Take 17 - Journalist, podcaster and writer Marc Bernardin, Castle Rock, Treadstone

SPEAKER_01 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 shore, dozens of unproduced scripts littering more.

SPEAKER_02 0:13

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

SPEAKER_00 0:26

This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Like everything in our business here and real light, double bigger.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Welcome back to screaming into the Hollywood events. I am the runs team over a year now into lockdown. I'm entering my gamerogen into my house, which makes a nice change. No one I imagine you're still in Hawaii.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

We're still in Hawaii, and um maybe coming to the end of our run here, we'll see what's going on. I am beyond thrilled to introduce our next guest. Um, his name is Mark Bernardin, and this is a guy who's done a tremendous amount of stuff. He's worked as a TV writer on the shows, Alphams, um, Castle Rock, Treadstone, Carnival Row, and others. He's worked as a journalist at places like the LA Times, uh, he's written for GQ, Playboy, the Hollywood Reporter. He's written comic books for Marvel, DC, image comics. He's also the co-creator of the DC comic book series, The Highwayman. On top of his writing, you can hear him on two separate podcasts. One is the very popular, in fact, they're both very popular. Uh, the first one is called Fat Man Beyond with the little-known filmmaker Kevin Smith. And the second podcast does a deep dive into one of my favorite shows, Battlestar Galactica. This is called the Battlest Galacticast with Trisha Helfer. Welcome, Mark. Thank you for coming on our show.

SPEAKER_03 2:10

Thank you for the invite, gang. I've uh I've been doing a very recent deep dive into screaming into the Hollywood Abyss and found it delightful, which is probably not how you'd ordinarily describe a podcast about failure. But yes, it is uh I'm so glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Great. Well, thank you. We uh we like to be called delightful. So I'm gonna I'm gonna to start with, I'm gonna give you a choice. Given your varied career, do you want to start with rejection in TV? Do you want to do rejection in the comic book world, rejection in journalism, and not quite sure it's quite the same, but failure in podcasting. Where would you like to start?

SPEAKER_03 2:51

Um I I figure let's go chronological. And so let's start with failure in journalism. Okay. Which uh which, you know, there has been some.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

So I was in my old life a journalist working as a news reporter and a sports reporter. And the journalism is is not recognizable anymore to the world I started in. The internet hadn't been invented in my day, and so exclusives were actually in newspapers rather than just tweets from people. So tell us about journalism for you and where it didn't work.

SPEAKER_03 3:27

Um, journalism for me also begins in the Stone Age. Um, I I remember getting email for the first time at my very first job at Starlog magazine, um, way back when. And for a decent check of my career, I was a journalist for almost 25 years. And for the first like 15 years of it, it went really swimmingly. You know, like I graduated from college, got my first job at Starlog. I worked there for like three years and slowly climbed up the masthead, and then I got an offer to come to Entertainment Weekly, um, which was great, you know, and and it was at the time, again, that the business was transforming. We're shifting from like VHS to Laserdisc to DVD, and like comic book movies were just starting to become popular. Like I was there for Blade and The X-Men and Spider-Man. And, you know, the the first time that I actually ever encountered failure in a real way was um I I I asked for a promotion, went to my boss, and I was like, hey, you know what? I see some of my other peers, you know, getting a bump from senior editor to assistant managing editor. And I've been here longer, and I think I'm pretty good at this, and I'd I'd like to I'd like to be to be promoted. And like he he thought about it and then went away and came back the very next day and was like, you know what? I'm not gonna promote you. Like, I don't, I don't think you're ready. I don't think you your your attention to detail is not what I'd like it to be. Like he had some legitimate reasons and also some that I didn't feel were legitimate. But and and the the kicker was some people spend their entire careers at Time Inc. as a senior editor. And uh, and like at that moment, I began to develop an exit strategy, you know, realizing full well that I didn't want to spend my entire career doing the same thing for 30 years. And this again was before there was a time when you could imagine collecting a gold watch from a company and like retiring and riding off into the sunset. But that sort of that that buffeted me a little bit, the the idea that that uh that maybe this wasn't going to be the end all be all, you know, and then that's when I began to like start to really seriously think about things like writing comics and and eventually getting into TV and sort of chasing the dream I'd had since I was 11 and sort of put in on the back burner because journalism was treating me well, but the golden handcuffs um were were about to be pulled off.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

So this isn't something we've actually touched on before in the podcast, but journalism in some ways is quite a useful preparation for writing in TV and film because there's a good chunk of what you write. It's a smaller chunk, but there's a chunk of what you write which goes nowhere. So I'm sure they don't call it this anymore, but in my day it was called writing for the spike. So in the old days, you wrote something, and if they didn't want it, they spiked it. They just put it on literally a metal spike that was on the desk, and the story just never appeared in the paper. So you could work, now if it's just a news story, you could work on it for a couple of hours, and that's one thing. You could write for a week on something and you hand it in, and the editor would be like, nah, don't like it, doesn't fit. They'd spike it and it's gone. And often in the new in the world that you've moved into, writing things that never see the light of day is standard practice.

SPEAKER_03 6:46

It it really is, you know, and and journalism trained me in a lot of ways for being a TV writer. You know, you're you've got to write on deadline, you know, at some point you can you have to stop messing with it and give it to the people who are going to make something. You know, like a writer, if left to their own devices, could rewrite a thing for a year, but journalism does not give you that time. So it's make it as good as you can make it, send it out the door, start working on the next thing. And then I eventually would get laid off from EW, which was the first time I'd ever been um sort of gently removed from a job, I suppose. Like being laid off was it was not about performance, but it was still you're gonna be out of a job in two weeks now. Um, you know, and I was on vacation, I was on my 10th wedding anniversary vacation with my wife, and uh, and like I get a call from my boss back east of San Francisco, and I get a call from New York. Like, this can't be good. Like, there's there's no way that they're calling me on my vacation for for like a good thing. And then I just got the words, like, yeah, no, I'm sorry, we're we're downsizing a bit. Um, we decided to to eliminate your position. So when you get back to to New York, you know, um two weeks, three weeks if you need it, pack up your office and go. And you know, that's that was devastating to me, you know, like it it broke my heart because, you know, while I thought I was doing a good job, you know, and while I thought I um even if my eye had been occasionally on the grander prize of of LA and life writing TV and making stuff up for money, um, you know, I I never imagined that I would get let go. And that is precisely what happened.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

Is it is it, do you think it's common? I noticed that you've you know worked for a number of of media organizations, but including our trade, you know, papers and and trade journals here in Los Angeles. Do you think it's common for those journalists to have ambitions that are, you know, screenwriting ambitions, or do they like do they stay in their lane? I I know a few who've kind of jumped over, and also another few who have who have secretly written screenplays and and nothing has come of that.

SPEAKER_03 8:50

I mean, I I think it's it's probab there there's probably a deeply held desire to at some point want to try and do the thing that you've been covering for so long. You know, and some of that is because you've loved it since you were a kid, some of it is because you see the people who make it, you're like, I could do that. I know how they make this stuff, I could probably do that. You know, and I worked with a handful of people who who absolutely had their eyes on other prizes and and proved to absolutely have the chap to make it to make it work. I mean, I worked with Mark Harris, who was one of my bosses at AW, who is now a sort of best-selling author. I worked with Gillian Flynn, who, you know, go over the world with Gone Girl and Sharp Objects and that sort of thing. And, you know, I think there's the the people drawn to entertainment journalism are people who are drawn to stories very, very young and drawn to that sense of I like this stuff. I like talking about this stuff, I like the people who make this stuff. At some point, I might want to try and do this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 9:51

And did you find, I mean, the uh, you know, all of these worlds are brutal in their own way. The failure, the rejection, the ego that you put into, I mean, your own ego that you're putting onto the page, and then someone like Dan just mentioned spikes it. We have our version, of course, of spiking things in TV, where I mean, where they just this, you know, our spike is mostly just silence, or people just don't respond. But I mean, did you find one path to be more painful than another as you are, you know, climbing the ranks through one field of writing and then into another?

SPEAKER_03 10:22

Um, you know, I think I think in journalism, you know, the doing the work and writing stories, and absolutely there's there's stories that you write that mean a lot to you. There's stories, there's interview subjects that you you you gravitated towards, there's subjects that you love, but it's never actually you, you know, like it's never you're not clawing out a piece of your heart to make this thing go. Where I think that's where it's different in in comics and especially in television, where you're you have to bring so much of yourself to the table that when somebody says, you know, it's like, but I this took me a year, right? And I and I craft my chest open to give you a little bit of who I am, and your response is like that can't be no, I reject that rejection, um, which never really works. And so I think the the sting of rejection um is is is sort of tied to the amount of personal investment you have in the thing that was rejected, and I just think that that balance is is heavier in TV.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

As a podcaster in this realm, I am something I've written a script, it's terrible. I will revisit it at some point, but every so often we'll have a guest on the podcast. I'm like, if I ever rewrite this script, I you know, I've got the email address now of you know you John Rogers and David Goodman, all these people who've we've had on the show, and there's a part of me that's like, I might just cheat and see if they want to read my stuff, which is which isn't how it's meant to work because I haven't done my time and and plus myself isn't very good. As a former journalist who knew some of those people, when you moved across into the writing, did you take advantage of the fact that you knew people, or did you not do that because you thought it was cheating? And is it actually cheating?

SPEAKER_03 12:10

Um I the there's there's very much, and and and you'll know this, Dan, the the idea of you know, the the the illusion of impropriety is almost as bad as impropriety itself. You know, there's there's a code of ethics, there's a line that you know one doesn't cross, the the church and state line, and then the subject and and interviewer line. And uh and I held that pretty closely until I didn't. And when when I didn't, I I sort of came to the realization that you know, if my if my heart is in the prize, if my heart is in the where I'm going, um, then not to say that you're going to abandon all ethics, but you can find a way to dance that dance, you know. And and one of the first times I did it was reaching out to John Rogers. Like I was I was uh I was an editor in Entertainment Weekly, I was covering comics. I read a book called Global Frequency by Warren Ellis, which I loved. And then I saw in the trades that uh that they would that the WB at the time was making a TV version of it, and John Rogers was gonna run it. And so I emailed Warren Ellis and I was like, hey man, do you have John Rogers' contact information? He says, Yeah, be my guest. He's a he's an Irishman, glam Scotch will tell you anything. So I emailed um John and he's like, Hey, you know what? Yeah, I'm gonna need people who like this at some point, you know. If you'd like to sort of keep in touch, we can. And oh, by the way, we're shooting the pilot in Vancouver if you want to come up to the set. And so I did, because you don't often get an invite from a showrunner to come visit the set where we're shooting a pilot for a show that you at some point want to write off. And uh, and yeah, like that's kind of to the left of the rules, but at the same token, I in no way promised anything. I was not trading access for for preference referential treatment in the magazine. I was a fan who was going to a set in hopes of eventually getting a job for which I would quit said job. You know, like it it didn't feel to me as if I was I was you know breaching some unbreachable barrier. Um, and I think that at some point uh you know any journalist will have to decide for themselves what that line is and where they won't cross it, but it's a hundred percent crossable. Um, and and in very many ways, I would not be where I am had I not crossed that line at least twice.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

Noted. So, John Rogers, if you're listening, um I am gonna send you a bottle of whiskey and my script. Um, you've probably got a more grown-up thing to say.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

No, I just I just think found this find this part of the discussion fascinating because the uh we get these questions all the time about impropriety. I I, as our podcast grows and my career grows, I suppose, you know, we get DM'd all the time, request to read scripts, people crop, you know, shooting their shots, so to speak. And you do have to learn the dance. And I think some people don't don't get it like instinctively. Like there is a dance, there is etiquette, there is people you can approach, there's ways to approach, and there's ways not to approach. And you have to be really careful because these people can help you get access. Um, but the end of the day, your script also has to be at the point where it's ready to be read, and often they're not. And that's the sad reality is you read them and you realize that maybe they should have spent another six months to a year working on a project uh to get it, you know, to their first wide read. But then there's some people that I've read out of the blue who've been just, you know, amazing. So it is kind of this weird thing where the only way people can get access is through their peers. And that can lead to a the beginning of a career, which is sounded like what happened with Mark and John Rogers. John Rogers seems to be the anchor, by the way, at this point to our show where a lot of people are, he seems to be our son that we're all orbiting around. Uh so Mark, you know, so kind of digging into some specifics. As you're moving into TV and you're beginning to staff, what did your first staff job look like? And and and where did you go from there? I mean, and did it did you stay on the show? Did did you end up having to move on? Did it get canceled? Like like where were you at your head as you've given up one career, are in another career, and things might be not quite going your way, you know, completely.

SPEAKER_03 16:27

Yeah, I mean, I after I got laid off from EW, I had a year, I had a year's worth of severance. And uh during that year, I was trying to stab. You know, I I had gotten um sort of hip pocketed, I guess, by an agent at WME who, you know, he asked me, What do you want to be when you grow up? I says, Well, I want to write TVs. Like, I like I like working with people, I like being in office, and I like stealing off supplies, and I like getting paid every week. Um, so you know, we said, All right, write a pilot, be willing to come out to LA for meetings. And if you get a job, you got to move in like a weekend. Um, and so that is exactly what happened. Like, I wrote a pilot, I got a couple of meetings. Um, the and the one that was the most um beneficial was I met with Ira Stephen Baer, Zach, Zach Penn, and Robert Hewitt Wolf on Alphas. Um, they were they were um probably about two, three weeks deep into the room. And they had uh as as at least as explained to me, they had like diversity money. They were like, hey, so um we can bring on another writer. Um, we're looking for somebody who has you know some some comic book shops and some nerd skills, um, and it's free for us, so we'd be morons not to do it. And uh and so I said, Yeah, well, if it's gonna be free for you, that means it's a win for me. Um, if you want me, I'm I'm yours. And so yeah, I did exactly that. I had to move. I got the word on a Friday to be in LA on a Monday. Um and there's there's a lot of um downsides to the diversity writer slot. You know, I think that very often they can be traps for writers of color, where you get invited into a show because it's free for the show, the budget for that writer comes out of the network, um uh, but you get trapped in a staff writer slot, or you don't get to ask to come back because you're not free the next year. Um, or everybody on that show knows that you're the diversity guy, and so you're treated somewhat as a second-class citizen. None of those things happened to me. Um, you know, I got invited in, everybody was super cool. I got to see how the sauce is made from the inside. I have a comic book there, I grew up reading comic books. So if we're doing a show about sort of the pitch was, you know, uh strip mall superheroes. Like we worked out of a uh strip mall in Queens and we somehow fight crime, and and it was super fun. And I got to write an episode. I got my first sole credit on an episode on Alphas. Um, I got along really well with the showrunner, I got along really well with every writer, I got to be friendly with some of the actors. Um, and the show was a hit for sci-fi, which was great, and I was feeling pretty good about it. Like I did my 20, 25 weeks in LA. I moved back to New Jersey to be with my family and was just like waiting. Like, all right, so season two, all right, we're gonna get going. Is it gonna get picked up? All right, six months, eight months, and I'm like, you know, not working really, like, is I'm kind of waiting to go back into the show. So I'm doing freelance journalism on the side, and then like at the one year mark, you know, we got the word that the show got picked up for season two. Great. Um, but Ira, who was running the show, was was fired. So new showrunner comes on, and and I have to then meet with a new showrunner who um was incredibly nice on the phone. You know, it's uh Bruce Miller, who you know ran office for another year and then went on to do handmaid sale and went a boatload of em. Um and he was cool and he was nice, but there is always a bit of um tension, I suppose. If you're the new guy coming on, looking to, you know, decide who's gonna come back from the original staff, who was gonna be the new blood that he brings on. I have no idea what pressures were on high budget-wise or or anything, but I wasn't asked to come back. And by that point, it was an hour, a year and a half since the first season that I hadn't been a TV writer. And you know, the the currency of this business is momentum. And there was nothing more deadening in momentum, especially for a staff writer, than to not be working for a year and a half. And it was it was punishing. Like there was there was there didn't seem to be a way forward. The agents couldn't get me really any great meetings. You know, I'd come out to LA, you know, once twice a year for a week and take a bunch of stuff, but nothing really gelled. And I went back to journalism. Like I was convinced at that point that like my TV writing career was over, um, because you know, we couldn't get anything to catch fire. So yeah, I went to the Hollywood Reporter and I was there for almost four years. Um and it was it was a bit of a retrenching into the thing that I knew, which is yeah, no, I can get money to do this, and I'm pretty good at it. Um but it's it's not the dream. And at some point I kept on telling myself, my dad didn't dream of being an accountant. You know, like I feel like everybody's dad didn't do what they dreamed they could do. They did what they had to do. Like they had a family, they had mortgage, they had, you know, mouths to feed, so you do what you can do. Am I being incredibly selfish? Am I still holding out this dream that is as hard to do, if not harder, than to be a professional athlete? You know, like how many, how many working writers are there in all? You know, what maybe 1,500, 2,000 TV writers in any given season? You know, and how many professional football players are there? That's probably about 2,000, 2,500. Like the odds are so long that to to nurture a dream like this feels selfish at best. And I had a lot of those sort of dark nights of the soul, not quite thinking about um as Sean Simmons did, um, which celebrity can I leave my children to? Um once once potentially my wife and I do the unthinkable. But it it very much was like, do I keep trying to do this? Do I keep writing pilots? Do I keep you know trying to get representation? Do I keep trying and trying and trying if it's never going to happen?

SPEAKER_00 22:27

So I I hate to stop the sort of sadness, rejection, failure stuff, because this is, you know, this is what our listeners come for, but I do want to go back and just you mentioned diversity slots. Now, obviously, this should be a question asked by Noah, who only got a job on Hawaii 5.0 because of his tattoos. But um I'm gonna ask the question. So when I was a sports journalist, I covered cricket, uh, which is another sport that's not well known in America, but I remember having a very long conversation with the Namibian cricket team because they had brought in um they had diversity slots, they had ratios that they had to meet and quotas. And I talked to the wallet players who thought it was ridiculous because it it decreased their chances, and as popped to back players who felt that whenever they're in the team, they were only in the team because it was fulfilling the quota, and there was no team harmony, and the whole thing didn't work. Um, even though it was the right thing to do, it didn't in that particular instance for lots of very complicated cultural reasons in Namibia, it didn't work. So the principle of it, and you said it in this case, it worked reasonably well for you. As a principle, is it a good principle and does it work?

SPEAKER_03 23:40

Um, I think it's a good principle that often doesn't work, you know, and I think it's a problem that people have been wrestling with for maybe the past 10 or 15 years, which is fully understanding that there is a fundamental inequity in the way TV writing access happens. You know, who gets these jobs, who gets to work as a as an ongoing professional in this business, and what are the barriers to those entries, and how do those barriers affect people of color more than they do not? Um, and so trying to attempt to tackle it is noble and a process absolutely worth nurturing. But the the manner in which it had been done, which was all right, um, we've got a staff of 10 people, they are probably all going to be white guys, there might be one white lady, um, and we realized we need to fix this, and so we're going to sort of drop shift uh a person into this who may or may not really fit, may or may not gel with anybody else, um, may come like later to the table than everybody who will already be an outcast, you know, and and the idea that this is a free rider and that everybody knows that this is a free rider automatically sets that person up for a certain amount of of ostracism. Um but I think the the the the heart behind it, which is we know that we are not we are not representative of our audience. Um and so the content only gets better the more we can represent that audience in an equitable way. And so the drive to to sort of diversify staffs um is important. The drive to diversify executives is important. Um it just it needs some fine-tuning as to how to implement that. And I and I think that that we're getting better at it. I feel like I think the the fellowships that exist, the writers' programs that exist, you know, the the diversification of the executive ranks and the agent ranks help, you know, so that that one person doesn't automatically just feel like that one person. Um it's a tool. Um, and like every tool, it has its downsides. And like getting one foot in the door is great, but if that door is continually wedged closed on your foot, um, it's not actually opening for you. It's causing more pain than it's helping. And nothing is getting better because of it.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

I think you shot you shin a really interesting light on something that we don't talk about enough, which is that the diversity spot is often free to the show. And I could, some showrunner might correct me on what's going to come out of my mouth next because I've never dealt with a show budget. But as far as I know, a show has X amount of dollars per year to hire writers. And then they get this extra person on for quote unquote free, because it is free to that writer's budget. And the next year, even though they've signed a multi-year contract, they don't have the budget to easily slide them into the next to the role that's much more expensive, assuming they went from staff writer to story editor. So where does that money come from? And I think that's one of the real problems with this program is it doesn't allow the, you know, even if they love the writer, suddenly they have to come up with all this extra money that might not have been budgeted. So when you said you were asked back, they had managed to do it. Some shows can't, there are other issues involved, many more issues involved that all need to be solved. But one of it should be just the budget needs to go up for this person. When you contract them for three years, the show needs to assume that this person's gonna be good, this person's gonna stay on, and there's gonna be the money for them to join the staff again next year, and that it's not some fight that has to happen uh behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_03 27:13

Does that it's totally fair? And I think there's a value judgment for things that you pay for and things that are free, you know, and and you value as a consumer, like, oh no, I I paid, you know, $50,000 for that car, but here's the car that I got for my mom as a hand-me-down. I am going to beat the crap. I'm gonna smoke in the bandit the free car, but I'm gonna take care of the one that I paid for. And so the free rider doesn't have the same value judgment in the in many showrunners' eyes as the ones that were on the budget, which is no, no, no. I went for those people, I looked for those people, I hired those people on purpose, and I was willing to take the the financial hit to get them. I don't know if if that same investment is there for the thing you got for free. You know, it's it's the it's the the birthday gift that you were happily to re-gift to somebody else because it's not what you wanted, but yeah, okay, it's it's a bottle of canti and the wearing a little wicker basket handle. All right, that's cute, but uh it's not what I wanted. Um and so changing the perspectives of it, changing the financial incentives of it, you know, I think can only help it go forward so that you know you're incentivizing showrunners to keep these people and then promote these people and then train them to be mid-level writers and then train them to be showrunners, as opposed to, well, you were free the first year, so but we're not gonna pay you like twice as much as we would have paid you to begin with to promote you to story editor. So if we keep you at all, you're gonna repeat your first year, you know, and then are we gonna promote you to ESC? Are we gonna promote you to co-producer? Who knows? Maybe we're not sure. Like, and it just begins to stifle everything at the bottom. And and so, yeah, the there there kind of needs to be, and there has been, um, to the best of my knowledge, a bit of a rethink about how that works. Um, luckily for me, unluckily for me, it was the only the only experience I had as a as a diverse writer. Um, and and coming out of that experience and building a career back, I was I was very insistent to whatever apps I had at the time, is that I don't want to be considered for the diversity slot. You know, like I realized that that might be cordoning off certain opportunities, and I get it. I'm happy to repeat the staff writer year, which I eventually did on Castle Rock, but I want them to want me as much as I want them. And I think that that's that's the best way to sort of build the foundation for what you hope is going to be an ongoing relationship, as opposed to this was an arranged marriage, and I don't know. I mean, it kind of worked out for the first year, but am I as invested in this as the girl that I fell in love with? Probably not.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

So sorry. This has been a fascinating tangent, and you use analogy, if I may say, you use analogies brilliantly. You should you should think about a career in writing, either journalism or TV, whichever is easier. Um, so let's go back. I I we sort of interrupted your your failures and rejection stuff. So let's go back to being back in journalism and thinking I want more. So about that.

SPEAKER_03 30:19

Um, you know, it it was very much like I took the job at the Hollywood Reporter for two reasons. A, I definitely needed a job that would give me benefit, and B, they were gonna move me to LA. I was still living back east at the time. And so took the gig, they moved me and my family out to the West Coast, which uh is now great. At the time was awful because uh LA is an acquired taste, especially if you are um an East Coaster. I was fine with it. My wife, let's go. Um, it took her about a year and a half to stop hating every breath that I took because I dragged her across the country away from her family and friends, um, which made everything else just difficult. Eventually she found her thing, as I was told people do. It takes about a year and a half before everybody finds their thing in LA. Um, and then you know, she found a path to being happy for herself, which was really important. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be like, hang out with me and all my writer friends, it's gonna be great. She's like, I'm not a writer, I don't know what she's talking about. And also, no, she needed her own stuff and and she found it. So that made the home life much, much better. Um, but you know, I I kept on writing pilots, I kept on writing scripts. Um, you know, my my little hip pocket itch in a WME was always still there for me. Um, but at some point there was not that much he could do for me. And so I uh I the the the biggest the biggest break, there there were two big breaks that I had when I was working for the for the Hollywood Reporter. The first was I I pitched uh an issue about screenwriters. I pitched like the the first screenwriter power list issue or whatever, which was really an excuse for me to talk to writers because I love talking to writers. And uh and Damon Linda Locke was on the cover. And so I I wrote the Damon Linda Locke cover story. So I had been a massive Lost fan. Um, you know, and so to get to just hang out with him for a couple of days and and uh go to his office and dig into his process and talk about Star Trek and talk about television and everything was was just wonderful. Like it was it was an education, and he's a lovely, lovely guy. And uh and when I saw the the news break, the the trade break that the leftovers was going with this series, um I I did my my second big journalistic no-no, which is I emailed him like out of the blue, and I was like, hey man, listen, I know you have no reason to take this email. I know that this is not a thing that that I'm sure you're looking to do, because I'm sure you get these kind of emails all the time, but I would like to be considered the the to join the leftover staff. And he uh he said, Listen, I I love your writing. The time we spent together doing this cover story was was wonderful, and I like the way you think. Um send me a sample. And so I sent him a sample.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Can I just interrupt? So did you you just described the email? Did you actually send a version of that?

SPEAKER_03 33:10

It was a sort of you know an email which would start with sort of three apologies and then Oh yes, no, it was 100% sent me a culpa email, which is like, listen, I know that you get this all the time, and I know that you probably don't want to do this, but here's my ad. Um, I always find like diffusing the bomb before the other person sees it um is probably helpful. Um, and so he's like, All right, listen, you know, uh we're starting to meet with people. Uh yeah, sure, send me a pilot. So send him a pilot. Um, you know, and whatever. A month later, he gets back to me. And he's like, Listen, um, two things. First, I love this pilot. It's a Damon factball. It has all the things that I want to have as a pilot, um, which is lovely and fantastic and wonderful. And I'm so glad that I didn't have to write the email, which is, I'm sorry, you can't write. And he's like, No, you can write, which is great. Um, number two, um, we're done staffing. Like, you know, I I I've already spent all of my gunpowder arguing with Warner Brothers about bringing on like a couple of playwrights from New York who have no experience. I I don't have any more gunpowder to do that with. So um, you know, it's not it's not gonna happen for this one. And I said, listen, I completely understand it was a long shot at best. Um, but I have to tell you, like, I was about to give up. Like I was I was about to stop wanting to be a writer because for all of those reasons. Like, I've got kids, I've got a job that like I could do and do well and then and and do for the rest of my life if I had to. Um, how selfish am I being by continuing to chase this dream? And and I'll never forget what he wrote back. He said, Listen, now's not the time to give up. Now's the time to double down. He says, You have the talent, you just don't have the timing, and you can't control that. So if I were you, I would just keep going, keep hammering at it. And uh, and that that stopped me from giving up, honestly. That kept me from from just abandoning writing as a as a pursuit and just being a dude and being a dad and finding a way to be happy with the life that I had, which wasn't that bad. Um and and and so I kept writing, you know, and I decided like, all right, you know what? I'm gonna write one more thing. If I write one more thing and it doesn't do anything for me, then then I'm done. Like I did it. I I I I sort of fulfilled the promise that I made to Daniel, which is I'm not gonna give up. Um, I will have exhausted all of my avenues. And if this doesn't go, then this doesn't go, and that's fine. Um, and so I wrote one more pilot. And on a LARC, I submitted it to uh the WGA West has a program called a Writer's Access Program, which is sort of a fellow, it's not a contest really, it's more of a fellowship. But um, out of 200 some odd submissions they get every year, maybe 300 submissions, they choose about 10, um, five comedy, five drama. And you get enrolled into a series of workshops, all of which are designed to help writers who sort of installed in the middle of their careers, um, writers from diverse backgrounds, you know, women, you know, LGBTQ, writers of age, um uh handicapped writers, and uh, and sort of aims to support them and give them some of the tools that they don't have. So I submitted to that. I'm like, listen, I'm in the guild, why the hell am I not? So I sent this pilot script off and then went about my business. And I would keep getting these emails of like, hey, she made the first round. It's like, oh yeah, great. Hey, she made the second round, oh yeah, great. Uh and I I was then I was working for Playboy and I was on a junket in Romania, um, which you know, as you do.

SPEAKER_00 36:51

I don't mean to interrupt, but you can't say things like I was working for Playboy and I was on a junket in Romania. A brief diversion. So can you just expand a little bit on that, please?

SPEAKER_03 37:02

Uh yeah, no, I got I I I had gotten an offer to, I was still at the at Hollywood Porter, I got an offer to join Playboy um their website. They were rebranding, they were trying to get away from their image of you know, Playboy, and uh and strip all the nudity from the website and just make it a full-on entertainment destination for men. And so I was the deputy editor and I was running the entertainment vertical, and uh, and it was I was there for 18 months before I got fired. Um and uh and it was great for like the first year because it's in Playboy. Like there are few things, there are few jobs, there are few companies that have the same allure and awe that Playboy has. If you were alive in like the 70s, 80s, and 90s, um, the the legend of Playboy rang very loudly in my head until I took the job and it was great until it wasn't. But um Universal was promoting their Dracula Untold movie, and they're like, hey, we're taking journalists to Romania. Do you want to go? And I said, I never wanted to go to Romania, but if you're gonna pay me to go to Romania, then I'm going to Romania. And so I'm I'm on the streets of Budapest, like it's one o'clock in the morning. We were all a little bit hammered, drinking what uh a kind of liquor that they call dragon's tears, um, because it makes you cry and then breathe fire. And uh, and then I get the email on my phone, which is like, you're a finalist in the writer's access program. So I'm like standing on these cobblestone streets of Romania crying because like the thing that I never thought would happen happened, which is the pilot that I wrote that was going to be the last pilot that I wrote did something for me. Um, and so you know, finished my trip in Romania, came back and started enrolling in these programs. And and Glenn Mazzara, I think, is is one of the the big shepherds of this program. And you know, he then gave, like, all right, we're gonna spend two hours talking about your meeting. Like the meeting you're gonna have, you're gonna go in a thousand general meetings, here's what you do. And then Glenn gave his, here's what my general meeting story is, here's how I was a hospital administrator in Brooklyn, and here's how I was this, and then how I can convince you that I should be a person who can run your show. And let me tell you why, and how you could use those 45 minutes out of that hour to sell the version of you that you want to sell, how every story you can tell gives them ammunition to help decide and fight the battle to give you the position that you want. Um, and how even sort of putting a spin on your own failures can help you. Here's what I learned from that thing, here's what I discovered from that thing, here's how I can pivot my life to make it an asset, as opposed to what uh we all felt at the time was a liability. And then there was a sort of manager and agent seminar where they were like, hey, here's a bunch of managers and agents who are all here to tell you, here's the difference between us and here's how we can go. And from that meeting, I got my manager, my very first manager, who then got me an agent. Um, you know, and it was it it was a life changer, like it honestly was, like, because it it gave me confidence, it gave me a sense of purpose, it gave me a feeling that this was not all for naught. That there's there, I wasn't kidding myself because that, you know, one of the other things that I that I take from from Damon, I remember interviewing him, and I remember him saying, we all have imposter syndrome. All of us feel like at some point they're gonna discover that we're a charlatan, that this is a charade, that we have been pulling the wool over all of their eyes. He's like, I got a shelf full of Emmys, and I still feel that way. And so if he feels that way with as much gold behind him, then everybody should probably feel that way. And then it's a matter of just pushing through that and getting it done. And and and all that takes is confidence, all that takes is belief, all that takes is like one person saying, you know what, buddy, like, yeah, you might have it. Um, but you won't know unless you keep trying. And and that sort of led to to everything, like that that sort of unlocked for me. Like, I got a manager at a small company um called the mission, who then got me an agent at CAA, and that agent, you know, started sending me out on stuff. And then we all broke up. Like we all had that, like, hey, listen, so we're just not getting the traction we thought you would get. We're not getting, you know, the the the jobs are not materializing as much as we thought they were. So, you know, we're just gonna have to agree to disagree and go our separate ways. Um, to which I said, but I haven't changed, like, I'm still the person you signed. Like, how is it my fault that you haven't gotten me any gigs? Like, that's your job, right? Like, isn't your job supposed to be talent scouting at the end of the day? And like, hey, no, you're good at this. Um, I think I can get you worked because that's how I get paid. And then if you don't do that, is it my fault that you didn't do that? Um, and then Casseroc came calling, you know, and Cassarock only happened because my assistant at EW was a fellow named Scott Brown, who was one of the worst assistants I've ever seen, but also one of the best writers I'd ever seen. And we all knew any of us who worked with him at EW knew that our like tombstones would be, oh, we're the ones who hired Scott Brown once. Um, he then went to be the theater critic at New York magazine, and then he went to go write on a show called Manhattan that was run by Sam Shaw and Dusty Thomason, who were then doing Catherine. And uh, and Scott said to both of them, it's like, hey, listen, we got this show, uh, this set in the Stephen King universe. None of us are horror fans. Also, the protagonist will be played by uh, you know, it's a it's a black dude, none of us are black. I've got the guy who can kind of fill both of those voids for us. You know, like I've got a dude, I've got a friend who's a nerd who can write his ass off, who's also a black guy. And while this was not a diversity hire, it was the very beginning of a phase in my career where people are looking specifically for me. And I never thought that that was going to be possible, where I was exactly what they wanted. Um, you know, nerd content exploded in ways that nobody could have seen it. The desire for diversity in a real way and inclusion and representation began to be on everybody's minds. And and I and you know, 15 other people are the answer to all of those problems, you know, and we can't go out together anymore because like one of us has to stay back in the bunker, like to maintain the continuity of government. Because, like, if if all of us are at the movies at the same time and a bomb goes off, then there are no more black nerd writers in Hollywood.

SPEAKER_02 43:46

I mean no, I I I I want to press down on something because it, you know, I don't know the years that have gone by in this story, but I'm guessing about four years or something, five years between your staff writer gig and your story editor gig. And this is a pretty normal story for people. I mean, they don't people think from the outside, I get my first job and that's it. I'm on the roller coaster. I'm gonna go up all the ranks and I'm in the parties and the world. And often there's this gap in between staff writer and story editor. A, the pay goes up a lot, B, the responsibilities go up a lot, but there's also it's kind of like a it sort of phases a whole group of people out. And some people just never get there. So you have this dream. The dream never dies. This is a story about this. This is normally a podcast about rejection, but I want to think about the success for one second. You get the call. I want to put us in that moment. Castle Rock has is put it given you an offer. They want you on staff. What's your feelings like? What are you telling your wife? What's going on? What's going through your head?

SPEAKER_03 44:44

Um, I mean, it's it and it's funny because I also like I was repeating staff writer. Like it wasn't even like I got the bump. It was like, it's as if alpha's never happened before. And so all of that time, you know, while useful to me, was just washed clean off of the slate. But the the the emotions are are complex because it's you know, it's is it finally happening? You know, is it happening? Or is this just another blip in in an otherwise, you know, steady career as a journalist? You know, is is this is this the reason why? Is this what made all of that trouble and heartache and despair worth it? You know, like and and what kind of problems does this solve? You know, trying to explain to my wife, you know, and then my mother, you know, let me tell you about the money in Hollywood. Like, it's ridiculous. And this is staff writer money. It's still ridiculous compared to just about any other job you do, unless you're a professional athlete, you know, and a sport that's on television. You know, and like those four years between were the kinds of years where you decide what bill gets paid, you know, where where you're like, all right, well, um I got this big bucket of change on my dresser. Maybe this is the month that we trade in that change so I can buy lunch when I go to work. Like maybe, you know, this is the the I used to get um comp shipments of comic books from companies because I was still in the press. And so, yeah, I get a big box of DC comic books. I can go and take those comic books to a comic book store and kind of resell them and get some money just to make the the day by day a little bit smoother. You know, I will never forget my first electric bill when I moved to LA and had my first summer in the San Fernando Valley. I'm like, is this a $3,000 electric bill? I need another job to pay for air conditioning. Nobody told me that when I moved out here. Um, so getting the casserole job, you know, not only meant uh a sort of validation that this pursuit was not, you know, worthless, that it actually had some merit, but it was a very real way to affect my sort of quality of life. You know, like it's it's and I think lots of people can understand that over this past year, the amount of stress that you have and you have to endure when you might not know where the next paycheck is coming from, when you might not know the bills that you're gonna get to pay, you know, and then to try and and chase a dream when that level of stress is is is heaping on your shoulders, like you know, Kelly Savala's hair just kind of sitting there, you know, and it just the the the amount of relief that Castle Rock offered on almost every front um was unparalleled. Like I'd never quite felt anything like it. Um you know, which is in and of itself a bit of a heady experience of like, oh, this is what this life is like, you know, like I get to just do this one thing for this time that I'm here. I don't have to be chasing each other, I don't have to be writing another pilot. I can just do this work, the work I've always wanted to do. And there was there's a liberation in that that I that I had never felt before.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

So, so I could honestly, I could spend 900 more hours listening, and we're still so early in your career, but but we we have a we have a cap and we've reached that cap. So, what we do need to ask you, and we ask, we ask everybody who comes on this show, um, you know, if you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring writer, uh, what would that be?

SPEAKER_03 48:17

Um I, you know, artists have that saying, you know, and it's it's I think it's a maximum. I think it's like a Malcolm Gladwell thing about the 10,000 hours. You know, Chuck Jones used to say, you know, you have every every artist has 10,000 bad drawings, and the key is to move through them as fast as you can to get to the good ones. Um and I think it's it's the best part about writing is that you can do it anywhere. And you're not a sculptor, you don't need a giant you know, hunk of marble, you're you're not a director, you don't need a camera. You know, you are a writer, and writers write, you know, and and whenever whenever I found myself in a problem that I didn't know my way out of, um writing always ended up being the solution to that. And so, you know, you have to do the work, you know, like there's no there's no shortcut to this, you know, because at some point you will get called on the mat and you will have to you'll have to show your work, like we used to have to do in high school. So I get how you got this problem, show your work. And that's that's the key to this. And it's it's an impossible dream that you have to be willing to nurture against all odds if this is a thing you want to do. Um, especially if you are not from LA, especially if you have no LA connections, especially if you are, you know, a normal person in whatever small town you live in, is but when by the time you get here, you have to be good at this. Um, and the only way to get good at this is to do it and do it over and over again and find some people to read it and get better at it. Um, you know, find the things that you like on TV and in movies and dissect them and reverse engineer them and see what lessons you can apply to them. But it's all about grindstoning, it's all about just keep sharpening yourself so that when you get that shot, you know, when you send that letter, when you shoot your shot to that showrunner, that you have no business emailing, that when they say, All right, show me something, you can show him the best you've got. And because you're only going to get that one chance. And, you know, that is that is how Hollywood works. You know, luck is is preparation meets work and and initiative and ambition. So, yeah, do the work, write a bunch of awful things, and then hopefully it'll give way to the good things, and then that will give way to a career.

SPEAKER_00 50:34

Yeah, that's great. And look, obviously, as you said, you you crossed the line a couple of times, but when you did it, you had something to give them at the end of it, and that's the key thing. So that's been brilliant. So look, Mark Bernardin, the former deputy editor of Playboy magazine's website. Thank you very much indeed for being part of the podcast.

SPEAKER_03 50:54

No, gentlemen, thank you. This is this has been um this has been more fun than I expected it to be, um, Bearing One's Soul. Um, but then again, this is also a third of the time I'm used to podcasting, so I feel fresh. Thank you, Mark.

SPEAKER_02 51:10

All right, that's a wrap on this episode. If you want to leave us any feedback, go to hollywoodabys.com.

SPEAKER_00 51:16

And if you'd like to subscribe, we won't stop you. And if you want to leave a review, we certainly won't stop you. In fact, we'll be incredibly grateful.

SPEAKER_02 51:23

And we have a couple of thank yous before we go completely. We want to thank James Launch for the intro and outro music. We want to thank both our wives who allowed us to hide in our respective basements while we record all of these interviews.

SPEAKER_00 51:36

If you want to find us on Twitter and join in the conversation, I'm at Dan Rutstein, and Noah is at M. Evelslyn. Please come and find us, please say hello, and if you really want to, please give Noah a job.

SPEAKER_02 51:48

Yes, I am looking for a job of any sort. I can polish shoes, I can write copy, I can even be in a writer's room. So if that's the case, feel free to reach out.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

But you definitely can't podcast.

SPEAKER_02 52:01

I definitely this is not the thing that I do well.