams Emily two and then in the animated series is
• 1:07:21
  a little bit different than the live action because they I think they are aimed
• 1:07:26
  more at kids. So it's then saying, okay, well, what's a
• 1:07:30
  story that honors the Adams family. Tradition and isn't pandering and isn't dumbing down,
• 1:07:35
  but also is something that is emotionally accessible to younger people that they can
• 1:07:43
  really look into and understand. And so then the question becomes, Okay,
• 1:07:50
  yes, it's great that these characters are sort defined, but we've also seen
• 1:07:54
  them in a lot of different circumstances over the years, and so it's like,
• 1:07:57
  what's left that we have seeing them do a million times before that we
• 1:08:01
  haven't explored fully. In this case, one of the premises of the movie
• 1:08:10
  is is Wednesday actually a member of the family, an Adams family, by
• 1:08:15
  blood, by birth or not? And that was and so it then became
• 1:08:20
  a question of, well, what makes an Adams? What isn't Adams?
• 1:08:25
  What is it a birth thing? Is it an attitude thing? Is it
• 1:08:30
  nature? Is it nurture u? Both of which I think the Addams families
• 1:08:35
  would not like. But but so that was the genesis of where that story
• 1:08:43
  idea came from. And then, like Benjie said, the characters are so
• 1:08:46
  defined that part for us was relatively easy because we felt pretty confident to write
• 1:08:54
  in the voices of these characters. Now, not everyone can be not everyone
• 1:09:00
  likes doing that, right, right, They want to create their own thing,
• 1:09:02
  right, right, They want to create their own thing. And it
• 1:09:04
  just so happens that we actually enjoy doing both. Sometimes we enjoy creating original
• 1:09:10
  new characters, and sometimes it's really fun to take somebody else's character for a
• 1:09:15
  spin and get to try out some things that you wouldn't normally. You know,
• 1:09:18
  I never thought I would get to write gomss jokes characters in all of
• 1:09:24
  anything. So it was a lot of fun in that respect, And it
• 1:09:29
  also felt like he didn't really feel like work because so much of the work
• 1:09:33
  had been done for us. Really, the bulk of the world was in
• 1:09:36
  the plotting and in the structure and the execution of that plot, as opposed
• 1:09:43
  to how is Goma is going to act? Here? What's a funny and
• 1:09:46
  professor bit? And then, you know, because this is animated, you
• 1:09:51
  can expand the range of what is possible for these characters physically. We'll be
• 1:10:00
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:10:09
  In cousin yeah you know, yeah, you know, you know,
• 1:10:14
  Bester slowly transforming into an octopus Creature's like it's one of those things where it's
• 1:10:20
  like in live action you would never really do. But in animation it's like,
• 1:10:28
  yeah, yeah, you can hear that as long as it feels consistent
• 1:10:31
  with the fester that we know, and in this case especially that you know
• 1:10:35
  that the kids are now familiar with. And we've been really fortunate that kids
• 1:10:41
  love. Yeah, I mean they love the movie and the first one they
• 1:10:45
  love. That's awarding for us to get to hear from people. My kid
• 1:10:50
  has already watched it five times. I I don't know. My daughter is
• 1:10:54
  obsessed with Wednesday, like obsessed with Wednesday. She's like, she's like,
• 1:10:58
  Wednesday's the coolest character. She's so and she is have I have a four
• 1:11:02
  year old daughter who just the other day she watched the movie for the first
• 1:11:08
  time and she loved it and she loved Wednesday and like, yeah, I
• 1:11:11
  mean for me, that was exact because it was like the first thing that
• 1:11:14
  we've written that my kids could watch right and I was thrilling in its own
• 1:11:20
  she was she was very proud. It was nice. No, yeah,
• 1:11:25
  so that's how you were, I would say, that's how we approached something
• 1:11:27
  like as family, which is you know, every project has its own idiosyncratic
• 1:11:32
  Sherylman and you kind of have to be adoptable and Taylor kind of what is
• 1:11:38
  required of you as a writer to what the project is and what the ultimate
• 1:11:45
  goal of each of those projects is. Now and obviously you were listening to
• 1:11:47
  the mc hammer song on loop while you were writing this, right the Adams
• 1:11:50
  Family, we did we did not listen to it. I'm gonna ask you
• 1:12:00
  a few last a few questions ask all of my guests, Um, what
• 1:12:03
  is the lesson that took you the longest to learn, whether in the film
• 1:12:06
  industry or in life. M h um, I would say that like that,
• 1:12:26
  it's sort of what I was talking about earlier, of like the the
• 1:12:31
  moments of defeat and the low point right in hindsight are actually every single thing
• 1:12:41
  that is it is a path towards victory in the end, or you know,
• 1:12:45
  it is a stepping stone. Like you you look at it as like
• 1:12:48
  this is the end, but really in hindsight you will see that like that
• 1:12:53
  was like that could have been a key pivotal moment and to not and and
• 1:12:59
  to sort of like allow yourself to remain open to that possibility even and try
• 1:13:03
  when we're in the moment now, I think we're now a little better because
• 1:13:08
  we now have this career that we can look back on it is happening again
• 1:13:11
  and again. Of like when a bad thing happens, we can now sometimes
• 1:13:15
  say, well, like maybe it's for the best because we made a good
• 1:13:18
  relationship here and we can still turn it into like it's not the end.
• 1:13:23
  It's not as like doom and gloom as it maybe was early on in our
• 1:13:28
  career. Yeah, it's great advice. What is what advice would you give
• 1:13:34
  a screenwriter trying to break into a TV or into the film business today?
• 1:13:41
  I think, you know, like I said, there isn't one path that
• 1:13:46
  is the path. So you should disabuse yourself of the idea that you can
• 1:13:51
  replicate anyone's journey, or that what you're doing is the way you have to
• 1:13:57
  do things, or what the way someone else did it. It's it's just
• 1:14:00
  not true. I think that the part of it that will always remain true
• 1:14:04
  is having something that you can a piece of material that you could share with
• 1:14:10
  people where you say, where you reach a point where you can say,
• 1:14:15
  if someone doesn't like this, I'm okay with that because I feel like I
• 1:14:19
  executed what I wanted to execute the best I could possibly execute it knowing fifty
• 1:14:26
  percent or more people who read anything that you write, including us, will
• 1:14:30
  just not like it for whatever reason. So you have to get comfortable with
• 1:14:35
  rejection. You have to get comfortable with judgment of things sometimes that are very
• 1:14:40
  personal to you. But my opinion is that if you write material that really
• 1:14:47
  is unique to your point of view, whether that is a personal, ethnic
• 1:14:53
  point of view, cultural society or class, whatever, some amazing experience that
• 1:15:00
  you had, some point of view or philosophy that you have that is unique,
• 1:15:05
  like Larry David, you know, something has a view. So when
• 1:15:10
  you when you can do something, when when what you have written really is
• 1:15:14
  a calling card into the shorthand of your being and your personality and the way
• 1:15:19
  that you look at things. That's the material that that inevitably is noticed and
• 1:15:25
  is passed around and is well received. And so don't chase trends, don't
• 1:15:30
  chase things like you think that you ought to do or think it a flea
• 1:15:35
  bag, right, like that was a play and that she wrote. But
• 1:15:41
  it would be hard to say, Okay, I'm going to write a fleabag
• 1:15:44
  that you know that's I don't think it really works like that. I think
• 1:15:47
  that probably she had something inside of her that she needed to express and and
• 1:15:53
  through, you know, because she's brilliant, you know like that it you
• 1:15:57
  know, it wound its way until suddenly she is Phoebe water Roage, you
• 1:16:00
  know, right, and Fleeback is Fleeback. But everyone I think has that
• 1:16:04
  thing inside of them that is extremely personal, extremely neat. That doesn't mean
• 1:16:10
  it mean it needs to be super serious or heavy. It just has to
• 1:16:15
  be from you and you alone. And once you have that piece of material,
• 1:16:20
  then you can and it takes time. Right, you may not hit
• 1:16:24
  on that piece of material the first time out or the fifth time out of
• 1:16:27
  the tenth time out, but if you make a little progress each time,
• 1:16:31
  now you're able to share that material with others, and the feedback that you're
• 1:16:35
  going to get is going to start to get better and better and better.
• 1:16:38
  And as the feedback gets better and better and better, the range of people
• 1:16:41
  who read it and the opportunities that are going to come your way are going
• 1:16:44
  to be are going to just expand. And so I would focus on that
• 1:16:47
  first and foremost, and then start to strategize about the nitty gritty of Okay,
• 1:16:54
  who, how do I network? How do I get an age that's
• 1:16:58
  all good, an important, but it doesn't really mean that much and it's
• 1:17:02
  not as high yield unless you have that that entry ticket, that is your
• 1:17:09
  script, that is your voice, your voice, you know. I think
• 1:17:13
  again, that's like write a brilliant script. It's like, yeah, but
• 1:17:16
  I think it's actually a little more nuanced than that. I wouldn't say the
• 1:17:19
  script that Benji and I wrote that got noticed by some of these people was
• 1:17:23
  a brilliant script, certainly not by our current standards, But what it was
• 1:17:29
  was a true script to who we were and the time that we wrote it.
• 1:17:32
  And I think that that came through in such a way that they were
• 1:17:35
  like, Okay, maybe the script itself isn't perfect, and we were not
• 1:17:40
  trying to emulate anything else. We were just writing ourselves on the page.
• 1:17:44
  And I think that's what excited people and sort of So there's a difference between
• 1:17:48
  like a perfect script and a script that is getting across the point of view
• 1:17:53
  and a person, especially in television, it's like if I read something that's
• 1:17:58
  not perfect, but it's really interesting, or I think that the brain behind
• 1:18:00
  it is really interesting. Nine times out of town, say, let's let's
• 1:18:05
  talk to this person. Let's see what what they're about. Because especially when
• 1:18:11
  I'm running a show, I don't need everyone to be the best at writing
• 1:18:14
  the show that I'm in charge of. They don't. They don't need to.
• 1:18:18
  I don't need their own personal material to be so perfectly brilliant that that
• 1:18:25
  you know, there's no criticism. But what I do need is to say,
• 1:18:28
  I think this person thinks in the right way, they have the right
• 1:18:30
  per episite amount of you know, technical writing ability, and if they're a
• 1:18:34
  cool person, and I like how they you know, they are, like
• 1:18:38
  if we vibe, I can teach them how to write how I want them
• 1:18:43
  to sure, sure, sure, And so I think that that's that that
• 1:18:47
  Yeah, that would be my miss. And last question, uh, kind
• 1:18:51
  of like rapid Fire three screenplays that every screenwriters should read or three pilots,
• 1:18:56
  three pilots that every screen shore read. It's a good question, should um
• 1:19:06
  three screen places or pilots that everyone should read? Okay? Uh, if
• 1:19:11
  you're a drama drama, if you're a dramatic writer, you should read the
• 1:19:15
  pilot of the shield yep Um. It's unbelievably good and it's just a special
• 1:19:24
  it's just a special script. It just does some things that are shocking and
• 1:19:29
  even to people who watch it now, it's it's unexpected and it's just not
• 1:19:33
  what you think it's gonna be. So that that would be one for drama.
• 1:19:39
  Um, you have one comedy. Uh, trying to think the pilot
• 1:19:51
  of I mean, I'm just thinking of a script that I think a brother,
• 1:19:55
  you're you may be surprised. The pilot of Blee is sexual. We'll
• 1:20:00
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 1:20:06
  show. It's it's truly it's nearly flawless actually, um, just in the
• 1:20:15
  way that it uses voiceover, in the way that it uses the integration of
• 1:20:17
  the songs, and the characters are clearly defined in a lot of characters in
• 1:20:21
  a period of time. It's very funny. It's really funny, you know.
• 1:20:25
  Um in many ways the high water mark of that show. And it's
• 1:20:29
  for me at least, it's really damn good. Um. So that's a
• 1:20:32
  pilot that jumps out at me as as a really something to study and to
• 1:20:38
  and to like just dig into what makes this thing work. And then as
• 1:20:44
  as a movie, Um, it really can't go wrong with Wayne's world.
• 1:20:53
  It's yeah, it's really really, really special. Yes, they're amazing performers
• 1:21:00
  at the heart of it, but if you really strip it down, it's
• 1:21:03
  basic components. It is an underdog story that is perfectly articulated, and every
• 1:21:10
  step of the way feels truthful and it feels real too. And the stakes
• 1:21:15
  while in the wider sense of the world are pretty low, to them,
• 1:21:19
  it means everything and sometimes that's that's a hard actually a pretty hard part to
• 1:21:25
  hit, which is like they're gonna lose their public access shop. That's their
• 1:21:30
  world, that's everything they have. But for Wayne and Garth, that is
• 1:21:34
  the world. Yeah, that's their world. That is the one area in
• 1:21:40
  which they feel special, the one area in which they are anything, coming
• 1:21:45
  from Aurora, coming from this town where there's not much in front of them.
• 1:21:49
  But what they do have is Wayne's world, and when you try to
• 1:21:54
  take that away from them, it is an existential crisis, and you do
• 1:21:57
  understand like what are Wayne of Garth without Wayn's world? And so there's a
• 1:22:03
  lot to really study, and there's all kinds of craziness in the movie.
• 1:22:08
  But the four emotions, the friendship at the heart of that movie, the
• 1:22:12
  idea of small town, the idea of having a dream. All of it
• 1:22:15
  isn't in that screenplay, and I just think it's remarkably good. Well,
• 1:22:19
  guys, thank you so much for your time and thank you for being on
• 1:22:23
  the show. It has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you
• 1:22:26
  for making Adam's family. Thank you for making Detective Pikachu. My daughters are
• 1:22:30
  very happy about that. Continue success to both of you, guys, and
• 1:22:33
  keep doing what you're doing. Guys. We appreciate you well. Thank you
• 1:22:35
  so much, very much. We're talking to really appreciate it. I want
• 1:22:41
  to thank Dan and Benji for coming on the show and dropping their knowledge bombs
• 1:22:44
  on the tribe. Thank you again so much. Guys. If you want
• 1:22:46
  to get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to
• 1:22:48
  the show notes at Indy Films dot com Ford Slash six seventy seven. If
• 1:22:53
  you haven't already, please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and
• 1:22:59
  leave a good review for the show. It really helps us out a lot,
• 1:23:01
  guys. Thank you again so much for listening. Guys. As always,
• 1:23:04
  keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there,
• 1:23:08
  and I'll talk too soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle
• 1:23:12
  podcast at Indie Film hustle dot com. That's I N D I E F
• 1:23:15
  I L M h ustl dot com.