Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 756: Confessions of a Hollywood Script Doctor with Peter Douglas Russell

Transcript

IFH 756: Confessions of a Hollywood Script Doctor with Peter Douglas Russell · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

• 0:03
  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle
• 0:14
  Podcast, Episode number seven fifty six. The Secret to writing a screenplay is
• 0:18
  keeping your ass in the chair. Oliver Stone broadcasting from the back alley in
• 0:24
  Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to
• 0:29
  survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz.
• 0:33
  And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of
• 0:39
  the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari.
• 0:42
  Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur. How to turn your
• 0:46
  independent film into a profitable business. It's harder today than ever before for independent
• 0:51
  filmakers to make money with their films from predatory film distributors ripping them off to
• 0:55
  huckster film aggregators who prey upon them. The odds are stacked against the end
• 1:00
  filmmaker. The old distribution model of making money with your film is broken and
• 1:04
  there needs to be a change. The future of independent filmmaking is the entrepreneurial
• 1:08
  filmmaker or the film entrepreneur. In Rise of the Film Entrepreneur, I break
• 1:14
  down how to actually make money with your film projects and show you how to
• 1:18
  turn your indie film into a profitable business with case studies examining successes and failures.
• 1:23
  This book shows you the step by step method to turn your passion into
• 1:27
  a profitable career. If you're making a feature film, series, or any
• 1:32
  other kind of video content, the Film Entrepreneur method will set you up for
• 1:37
  success. The book is available in paperback, ebook, and of course audiobook.
• 1:42
  If you want to order it, just head over to www dot filmbiz
• 1:47
  book dot com. That's film bizbook dot com. Now today on the show,
• 1:53
  we have script doctor, ghostwriter and consultant Peter Douglas. Russell is one
• 2:00
  of the most sought after script doctors in Hollywood and has worked with many big
• 2:06
  companies and studios working as a script doctor. And that is one of the
• 2:12
  reasons why I wanted to have Peter on the show, because I wanted to
• 2:15
  kind of do a deep dive in what a script doctor does and confessions of
• 2:21
  what a Hollywood script doctor does. Specifically, he's got stories and stories and
• 2:25
  stories about what he does, how he does it, and we also go
• 2:29
  over his process, his storytelling process called the story Maker. And I really
• 2:35
  think you guys are going to get a big kick out of this episode because
• 2:38
  it is plump full of knowledge, bombs without question. So let's get to
• 2:44
  it without any further ado. Please enjoy my conversation with Peter Douglas Russell.
• 2:52
  I'd like to welcome to the show, Peter Russell Man. Thank you so
• 2:53
  much for being on the show. My friend. Thank you, Alex big
• 2:57
  fan. I think that you've got a whole Joe Rogan thing going. I
• 3:02
  really think I see great things ahead. I appreciate it, sir, I
• 3:07
  appreciate it. Now, how did you get started in the business. Uh?
• 3:10
  Well, I was a theater director in New York, in New York
• 3:14
  City, uh and I was doing really well. And then I went to
• 3:17
  a Broadway show and I saw what the directors were making even though they were
• 3:24
  on Broadway, but they didn't have hits. And I realized I was going
• 3:28
  to be poor my whole life. And so, and I was getting married
• 3:32
  and my wife wanted to move to La she smell. I said, well,
• 3:37
  let's let's go out to LA because I don't think theater is gonna ever
• 3:40
  make I'm never gonna be able to buy a house. So then so then
• 3:44
  you said screenwriting, That's that's where the money is. Yeah, yeah,
• 3:47
  exactly, get rich quick scheme. It's screenwriting. Get rich in thirty years
• 3:54
  steam, yeah, exactly, or get rich never and live off so security.
• 3:59
  Yeah, that's you know, but yes, you're right, but that
• 4:01
  but of course, and then I'm an idiot like every other idiot, and
• 4:05
  decided to go out here. And then I lied my way into a job
• 4:10
  for CBS, working for Cinta. It's Akupo, who is a brilliant,
• 4:14
  brilliant producer of what back in the nineties was what was saving CBS. Which
• 4:19
  were the movies of the week that they had, which was the thing there
• 4:24
  and CBS was completely in the toilet and this and Suta was She's an amazing
• 4:30
  genius of producer. We made eighty movies a year close to it at CBOs
• 4:36
  and which is more than all the studios made. Granted they were three million
• 4:41
  dollar movies and still yeah, and they took six weeks. But I learned
• 4:46
  from her what commercial story was and how powerful commercial cinematic story is, and
• 4:56
  of course it was a genre. It was called the it's called the min
• 4:59
  or. No damn good movie, that's what we call those stories. Men
• 5:03
  are no damn good movies. So Lifetime basically so Lifetime, Yeah, yeah,
• 5:08
  I was. In fact, Lifetime took away the business eventually, and
• 5:12
  a lot of the execs hopped from CBS to Lifetime. But by then Lessman
• 5:17
  Vus was there and CBS is really coming back. But I learned just how
• 5:21
  to quickly. I was a script reader, and I learned how to quickly
• 5:27
  assess story, and I learned a lot about what makes great film story because
• 5:32
  movies were everything then. And I started doing these notes and then these notes
• 5:39
  I did script coverage, and then people would read it, and then the
• 5:42
  people that were making a movie would read it, the director and they say,
• 5:46
  hey, you know, this is really good. These notes are great.
• 5:47
  So what we got this problem? You said in third X, So
• 5:50
  what should we do? And I just started calmly, confidently telling them what
• 5:55
  to do. I didn't know, but I sort of got a knack for
• 5:58
  it. So then I started getting paid for my notes, and then I
• 6:03
  decided this is better than working at costco and if I can get paid for
• 6:10
  these notes, damn, that's fantastic. And so I started doing notes for
• 6:15
  directors and writers doing film and within about. It wasn't quick. It took
• 6:24
  me like five years. And I worked as a script reader while I was
• 6:28
  doing this too. So I worked as a script reader for Imagine. I
• 6:30
  worked for Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. They were amazing, amazing teachers,
• 6:38
  an amazing just geniuses at what they do. And I worked for Brian doing
• 6:45
  Brian was an amazing guy. If he's interested in something, he'll just buy
• 6:49
  all the books on it. He wanted Einstein series and eventually he did.
• 6:57
  But one of the things he decided he wanted to learn about was was quantum
• 7:00
  physics. So he got me to read several books on quantum physics. Now
• 7:08
  I'm an English major, right, so you know I'm basic math at Ralph's.
• 7:13
  You know that's it. I can't even do that. So but I
• 7:15
  had to boil down these quantum physics books into into coverage and I learned a
• 7:21
  lot. But he would he would commission and I learned a lot about movie
• 7:27
  story from him and TV story for him. He he was an omnivore.
• 7:30
  He would he would learn everything about a subject that he was interested in,
• 7:35
  and he had a Ron Bass was going to do the movie script on Anstein,
• 7:42
  and eventually this thing became what's now on I think National Geographic, which
• 7:46
  is a series a television series Einstein. But it was a long process and
• 7:50
  I just got to watch and also participate in his creation machine, which is
• 7:58
  an amazing thing to see because he was just he wants to learn everything about
• 8:03
  anything that interests him and then it eventually comes out in the story. So
• 8:09
  it was a great lesson in how you want to how your story gets informed
• 8:13
  by every piece of information about it that you can find. And I think
• 8:18
  it's why later on I got interested in historical stories. In this mini series
• 8:26
  that I just did on Jack Johnson was also a historical figure. Jack Johnson
• 8:31
  was the first African American heavyweight champion of the world, and I read everything
• 8:37
  I can get my hands on about him, because you know, Brian Grazer
• 8:43
  was sort of a guy who showed me, this is what you do.
• 8:46
  Your story will be so much more interesting if you know all this information.
• 8:50
  So anyway, so long story, even way longer, I started doing that
• 8:54
  and then eventually about I guess twelve years ago I started ghost writing for film
• 9:03
  for screenwriters, and I know credit, and that's often still how I work.
• 9:11
  I get paid, I get money, I don't get credit. I'm
• 9:15
  not even in the w GA, although I want to be, and that's
• 9:16
  going to be a stipulation. I think of a couple of jobs I have
• 9:20
  coming up I'd like to actually get in the w g A instead, and
• 9:26
  there's no real easy way to do that if you don't have your name on
• 9:28
  the scripts. But so for the last ten or twelve years, I've done
• 9:33
  a lot of ghosting for a lot of screenwriters who want help. So let
• 9:39
  me at least I'll be there for a second. That I've heard of,
• 9:41
  I mean obviously ghostwriters and novels, and I've heard of, you know,
• 9:45
  script doctors, which we're going to go a little bit deeper into script doctors
• 9:48
  in a second, but I've never actually heard of a script doctor screenwriter and
• 9:54
  a script a ghostwriter script a screenwriter, like like, are you writing full
• 9:58
  blown scripts we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 10:07
  to the show. Or you're just taking other people scripts and then really doing
• 10:13
  the bulk of the writing, and then they get to put their name on
• 10:16
  it. It's all all of that. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes it's someone
• 10:22
  who's gotten three drafts of a big screenplay or television now, which is obviously
• 10:28
  a lot of my work now is TV. But they haven't. They'll have
• 10:33
  three drafts, they've done a lot of work on it, but they want
• 10:35
  it to be better. So I'll come in and I'm essentially in those situations,
• 10:41
  I'm giving a lot of notes and I'm actually helping them realize in their
• 10:48
  vision. I don't go, okay, well, I think this characterity,
• 10:50
  this, this, this, and this that he's not doing it. I
• 10:52
  think we need the storyline here. That's something I've learned that often screenwriters,
• 11:00
  especially fairly successful ones, don't really want you to do They've got their own
• 11:03
  vision, and you sort of are there to deepen their vision and to really
• 11:13
  understand what they want now. At the same time, often what happens is
• 11:16
  I'll say, well, what if we had them do this? And then
• 11:18
  they'll say, yeah, that's great, and I love that idea for a
• 11:22
  scene, and I love this idea for a scene. And then sometimes you
• 11:26
  find yourself writing complete new storylines but it's always in service to their vision,
• 11:31
  and if you lose that idea, you can run into trouble because they don't
• 11:37
  want you to create a whole nother story. It's not like you guys are
• 11:43
  writing partners. They want their vision but better. But then there's also and
• 11:50
  this happens a lot with beginning writers, and I work with beginning writers too,
• 11:54
  especially if they if they hire me, I mean, I will work
• 11:58
  for money. And often people that are beginning, they do want to really
• 12:05
  sort of be shown what works, and they really want my ideas. But
• 12:11
  there's also of variations in that as well. Sometimes they really want their vision
• 12:16
  still on the screen. But then I'm teaching them because I am a teacher,
• 12:20
  you know, I've been a teacher at USA Licence two thousand and three,
• 12:22
  so I do, and I'm a very good teacher. I'm probably a
• 12:26
  better teacher than writer, to tell you the truth, I still feel like
• 12:28
  my writing is it's certainly not the equal of great screenwriters. I have sold
• 12:35
  projects in the last several years under my own name, and that's a great
• 12:39
  advance for me, but I don't feel like I'm anywhere near that. The
• 12:46
  kind of writer that you know, like Kraigmazina just did this. Chernobyl.
• 12:52
  I mean, you watch Chernobyl and you just go wow. You know,
• 12:56
  that guy's on a different level. He's just he's just amazing. So I'm
• 13:03
  very humble about my writing talents. It's taken me a very long time to
• 13:07
  sell. And I also I also know and it's always difficult to do you
• 13:13
  tell people this or not? This is always a dance I do. When
• 13:16
  I've got someone who's interested in doing this, what do you tell them?
• 13:22
  Do you tell them? Do you encourage them? Or do you tell them
• 13:26
  the absolute truth? It's a dance because you know, I've done this for
• 13:31
  twenty years and I'm only now really getting some success as a writer myself.
• 13:37
  You know. John Wells said that he wished when he started out, and
• 13:41
  Chris John Wilson is probably one of the greatest showrunners of all time. You
• 13:46
  know, does all kinds of fantastic stuff. I just saw his last season
• 13:50
  of Animal Kingdom, which he just penned a lot of episodes himself. She
• 13:54
  sounded believable. He said he wished somebody told him when he started out how
• 13:58
  long it was gonna take. Yeah, because I get people and you don't
• 14:05
  really want when you've got total newbies and they say, well, you know,
• 14:09
  I'm gonna in six months, I'm going to have this done. So
• 14:11
  we go, yeah, that's fantastic. Yes, yes, you got to
• 14:13
  aim for that, you got to go for that. But the truth is
• 14:16
  that most of the time it takes many, many years before you're any good.
• 14:24
  Uh. And obviously if you're a super Shakespeare genius, that's not true.
• 14:30
  But I only know one guy who sat down in a coffee shop.
• 14:33
  He was a comic. He sat down in a coffee shop and the first
• 14:37
  thing he wrote got sold. I know one guy who did that, and
• 14:41
  I don't know. And then I know a lot of writers and none of
• 14:45
  them did that. Okay, it's rare on both sides of the camera,
• 14:48
  Like it's you know, it's on for actors to be a blowout success right
• 14:52
  away, or for a director to be a blowout success or a producer.
• 14:56
  It's those are called lottery tickets. It happens once in a while, Like
• 15:00
  I had John August on the show the other day and John doesn't look so,
• 15:05
  how was it where? You know, was it really tough? He
• 15:07
  goes, You know, I was lucky. My first script got sold,
• 15:11
  but it doesn't happen. It just generally doesn't happen. I think you're completely
• 15:16
  right. I fall into the same world with independent filmmakers and even screenwriters where
• 15:20
  I tell them this is a long game. You cannot think this is gonna
• 15:26
  I've got a five year plan. I'm like, you're done like that,
• 15:28
  that's not enough time. Yeah, that's a five year plan to get me
• 15:33
  one place, but not all the way. Well yeah, I mean it's
• 15:35
  me And you mentioned John August. I mean he's you know, he and
• 15:37
  Craig Mason have an amazing podcast. And yeah, he's super talented. I
• 15:43
  mean I direct my students to him for just last week for some of his
• 15:46
  dialogue lessons. I mean, so yeah, a guy like that. You
• 15:50
  know, I don't put myself in that league at all as a writer.
• 15:54
  It was a painful, long process for me to even get where I am
• 15:58
  now as a writer. And I just think I'm still a baby. I
• 16:02
  really am, especially when it comes to TV, because TV is a complex
• 16:07
  beast and it's and it's where so much of my work is now. It's
• 16:11
  so much most of Hollywood's work is now. Although movies are coming back but
• 16:17
  so when you're doing television and you're paneling four or five six storylines, yeah,
• 16:22
  my head explodes. It's it's such a complex form. So I yeah,
• 16:26
  it's it's I guess if you're a super genius like John August or this
• 16:32
  guy that I'm not going to mention because he hasn't told me, I could
• 16:36
  tell him anybody about this. This comic guy who sold this and he's very
• 16:40
  successful on tell. He just sat down and wrote it. But ninety nine
• 16:44
  percent of the very successful writers that I know took a long time to do
• 16:51
  it. But yeah, there's exceptions. You know Nancy Pimental, who's an
• 16:55
  amazing writer on Shameless. You know, Nancy was a comic and and she
• 17:03
  just you know, she her rise. You know, she doesn't sweat it.
• 17:07
  She just sort of writes it out. And the other thing I've noticed
• 17:11
  about people, and I don't think Nancy would mind me telling this story about
• 17:14
  her. Nancy was a comic, but she's a stand up comic. And
• 17:18
  those guys always are super talented, super genius people. They're just to do
• 17:25
  that requires so much. But she she she got she sold a movie off
• 17:30
  of I think it was off of a pitch and it was and it sold
• 17:37
  for an astonishing amount of money. This is before the big crash in two
• 17:40
  thousand and eight, and sold for like a lot of money because that's when
• 17:44
  movie specks were just flying off the shelves and people with enormous amount And then
• 17:49
  these three brilliant actresses, top named actresses, you know them all, they
• 17:56
  all they even moved into Nancy's house because they were all going to be in
• 17:59
  the script and and they hung out with her, and they did and and
• 18:02
  and the script had insanely great buzz and where they were filming, it was
• 18:06
  like, this is the next thing, and you know, fantastic, it's
• 18:08
  going to be amazing, and all these actresses, uh, we're talking about
• 18:12
  and interviewing about it. And then the movie came out and it was a
• 18:17
  huge bomb, and the critics were were just vicious about it. Now,
• 18:23
  me, I would have crawled into my bathroom with you know, with a
• 18:26
  bunch of heroin. I wouldn't have come out for eating. Right, Nancy
• 18:30
  had a party and she invited everybody over to her house and to read these
• 18:37
  reviews and to watch the revies and she just laughed about them. And then
• 18:41
  she went and you know, and then she she just started writing her next
• 18:45
  thing the next day because she's a stand up comic. The stand up comics
• 18:48
  has a different they have a different resiliency to that because the day and I
• 18:53
  know a lot of stand up comics. I've worked with a lot of high,
• 18:56
  high profile stand up comics in my career. Uh and they they there's
• 19:03
  this, they're a special kind of animal like to get up on stage with
• 19:07
  a microphone and basically have the your voice, your ability is the only thing
• 19:11
  that's going to make them laugh and things. Even the biggest, most successful
• 19:17
  comics of all time all have bomb nights. They've all had bomb situations that
• 19:22
  they but they get used to it because it's day in, day out,
• 19:26
  every night. And that that makes perfect sense, makes perfect sense. That's
• 19:30
  great, you're absolutely right. I haven't thought about that, but you're right.
• 19:33
  They they're in the fire. They're in the fire every night. And
• 19:36
  yes, they get they get humiliated horribly where yeah, actors, writers,
• 19:41
  and humiliation is secondhand or whatever. They don't really get scalded, but it's
• 19:45
  not in their face. It's not in their face like a comic. That's
• 19:48
  right, that's right. I have never done stand up, and you know,
• 19:52
  I think everybody who hasn't done stand up will be right back after a
• 19:57
  word from our sponsor. And now back to the show. Who thinks they're
• 20:06
  funny? They have that fantasy that, yeah, they say it's really hard.
• 20:10
  But I know if I got up there, I'd fill it from the
• 20:14
  and I think that that is the siren song of disaster, right, And
• 20:18
  I still have that in my head. I got a secretly in mud I
• 20:22
  do. It's like, oh, you know what I'd be different. I'd
• 20:23
  get up there. I'd be the one guy who I've never done before.
• 20:26
  I would kill I just know I would kill it. And so, and
• 20:29
  you know what would happen if I got up there. It would be the
• 20:32
  biggest fucking sorry, the biggest disaster in history. It would be I'd be
• 20:37
  humiliated. Oh yeah, my face would be made fun of all my secret
• 20:41
  horrible embarrassments. People would shout them out. You know, That's what would
• 20:45
  happen. But you know, the funny thing is I was directing a comedy
• 20:48
  special for a comic friend of mine, and we were doing rehearsals before the
• 20:52
  audience came in, and I stood up on stage and grabbed the mic so
• 20:56
  we can get some lighting. You know. It was doing a stand in
• 21:00
  and I was I was looking out at empty seats, empty seats, and
• 21:04
  I'm like, oh, hell no, like this is this is terrifying.
• 21:10
  Like and I'm an outgoing guy. I can spitball. I'm great in a
• 21:15
  room. You get me in front, you know, at a party,
• 21:17
  you get me a corner with five or ten people, I'll have them on
• 21:18
  the floor crying. But this is and I've worked with enough stand up to
• 21:23
  understand the technical aspects of their storytelling, how they do it, how they
• 21:29
  deliver, the timing of it. It is. It is such a brutal,
• 21:34
  brutal experience, and you've got to be kind of nuts to do it.
• 21:37
  As a general statement. Oh, I think I'm fascinated by them.
• 21:41
  I think they're great, and I'm going to have to do it someday,
• 21:42
  just so I get that full horrible experience that I know is coming to me.
• 21:48
  That I dare to have the secret, tiny little sniggery hope. You
• 21:52
  know, the audacity, sir, Yeah, the audacity. I know I
• 21:55
  would be punished horribly for it. You know, I've always thought it would
• 21:57
  be fun to just have any guys like me, these arrogant twits who think
• 22:03
  they could do it, just get up there and give them three minutes and
• 22:06
  film it. I think the humiliation level might be compelling to watch. But
• 22:11
  you know, nobody, you know, do you know how much three minutes
• 22:14
  is? That is like a hour? Yeah? Yeah, one minute?
• 22:18
  You know, And yeah, I think that would be all you'd need.
• 22:22
  Yeah yeah, maybe all you could stand. Had to stay out three minutes.
• 22:26
  That might be part of the horrible fun of it is they had to
• 22:29
  stay out there even if you were being eviscerated. But yeah, I think
• 22:32
  that comics. And the thing about Nancy is that she's so funny and she's
• 22:37
  such a brilliant writer, and she's done so much great stuff on Shameless,
• 22:42
  but she just didn't. I mean, I admired the balls of someone who
• 22:48
  who could just get those kinds of horrible reviews and go forward. I don't
• 22:52
  even like, I can't even stand table reads. I have to take tranquilizers
• 22:59
  to have somebody, you know, I'm even when I've got the final draft,
• 23:03
  you know, voice up where they do the dog I don't even want
• 23:06
  to hear that. So I can't stand being having my stuff bomb. I
• 23:11
  can't even stand watching it at a table read. So I've got some work
• 23:15
  to do on myself now. And you obviously are a script doctor and you've
• 23:21
  done a lot of script doctor and can you kind of really explain to the
• 23:25
  audience specifically what a script doctor does and and and trying to kind of shine
• 23:30
  a light on the whole sub like this not subgenre, but the the the
• 23:37
  there there's a there's a very cultural subculture of script doctors that run throughout Hollywood
• 23:45
  that do a lot of a lot of heavy lifting that people just don't really
• 23:48
  know about. I know personally multiple big name screenwriters who have big scripts under
• 23:55
  their belt, but they have maybe three that have been pulped that have been
• 23:59
  produced, but they never stopped working, like they're always script doctoring or taking
• 24:04
  this assignment constantly. So can you kind of touch upon that a little bit
• 24:08
  so people understand Yeah, underworld. Yeah, the best way to describe it
• 24:12
  is I talked to the I can't think of his name, but he's really
• 24:17
  good guy over at the w GA about a year ago. I ran into
• 24:21
  him and we talked and he goes, oh yeah, he says, he
• 24:25
  said, we don't you know, we don't really have an official category for
• 24:27
  you guys. And he was kind of laughing, and I said, well
• 24:30
  you should. I mean, if you want more dues, you know,
• 24:33
  we should be able to be in the w Gas story doctors. And he
• 24:36
  goes. The problem, he says, is that the writers wouldn't like it.
• 24:38
  He says, because you know they don't want sometimes they don't want to
• 24:44
  acknowledge that you know, they didn't write the script. And even if just
• 24:48
  a story by credit, you know, it can rankle them. And so
• 24:52
  we there aren't enough of you guys to put up that new category compared to
• 25:00
  the source we'd get from the writers about it. Now, most a lot
• 25:03
  of writers aren't antagonistic about it, but they can't be insecure about it and
• 25:08
  not wanting to share credits. So what they tend to do shockings or shocking,
• 25:12
  yeah, shocking insecurity in Hollywood. But what they tend to want to
• 25:17
  do then is pay you. And so what you get into is a bit
• 25:22
  of a Fostian bargain. Well, it's not really Fastian because it's actually pleasurable.
• 25:27
  And I don't think you sell your soul. Maybe you do. Maybe
• 25:30
  it is fosting because it does delay your development as a as a screenwriter yourself
• 25:36
  because you don't get credit, but they pay it, tend to pay you
• 25:38
  a good amount of money to help them. And then but you don't get
• 25:42
  a credit, you don't get your name on the things, or any or
• 25:45
  any residuals or any benefits or any of the spotlight. You don't even have,
• 25:51
  you know, no health insurance, not because none of the w GA.
• 25:53
  So what I'm going to do in the next couple of years is I
• 25:57
  am going to take less mind for what I do, just so I can
• 26:00
  get a credit, so I can actually get on the book somewhere. So
• 26:06
  there is a sort of a surreptitious, furtive quality to script doctor, And
• 26:11
  it's a little bit shameful in a way. It's like a dirty It's like
• 26:14
  Hollywood's dirty little secret in a lot of ways. Well it's one of the
• 26:18
  cleanest dirty secrets home. Very true, very true. But yeah, yeah,
• 26:22
  but yes, in a sense, we are kind of a whoores in
• 26:27
  that sense, come in, we get paid, and we leave, and
• 26:32
  we leave and no strings attached, no acknowledgment made, which I think keeps
• 26:37
  it underground. But scory doctors are fine with that again, because the money
• 26:41
  can be very good, but it is when you if you want me to
• 26:47
  talk about what I actually do, it's really as varied as let's say you
• 26:52
  have a regular doctor and he sees ten people in a day. Well,
• 26:56
  he's going to do something different for every one of those persons because they're all
• 26:59
  sick, but they all have different things wrong with them. But then of
• 27:02
  course you can begin to see patterns there too. So there are things that
• 27:07
  are usually wrong with scripts, and you do look for symptoms. It's almost
• 27:12
  like you are a doctor. You can sometimes somebody just walks in and the
• 27:15
  way they walk okay, Well I think I know what that is. Or
• 27:19
  then you have to do X rays or cat scans, and I have several
• 27:23
  tools for that as well. So I will I will, I often ask.
• 27:29
  I often put the screenplay into a synopsis form because I like to see
• 27:33
  the bone structure of the story, and often the bone structure of the story
• 27:37
  is wrong, and if the bone structure is wrong, then everything else is
• 27:41
  wrong. And by bone structure, I mean things like storyline structure, what
• 27:48
  the characters do. It's often not right. Now, how do I know
• 27:53
  that it's not right? What am I comparing this cat scan too. What's
• 27:56
  the ideal script, ideal story? Well, there are wonderful, wonderful scripts,
• 28:02
  and I've read probably five thousand to six thousand features. I counted it
• 28:10
  up last year. I think about sixty five hundred features I've read and synopsized
• 28:14
  because I was a script reader for ten years, which is way longer than
• 28:18
  you should do it. Most people do it for a year or two and
• 28:21
  then they go into the business. Well, I was too stupid to do
• 28:23
  that. I just just kept reading more scripts and then I've read several thousand
• 28:29
  television scripts too. Of those, I've sort of distilled is what's good and
• 28:34
  what's bad. And believe it that the best scripts share certain traits almost always,
• 28:42
  no matter what the genre, no matter what the subject. And I'm
• 28:48
  not talking about French movies that don't follow Hollywood structure. Those are obviously out
• 28:52
  of my purview. You know, I love Godard, but he doesn't follow
• 28:56
  commercial structure, you know, And that's great that he doesn't, but Hollywood
• 29:02
  does. Because Hollywood has to sell. Hollywood has to sell to people all
• 29:07
  around the world. Hollywood doesn't have to ingratiate itself with film festivals or have
• 29:11
  political connections like so many European countries have, so that it isn't whether or
• 29:18
  not you can sell tickets that gets you your movie. It's who you know
• 29:21
  on a film commission or who or who you can get the money from politically.
• 29:25
  You know, those are great models for filmmaking. But Hollywood is commercial
• 29:30
  and so you have to sell tickets. So there are models that help you
• 29:34
  sell tickets. And by the way, I think selling tickets is the ultimate
• 29:38
  test of a great story. I mean, Shakespeare had to sell tickets.
• 29:41
  I think the reason Hollywood's so great, frankly, and I think Hollywood is
• 29:45
  great. The best movies are great, the best in the world, is
• 29:48
  that we have to sell tickets. We are not just trying to please a
• 29:52
  group of judges or a literary committee or a political committee. We have to
• 29:57
  sell tickets. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
• 30:06
  now back to the show. And yes, you can say, well that
• 30:11
  makes you a horror of China or whatever, and it does, but it
• 30:12
  also creates the very best movies. I think the very best movies in the
• 30:18
  world, A lot of them are Hollywood commercial films. So I've studied what
• 30:22
  those structures are and they're fascinating because they're not things that amateurs understand. These
• 30:30
  structures are actually really cool. And when I was just a professor at UCLA
• 30:38
  starting two thousand and three, I started showing these structures in class and I
• 30:45
  became pretty successful. I was teacher of the year there. I'm really proud
• 30:49
  of that because I had these I would and that's all I really did is
• 30:52
  I showed these patterns that I'd found in film and television. Now, I
• 30:56
  thought that was really cool back then, but I was still approaching things academically.
• 31:03
  When I started applying all these patterns to my work or to the work
• 31:07
  that I've started to get hired to do, I found that some of them
• 31:11
  were brilliant and helped me a lot to actually create story. Some of them
• 31:15
  were more film theory and academics, so that was fascinating to see as well.
• 31:22
  So anyway, as a story doctor, I've got these ideas of what
• 31:23
  makes a healthy, great body of story. And then I take an X
• 31:27
  ray of your body your story, and I go, oh, well,
• 31:30
  you know your bones out of alignment. You know, your femur doesn't hook
• 31:34
  up with your boobah, you know, and that can be. You know,
• 31:38
  you don't have a core wound for your hero, you don't have proper
• 31:45
  reflect your characters in your story, you don't have a good theme, you
• 31:48
  don't know where you're going in two of your storylines. They don't pay off.
• 31:53
  Thousands of things like that where I diagnose those, can you actually can
• 31:59
  you actually put to rest? Because I think a lot of especially first time
• 32:02
  screenwriters and even people who've been trying to get their stuff made for a long
• 32:07
  time, they fall into this camp of like, well, structure is going
• 32:10
  to take all the creativity out of this and it's going to be very formulaic,
• 32:15
  and I'm not going to write like that. And I've yelled at screenwriters
• 32:22
  often, I'm like, dude, it's just it's like a frame of a
• 32:25
  house. All houses have frames, but not all houses are the same.
• 32:30
  But you still need framing, you still need a structure. I like the
• 32:36
  frame metaphor. I have one too, which is that Hollywood commercial structure is
• 32:40
  like a vanity license plate. Okay, when you see a vanity license plate.
• 32:46
  The reason it's funny is that it's a limited form. It's a limited
• 32:53
  canvas, right, But the canvas actually dictates the humor. In other words,
• 33:00
  you see a guy driving a Porsche around and his license plate, I
• 33:04
  think you get eight words eight yeah, and his license plate says three inches.
• 33:08
  Okay, so that's that's funny, right, that's hilarious. It's funny.
• 33:15
  Now, imagine that the license plate could be ten feet long and it
• 33:20
  says instead of three inches, it says, I'm driving this Porsche because I
• 33:23
  don't have a large penis right, that's not funny, right, So you
• 33:28
  actually had more room to write something, but there's no entertainment to it.
• 33:35
  Yeah. Commercial form is a limiting form. You must in a movie.
• 33:42
  It's got can't be longer than two hours, unless you're James Cameron or Scorsese
• 33:45
  or Peter Jackson. Yeah right, Peter Jackson. But the exceptions prove the
• 33:51
  rule, and it can't be. It's got to have three acts, it's
• 33:54
  got to please the audience at certain points. It has to do those things.
• 34:00
  The genius of it really is figuring out how to write within that very
• 34:06
  limited form something that delights people, almost precisely because it's limited like a hip
• 34:13
  like almost like a high coup. Yes, just like a high coup.
• 34:15
  So commercial form is necessarily limiting. But within those limits is where you show
• 34:22
  your genius. It's like I made a ship in a bottle, right,
• 34:25
  Well, if you made the ship out of the bottle, big deal.
• 34:28
  You know anybody can do that. So you've got to follow this commercial form.
• 34:32
  But I find that sort of a delightful puzzle. Now. Having said
• 34:36
  that, you know, I used to be friends with Blake Snyder, who
• 34:40
  wrote Save the Cat, and Blake was a genius. But Blake knew,
• 34:46
  God bless him that his book Save the Cat was not sufficient to make to
• 34:53
  write a great movie because he didn't have anything to say about character. He
• 34:58
  didn't have anything to say about huge portions of what it takes to make a
• 35:04
  great movie. He had a structure. Yeah, And you can follow a
• 35:07
  structure exactly. I have something called the BMOC structure, which all my students
• 35:12
  know about. But it's sort of like the thirty sixty ninety. But I
• 35:15
  think it's cool. But anyway, you can do all that. You can
• 35:19
  follow structure, and like your folks say, oh my god, you can
• 35:22
  make such a boring movie. You can have a perfect BMO. You can
• 35:25
  have a perfect structure and make a terrible, terrible movie. You see it
• 35:30
  all the time, but most of the time you don't. Most of the
• 35:35
  time you have a lousy structure and it makes a lousy movie. But I
• 35:38
  tell people if they're starting to write, don't worry too much about structure at
• 35:43
  all. Do a vomit draft. Write exactly out what you think you want
• 35:47
  your story to be about. Just write it all out, write it out.
• 35:52
  Don't worry about, oh my god, i've got thirty pages for the
• 35:53
  end of the first act. I've got to have a cliffhanger here. I've
• 35:58
  got to do this. Write it, write it a couple of times,
• 36:00
  all out. Forget about anything. Don't write from a rule book. You'll
• 36:05
  kill yourself. And then when you sort of run out of steam and your
• 36:09
  your movie or your TV show is on the page, one or two things
• 36:14
  will happen. One you'll be that one in a million who goes, oh
• 36:19
  well it's perfect, here I go. You'll be John August or you'll be
• 36:24
  this guy I was talking about, Craig. Ninety nine point nine percent of
• 36:30
  you. And by the way, these are the people that are gonna make
• 36:32
  it. These are these are really smart, talented people. Ninety nine point
• 36:36
  nine percent of them will be like, oh, well, this is really
• 36:38
  just a heap of shit, and I've gone now I've got to make it
• 36:44
  better. And that's when you start looking at it and going, okay,
• 36:47
  well, I'm going to ask you some questions, and the question is going
• 36:52
  to lead you to maybe make get excited about this guy, or get excited
• 36:55
  about this setting, or get excited about this portion of it. We did
• 37:00
  a really good job. These people are really funny in this scene, so
• 37:02
  let's explore who they were and what they are. And then you'll start going
• 37:07
  okay, yeah, yeah, and you'll get re excited about the story by
• 37:10
  my questions or by the questions of anybody you collaborate with, or the reactions
• 37:15
  you get from them, and then you start going okay, wow, well
• 37:20
  I want this to happen here, and that's going to have consequences here.
• 37:23
  And by the way, then you're doing structure. Then you're working on structure.
• 37:28
  And but here's the truth. You're going to be rewriting this thing forty
• 37:34
  fifty, sixty seventy times. And that's another sort of hard truth that it
• 37:39
  can be hard to tell the beginner about because every beginner, me included,
• 37:45
  wanted to be John August. We all want to be the guy who just
• 37:47
  sits down writes it out. You know, you buy a book, like
• 37:51
  one of those great books you can get in the bookstore or on Amazon now,
• 37:54
  which says things like, you know, write your screenplay, you know
• 37:58
  while you masturbate, you know, right, was it writuscreenplay in thirty days
• 38:04
  or something like that, or you're in fifteen minutes. I saw one that
• 38:07
  said something that you can write your They implied you could write your script why
• 38:13
  you were on a break at the office right getting a drink from the cooler.
• 38:19
  And it's very attractive, and some of these people have a lot of
• 38:22
  really valuable things to tell you once you get that book. But the book
• 38:28
  title is bullshit. I'm sorry, sorry, the book title is bs.
• 38:34
  It just you know, unless you're the one in literally twenty million, you're
• 38:39
  going to have to work hard to get your script in shape, and you're
• 38:44
  going to have to write it a whole bunch of times. And that's when
• 38:46
  structure comes in. That's when storyline, when character, when premise, when
• 38:52
  all the stuff that I make a living doing comes into play. But yees,
• 38:57
  start from inspiration, don't start from a rule book. I think you'd
• 39:00
  kill yourself and it doesn't work. So many of the tools I use won't
• 39:05
  work for you. You have to I've got like fifty tools, and I'll
• 39:08
  see people come in and pick them up and they'll go, Okay, I
• 39:12
  really love this one. I think this will happen and it doesn't really help,
• 39:15
  and then there'll be another one that they pick up, like, oh
• 39:16
  my god, this has helped me so much. So everybody's different, but
• 39:22
  you are gonna have to eventually structure your story. Whether it's instinctive or not,
• 39:29
  you will have to structure your story because it is a commercial art point.
• 39:31
  Now, what is the biggest mistake you see first time screenwriters make.
• 39:36
  I mean, you have read sixty five hundred screenplays. I'm assuming you've seen
• 39:39
  a couple of patterns of mistakes. Well, the beginning scriptwriter has a completely
• 39:45
  different problem than the professional. The biggest problem beginning screenwriters have doesn't have anything
• 39:52
  to do. It's what's on the page. It has to do what's in
• 39:55
  their head. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
• 40:04
  now back to the show, and it is what we just said. They
• 40:09
  I often feel like I'm more of a psychotherapist than I am a writing guide
• 40:16
  for sometimes people that start out because when they get that crashing realization that this
• 40:22
  is not going to happen in two months, that the story that they were
• 40:27
  pretty sure. And believe me, I sympathize with this enormously. I had
• 40:30
  it too when I was a young guy, the idea that in two months
• 40:34
  I'm going to sell this on I'm going to be in Malibu. You know
• 40:37
  that, and that motivates you, and I love that it motivates you,
• 40:40
  and you know maybe that one in twenty million, you're going to win that
• 40:44
  lottery ticket and you're going to be that guy or that girl. But it's
• 40:50
  managing the disappointment of my clients for students learning that this process will take years
• 41:00
  that I find is the biggest mistake that beginning screenwriters make. They don't they
• 41:07
  underestimate how long it's gonna take, and then when they get a glimpse of
• 41:13
  how long it's gonna take, they crumble and maybe they and by the way,
• 41:17
  that can be a really wise move. Okay, they're like, you
• 41:21
  know what, I don't want to spend the next ten years of my life,
• 41:23
  you know, with four roommates who are all, you know, doing
• 41:27
  Chinese gong at four in the morning, and you know, and and I'm
• 41:30
  here because I and I got to work my my my messenger job. I
• 41:35
  don't want to do that. I'm gonna go be a CPA. I'm gonna
• 41:37
  have a nice life. I'm gonna have a house in Ventura and and you
• 41:42
  know, but they'll be miserable, I promise you. Yeah, well,
• 41:45
  you know, maybe they will. I am always open to wanting people to
• 41:50
  take the right path, but they got to know that it's a warrior path.
• 41:54
  It's a path with bushido. It is it's this. This is not
• 41:59
  yeah yeah, this is a path of bushido. This is not your standard
• 42:02
  issue. This is like going to med school. This is like this is
• 42:07
  like particle physics, you know. And and people say people in Hollywood,
• 42:13
  and it's a cliche that they're that there. There's a lot of dumb people
• 42:15
  in Hollywood who lucked into their success and they just do a few lines and
• 42:20
  they have a meeting and then you know, then they go to their house
• 42:23
  and they're done for the day. I have never run into smarter people than
• 42:28
  I have in home. They're just as smart as you know. I was
• 42:30
  in academia for a little while. They're very much smart as university professors.
• 42:36
  They're very much as smart as Wall Street guys. They're very much as smart
• 42:39
  as all the typical stud occupations that brag about how smart they are around the
• 42:45
  world. Hollywood is full of insanely smart people that to succeed. So it's
• 42:52
  it's path of bushido. Yeah, you're you're committing to a path where some
• 42:59
  of the most competitive people in the world are trying to do exactly what you're
• 43:02
  doing, and you've got to compete with them, and you've got to compete
• 43:06
  with their product. Now, what I find funny too, is that unlike
• 43:09
  the doctors, the lawyers, the CPAs, you can go down a certain
• 43:14
  path and when you graduate, most of the time you'll be able to find
• 43:17
  a job. You know, your doctors are pretty much set up to get
• 43:22
  a job. Lawyers, you know, it might be a little harder,
• 43:24
  but generally speaking, if you're even halfway decent, you're going to get You're
• 43:29
  going to get a job somewhere. CPAs. There's God knows we need more
• 43:31
  CPAs in the world. So there's always always I mean, we always work.
• 43:36
  But you can go to you can get a PhD in screenwriting, story
• 43:42
  and mythology. It means absolutely nothing in this business because it's a commercial business.
• 43:50
  Look, Hollywood doesn't give a shit. I'm just sorry, doesn't give
• 43:52
  a crap about your credentials, right, not a crap. And when people
• 43:58
  say because I teach you so and I love UCLA where I teach, because
• 44:01
  the school I teach at, You've got to be working in your field right
• 44:06
  now to teach screenwriting or story development. You have to be working now.
• 44:10
  You know, you can't have done it ten years ago. You can't just
• 44:14
  have an MFA from film school and then you decided you're going to teach at
• 44:16
  UCLA Entertainment Division Extension School. You've got to be working in your field right
• 44:22
  now to teach how to make a movie or television show. And for me,
• 44:25
  that is great. That's why I love UCLA because you're actually getting it
• 44:30
  from people who have to do it. And so I think it's people as
• 44:38
  often ask me should I go to film school? And that's of course a
• 44:43
  loaded question. Sometimes you should if you've got rich parents or you're wealthy and
• 44:47
  you want to learn a lot about film and maybe meet some people. You're
• 44:52
  going to work with in the future. Absolutely, you can go to film
• 44:54
  school. It's going to cost you probably a couple hundred thousand dollars to to
• 45:00
  do so, unless you're very lucky and get a full scholarship, and that
• 45:02
  can be extraordinary. And I know that USC is great, UCLA is great.
• 45:07
  But if you are an ordinary middle class person, it's it's a tougher
• 45:15
  question to answer because so much of what you do is going to be what
• 45:20
  you've learned just doing it. And it's do you want to be two hundred
• 45:27
  thousand dollars in debt and then coming out and then you're still in the same
• 45:31
  place or a similar place to somebody who hasn't gone to school at all,
• 45:36
  but who's really hustling it as a as a assistant, you know, in
• 45:40
  Hollywood. And obviously, if you've got you know, Hollywood parents and all
• 45:44
  bets are off, you've got to you've got a smooth ticket in. But
• 45:47
  most of us, you know, you gotta gotta think about that, is
• 45:52
  school really going to give you that much of an edge. I get a
• 45:55
  lot of people at my school that have gone to film school and they didn't
• 46:01
  learn what they thought they were going to learn. And I do think.
• 46:06
  I think if it's a third or fourth rate film school that costs a lot
• 46:10
  of money, and there are a lot of them out there, I'd be
• 46:15
  very careful about going to a school like that. Yeah, for screenwriting or
• 46:19
  for filmmaking there. But I do feel truly that there is so much information
• 46:22
  that you can self educate. You can take workshops, you can take extension
• 46:28
  classes, you can you can do what you need to do to learn the
• 46:31
  basics, and no matter all that stuff that they teach you until you're in
• 46:36
  the fire. When you're in the fire, when you're when the bullets are
• 46:38
  swinging by, flying by your head, that is when you learn. And
• 46:45
  I agree, right, totally agree. And most of the people I work
• 46:47
  with, a lot of them didn't go to film school and they're very successful.
• 46:52
  I mean, you know, the classic example everyone's fice is Spielberg.
• 46:55
  You know, you didn't didn't get into USC, although they claim as one
• 47:00
  now. But I was confused about that, but I really realized he didn't
• 47:02
  didn't go They turned him down. No, he didn't. He went to
• 47:05
  a community college for a little bit and then he dropped out of that and
• 47:07
  by the way, community colleges are fantastic place to learn your craft. Yes,
• 47:14
  I went to an Ivy League school, and I gotta say it was
• 47:21
  no better than for actually what you're learning practically. I think community colleges are
• 47:27
  often better, so better better ROI without question, I think they are.
• 47:32
  And I think the apprentice system, by the way, is a system that
• 47:37
  worked well for a thousand years. And I think being an apprentice, if
• 47:40
  you can get a gig in Hollywood, in an actual production company, I
• 47:45
  think that is just as valuable as going to film school or more. And
• 47:52
  the other thing that I realized about film school is that I don't know if
• 47:55
  it's because it's just the nature of institutions, but they took a long time
• 48:01
  to pivot to television story. They were teaching film story exclusively up till just
• 48:08
  a few years ago, even when the industry had really pivoted to television after
• 48:15
  two thousand and seven. The bottom fell out of my business, by the
• 48:17
  way, when we had that big crash in two thousand and seven, and
• 48:21
  all the independent film companies went away because the financing wasn't there anymore. We
• 48:24
  all had to pivot to television story. So yeah, I was going to
• 48:29
  ask you about that there has been an absolute explosion in long format streaming series
• 48:32
  and there's such a need for content. Do you really believe that that is
• 48:37
  where a lot of screenwriters and writers in general can Actually there's a lot more
• 48:43
  opportunity in those areas than trying to be a feature film screenwriter in Hollywood.
• 48:47
  Well, I'm sort of going to be a contrariant because yes, I agree
• 48:52
  with all of that. But having said all that, Apple is buying movies,
• 48:57
  Amazon's buying movies again. So these guys, these ips, these internet
• 49:00
  platforms, they're pivoting and buying movies again. But yes, of course you're
• 49:04
  right. For the last six years, I think we've gone from like two
• 49:07
  hundred scripted shows in Hollywood to like, it's a lot, a lot,
• 49:13
  it's a lot, it's a ton of them. And but yes, so
• 49:16
  a television story has exploded, and it's kind of like the Russian novel.
• 49:21
  I mean, is the longer they get, it's a sign of the the
• 49:24
  of the absolute, the the the the idealization of the form. Right,
• 49:32
  the television's long form. Television has become really our Russian novel. And it's
• 49:38
  I'm so amazed and happy to be able to be in a business at a
• 49:45
  time when there's such a boom in that story and then the stuff I've sold
• 49:50
  i've under my own name, they've both been television story. So yes,
• 49:54
  obviously the market is way bigger. We'll be right back after a word from
• 50:00
  our sponsor and now back to the show than it used to be. But
• 50:09
  do you think, but do you think that this is a bubble? Like
• 50:13
  do you? I mean, you know what everybody says, No, it's
• 50:15
  not a bubble, and that means it's a bubble. But I'll say it
• 50:17
  too, because I think television is just getting started, and it is because
• 50:23
  the means of distribution, right, it's just it's just all Internet now,
• 50:29
  and so those those classical distribution channels of the networks and theater they're over.
• 50:37
  So people have an enormous thirst for story. I've got students all over the
• 50:42
  world now because I a lot of my I teach international students as much as
• 50:47
  national now, because because hell, because of Zoom, because I can lecture
• 50:52
  anywhere, and in fact, most of the work I do is at my
• 50:55
  laptop now, even when I'm contracted for story doc and you know, I
• 51:00
  sit in my house and I do the work. I don't even come into
• 51:06
  to Hollywood much anymore so, and that sort of reflects what I think has
• 51:10
  happened to the entertainment business. It's a pipeline now that's infinite. It has
• 51:16
  no you know, the old pipes were like let's say the three inch pipes.
• 51:21
  They carry so much water per per hour. You know, those are
• 51:23
  your networks, that's your movie theaters. Well, the pipes now can be
• 51:28
  eight hundred feet wide. Because it's the Internet. It's just how much data
• 51:34
  you can pack. And so people's appetite for entertainment is insane and it's getting
• 51:39
  bigger, and we've barely scratched the surface. I've got a Nigerian client now
• 51:45
  who's they're starting a new television network in Nigeria. So Africa is almost untouched.
• 51:50
  I have a client coming up, a film client that's in South Africa
• 51:54
  doing a show and they're they're and they're building a studio in in a city
• 52:01
  in Africa that has never had production before. I don't think obviously things are
• 52:08
  going to crash, and there'll be a crash. Obviously, this bubble will
• 52:12
  pop, probably because our financial markets will pop and they're the ones that fund
• 52:19
  a lot of Hollywood now, and that's what happened in two thousand and seven,
• 52:22
  I think is when the stock market crash all that indie money fell out
• 52:27
  of film development. That'll probably happen again, you know, but it'll come
• 52:32
  back because we are thirsty for entertainment in our world, and so yeah,
• 52:38
  I think it's going to get bigger and bigger. Having said that, just
• 52:43
  let me caution again. This is an insanely difficult business to get your story
• 52:50
  even in front of people who matter. It's, if anything, Hollywood's gotten
• 52:54
  more closed off in the last few years than ever. I used to tell
• 52:59
  my students, hey, you know when you want because I teach a class
• 53:01
  on how to become a script reader on Peter russellscript doctor dot com. It's
• 53:06
  one of my most popular classes, and I used to tell people at the
• 53:09
  end, Okay, so now here's how you get a script reader job.
• 53:13
  You know, you go on IMDb pro, you get it. It's twenty
• 53:15
  bucks through a month, and then you look look up all the production companies
• 53:19
  and you see what they've got green lips, So that means they've got money.
• 53:22
  If they're making movies. They can't lie about it. They're making movies.
• 53:25
  That means they've got money and they're the people that are going to hire
• 53:29
  you. So just go on there. Find those companies. And then you
• 53:32
  look and you say, okay, hey, way they get a director of
• 53:34
  development, here's the email. Well guess what. A couple of years ago
• 53:37
  they stop putting their emails up on imbro and now they're not even phone numbers
• 53:45
  there. I tried. I was trying to pitch an exec I used to
• 53:47
  work for, and I couldn't even find out what building he was in anymore.
• 53:53
  And I couldn't find his email, his old email, and I couldn't.
• 53:57
  I still haven't gotten a hold of our tourro because I don't know what
• 54:00
  buildings. I don't know the company works for. I know I know where
• 54:02
  the building is, Physically I can't. I literally can't contact our TUW because
• 54:07
  I don't have any way to do it. So they've sort of shut down.
• 54:13
  And I don't know why this is, but they've sort of even more
• 54:15
  recently shut down all ways to get in touch with them. So you've got
• 54:22
  a lot of frustrated creators out there that I have to tell every day.
• 54:24
  Look, I'm sorry, it's really tough. Would you recommend that, you
• 54:30
  know, like I always tell people that if you're a screenwriter, you should
• 54:34
  try to start, you know, developing your own projects and producing your own
• 54:38
  work because that's a great way to get seen, because you're stepping yourself out
• 54:44
  of the crowd, because not everybody does that. Yeah, yeah, yes,
• 54:47
  and yes right yeah. Look. I was at a big film mark
• 54:52
  recently, and I noticed that the way people sold their work. If they're
• 54:57
  new, they have a three trailer on their iPad, and they go up
• 55:01
  to the sales agent or the manager or the of the agent, and they
• 55:06
  shove it under their nose and go, look, here's here's what we did.
• 55:08
  They don't even give them a log line, they don't even pitch them
• 55:12
  a script. They thrust this image under their nose. And so for two
• 55:16
  minutes, this guy will watch their sample reel and it isn't a sizzle deck.
• 55:22
  It's an actual excerpt of their show. Let's say it's for women.
• 55:24
  They want to make the new friends. They've shot it in their apartment in
• 55:29
  New York City. They're in bedsty and they've they spent maybe five grand total
• 55:32
  on a on an eight minute episode, which is a great way to pitch
• 55:37
  now to Netflix and stuff, and then they take it to the sales agent
• 55:42
  and they just thrust it under their nose and the manager to go, here,
• 55:45
  here's what we did. Here's we've already got it on. We've already
• 55:47
  got it down in the can. That's how people were selling at this mark.
• 55:52
  That's how that's who. That's who Netflix was interested in. And they
• 55:55
  weren't interested in many of those, but they were in some of them.
• 56:00
  But if that's the way people are doing it now, not Oh, I'm
• 56:02
  going to take my log line and my script sample and I'm going to do
• 56:06
  a pitch, a verbal pitch for you know, four minutes in front of
• 56:12
  a manager an agent. They want to see that trailer. They want to
• 56:16
  see it, and otherwise you're And that's if you can get a hold of
• 56:21
  them. I mean just getting in front of a Netflix person. We were
• 56:25
  We did that a few months ago for for for this Jack Johnson mini series
• 56:30
  that we sold, and the guy listened to the pitch and he said,
• 56:34
  well, where's your trailer. No, we don't have a trailer. I've
• 56:37
  got this little picture of Jack Johnson. You want to see it? And
• 56:39
  then he he and then he said, okay, so how much are you
• 56:45
  going to ask what do you want to how much you're going to ask for?
• 56:49
  If I was going to buy this, what what would you what would
• 56:51
  you tell me the price was? And we were so dumb we hadn't even
• 56:53
  thought of that, Jesus. And so finally my partners is this wonderful guy
• 57:00
  just said well what do you think? And the guy gave us the figure
• 57:05
  and he said, here's what you here's what you asked were never asked for.
• 57:07
  Lesson is So it's it was just it was fascinating to see, you
• 57:13
  know, the selling end of this. How how difficult it is just to
• 57:16
  get in front of one of the people that can that can get your project
• 57:22
  done. It's very tough. I'll tell I'll tell you, I'll tell you
• 57:24
  what I actually got. I was reached out by Amazon Studios reached out to
• 57:29
  me about a project like Out of the Blue, which is which is insane,
• 57:32
  right. So I get a call Out of the Blue and they're like,
• 57:35
  it's Amazon Studios, we'd like to set up an appointment all this stuff,
• 57:38
  and I'm like, great, this is insane, right wow, And
• 57:42
  the project never happened. But but I did have multiple calls with them,
• 57:46
  and then I spoke to some high level executives at Amazon. But every time
• 57:52
  they called me, the phone number was different. Every I'm not I'm not
• 57:55
  kidding you. Every time I got called, their phone numbers were different,
• 58:00
  and I and then to the point was when this whole you know, we
• 58:02
  went through this whole project and it didn't go through. I can't get anybody
• 58:07
  back on the phone. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
• 58:10
  always the way it is. They're they're very super paring on. I'm sure
• 58:14
  they have to be, yeah, because everybody is trying to pitch them.
• 58:17
  And even if they approach you, they still like, eh, you're still
• 58:21
  not part of the team yet. Yeah. Yeah, you know, hey,
• 58:23
  watch out, be careful, don't don't get too close to me.
• 58:25
  I'm standing here, but I could go away at any moment. It's it's
• 58:30
  it's it's hilarious, but you know, But but I find that that I
• 58:35
  a lot of a lot of people are still teaching the old ways of doing
• 58:38
  things, which is that log line, the elevator pitch. And that's fine,
• 58:42
  and they're still pitchfests and all of that kind of good stuff, But
• 58:45
  what sets people apart is what you just said. If you have a trailer,
• 58:50
  if you have a real a sizzle reel, something that a producer or
• 58:55
  a production company or somebody can see, and you have a good story and
• 59:00
  you have a good script, that's almost I feel that that is the new
• 59:06
  norm, and that's where we're all going. Like, if you don't have
• 59:08
  a sizzle reel, if you don't have four minutes of a scene, if
• 59:13
  you don't have a trailer, you won't even walk in the door, even
• 59:15
  if you can find the door. Yeah, and I've got a class in
• 59:20
  how to make a webisode, and I always urge people to take this class
• 59:23
  because the webisode form is an ideal way to show off your skills to a
• 59:29
  TV producer. It's a very short form. You've got to do a lot
• 59:35
  of things in it. You got to do what I call a BMOC,
• 59:37
  a sequence set. There's all these things you need to do in your website,
• 59:42
  and you really should study it because, as you said, this is
• 59:46
  how you get the job. Now. You don't do it with a pitch
• 59:50
  off a three by five card. And maybe next year that'll change again,
• 59:53
  but this is the current market, and yes, you and by the way,
• 59:59
  you only learn that by going to these marks and seeing how it actually
• 1:00:02
  works. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now
• 1:00:10
  back to the show. I don't think too many people are teaching that because
• 1:00:16
  just the nature of the beast is that they they are behind the times.
• 1:00:21
  The other things you can do is is, obviously you can put your shit
• 1:00:23
  up on YouTube. And I have to say, the one of the main
• 1:00:29
  reasons I have that I get my jobs is word of mouth. But also
• 1:00:34
  I've got a lot of interviews now up and I get people contacting me.
• 1:00:38
  I got my current manager because she saw me on YouTube, and of course
• 1:00:46
  she hates me. I hate her, you know, she tells me I'm
• 1:00:51
  horrible. I tell her she's horrible. We have a classic dysfunctional manager relationship.
• 1:00:57
  It's just, you know, that's just kind of what it is.
• 1:00:59
  I mean, this business is so full of and I don't mean she really
• 1:01:02
  hates me, and I don't really hate her, but there's an antagonistic relationship
• 1:01:07
  you have with the people that are supposed to help you sell because their job
• 1:01:14
  is so difficult because you don't know so many things they know about the business,
• 1:01:17
  and you don't want to know. So you've you've, You're always it's
• 1:01:23
  always an interesting day. This is never there's never a dull day. I've
• 1:01:28
  never had a dull day in Hollywood, but always exciting. It's full of
• 1:01:32
  shouting and anger and but also greatness. So I don't have great advice on
• 1:01:39
  how to get a manager an agent. It seems it's almost like you almost
• 1:01:45
  have to. It's like a real estate agent. You almost have to have
• 1:01:47
  a beautiful, big house and then I'll come talking. Right, It's exactly
• 1:01:52
  it, It's exactly because if you don't, it's like that's a great analogy.
• 1:01:57
  Imagine if you're going to go get a real estate agent, like I
• 1:01:59
  need a real estate agent or new real estate agent. When you finally get
• 1:02:01
  one, they're like, well what do you have. I'm like, I
• 1:02:02
  have this idea for a house. Yeah, exactly. And you know,
• 1:02:07
  I often people always say, you know, to me when I do similars
• 1:02:12
  and stuff, they go, well, you know, okay, just assume
• 1:02:15
  I've got a great script. How do I get an agent or manager?
• 1:02:17
  And I said, that's like saying, okay, look, let's assume I'm
• 1:02:22
  a great brain surgeon. So am I going to do your surgery on you.
• 1:02:24
  How am I going to? That assumption is insane. I mean,
• 1:02:29
  if you have a great project, if you why not be Why not have
• 1:02:32
  a great project before you think about an agent or manager? Because I think
• 1:02:37
  some people think that Hollywood is a place where once you get in the door,
• 1:02:39
  everybody's the same and ah, okay, I love your project. I
• 1:02:43
  don't even need to see it. Here's your money. But the first thing
• 1:02:45
  I will tell you is, well, what okay, I'm a big agent.
• 1:02:50
  You're meeting me. What do you have to sell me? And people
• 1:02:53
  don't want to think about that. Sometimes they just want to think, well,
• 1:02:58
  once I get that agent, I'll be able to write something great.
• 1:03:00
  Well you got to write something great, you really do, and it can
• 1:03:04
  take you years before you even ought to think about an agent or manager.
• 1:03:07
  I know people don't want to hear that. They want to shortcut it.
• 1:03:10
  And there's some people in Hollywood, by the way, who will help you
• 1:03:15
  with that delusion. They'll say, well, we're going to get you in
• 1:03:16
  a room with a bunch of famous agents and managers. That's that's what we
• 1:03:21
  offer here. We offer access to you, and people will pay money to
• 1:03:24
  get into that room. But then they don't have anything to sell. They
• 1:03:28
  just they're not going to just like the person. The agent's not going to
• 1:03:31
  go you know what, I like the cut of your jib boy? You
• 1:03:35
  know god, Well, that's the myth that Hollywood has been selling since you
• 1:03:38
  know what's her name was found at at that ice cream bar back in the
• 1:03:44
  thirties or four actor by the way, And yes, actors do advertise themselves
• 1:03:49
  on their bodies. I mean, if you're gorgeous, then that's sometimes all
• 1:03:53
  you need to be for an agent or fascinating looking, because that's a product.
• 1:03:59
  That's a product that they can it's the product right there, and they'll
• 1:04:00
  take you. Writers don't have that. Most writers aren't gorgeous. A few
• 1:04:05
  of them are. Actually, my friend Nancy, how dare you, sir?
• 1:04:09
  How dare you believe me? I'm not gorgeous either. But even if
• 1:04:14
  we were, then we might want to be actors. And that's fine.
• 1:04:15
  But our product is internal or it's on a page, so we we have
• 1:04:20
  to have that product. Our equivalent of a beautiful face is our story.
• 1:04:25
  And and you got to realize you're not going to get an agent or a
• 1:04:29
  manager on the on the force of your personality, or your charm, or
• 1:04:33
  even your hustle. You know, I had a I had a manager tell
• 1:04:38
  me the other day. She said, Look, she said, I don't
• 1:04:42
  ever accept any manuscripts from anybody unless they're a friend of a client. And
• 1:04:47
  she said, and the reason is if you're talented, you have talented friends,
• 1:04:53
  and you're and so that's that's the only that's my filter is if I've
• 1:04:58
  already employed you, you're already an actor or a writer who's working for me,
• 1:05:02
  then if you've got a friend, they'll be talented too. So that
• 1:05:06
  is I guess the good news for someone who's a networker, maybe don't try
• 1:05:12
  to meet managers of agents, but maybe try to meet talented people and befriend
• 1:05:16
  them. That can be a way to use networking to your advantage in Hollywood.
• 1:05:23
  If you're a writer, have talented friends, Now would you would you
• 1:05:28
  suggest? And I know this is a very out there concept, but how
• 1:05:32
  about in spending instead of spending the time chasing a manager or agent, how
• 1:05:36
  about spending that time on the craft and becoming a better craftsman. Yeah,
• 1:05:41
  I mean that's the obvious answer, and that's the one I always give that,
• 1:05:45
  and that's correct, but people are thirsty for so many jobs are about
• 1:05:50
  who you know they really are. And Hollywood can be of course too.
• 1:05:54
  If you're a rich kid and your dad's the head of a studio, then
• 1:05:58
  your your path is is smooth. It won't be easy, but it'll be
• 1:06:01
  smooth. But for people who really want to say, well, I'm a
• 1:06:05
  hustler, I want to be able to hustle, how do I hustle in
• 1:06:08
  Hollywood, I would say, yeah, don't try to hustle a manergation,
• 1:06:12
  hustle up some friends, some talented friends you think are going places. If
• 1:06:15
  they get representation, then you can say, hey, Dale, you know,
• 1:06:20
  here's my script, give it to her. And this manager told me
• 1:06:24
  that the other day. She said, I do believe if you're talented,
• 1:06:27
  you've got talented friends. So I just I'll read a script. If one
• 1:06:30
  of my existing clients has a friend that has a good script and they say
• 1:06:33
  it's good, I'll read the script. But yeah, otherwise, it's very
• 1:06:36
  difficult to come into this town as a writer and network your way into gig.
• 1:06:45
  It doesn't work because at the end of the day, you have to
• 1:06:46
  have the goods. You have to have the goods, whether it's a product
• 1:06:50
  that you've already created or multiple products you've already created to prove that you have
• 1:06:55
  the goods. But they're not going to take you on the word just because
• 1:06:58
  you're a nice guy. They're not going to go, you know, I'm
• 1:07:00
  gonna give you that first shot on the next Marvel movie because you were able
• 1:07:02
  to get to me and I like you. It doesn't work. That way
• 1:07:05
  doesn't work. And by the way, there is a slot for those people,
• 1:07:09
  but it's it's your it's your brother, or it's your cousin, or
• 1:07:13
  it's your son or daughter. I mean, nepotism in Hollywood is huge,
• 1:07:18
  So you're not going to get in there anyway. Even if they do like
• 1:07:20
  you, they're that slot's already full. It's the nepotism slot, you know.
• 1:07:26
  And and and yes, that that's that's not gonna work either. But
• 1:07:29
  hey, having said all that, you know, the business is bigger than
• 1:07:31
  it used to be. It's a really actually a really good time to be
• 1:07:36
  entering as a writer. You just have to realize that it's also still insanely
• 1:07:43
  hard. It's the door is slightly a jar. Actually the door is not
• 1:07:48
  a jar. Anymore. It's just inside. The roof the house is bigger,
• 1:07:53
  but the door is still really hard to but more people are trying to
• 1:07:56
  go through that door too. I maybe, yeah, maybe, yeah,
• 1:08:00
  you're right. I think I think you're right. You know, when I'm
• 1:08:00
  at UCLA in the coffee shop and I'm sitting there and the entire university is
• 1:08:08
  all there, right, it isn't just film people. Everybody's talking about their
• 1:08:12
  television show or their screenplay. They're all you know, even if they're pre
• 1:08:15
  med or pre low. Everyone's got a show. And yeah, I think
• 1:08:19
  entertainment has become just overwhelming. It's exciting. I mean, I love it.
• 1:08:25
  I love I love what the business we're in. I think it's an
• 1:08:29
  amazing, fun, wonderful business. And yeah, and so a lot of
• 1:08:34
  people want to do it, for sure, But those ninety percent of those
• 1:08:39
  people won't really be your competitors because they'll they'll either stop when it gets really
• 1:08:45
  hard, or they're too sane to take the take the notion that they're going
• 1:08:54
  to do something for five or six or ten years that may completely not pay
• 1:08:59
  all right, you know, saye people who think about their iras and retirement
• 1:09:08
  and you know, and kids, you know, saying people don't really enter
• 1:09:11
  this business. We're all insane, without question, you have to have a
• 1:09:15
  little We're carnies, as I always say, we're carnies. Yes, that's
• 1:09:18
  what I say too. We're comfortable, you know. We're those guys you
• 1:09:23
  saw, you know, smoking next to the tilta world. You know when
• 1:09:25
  you were in high school they got with Popeye tattoo on their arm, who
• 1:09:30
  looks like they take your wallet. That's us. That's basically what we are.
• 1:09:34
  And you've got to be a little insane to be in this business.
• 1:09:38
  There's no que I mean, I've been in it twenty five years and I've
• 1:09:43
  seen a lot, and the one thing that's common is that everyone's nuts,
• 1:09:47
  and there's very smart nuts. But you've got to have a little bit of
• 1:09:51
  insanity to do this, because, like you just said, if you just
• 1:09:56
  sell the pitch of you're gonna work for ten years. We'll be right back
• 1:10:00
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. On
• 1:10:10
  something that you have absolutely no guarantee that you'll ever be successful at, and
• 1:10:14
  it has nothing to do particularly with you. Possibly you might be a genius,
• 1:10:18
  but the breaks might not happen. Yeah, but chances are the genius
• 1:10:24
  part's important. But look, I deal with this as as a professor all
• 1:10:28
  the time. I have to tell and I don't tell people this, but
• 1:10:31
  I should tell people this. I wrestle with it all the time. And
• 1:10:34
  in any fine art this is probably the case. But one to two percent
• 1:10:40
  of you are going to succeed. One to two percent of a class maybe
• 1:10:45
  not even that. Now, how do you palatably tell people that? It's
• 1:10:49
  very difficult? But the fine arts have always been that way. They're very
• 1:10:55
  demanding. There's not many jobs, so you have to go into it with
• 1:10:59
  the idea that it's going to make you a better person. And also,
• 1:11:03
  you couldn't not do it, you know, and this is cliched advice that
• 1:11:08
  everybody gives, but it's true. If you cannot do it, don't do
• 1:11:12
  it. If you can, if you can avoid a career and show business,
• 1:11:15
  avoid it because you'll you'll probably be more content at least in the short
• 1:11:23
  run. But if you can't avoid it, those are the people that should
• 1:11:26
  do it, because you're you're never going to be happy being a CPA.
• 1:11:31
  If you've got that burning desire, you're just not you'd rather be, you'd
• 1:11:34
  rather want to. Hey, I might end up being an uber driver.
• 1:11:38
  I mean, I don't know. You know, I've sold some stuff,
• 1:11:42
  but only in the last couple of years. I did this for twenty years
• 1:11:45
  without really having my name on anything that's sold. And you know, I
• 1:11:50
  made enough money to live on, thank God. And most people don't even
• 1:11:55
  do that. But because you do need a side hustle usually. But and
• 1:12:00
  that's why screen that's why script reading, by the way, can be a
• 1:12:03
  good good thing because you can do it at home in your jammi's and you
• 1:12:05
  but you can't. You've got to live a really small life. And by
• 1:12:09
  the way, while all your friends are having their kids and there, and
• 1:12:12
  they're by, they're driving the Mercedes, and they got their big homes and
• 1:12:15
  there, and they're going to France in the summer and and they're doing this
• 1:12:18
  and doing that, you're gonna be in your rent control department in West Hollywood
• 1:12:21
  eating peanut butter. You know. I just always like to lay out the
• 1:12:27
  most dire career. So so peanut butter, what what what are we?
• 1:12:30
  What do we? What are we? The Rock, the Rockefellers. Peanut
• 1:12:34
  Butter exactly, it's Romen, sir, it is Roman top Ramen whatever.
• 1:12:40
  Yeah, it's that's what it is. But you know, Jerry Seinfeld said,
• 1:12:44
  you know, he was interviewing the South African comic who yeah, yeah,
• 1:12:51
  yeah, and and the guy said, he said, when you get
• 1:12:55
  up and and and he said, I get up at h I get up
• 1:12:59
  around the seven pm, and then I go to clubs. I go to
• 1:13:02
  five clubs and then I get home at eight in the morning. And Seinfeld
• 1:13:08
  said to him, Oh, you're you're, You're a classic. You're gonna
• 1:13:12
  be just fine. You're you're gonna this is gonna be your your your life,
• 1:13:16
  and you're gonna do really well. And of course he has, uh,
• 1:13:19
  but that's the sort of pure dedication that this sort of thing requires.
• 1:13:28
  Did you Did you ever see the documentary Giro Dreams of Sushi? No,
• 1:13:32
  but I heard of it. It's it's a fantastic documentary about this master sushi
• 1:13:38
  chef who's whose restaurants in a subway. He's the only uh sushi chef ever
• 1:13:44
  to get a Michelin star, that's how good he is. Wow. And
• 1:13:47
  when he got way in Japan, he's like in a subway somewhere in Japan,
• 1:13:51
  and it's like takes three months to get it a get get a reservation,
• 1:13:56
  and basically you walk in, you you say nothing in whatever Jerro gives
• 1:14:00
  you, you eat and that's basically it. But but your life will change
• 1:14:03
  once you do it. But what the reason I'm saying is, if you
• 1:14:06
  want to be an apprentice with him, it's a seven year apprenticeship and you
• 1:14:13
  have to agree to seven years. I think it's seven or ten years.
• 1:14:15
  I'm not sure. I don't remember exactly. But what I found really fascinating
• 1:14:19
  is because you know, this is exactly what happens with screenwriters and filmmakers is
• 1:14:24
  they want to jump in. They're like, oh I want to I want
• 1:14:26
  to jump on that techno crane and let's let's start moving the camera. I
• 1:14:29
  want to be like Scarsese and everything, like calm down, calm down,
• 1:14:32
  Sorkin, just calm down for a second. Their apprentice in order to touch
• 1:14:38
  fish. Because if you're a sushi apprentice, you're assuming that you're going to
• 1:14:43
  touch a fish, right, yeah, ya, you don't touch fish for
• 1:14:46
  three years? Ah you no, no, no, you're cooking rice.
• 1:14:53
  Oh my god, you have to cook the rice. You have to master
• 1:14:58
  rice first before you're ever allowed to touch a fish. And that is what
• 1:15:05
  we hear in our business need more of and need more understanding of that You're
• 1:15:11
  going to have to write and write a lot, and you can be true
• 1:15:15
  a lot. That's true. And you know that. My my, what
• 1:15:18
  I see a lot and I did this myself, is I would think about
• 1:15:24
  writing more than I wrote, and I think there there's six months a year
• 1:15:27
  I go by. Aye, you know that's a fantastic idea. I just
• 1:15:30
  have to write it down. And there's a lot of that in the biz,
• 1:15:33
  which is that you know, you don't actually get to the on the
• 1:15:36
  page. You don't hear that much writing, and that's a really bad thing.
• 1:15:43
  And a lot of I think a lot of people when they feel like,
• 1:15:45
  oh why amn't gotten anywhere, you say, well, how much have
• 1:15:47
  you actually written? You write every day? No? I write once a
• 1:15:50
  week. I write when the spirit moves me. Then you know it's they're
• 1:15:55
  not cooking that rice, right, They're just not cooking the rice, and
• 1:15:59
  and and so so. Yeah, And I think I also had a person
• 1:16:01
  that had a lot of money, they had a trust fund, and they'd
• 1:16:03
  wanted to be a screenwriter for like twenty years, but they'd actually only written
• 1:16:10
  one script in that entire twenty years, so there wasn't that urgency. Yes,
• 1:16:14
  you got to write, you gotta do your thing. And that's why
• 1:16:15
  I think it's great to apprentice with someone and really just start doing scenes and
• 1:16:20
  start and pick up the camera and make something, you know, make a
• 1:16:26
  TikTok. You know, even these commercial forms that are now prevalent in social
• 1:16:34
  media where you have thirty seconds to make your movie or forty five seconds to
• 1:16:39
  make your movie or TikTok, I don't think that's fifteen or twenty. Those
• 1:16:43
  impose discipline on you and they make you need to tell a story in that
• 1:16:48
  form. And it's all about that discipline. So yeah, cook the rice
• 1:16:53
  man. That's a good metaphorm. Now I'm going to ask you a few
• 1:16:56
  questions. Ask all my guests. What are three screenplays every screenwriter should read?
• 1:17:01
  Oh wow, well, okay, are we talking film or are we
• 1:17:08
  talking television? I mean, give me, give me a couple of film
• 1:17:13
  and one television one. Okay, well, I think one of the greatest.
• 1:17:21
  Okay, so so there's I have to go too with TV. One
• 1:17:28
  is the Wire and I think you should read The Wires entire first season,
• 1:17:34
  which I guess his cheating because he hasked one script, but and also read
• 1:17:39
  the Wires story Bible because Simon is and I don't know if you've seen The
• 1:17:44
  Deuce, his newest one of the Duces. Simon is one of the most
• 1:17:48
  brilliant journalistic writers there are. He creates worlds and his dialogue is extraordinary.
• 1:18:00
  It's so naturalistic it almost feels like a documentary documentary and that's true of all
• 1:18:11
  of his work. But if you want the most sort of brilliant naturalistic storytelling
• 1:18:17
  you can find around, I think he and and then also Chase. So
• 1:18:27
  in television, I really think there are three great guys you want to you
• 1:18:32
  want to want to study. Yes, one of them is Is Simon,
• 1:18:39
  the other one's David Chase and the Sopranos, because again the writing is extraordinary.
• 1:18:44
  And then I think that Matthew Weiner also it is a brilliant teller of
• 1:18:54
  television story. I think that I'm sorry, I'm gonna go Vince Gilligan.
• 1:19:00
  If you want to study the hour form of television form. Vince Gilligan is
• 1:19:06
  just the greatest at what he does I still teach the pilot of Breaking Bad,
• 1:19:13
  Breaking Bad, because structurally it just it just shows you what an amazing
• 1:19:19
  writer was. Now, I will also tell you that I think for network
• 1:19:23
  television, I think you can study John Wells. I think the way that
• 1:19:28
  Wells writes is amazing, and it's sort of a different kind of of of
• 1:19:32
  storytelling on network. So so those are the guys that I would I would
• 1:19:41
  really recommend there sort of the classics, Okay, and then I think,
• 1:19:47
  by the way, Phoebe Waller Bridge also television writer Fleabag. Phoebe Bridge is
• 1:19:55
  an extraordinary writer. Well be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:20:04
  and now back to the show. She's just she's probably the best new television
• 1:20:12
  writer we've got. She comes out of playwriting, as a lot of these
• 1:20:15
  guys do, and then for for for screenplays, gosh, there's almost three
• 1:20:25
  to come to mind. Three to come to mind. Okay, Well,
• 1:20:28
  this is one that I don't know how much he's gonna help you. It's
• 1:20:30
  Charlie Kaufman. I love Charlie. I love Charlie, but she's he's so
• 1:20:34
  he's such a singular genius. He doesn't follow structure really although he really kind
• 1:20:39
  of does. But it's difficult, but I love him. I can read
• 1:20:44
  his stuff all the time. And and so I also, well, I
• 1:20:51
  think that there's so many I think that probably well, well, yeah,
• 1:21:00
  that's going true, Okay, So in I think that Robert Town, I
• 1:21:04
  do think that the the the Mystery Thriller is such a potent vision. So
• 1:21:14
  I I would I would say Town as classic. Uh And and then I
• 1:21:17
  would I think the Cones. I think Joel and Ethan Cohen are probably the
• 1:21:27
  greatest filmmakers that we have right now. Of course they write television two uh.
• 1:21:33
  And if you like action, I think Christopher mcquarie. I often use
• 1:21:39
  his stuff for modeling action, Alan Ball anything. I almost feel more by
• 1:21:46
  writers than by because it's what helps me. And and Alan Ball has been
• 1:21:55
  an enormous help for me in a drama that I'm I'm writing right now.
• 1:22:00
  Steven Zaleen is amazing. I'm sort of a classic. I've been I've been
• 1:22:05
  reading William Goldman's scripts, who is a sixties screenwriter, and he's his world
• 1:22:13
  building and his his cinematic style is is just amazing. I love Brian Helgeland.
• 1:22:20
  There was three three, Sir three, there's three. Sorry, sorry
• 1:22:27
  I went nuts, by the way. That's there's like forty more that are
• 1:22:30
  just about as good. So but yes, but you know, I I
• 1:22:34
  think that, yeah, that'll do. Okay, okay, good. Now,
• 1:22:38
  what is the lesson that took you the longest to learn, whether in
• 1:22:40
  the film business or in life, how hard I have to work? I'm
• 1:22:50
  I'm kind of lazy, and I think it's probably the reason that took me
• 1:22:55
  so long to succeed. I'm kind of lazy, and I have delusions of
• 1:22:59
  grandeur, so I kind of want to be a big deal. But when
• 1:23:04
  I see the work involved, I'm like, oh god, damn, let's
• 1:23:08
  just let's let's have a joint. So I think learning how to work super
• 1:23:14
  hard was the toughest lesson for me in life and also as a writer.
• 1:23:18
  You know, the first thing I ever wrote when a big prize and I
• 1:23:23
  thought that was really cool, and I was twenty years old, and I
• 1:23:27
  thought that I was home free. Man, my life was going to be
• 1:23:30
  fantastic. And it was the worst thing to have ever happened to me because
• 1:23:35
  I didn't have a good work ethic and I thought I was a genius and
• 1:23:39
  I see a lot of people with that who want to go into Hollywood.
• 1:23:44
  They think they're a genius and that's going to be more important than their work
• 1:23:48
  ethic, And the appalling truth is it's not. And a work ethic is
• 1:23:55
  everything that your boy scout master and all those nasty adults that were so boring,
• 1:24:00
  all the things they told you about that life was about that you sneered
• 1:24:04
  at if you were a little rebel like me. Turns out they were right
• 1:24:11
  that that hard work is an enormous important part of success. And yeah,
• 1:24:16
  now what does what did you learn from your biggest failure? Oh? Okay,
• 1:24:23
  Well, I wrote a book that I wrote three quarters of a book
• 1:24:29
  when I wanted to be a novelist because that was my first big love.
• 1:24:31
  And it was picked up by probably the most prestigious publisher in New York,
• 1:24:36
  even though when it was it was even just halfway done. I got a
• 1:24:40
  big agent. I just sent her the first chapter and she says, oh
• 1:24:43
  my god, you're the next whatever. And then she sent it to this
• 1:24:46
  press and they said, oh my god, you're amazing. We had a
• 1:24:50
  meeting about you. We wanted, we want you to come to New York.
• 1:24:54
  Blah, blah, all this wet dream crap that you never imagine is
• 1:24:57
  going to happen to you happened to me, And and then I couldn't finish
• 1:25:01
  the book, even though the publisher flew me out to New York and said,
• 1:25:08
  hey, we're going to sit down with you and walk you through the
• 1:25:10
  outline, something my agent said had never happened in her old career. This
• 1:25:15
  guy, he asked how much he loved my vision and said, I could
• 1:25:17
  never finish the book. But why well, And this goes to structure and
• 1:25:23
  what we talked about earlier, what you were saying about structure, and what
• 1:25:26
  people think about structure. I think what happened is I had written the first
• 1:25:31
  half of the book purely on instinct and adrenaline and pleasure. I didn't have
• 1:25:36
  a clue in my head what was going to happen next. And then I
• 1:25:41
  got halfway done, and I should have just finished. But I got halfway
• 1:25:45
  done, and I thought, oh, well, you know, I got
• 1:25:46
  to get an agent. We got enough here. I read in a book,
• 1:25:49
  have you got a couple of chap you just send it out? So
• 1:25:51
  I sent it out. I sent half the book out and got the agent,
• 1:25:58
  got the publisher got it all and then they said, this is fantastic,
• 1:26:00
  We can't wait. I got an advance. Then I went back.
• 1:26:04
  I was living in Tapanga, and I went back to my little cabin and
• 1:26:09
  for the next six months everything I wrote was shit, sorry, crap,
• 1:26:15
  because I have this structure now in my head. Now you've got to do
• 1:26:18
  this, this and this. Now your hero has to do this, this
• 1:26:21
  and this. And I couldn't get my hero to do any of that stuff.
• 1:26:27
  All the entertaining effervescent tone because it was a comic novel was gone.
• 1:26:32
  Nothing he did it was all leaden. It was my It was awful,
• 1:26:38
  And three times the publisher tried it came in with a new plan. Oh
• 1:26:43
  that's terrible, Peter. But you're aid, it's gonna You're gonna do it.
• 1:26:45
  Here's another plan, here's another you didn't. So structure can sometimes kill
• 1:26:51
  you. And that's why I imagine I say, when you're writing your script
• 1:26:58
  and you're cooking, don't quit. Just get it all out on the page.
• 1:27:03
  Ride your excitement as long as you can. Maybe you'll be done.
• 1:27:10
  And even if you're not done, you'll have this whole work on the page
• 1:27:14
  that's of a piece that isn't about oh, gotta plug in column A,
• 1:27:18
  gotta do B, got to do C, because that can kill your creativity.
• 1:27:24
  So yeah, that's what I learned from my biggest failure. Don't try
• 1:27:30
  to rely on books and structure and stuff you read. Just ride your own
• 1:27:38
  excitement as long as you can, and then you'll have to go to structure
• 1:27:44
  and stuff. And by the way, Hollywood story is such a complicated form
• 1:27:47
  that the chances are you're not going to get the whole thing out and you
• 1:27:51
  are going to have to have And this is the last thing i'd say,
• 1:27:55
  if you can have a collaborator, have a collaborator. This is such a
• 1:27:59
  lonely bit business and it's so hard. If you can have somebody who helps
• 1:28:02
  you, who you're co writing with, I've seen it many times because that's
• 1:28:06
  kind of what I get hired to do. Sometimes. I'm your professional friend,
• 1:28:10
  I'm your screenwriter, but I'm also your friend in this business. You
• 1:28:13
  know I'll help you at this if you can have a collaborator. So many
• 1:28:16
  people do. And the reason is this is so hard, and doing it
• 1:28:21
  by yourself can feel terribly lonely. So having a part it's not till I
• 1:28:28
  got partners. By the way that I really sort of started having some success
• 1:28:31
  under my own name. Now, where can people find more about you and
• 1:28:35
  the work you do? Okay, well, it's just this simple. It's
• 1:28:41
  my last my first and last name, Peter Russell script doctor dot com.
• 1:28:46
  That's it, Peter Russell's script doctor dot com. That is where if you
• 1:28:53
  go to Peter russellscriptdoctor dot com. That's where all my classes are, my
• 1:28:58
  lectures. I've studied most genres, and I have lectures in every genre on
• 1:29:05
  my site, and they talk about all the things. I've observed that the
• 1:29:12
  greatest writers in this genre, whatever the genre is, love stories, rom
• 1:29:15
  comm's, action, whatever, the common patterns are that these guys and girls
• 1:29:23
  use. I show you those patterns. And I've noticed that when I give
• 1:29:28
  a writer these patterns when they get stuck in their story, if they're writing
• 1:29:31
  a rom com or they go and they look and they see, oh,
• 1:29:35
  that's what this guy did at this point. Oh my god, And this
• 1:29:39
  is how this guy created this character. And this is how these lovers fell
• 1:29:43
  in love, and this is how they this is when they fell out of
• 1:29:46
  love, and this is why and this is what almost every great romantic comedy
• 1:29:51
  character has in them every time. So we'll be right back after a word
• 1:29:58
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And some of those
• 1:30:06
  things will, in my experience, they will set your heart to glow,
• 1:30:13
  and they'll fire you up again, and you will be excited about your project,
• 1:30:18
  because you know, like Picasso said, you know, talented people borrow
• 1:30:24
  geniuses steel and I do think that. And these aren't structural patterns, although
• 1:30:30
  those are in some of them. These are tricks. These are tricks that
• 1:30:34
  the greatest people like Tarantino use in his story. There are tricks. They're
• 1:30:39
  tricks with guns, their tricks with knives, they're tricks with the suspense,
• 1:30:44
  their tricks with the way you enter a scene and get out. He stole
• 1:30:47
  so much of what he did from nineteen seventies drive in film directors who have
• 1:30:55
  a whole bag of tricks that he uses in all of his works. And
• 1:31:00
  he stole from classics too. But you want to steal stuff, and you
• 1:31:04
  can't patent suspense devices. You can't patent what Hitchcock did. You can't patent
• 1:31:09
  what Lowland does. You can't patent what Tarantino does. They're there for you
• 1:31:14
  to steal, and I just show you the big glass case of things I've
• 1:31:17
  stolen. Hey, would you like to try this? You know, here's
• 1:31:20
  a plot device. Man, I think you love it and you go,
• 1:31:25
  okay, I'll try that. Let me have one of those and two of
• 1:31:27
  those. It's like when John Wick goes in to get his guns, you
• 1:31:29
  know. So that's kind of what I've got there on that side. It's
• 1:31:32
  a glass cabinet full of tricks you can steal. Peter. We can keep
• 1:31:36
  talking for at least another two or three hours, I know for sure,
• 1:31:40
  for sure, but I do appreciate you taking the time and dropping knowledge bombs
• 1:31:45
  on the Tribe today, and it's been very educational without questions. So thank
• 1:31:48
  you so much for being on the show. My friend, dude, I
• 1:31:51
  love your show and I think you're performing a real service and it's been really
• 1:31:58
  entertaining and fun. So yeah, I've been really appreciative. Thanks for your
• 1:32:02
  intelligent questions. I want to thank Peter for coming on the show. I
• 1:32:06
  really appreciate all the insights that you brought to the Tribe today, So thank
• 1:32:12
  you, Peter. If you want to get links to Peter's work, his
• 1:32:15
  little tricks of the trade that he offers on his website for you guys to
• 1:32:19
  take a look at and steal as he puts it. Head over to the
• 1:32:24
  show notes at any film unscole dot com forward slash seven fifty six, and
• 1:32:27
  if you haven't already, please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe
• 1:32:32
  and leave a good review for the show. It really helps us out a
• 1:32:35
  lot, guys. Thank you again so much for listening. Guys. As
• 1:32:39
  always, keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out
• 1:32:42
  there, and I'll talk to you. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film
• 1:32:45
  Hustle Podcast at Indie film Hustle dot com. That's I N D I E
• 1:32:49
  F I L M h U S T l E dot com.