Take 21 - Graphic Novelist and screenwriter Bryan Hill, Titans and Batman and the Outsiders

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for sure, dozens of unproduced scripts littering the floor.

SPEAKER_03 0:14

All of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

For every success, there is months, sometimes even years, failure. This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

That's the default thing we have to be able to persevere. Like everything in our business here, hands in the out. That bounce takes care of that doesn't happen overnight.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

I was being told by my manager it's yours to lose. And I promptly lost it. And I remember thinking like, well, that's it for me. I blew my one big shot. What I've realized from that moment is it's never one big shot. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

So welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. I am still in lockdown, although I'm now half vaccinated, so life is looking half better than it was before. Noah, how are things in Hawaii?

SPEAKER_03 1:16

Hawaii's doing great. I apologize if you hear a barking dog in the background and some chickens. There seems to be some livestock issues in my yard, but uh otherwise it's hot, humid, and very beautiful here in Hawaii. Um, as always, I say this every time, and I have no way around saying this because I am equally excited every single time we have somebody on, but I'm very excited to introduce this next person onto our podcast. Uh it's screenwriter and graphic screenwriter, TV writer, and graphic novelist, and many other things, Brian Hill. Uh, not only has Brian wrote the screenplays for the feature films Gone at Universal and Just Cause 2, he also wrote the upcoming Zone 414 starring Guy Pierce, and is re and also is working on the recently announced Power Rangers movies. He's written for television on such shows as Ash versus the Evil Dead and the Titans. And he's written a ton of graphic novels and comics, uh, including a run of Batman comics for the little known graphic novel company DC. Welcome, Brian. Thanks for having me. This is great.

SPEAKER_04 2:24

Wow, you make me sound like I've accomplished things. That's that's nice.

SPEAKER_03 2:27

Now, now, I normally don't open with a personal story, but neither you nor Dan know this story. It's a failure story, and it is directly connected to you, Brian. And you don't, you'll have you have no idea what's coming. But about a year ago, I got a call from a, let's just keep them all anonymous, but a large graphic novel company who also is a movie studio. My eight my reps got a call and they wanted to meet with me. And this is not, I'm not in this part of my career where I will normally be getting these kind of calls where they're not trying to push me on somebody, but in fact, they came to me and came to us. And I had no idea why. Uh, turns out that they had been given a script of mine from their sister major studio, sister studio that I had just done a project with. And they had a few graphic novel properties that they were looking to adapt. And one of the, and of the four that I read, the one I connected to the most was one that you had written. And I'll sort of keep it anonymous for now. We can talk about the titles later. I'm not sure where they are in the world and how they're being developed. But uh I was excited. I love, I really love this, this, this thing that you wrote. And I got into the weeds, and it's really an interesting process where you're trying to mind meld a little bit with somebody else because you wrote it. I'm trying to stay in the spirit of what this thing is, but you know, bring a TV version to it and how do we make this thing work? And I spent, I don't know, two to three weeks uh on this sort of pitch deck for them. And I they they were okay with me just pitching it, but I really wanted to impress them because I was like, this was a big deal. And I uh turned in my take on I I don't know what day it is. I'm I'm guessing it's a Thursday. The next day, and I didn't hear anything the next morning in the trades, both major companies are dealing with huge restructuring, firing like it was a bloodbath at one of these companies. And I think every single exec that I met with had been fired. I never heard back. There wasn't even a response to the email after I turned it in. It was like this thing had just completely disappeared. And it it was heartbreaking as these things can be. Uh, but what it did do is sort of connect me to your writing in a sort of really intimate and engaged way. And I realized, you know, for the first time, but probably not for the last time, uh, just how talented you are. So I just want, I wanted to open up with sharing that story and getting the conversation going about failure, but then wanted to ask you a direct question about failure. Uh, do you have a personal, like what is your favorite? Do you have a favorite failure story in this business?

SPEAKER_04 5:10

Oh, wow. Well, well, first, thank you for your kind words. I really appreciate that. Um, and I will have to uh uh, you know, after game time, you know, talk about that so I can know which one you were talking about. But yeah, I mean, uh a lot of my path has been defined by adversity, right? Like it's uh I can almost sort of chart my path through these very difficult moments where you know you kind of question everything. You know, I think this is going way back. But you know, if you imagine me, I'm an NYU, I'm graduate, I'm getting ready to graduate from film school, I'm broke, I'm like flat broke. I can barely afford tuition, right? And I'm clinging to any sort of sense of identity as a creator. And I remember I was working for a, I probably shouldn't name her, but I was working for a uh Emmy Award-winning producer. I was an intern at her company, very small company, new company. And she gave me an opportunity to write a pilot for a television series that she had an idea for, wanted to do a thing. I, as I recall, it was like uh the paper chase in film school. It was, you know, supposed to be kind of a renegade, coming-of-age film school student kind of thing. Um, very much my wheelhouse. I wrote the script, really poured my heart into the script over a weekend, uh, you know, trying to put it all together and pilfered a lot of personal experience with the script, turned it in, and she read it like a day. The next day she called me into her office and told me that I had no talent as a writer. Uh, she didn't know what NYU was teaching me, but clearly they weren't teaching me how to tell a story, and that it was a good idea for me to consider doing something else in the business while I was still young enough to make the change. So um, you know, that was a big formative moment because that was like getting kicked down the stairs in a way, right? Um, but the nature of my personality is uh maybe because I'm a Taurus, maybe it's because I've been reading Marcus Aurelius for you know most of my life since my adolescence, but you know, you just factor that in and say, well, you're wrong. You know, in your mind, you say, Well, you're wrong. Um, but clearly I missed the mark somewhere. So I just need to figure out what I was doing wrong, right? So um, you know, that was probably my first real experience of, oh, someone just tried to take all of my dreams away. They tried to crush me, like literally, right? Um, you know, since then, like I'll tell you another one. Um, again, I don't want to get into like the the weeds of like who's involved. So I'll strategically talk around the details, but I had an opportunity um to adapt a very large IP with a lot of producers on it that were people I really admired. And it was a project I was doing for a big studio. And I had written a draft based on the conversations that we had, you know, the pitching and everything you need to and all the meetings. Um, and I thought, you know, I managed to put in a lot of things in there. And uh when I turned it in, one of the notes I got was can you make the female character less interesting? And I was like, what? You know, and so it was it was really destabilizing because I had worked really hard to try to make sure that you know the characters all had different like levels of growth and everything else, and you know, and so that was that was another moment where you know you hit a brick wall of something that doesn't really have to do with the merits of what you're writing, it has to do with like the cultural perspective involved in all of it. And I wasn't really prepared for that. Um, you know, so that was a that was a major thing, and then um, just real quick, before I I worked on Ash versus Evil Dead, I you know I hadn't worked in a little bit, like in a year and a half or something, I was totally running out of money, right? So um there was a period before what I would consider the second wind of my career when I had like nothing. I was in LA and it was all falling apart. You know, I had to pawn my still camera to make my rent that month, right? It was like that bad. Um, you know, so yeah, it's there's there's always been, I think, these kind of you know, uh thresholds of adversity I've had to go through. But what's always kept me focused is I don't believe in failure. Um, I think failure is uh only result of quitting. And everything else is just an iterative step on your way to succeed, right? So I consider every setback a lesson. And my my my mantra is don't learn the same lesson twice. So I don't mind failing, I just don't want to fail the same way two times, right? Like I try to fail differently every time so that I'm learning and kind of growing. Um, but yeah, like those are the those are the ones that really, you know, you know, come to mind. You know, I mean I had comic books that fell through that I thought I was gonna be able to write and didn't, you know, we always have the the we're gonna we think we're gonna get hired to write a thing, we won't, you know, all those things.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

But yeah. So I think this podcast has reached a stage where because guests know what it's all about now, I think we don't need Noah and I because you've basically just done all of you've given us three different types of failure, your way of responding to us without us having to ask any questions. This is making our job very easy, but in some ways we're failing um because it's been made too easy. But let me just go back to the first one. So you're young, you're working for somebody who is successful and you respect, and uh you and as you put it, you know, you you pour your heart into this. So, and this is the thing, you know, it's not just it it's a real this is you, and she's uh giving you criticism, which isn't just you know, I don't like what's on page seven, and this character could be different. It's it's the proper this is not for you, this career sort of at all. In the moment, if you can cast back to it, like what did you actually say in response to that?

SPEAKER_04 11:49

You know, I recall just sort of quietly accepting what she had to say about this project and my future, and then getting back to task with whatever my intern job was that day. You know, it's one of those um one of those moments where you you hear it, it's hurtful, it hurts, but kind of in the moment you sort of decide what shelf you're going to put this on, right? And I've always viewed my my life as the path of the improbable. And I always expected adversity because the people I admired had a lot of adversity, right? Like, I mean, I I was the kid who grew up reading about the making of the Terminator and hearing about Stan Winston and James Cameron struggling with tinfoil to make the last effects work, you know, or Schwarzenegger thinking that Cameron didn't know what he was doing, but sort of did the movie because it seemed interesting, but he had no idea if Cameron understood what he was doing. Or you read about aliens, about how the crew had no respect for this Canadian who was following Ridley Sky, um, and didn't understand any of the things that Ridley was doing in alien to them, didn't understand the tea break that they have in production, just didn't want to go along with Cameron's vision of aliens, right? Um, or George Lucas having a panic attack uh while trying to finish Star Wars. You know, there's so many of these stories lived in me that I kind of instantly factor any kind of adversity like that into that aspect of the narrative. So I think in the moment, as I recall, I probably just clicked and dragged her into, oh, so you're one of the people that tells me I can't do it because I'll have those people. But I I've been through too much already to let that opinion decimate my progress. Um, so I think I asked her like what she didn't like about it, and she just had a bunch of vague, vague moments. You know, there wasn't anything useful. It was just like everything, the story, the characters, this, I don't relate to this at all. And you know, the kind of things aren't really helpful as a writer. But um, yeah, I think after that, you know, part of my personality is if I'm like I'm a little bit like Coolhand Luke, right? I'm a little like, if you try to break me, I gotta demonstrate how you didn't, you know? So, like, I think the other thing that that woke up in me was a, I'm not gonna give you the satisfaction of being upset. I'm not gonna brood, I'm not gonna sulk, I'm gonna listen to what you have to say, be respectful about it, ask you a couple of questions, see if I can get some useful information. And if I can't, I'll go back to making copies. I'll run my errand, I'll show up tomorrow with a smile on my face. You know, I'm not going to let you affect me. And so I think that's the place that I went to, and it's usually the place that I go to whenever I go through something like that, is you know, just don't, I just don't let it define me in that way.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Because the the lazy sports analogy here is people saying to people like Lionel Messi, the arguably the greatest player, that he was too small to make it, and then he went on to you know, actually play the game in a completely different way where actually being small didn't matter anymore. Um do you think that if you hadn't had moments like that, you'd end up where you were? Did you almost it the way you're talking about this and sort of using people's criticism and building on failure? Do you think if you'd had early success, you might have not got to the levels you've got to? Did you almost need to be told you're not allowed to do it in order to do it as well as you have?

SPEAKER_04 15:41

I think about this often, uh, actually. Um, and you know, I'm not, I can't be certain, Dan, right? I can't say, well, without the scars, I wouldn't be able to, right? Because how do we know in in our Michi Okaku, you know, hyperspace string theory dimensional universe, the other dimension where Brian has just a bunch of open road ahead of him. Is he able to do it? But um, I I think, yeah, I mean, it's my life, my creative life, is sort of birthed by adversity, right? Like my father died when I was a kid, I was seven years old. Um, the day uh the day after he died, I walked across the street to a comic book store and I read an issue of Batman that flashed back to Bruce Wayne's parents getting killed. And I connected with Bruce in that moment on a one-to-one level, right? I mean, I wasn't a billionaire, I was a poor black kid in Missouri, but I had the same feelings, right? This, you know, like what the character was going through. That bonded me to that character, which bonded me to storytelling, right? Like, I think the absence of having a father growing up made heroes like Luke Skywalker, James Bond, Indiana Jones more important for me because I had to define manhood through fiction in a lot of ways. Because I didn't have like that male figure in my daily life. So the heroes that I grew up with, that those were my examples, my my day-to-day examples of right living, of ethical living, right? Had I not had the loss of my father, I might not have had that connection to fiction, right? So, you know, and then when when and some of this is self-fulfilling too, and this is what I also warn people, right? I think the difference between me now and me then um is I fully expected to get adversity at every step. It's almost like I sort of pre-planned in my mind for the no's. I walked in expecting a no, already calculating how I wasn't gonna let their no stop me. And I think some of that became self-fulfilling. I think, you know, whether you want to go a strictly psychological way, self subconsciously, I was sort of trying to break things because I knew how to deal with a broken thing, right? Um, if you want to think in like hermetic terms, like sort of philosophical terms, I might have been putting out the energy of adversity and I might be getting the energy of adversity back, right? And what has happened over time, and part of this is just growing a little older, chilling out a little more, you know. Um, now I don't worry about getting the no or getting the rejection or having the thing fall through. Um, it can, it can. I will handle it as it comes, but I go in to genuinely enjoy the experience I'm having as long as I get to have it, right? Um, but I didn't have that presence of mind. So I do think that if not my artistic career, the nature of my work, the hero stories, the character-driven genre stories, stories where people have to beat the odds and dig deep and mend the broken bones at the end of the second act and rise up in the third act to defeat the bad guy. I think that energy, that focus creatively may not have been there had I had an easier time. You know?

SPEAKER_03 19:17

That I just want to open by saying, first off, in that first story, that woman's criticism is so brutal. I mean, this town is brutal, but this town is normally brutal in a very different way. This town was brutal in the way that someone will read your work and tell that tell you they loved your work and they hated your work. There's there's a there's there's a certain dishonesty built in because we none of us are really designed to handle the honesty, to be honest. I mean, we're dealing with our egos, we're dealing with our creativity, we're dealing with our our literal hearts we put up, beating hearts we put on the page. And then someone reads it, and if they don't like it, they're not gonna tell you you're not fit for this job. They're gonna just say we hired another writer or we didn't connect, or there's all these different languages to use. So this woman, right out of the gates, used this language that I've almost never heard, you know, in this business of trying to dissuade a young, aspiring writer from from joining this career, which is which is frankly awful, you know, in many ways, because you you never really know based on one thing either.

SPEAKER_04 20:18

Yeah, I think about it, you know, sometimes, and I don't hold any resentment uh towards her, but the older I get, the more I accomplish, the closer I get to like I have a production company, but it's I don't have employees or anything like that. I'm trying to close some some financing to make some films um this year, but I could very well be in a position to have my own intern, right? And I think about I wouldn't if that intern turned in all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy 10,000 times. I still wouldn't have said that, right? Like, and so I think about what she must have been going through, you know, like what her perspective was, like um the vacancy that that at least was there then to want to do that, to feel like that was helpful, right? Like, I don't know, it's just very weird. Like sometimes you you look back at things, you think like, hmm, I don't understand why you would make the choice to do what you did, but you did. You know, it is what it is. Um, it it serves well as a reminder for me to make sure that when I'm giving people feedback and giving people useful feedback. And if I do think that someone has a bit longer to go in their journey, I never want to leave someone with less hope than they came to me with, you know. Um, but I suppose everyone doesn't, you know, uh sign on to those ethics. So there we have it.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

I I don't want to turn this into a sort of revenge story, but have you seen her since? And more importantly, since you became successful?

SPEAKER_04 21:58

I have not. Um The nature of the work that she does does not cross-pollinate with the kind of work that I do. Um, you know, her work is more uh, you know, kind of independent-minded, uh, adult drama stuff, stuff that I like. I mean, she's produced things I like, and I don't think she's a bad person. She was very kind to me, you know. Uh, on balance, she was very kind. It was just her estimation of my creative ability was incredibly harsh. Um, but she was not a, she's not a bad person, and she wasn't a bad person then. I think that's what really kind of made it such an impactful moment for me because it was out of character in a way. But for all I know, like one of the things that we don't consider as writers is we're we think so much about what we feel and our emotions and what we're trying to convey and our catharsis and all this stuff. Sometimes what we write can just trigger somebody. And we're not aware of it. It literally could have been there was something in that story. I don't even remember what happened in that story, but it could have just triggered something, you know, like an aversion response. Um, uh, because I didn't get in-depth criticism back. I really didn't get notes. I don't know if it was a simple like, you can't construct a sentence that I understand or your character sound wouldn't, or is it a uh was it a matter of, I just don't agree with how you see people, right? Um, and that could have been a generational thing because she was much older than I was. It could have been um uh the the vagaries of of gender, and that perspective, it could have been race, not that she was a racist, but that's just that my perspective being black in the predominantly white environment of film school, even though the script wasn't really about that at all, I might have just had a different perspective on it, you know, like my sense of the in-group and the out group may not have sunk up with that. We just don't know. I wrote a novel uh um uh a bit ago that I was pretty proud of. And uh when it went around, you know, an agency loved it, they sent it around to a bunch of people, and it was a Hawaii novel. And all of the responses, it got rejected, didn't get published. All of the rejections said kind of the same thing. They they all said in various verbiage, we don't agree with what you think young people are. And I felt like the novel, even though it was a sci-fi novel, was as honest as I can make it, kind of ripped from the experience I had working with kids that were in crisis, and kind of all of that got ported over into the book. And that was another example of oh, you just don't want to see the world the way I see it. And that's that's when I realized like there's a culture among gatekeepers, and if your perspective doesn't match their perspective, they may not see value in your work, if that makes any sense. You know, like the the realization of that, like, oh you sort of have a suburban soccer mom viewpoint. You don't want to believe that kids can have the extremity that I'm depicting in this book. So you need my book to be false when objectively, statistically, clearly it's not. But you don't want those stories told in that way, right? This doesn't support your worldview. Um, so yeah, you know, that happens on occasion as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

Okay. Well, look, I think once we release this podcast, uh, I think you should uh turn it into a physical asset, like a CD or a cassette and send it to her.

SPEAKER_04 25:56

No, no, no, no. I'm sure hey, but look, if we if we met each other, um I'm gonna I'm not even sure if she's still working in the business or not, but if we were, I have no resentment. I mean, look, sometimes people have bad days. So, you know, resentment is a bill that you do not need to continue to pay as you grow older.

SPEAKER_03 26:13

Yeah, I I mean your story about the not connecting with the story of the kids as written by you in this novel really resonated with me, not for anything I've written, but I remember in college watching this might date me a little bit, but watching the movie Kids, which was the the skateboarders and and the HIV pause of the whole thing, it was a dark, brutal portrayal of yeah. And you know, I grew up in Hawaii on the island of Kauai, very much different from New York City, but that was my childhood. There was that, that was exactly what we were doing at those ages. And so when we watched this movie, I was like, Yeah, that's real. And someone people came out of that movie with me going, that was no kid acts like that. That is so unrealistic to my experience, to my life. And therefore, it's unrealistic to the whole world because we tend to project out our experiences and think that they're universal. And I'm like, no, no, no. I that what do you I felt every single moment of that? So that was a interesting how if you're not connecting with the right executive the right time with the right material that they connect with, they can put this sense of like this isn't ringing true, and therefore we don't want to move forward with it. Um, I do have a question about, you know, you you had this sort of, I'm I'm not gonna let's just call it a trauma. It wasn't a trauma, but it probably was a trauma. This really harsh advice early in your career. You do have a gap in your screenwriting, you know, CV. And now, granted, people, you know, in your credits, a lot of people are writing and nobody knows, and you're making money and all sorts of things. But like it feels like, and probably during this time you had segued into graphic novels and comics, and you were doing this whole other career, but it feels like you said your career was broken into two parts. You had the beginning part and then you came back. I guess my question is twofold. Were you and are you surprised at how hard the business can be and how hard it was for you? And I'd like to learn a little bit more about that moment where you kind of left and the moment where you came back in.

SPEAKER_04 28:08

Okay, well, to answer your first question, not at all surprised. Um, I this is a in the in the Venn diagram of ways you can put roof over your head and food in fridge. Making stuff up is a very small circle. Uh, you know, unless you're like a politician, then it's a requirement. But um the so I always expected it because every story I ever read about anything I loved was always, you know, a bunch of people trying to bring a block of ice up a hill in the middle of summer and have some ice left at the summit when they get there, right? Like nothing I cared about ever happened easily. So I expected it to be difficult, um, for sure. It was difficult in different ways than I expected, right? Like, so the the paradigm shift wasn't, oh, this is much harder than I thought it was going to be. The paradigm shift was, oh, this is harder in ways I didn't anticipate. I expected the difficulty to be a meritocritous difficulty. Not that I'm like some brilliant genius and everything I write is that's not what I'm saying. But I was prepared to have to write, rewrite, study, study, read, all that stuff. Totally willing to do that, still still do that stuff to this day. What I wasn't prepared for were like industry politics. No one taught me about that in film school. Uh, I wasn't prepared for company layoffs, getting rid of staff, and then suddenly your thing that had all this momentum on Monday doesn't. I remember I was writing a big movie for another studio. And uh every week, what they wanted changed because of what was number one at the box office. So, like when the big thing failed, Monday's edict was can you make it smaller while you're writing? Sure, I'll make it smaller while I'm writing, start writing it smaller. Then, like the big thing, new big thing made a bunch of money. Then it was make it bigger, right? And so I wasn't prepared for the uh for things like that, you know, like kind of writing with a moving target, you know, like that was that was a different one. Um, so no, I didn't, I you know, I I thought it was gonna be hard. It's just harder in a different way than I thought it was going to be. Uh and the the second question was oh, the kind of the phases of the career. Yeah, well, so I so succinctly, I uh when I was in New York, I got a job writing a direct-to-video Dolph Lungburn movie. That was my first thing. So I wrote that. Then I thought I was gonna get more direct-to-video movies. I was totally fine with being a direct-to-video action guy. I was like, cool, that's a job, that's a career, love it, justified choices I've made. And I just got no no uh no more opportunities there. Part of it was my management at the time didn't want me to continue to write those movies, so they didn't really put me up for them, you know. Um, I was in a situation where it was more pragmatic for them to have me chase a golden lottery ticket than to just put me in a situation where I could earn money and live, right? Because if I'm just earning a living and my bills are paid, you know, I'm not accruing major wealth, but I'm making stuff up for a living, I'm happy. But then I'm not chasing the golden ticket of possibly maybe writing the big thing and getting the million-dollar payday, right? So I think my first representation, they were more interested in getting a percentage of the lottery than getting me up on my feet. So uh a lot of time, I think, got wasted in that period of my life. Just spending time just doing the wrong things, going after the wrong things, you know, um, trying to live up to uh what what they wanted me to be without spending any time, spending enough time, I think, just building up my personal needs, right? So that was part of it. Time got wasted. Um, but then I sold something universal at Gone Movie, and I came over, came over to LA, sold some pitches, wrote some scripts, uh, and then yeah, I don't, I don't know. I don't know exactly what happened. I think it was really a falling out between me and my representation. Like as I started to deviate from their perspective, they stopped really facilitating my career. And so, you know, it's out of sight, out of mind kind of business. Um, and uh that's when I turned towards comics because I always wanted to write comic books, one, because I love comics, but two, I thought it was critically important to my career to demonstrate the ability to do that, to get in the shelf, to get an isbit, right? To have a world outside of filmmaking where people know you as a writer. And the reps that I had at the time saw no value in that. Um, and they didn't help. So the comic book career I had to kind of get on my own, right? Um, and then if you're getting things on your own and they're not doing the things they want you to do, you kind of get punished by being put in a pay no mind list, right? So I think I had all of this going on. But then when I finally got out of those relationships, it's very hard for me to break up with people. You know, just it's just not my nature, right? I'm just not a get rid of this, get rid of that. Um, uh so uh I left uh those reps, uh, which had really kind of fallen down into one rep. Then I started working with a friend of mine who was a manager producer that I knew from kind of just the ambient presence uh around other things I was working on. And then things started to get turned around, you know, um, really and just having confident management, you know. Uh and I don't want to put everything on my manager uh and my agent at the time. Um uh but you know, like it is just a bad mix, you know, it's just a bad mix. But it there was a uh uh a changeover when I had my my current manager, a guy named Mikhail Mayfield, who I like very much. And uh at the time my agent was Harley Copen over at ICM, um, who I also like very much. That's when things got got better. Um uh and uh and subsequently I had to move from ICM to uh verve, but that was really because of the WGA thing, because you know, I just needed a rep and you know had to come do that. But um, even though I'm no longer with Harley at the moment with Verve and like my Verve guys, Harley and Mikhail were good people. And so some of it is just I had the wrong people, you know, which is something else you learn, right? Because you think uh to you know, people listening to this that are sort of in the beginning of their careers, you think that getting an agent or a manager is going to suddenly unlock everything for you. Like I have that, but there's still compatibility, right? There's still what is the nature of that relationship? So there's always these vagaries and layers to everything. And sometimes you just need a bad experience to teach you what a good experience is, right? Date the wrong person so you can appreciate the right person, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_03 35:19

I I want to just drill down on something that I think is critically important that you were talking about, and that is how you're defined by your reps. And you think there's sometimes an assumption that they're defining you, that they are the ones that are that have kind of an idea of what you are, and maybe they do, and they're trying to get you work or they're not, but you make their job a lot easier when you define yourself to them through your work, but also through your bio, through your conversations. This is the jobs I want to be specific. You know, I've made many mistakes of saying, all right, I'm gonna write horror and comedy and this and that, and then they can't put you in that box. And really, your reps, your your agent more than your managers, but your managers are well. You got to think as well. You got to think of them as a gun and you're putting bullets in that gun and they're pointing that gun. They're not scatter shooting. You want to aim them, you want to load them so that they can have the best chance at hitting that target when they lift that gun. The more specific you are, the better chance that I think people will find that they're that they're getting work and that it's the relationship's going a little bit easier. Because of that understanding.

SPEAKER_04 36:22

I think so, Noah. I think, you know, when when when I first started, it was just a battle of can I have any career at all? Right. And I would have taken anything. I just wanted to finally feel like I had some agency in in my creative life, right? So as time has gone on, you know, and again, I think you you grow older a little bit, you chill out some, it became easier for me to understand what I wanted to do, um, what mattered to me as an artist, right? And and some of that has been just working on things and you work on a process, you get through it and you realize I don't ever want to do something like that again. You know, um, uh, and sometimes you do a thing, you don't know if you want to do it, and you do it like, oh, I'm really taking to this, right? And so now I have a more clear understanding and I'm able to uh to let my my my reps know like this is what I'm interested in. But I think at first, when you're impressionable and frankly a little desperate, it's hard uh to have a clarity of self while you're still just looking to get terra firma. And when you're in that part of your career, that's when you are the most vulnerable. Uh, and frankly, there are people that will prey on that vulnerability. And I think early on, I had a couple predatory relationships that took me a long time to realize were predatory, right? Because that wasn't abusive in the classic way things are abusive. It's only in retrospect, you're like, ooh, that was abusive, right? Um, you know, you're you're you're it's not someone who's beating you up every night, it's just someone who's gaslighting you all of the time, right? Uh but then when you're when you're starting off, yeah, it's it's hard to know those things. But I think you're absolutely right. Um defining yourself as a creator for yourself makes it much easier for people to empower you and put you in situations where you can succeed.

SPEAKER_01 38:24

So, gun analogies aside, I think I agree with the point. Um, just you're very analytical um and self-aware. Um, and you've talked about failures in a really interesting way. Now, much as I I'm loath to talk about successes, um, we should we should allow some on this podcast, uh, but this is more a question for you of particularly now you sort of know what sort of uh person you are, what you're trying to achieve. What does success look like for you in this industry?

SPEAKER_04 38:59

That's a very interesting question, Dan. Um in all honesty, I could leave this conversation, fly out of Los Angeles, never write a story for someone again and be absolutely happy. Um, because in a lot of ways, I think I have kept the promise I made to my 12-year-old self. You know, I wrote the Batman comics, I'm working on the superhero show. Uh, you know, I've gotten to write the big movies for people, right? So for me, success is a very philosophical place. Rather than saying, oh, if I draw a red circle around this achievement, that's when I've succeeded. For me, success is when you're not doing it for validation, you're you're not uh living uh to escape the fear of failure. You are pursuing things you think are interesting. Uh and now I'm in a place where I'm pursuing things I think are interesting. Like I'm not J.J. Abrams, of course, right? Like, you know, I'm not um you know, at the top of the heap, or even near the top of the heap of Hollywood. Um, but I'm in a place now where I'm no longer worried about someone taking things from me or not allowing me to do things. Um I'm just interested in what would be a cool thing to do, right? Um, and I honestly credit uh Greg Brante and Greg Walker at Titans for um kind of I didn't anticipate the structure of television being as helpful for me as it has been. But it really has been. And I and being a screenwriter is such a lonely uh state. It's you and executives, basically. And you write a screenplay, maybe 15 people, 30 people may read it, you know, and even you make money, only like 15 people may read it, right? And then maybe you get the actors, whatever gets mailed or more people read it. But like it's it's such a lonely environment. I didn't anticipate how helpful it would be for me to be in a room with other writers who have varying levels of experience who can share their stories with you. And so that's been really rewarding for me. Um, and I think it just gave me a lot of useful perspective. You know, it's it was helpful to see myself on a continuum, like, oh, I'm here. This is the this is the thing. Oh, and I'm and and I'm just there's a scale, and I am on the scale. I am on the scale. Like if you if you live in a polemic where you're either nothing or James Cameron, that's a very hard way to live, right? Because you're going to be chasing James Cameron your entire life, right? But when I would meet other people and and other creators, uh, it helped kind of see where I was in the scale. And then things became more fun. So yeah, I think I think for me, success really is uh writing and creating because I genuinely want to do it, not because I'm afraid I'll never be able to.

SPEAKER_03 42:17

From the outside, it feels like you're having a moment. I know that that can be very deceiving, but it feels like you are you're you're getting cool projects, you are the the the there's a lot on your plate, uh, and you're definitely handling it all. Um, which kind of segues us into our last question. And and you got there because you've been in the business for a long time and you figured some things out. Uh emphasis on some. Some things out. What advice? And you've been giving advice all the way through this, but what advice would you give? And this is our standard last question to everybody, what advice would you give to somebody trying to break into the business as a writer? Um in this case, you can pick graphic novelist, TV writer, or film writer, but breaking in to the entertainment business as a writer, what what what advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_04 43:03

In all honesty, and I don't mean this in a pithy way, I would tell them learn how to direct and direct a film. Let's legit. Like, and the reason here's why I say this. When I was coming into the business, it was at least $1,000 a minute to make anything. Now it's not. Now you can shoot a movie on a cell phone. And the reason why I suggest it to people is your value as a writer goes up if you're also a filmmaker. Because the the the fact is, Hollywood doesn't really respect writing, really. Like it's a necessary evil for them to get to the rest of the thing, right? So how do you get people to read your work who don't know who you are and have no reason to read your work, right? That's the chicken or the egg of the whole thing. You can write Citizen Kane, but if they don't know who you are, they may not read it. Or it might take the A year to read it, right? So I tell people honestly, think about making something, think about making a short film, think about making something that can in an in a in a faster way generate interest around you as a creative. Um uh and you might find that people will be more willing to take a look at your work because to me, to me, I know this is a strange advice, but Hollywood to me is it's like success by strategic negation. And I'll explain. Let's say I write a movie. I write a movie, I want to sell the movie, and no one knows who I am. I want to get an agent, no one knows who I am. Well, now they're reading my script to decide if I'm a writer. Are you a good writer? Are you a writer? Are you a real writer? Are you professional? Are you worth it? Right. If you write something and then you direct a five-minute thing, right? Generally, people will give you the writing part so they can take away your directing part, right? So a lot of my strategy is give them something to kill. Right? It's like chess. What is the pawn of your chess board? So if I write a movie and let's say I say, I want to, I I wrote it, I want to direct it, I want to act in it, right? Well, the first thing they kill is me as the actor. You can't act, okay, you want an actor. Then do you have to direct it? You let them kill that too. And then you land on writing, right? So I would say to anyone who is a writer that has any inkling of directing, direct something. Get a phone, get your friends, find an actor in backstage, however you do it, direct something and position yourself as a filmmaker before you go to reps and all of that, because I think it'd be useful. If you don't want to do that, um I would I would, you know, again, boots in the ground pragmatic, if you're interested in genre, which is kind of where I live. Write a under $30 million high concept movie that you can put two celebrities in. Do that. And that is something that people are always looking for, right? And if you don't, if you're listening to this and you don't know what under $30 million means, look it up. You know, Google low mid-budget genre. Read every article you can, understand what makes a movie more expensive and less expensive, and then write a movie where you've got two castable parts for celebrities around a high concept that you can make for under $30 million. If you write that and it's really good, then you have a good chance of either selling that script or getting a chance to rewrite that someone else's movie. You know, it's just a solid, solid sample, or it could be a piece of business for you. I have a more detailed version of that that I don't have to belabor your podcast with, but there is a mad lib sci-fi thriller strategy I have that could probably give you a high concept script that can unlock a few doors if you followed it. Well, we're gonna have to share it, but you know, I don't know how long you guys have. Um, all right. So very just very quickly. Again, this is this is really just sci-fi action thriller, which is kind of the coin of the realm these days, right? Um, because when you're looking at comic book movies, they're basically sci-fi action thrillers anyway. Um think of a problem that the world will have in 10 or 15 years, right? Like go to a futurist website. What is it? Overpopulation, is it uh lack of rare earth minerals, whatever it is. Find a problem we're gonna have in 15 or 20 years. That's step one. Step two, create a character whose job it is to solve that problem in an ethically challenged way. For instance, there are too many people, so this character has to kill people to bring the population down. Right? That's step two. You have a character who has to solve this future problem in an ethically challenged way. Step three, your story. Your story is this character is the best at what they do in this ethically challenged environment until they have an experience that makes them challenge their masters, right? That ethical challenge comes to a peak at the end of act one. They make a choice to rebel against what they've done most of their professional lives. And by choosing to follow the ethics, they are now hunted by the same system that they helped support in the first act. Add a love story in the second act, take it all away from them in the end of the second act, and in the third act, the same people that they were going to, you know, ruin in the first act, they align with in the third act, and then they take on their former bosses. Write that script. The next part is call that script the name of the job that you give the character in step two. Right? So if the problem is there are too many people, well, then a secret consortium of corporations and governments have knighted people in secret to will down the population, and they are called shrinkers. Right? Your script is now called shrinker. Your story is the best shrinker in the world gets into a situation that makes them question the ethics of shrinking. Now they buck their system and become targeted by all of the people that they've taught. They fall in love with somebody they should be forbidden to fall in love with. That love story helps buttress their characterization. They have a darkest moment at the end of act two where the thing they thought was gonna help them escape doesn't work. So now the only choice they have is to fight. And the only way that they can fight is to gather up forces from the same people he hunted or she hunted in the first act. Write that script.

SPEAKER_01 50:33

Right. So look, I'm gonna write that script. I'm gonna come to you with it, and you have a choice of either saying, you know, here's like 10 notes on how you can improve it, or you are not a writer, you pursue an alternative career. I'll always choose the first, and that will inspire me to become a writer. So either way, I become a writer after this podcast. So, Brian Hill, this has been fascinating. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you guys for having me.

SPEAKER_03 51:03

Thank you so much, Brian. Cheers. All right, that does it for us today. I want to thank you for tuning in to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach out to me on Twitter. I am at NEBslin.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

Wait, are we are we not bothering to talk about the other Twitter account, given we have this great social engagement and people never bother to actually include me, whose idea it was to do this podcast in the first place. Do you have a Twitter account? I do have a Twitter account. It's at Dan Rutsteve. And not only do I have another Twitter account, I also have two other podcasts. And I've some of our listeners have been saying, please tell us about your other podcasts. So our other podcasts are. What are my other podcasts? Oh yes, United States of Dramerica, where I share a glass of whiskey and have a fascinating conversation. And America the Beautiful Game, where I talk about soccer in America and what it can learn from Europe.

SPEAKER_03 52:01

For our repeat listeners, uh, you can probably stop listening when Dan starts talking about his second and third podcast. Uh, that brings us to the end of another great episode. We, as always, want to thank our wives for putting up with our nonsense.

unknown 52:17

That's good.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

Hello, dude.