Take 26 - Show creator, writer and Emmy winner Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Lost, Dark Crystal

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 the floor.

SPEAKER_03 0:13

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

SPEAKER_00 0:20

For every success, there is months, sometimes even years, of painful failure.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default. That's the normal path to be able to first report. Unlike everything in our business, your hands get powerful and it all bounces off you. That process takes up an hour overnight.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

I was being told by my wallet job, 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-point job when I've realized what that moment was. It's never one point job. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, the podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. I, as ever, am your non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rotstein. And we have, as always, young Noah Evslin.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

Hey Dan, how are you doing? Um, on today's podcast, we have the incomparable Emmy Award-winning TV writer and showrunner Javier Grejo Markswatch. Javier has written on no less than 23 shows, including but not limited, to the Pretender, Charmed, Law and Order SVU, Lost, Medium, The Middleman, which he also created, The Hundred, The Shannara Chronicles, Blood and Treasure, and most recently The Dark Crystal, as well as Cowboy Bebop coming out soon. He's also one half of the popular podcast The Children of Tendu, which might or might not be ending, depending on who you ask. Welcome, Javier. Hi. Thank you for that lovely intro.

SPEAKER_04 1:51

I really appreciate it. It's really been 23 shows. My God.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

I guess a good place to start is you've had 20 plus shows. Yes. How many, how many of them have been canceled or cut short prematurely?

SPEAKER_04 2:08

Well, um, first of all, I think it's it's important to note that I have quit the two most successful shows of my career, uh, those being Charmed and Lost. And I think Lost, I think Charmed actually did better financially than Lost because it got a rich syndication deal. Um, and I left both of those after my second season on them after having helped launch each of them. Um, so I don't know how that fits into your paradigm, but it probably says something about my love of failure. Um, how many of them have been canceled? Let's see. Sequest was canceled the year that I worked on it, but that was its third season. I had been the network executive on it in its first two seasons. But I think that show is widely, you know, it's inter it's interesting in its time and now it's sort of understood to have been a huge failure and an embarrassment. But I keep meeting people online who are in their 20s and their late teens who watched it as kids and loved it. Um, so that's good, uh, or who watched it on, you know, DVD or what have you. Uh, let's see. So Sequest Pretender lasted uh four years, but I got fired after the first year. The next show I worked on, which I don't talk about, uh, was canceled after I think three episodes aired. Um, let's see, then there was uh Charmed. That did well, I suppose. Boomtown uh got canceled in its second season, and we had our order in the first season cut down to 18 because the show was deemed incomprehensible to the audience. Um, but we're kind of we won a George Foster Peabody Award that year, and we were perceived as a great groundbreaking, sort of form-breaking show. So uh The Chronicle, which was in 2000, was canceled after its first season, but we got to make 22 of those. Then uh gosh, uh Jake 2.0 canceled uh after uh after America's Next Top Bottle doubled our rating in our time slot. Then I got the job on Lost, that did not get canceled famously. Then I worked on Medium, which did not get canceled, but I left after a season, after two seasons. Then I made my show The Middleman, we got canceled after 12 episodes. Uh then so actually the three the three most successful shows, because Medium went on for also seven or eight years. So I and I quit that to go do the middleman. So there you go. Um, you know, I could I could have probably been getting all of those great green residuals checked from the writers' guild on that show because it's a procedural and it probably airs every day on Lifetime or something. Um, so let's see, Charlie's Angels, a notorious disaster and creative failure. Uh Shannara, we got two seasons out of Shannara, but I only worked on the second one, and then it got canceled. Uh on Charlie's Angels. The show got canceled the night that my first episode aired, the morning after my first episode aired, which was also the day that my that the last episode of the show, which was my second episode, wrapped. So I literally was nailing, putting nails on that coffin. Uh and uh yeah, you know, the list, uh, I don't know, Cowboy Bebop has not been canceled. Dark Crystal, sadly canceled. Um, but we won an Emmy. And uh, you know, I mean, look, I think with a lot of these things like Dark Crystal, The Middleman, Boomtown, you know, you look at them and you say, Oh, they only made 18 episodes in their first season, and then their second season was was, you know, basically never aired functionally. Uh, but the show won a Peabody Award, and it's a brilliant, front-breaking show that artistically I'd put up against pretty much anything. Um, The Middleman, I made 12 hours of the Song of My Soul, and it's a weird little soul, and we got to do it. So that's a triumph. Dark Crystal. Um, I glad, I mean, again, canceled after the after the first season. It was a very expensive show that Netflix couldn't support with the viewership it got on the show. Artistically and critically, that show was a huge, huge success. We we we have all of these awards, and I mean, you know, I get to say that I worked on a, you know, you know, a puppet show made for, you know, uh uh uh well into the obscene amounts of money that was for adults that had the narrative density of Game of Thrones, and I helped further Jim Henson's legacy. So, you know, I call that a success. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

So uh you are I may have said this already once to somebody else, but I think you might be the perfect guest in the sense that you you have you have that amazing balance between shows that got cancelled, you being fired from things, you're also choosing to quit things, but also winning two Emmys and uh various other awards, which is I think sort of almost that is uh this is how even a successful career in Hollywood obviously looks like this. Absolutely. But let's let's just pick up one to start with. I'm gonna I'm gonna pick middleman if I if I may. So I guess this is the whole tension in your world, which is it's a show that you're very proud of and fans love.

SPEAKER_04 6:51

Yes, but all three of them, yeah. But somebody upstairs didn't and it got canceled. We used to have, and actually they loved it. That's the great thing. First of all, we had a joke on middleman that we had fan. So yeah, and her name was Trudy. And uh, so like, so like whenever we we thought about maybe doing something on the show, we weren't sure. We're like, is Trudy gonna like this? Are we gonna get letters from fan? So every time we talked about the fan expectations, really just one fan, and it was Trudy. So, but also look, ABC Family, here's here's the thing about the middleman, okay? We got canceled because ABC Family was working on a very low margin of profit at the time. It was maybe the third year they'd had original programming. Um, and we were over budget by, I don't know, between $1,500 and $5,000 an episode. Okay. Now at CBS, they build you a statue for doing that, okay? Like when they called me and they said, well, you've been over budget, you know, between $1,200 and, you know, $5,000 an episode, I said, Great. Where are you gonna put my statue? That's amazing. I'm like the best show runner ever. That's it. And they're like, Well, you gotta understand that at ABC Family, that means we don't get to make one of our pilots. So um, so the margins were razor thin. The executives love the show. And Paul Lee, who was the president of ABC Family at the time, he went on to run ABC, actually said to me when he called to give me the bad news um, look, we love your show. We're gonna make as many of them as we can. Um, and then when we're done, we're gonna find the best company to make the best DVD set of it with all of the whistles and bells we can afford to put in it. And that's what happened. We made 12 episodes, then they gave us money to do a comic book of our of our last script, which we had written because we were about to go in production. They gave me the choice of whether to cancel the show. Um, we could have basically stopped at episode 12, and which is what we did, and gotten money to do the comic book and gotten a little extra money to make episode 12 fancier. Or the other option on the table was that we could do the series finale in six days with a budget cut of about $100,000. And I said, and it was the first thing I was gonna direct for television. So I was like, you know, and we still waited, and I went and talked to everybody, and everybody was like, look, we love the show, we'll do it, we'll do it in six days, and we'll make it look pretty, and you know, if we have to. But ultimately, I just thought there's no, you know what? I've it it it the fact that the crew would say that to me um was all the success that I needed. And one of the writers on the show walked in uh to my office as I was having my Dark Knight of the Soul about whether to cut the show off at 12 episodes or shoot an entire season and put a big bow on it. And this writer said to me that in all the work they've done, um, they'd always been made to feel less than, like they'd never work again, and all of you know, all of the standard humiliations that showrunners tend to pile on writers. And this writer said to me, after this show, I'm never gonna feel that way again because you've empowered us, because you know, that's the kind of boss you've been. And I thought, fuck it, cancel the show. That's it. I've achieved, you know, if if that's if that's that's a bigger definition of success to me than making the C the series finale for six days when most shows get eight days and you know, twice our budget. It's like it was it, you know. So we made the comic book. It came out at the same time as the big DVD set from Shout Factory, which has all the whistles and bells. And then they let me raid the prop, the prop warehouse, which is how I got all this all this crap in my office. So frankly, total success. And and the executives all love the show. They love to come to the read-throughs, they loved hanging out on the set. They were always telling me how much they enjoyed the show, how it was different from all the other stuff they did. So honestly, like I threw the world's best party for 12 episodes, you know, and it's better than doing a it's better than doing some shitty, humorless doer police procedural for 22 years, you know.

SPEAKER_03 10:30

We we we we we normally take a few questions to get to this question, but uh because you brought it up in your in your opening answer about writing the song of your soul, which is such a beautiful phrasing. And we've had other guests on this podcast. Uh, in fact, I can just name them. Jeffrey Lieber had talked about not writing his soul's work yet or wanting to write his soul's work, and if you have a lost connection with him.

SPEAKER_04 10:54

Yes, I do. And and how actually I have I have I have no lost connection with him, which is the part that's so bizarre, because I have never read his script. Right. You know, so so it's very weird because he's he's on the credits. I've met him, and he's a lovely man, and he's a it's a very talented writer. I mean, he's he's delightful. Um but boy, his story breaks his story on Lost breaks my heart. You know, I've uh I can only imagine his psychotherapy bills. We we and we got into that as well, yeah. And he obviously we talked about pros and cons of that.

SPEAKER_03 11:27

I have heard that his house in OHI is very nice. And named named somehow after Lost or some version of Lost. We got we we dug into that a bit. But my my question to you is this you've you've been on a lot of shows that have been canceled. You were probably you know anywhere from low to mid to high level staff when that happened, and you took various levels, probably of personal responsibility or no responsibility. Middleman gets canceled. The execs love it, presumably got canceled because Trudy wasn't making a big enough fuss. Your one f wasn't making enough noise. Trudy failed us, man. Trudy did not step up when we needed her. But what what what does that do to you as a do you leave looking back going, that was like only fond feelings, only good stuff? Do you miss not having that opportunity again? Is that what you're striving for? Is the blow bigger, smaller? Such a weird combination of everything going on. Let me put it to you this way.

SPEAKER_04 12:20

I I have I have a theory that you could go talk to Steven Spielberg today, and he'll probably tell you that he feels like he hasn't quite gotten his due and he really hasn't gotten to make the movie he always wanted to make. You know? Um, I think you could talk to JJ Abrams, and he might have some. I don't know, maybe I don't I I don't know him anymore. I worked with him for a year, whatever's, but I'm just saying, like most people working at a high level, and and and I, you know, I say this not as arrogance, but just as a fact. Like I'm working in an industry that's very exclusive and uh working at a very high level with big budgets and big talent and all of that. Um it's it's not a business where you'd normally get to tell the song of your soul, you know. So there's two facets to it. One of them is I've spent, you know, middleman went off the air in 20, 2008. So I've spent the last 13 years trying to get the next one on the air, you know, and I've sold about a dozen pilots, and you know, they they all reach certain levels and then they don't get made or they don't get picked up or what have you, you know? And it's so destroying because you put so much into so many of them. Some of them you don't, by the way. And and and if you want to hear about my biggest failure, I have to tell you about my year of selling out, which is actually my biggest failure in my career, okay? My failure to actually sell out and make a shit ton of money. But but so, you know, and look, I had a pilot last last year called Skyborn, okay. This pilot was born when I got done with the dark crystal, and the president of Henson TV came to me and said, We want to work with you. What would you do if you had free run of the creature shop? And I said, Wow, I said, Well, is there anything in particular you're looking for? And she said, Well, I miss Farscape. And I said, I can help you with that. And I literally had a show about Buddhist fish monks from outer space who kidnap six ordinary people under the premise that one of them is their Dalai Lama and is going to save them from a galactic invasion by what is basically Space Walmart, which is run by lizards and exoskeletons because they're so tiny that they have an inferiority complex and they have to walk around in these exoskeletons and they put big suits on top of them so they look impressive, right? Cuckoo Banana Show. The producers of Doctor Who get attached to it, okay? So I've got Bad Wolf America, the Jim Henson Company. I'm coming off of the Dark Crystal. We finally sell the show, we're at the last stage of script writing, and it's two weeks before the pandemic. And of course, a month later, the answer we get is we can't afford to make the show. We don't know how we're gonna so that's literally a show, and and the main character in that show is a 50-year-old cosplay dad, okay? So, like next to the middleman, that is the song of my soul again, you know? And the pandemic wiped it out completely, you know. So to get to do something like the middleman, that's not a failure. That I didn't walk out of that feeling failed. I walked out of that, like, holy shit, I got that past the goalie for a year. I got to hire people to make this. There's like there, you know, like this fish behind me, this is a $10,000 sculpt made by prop-making artisans, right? Cast in silicone. That's not failure. Okay. Failure is this, okay? 2009. Um, I'm getting a divorce. Um, I'm looking down the barrel of a very messy divorce, and that wound up costing an enormous amount of money. And I said, fuck it, I'm selling out. This is my year of selling out. I'm gonna sell the fuck out. So I get attached to develop a project called Tom Clancy's Homeland Security. Now, mind you, I'm a bleeding heart Hollywood socialist. Like, I shouldn't be touching this project with a 10-foot pole, but here I am. You know, I'm doing a project that glamorizes ice. Now, this is 2009, it's not as bad as it is now, but nevertheless, it's fascist cop propaganda, right? I sell this show and I'm developing it and I'm writing it, and uh, it's all going very well. And then I take a job on Charlie's Angels. Because what's Charlie's Angels? It's sex and the city with guns. I'm like, this is gonna run for 11 years, and I'm gonna buy a house in OHI next to Jeffrey Lieber's off of this show, right? So I'm feeling like, okay, we're doing it. No more of this Mambi Pambi, indie film, Dan Harmon, fucking quirky voice shit that I did with the middleman. Let's get real. We're gonna make some money, we're gonna pay for this divorce, we're gonna get the house, and we're gonna be that guy. Um, Charlie's Angels uh got canceled the morning after my first episode aired. Um, and I don't know if you saw the reviews for that show, but they were not auspicatory. And then Tom Clancy Soulman Security, I'm the only guy in Hollywood who ever wrote a pilot about terrorism who got the note from a network. Uh, well, we think um Arab terrorism is just too frightening for our audience. And I'm like, Homeland just won an Emmy? What are you talking about? And they're like, Well, we just we just don't think that uh that you know, I mean, can you do the show without you know Middle Eastern terrorists? And I'm and I'm like, it's called Tom Clancy's Homeland Security. What the hell's the matter with you? You know, what am I gonna so you know? So Charlie's Angels canceled Homeland Security, purchased, and then literally, like, I mean, what was I gonna do? Make them North Korean or something? I mean, ridiculous. So I I left that project. And and that was in terms of an objective failure, that was a year of a much greater failure than anything that happened with the middleman, you know, because if I'd succeeded, I would have still made television that I didn't believe in. And and that's when I realized, and it's something that has been the hallmark of the last you know few years of my career, is I really only take projects or do projects now, even when I need the money and I have to do something. Like, I'm not the guy you're gonna hire on a CBS procedural. Those shows are really hard to write. They're written by real artists who know what they're doing and they truly execute a formula. Well, I can't do that. And when I tried to do that, I failed miserably because I'm not that guy. And having that come to Jesus is what real failure actually did to me. Extraordinary. Am I being depressing enough? Is it depressing enough? No, it's it's it's I can I can I can give you some real misery porn. I know that I'm kind of relentlessly upbeat. So if you want, like this is good.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

This is this is good. Like we like to hear I I love the fact that you actually you tried to sell out, which you know is the wrong thing to do, but you sort of had to do it and you couldn't actually do it. That's a that's a good story. That's a great there's some karma, there's some universe telling you that maybe you should actually just try and do things properly rather than selling out in there.

SPEAKER_04 18:43

Well, and I think properly, you know, that's the interesting thing is properly is the word. It's like because doing things properly means doing commercial projects, you know, and and making your bones that way and rising up and getting that big overall deal and doing those things, you know. But that's just not in the cards for me, you know. Um, so so for me, properly is doing projects that are weird and and off the beaten path, and you know, maybe I don't have the kind of recognition or the kind of wealth that a lot of other writer creators sue, or the opportunities to showrun as much as I'd like to, you know.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

You know reasonably well. So Jose Molina was on the podcast. Yeah, I know him all right. And you know, he told the story of walking away from law and order. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 19:27

Um, which did he did he use the line I peaked when I had a guy get sodomized with a violin bow? Because that's how he played it to me.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Well, I think his one was uh sniffing baseball caps, um was the end for him, you know, a pedophile sniffing baseball caps. But the but you know he said you know walking away from that cost him a lot of money, yes it did, but he wanted to do the right thing. So uh on that note, I guess I want to ask you about your Emmys. So from the outside, winning uh awards is always great. Winning Emmys is sounds amazing. Yeah, in terms of winning an Emmy, like what does it really mean to you in the big scheme of things? Given what you've talked about with Miniman, is it less important than doing a show you want? Is it is it nice? Do you really care?

SPEAKER_04 20:16

Uh winning an Emmy doesn't suck, dude. It's kind of great. I mean, there's no downside to winning an Emmy, you know, it's it's phenomenal. I mean, we you know we we got dressed up, we went to the shrine on Wolverine and Gynan announced Lost's Emmy. Okay. William Shatner that year won. He actually beat uh uh Terry O'Quinn, which broke my heart, but it was Shatner, so I didn't know how to feel about that because you know it's Captain Kirk. Um, he did a live performance of the Star Trek theme song with a with a soprano on stage that year at the Emmys. It was phenomenal. I mean, what, and and by the way, Lost, as successful and interesting and as amazing as the work was, was not a fun show to work on. It was a pressure cooker and a roller coaster, and the drama and the insanity was off the hook. So it was the perfect, you know, thing to get from having, you know, like we suffered for for for that show, and to get rewarded for it was wonderful. Um, on Dark Crystal, I have an Emmy trophy that has my name under Jim Henson's name. How do how is that a bad thing? Like, I can't go on going, oh, winning an Emmy is terrible. No, it's wonderful. I mean, did I get a big overall deal after I walked off of Lost with an Emmy? No. You know, um, I went to work on Medium. I was a co-executive producer under, you know, two other executive producers, I wasn't running that show. It was, you know, so so so did winning the Emmy give me that burnished in my career that maybe would have propelled me into the if I had stayed on look, if I had stayed on Lost for the run of that show and not won an Emmy, right? And you know, maybe, you know, because for example, Kitzes and Horowitz came in to came in to work on the show, and they actually came into late in the first season, so they weren't on the Emmy ballot, which you know was awful for them. I mean, I I think they they they Worked really hard on the show, but they were there the entire time. And you know, they got once upon a time, they got a very big deal at ABC, and they've done very well. That's that wasn't my story, you know. Um, and ultimately, the Emmys, what the Emmys mean to me is that I gave them both to my parents. So they're just sitting on my parents' mantle along with the Peabody and the Writer's Guild Award and the Huron High School Hall of Fame plaque that I got a couple years ago. And they do so much better in their home than in mine. You know, people go to their house and they look up above the TV and they're like, oh my God, is that? And they're like, Yes, it is. Would you like to touch it? Yes, you know, and it's it's phenomenal. You know, it's like they paid for me to go to film school. I get to, I get to have given them that, you know. Um, so you know, but I still quit lost. You know, it was still a work environment that ultimately didn't need me anymore. Um, again, a much worse feeling than the middleman being canceled is walking away from the most popular show on television that's actively facing the the face of the popular culture, you know. Uh uh much worse and complicated feelings than that than having the middleman canceled and much longer lasting feelings, you know. Um, and it's the same with the dark crystal, you know, not getting picked up for a second season. That is a that was a crushing, dismaying disappointment that literally made me, it's it's actually made me lose some of my faith in humanity. Um, because I mean, not, you know, I haven't become Jean Paul Satra or anything, but you know, it's like, I mean, how how did people not wonder the way that so many of us did at this? And then you realize, you know, it's it's it's it's it's not for everybody. And and you realize how many miracles have to stack up for this show to even exist, and then you run out of miracles, but it doesn't make it any less painful. When you put something out there like the Dark Crystal, and the world doesn't immediately find it, and success depends on the world immediately finding it. Um, you just wish the world were a little bit of a better place because that's what you were trying to make it with that show.

SPEAKER_03 23:59

As we're as we're talking, by the way, I'm rethinking my whole career as I'm looking at my second monitor over here, which has an actively breaking CBS procedural that I'm working on, going, maybe I made some made some choices.

SPEAKER_04 24:10

No, no, no. No, no, but I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what, though. I I do want to say this because I I went through great pains to stress it previously. And a lot of people see the CBS procedural as this sort of outlier, you know, or this thing that that's from another age or whatever. I look at those shows and I see genuine mastery, you know, it's the same way I felt about 24, which is a show that I loved, even though it was a you know poem to fascism. Um but I love that show, probably because I have some you know jingoistic, super masculine stuff going on inside of me as well, but also because of just the sheer Olympian athleticism of doing that format 24 hours, you know. So I mean, if you're able to successfully make a good procedural, whether it's on CBS or NBC or wherever, kudos to you, man. That's that that is that is a form of artistry, and I respect it tremendously. It's it's it's uh it's like you it's like you know what, you know what, I can't write, I can't write a villain L. You know, I can write a haiku, but I can't write a villain L. And those guys are writing, you're writing villain L's, you know. So kudos to you.

SPEAKER_03 25:06

I'm I'm just uh one of many worker bees. This is my question um to you. I had listened to your Children of Tendu podcast. We're not gonna rehash that, but you you and Jose were talking about the changing nature of Hollywood and how you know the last year the Hollywood's changed probably more than the last 20 years combined. Yep. What and we can kind of we can we can talk about that, but what I really want to know coming from you is is, and you and Jose didn't you got into this for a second and then you talked about other things, is what keeps up. Well, Jose and I digressed. You're kidding me. No. What what what keeps you up at night? Not about not maybe about your career and or about just careers in general and this thing that we're all in.

SPEAKER_04 25:51

Well, I mean, look, aside from the pandemic, the fascism, and the race war, we still have climate change to worry about. So there's that. Uh I mean, but career-wise, I mean, look, um, we have gone from a world in which a very, very small number of writers could make extraordinarily good living doing this work, and the amount of competition coming up was far less, and the business was very regimented. It was like it was like farming, you know. You sowed in the summer, i.e., networks bought development pitches in the summer. You, you know, the the the crop, you you watered the crops over the fall, i.e., you developed your pilot script. Then in the late winter, you know, you that they decided what scripts they were going to make. And then in the spring, you make your pilot, and in the summer, you know, you knew whether you had a show on the air. It was the seasons, man. It was literally like, you know, you reap, you sow, you reap, you sow, you reap, you sow. Now there's 50,000 channels, you know, some of them have billions of dollars, some of them have a buck fifty. You know, I mean, look, my my age, I I have I've had this call with my agent where he goes, like, hey, there's a show, and I'm like, oh, great, or what is it? And he goes, you know, it's it's it's whatever. And I'm like, oh, great. Well, what is it? What is it gonna be on? He goes, it's on pooflinger. And I'm like, what's pooflinger? And he goes, we don't know either. I'm like, well, is it an app? Is it a web page? Is it a channel? Is it a stream? They're like, we don't know, but the an offer's coming in. So there's all of these places where shows can go, and there's also a great deal more competition because one of the great things about our increasingly diverse era is that look, what you television in the 80s was what you got when 95% of the potential creators were systematically kept out of the business by racism, by misogyny, by all of those factors, right? And now suddenly those floodgates are opening and there's a lot more people coming into the business with a lot of great ideas and a lot of fresh voices. All right. So there's more competition, there are more shows, but also the seasons are shorter. The writers' rooms spend less time uh there, you know. Um more and more, you know, feature directors and directors are exercising great greater control over it. Um and it's and and it's uh not to mention, you know, the United States is in a very odd place as a nation. You know, our hegemony as the world's exporter of culture is ending, is actively ending. You know, you look at the success of things like Money Heist, uh Dark, you know, uh Veneno, you know, you look at any of these shows that are, and you realize other countries are catching up to us. We don't have the advantage that everyone but us was bombed back into the Stone Age in World War II anymore. You know, like we we coasted on that for a good 50 years, but that day is done. So we have to be more competitive, we have to be more entrepreneurial. Right now I'm working the equivalent of three jobs. I'm writing a pilot that is for pay, so that's a paying job. I'm on a writer's room for 10 weeks, right? I'm developing another pilot that I have to go pitch, um, and and I'm supervising two other two other projects. Um, so I'm working harder than I ever have, and I'm not earning in the way that I used to, because the way that I used to, I got parked on a show and I'm like, great, I write a couple scripts here, I'm I get my episodic fee, here's how I'm gonna make for the year. All of that has gone into uncertainty. And look, for somebody like me, who is if not a fat cat, I'm a I'm a cat of reasonable girth. You know, I think I can say that without it sounding too arrogant. Um, that keeps you up at night because your your life, your lifestyle takes on a certain affect, and it's like everything is changing, and now I have to look at my life and say, can I continue to live it the way I have? What kind of provisions do I have to make for a very uncertain future? You know, in a business where the future was never certain to begin with, and now it's like twice that. So it's it's extraordinarily uh worrisome, you know. The the silver lining in it is that more and more unique shows are getting made. If you look at the shows I've worked on in the last four years, you know, from developing a pilot for Xenoph to the 100 to um to Cowboy Bebop, Dark Crystal, Blood and Treasure. I mean, the when when we when I saw the Cowboy Bebop pilot, I was talking to Christopher Yost, who who wrote it and who developed the show, and I said, I'm so happy. And he goes, you know, so you like the pilot? I said, Well, I like the pilot, I think it's phenomenal. I really love it. But I also like happy that TV got weird. TV is finally what I wish it had been in 1993, you know. Um, and and I've been here for 27 years waiting for TV to get this interesting to work on, you know. So, but it still keeps me up at night because I may not get to work on it.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

So a question about what comes next for you. I'll give you I'm gonna give you three options. Option one is some show which might not be your dream but plays ridiculously well and will run for enough seasons that you probably won't have to you really will be a fat cat by the end of it. Option two is the chance to create another middleman, you know, genuinely your dream show, but knowing that it'll only last probably one season. And the third option is winning another Emmy. Which of those three would you take? Second.

SPEAKER_04 31:18

Straight up no chaser. I mean, look, I've I've I've uh I have saved a fair bit of money. Um my my my children's college education is is is reasonably well taken care of. I know that that they're not going to starve. Uh I know that they'll get to go to school. Uh, you know, we moved, we bought a house near like a really great public school, you know. Um if I get look, the the show that I told you about the Buddha spacefish, like I mean, if you told me that I got to make 12 episodes of that, or I could go to work on again, a show that I maybe didn't love, but how could you turn down the opportunity to put puppet fish from outer space on the air, you know?

SPEAKER_03 32:00

By the way, I read puppet fish from outer space and and and people out there. It's it's the world building in that is something that everybody should look at and how how quickly and elegantly you were able to craft this thing, which is set in outer space with creatures and design work, and you have to put them in this thing and not be overly verbose. And and of course, you accomplished that. So I was you had posted on Twitter, and I was really grateful that you did that. But uh, this also leads me to my next thing is at some point you decided, and you were the first, I think, to be more open on social media in a way that exposes you to people looking at you as otherwise than a, let's say, uh a cat of a reasonable size. Meaning, we know your career has been successful, but you're also telling people for the first time, which again, what kind of in a weird way inspired this podcast. I've got this pilot. I failed at this. This these pilots didn't go. You talked about Xena, you talked about, you know, I've seen I've been following you for years and watching you more often than not, you're quiet about your wins and you're vocal about your losses, which sometimes feels like the reverse of many other people in this town. And yet you have a lot of up-and-coming writers who are hearing this and and being like, I feel like they're being inspired by by what you're telling them. Was that intentional? What why did you make that choice?

SPEAKER_04 33:27

First of all, thank you for reading Skyborne and for saying such nice things about it. You know, you know, look, I don't know if you're trying to like like be like Barbara Walters with Patrick Swayze here, get me to break down because it's starting to feel that way. Skyborn, I mean, look, I wrote and illustrated the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of the Skyborne universe. You know, like I literally have a book with like hand drawings and entries about all the different things in that universe and all that. That show, I could have retired after making that show if that show made it on the air. Um, so so to see it fail because you know, the world sucks, and you know, uh uh uh we we we we have a science denier in the White House was uh uh was a shiv to my kidneys. Um so I'm I'm glad and I by the way I put it out there because I really just wanted people to read it and find it good, um, because we're never gonna see it. Um I'm who I am, you know, and and as with my story about trying to make a show about Homeland Security, and you know, like like I can't, I don't know how to be anyone else, and and that has been to my very great detriment for much of my life. Um and um I've found in social media a place where I can do that. And by the way, as far as the shit I talk about, you don't know, you don't know the the the seven-eighths of it. Um, you know, because because I don't there's a lot that I do not talk about because it involves other people. And I mean, I think I already have a reputation as somebody who tells tales out of school anyway, and I'm okay with that because mostly people who don't have tales told about them out of school hire me nowadays, you know, and that's very nice. Um, I I wrote an essay called The Eleven Laws of Showrunning, and the great knock-on effect of that is that nobody who saw themselves in that essay will hire me. Which I read as well. God bless you, sir. Um, and I think ultimately, in terms of my contribution to television as a medium, um, if things continue going the way that they have in terms of people reading that essay and the kind of feedback I get on that essay, that may wind up being my biggest contribution. Um, which, you know, I mean, I'm a TV writer, so I kind of look at that and go, wow. But at the same time, I'd be okay with that. Uh if I actually manage to make some kind of a dent in the culture of showrunning and make some kind of significant change, I would consider that success. And I would consider that a good reason for having spent my life in this very difficult business. Um, you know, if I and ultimately with what I do on Twitter and what I do on social media, um, a lot of it is just my benign narcissism, you know. I I want to be seen, I want to be heard. And guess what? Because most of your pilots don't make it on the air. Twit, that's why so many of us are on Twitter, by the way. You know, I mean, I've said this a million times, and it it, you know, but but it's true. It's like, you know, we're all in this because we want to get the love and attention we didn't get as children, you know? And what's Twitter but like a spigot of the love and attention you didn't get as a child? You know, but you have to give something. You can't just go in there and be like blue, you know. And I realized, and one of the things that that I realized from early on in my career is that nobody wanted to educate you, you know. Um, I worked with so many people who were just horrible and just didn't want to give you like just the just the benefit of their knowledge when it would have let you make their lives easier. And that's the part that I don't understand from a strictly utilitarian standpoint. If you're a showrunner who mentors, you are literally grooming people to make your life easier, and the vast majority of people I've worked for do not do that. So I saw this thing where if I started to talk openly and honestly about what I do, it might actually help some people. And to the same reason I put the scripts up on my webpage and the treatments and the pitches and the Bibles and all that stuff. You know, ABC could send me a cease and the cis letter about any one of those pilots or NBC or whoever owns them, because I don't own those scripts. Um, but uh, you know, if they do, I'll take them down. But it's like right now, my biggest problem going into writers' rooms is that half the writers who get in those rooms don't know what their job actually is. So for me, you take all of that failure, all of those failed pilots, all of those unpicked up pilots, and a couple of ones that made it or did better than not, you put them out there and it increases just the amount of material people have to look at so they can model after something. I don't think people should model after me necessarily. Like I don't have the secret sauce, but it's just another thing out there that you can look at and it gives you an idea of how to behave. And it's the same with with children of Tendu. You know, I'm sure Jose told you the story of why we started that podcast, right?

SPEAKER_03 38:14

Uh at that point, I think he was my mentor, but I when you first started, and I realized it was seven years ago or something like that. Oh god, it was yeah.

SPEAKER_04 38:22

Jose and I were sitting at a bar getting drunk before our Dungeons and Dragons game, you know, like you do. And uh and we made a list of all of the sociopathic abusers we'd worked for up until then. And that list was by an order of magnitude greater than the order than the number of people who we work for that we said that was a good person who taught me something and who really treated me with decency. Um, and that doesn't mean that some of them don't have the ability. Some of them, you know, some the weird thing is some of them treat you nicely in flashes, and then the next thing you know, they're like eating your liver, you know. Um so we started thinking, okay, so how can we turn those people around? And we realize there's no turning them around, they're already successful. So you have to start with people who are starting out and who are hungry for a certain kind of knowledge. And by giving that knowledge, you model a different kind of behavior than you've gotten, you know. And you know, it's one of those things where you realize I'm kind of doing it for me because I want a lot of people to have more knowledge when they get in the writer's room that I'm in, so I don't have to teach remedial writers' room. But it's also there because it's for for who I was when I was 25 and I got my job on Sequest, you know. And and look, the whole point of living, right? I mean, I know this is like a stupid sort of chicken soup for the soul towning kind of shit, but like adult you is supposed to reach back through time to save kid you. That's the whole reason you become an adult, you know? So that's my way of doing that. That's my way of reaching back in time to my 23, 24, 25-year-old self floundering in this business, knowing nothing and saying, uh, here's what you should have had.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

Extraordinary, which is the perfect lead-in to the uh final question, which makes it rather sad actually, because if ever a podcast could go to a three-parter, this is the one. You're very sweet. The last question we have to ask is if you could give a single piece of advice to somebody entering the the industry you know, apart from seven years of your podcast, what would it be? It doesn't matter who you're working for.

SPEAKER_04 40:25

That person is not there to perform the role of your father, your mother, or your brother. They're not your family. It's not their job to bolster your ego, tell you everything is gonna be okay, and make you feel better about yourself. It'd be nice if they did that because it doesn't take that much effort. But it's not their job. And most of them don't see it as their job. And if you go into a TV staff hoping that you're gonna do such great work that daddy's gonna love you and tell you how great you are, you are setting yourself up for decades of heartbreak. Um, I learned that lesson so late in my career that it's shameful to me because I tortured myself. I was depressed. I mean, I'm still clinically depressed, but that's a chemical issue. Um, you know, I had dark nights of the soul left and right because I kept putting on my bosses this need that I had for a certain type of friendship validation, what have you, you know? And they they weren't there to give me that. You know, we weren't a bunch of a bunch of happy go-lucky kids who ran off and joined the circus. We were people who are working in a multimillion dollar business under great stress. And as much as I would have liked for those communities to have been families, they're not. And when worst comes to worst, that person who you want to be your daddy, that person who's who you want to be your your big brother who tells you your work is good, that person will stab you in the front to keep their show on the air. You know? And and and what do you what do you wind up with? You wind up with the same heartbreak you had when you were six. And you have to get a good psychotherapist and work all of that shit on the couch because it's not you can't work it in the writer's room. In the writer's room, it will kill you and it will shorten your lifespan. So that's my advice. And it should be something like you know, never bold your slug lines, but it's not. It's literally the same advice you should have wherever you go in life, but especially in Hollywood, because it's about creative work. And so much of creative work is sewn up with who you are. You know, you you're ripping a piece of your soul and giving it to somebody, and then you're and then you know that person is gonna come back and at best be professional. You know, at worst, they'll write no on every page of the script in red pen and throw it at you. You know, the most you can expect is professionalism. Um, and even that isn't enough if you're coming at this wanting, you know, a certain kind of validation that pathologically you you you require in order to maintain your self-concept. Don't go look for it in the writer's room, it's not there.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

What an extraordinary answer. Javi, can I just say, look, it's been amazing having you on the podcast. Thank you very much. We hoped this episode would be something like this, and it absolutely was. So thank you. Javi, a Emmy Award winner, showrunner, creator, and a man who the biggest failure you had was failing to sell out, which is actually a great failure to have. So thank you very much for being part of this.

SPEAKER_04 43:29

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Robbie. All right, cool.

SPEAKER_03 43:39

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 NEVslin.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

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. You have a Twitter account? I do have a Twitter account. It's at Dan Rutstein. And not only now do I have another Twitter account, I also have two other podcasts. And I've some of our listeners have been saying, Dan, 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 44:33

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.

SPEAKER_00 44:49

That's good. I'll do.