Take 31 - Writer and showrunner David Steinberg, Slackers, American Pie 2, No Good Nick

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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

SPEAKER_04 0:13

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

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Sometimes even years of painful failure.

SPEAKER_03 0:26

This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default. That's the moment we have to be able to first read. That does not work.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

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

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about injection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. I am Dan Ratstein. Uh Noah, how are you today?

SPEAKER_04 1:10

We're we're doing great. We got a new refrigerator in the Epsilon household, which is always a reason to celebrate. We've been watching Mosquito Coast and we know the importance of ice, and now we have our very own ice machine. We're thrilled. But I'm not as thrilled as I am to introduce our very next guest. Uh David H. Steinberg is an American writer, director, and producer for film and TV. He wrote the screenplays for the feature films American Pie 2, Slackers, National Lampoons, Barely Legal, and American 2. American Pie 2 presents The Book of Love. He also created two animated series, Space Racers and Yokai Watch. He most recently was the executive producer and showrunner on No Good Nick, currently streaming on Netflix. Welcome, Dave.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Thank you. Thanks for having me. So I'll jump in with the obvious first question, which is how does it feel to be the second most famous David Steinberg?

SPEAKER_02 2:03

Yeah, you know, I'm I'd be lucky if I was the second most. There's actually more than just the one that everyone, the sort of famous stand-up comedian that directs Kirby enthusiasm, and I get his phone calls confirming his reservations at the Ivy all the time. I got invited to host a roast at the Friars Club once. So I sometimes get his mail, but there's also the other David Steinbergs. There's the head of Nickelodeon animation, there's the manager David Steinberg. So we've discussed having a club, and I've actually had lunch with the one of the other David Steinbergs, the Nickelodeon president, and he's fully on board with it. We want to get us all together and form a club where we haven't gotten any other people to accept this offer, but um it keeps you humble. You know, that's good, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:48

So funny, I on one of my other podcasts, I had a guest, Natalie Morales, who's an actress, which is also the same name as a TV anchor. And the TV anchor was slightly more famous than her, although that's now beginning to change. And it's interesting because if you can overtake the other David Steinberg, then we'll get the Canadian guy on going, yeah, it's slightly annoying. I've been asked to show run these new shows for Netflix, and it's not really what I do. So you know, you've got something to aspire to there.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

Yeah, but plus I'm much younger than he is, so I just naturally assume that eventually he will die and I'll take over. Indeed.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

On that whole on that happy note. So look, obviously, we're very excited to have to this David Steinberg on. Um, so we're just gonna I think we should just jump straight into a a straight up sort of rejection failure adversity uh part of it. So you can start by telling us of all of the rejections that you've had, and assuming you like everyone else in this career in this industry, you've had a few. Are there any that particularly stun for you?

SPEAKER_02 3:55

Well, I would say my biggest failure in terms of like depth of falling was my first one. I kind of did breaking in backwards. I broke in right out of film school and then had my biggest failure right away. So I was um I was at USC and um in the producing program, the Stark program, and I had written my third script and actually cataloged this whole story of selling my first spec script. I've got a whole long Twitter thread on it. And so it was like the end of the spec boom in 1999. Um, so I wrote a feature script because features is where everyone wanted to be when you were a writer. TV was like, you know, second-class citizens, which obviously, if I could have done it differently, I would have gone the other direction. But everyone wanted to write film. And so I had written a couple specs. I got an agent, and Slackers was my third script that I had written. And I had was still, it was uh right after graduation. We sent it out, and it was this huge spec sale. And you know, it was kind of in those days, like Daily Variety would announce like spec sales, like on page one, two, three, five. It was like all every day was like 500,000, 900,000, 1.5 million. So this um was a sale, and you can look it up. So I'll just tell you uh it was for $700,000, and it was a um progress to production deal where they had to make the movie, otherwise, I got the rights to the script back and kept the money. So it was a pretty good deal. Um so that being the case, uh my first meeting with the producer, um I naturally thought I was a pretty good writer. I thought that I that the money that had been thrown at me reflected my worth as a writer and my quality, even though this was like kind of a stupid comedy. Um, back in my youth, I sort of internalized the idea that this meant that I was that good. And so I walked into that meeting and no one told me, they don't you you joined the writer's guild, you know, I had an agent, I had a manager. They didn't say, like, here's what to expect on your first meeting. No one held my hand, no one told me anything. I just walked in like an idiot to that meeting and sat down and they said, Okay, so here's our thoughts on the movie. Now, if you've seen Slackers, which most people haven't, it did $4 million in the box office. But it was about three college kids who have scams to beat the system, and they're supposed to be very smart and clever, and they've got all these scams to like cheat on exams, to try to get dates, et cetera. So the first suggestion that came from the producer is like, we want to make the world bigger. We're thinking like these guys should have like all sorts of operations. Maybe that you walk into their dorm room and there's like a boiler room, and there's like, you know, a dozen guys, and they've got like a stock scheme going on in like Hong Kong, and they've got like some sort of pyramid scheme, and they've got like things going on worldwide operation, and like they've got monitors, and and I wrote a comedy about like three guys in college that were cheating on tests, and they're like talking about stock schemes in Hong Kong. So the idiot that I was, I just said, Well, that's the stupidest idea I ever heard. Literally came out of my mouth. And they basically fired me right then and there. I mean, they didn't say that they I was fired, but in their heads I was fired. And so I had a contractual obligation. I mean, I they had to let me do my one rewrite, and then they fired me. And they said, Oh, that guy, yeah, he's total asshole. He's he doesn't he's not collaborative, he doesn't take notes. And that one mistake haunted my career for years because I had thought that I had made it to like the upper echelon of like the big spec sale, and all of a sudden, and you know, rightfully so to a certain extent, I feel like I kind of deserved it, maybe not as bad as they gave it, but they not only fired me, hired someone else to rewrite the movie, and getting that script in when that some other writer that I'd never met before came in and took what I loved and just changed it to something else. And guess what? There were stock schemes in Hong Kong because that's what they wanted. And so that pit in your stomach of like nausea of reading someone else's rewrite of your script that you never even met this person before, and then walking into rooms for years where I would uh be up for a job, and I was trying to make a living, and the you know, I almost had a job at Sony, and I walked out. I come up with a take on a rewrite, and I thought I had the job. I walked out, and that producer was walking in. And I was like, Oh, hey, and then I got a phone call from the producer that I was working with on this project. They said, they don't want to hire you. I'm like, why? We we we nailed it. Like they said in the room that I'm getting the job, and they're like, Yeah, that they that other guy that walked in, he said, You're a total asshole, you're not collaborative, you're not good to work with, and they said we don't need to deal with that. So I struggled for years to come back from being an asshole. And by the way, I'm the super nicest guy in the world now, but I was an asshole then.

SPEAKER_04 9:20

It's amazing how you know, one word out of your mouth or one sentence out of your mouth can have such residual damage. I have I have a some a comment and then a question for you. The comment is what you said really resonated about with me is we don't no one ever teaches us anything, you know, when we're beginning our careers about like what we're supposed to do in any of these meetings. They're like, you have a general, you have a pitch, you have this, you have that. And there's no like explaining. There was social media wasn't really around when I was breaking it either. So you couldn't ask the question on Twitter, what do I do in this situation? I remember my first pitch I went out on, and I I think it was like two hours. I took two hours to pitch a feature film. And they're like, How long did it take? I'm like, two hours. Like two hours. I'm like, it's not supposed to take two hours. Like, no, like there was no process for me. But my question for you is is related to your sort of your slow climb back. What do you do when you're in the situation you're in now where people think you're an asshole, you've written one big thing, it's got a lot of press about it, and now you're in some sort of jail. What do you do to begin to sort of get get back and see the light and sell the sell your next project?

SPEAKER_02 10:27

Well, by the way, uh just commenting on what you said, like you're absolutely right. There's and if there was better mentoring or anything, or someone just sort of walking you through. I walked in my first general meeting, I was wearing a suit. So I was like, Oh, it's a general meeting it's a meeting, a studio. You were, you know, they were like laughed at me. But yeah, I mean, you know, the thing that's that's so tough is that your representatives aren't gonna help you. No one's going to say, hey, look, this is a person who needs to continue making a living. They're just like, okay, well, that guy's career was short. It's over. You know, like people will say, have said on this podcast before, like, no one tells you when your career's over. And that's the hardest thing. If they just called you up and said, though, by the way, you're never gonna work again as a writer, you would be upset, but at least you'd know. And so it's that dread of like, am I going to come back from this or not? It's not how do I come back for it? Is can I? Because it's it's an actual, it's not a rhetorical question, you know. So, you know, you just gotta like do the hard work and you've got to like try to become a better writer and a better person. Those are the two things that you know, people say all the time, you can only control what you can control. There's a lot of things that are out of your control in this business, and there's a lot of luck involved, but that doesn't mean that everything's out of your control. And, you know, I worked on being more collaborative, I worked on being nicer to people, I worked on not being thinking that I was, you know, so great. You know, certainly like 20, I've been doing this now for 22 years, people telling you that you're not great all the time has certainly taken that idea out of my head completely you know permanently. But um, you know, it just you have to like make a decision. Are you going to do whatever it takes to work your way back up or not? Because no one cares if you don't, they're just happy to never work with you again.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

So obviously, you've had uh a lot of success in recent years, despite your slightly difficult start and being difficult to work with. Obviously, you you own that story now, you know, you're you're voluntarily telling us this story. Um do you find because uh you're now successful again and people think you're nice because you actually are, like, do you feel comfortable? Like, do you tell people that story or when people bring it up? Didn't I hear once that you know 10 years ago you said this crazy thing in a meeting? Like, do you is it something that comes up? Like, you know, you're you're at Netflix, your show running. Do you make some casual joke that you did this early in your career, or do you try not to think about it and not tell people it happened?

SPEAKER_02 13:09

Yeah, no, I absolutely own it and I will tell anyone the story. But to to clarify, I don't joke about it. I use it as a warning story because I'm embarrassed, you know, about you know, I think people make mistakes and you're embarrassed about your mistakes and the question is whether you learn from them or not. It's it's an embarrassing story, but I'm happy to tell it to people as you know to teach them or to to be an example of what not to do. I have lots of examples of what not to do. So I will tell the story in the context where someone's saying, like, how do you do a general mean outstanding? Well, here's how you know, here's how you don't do a notes meeting. And I would be tell a story and not like be like, ha ha ha. I'm like, I'm actually embarrassed because it was a stupid thing to do. And you know, when I was 30, I did a lot of stupid things, and I do fewer stupid things now than I'm in my 50s. Um, because it it fundamentally has to do with this this belief that you have to think that people are capable of change, right? I mean, that's what we do as writers is we write stories about people who go through some sort of catharsis and learn a lesson. If it's a TV, maybe they reset at the end of the episode. But you know, change is the fundamental spine of all stories, you know, heroic journey, whatever. It's about people changing. So if you don't think people can really change in real life, you really have no business being a writer. So if you write about characters changing all day long, but you don't think, but you honestly think like, well, I people can't change. I don't get it. You have to think that people can change. And if you think that people can change, then you should try to change into a better person than you are now. You should be working on becoming better.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

So are you are you sort of comparing yourself to Iron Man? You're like, you know, like an arrogant weapons dealer, and then you suddenly become a hero and change the world. You're the writing equivalent of that. You went from arrogant, I don't take notes and I call executives stupid, to actually being a nice guy who cares about his rooms and writes very well. That's exactly what I was going for.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

Yes, I would love to be the Iron Man of a I would like I totally relate to like him and Peter Parker when Peter Parker is like, you know, what's happening to me? I'm just Mr. Stark, what's happening to me? I'm totally can put myself in the the position of you know, Tony Stark in that situation, watching, you know, the person disappear.

SPEAKER_04 15:38

The I have a question for you about um um transparency and your willingness to, you mentioned transparency in your last answer, and you also um are very transparent in a way that uh I find admirable on social media. You're willing to talk about your failures, you're willing to talk about, you know, be very open about your process. And even today you talked about sort of making sort of uh can't remember the exact phrase you use, but oh, normalize, normalize failure. Yeah. Why is it so important? And that's obviously what this whole podcast is about. So why is it so important to you that people out there understand that failure is part of the process?

SPEAKER_02 16:19

Well, I think that, you know, writers, we're in a tough business. It's it's a lot tougher than a lot of other, you know. Sure, there's a there's a lot of tough industries, but it's emotionally draining. And I feel bad for people going through this. I feel bad for myself going through it. I feel even worse for people who have no guidance on how to deal with the struggles of being a creative person in the industry based on failure, based on saying no. So, I mean, I don't know. I definitely have become more empathetic as I've gotten older and since I've gotten a family, but I want to be a mentor to young writers. I want to um give advice, you know, to people who are interested in that advice. And I have over the years built up my own self-confidence that it doesn't make me feel less good about myself to tell you about my mistakes and my failures. I feel, you know, fine. I'm not gonna break down and and and um worry about you know, telling you some story about something stupid I did 20 years ago, um, make me feel like I'm a failure now. And so I think that being empathetic and being kind to others, you want to share that information because also it's a weird industry because there's no guidebook, there's no rules. You can't you can go to film school, but they're not gonna tell you how to um navigate the career. You know, a lot of their advice that you get on Twitter, and I love Twitter, and I give a lot of writing advice, and and I think that the community is actually really nurturing and supportive given that it's Twitter, it's surprisingly nice. But a lot of my advice isn't necessarily like how to write better, because I think you can find that elsewhere and you can figure it out on your own. But it's like how to navigate the career that no one tells you, and it's just a complete mystery. It's like Hollywood is it's designed to be a mystery because they want to keep people out.

SPEAKER_04 18:15

Do you think, you know, you spoke about having a career that's over 20 years long. Uh, I came to Hollywood, I think 14 years ago, right as the writer strike was winding down and the 2008 writer strike, and it was hard then. I feel like it's harder now for people breaking in. I think the business has gotten impenetrable on some on some levels. And some levels there's ways in that we never had in communication, ways to communicate, Twitter, social media, maybe more shows to go onto than what we're about, you know, 14 years ago. But I feel like the business has changed. It might not have changed for the better. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think it's it's it's for a young writer coming into the industry today?

SPEAKER_02 18:54

Yeah, I do I definitely think it's harder now. Uh, and people, that's the number one question anyone really wants to know is like, well, how do I break in? I just, you know, tell me the secret. And there's no secret, and there's no right answer. Um, and it was a lot easier in the 90s when I went to film school, you know, uh like I got into the USC, and that was like they said the USC is the best film school. So I'm like, okay, I'll go to that one. I got in, and I met people at very high levels. All the teachers are like studio executives and agents, and you know, they weren't like, hey, let me help you, but you're just coming in with access to very high label. And the Peter Stark program gives you an internship after your first year at a studio. So it's a great system to just like kind of bypass the barriers to entry. Um so you know, if you're just someone in the middle of nowhere trying to write your script and like sending out query letters, it's impenetrable. I agree with you. There are a lot of things that are better now. You can um people have said on this podcast before, like, go make something, you know. You you know, back when I was in film school, you if you had to rent a film camera package, that was a big undertaking if you wanted to go make a short film. One um Joe Nossbaum's uh director and friend of mine, and he um made Lucas in Love in like 1998, but that was a big deal in a you know, making short films back then probably would have cost you 10, 20, 30,000. Um now you can just make a TikTok and or you can um just get attention for creating content. It doesn't have to be a screenplay, you can create content of any kind as long as people find it interesting. Look at um uh the name's escaping me. The woman who um was doing all the lip syncing of of Trump. Sarah Cooper. Yes, Sarah Cooper. I mean, genius, right? And and she's like did this really funny thing, everyone loved it, and she got a show, you know, because she's talented and she did something that was unexpected. There was the woman uh that made the musicals all by herself, and she got super famous last year during the pandemic, too. It's like you can always just make something, so that's easier to make things that get attention, you know. If you can do something that people find cool, you can like publish your own graphic novel, you can make your own podcast. There's lots of ways to get attention if you have um great ideas and great content, so that part's easier, and you know, I've also seen people break in like in the last year, just based on like Twitter, you know, making friends at their own level, being a nice person who has good ideas and you know, in it in an appropriate situation, not saying, Hey, can you read my script and read my script? But like someone saying, Hey, I've gotten to know this person, they never bothered me at all. If you ever have a script, I'd read it and then hey, it's pretty good. And that person, or there's more than one, a bunch of people I know who have, you know, slowly but surely gotten their scripts into the hands of people who can help them. And then all of a sudden they got a rep and all of a sudden they got staffed. It's possible. You just, you know, I'm gonna digress here for a second. It has to do with like figuring it out. You know, there's no people say there's no one way to break in. But you can't tell someone, here's what you do. But the people who sort of deserve to be in the business are the people that figure out how to get into the business. Figuring it out to a certain extent, I'm not sort of justifying that the system is is perfect the way it is, but having this like impenetrable mystery about how to break in is kind of genius if you think about it, because the people who actually figure it out anyway are the ones that are the kinds of people that you want, you know, in the writer's realm.

SPEAKER_01 22:55

So I don't want to go back all the way to that thing you said at the beginning, but actually I'm going to because that's sort of what we do a bit on this podcast. So you said that obviously, you know, you got fired from that you got fired from that movie, and then you said you nearly got on another one, but the producer recognized you and didn't want to work with you. I'm fascinated now, I don't I know we don't like to talk about success on this podcast, but I'm fascinated by the first win that you had afterwards and sort of how that worked and how you felt afterwards, given that you you were at risk of not being somebody people wanted to work with. When you sort of manage to persuade somebody that you're not actually a bad person and you can take notes.

SPEAKER_02 23:36

Well, I think that the first of all, the timeline is a little bit off from what I said before, because I had already booked American Pie 2 before they fired me from Slackers. So I had already like gotten that, but I got fired from that also. And the truth is that like everything ends in failure. I got fired from every in the film business, you get fired from everything, whether you did a good job or a bad job, or whatever. That's just that's how you know your contract's up, is you get fired. And so, like, even on so on American Pie 2, I got fired because the writer of American Pie 1 suddenly realized that the movie was the train was leaving the station and wanted to get back on. But he said he didn't want to write the movie, so they hired someone else, me, my first job, and did my best. The movie got greenlit, and then he's like, I want to be the writer on this and fired me, got me fired, and I wasn't even allowed to go on set. I never even went to the set of American Pie 2 because I was banned. So I didn't even do anything.

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Now I I like, sorry, I say I like this stuff. It's a little bit mean and sort of demeaning the emotions you will have gone through. But we had a version of this before with the writer of Maze Runner, uh, who got fired just after finding, in fact, in the same phone call that the movie got green lit, he also got let go. So can we just break this down for people like me from outside? I find this stuff extraordinary. So you're brought on to write this thing, you write it, and then somebody who wrote the previous one decides that actually want a bit of the action. So talk me through what, like, who tells you at what point, and then what what does being banned mean? And they are they genuinely worried that you were going to come on set? So I just love a bit more detail on all of this.

SPEAKER_02 25:17

Well, I'll tell you the two different things that we're talking about is Slackers and American Pie 2. So, Slackers, I got fired for that meeting, and then they hired another writer, and I was allowed to go on set of that movie for two weeks until I got banned from that set because the director said we were on set, and he had wanted to do an on-set rewrite to a scene. If you've ever seen the movie, which I'm sure you haven't, it's Jason Siegel is like having sort of a fantasy sequence in a bar with Gina Gershawn, and he's talking about how to like be rude to women, and he's supposed to throw a drink on her. And but the the way it's written is he's like, I he's like telling his buddies, here's how you interact with women. Those are not the words in the script, but here's how you interact with women, and then you see the scene, and then you come back, and the and he's like, So I don't that's not a flashback, it's not a dream, it's an illustration of of his what he's saying, right? So we're on set and we're in the bar, and Gina Gershawn's the woman, and Jason Siegel's the guy, and he comes up to the director, Dewey Nix, and says, Um, so I was thinking this would be really funny if I was in my underwear. And Dewey's like, Yes, that's hilarious. If you're in your underwear, yeah, like tidy whitey's so funny. And they I've been sitting there minding my own business, so they turned to me, the writer of the scene, and said, Like, super funny, right? And I'm like, well, I kind of half learned a lesson, but not all the way. I was like, well, it doesn't really make sense. I mean, I'm not saying you can't do it, but like underwear kind of to me is like when you're having a dream that you're in your underwear. This isn't a dream. He's just saying what he's doing. And if he doesn't explain to the friends that he's talking to in the voiceover that he's in his underwear, then I think it's confusing. Why would he be in his underwear? And they're like, hmm, okay, let's go get in your underwear. You're fired from your band. And they had the producer come talk to me and say, You're just not being cooperative, and you're just like a negative influence on the set, so you're not going to be allowed to come back.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

So that was slackers. This is brilliant. So in a meeting, you got fired for saying that's the stupidest idea ever. So, you know, wind forward a bit, you're on a set, and they give you what might be the stupidest idea ever, but you've now learned your lesson, and you don't say this is a stupid idea ever. You sort of give a nuance, well, it doesn't really make sense. And you still got fired again.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

Correct. Amazing. Well, I wasn't being paid to be there to sit around. I was just like saying, Can I watch my first project getting made? And they're like, Yeah, you can come, but don't say anything. But when the director asked me, and I gave my honest opinion, that was the last time I was allowed to come to set. The the producer pulled me aside, said you're a negative influence, you're just kind of a bummer to be around. And so you're gonna be asked not to come back. And so I never went back to the set. So that was that that was being shot in 2000. So 2001, flash forward now, uh, and I had three movies made back to back to back. So these three projects were already like in the pipeline by the time I had all this bad news. So when I was writing American Pie 2, the writer of American Pie 1 didn't think there could be a sequel. And it sounds crazy now that there's like nine movies, but at the time, American Pie is a movie about people losing their virginity. And it was a really conceptually challenging question of like, what could a sequel be about if they've already lost their virginity? So, like all day long, we would sit around being like, what could this movie even be about? It's impossible to imagine what this could be. So the writer of the first movie passed on the opportunity to write the second movie because he thought it was impossible. So they just I had just sold slackers a month earlier, and it was like 30 days later, they're like, Okay, this guy just sold something that seems similar. You're hired. Great. First job, I got paid scale, by the way. And I, you know, did my best. I wrote the drafts and I wrote the drafts, and they're like, okay, good enough. And by the way, we figured out what it was about. We're like, you know, American pie, it's not about virginity, it's about like a feeling of like innocence, and and I'll tell you a funny story that one of the reasons why that guy hates me is that well, I'll tell you the stories in the right order. Okay, so there's two stories here. First of all, I turned in the draft and they're like, We're green lighting the movie. And he, when he said he didn't want to write it, negotiated to be a producer. So he was a producer. So in all those meetings, when I was trying to write the thing, he was always there with the other producers, and he was so I'd be like, Well, what if Jim Nadia say that? He's like, Jim wouldn't say that. I'm like, okay, um, well, what about okay? Here's a funny thing. What if we have like uh, you know, Finch do this, do that? And he's like, No, Finch wouldn't do that. And you're like, you could have written this. It was your it was your product, they offered it to you. You could have done it, you said no, so let me write it. And so then, as soon as I turned it in, not only did he um take my name off the script, like that's which is a violation of the writer's guild rules, you're not allowed to do that. It's supposed to say written by you, and then uh, or written by the first writer, current revisions by the second writer. Those are the very specific rules. Took my name off the script, told ever everyone involved that there was no other writer, that he was the first writer. And then when it started getting shot, I called up the producer who I was had a good relationship with. It's not like I did a bad job, and said, Hey, I would love just to come by and see the movie getting made. And they said, No, the other writer doesn't want you, and he thinks that it would be awkward. So I wasn't allowed to go to the set and never went to American Pie 2 to watch it being filmed because they said that it was would be uncomfortable for the other writer who is a producer. So there's that being banned from set number two. And I don't know if this constitutes revenge or not. I you are entitled under the writer's field certain uh perks. One of them is you get to go to the premiere. You they can't tell you you can't come to the premiere, it's in your contract. So I get to go to the premiere, it's in Westwood and in one of those big theaters, and it's my first experience walking the red carpet. And you the way the red carpet works is just lines and lines of reporters, and they just ask the same question over and over again, and you walk behind actors and other people, and they don't want to talk to the writers, they couldn't care less about you, they just want to talk to the actors. So, the one smart thing I figured out ahead of time is that if I came up with something really, really short, like a perfect sound bite, I might be able to like get their attention and get some reporter to pay attention to me. So this first writer was walking in front of me, as you know, the main credit. I by the way, I only got story credit because he massively rewrote me. But he's writing there and he's and people are saying, Oh, you're the writer. So tell me, what do you what was it like writing a sequel? And it's like, he's like, blah, blah, blah, long story, long story. They're just like, okay, we're not going to use this. And so then I'm walking in line and I had like figured out my sound right. And so Entertainment Tonight's like, oh, you're the other writer. What do you think this movie's about? And I was like, Well, you know, American Pie was about sex, American Pie too is about love. And that was it, and I just walked off. And they're like, Oh, okay. That night, Entertainment Tonight is like they show the premiere clips and it says, and I'm on Entertainment Tonight saying that super short, simple thing, and it was like burned him up, man. It was like the writer of American Pie says, This movie's about love. And it was like, so, but I'd already been banned from set. So he, so anyways.

SPEAKER_04 33:17

For for people who are, you know, our listeners out there who are maybe new to screenwriting or haven't been in it very long, and and who think that these stories might be the exception, I want to point out that there's a long history of screenwriters being fairly abused on set if they're even allowed to go to move. This is movie sets, uh, where traditionally the director and the producer are in charge. And then the stark difference in television where the the writer is in charge, and these two worlds often collide where people go back and forth between the two worlds, and there's such a difference in power between when you're working in features and you're working in TV that it can it can make your head spin. Obviously, you made the transition to television uh in the last, I mean, probably for over the course of your career. Uh, do you still go back and forth? Do you not want to deal with these moments on set anymore? Where, I mean, obviously, when you go on set now for the things you've created, nobody is going to say the things to you that they said at these on those other sets. You are the boss.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

Right. Yeah, it's it's a night and day difference. Um, being a film writer is terrible. And I, like I said, have gotten fired from every project I've ever worked on. And not and not even because I did a bad job sometimes. Sometimes I did do a bad job, but sometimes that was the way of saying, great job. Um as and it has to do with the game theory analysis, really. It's about being a film writer, it's a one-off um production. They're only making one of them. And when you turn in the script, that's all they need you for. They don't need you anymore. So it's like a prisoner's dilemma. If you know in game theory, the prisoner's dilemma, you've already acted first, so they can defect. You know, you turn in the script, they can treat you like shit because they don't need you anymore. Whereas the TV business is a repeat business where they need you for the next episode, so they have to keep being nice to you. And so it's about mutual respect and cooperation, whereas in the film business, they don't need to cooperate with you. So as a result, you're, you know, and the other thing about the film business is that you you rewrite other writers that you've never met before. Part of the business is selling original material or getting hired on an assignment as the first writer, but most of it is being the second or the third or the fifth writer on something someone else wrote. And it's not like as a TV writer, you might imagine that you get together and talk about it. You don't. You never meet that person, you never talk about what they did and what mistakes they might have made. You're just like shown a script that maybe has one person's name on it or three or whatever, and they say, Well, how would you do it differently? And you make your pitch. And if you you get hired, you don't talk to those people. And when you get fired, you don't know who they hired. So I'll give you a couple examples of how bad the film business is. And by the way, one thing I did in sort of the middle point of my film career is I started sending a letter to the writers guild, and I it would say to the writer of the previous draft of this script, I've been hired to rewrite you. And I know they won't tell you this and they won't tell you who I am, but I'm telling you, and I'm gonna send you all the drafts so that you can see what's going on with your project. And 100% of the time, I got a response back. Here's my email address, and I get a response back from people saying, This has never happened to me before. That's super nice. I really appreciate that. Um, thanks for keeping me in the loop. And I'll be like, look, they put your project in turnaround. I'm sorry, but at least now you know, because they might never tell you. So, a couple other stories about how it's difficult being a writer in film business. So once I clawed my way back, one of the big jobs that I got that kind of um got things back on track for me was Puss and Boots. It was in 2005. I was the first writer on the animated movie Puss and Boots for Dreamworks. And it was originally supposed to be what they call direct-to-video title. Back then, it was going to be like, oh, we'll do a DVD movie of Puss and Boots, which is a spin-off of Shrek 2. And so I was hired to come in and figure the movie out and write the first drafts. And I did all that and I actually did a good job. And this may sound self-aggrandizing, and I don't mean to pat myself on the back here, but the truth is that when I turned in my first draft, they greenlit the movie and they said this could be a big movie. Let's have it not be a direct-to-video movie, let's have it be a theatrical release. So the budget maybe goes from 20 million to 200 million. Uh, those are not real numbers. I don't know what the real budgets were, but the point is that I got the movie Greenlit and I got it turned into a theatrical feature, which by the way got nominated for an Academy Award. So, how was I rewarded for this? I got a phone call from the producers at DreamWorks, and they said, You've done a phenomenal job. You know, the director who was a director video director, there's people who work for DreamWorks that he's a kind of our RB team. He's being replaced by an A-list director, which is great news. Now we're bringing one of the heavy hitters to direct this movie, and he's going to bring in an A-list writer. So great job. You've been replaced by a better writer. And that is how you get treated in success. So I wound up getting no credit on that movie because there were five writers. The first and second writer didn't give credit, the last three did. Um, so on my IMDB, IMD was gracious enough to allow me the credit of uncredited, um, after I showed them my contract. But uh, you know, so that is a project that I did well on. And one last example of the film business, and then I'll tell you about how TV's different. Uh, I wrote a I did a bunch of direct-to-video movies for Universal, kept me, you know, getting my health insurance, earning a living. I wrote five of these movies in a row from like 2009 to 2011. And what the Universal Division, the Home Family Division was doing is they would take a hit movie and they would do like a sequel or a spin-off or a remake for video, and they would kind of do it on the cheap. And I would I wrote a ton of these. And one of them was um the American Pie Presents movies. I did The Book of Love, which was like American Pie 7, and then I did a bunch of other ones. And the last one of those I wrote was American Pie East Great Falls. That's what I called it. I wrote it in 2010, and uh that was the last I ever heard of it. They didn't make it. Okay, they I understand you're not making American Pie movies anymore. Great. I wound up making writing three American Pie movies. That was the last one, they didn't make it. So in 2019, um I was we were finished shooting No Good Nick. Um, we were waiting for our renewal decision, and I got an email from one of the actors saying, Hey, I went in for an audition on your movie. And I was like, What movie? He's like, American Pie Girls Rules. I'm like, I don't know what that is. I didn't write a movie called American Pie Girls Rules, and he's like, Well, it's got your name on the script. And I was like, uh, hello, Universal. And so I literally like called Universal and said, Are you making a movie called American Pie Girls Rules that I wrote? And they said, Oh, yeah, we are making that. We there's been two other writers, and we flipped all the genders. It was uh all men when I wrote it, and then we changed it to all women, and now it's called Girls Rules, and it's uh start shooting next week. And I was like, So you were never gonna tell me? And they're like, sorry, forgot, forgot to tell me. So that's that's the film business.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

So, two questions. Did you get banned from set on Puss in Puss and Boots, or did you just was so far away that you didn't even ask to come on set?

SPEAKER_02 41:19

Well, there's no set, it's an animated movie, but I was not banned. In fact, they were very happy with me, and um even though I got replaced by a better writer, uh, their words, um I did get a constellation prize. They gave me um Shrek the Halls, which was their TV Christmas special, as sort of like, yeah, no hard feelings, go write this other thing. I did get fired off of that also, um, because a storyboard artist rewrote me. Um, because I wrote a draft of that. And then one day we were in the meeting with the storyboard artist, and the storyboard artist just went rogue. And instead of like boarding what was in the script, they were like, what if it was just like something completely different? What if it was like the night before Christmas and they just drew a bunch of stuff and they're like, Yeah, that's great, let's just do that. And so a storyboard artist derailed that project, and I wound up not getting credit on that either.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

Um, but yes. And then, second question with the American Pie East Great Falls that became something completely different. So, you do you get you got paid when you wrote the original, but obviously you get no value in the in the later draft, and you didn't get a credit for that one either.

SPEAKER_02 42:31

I did get credit for that one because it's very complicated, and I won't go into the details. It has to do with the arbitration rules, which I I used to be a lawyer in my former career, and I'm really good at arbitrations. And so, under the arbitration rules for video sequels, they use the TV rules, which is drastically more favorable to the first writer than film rules, even though it was a film, they used the TV rules for video, which makes no sense. So, long story short, it was basically impossible to get my name off of it, even though it was like more or less nothing what I've written. So I got screenplay credit on that.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

But did you get did you get banned from the set from that one?

SPEAKER_02 43:09

No, I went to this at that point in my career in 2019, after I'd already run a show, I was like, I'm gonna show up for one hour on one day just to say hi. I did it, I left. I was like, good luck. I wasn't like, you know, spending weeks there like looking around the set to like see what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 43:26

So you're a little busy. You didn't get banned, but you weren't there long enough. Had you gone for longer, you might have got yourself banned.

SPEAKER_02 43:34

I could have, I could have easily gotten banned if I had just spoken up a little bit more about you know what they were doing wrong. Yeah, I'm sure I could have done.

SPEAKER_04 43:43

I have a feeling that this is just going to be part one of a five part uh Dave Steinberg uh uh you know podcast episode for our show. Um and also as I'm listening to you talk, I'm not sure if I feel much better about my career or much worse about my career. Because even though you Of all these, you know, tragic onset stories, or not even onset, because you're not getting there, or you are getting there and you're getting fired, uh, you have moved through your career very nicely and have had a number of successes after, which brings us, unfortunately, because I would hear this, I'd sit here for like another nine hours listening to these stories, uh, to the question that we ask all of the guests that come on this show. Uh, it's our very final uh question that we ask everybody if you have any advice for an aspiring uh feature writer or TV writer or both, what would it be?

SPEAKER_02 44:34

Well, I mean, this is this is so this is something that I've said recently on Twitter Twitter. Something just came to me and I think it sounded good. I said, there's a lot of great writers, but there's not a lot of great people. So you should try to try to be both. And like when I started thinking about that and digging deeper, I think there's two things in that statement that you can actually work on as a writer. One is to actually grow as a writer, because we talked a little bit earlier about if you don't believe that people can change, then you've got no business being a writer. But that applies to you too. So, how can you become a better writer? And I'm not talking about like writing 20 pages a day or like you know, getting $10,000 an hour is I don't know how to like actually make your words be better, but I'm talking about like going all in on it as a career and like doing all the other work about having a career and being a professional and learning about it so that you can, you know, take charge of things. Because as everyone always says, you can only control what you can control, but you can still control a lot. And you can learn about how the arbitration rules work. And people's like, oh, I don't care about that stuff. You know, on No Good Nick, one day we were um in the room and we were talking about uh filling out our dues declarations, and everyone's like, I don't know how to fill these things. No one knows how to fill these out. They never explain how to do it. And I said, Okay, well, let's talk about it because I can tell you exactly how to do it, and you guys are all doing it wrong, and you're paying too much in dues. You're only supposed to pay this much, and you guys are paying this much. So I can save you money if you guys will just listen to me for like a half an hour. And they're all like, no, it's all it's math. I don't want to know that. And I was like, really? You don't want to know how the how that that works? It's crazy to me. Because you can learn about how your pension work, how do you, you know, anyways, figuring all this stuff out and learning about it as a career is important. And I think that it involves doing things that are hard, because you know, doing the easy stuff's easy and the hard stuff's hard. But if you believe that, you know, mistakes is how you learn and that you want to be a lifelong learner and that you can get better at things, then you should be curious about how to um be a professional in this business and how to like conduct meetings and take some, you know, just because you have made it to a certain level of success doesn't mean you can't learn more. I go to seminars all the time that the Writers Gold has like on Zoom meetings. I'm like, well, I think I do great on Zoom meetings. I sell tons of pitches, but maybe they know something I don't know. So I'm gonna go to the seminar and see if I can learn something. And maybe you can learn something a little bit more. So if you sort of view challenges as an opportunity to learn, you can become a better professional writer. So that's one. So how do you become a better writer? But two, how do you become a better person? Right? Because that's really the key to like overcoming failure, right? It's like that's what girds you against the devastating effects of failure, and that's what builds resilience. Um you know, it's like your your emotional well-being is the scaffolding because like the thing about this business is that there's a lot more failure as a percentage, but it's also a lot more painful because we're creative people and we care about what we do. I think there's another little I have a lot of little aphorisms. One of the things I said on Twitter once one time was that the best thing about being a writer is how much we care about our work, but it's also the worst thing. Because when you get the bad news, you care that much more about it. And as a creative person with emotional stakes being so high, how can you deal with it? How do you deal with these failures? And it just goes to the question how do you deal with any failures? How do you deal with failures of if your boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with you? How do you deal with, you know, loss of a loved one? How do you deal with anything? It's about building up your own emotional well-being and working on the things that are problematic in your life. And I don't want this to be touchy-feely, I'm not here to give you like life coaching advice, but I've worked on so many things and become such a better person in the last 20 years, whether it's relationships with my spouse, with my kids, trying to become a better parent, trying to be a better friend to people, being kinder to people, you know, learning about um, you know, why diversity is so important and inclusion, just learning this thing and trying to be a better person. And that has the effect, by the way, I lost a lot of weight, you know. I'm not like a health guru by any chance, by any stretch of the imagination, but I lost 30 pounds in 2011, like kept it off for 10 years. And these are things you can control, things that you can you can do that are hard, that can make you a better person, is going to be the things that you fall back on when something bad happens. Because at the end of the day, it's not always your fault. Sometimes it's no one's fault. When you analyze the situation, say, Did I did I make a mistake here? If so, own the mistake, learn from the mistake. I literally have a file in my on my computer called Mistakes I've made and lessons learned. And if I have a tragic situation where like some project, something bad happened after I get some distance on it, I will say, What did I do wrong? Did I did I could I've done this? Could I have done that? Is there something that I can learn here from that mistake? And maybe the answer is no. And maybe it's something they did wrong, or maybe it's just no one, it's just bad luck. And but when it's bad luck and you think there's no cosmic justice in the world because you know everything's not going your way, that's when you can say, Well, you know what? I still got my family, I've still got my health, I've still got this, and it's not the end of the world because you've built up your own emotional resilience to this bad stuff. So I think it's this maybe sounds crazy, but the advice I give to people is work on being a happier person because happiness is not just about being happy, it's about um it's an antidote to being sad when bad stuff happens.

SPEAKER_01 50:28

Brilliant. Look, you know, we're 20-something episodes into this podcast, and it all always amazes me that people, particularly ones who've listened to old episodes in the way you have, can still think of something new and inspirational to say to aspiring writers. And um, I think that was a really interesting and meaningful answer, which is way beyond just the writing. So um extraordinary. So look, David H. Steinberg, thank you very much for being part of our podcast.

SPEAKER_04 50:58

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

SPEAKER_01 51:10

Wait, are we are we not bothering to talk about the other Twitter account given we have this great social engagement and people never bother to actually include me, whose idea it was to do this podcast in the first place. Do you have a Twitter account? I do have a Twitter account. It's at Dan Rusty. 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, please tell us about your other podcasts. Our other podcasts are. What about 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_04 51:52

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_01 52:09

I'll do it.