Take 10 - Actor and writer Geoffrey Thorne, In the Heat of the Night, Magnum PI

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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

SPEAKER_04 0:13

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

SPEAKER_01 0:20

For every success, there is months, sometimes even years, 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 norm. You have to be able to persevere. That process takes years, that doesn't happen overnight.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

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

SPEAKER_01 1:10

I am Dan Rutstein, the non-entertainment co-host who's spent the last 10 months in his garage. And we have Mr. Rejection. Um Evelyn.

SPEAKER_04 1:20

Mr. Rejection should be in capital letters at this point. Uh guys, we are I I am like just super excited for this particular guest because he is like a multi-hyphenite on top of multi-hyphenite. His name is uh Jeff Thorne, and he has, you know, he's been in so many different things as an actor, as a writer, as a producer, uh and he even does graphic novels and comics and books, and he's a novelist. I mean, this guy's done really everything, uh, starting, I mean, we can go way back, but he's been on the TV show uh, you know, as an actor in the heat of the night, worked as a writer on like just a ton of different TV shows. But both, and by the way, both like live action and cartoons, he's been on Ben 10, he's been on The Librarians, he's been on uh Ultimate Spider-Man, he's been on you know Avengers Assemble, he's been on Power uh more recently, he's been on the the TV show Leverage that a lot of people loved, and the librarians. And most recently, he's on the TV show, uh which is close to my heart, actually, uh Magnum PI. And by the way, he's also written graphic novels for both DC and Marvel and other imprints and novels. I mean, this guy's done so much. Jeff, thank you for coming on our podcast.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

You guys are freaking maniacs. That sounds all so grand. It didn't, it it it's it tells great, but it didn't live so great all the time.

SPEAKER_01 2:44

So I think the point we've had on this podcast, we've talked to writers about rejection, we've talked to actors about rejection, we've talked to a manager about rejection. Given you've had so many different jobs and presumably been rejected in different ones in different ways, is it harder or easier to be rejected as an actor or as a writer?

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Wow, interesting question. Um, I will say that it's just massively different. I think when you're an actor, there's more of you in the situation in a weird way because they are literally looking you up and down and deciding essentially if you're sexy enough. Right? Like whether the role itself is sexy, there's that sort of do I want to watch it? Do I want to see this person? What draw does this person draw the eye? So when you don't do well in that situation, you're speaking. There's people in the room, well, in the old days, when we could actually be in the room, um, there's people in the room looking at you. Um it's almost like being rejected on a date, almost like on a blind date. Um with writing, at least the way I got in, rejections came. My first writing gigs were short stories. I couldn't get arrested in Hollywood for a long time. And the rejections were just no, we're not gonna take a uh we're not gonna take a script from you, we're not gonna, we're not gonna entertain you at all. So it was, pardon me, sort of pro forma. There wasn't anything personal to it. It was like, we don't know you, therefore we will not accept anything from you. But when you get rejections from magazines or publishing companies, there's a letter. So you'd get a letter back. And it'd be like, also a form letter. Um that was sometimes crushing because depending on where you were in life, you sort of send out these short stories or novel proposals as almost like lifeboats on a sinking ship. So if the rejection came back on the wrong day, it's crushing, right? The three days before rent and you're 500 bucks under. That's crushing. Three days after rent, and you're not worried about anything, it's like, ah, fuck you. You know, you you will see my layman lights one day, you bastards. But um, I wouldn't say there's much of a difference. It sort of depends on how much it depends on how much of your ego you're risking. When I was an actor, I didn't risk much ego. I watched my friends get destroyed. When my friend who's were also actors, they'd get crushed when they didn't get gigs. And on a certain sort of basic level, my heart wasn't as deeply in it ever, so I could walk it off more effectively than um, I think some of my friends who would carry it for a week sometimes on a relatively small part. You know, but with a writer, when I didn't get on a show I wanted to get on, whoo, buddy! Like, there are shows I still can't watch because I'm like, I I it just breaks my heart that I didn't get to write on that show. Like, I can't look at it. It's just every time I look at it, it's a failure again.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

So just what you've just said, Jeff, me has made me feel like this is gonna be an amazing podcast because I have asked this question about half a dozen times of different people, which is a sort of when you haven't got on a show, you know, do you carry it with you? When you watch it, you know, does it hurt? And everyone's answer has been a version of no, no, no, I wish them well.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

Horseshit, fuck them. They should have hired me. Supernatural. I'm talking about you, you fuckers. You should have fucking hired me. I'm built for that shit.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

So you don't take it well. And I I don't get angry about it, but there are like it's interesting. I feel like our job is a lot of the time you get the job that somebody else really wants. You don't get the job you really want, somebody else gets that. You get the job somebody else really wants, and you've got people behind you going, God damn it, that son of a bitch. You know, I'm perfect for writing whatever show. Like, and what you should be on is Star Trek. But I'll never write, I'll never get to write Star Trek ever. I will die never having written Star Trek, but there's some guy, maybe even someone who's on Star Trek, who would kill to write some of the stuff that I've been a writer on. So, you know, you just gotta swallow it, I guess.

SPEAKER_04 7:03

I I I wanna I want to start by saying real quick that in your intro, I called Ben 10 a cartoon. I shouldn't have probably called it a cartoon. I was like, my brain froze in that moment. These are called animated series. They're all cartoons, but I just I just want to put a correction out there on the air. That's fine. I have a question. I mean, you you literally you know do it all. Later on, we might talk about you know, how do you find the time to do the amount of stuff that output that you do? But I at the heart of your heart, do you feel that you're you're an actor or writer, a novelist, you know, a graphic novelist, all of them? Like what is what at the core, what do you feel like?

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Well, speaking of rejection, this should be interesting. Back when I was an actor, I haven't been an actor in what, 20 years? Uh I quit in 2000, so 21 years. Um I sort of, the times were different. The kind of roles that were being written were different. And I sort of looked up one day and I was like, huh, I'm looking down the barrel of the next 20 years of my life getting jobs being either like guest star lawyer, dad of some hot teenage girl who's really 25, um, or boy who's also really 25, um, occasionally a tough guy if I get bulked up and look hard one day. Um, and that's kind of it, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for decades. And that's a life. There are plenty of actors who are like, whoa, I lucked into it, I got a nice house, my kids are going to college, all of that stuff. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know, man. Um, and so again, speaking of rejection, I went to the guy on my show who was the head of my show, and I said, Hey, look, so you sort of started to not downgrade, but like the stuff that I'm doing on the show is basically basically coming in and handing you files. Like, they're over there, or let's get in the car and go somewhere. And then you and some of the others do all the fun stuff, which wasn't how it started out. So, did I do anything to annoy you? No. So it was just you have a new shiny object with some of these new people. Great. I'm not asking for you to be um, I'm not asking for a big giant part or anything, but I wouldn't mind going back to Los Angeles and trying to be a working actor again. And the stuff you've got me doing, somebody who lives in this town that we're shooting in, they will consider that to be like the height of their career. They'll be just starting out, it'll be you know, that'll be great for them, and you'll pay them, I don't know, a tenth of what you're paying me right now, and we're all happy. No, you gotta stay. So I quit. Um all the while we were doing the show, that big show I was on, um, there was another show shooting down the block called uh I'll Fly Away. Um a lot of people don't remember, but I think it was a b Falsey brand show. Um and it had Sam Waterson was in it, really stellar cast, and it was set in the past, right? Like in the late 60s, mid-sixties. So he was dealing with a lot of the crap that was going on in the South at that time, but it was like, as one would expect with the show starring Sam Watterson, it was beautifully written, beautifully acted. Same a lot of the same locations that we were using. And I was like, we shot there. Oddly, it didn't look like that when we shot there, right? The things we said and did there weren't as mmm, right? And the things we were doing on the show, as much as it's a popular show and everyone likes it and I enjoyed working on it, I know I have to say that, but actually did. I have friends still from the to that to this day from that show. But I've I always felt like if we had just done whatever was in the local news crime blotter, like literally for the small towns we were in, I would get the local paper and I'd be like, wow, that'd be a great episode. Right? Oh my Jesus, these kids did what? Holy crap! Like, this is literally actually happening, right? Meanwhile, we're sort of doing the Angela Lansbury murder she wrote vibe, only set in the South. And I was like, we can all do better than this. And I talked to one of the writers and they're like, Aren't you a teenager? Aren't you an actor who's a teenager on our show? Like, well, actually, sorry, I'm 20. That's what I said, teenager, right? So um, the answer I guess is I was always a writer because the things that always pinged me had less to do with performance and the visual aspect of it, and more to do with we can tell better stories than the stories we tell.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

So it's interesting, because obviously uh you know, you worked on Law and Order later, obviously, as a writer, which I I think I'm right in saying you know, they say ripped from the headlines in and you know, particularly at the moment, every time I watch particularly like my my wife's obsessed with Law and Order SVU, um, and every time we watch that, like you know, when they do the episode, you're like, well, that's linked to the story six months ago, which we remember when this happened, and now actually that's not six months anymore, it's linked to the story that happened you know a month ago or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

So that's all happening definitely on that show. Do you think, given all that's gone on in the world, that actually if you wanted to go back into acting, you could the things you were craving back then and the roles that you wanted to have, there's probably more of them now. And actually, you could do that again now.

SPEAKER_02 12:41

Well, yeah, if I was 25, like I don't know that they're writing middle-aged um middle-aged black superheroes with a gut flying around, you know, saving the freaking day. Um, there's probably roles like that out there. I wouldn't mind, like, there are a couple of I'm a geek, so like you can imagine the shows that I would want to guest on if someone were to offer me something. Um they generally involve psychic powers or some sort of robot apocalypse or you know, trapped in a spaceship that we we know the oxygen's running out, that kind of crap. But I don't really entertain like, oh, wouldn't it be so great if I could just go back and get in front of the camera? I I liked it, but I didn't love it. And I've always felt like I was taking somebody's slot. As successful as I was, I think part of the reason I was able to be successful was that I didn't care as much. Right? It breaks my heart sometimes when I don't get on a show or one of my pilots gets developed for a while and then it ultimately doesn't happen. That takes a chunk out. Like that, that I feel that. I almost never felt it when I didn't get a part. Like, almost never.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

And now now you've swapped sides. If you were if you're writing on a show and the actor and a young act, a 20-year-old, a teenager, as you would call a 20-year-old or they were, came to you and said, Can't we do this a little bit differently? Or should we think about these sorts of things? Because you were on the other side of it, are you likely to dismiss them or actually take them more seriously because that was you?

SPEAKER_02 14:14

That literally depends on the actor. Some actors are full of shit. And you can tell right out, right off the top, you're just full of shit. You're stalling for some reason, or you know, you're high, or you're fighting with your co-star and you're trying to cause them trouble. So you're not really have a beef, but you want to hold things up and blame it on them or whatever it is. So fuck them. They get dismissed. You're gonna fucking do it. Period. Right? That's my vibe. Sometimes the boss will be a little bit softer about that stuff. If I'm if I'm not high enough up the food chain, then I have to go by whatever the boss's sort of vibe is with that particular actor. But the higher up the food chain I get, the less give a fuck I have. So um, if you're holding up production, if you're wasting people's time on some bullshit, uh, you're gonna get told you're wasting people's time on some bullshit. If, however, it's you can tell the actor is not um, I don't know how to say this right. Let's say you're a normal person, but you're playing a genius, and the genius has a lot of technical stuff that has to be said just so. And you it's really starting to bug you because you can't, you can't visualize it in a way to make it make sense to you, and therefore it's very difficult to trust that it's making sense to anyone else. I've watched actors melt down over stuff like that, especially in, frankly, a show like Star Trek, you could imagine, where it's not even real science, or you can't even go look it up. I can imagine certain actors just sort of just burning down, like, how am I going to make this shit work? You know, um, that actor you take aside and you work with them. You, you, you, you break, you break the you break the bits up, right? So you can make sure they get the section and then cut and get the next section, things like that. Um, if it's a kind of interplay between a couple of actors and they can't quite get the words in their mouth, it's not Shakespeare. So unless it has to, unless the flow of the words is the point, I'm generally accommodating of actors that try, I say, can you fit these words in your mouth? Right? Um, unless it's like the big summation in court, or you know, we gotta talk the guy down because he's landing the plane by himself. You don't get to ad lib that stuff. We don't get to fudge that stuff. You're gonna have to get it right, you know. But there is flexibility, but it generally depends on that whether the actor's full of shit or not. And I think I got a good radar for that, having been one for so long. I'm like, you just don't know your lines, man.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Like so now, obviously, there are a lot of people listening to the podcast who know the answer to this question. Um, I am a I'm from the outside world, so I you know, I'm not from the entertainment business. So I guess my question would be, and and you'll have a more interesting perspective than the usual question here, because you've done both sides. From the outside, we always assume that these great TV shows everyone's friends and it all works reasonably. I think you know what's coming. So, what's the answer to the question about the relationship between the people who write the words and the people who speak? Are you all best friends? Well, smoothly.

SPEAKER_02 17:21

Look, I'm great friends with Alice Hodge, who was on leverage. The young black guy that was on leverage, he's blowing up right now. I don't think a month goes by where we don't have some kind of contact. I'm like thrilled with his giant career. He was he's the kind of actor you want on a set. Uh, most of the actors on leverage I would categorize that way or slightly below. Like, I don't think we had any real duds on leverage. But um, there are also those actors, like, just as you hear stories about actors who are monsters and they just cause trouble, there's also that opposite end where there are people who are like, oh my god, thank God this person's here. Like, at least the set's gonna go smoothly. But are we all friends? Is it a family? Hmm. Um, I think that's generally the pattern that you sort of float to the public uh on a certain, especially on family-based shows. But unless you went to through some sort of version of the trenches on your show, right? Where it was like constantly besieged by the network, or there were huge physical obstacles to overcome while making the show, I don't know that you generate that real feel, right? You have to have gone through the you have to have gone through the wars together in a certain way, or it has to have been such a joyous experience, which also does happen. So that it's fun and it's nice and everybody says that, but as soon as the show's over, you don't see each other again. Right? So, but from the public point of view, especially on shows that are all about that warm feeling, yeah. I mean, everybody's gonna say that, and on a certain level, you have to, you have to make yourself feel that. You want to feel like you're on the team, right? And everybody's working together. But sometimes, I mean, we've all heard stories. There are shows where the two lead actors are supposed to be lovers can't stand the sight of each other, much less touching each other. But you wouldn't know that from watching it because that's their fucking job for me not to know that. Um, people have said I'm not gonna come back to work if that person's on the set, or writers have been banned. Don't this I'm walking, the star will say, if this person's on the set, I'm not gonna be there. And then you have a real problem because the network has to like gauge who's more important. Generally, the person who wins that fight's gonna be the star because it's their face, right? They're the face, and you're gonna have to step back. Now, I haven't been banned yet, but I I've we've all heard stories that aren't ours to tell about that kind of conflict. And it generally comes down to some sort of ego on one part or the other. Like it's never about the words, it's always about who's more important today. It's not even generally, it's literally today who is more important, right? And I'm gonna flex my power at you, or I'm gonna, you know, and therefore you will retreat. And um there are some actors, you've seen them, right? Where they still say an interview. Who did I can't remember the actress who said this. Thank God I can't remember who she is. It's like, I don't know what these writers are for. We just sort of make it up, and the director cuts it together later, and I'm like, not on my fucking shoes, you don't. You're not making up shit when I'm writing the words. Okay. Um, so, but there is a sort of an attitude like that in some of them because they've been allowed to develop that attitude, so you can't really blame them either, right?

SPEAKER_04 20:42

I had worked with an actress on a show who did say that, and so we can talk about it off-credit off-podcast who that was. Um talking about the same person. Okay. And I think part of this is like we are maybe a family, but we can be a very dysfunctional family because often we're together for like what 14 hours a day when they're back in the day when we had a real room, and the actors are on set, the crew for 14 hours a day, or eight, you know, the hours are so long, and there are these power struggles. There's just so many different things going on. There's so many different dynamics that you need to parse. Um, I do want to back up though. I want a little bit of an anecdote because you made me think of somebody, your conversation about being an actor and being kind of like asking these questions about process and whether it's disingenuous or it's real. We had um the young actor, Chosen Jacobs, uh, come in. He was he played Michael on Kit. Oh, okay. Oh, wow. He was um, he was on our show. He had a very small role. And the showrunners, he asked the showrunners if he can come in for a day or his two days to sit in the writer's room with us. And he wanted to just see what our process was. He better understood what his job was on the set. And there was no pre there, it wasn't a game he was playing. It didn't feel like it. He really wanted to see it, he really wanted to see it, and he was so interested in our. Process and he wasn't intrusive. He asked all the right questions along the way. He was taking notes. He was just like, and then at the end of the two days, he was like, you know, I understand so much more when someone says they don't want the line changed or they want it said like this. I have such a better understanding of what it is that you do on your side before it even gets to me. And I've always kind of thought about that. But you're right, some actors are full of shit. They have no idea what's going on with that. So my question leading into that, you know, as an actor, I'm always feeling like we're all siloed in our jobs, right? Where I'm a writer, there's actors, there's directors, sometimes there's crossover. Often there's not. Is there and as we segue into the writing part of your career, is there anything that you brought as an actor, besides pitching, which I'm sure is actually a huge, you know, like advantage for you, into the job of writer that has been really helpful for you?

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Um I will say I'm never sick of seeing on a set. I basically grew up on movie sets or TV sets. I was an actor from the time I was, I think, 14 till 30. So that's a long time. Um I think I'm pretty good with the way the words sound, like how a real person's gonna say them, as opposed to how it reads. It reads great, but what would it be like to say it? Um and uh in the writer's room, I feel like you'll probably be in touch with this. I interned at Star Trek. That was my first gig in Hollywood as a writer, I guess. I interned on uh Star Trek The Next Generation. And uh I got to um sit in on they take pitches, right? Back when back in the back in those days, there was such a thing as a real really such thing as a freelancer, right? So occasionally freelancers would come in and pitch pitch episodes. And what I noticed was um also part of my job was to read the thing that got them the ability to come in, right? They had an open door policy, you sign an NDA, send us a script. If we like the script, we'll ask you to come in and pitch. No matter where you are, if you can get to LA, it doesn't matter if you're in the guild, it was great, right? From a writer, from an outsider point of view, it's great. Um and the lovely interns were the ones who were sort of the first line of defense for the show. So I'd already read a script by this particular individual. I loved it. I gave it the coverage that said you you know we should see him. Everybody else agreed. The other writers were like, this is a great fucking script. Bring this bring this guy in. So he comes in, but he wasn't used to pitching, he wasn't used to talking to people, he wasn't used to all that attention, the attention of eight or nine people, just zeroed on him. Um and so he spoke very quietly and he was sort of looking down at his lap a lot, and you could tell he was really nervous, even though they kept telling him B Ed E is don't worry. It's you know, it's it's he was really down like this. And I was watching him die. It was like watching a comedian set die, knowing all the jokes that were coming and they weren't gonna land. And he didn't get the gig. He didn't sell anything, he didn't we didn't make anything from his work. Uh he was just sent off go with God. Um and I found that because of the nature of our job as writers, it's generally insular. Uh you're generally writers' rooms are a little bit of a weird animal in the life of a writer. Mostly it's solitary, right? The kind of mind that lends itself to being a writer is you see, or a lot of us are sort of asocial, right? Now, I'm not, but I'm unusual, right? Um and so those things coming from being an actor. Um, you say that about when I pitched leverage, um, I pitched them from memory, something like I'll be conservative and not overblow it. I said I think I pinched them between 15 and 20, 20 episodes, to which they would go, no, we're not doing that, or we're already doing something like that. You got anything else? Well, yes, I do. And it wasn't just springboards. These were fleshed out. Anytime they stopped and said, Let's talk more about that. I I could stop and talk more about it. To which Chris Downey, one of the two showrunners, was like, How many fucking things do you have, man? Like, and I was like, How much time have you got? And I didn't realize you're not supposed to pitch that much. It was too much, like way too much. Um, but also I guess it impressed them that I had all that just sort of floating in my head at my beck and call, whenever. So even though I ultimately didn't even get on the show that year, that was the first year or second year of leverage. First year, had to be the first year. Uh, I didn't get on. I didn't get staffed. They remembered me from like that, was that guy. So um, so that helped. Memorization. Uh, I don't know how good at it I would be now. It's been quite some time since I've had to use those muscles. But uh, so that definitely carries over. And just being at your ease in a room full of people, um I don't have to put anything on. I feel sometimes when you're alone with one of your co-writers that you get to see their real personality versus their room personality. Their room personality is almost like a shield they put on so they can interact in that situation. Whereas I don't care, I'm just always the same dude. But again, I think that's largely being a being an actor is so rough and tumble in that regard. You're sort of wearing your emotions on your sleeve a good part of the time, and if you can't take it, it it kills you right away. Like those who can't take it get destroyed right away.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

So now um, I hope you're gonna take this the right way. So I'll I'll ask the question this way so that you can get what I'm trying to say. So, look, I'm I've had four completely separate careers. Um sports journalist, diplomat, ran a tech company, now working in sports. Holy crap! So, well, so there's two ways of looking at this. One is wow, look at this guy, he can do loads of different things. The other one, which a lot of my friends I went to school with say to me, is well, you haven't really actually you know succeeded in anything. So that question to you, so you could say, and you know, when Noah introed you, look at this guy's range, he writes, you know, he does comics, he does short stories, he's an acting. Is it because you've never quite managed to win in one area that you've tried different ones, or do you see it as success everywhere?

SPEAKER_02 28:28

No, uh also definitions of success are extremely fluid. Um, no, I like I said, I could have had a very nice career as an actor. There, a lot of my peers stayed on that track. Some of them became movie stars, and the ones that didn't, they fell into the the future that I did not want for myself. I can only imagine I would have done the same. Like we just would have been always competing with each other to play Black Father number six for the rest of our lives. And that would have been fine and is fine for some people. For writing, um I'm not really an awards guy. I just kind of like to get to do what I want to do. So if you look at the things I've written, what you won't see is, with the exception of the um writing on power, or ghost, I should say, uh, you won't see a lot of me writing um black criminals being chased down by cops or the inner life of the the secret inner life of the gangster, or you know, um the what's it like behind the scenes in that that RB band that came up in the 70s? I don't write that stuff. I write laser beams and spies and stuff like that. And um so the fact that I get to is my win. When I when I quit acting, I went to a party at a friend's house, and it was sort of not common knowledge that I had done this, only a few friends knew that I had actually done this, and there was some random woman at the party, and we were talking about it, and I guess she overheard. She comes over and says, Wait, did you quit that show? And I was like, First of all, I don't know who the hell you are, but yeah, I quit my show. I'm allowed to quit my show if I want if I want to quit. And she's like, What the hell do you think's gonna happen now? You know, and I'm like, Well, I I think I'm gonna go be a writer. And she literally laughed in my face. This is a a stranger, someone who'd never met me, and then proceeded to lecture me about how I was never gonna work, that you don't understand how many people would kill to be in that position that you were just in. Um, what makes you think that you like I can't tell you how many times someone has started a sentence to me of what makes you think? Um uh that who the hell do you think you are, basically, was the attitude that you can dump this like Prestee's career and then segue into this other Preste's career. Who the who the fuck do you think you are? Um, and I was like, wow, lady, I've just met you need to step back about five feet and shut the fuck up. Um, you only get one life. That was not the life for me. That's it. I don't know why I'm even explaining myself to you. Um in terms of like, like I said, I get to write what I want to write, man. I'm currently writing a Magnum freaking P.I. I watch Tom Sellick be Magnum PI. Like, are you kidding? Um, I I I got comic books coming out, which from our standards pay zero money. So, like, like people. When you write animation, people in live action are like, what are you doing that for? There's no money in it. You don't get residuals, it's ridiculous. You can't do anything with it. I'm like, I like them. Right? Uh comics, I grew up on comics. Part of the reason I'm a writer is Jack Kirby comic books, Marvel comic books. Uh I'm writing Marvel and DC comic books right now. If I don't get to, it doesn't hurt my bottom line, but I get to. I get to. So that's my win.

SPEAKER_04 31:52

That's my win. I see how excited. I see from your Twitter feed where you're talking about your different things coming out, and a lot of your excitement seems to be geared towards these graphic novels that you're writing, and that is for like, you know, people realize how the different the disparity in pay is pretty huge between it's nonsense!

SPEAKER_02 32:09

I'm so not doing it for the money. I'm so not doing it for the money. I really like it, and I think I think you're lucky. I feel I I I truly do feel not in that like, oh, I want to thank God who's blessed me. I don't give a shit everybody. I always think that's horseshit. Like, there's a kid getting raped in Nigeria or wherever, you know, some battlefield in the middle of the Middle East that God's apparently not looking out for, but he made sure you got a fucking Emmy. I don't think so. Um for me, um you get one life and you do your best to find the thing that is your thing. And if you're lucky, you find that thing. It doesn't mean you have to make money at it, but if you can find that thing if it's sailing, if it's freaking roller skating, you know, if it's writing haikus that nobody but you and ten people ever read. But it just is that thing. You can't you can't go through a day without doing that thing. You know, my wife's always telling me everything's not a story because I always interact with people in terms of telling stories. I can't just say I would like to do X. It's like, well then this will happen, and then I'll do that, and then somebody will say, like, she's like, Jeff, please, please, everything's not a fucking story. Everything is a story for me. So I get to tell stories for a living. Um yeah, I'm pretty good with that. I I I don't I consider that a good life. Uh I don't need to be. I was never big on the fame side of it anyway. I know I was always sort of that status game and the celebrity stuff. A lot of my friends bought into that. And as that was part of the parting of the ways with me and them. I was like, I, you know, the kind of I knew you when guy. You don't want to be around me if you're trying to be a big star. You know, I was the guy who held your hair when you were vomiting in your girlfriend's underwear, you know, like like that's a horrible image on purpose. But if I'm that guy, I'm not gonna suddenly start treating you like you were always George Clooney with the perfect teeth. I'm just not gonna do that.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

Yeah. Look, it's a great answer to the question. And you know, I think you actually answered the question if I was asked it the way I would want to. Because you know, this podcast actually is an example of something that we both love doing and we get paid nothing for. But we think rather than something we could be doing, we could be paid. So yeah, I fully subscribe to the you know, why wouldn't you do this stuff rather than choose to do something that you don't want to do?

SPEAKER_02 34:35

Can I can I interject one thing though? When I said earlier it lives, it it didn't live as well as it reads at the end. A lot of these jobs come up because you're desperate. Like you want to be a screenwriter, but you can't get arrested. So you try to sell short stories and you sell some. All of a sudden Hollywood takes you seriously because now you're a real writer. So the people you couldn't sell screenplays to before, now will listen to you when you try to sell them screenplays. But you still can't sell screenplays, so you're still doing, you're still moving along. And then out of left field, someone says, Hey, do you want to write a pilot together? Oh, I'm a screenwriter. No, I well, well, let's try to write this pilot. And that doesn't get sold, but you get put on staff. You see what I mean? So a lot of these jobs, like at the end of the day, oh, you're this virtuoso, you do all this stuff. I'm like, I was trying to eat. And the way I was trying to eat was to tell stories for money. And over here, somebody pay me 500 bucks for a three, 3,500-word story. Well, that was enough to get me through rent that month. You know, and then you look at the resume points at the end of the day, and it's like, wow, you did all this amazing, disparate, you know, stuff. You know, it looks really and I'm like, yeah, that was what was it's hit, Indiana Jones says, it's not the years, it's the mileage. It's very much like that.

SPEAKER_04 35:52

So I remember somebody asking on Twitter, what was my favorite part about working in Hollywood? And I said, you know, feeding my family. Like they don't realize the importance of just putting food on the table and that the financial pressure, even when you get paid really well for a long time, that that that you know, spigot turns off. And then there's residuals, but there's often nothing for long periods of time. And you talked about the desperation. And I want to like try to like dig into that a little bit because I'm finding as we interview different showrunners and creators and screenwriters, that desperation to continue working and to continue feeding your family, doing the thing that you love and the thing that you are, it never goes away. And it never goes away for almost any of us.

SPEAKER_02 36:38

No, that's true. I agree with that. I well, here's a lovely thing. The official Hollywood story is he quit acting to become a writer, and within a minute he became a writer, right? But in fact, there was a three-year gap. There was uh, I didn't sell my first short story, and that was not for lack of trying, until 2003. I quit in late 1999, but effectively quit in 2000, right? I still had work that I had to do contractually, so it didn't technically end until 2000. But um I was uh there were three years of drought, and I got ripped off by an accountant, so I was all that residual stuff people talk about, I was busted. I was not some sort of ex-actor living in a big house, you know. Maybe I think I'll be a writer now and I'll just gradually segue into it and start my own production. I was none of that. I was living on the street. I was drawing pictures for people I met on Craigslist. I was um uh I tell the story now because people think it's funny because they're all net savvy. But I was in the, I've been on the internet since 1980. The days of Usenet and dial-up modems, uh matrix printers, I was a literally a child when I got on the internet. So when it started to become more user-friendly, we could do stuff with it. I couldn't, I I didn't have an agent, I didn't have any of that stuff. So then that three-year gap, I fabricated a management company, fabricated a website, fabricated letterhead, got a burner cell phone, fabricated a voice from having been an actor, and I was my own manager, calling people out of the blue to set myself up with interviews. Will you read my client's shit? Will you take a look at this guy that you've never heard of before? Well, I've never heard of you, weird manager guy. It's like, yeah, but you hear managers all the time that you've never heard of. This guy's great, you know, he sold this, he's done that, never mentioning myself as an actor because I felt that would have been a detriment. Right? Um meanwhile, I'm literally taking jobs off Craigslist to drawing pictures uh for some certainly quite crazy people of many, many of the times who whose checks cleared, thank God, but who were definitely insane, a lot of them. Um I didn't, I tell that I've told this story before. The worst day when I hit rock bottom, so-called, it was because I drove all the way out to the valley on the on the idea that I was gonna get a job drawing Disney, Disney movie-inspired art on the boxes of porn pornography of movies, of porn movies, that there were going to be doing sort of send-ups of the various Disney movies, and I would do, I would mock the Disney video box covers for them so it looked like a Disney video box. I did not get that job because I was not good enough. I literally could not draw in the Disney style well enough for the porn company. So I drove all the way out to the valley on gas I couldn't afford, and then all the way back with no job. So when you say, Is it desperation? I say say yes to any job that lets you write. Right? Like take that gig that might not necessarily pay you a lot, but has huge notoriety. Like the other guy who's in it is some big fucking star in some way. So that everyone's gonna see, they're gonna show up for Neil Gaiman, but your story is at the is also in there. And maybe a person will read that and go, what the hell? This guy can write. Um, so it was rough, man. Um, my my girlfriend, who's now my wife and I, was almost not my girlfriend because of this crazy period. Um I had constantly people on my neck uh telling me what an idiot I was for having quit this great life that I had, shot myself in the foot, family members. Uh, meanwhile, some of my friends are becoming movie stars, literally globally famous Oscar-nominated people, while I'm sinking the entire three years. And the only thing I was holding on to was I know I can do this. And the reason I knew I could do it was I sent in some stories to a Star Trek short story contest, and I got a rejection. And in the margin of the rejection, the editor had written, not quite, I want to see more from you next time around, next year when you do this again. I lived on that like it was fucking adrenaline, heroin. I lived on those margin notes, and in that next year I sold them two stories. Wow. Right? And so am I built for it? Maybe. Was I desperate? Absolutely. You know, uh a smarter person might have taken their, what was I, just under 30, just about 30? I could have started over in a completely new life. I could have gone back to school and learned it something else. I'm smart. I could have learned a lot of things. My mom kept telling me all the things that I'd won prizes in. And I was like, yeah, sorry, not doing any of that. I'm doing this. And what does Paul Newman refer to it in an interview as the tyranny of luck? Um it's it's what do I say? You can't see this visually, but it's this much talent, this much hard work, this much luck. Right? And luck and luck and talent are equal, but you need both. The hard part is being able to stick to it and and really refine. And so one way to do that is to say yes to different kinds of writing jobs, right? Like I wrote comics, I wrote short stories, I wrote freaking pamphlets, I wrote, I I ghostwrote other people's shit, I edited other people's shit for scraps of money from our point of view. All of it with the mind of this will make me better, this puts a little food, more food on my table, this helps me pay my rent. Doesn't matter that it's not screenwriting, right? It's writing. And some of those people blew up and they make they call me up and say, hey, now, now they're producers, they're not writer types, they're producer types. So like, hey, remember when we did that gig back when I was living over that bar? You know, well, I'm now running product production company X. What do you remember that story about werewolves you told me? Yeah. Did you ever do anything with that? Come in and talk to my people. Like, you just don't know. And it's yeah, I I I'm not a big wow, this is so weird. I haven't talked about any of this so long. Um yeah, I'm just not a big believer in um people looking at your life and deciding you're not you're not living it the way they think you should be living it. Like, fuck you with that.

SPEAKER_01 43:27

So look, I mean, after that extraordinarily powerful and honest answer, I don't want to make the glib remark of saying the only other person I know who pretended to be their own manager stopped being president about three weeks ago.

SPEAKER_02 43:43

So, yeah, but he was shitty at it. Everybody caught him. Nobody caught me. Nobody caught me. And and to my credit, I actually got one of my actor friends a gig as his fake manager.

SPEAKER_04 43:55

So I actually think I I know Dan has a follow-up question. But I actually think I was like mulling that over the manager, like being your own manager. And at this point, there's so many management firms and there's so much hustle involved that I think it would totally work. Like, I mean, if you're good at it and you're have the balls to just well, you know what?

SPEAKER_02 44:16

The thing that was weird about it was you got to remember you're playing a role. Yeah. Right? So if somebody calls you, if you call in on your client Jeff, but you're not Jeff, you know, calling up to follow up, what was the feedback on that script or whatever, and they hate it, they're telling you point blank in the way that we talk to each other, how they felt about that script, which you've got to respond to as if you are equally dispassionate. Right? Okay, I'll I'm taking notes, I'll pass that on to the client. And it's like, don't bother because we're not gonna see your client again.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

So when you do that, you'll be like, no, okay, thank you. I'll pass this on to Jeff. But just out of interest, I know that Jeff would probably say at this point, you know, I poured my heart into this story. I guess you can't do that, can you?

SPEAKER_02 45:00

No, no, no, no, no. You've got to commit that that's not you. And but what it's good about is you're getting the unvarnished note. You're being told really why it didn't work, as opposed to nobody wants to be the bad guy in our business. So a lot of the time they'll tell you something else that will let you walk out of there with some dignity. Nobody lies to the manager or the agent because they don't give a shit about your dignity. It's not your dignity that's at stake. So they're like, your clients sucked because of this, don't send them back in. Like, we don't need to see any more scripts from this guy. Or it was really good, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or why does he always do this in every script he sends us? Things like that. And each time you just refine, you remove the thing, or you go fuck that guy. He doesn't know what he's talking about, or whatever it is. But it gave me a view of that part of the business that in a weird way gave me more respect for what they do. You know, there's a sort of adversarial relationship sometimes between performers or creatives and their management. Good ones, that's a job. That's a real job. Like, that's that's that's a tough job.

SPEAKER_01 46:04

I mean, what an extraordinary way to inadvertently get probably really useful insights. Because, as you say, like you're you weren't doing it as a clever way of getting insight, obviously. No. Actually, maybe it's someone listening to this will be like, you know what? I'm gonna fake being my own manager.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Don't fucking do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Also, you won't get away with it now. Everyone's net savvy now. No one was net savvy then. So when they went to check the management company, they found one with a website. That's nothing now. Children have websites. Yeah. Right? At the time, only businesses had websites because who else knew how to do that? Right? So when they went to look for this agency, there was an agency there with a fully professional looking for the time website. Right? Oh, okay, this is real, right? There was no way to check.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

So I guess did you have a stock photo of the fake manager?

SPEAKER_02 47:02

Or was that No, no, I didn't have any photos of the manager, but I did have like a sort of a photo of where the building was of the management company, and I had the little logo of a palm tree and some other stuff and a pen, I think. Um I the whole fake page about the background of the manager, started out as a lawyer and all this other stuff, and all bullshit, complete horseshit. What was what was his name? Oh huh. Michael Green was Michael Green. His name was Michael Green. Turns out there's a real Michael Green as a manager, so I had to stop anyway. But um, yeah, so and it's horrible because you're literally uh first of all, I'm a shitty liar in real life, but on the phone, I'd be a great phone pranker because I could kill, you know, as long as I wasn't face to face with them. I can't do the voice, but I had a voice, it was a whole thing. Like it was a whole thing, and it worked. It definitely worked. I got I got a meeting on Battlestar Galactica doing that. I got into development at Disney doing that. It was a whole fucking thing.

SPEAKER_01 48:07

I'm intrigued as how you can answer this question. Um so our last question we ask every guest is if you could give a single piece of advice to somebody wanting to enter the industry, what would that piece of advice be? And obviously, given you've done different bits of the industry, you pick the bit of the industry you want to give advice on.

SPEAKER_02 48:29

Two points of advice. Don't be a dick, because we got plenty of those. We're full up. We don't need any more. You're not helping us. Don't be a dick. Um I think you need to uh have a really uh sober assessment of what it is you actually want out of it. Um if you're, for instance, if what you really want to do is be Will Smith and have Will Smith's life, that's a different career track than I want to be Robert De Niro. Right? If I want to have Robert De Niro's life, what you want is to be an actor. It's coincidental that he ended up being a movie star. Right? Completely coincidental. Same with Merrill Street. It is an accident of fate that they ended up being movie stars. They were always going to be good actors because that's what they focused on. But it's a different career track if you and and there are movie stars who are also good actors, right? It's also a coincidence of fate. So I would say decide, are you going to be a movie star, which you'll make a whole bunch of different choices, or are you going to be an actor, which will make you and when you put your feet down on it, you'll be less you'll be less deterring when things go wrong, because you'll know that wasn't part of the track. The reason it went wrong will generally be because it was off model, right? You'll have management are like, oh, you're so pretty. Right? You should be this. You should be the ingenue du jour. Yeah, but what I really want to do is put on 80 pounds and be that truck driving serial killer like uh Charlie's Thoreau, right? I want to do that. Yeah, but you're so hot. The boys really like you. Yeah, but that's not the track I'm on. So I'm gonna say no to that and I'm gonna feel fine. I'm not gonna feel bad that I didn't get the bikini gig because I wasn't shooting for the bikini gig. Right? My agents will be mad they might break, they might cut me because I refuse to take the bikini gig. But if you're sure that that's not what you want, not a problem. As a writer, huh? Hmm. That's a tough one. Know how to fucking write. Um, seriously, like what's the rush? Like, I think a lot of people want to rush to the head of the class, right? They want to, I mean, Noah, you can talk about this, I'm sure. Like, there's a lot of people. I'm not saying you should you can't be young. There's certainly people who are very young and they're they're geniuses and they're adept, but they're few. That's why they're news. Like, we hear about them because they're unusual. But sometimes the trend is, oh, I can get this now, therefore I'll take it now. And you're not equipped, and it's going to show, and then you crash and burn and don't come back. You know, I would say live the life, don't don't try to get the thing. Just keep living the life.

SPEAKER_04 51:10

I was thir I was 32 before I moved to Hollywood, and I had written a few bad novels, a book of poetry. I've been writing other things, but I and I think I started writing screenplays when I was 30, and I didn't move to Hollywood until I had 10 finished. And even then I was not ready. You know, it took me another five years. And I think people are it just takes so much more work. And then you're right, people do want to jump the line. They want this isn't a lottery anymore. This isn't a huge payday. It's it's because it's in your soul, right? That's you're doing if it's not in your soul, please do anything else.

SPEAKER_02 51:43

Yes, anything else. Do anything you love that's not this, yeah. Because it's work. I do feel we're all overpaid. My mom was a school teacher. Like I said before we got on, I was a roofer for five minutes and a lot of other crappy jobs. We make a lot of money, a lot of money for what we do, less than some of what they used to. Apparently, I've heard stories about the 80s and the 90s. That was some crazy shit back then. What was that like? I have no idea. But it's a lot. Um, but it's not because we're all at parties that you see in freaking entertainment tonight. It's rough work, man. It's it's it's work. It's not the kind of work that grips do. That we don't have to be there at 4 a.m. in the mud and stay till 4 a.m. in more mud and carrying shit all day and all that, and possibly get electrocuted. It's not that kind of job. But it's a job. It's a job, job, job. It's not fun. We're not sexy. You fail, you still have to put it on the air knowing it's not perfect, it's not what you wanted. But you've got, you know, the monster is chasing you at all times. Like the mon as soon as you say go, there's a huge shark on wheels behind you trying to eat you until you rap for the season. Like, it's right there. You can smell it, you can feel the teeth. You know, if you're not built for that, please don't. You're gonna hurt yourself. It's not easy. It's not it's not always fun. It's definitely not a musical.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

Like so look, um Michael Green, please tell your fantastic popcorn. Maybe tell him he talked a bit too much, but we can, you know, we but tell him he did a good job, but we'll sort the rest out first. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02 53:30

I like I've talked about some of this crap in so long. Oh my god. Thank you for having me. Sounds amazing.

SPEAKER_04 53:40

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

SPEAKER_01 53:46

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

SPEAKER_04 53:54

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

SPEAKER_01 54:07

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

SPEAKER_04 54:18

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

SPEAKER_01 54:29

But you definitely can't podcast.

SPEAKER_04 54:31

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