Take 11 - Writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Star Trek, Alphas, Elementary

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for 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_00 0:21

There is something up.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

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

SPEAKER_01 0:43

I was like, and I probably lost it. Well, that's it for me. I moved by one point five what I've realized, but that will never one point bar. There will be other five.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

My name is Dan Ratstein. I'm doing really badly actually at the moment, but I'm not in the entertainment industry. And Noah, who's also doing badly, is in the entertainment industry. Welcome, Noah.

SPEAKER_04 1:22

Thank you, Dan, as always. Uh I'm super excited to introduce our guest today. His list of credits would actually take me about nine and a half hours to read the entire thing. So I'm gonna do a little bit of a highlights reel. His name is Robert Hewitt Wolf. He cut his teeth on a little known show known as Star Trek The Next Generation. Also worked on Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, Twilight Zone, Dead Zone, Andromeda. I'm skipping over a whole bunch to going to Star Crossed, uh, and and most recently the TV show Elementary. Welcome, Robert. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

So I'm gonna I'm gonna jump straight in with this because I've known you for a while. We've met a few times. You were even on my other podcast, which wasn't meant to be about rejection, but you started talking about rejection on that one as well, which is why you're the perfect guest.

SPEAKER_05 2:09

I'm a modelin, I'm a marvin whiskey drinker.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

So you're the perfect guest here. So I remember being at somebody's Christmas party, and we were talking to you, and Elementary was, which had been running for a while and obviously was a great show, was reaching the stage where you weren't sure if it was going to get cancelled or not. Right. And you were going through the whole, you know, do I need to look for another job or not? So this is a part of the industry we've not explored yet, which is the you've got a job, but you don't know how long it will last. So how hard do you try to find the next job part? How much of your life is spent doing that weird dance?

SPEAKER_05 2:51

Looking for the next job is probably 50% of my job. I mean, I've had the good fortune of being on two long-running shows. Uh, one, the first one, Deep Space Line, I really didn't have to worry too much. I mean, I was out trying to pitch some features or sell some feature films uh and uh and that sort of thing. But but that that when you're on Star Trek, it's a special thing, especially back then. You kind of knew it was gonna be a seven-year gig if you wanted it to be. Uh, so I didn't really have to worry about that. With elementary, you know, it was a network show that was pretty successful and did well for CBS, but I think it was a little bit on the bubble, especially towards the end. So it really looked like we were gonna be done after six years, six seasons. So I was really starting to look after six seasons. Um, and then um we got a seven season parachuted in. We actually did a series finale as the end of season six, and then wait, no, no, no, we want more. So we sort of un unwound some of the finale elements, and but so yeah, and we did a seven season with another finale, but yes, between season six and seven, I was definitely uh looking for work because I thought you know that was gonna be it, and then a lot of the other shows I've been on, you know, a lot of them have been one-year runs or short runs, um, or I've I've been on it just for a short time in between other gigs. Uh so you know, you're always doing that, and then obviously the last anytime I don't have a job, I'm out running around pitching and looking for work and all that other kind of stuff. It's not really 50%, but it's it's a giant amount of my time right now, or uh or a or a big part of my focus right now. There's no job security, you know. If you want to scream into the Hollywood Abyss, we could scream that, you know, where's my job security? There's no job security. The abyss screams back. You knew what you're getting in for.

SPEAKER_04 4:49

I do want to say that it's really rare, you know, as a TV writer in general, uh, and with the guests we've interviewed, you've been on a number of shows that have run for a while, and to have actually that security between the hiatuses of like, I'm coming back, I can actually, I don't need to develop a new show now, I can just focus on this show for a bit. And then there's definitely been times, it looks like in your career where you are going from show to show to show to show. Um, it sort of in all of that, do you have a sort of a rejection or tragedy story that that just sort of jumps out of you in in this middle of this, in these middle years where you're kind of going from project to project where where it still breaks your heart to think about a little?

SPEAKER_05 5:28

I mean, uh, you know, I've I've had since I have a long, long list of credits, I think what's important for people to understand is that for every job you get, there's like six to ten jobs you go out for, maybe, maybe more, you know. You know, I've gotten, I probably get like eight to ten rejections a year. So there's probably a couple hundred uh that we could go through. I mean, the upside is obviously, you know, when you get them, that's great. And and there's definitely I've definitely had the blessing of had having had we call it a hiatus a hiatus between seasons where you don't work or you work a little tiny bit and you know you're coming back to the show. And and whenever you know that you can come back, that's a whole different thing than that's like a much better thing to know you're coming back because then you can go on vacation and it's like a real vacation and you're not like looking for work. So that's a that's a great and rare thing. Uh let's see, what are some I mean, there's been plenty of well let me let me make it easy for you. Lord of the Rings. Yes, yes, that is that is one of the many things I have pitched on.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Yes, that was a thing that happened. I think this is either the same or a different Christmas party I met you at. You showed me, and again, for someone outside the industry, I found this extraordinary. You showed me the most extraordinary, not not the whole pitch book, but you showed me some illustrations and so on that you were putting together as part of your sort of Lord of the Rings pitch. And you, you know, you told me a story which I think I would have bought, but I don't think I was in charge of the budget. But that one, that's I mean, you know, you've obviously worked on some serious franchises like Star Trek, but there's Lord of the Rings, maybe it's because there was so much money and excitement about it, but that was a big thing everyone was talking about, and you were you were close. Tell me what tell me the excitement about getting close and then the the the other side of it when you come back.

SPEAKER_05 7:21

Yeah, or third, I don't know, somewhere in there. Um no, it was great. I think that they had a pretty big cattle call for that, for that. So I think a lot of people pitched. I I I think I'm not uh a rare a rarity in in the in the group of writers who have TV uh fantasy and and um science fiction credits in that I was invited to pitch, which was terrific and very complimentary. And so I I put together that pitch that you saw. I won't, I can't go into I won't go into the details of the pitch, uh, because who knows, they may do another series. But um, but I was really excited by it. And and as Dan said, I put together a very detailed pitch pack, which it don't always do. But for this, I felt like it was really important to set people in the world, understand the characters I was talking about. And it was a complicated structure because it was sort of like in Game of Thrones, it was three different intersecting uh um stories all set in sort of the same time period. So you had basically three story threads that would sort of crisscross each other over the course of the theoretically five years of the show. So I worked it all up. Um I was super excited. I went into Amazon and I pitched some great executives, and I had my little comic book basically of um characters and stuff, and I pitched the whole thing out, and uh it went great. I mean, you know when uh I mean you can't always tell when something goes well, but in this case I knew it was going really, really well. They were very excited, and so I laid out the whole thing, my whole plan. I even talked a little bit about the obvious way to go, which I think a few other people pitched. There was one obvious way to go based on the material they owned, um, which was sort of like Strider the Early Years. And I said why I didn't want to do Strider of the Early Years. And and look, we we uh PS Amazon, if you're listening to this and you want to do Strider of the Early Years, I'm I'm still um, but but but that wasn't my first instinct. So I pitched this whole thing out and I got a call back. Um I listened to to pump myself up beforehand, I listened to like the Battle of Evermore or something like that in the parking lot. And then I went and I pitched this whole thing, and uh it went great, and then I got a call that I had blown them away. I mean, those were the actual words, and I was so ecstatic because I mean this is a this is you know, these big franchises to be able to create a show in one of these big IPs is a is a rare and wonderful thing, you know. And so I was super excited, but they there was some um, they were having some administrative, they were having a little bit of an exec shuffle there. They got new people in. Uh the people that I pitched to stayed, but but some of the people above them changed. Um, and then you know, I was supposed to come back in and pitch to the new people, and um, that never happened. You know, I was told I was like in the final group, and then they bought the uh the second age thing that they're doing. Um, and I don't re you know, sometimes I say like showbiz is like a giant black box with a little ticker tape that spits out answers and results, and you look at them and you're like, okay, that's what the network said, and but you have no idea what's going on in the box, you know, like why they make the decisions that they do. Um, it sounds like the new one is gonna be great. I mean, like the premise is great. It's one of the things I actually thought about. Again, they have a certain amount of material they have access to, and some stuff that is out off limits. And so when you look at the material, there's a few, a few natural ways to go. I did not go the way they're going, which is sort of second age Sauron, uh Numenor and all that stuff. Um uh, but it could be great. Anyway, I was crushed. I mean, I was I was very, very I was very disappointed. Um, but but it it's sort of like the normal disappointment amped up a little bit because of how much I wanted it and how excited I was when I thought I had a legit shot at it, you know. I think if I'd been turned down at the moment, I would have been sad, but it was a little harder having heard that I might be in that last group and then and then never really getting to even try, even get to pitch it a second time, or you know, and hear that they went a different way. It's a crazy showbiz, man.

SPEAKER_04 11:40

I mean, the whole Lord of the Rings saga has been, you know, even if you read the Peter Jackson story about how he how he launched his version of it, but then the Amazon take, you know, spending hundreds of millions of dollars for the the underlying IP to create their version of Game of Thrones, which you always knew they were trying to do for a long time. So this is not only their swing, it's their huge swing, which still hasn't released yet, and it's still their huge swing. But I have a great, I have a very sort of just crafty question for you. When you're put up for this as one of, let's just say, 10 writers who who get to like be up for the show or more. Probably like 40 or 50 for that one, I bet. Do they just say your agent says, Hey, do you want to pitch on Lord of the Rings? You maybe have a meeting with them where they say, This is what's off limits. But do they just say, read, like, be creative, read the book, come at us with your own, or do they have like these like a five-page guide of like nothing?

SPEAKER_05 12:32

No, no, what they had was in this case, and this is true a lot of the time, but in this case, they were like, This is the IP, we bought this, but really what we're looking at is the appendices. Like that was sort of like, you know, the appendices at the end of uh The Return of the King. And so I reread the appendices at the end of, I mean, I read the whole trilogy again, just to you know get it all in my head and get the voices and sort of the approach to storytelling in my head. Uh, but no, a lot of the sometimes it's very specific. It's like we want to do this, but you know, this specific part of this specific story, you know, or this specific piece of IP, but a lot of times it's much more open-ended, and this was much more open-ended. It was like, here's, you know, six thousand years of Middle-earth history, tell us a story, you know, getting in there somewhere. And like I said, I I think there were like to me, there were there was one obvious way to go, which is not the way they went, to their credit, and then there were there was two or three other sort of rich veins to mine. And what I did was actually combine a couple of the rich veins, and what they did was really go for that the second age story, which like I said, makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Um question about the um again, about how it happened. So we've had people come on here and say, you know, I was in a room and you know somebody fell asleep. I think that's happened to Lower. Um people have said, you know, well read, which isn't great. When when when you're told that you've blown them away, which obviously I assume is something that doesn't happen very often. Are you old enough and wise enough to know that that still doesn't mean anything? Or or were you sort of, was there a the child inside you who's like, oh right, well, maybe I am gonna win this one? Like, that's quite a serious thing to say about something you end up not buying. So, how do you process something so overwhelming?

SPEAKER_05 14:26

That one I think I let myself celebrate more than I normally would. I mean, my very first experience with with with nearly selling something in Hollywood was nearly selling something. You know, I had a I had a feature film that uh um back in the day uh Carolko was interested in buying. Carolko, however they pronounce it. And uh we were they made me an offer on it, would have been my first big sale. This was before Next Generation, and they uh we they made an offer, we countered, which is very normal, and then they went bankrupt in the middle of the negotiation. So uh ever since I think I've had a certain amount of guardedness when it comes to these things. But I will admit that Lord of the Rings is uh something that I've loved since I was so young, that I I just really did celebrate that uh in a way that I don't normally do, in a way that I'm a little usually a little more jaded with. Um and yeah, so that one hurt. Um more probably a little more than usual. Uh yeah, I'd say that one hurt a little more than usual. Um just because you know, there was a day there where I was like, all right, I got a legit shot at this, you know? And I think I did have a legit shot at it. I I don't know, like I said, I don't know what happened inside that machine um that made them make the decisions that they made and and why I wasn't able to come back and at least pitch it, pitch what I might take to to the new the new bosses there. Um goes.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

So what happens next? What happens next in the sense of when it comes out, not written by you, right? Not your idea, you sit there and watch it and sort of hope that they get things wrong, so you can say, Well, my one would have been better, or you like good luck to them. I hope this is a massive success, and then when it wins all the awards, you'll be like, Well, that could have been me. But how do you how so how grown up are you about somebody else doing something you didn't win?

SPEAKER_05 16:27

I try to be super grown up about it. I wish them the best. I think I hope they do great, you know. Um, because like television is hard and I'm a fan and I want the show to be good. I want to enjoy the show if I get to watch it. Um and so yeah, no, I'm not. If if you if I carry myself around like, you know, sour grapes and everything that I didn't get, I there's a lot of television that I would really love that I wouldn't be able to watch. So um, you know, it's it's no, I wish them the best. I mean, I I I think it's a great property. I I I think it's an interesting approach. I hope it's great, you know. Um I also you know, also it I write that kind of stuff. So if the market for that stuff is looking great to people and they're super excited, then maybe something I'm you know doing in that area sells. I I I haven't, you know, the at the same time this year I went out with three different big kind of fantasy sci-fi different things, and you know, one of them looks like it might move forward a little bit, and it's in the you know, it's in the high fantasy genre. So, you know, in some ways, like rising tide lifts those boats, you know. If they fail, I mean if they come out with that and it fails, which I it's not gonna do, it's gonna be great and it's gonna do well. I I think. But if it failed, if it were to fail, that would be terrible for anybody who wanted to write in that genre, which I certainly do, you know. The same thing, like if the new Star Trek show had come out, like I didn't get they didn't offer me that, but the new Star Ship came Star Trek show came out and flopped, or if Mandalorian had flopped, that's less people are gonna want to buy the kind of stuff I love to write, you know? And so I wish them all the best.

SPEAKER_04 18:21

You hear you hear things in Hollywood, you start to hear rumors about different shows, and and that they've been they've kept that rumor mill super uh clamped down on uh camp down on the Star Trek world. I mean Star Trek on the on the Game of Thrones.

SPEAKER_05 18:35

Lord of the Rings, on the Lord of the Rings series that they have Game of Thrones series, they finally announced what the heck it was gonna be, just like last week.

SPEAKER_04 18:43

The uh yeah, and that Game of Thrones one as well. I know some people working on that one. I know some people working on the Lord of the Rings, and they're all under serious NDAs, they can't talk about it, and they can't even like whisper about it in dark corners, but it seems like they're progressing and excited, and when the writers are excited, the show tends to be pretty good at fingers crossed. You hope it is. Uh can we talk a little bit about uh Andromeda? So you went as I didn't mention that you were the creator of uh or developed this show, Andromeda, along with uh Gene Roddenberry, the you know, the creator of Star Trek, and you were uh in the Star Trek universe for so many years, and then you get this offer to create a show in that universe that did quite well. And can you run, you know, it didn't seem like you were on it for the full time, but you launched it. And can we can we talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_05 19:29

Uh sure. I mean, uh, you know, uh, I actually quote the uh when you stare into the abyss line, it is in there somewhere, I think. Uh I think it's episode eight or nine. Um, so yeah, I uh that was a fun one. I was, I mean, uh Roddenberry had passed away. Um, but literally, but basically, Tribune Entertainment had gotten the rights to develop things based on his unpublished or unproduced works. And uh they'd lured Kevin Sorbo away from Hercules to be the star. So they knew they were they had Sorb Sorbo plus Roddenberry, question you know, underpants, gnomes, question mark, question mark, question mark, profit. They didn't have any story, uh, but they knew they wanted it to be a space opera. And by the time they met with me, they'd already met with some other writers and and they were gonna do a planet-based show and a starship-based show. And since I'd just come off of Deep Space Nine and we were basically a star sh a station show where we didn't like boldly go every week, I was very excited to do a Starship show, it was a big difference. And so I pitched them stuff, and uh they they they they dug it and they bought a series proposal for me from me, which I wrote, which they then sold 48 episodes 44 episodes. No, 48, 48 episodes based on my proposal and a little one-minute short they shot with Kevin. Green lit, like go. And so I wrote a Bible, I wrote the pilot, uh, and yeah, off we went, you know, to make to make our little our show for like 10 Canadian cents an episode up in Vancouver in a refurbished shirt factory that we turned into a soundstage, uh sort of and in that sound stages are called sound stages because they're supposed to not let environmental noise in from the outside, and this did not qualify as a soundstage by that definition. But but yeah, we had some stages up there, and yeah, it was fun. We uh show went 110, and I I ran it for the first season and a half. One of the things with that show was when I took that job, I was warned by many people that they would fire me very quickly. Uh because Tribune, because that was their MO. And also it the way they structured their contracts, there were big kickers like incentives if you got renewed for season two and season three. And the really big kickers were if you got renewed for season three as the showrunner. Um And so the writing was kind of on the wall on that one that I was going to get fired. And I lasted a lot longer than people said I would, because they mostly fired people like halfway through season one, and I made it through halfway through season two. So that was one of those ones where, like, you know, it's it's it's not so much it's not so much staring into the abyss, but it's you know it was a deal with the devil. Not the devil is overstating things. A deal with uh, you know, uh an ice devil, but not like you know, as Modius in D terms, like a mid-level, like a low-level devil.

SPEAKER_04 22:38

I've been noticing that with these big franchises, especially the Star Wars ones that have been announced, all these different shows, unless you're really a big name, that they are gonna they are burning through their showrunner. In fact, they're not even calling them creators anymore, they're calling or even showrunners, they're calling them head writers. There's you Andromeda is a huge part of a this huge IP, so the writer creator is feels like it's they're they're a little bit more expendable, at least to the powers that be that are trying to keep this IP fresh.

SPEAKER_05 23:09

I think uh it's about control. I think if you can replace the showrunner or or replace the head writer or whatever, it just gives you more control, and and these sort of IPs are all owned by these giant corporations, and you know, they want things done their way. And that's not to say that's always the case. Obviously, with Game of Thrones, you know, those guys made it all the way to the end, and but there's been a fair amount of turnover on Discovery. I'm not at the very top, but sort of the next level down. There's been a fair amount of, you know, I think they've stabilized now and they've got they've got the people they want. Um, but yeah, I mean, look, the bigger they're spending a crap ton of money on these things, right? They're really expensive. I mean, they're spending, I think, a million dollars an episode just for the rights on Lord of the Rings. That my math could be off. So when you're spending that kind of money, I mean, you know, everybody's head is on the line. And and when you when when an executive's head is on the line, I think, you know, they want to make sure that that they're masters of their own destiny. So you definitely get uh that impulse towards towards a little tighter control. Um different situation than Tribune. I mean, with Tribune, it was literally like they didn't have a lot of money, they didn't spend a lot of money, they were a newspaper company, you know, and they they just were like, well, if we get rid of this guy after you know a season and a half, we don't have to pay him as kickers, you know.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

So yeah, I love the fact that in an industry where you can get fired for lots of different reasons, another thing you can get fired for is just to save a bit of money. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 24:51

Honestly, I've only been fired twice. Is that right? Yeah, like legit, fully fired. I've been fired twice, and both times it was to save money. Oh, lovely. So yeah, yeah, it's awesome. It's like, oh, you're really expensive, you know, or not even that. I mean, in case they have a dandromeda, I wasn't that expensive. Um, but I would have been more expensive if they had hadn't gotten rid of me.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

So talking about talking about money, it's interesting. There's been quite a lot of discussion recently about some of these shows that are being made and the and the cost of the episodes. And this feels like a sort of the question. If you speak to professional sports people from the 1980s who tell you that you know they they worked their whole life and hardly earn anything, and now these young people are earning, you know, signing multi-million dollar contracts. When you made your show, your budget, you know, you joked what the budget was, but if you look at shows like The Mandalorian now, they've got so much per episode. Is there a part of you sort of wishes that you were not born in a different generation, but you were working on a show, you know, with ideas like you had for Andromeda that you were never really able to do the same sorts of things with, and what you could have done with them if somebody had given you the unlimited cash pile that people are getting now?

SPEAKER_05 26:11

Uh sure. I mean, I was joking on on Twitter the other day that I I believe I could be wrong, and this is not adjusted for inflation, but I believe we made 110 episodes of Andromeda for about what they made one season of Mandalorian for. Eight episodes. Wow. Somewhere in that neighborhood. I mean, again, the math might might not be perfect, but it's it's it's it's not like a giant difference, if I'm wrong, you know. Uh, and that's not adjusted for inflation, and we were like shooting in Canada and we were getting all kinds of rebates and all that other stuff, but we made Andromeda for like $1.1 or $2 million an episode. We made 110 of them. That's $100, you know, $120 million. If they're spending $15 million on a Mandalorian per episode, then that's $120 million. Like the math checks out, right? So yeah, I there's a little bit of, I mean, look, I on Deep Space Nine had all the money in the world. Uh, not that we had an unlimited budget, but we had enough money to do whatever we needed to do. And that was also true with elementary. So it's not like I've been on a bunch of shows where I was starving for money, but certainly Andromeda was the one I was was the leanest of all of them, you know, and a lot of the money was like going to Wrights and to Kevin and stuff like that. So by the time we got to production, we had like two nickels to rub together. It was it was pretty the money, money on that show was really tight. And it shows like you if you watch that show today, you're like, wow, you know, these sets are these sets are not great. It was like, yeah, you know what? If we'd had like ten thousand dollars more for construction per episode, or twenty thousand or thirty thousand dollars more for construction per episode, and if we'd had been able to amort a five million dollar set instead of a fifty-five hundred thousand dollars of sets, the show would look a lot better. You know, the way it goes.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

When you're writing, when you're in the room and you're sort of getting close to shooting, is there a bit where you're like, right, we'll have to take out this scene with the four aliens in elaborate costumes who get shot and this thing explodes, and we can only have one alien, one blaster. You know, like how do you do you have to rewrite scenes to pair it down?

SPEAKER_05 28:21

I should have with Andromeda. I let's be honest, it was my first time running a show, and and what I sold them was a full throttle big budget space opera, and that's what they bought, and that's what they wanted, but then they didn't want to pay for it. So they didn't want scripts that didn't have those four aliens in the guy in the giant fight. And if you watch the first episode of Andromeda, there's literally like all these mercenaries who come on board, and they're they wanted aliens and stuff like that. So they're aliens and they have prosthetics and they have elaborate costumes, but none of it's good. Like, none of it's good. And so, had I known what I knew at the time, like if I knew what they were gonna do with the budgets, I wouldn't have pitched certain things, you know. I wouldn't have sold them certain things, I wouldn't have said that there would be androids all over the ship. And if you see some episodes, there's like some androids in the background, but they look terrible when we stopped using them. I wouldn't have pitched that there were as many aliens as there were. I certainly wouldn't have pitched that the aliens who founded the civilization were like centaurs, you know, and then when we finally saw them, they didn't look good, you know. Um it's just the way it was it was this disconnect between what they wanted, what their appetite was, and what they were willing to pay for. And and they kind of wanted both. They they never want, they didn't want to like like, you know, we want everything, and here's no money to make it. And so, okay, you do it, right? And the result is it doesn't always look great. There's ways to approach a science fiction space show where you can have more executable stuff and spend less money and still have it look good because you're not spending the money on stuff that you're gonna execute badly, like you know.

SPEAKER_04 30:04

It's it's crazy what a negotiation it can be. That and we're often hearing it through the line producers to us about that we're spending and so often we're pretty deep in the process where we've written something and we're starting to get throttled back a little bit on my last show on Hawaii 5.0, which is a sister show to your elementary on CBS, which was a hit show, but by season 10, we were getting all kinds of different notes that and often you start big, which means then you have like five episodes where you have to make up all of this money, and you'll get crazy notes where it's like you'll write someone in a suit and you'll get a note back saying, We don't have suit money this week. Can they be in an Aloha shirt or whatever? Because they're really down to that level of budget where they're trying to make it all work. And we've gotten even notes into the writer's room where we're using, we're drinking the wrong kind of water that is too expensive for the budget. Now, this is, I'm hoping, is a very different budget than what they're putting on screen, but they're watching everything to make sure that they can put as much on screen as possible. I'm guessing, or it's all it's it's a bit of a mystery to me still sometimes.

SPEAKER_05 31:06

The biggest issue really is like I'm okay with that. Like they they we had a little less money for our final season of elementary, and that's fine. And we just wrote some more interiors and we didn't go out as much, and you know, we were careful and it was fine, you know. Um that's normal. Like, like it's all it's normal to have certain cost constraints when you're making television, you know, it's very rare you get a blank check to make whatever you're making. Um, the only issue I ever have is when the appetite for what they want doesn't match the budget they're willing to spend, which is very rare, but that's what happened on Andromeda. It's like if I cut the fight sequences with you know 30 extras in a in a giant melee, they would be like, no, you got to put that back in. Well, I can't afford that. Well, no, figure it out, you know. So we'd do it and it would look like crap. Or they or they'd all wear the same thing, and we'd have like three stunt men, and then we'd keep rotating the stunt men through and shooting them over and over and over again, you know? And that's just that was just the way that show was made. So I don't really have an issue when when you're on a show like Elementary or Hawaii 5 0, and you've got a network like CBS and a studio like Warner Brothers of CBS in our case, and they're like, look, we we have to save some money. So can we do one less in exterior? That's cool, that's all fine, you know. The problem is when you have people who say, We have less money, but we you you still have to do the same number of exteriors, for example, or you still have to do a giant fight scene, you know, three fight scenes an episode. Well, fight scenes are money. Like, you know, I used to when I was on Andromeda, again, like, look, again, when 110 episodes, I cashed those checks. It was it was a lot of fun. Um, but sometimes I was like, you know, here's what you paid me for, here's what you're paying for close-ups of Kevin Sorbo. That's the single biggest line item in your budget. That's what you can afford. Kevin Sorbo talking to people, you can afford because you've already budgeted it. You're spending that money. Here's what you can't afford 50 ships in a space combat, you know. So maybe we can have a talk scene here instead of a combat scene. And a rational studio like CBS would say, yes, they understood, like on elementary, that the most expensive thing we could show on screen on elementary was a close-up of Johnny Lee Miller and a close-up of Lucy Lou. Like they're stars, man. We were paying them money. Like, that's money. Like, that's the best special effect you can have, is Johnny and Lucy talking to each other, right? So they were good with that. They understood that. We did what we could to have a little action here and there and good mysteries. Um, but they understood, like, you know, we couldn't have 15 suspects every, you know, especially towards the later seasons, just the way it is.

SPEAKER_04 33:59

We would get some notes sometimes about even though when we they knew we were having money troubles from the studio, that this episode's a bit quiet, which is their note for like they want more action. But we know when the writer we're we're like drilled in this episode or these three episodes on the board, they gotta be the money-saving episodes. So don't build in any, and then you'll and then you then you kind of finally get everyone to agree that it's gonna be a small episode, and then the director comes in, it's like, why can't we like we can and it's just I don't think people from the outside, and of course, people from the outside don't realize how much of these negotiations are going on in the creative process at all times, so that some of the episodes are maybe aren't as exciting as they want them to be. It's they're a byproduct of so many more moving parts than people probably realize from you know, yeah, yes, for sure.

SPEAKER_05 34:46

I mean, I I look if we're doing our jobs right, no one ever is gonna understand, no one should understand this stuff, right? This is like the magic trick that we're doing, and and hopefully they don't ever see us sweat, you know. Um and yeah, sometimes, like I said, like CBS was super cool. They understood what they were buying and what they wanted and what they were paying for and what we could afford to do. Other net, you know, it seems to me sometimes that other people are a little less aware of that, or they want more than they can really afford. Um and what's the what's the equation? I've seen this in a million production offices. Uh fast, good, cheap, pick two, right? And so if they pick fast and cheap, you know, or if they pick, you know, good and fast, well then it's not cheap, right? It's it's just the way it is. Like that's the the equation. And so when people are hip to that equation, it's great, it's all fine. Like, you know, you can do a great television show for not a ton of money, if you know, shit's creek, you know, great show, didn't cost a ton of money. They understood what that show was, they understood what they were doing, and they shot a great show, you know. Um as long as everyone's on the same page, you know. I I'm sure, like if you looked at Discovery versus Dark Matter, you know, dark matter cost a lot less, but it's still a fun show because they sort of understood what they were doing and they understood the limitations of their budget and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

So here talking of money, but in a slightly different way, when you first started this life that you've chosen, you had a sort of a budget and a runway that that budget provided you, and that was gonna be how you could work out whether you were gonna make it or not.

SPEAKER_05 36:46

Right. Yeah, that's true. Um, so when I started the in the business, I had a little bit of an inheritance. Um, my mom, unfortunately, passed away very young. She didn't have a lot of assets, but she had a house in San Francisco. And even back then, if you had a house in San Francisco that you'd had for 10 years, you know, the cost the cost of buying it versus the cost of selling it, there was a nice little gap there. So I had a chunk of money from the sale of her house after she passed. And and my I I promised myself I would I would get some other kind of serious job if I went through half that money. That was sort of my runway. And and my my girlfriend at the time, who became my fiance and my wife, was cool with that. And uh, you know, she was she was helping out too. And so that was my runway. That was really the budget that I had. At the beginning of my career, that was uh that was a ticking clock on my on my on my efforts to be a writer, was was that. How close, how close did you get? Pretty darn close. Pretty darn close. I mean, that first thing when it didn't sell, that was a huge setback to me because like I was like a year, no, nine months to a year into that money, you know, and I think I had about enough to live off of for about two years, and so I was looking really good for me there, and then it blew up. So that was a very nervous and stressful time. And then luckily the next generation sale came. Oh, I want to say it came like six months later. So I still had like six months of runway left when I finally got that gig.

SPEAKER_04 38:34

So it was yeah, people from the outside don't realize probably how when you sell a script or a feature or TV's pilot, how long it takes to negotiate that deal and many things that happen during the process. And so if you get really excited, you'll see all of us posting, I got an offer, I got this, and then it literally can take anywhere from three months to eight months before that deal is written, and then anywhere you know, upwards of a year to get paid, and that the fastest way to get actual money in the bank is to get staffed because you could not know the week before, and then even after that, it often takes six weeks to get paid, even when you're working on a staff because of the way the accounting works. So yeah, don't go down to fumes, is what the the right I mean, do not be down to zero because you won't make it, right?

SPEAKER_05 39:19

Exactly. It's it's very true, and like even once you get a gig and you have a gig for a few years, the next gig could take a year or two to get, or two years, you know. And so you always kind of have to be aware that, like, you know, don't go out and buy a boat, you know, or a fancy car or a house you can't really afford, you know. And I think a lot of people make that mistake, and it's it's tricky, you know, because you get excited, you've got a job, you're making more money than you've ever made in your entire life, and you think, okay, I'm in a good place right now. I can I can go do this, I can do that, you know. You can, but you know, when the when the job ends, you might be in trouble. And like you said, it takes forever to get paid sometimes. And like in the case of this first sale, this first sale that I made, the negotiations went on and on and on, and then they just stopped, and there was no money, you know. So that can happen too. You can literally negotiate for for a deal that you see none of. There's also deals you negotiate that are if come where you negotiate a deal on something. If this goes, I get X amount of money. Well, it didn't go, you don't get the money, or you get a very small portion of that money, and that happens all the time, too. I did a really nice big fat if come deal with the studio on a pilot like two years ago. Studio was all geeked up, I was all geeked up, it was a really nice deal. I got none of it. We didn't sell the show.

SPEAKER_04 40:51

It doesn't happen often, but I have sold a project. I did sell a project in the room with a director attached, one of my very first big pilot sales to a major studio. They bought it like at the end. It's never happened to me. I was never been more excited. And you think, you know, how can this fall apart? There's a big director, they love the idea, they want it, they preemptively got it, and then they never, they never actually sent the deal in, ever. It never happened. They just didn't, they took us out of the game and then never actually executed the con. And luckily, there was a big enough director that he was pissed and like he made a little bit of noise. They still didn't offer us any money, but we ended up retelling it to somebody else. But like the end of the day is you just don't know. Like they don't have to honor their guests in the room, they don't have to do anything.

SPEAKER_05 41:36

Nothing's real to the check clears. Yeah, like that's just the way the business works, you know? It's just, it's just there's a lot of a lot of that, like a lot of fake yeses, not intentionally, I think a lot of the time, you know, it's just it's just there's so many moving parts behind the scenes, and every one of these shows or movies is a multi-million dollar bet that the that the people with the money are making. And sometimes they change their mind about that bet before before the window closes, you know? And that's just the way it goes, man. It's like I get it's tough. It's tough, it's really tough, but I get it. Like, look, a TV series, like even the Andromeda was 110, 120 million dollar bet, you know, and and they made that money back, but you know, like you sell a script these days, like I've you know, I've I've sold a bunch of features, and every single one of them was gonna cost 150 million dollars to make, 200 million dollars to make these days, 300 maybe, and they don't go, and it's like it sucks. I didn't get paid all the money I wish I'd gotten paid, but my movie didn't get made even more to tragically. But to them, it's like, well, that wasn't a good investment. Uh, we decided that 200 million dollars wasn't a good idea, you know. It's hard to argue with that, it's not my money.

SPEAKER_00 43:02

No, this is this is this is great stuff. So it leads into a nice good question for our last question. So we you know, we've we've covered money and we've covered rejection and all that stuff, and how it's so difficult. What single piece of advice would you give to somebody looking to enter the industry as a writer?

SPEAKER_05 43:25

You better love it, don't do it for the money. I mean, the money can come, but do it because you love it and there's nothing else you'd rather do. If you're thinking this is how you're gonna get rich and famous, I mean, go be an investment banker or work on Wall Street if you want to get rich. If you want to be famous, I don't know, start an Instagram channel or something. I don't know what the hell you would do to get famous these days, but don't be a TV writer, you know. Uh, do it because you love it. I love it. I love writing, I love working with other writers, I love working with actors and directors. And crew. I love making television. It's really, really fun. But it's not like, like I said, there's no job security. There's no certainty for anything. Everything is every moment you're not working is a gamble. Every job could be your last. So, you know, do it because you love it. And you know, don't buy a boat. They're like, you know, do it because you love it, save your money. You know? Make sure you've got enough money, even in success, that you can live for a couple years, two, three years if you have to, between gigs. Residuals only go so far. Um and they're going away. And they're going away. I mean, one of the the the single biggest blessing I have right now in this COVID year where you know I haven't worked in nine months, is Elementary is one of the last shows in the world that pays residuals. You know, I mean Hawaii Fiber one I'm sure does too. But but you know, that that's that's helping a lot right now financially. But there's a but there's a zillion shows I've worked on that have that barely pay anything because they went one year or 13 episodes and maybe they stream every once in a while get like a dollar twenty-five, you know, for something that I did. But um, yeah, you've got to save your money. But the biggest piece of advice is you know, only do this if you love it. Not that you can't do anything else. If this is it, you know, if this is this is your dream. Um someone else told me like Hollywood is where they bludgeon you to death for your dreams, too, though. So you know who was that? Liz free Liz Friedman, one of the elementary writers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:49

Um there's no better way to end the podcast than knowing that you can have your dreams bludgeoned away from you.

SPEAKER_05 45:56

So no, no, they take your dreams and they use them to they bludgeon you with your dreams. They bludgeon you, they don't think they don't kill your dreams, they use your dreams to kill you. Oh that's the even better, even better.

SPEAKER_04 46:10

You know, give Liz some credit, give you know, quarter properly. We need to redo our opening credits with that line because that was fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 46:18

Yeah, rename the podcast. No, no, no. Good good podcasting. All right, very good. Robert Hugh Wolf, thank you very much. It's great to have you on. I'm glad that you have not been bludgeoned to death with your own dreams.

SPEAKER_05 46:33

Well, no, I have I have been bludgeoned with my own dreams, but not to death. That's the important thing. I've only been wounded, you know, and I've always gotten back up. So I'll continue to get back up.

SPEAKER_00 46:45

Super. And that's very good. I and I I um when Lord of the Rings comes out, I will I will text you and see what you think and hold you to your promise of being grown up about how to I want to love it, man.

SPEAKER_05 46:58

I really do. I want to love it. I wanna I wanna I wanna be a geek and I wanna be a big fanboy, and I want to watch every every episode and be super excited. And you know, that's that's that's what I want to see. I hope they I hope they kick ass. Very good. Thank you very much. All right, guys, thanks.

SPEAKER_04 47:22

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

SPEAKER_00 47:28

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 47:36

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

SPEAKER_00 47:49

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

SPEAKER_04 48:00

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. But you definitely can't podcast. I definitely this is not the thing that I do well.