Take 96 - Writer and Showrunner Diane Ruggiero-Wright, Veronica Mars, iZombie

SPEAKER_01 0:00

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

SPEAKER_02 0:13

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

SPEAKER_00 0:20

For every subject, there is most sometimes even failure. This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

What I've realized that that will be never one bit. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

Let somebody with a more charming accent do this bit. Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss is brought to you by Scriptation, the Emmy Award-winning app for anyone that reads scripts. Makes notes, organise them into layers, and save hours of time by automatically transferring those notes into new script revisions. Stiffer listeners can get a free month of scriptation by going to scriptation.com backslash stiffer. Now that's how you do it, Noah. Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. I am, as ever, your non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rutstein.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

And I am your entertainment co-host, Noah Ebslin. On today's Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, I'm excited to introduce TV writer, screenwriter, showrunner, and show creator Diane Ruggiero Wright. Diane burst onto the scene in the early aughts with the creation of the TV show That's Life. She's also worked on such shows as Wildcards, Dirty Sexy Money, Big Shots, Cupid, Base Motel, The X List, The Veronica T the Veronica Mars TV show and movie. And she was also the co-creator of iZombie. And maybe most importantly, a badass, shape-shifting rogue in Dungeons and Dragons. Welcome, Diane.

SPEAKER_03 2:35

Welcome. Thank you. I would be nothing without you. Think you saved me every single game, I think, right? Every um every campaign, I should say. I would be dead immediately if you didn't come and save me.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

That was my goal in the game and in life.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Um, so I was I was actually thinking my first words would be congratulations, Noah, on getting through the intro without making a mistake. But he, as always, tumbled over his words. Um he was perfect. He got he got the key facts right. He's just got to work on his diction, but that's fine.

SPEAKER_03 3:05

Um disagree.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

This podcast, it may not go as well as usual because you seem to be friends with Noah, and that doesn't always work for our shtick.

SPEAKER_03 3:15

Oh no, okay. I'll try. It's hard. I've got it, it's like ingrained. He's like, we've been to battle together. We were, you know, I feel like we've we've been in the wars.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

So we've been in the trenches for sure.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

So let trenches is a good place to start, actually. So um, as often, well, in fact, with all of our guests, they're only on because they're at the successful end of their career, but it was a beginning to their career where they were not in that place. So can we start with the hardships you faced earlier on?

SPEAKER_03 3:45

Well, I I have to say, we were just no and I were just speaking about this. Um, I started with a success, so I'm the opposite. So I started with a huge success, and then it was just all downhill from there.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

So tell us about your success and then tell us about what happened after.

SPEAKER_03 4:00

Oh, okay. So I have a uh, you know, I have a great Cinderella story. I was working at a restaurant and met someone who was uh and writing poorly and without anyone caring, and um met someone who was a professional writer and he said it by gave him something he would show it to his agent, and he put me on a writing schedule, and every week he came in and I give him 10 pages. And um, I got an agent from that script and sold that script. And from that script, because it was like a waitress makes good, um, there was a bunch of press, and uh an executive at CBS read it, and I talked about how I tried to go to college, you know, in my later 20s, and they wanted to do like the 30-something answer to Felicity. So I got offered to write a TV show, which I had no idea how to do and had never done, but I wrote the pilot and then it was on the air for two years with Ellen Burston and Paul Sorvino. And so, yeah, so I did I started off creating a show and at a supervising producer level, and then the show got canceled and I didn't work for a year because I was like, oh, I wrote my, you know, I sold my first movie and I sold my first TV show. Obviously, every time I write something, someone's gonna pay me. And then I pitched a show and pitched a movie and nothing happened. And I was like, oh shit, do I have to go back to waitressing? Like I had, you know, I had bought a house, and also it was like, you know, when you first got that TV money, it was like monopoly money. If you looked at me the wrong way, I bought you a pool or paid for your divorce or something. So I was like, shit, I need I need another job. What am I gonna do? Um, yeah, and it was scary because I think the biggest challenge for me is that I am not trained and not educated. And so it was very easy to write things that were just based on my life. That was about as far as I could go. So they said, you know, you have to stop on someone else's show. And I thought, what am I gonna do? Like, I don't know how to do that. I had no idea how to do that. I hadn't even really been in a writer's room because the show, we did two years of it. And the first year, there wasn't really a regular writer's room. I wrote like 19, I wrote like 17 of the first 19 episodes. There was a writer's room, but I didn't quite know what it did. Like it was a um, I'm sure everyone who worked on the show, besides my friend Ann, hated me. Um, but it was really just out of not knowing how anything worked. And um, so I was really terrified that I wasn't going to be able to make a living doing this because I didn't think I had the skills or ability to do it.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

There's a lot in that eyes, a great answer for a show like this. You've I know you're a regular listener, so you sort of know where we're gonna go with things, and you've answered sort of my next four questions, but I'm gonna have to no, no, it's good, it's good. But let me go back. I want to just slow it down and talk about this where you know, you casually like, yeah, you know, my show got cancelled, and I thought about going back to waitressing. So let's go into pieces. So your show gets cancelled. So I love the fact it started well, and Noah will later say that he doesn't like people who had early success because he didn't.

SPEAKER_03 7:05

But I will I will tell you though, here's the thing that happens though. So there was a showrunner, and I didn't, you know, I didn't know how things worked. And there was an executive producer, the woman who brought me on, who just protected me from everything. And in protecting me from everything, she kind of kept me from everything. So I didn't know how anything worked. I didn't know that there were people that were angry at me. I didn't realize that writers were all in the room coming up with stories, and I was supposed to, you know, listen to them and talk with them. Like I was just in the weeds constantly, you know. And so I, you know, my friend Anne, who who I met on the show, was like, here's what you're doing wrong. And so she would come in and like teach me. And I, you know, was just always apologizing and just always like overwhelmed. I mean, picture going from waitressing and having no experience at all in this business to be to writing a show that is on the air. Like it's just, it was insanity. And so they brought on a new showrunner. Um, and this man was very sweet, and he said, because the first showrunner was like, fuck this, I'm not working on a show where the writer is just writing whatever she wants, rightfully so. They brought on another man who said, Diane has to write everything. That's the only way this is gonna work. So, again, writer's room not loving me and me under the gun. That didn't work out. So when it comes back for the second season, they hired this lovely woman, personally, very lovely, professionally. It was horrible. And, you know, the show is about loosely based on my life, but it was about like a blue-collar Italian-American family. And it turned into like, I called it, I nicknamed it Touch by a Guinea, because it went from being like just a regular slice of life to being so kind of sappy, and she would grammatically correct my dialogue. And it went from being a show that was so personal to me that I could see my family in. The dad worked on the turnpike like my dad, and the mom was a stay-at-home mom like my mom, and she was trying to be a college student. She was like a bartender and had all these jobs, and she was trying to go to school. And they changed it and made it that she, because it needed an engine. So she, because I liked hockey, they made her a major in sports medicine, and that every week there was a different kind of sports issue that she was going to have to solve medically. And they had the parents open a restaurant so that there would be a place for them to go. And they gave her a boyfriend who worked in like a youth center so that there would be another engine. And it was so horrible, and I hated it so much, and I was so sad. And I thought, well, what do I do? Do I can't quit? Like this is I'm making right now what it would take my father to make in like 10 years. I can't quit. So I just said, okay, I know nothing. I can't being in this writer's room is like stabbing me in the heart and the eye simultaneously. So I'm just gonna learn what I can learn elsewhere. So I went into the editing bay and I went on to set. And I talked to all the people who were doing the things that wasn't writing because the writing was making me so unhappy. And that's how I learned about making television.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

We, I mean, this is no, no, no. I there's uh again, there's there's a lot of fascinating things to unpack because we've only had a couple, and I want to, you know, just add some color for the for our podcast listeners that we've only had one other person, I think, on this podcast who had this type of early success that you did. And we've had 95 interviews or something so far, which is like Mickey Mickey Fisher created his sort of out of the blue, created a show and did what you did, which was wrote it, but then somebody else came in to showrun. And I think he had actually uh it wasn't as difficult an experience for him, but that show didn't last very long. It's just really rare because you know, this is a skill you learn along the way. Uh, can we talk a little bit though about the unique pain? And it's it's a very privileged pain because you've created a show and you're earning money and you've gotten some press and some success, but about like the pain of when you lose creative control of the thing that is so specifically you. It sounds like we talk on this podcast about writing your soul. It sounds a little bit like you were able to write your soul and then someone took over your soul. And what does that how does that how do you deal with that emotionally?

SPEAKER_03 11:28

It feels it feels really horrible and soul crushing and invasive, and you want to fight back, but you also it was my inclination to fight against it, but I knew I didn't have the um the weapons because I didn't know enough about the business to fight back, and I didn't know enough at all to kind of assert myself and say, hey, here's what I think is wrong. And they also got rid of that producer who was the one that was protecting me. So it was, it was very much I was on my own, and I could have very easily like blown it all up, you know, because I am a hothead, and I could have very easily just said, screw this, I'm not doing it, and who knows if I would have worked again or what. But I just was very conscious of how fortunate I was to be in that situation. And when you have such a kind of great Cinderella story and you have all your waitressing friends from New Jersey and your family, and you know, the turnpike, my father's co my father's uh had had retired at that point, but um Alan Steppenwall, who's a television um uh critic, uh had written an article about me, and my dad had sent him a letter thanking him because he didn't understand, like your daughter has some success. He was like, Thank you for mentioning my daughter. Anyway, the Turnpike was invested in this show. Like I New Jersey Turnpike had fans of this show, and I just felt like if I blow this up, I am doing a disservice to this kind of blessing I've been giving, you know, and uh I just gotta suck it up and kind of get through it and see what happens next. And um then it got canceled. But it's it's heartbreaking and it's also like it's hard to when you know you're right, but you're in a different kind of machine, and it's it's this this you know machine where you have to keep generating story and there's production and there's all these other things happening, and you can't stop to slow down and say, But you're you're making this character do things that this person wouldn't do, this person wouldn't speak like this. And the showrunner says, Well, I'm the showrunner, and I say this person does speak like this, and you're like, But it's me. The person that's speaking is me, and I would never say that. Um, so yeah, it was part.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

My my my my guess is Dan is gonna want to stay here a little bit longer, but I I want to I want to ask a question about that set in the future, but about this time period, because I don't know what recourse you had in that situation 20 years ago to to solve this problem of a showrunner taking away creative control, but and you were wondering about the things you could do, and one of the options was a nuclear option, which is blowing up the show, which is maybe an option you had, but clearly you don't want to do that. 20 years later, you know, as a longtime working writer now who has gone on many, many shows and seen many other showrunners do it, how would the Diane present handle the situation that the Diane in the past had to deal with?

SPEAKER_03 14:27

Well, I could say the middle person, Diane in the middle of that, blew it all up because I had it happen-ish again, the middle, and I was just like, I went like full on, like just burned every bridge. But now, if I was in that position, I think I wouldn't um I wouldn't let it happen. I wouldn't. I would be able to, I think I have enough experience now that I could be a little bit more articulate in explaining why it doesn't work. And you know, someone's always paying you to write if you're if you're doing a show, it's someone else's money, right? So you can't just do whatever you want if unless you're wildly successful. And so there is, you know, a bit of like answering notes and all of that comes into play. But as far as just huge things like changing what a character does, you know, like changing, completely changing a show for the second season, I just wouldn't do it, you know, and I would probably walk away. Um, but I also I don't, I can't imagine it would come to that because it's very easy to do that to someone that doesn't have any power. But if you have the power, if you're the showrunner and you're the show creator, um, you know, obviously everybody still has more, the people in charge still have more power than you do, but you you can you have the at least you have the microphone long enough to explain to them why they're what why what they want doesn't work and what you would do to try to answer their note without fully going all in, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 16:01

This is fascinating. Um weirdly, it's I don't think it's happened before. We after 97 episodes, this is a circumstance we've not yet had, you know, the sort of early success and quite how this uh sort of turned out going upside down in the way it did. I guess you know, you again cashly mentioned earlier that you know you're gonna go back to being a waitress. Um was there a time in this, even though obviously uh you know you said that walking away wasn't really an option because of the money. But once it the show was cancelled, was there a part of you that thought, you know what, this whole Hollywood thing's ridiculous, I can't go through this again. I think life's simpler if I just waitress, or did you think, right, I want to go and get another show and sort of make sure this doesn't happen again?

SPEAKER_03 16:44

Um, you know, it's really funny. I was just thinking about this the other day. It just it came to me. Um, I was, you know, I'm writing a pilot right now, and I was in that space that I think we get in where you, you know, you have a couple days where you're like, this is awesome. I love this, and I'm having a great time and I'm good at this. And then you get into the depths of despair and think, I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. This is the worst piece of crap, they're gonna fire me. Um, and I was just kind of having, I'm jumping ahead a little and I apologize, but I was having this kind of like, even though I've been doing this for so long, maybe I'm not good at it. And it blew my mind to think when I was waitressing in New Jersey, 29-year-old waitress, uh, like no money, not no, not educated, no contact. I mean, I wound up meeting that contact at the restaurant, but before that, there was nothing in the world to tell me that there was a reason for me to be successful, that I would have a television writing career or that I would have a movie writing career. There was nothing. What like there's no, I couldn't even see how it would happen, but I knew it was gonna happen. I 100% believed in myself. 100%. And there's no reason at all walking around, you know, like selling crab pasta, like just, you know, living my life. And there's nothing that said you are going to make your dream come true, but I 100% believed it. Believed in my ability, believed that I had talent, believed that I had something to say, believed that it would happen, and I saw it happening for myself. Now I am a professional writer. I've been doing it for 20 years, 21 years, nothing but opportunity. Meet all these people, people that want to work with me. And now I constantly second guess myself. Now I constantly wonder if I should be doing this. I feel like an imposter. When are people gonna find out that I'm not really who I say I am? When is it gonna, when am I gonna accept the fact that maybe I'm not good at this? And it's just so wrong and bizarre. And I don't understand it. Like I should not feel this way. And this it's crazy that I felt as positive as I did when I had no reason to. And so now I'm in a space at 52 and having done this for a really long time, where I'm trying to get back to that person and get rid of all that noise of people of other people's opinions and just put my head down and get back to what was real and what was inside that you wanted to kind of put out and get all that other shit out of my ears, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

It does make sense. And that's why you didn't go back to waitressing.

SPEAKER_03 19:25

Because yes, and that's what I'm so sorry. I'm gonna be a little bit of a I ramble a lot, but that's why I didn't go back at the time. I didn't go back to waitressing because I really believed in myself and I believed that they were wrong. I believed that the episodes that I did first prior to them bringing the new person on were considerably better than those other things, and that I was right and that I had something, I still had something to say, and I still had something to offer. And I also had this thing that I'm trying to get back now. And again, I have to curse, but I call it the fuck you. And what it is, it's that little thing inside of me that when you knock me down, I'm like, really? Well, fuck you, I'm gonna get back up. Like that's just who I am as a person. It's gotten a little over the years, it hasn't been as strong. But in the beginning, I had that in spades, and they, and I was like, okay, I'm not gonna go back to waitressing. This isn't gonna beat me, and I'm gonna do it. And I didn't work for I think over a year and was really starting to um like ran out of money. It was like, am I gonna have to sell my house? Um, I wasn't saying, oh, I'm going back to waitressing. I was thinking if I sell my house and get an apartment, how much money will I have to be able to write the next thing that I could sell? And then I got the job on Veronica Mars. But oh, funny enough, I didn't miss one thing. The the money that I had in between gigs and between that last season of That's Life and Veronica Mars, the showrunner that took over my show, that changed it and made me hate it, did another show and had me write an episode because we got along as people. Like I liked them as human beings, they were lovely people. Just creatively, we weren't in sync. And they just said, Could you come write an episode of this? And I was didn't want to, but I was desperate for cash. And I said, sure. So that little bit of money got me through when I had absolutely nothing. And and then I got, and then I went on Veronica Mars, which is a whole different story.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

So obviously, there's different ways of getting to where you sit today. There's a lot, obviously, very many different paths to getting there. Is there any part of you? I mean, I know it's your story, but is there a part of you that maybe wishes you'd not that you didn't have that instant success because it took you away from serving crab pasta? But uh is there a part of you that uh thinks maybe getting to where you've got the more traditional route, being in a writer's room, sort of going up and getting the slow promotions, where you sit now, that that would have been a better way of doing that. I think about that every day. You do.

SPEAKER_03 22:01

I do. Well, the number one thing I think about that still plagues me to this day is I wish I had an education. Um, I really do because it's it used to be something that uh I loved. Like I'd be in a writer's room with these guys from Yale and Stanford, and I'd be like, I graduated 292nd in the class of 295, and I'm two levels above you. You know what I mean? Like I used to love that shit. But now, but then it just when you have every assistant has to grammatically correct everything you write because you feel like half an idiot, and and there's just so much that people learned in coming up through the ranks that you didn't have to, um, but that you should know. And uh it really does bother me. And I wish I I don't, you know, I'm not one to look back and say, oh, I wish I did this different. Um I wish that I'm glad it happened the way it happens. I wish that maybe in between that's life and the next job, I would have um, I don't know, I would have tried to learn more. I would have been a bit braver in putting myself out there, but I didn't put myself out for staffing until I absolutely had to because I was too afraid. Um, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it. I was afraid I'd hand in a document full of misspellings and they'd be like, who's this, you know, barely high school graduate from New Jersey? You know, what is she doing? Um, so I I wish I would have paid more attention and learned more early on.

SPEAKER_02 23:32

It's just so super fascinating. And I'm I'm wondering, and this is I apologize in advance because it's not a failure rejection and adversity question. It's actually a success question. If I think if you sell a screenplay just one early on, there I'm not saying it's a fluke, but it happens to people. If you sell a pilot early on, it it happens to people, and then they have a hard time. But if you sell a screenplay into a pilot that gets made, it's the the odds of that happening are so low that it's not a fluke, and that somewhere in those two scripts is a Diane secret sauce that people were responding to. Do you what is that? Like, what do you think it was in those early scripts? I'm not saying you've lost it today, that is embedded in your own.

SPEAKER_03 24:19

Oh, I know you also I feel like there is the reason I don't regret not going the other way is because I didn't know any better. I didn't know to do the things that people wanted me to do, so I wasn't in my head about it. I wasn't saying I have to have an act out that's like this because that's what the studio is gonna want. I didn't know what the studio wanted. It didn't occur to me. You know what I mean? So I just was just writing from my own, uh just writing what I felt and writing what was appealing to me and didn't have all that noise. And then as soon as that noise came in, you start to kind of second guess yourself and start thinking about what everyone else likes versus what you like, what everyone else is going to think is interesting versus what you think is interesting. And in both the first things I write that wrote, pardon me, they were based on, in a way, based on my life, right? Um, the movie was uh a suicidal writer who couldn't uh had writer's block, and so she couldn't commit suicide because she couldn't write the note. And that I was at a very dark time in my life and was feeling that way. And I just um uh wrote through it, which is what the whole thing was about. And um, so it was just very honest. And you know, um Nora Efron bought it, and I remember being in, this is really uh talk about failing, um, being in her um beautiful apartment in that that famous New York building that I can't think of the name of, where John Lennon was killed. And um, she had little like she gave me a cup of tea, and she had these napkins that were personalized with her name and her husband Nick, and I stole one because I was like, Nora Everon's house, you know. Um, and I remember her, she she had Columbia buy the script for her, and she was having me rewrite it. And she said all the things that she liked about it, but she said, you know, but this character, she's so unlikable, she's just so whiny, and and she's talking everything that she said, get over this relationship. And I'm like, oh my God, like she's talking about me. She's essentially saying everything that she's saying about me, but she also gave me, she's like, I you have to read this book. And she gave me this book, Robert McGee's story, because she said I didn't know how to write structure. And I'm thinking, but okay, I mean, she was right, but it was also just funny that it had gotten to the point that I sold it and I was someone she liked it enough to have Columbia buy it. They paid me for it. I was meeting with her about writing it, but she was like, Here, you have to learn how to write. And um it's it was I was like, okay. Um, and so then you get in your head, uh luckily not enough in my head that I could still write the pilot, but you then do start to second guess things that never occurred to you before. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

I mean, and making me I mean, you talk about being outs, you know, outside of the machine, outside of the noise, and then you wrote these two things, and then you're you're the the if there are metaphorical Hollywood gates, they open up for you, Nora Efron, Columbia, you're inside, and now you're getting Robert McGee's story, which a million screenwriters have read, and you're getting you're getting noted by the studio, you know, who uh you know, the button the using terms that maybe you hadn't heard before, and you're you're you're being molded by the machine to become part of the machine. And I guess my question is sort of a philosophical one for you and for all of us in this does that make us better or does it make it us worse as we get as we become this cog, this writer cog that is part of the system?

SPEAKER_03 27:56

I think for some people it definitely makes them better, and I think it it depends on the the people. I think sometimes at the beginning it really got in my head a lot, you know, and especially because I was writing things in which I was making myself a main character. So when they were telling or making my parents main characters, so then when they're telling me this is wrong, you're telling me that I'm wrong, you're telling me that my dad's wrong. You're telling like it was so personal that it's it got really confusing. And it was helpful to then kind of remove myself from it and look at it more technically. But then sometimes when you look at it too technically, you're leaving all the magical stuff apart, you're like you're kind of separating it from the thing that you do well, you know? And so it's it's it was a struggle. It actually sometimes still is a struggle with that, with trying to um weed out the other voices and just kind of keep on track with what I think is authentic and good, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

So where where we sit today, would you describe yourself as good at taking notes?

SPEAKER_03 29:10

No, no, I would not. I should say yes. Um you know, I like the whole note behind the note thing. I I'm uh, you know, I'm just like, just tell me what you mean. Like, just tell me what you want. I don't want to like, I don't want to have four non-writing producers have to have a meeting with them after so they can tell me what you really mean because they worked for studios for so long, so they know. Just tell me that you don't want the character to sleep with the guy on the first date. Like don't say, I'm worried about how she seems to blow, like just say what you mean. Don't don't go around it, just say what you mean. But um, that bothers me, the note behind the note thing. But some I think I've been I've gotten them enough now that I I am a little bit better about it, but it's it's hard when you really don't agree or when you think it's just it shows that they don't get what you're trying to do in such a big way that it's kind of devastating, you know, when they when you've made kind of a big choice and this is the direction I'm going in with this character, and this is who she is, and they give you a note that they think is a little note that is really just so contrary to the character that it becomes you're like, wow, they don't get this at all. They say they love it, but they don't understand it at all.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

When you're giving notes to people, yes, so when you're in a room and you know you're in charge and someone writes something, you give notes. Are you how do you give notes? Are you good at giving notes?

SPEAKER_03 30:41

I think I am because I especially well no, actually, usually I'm kind of like the room mom in a way, and especially if I like you, and you know, I've been lucky enough to work with a lot of people that I like, and you want people to succeed and you want them to not feel like you feel when people give you horrible notes, you know. And sometimes if you're super busy and you know, the note might seem a little a little curt because you're doing it quickly, but for the most part, I feel like I'm pretty good about it. You know, um, you know, I worked with Rob Thomas for so long, and one of the things that I learned from him that's really great is you know, teaching your staff to write the way you want them to write. So more like you if you're trying to have them have your voice, right? And so what we always did on Veronica Mars and we did it on IZombie is when someone, you know, hands in their first draft, if it's someone that we haven't worked with before, we give really, really, really extensive notes, super extensive notes, and then meet with them and walk through the notes with them so that they so it's not just this person who hasn't written for us before getting these notes and feeling overwhelmed. I mean, sometimes I would even sit with them before the notes came, or I'd sit with them with the notes before we went into Rob, you know, like just to kind of make sure that they understood everything and that everything's cool and this is how it goes. But really trying to explain to them here's what you did and here's what would work better for us, so that they really have all the information. Then they go out and do a rewrite, and then hopefully it comes back closer. But it's that idea of you doing you giving you a good note that helps you learn how to write the show better helps everyone. Because then it makes it easier on us, it makes it easier for the room, like having another person who can do the job just makes things easier. So you want them to succeed, and you can't just expect them uh to do it without really uh uh showing them and and respectfully explaining what wasn't working.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

Yeah. So uh I guess another question for me about where we are now in terms of now you're a leader. What is your leadership style? Because you said obviously earlier on that you know, the first time you were in charge, they sort of hid things from you and you weren't actually running things because they wanted to keep you away from that. But now you've obviously been through the cycle a bit more and you've worked in rooms. What how would you describe your leadership style?

SPEAKER_03 33:12

Um, I'm still kind of learning my my leadership style. I will say um I will say that I really want everyone to succeed and I don't want to um it's hard because you do like it is an unpopular position in many ways because you have to break people's hearts when you're giving notes or when you're not doing you're not accepting a pitch that they have. Um I will say, if you don't mind, the the in-between, um I think is kind of important, which is, you know, I haven't run a show in uh a bit. Um, you know, uh I did the last show I was on, I did uh iZombie with Rob. I co-created it, but Rob um ran it. And um I did this show called The X List in between Veronica Mars and and iZombie. And that was a show that I I ran. And um I could tell you why I failed really bad at that and the mistake I made at that, because I think that might be more helpful in talking about failure. Is that um I had done, you know, I had my own show, and then I went from having you know my own show that I didn't run and all that entailed with that to working on Veronica Mars with Rob, who is the best showrunner. He's, you know, if if he should teach a showrunning class, he's a fantastic showrunner. He has both sides of the brains, you know, the creative side and the business side. So he could he could do it all, but he's just a great showrunner. But I worked for him um, you know, for three years, and I just really wanted to break out and do my own thing and really felt, even though he was very generous to me and doing Veronica Mars was amazing for my career, and I got a lot of um attention from it. I wanted to kind of get out of his shadow. I felt like I was in his shadow a little bit and wanted to kind of break free. And then when I got my own show, I was so desperate for attention. I mean, I was not attention, I should say. I was desperate to be the one in charge because I hadn't been in charge yet. I had my own show that I created that I wasn't in charge of and it went ways that I didn't want to. I went on Veronica Mars and was like the good soldier and did, you know, what the showrunner wanted, but didn't get to do everything that I wanted because it wasn't my show, obviously. So I was so concerned about it being mine that I held too tightly and made a lot of mistakes. Um, the dumbest mistake I made was there were several writers that I met that I liked very much, female writers that I thought wrote very similar to me. And stupidly, instead of saying, Oh, you write similar to me, let's have you come on to make everything easier. I thought, well, I've already got that. I need the people that have what I don't have. And I just, which is the stupidest mistake you can make as a showrunner. And I made a lot of um mistakes and also did get screwed over a bit. But um, I noticed what one of the mistakes I was making is I was so worried about people, the staff being happy that I wasn't as firm as I think I should be.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

Thank you for that. We we we have had a number of people on lately who talk about how how hard it is to be a showrunner and that it feels like and and there's definitely showrunners who do it as a one-person job, but more and more of the people that come on our show are taking it on as a two-person job. And in fact, in the show that I'm on now, they do it as a three-person job, or there's three showrunners that are on this because it really is too much work. Do you find you think emotionally, if you had a co-showrunner that's that you you could have shared some of this burden with, it might have gone a little bit easier?

SPEAKER_03 36:57

That would have been amazing. And you know, that situation on the X List was very specific in that I um, you know, and I don't want to go too far into it, but um, I I did actively get kind of screwed over and um then kind of was forced into hiring someone, and um it wasn't a a good situation. And I think if I would have had a co-show runner on that show, or someone who was supportive and wanted me to succeed or wanting us to succeed together instead of someone that's like, I'm gonna get this chick out of here so I can have her job, um, things would have been better. Um, and I would, you know, I think that it's a hard, it's I like being a number two. And I think if you're a good number two, it's kind of like the sweetest gig to have because you, you know, it's just you don't have all the pressure, but you have some of the power and it's it's kind of amazing. And if you could find that person that you connect with that's either a powerful number two or a co-showrunner, I think it just makes everything so much smoother. And it's just such a big job, especially if the business part of it is not your thing, and the creative part is having that other person that's better at the things you're not good at is amazing.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

I think I've said this a couple of times, but the number two and the numbery spot on a TV show, in my opinion, are the two best jobs on the planet. Maybe even so the number three, because number two still has room pressure. Number three is just a good writer, power, authority, but doesn't have the same kind of weight on them as the one and the two.

SPEAKER_03 38:35

Yeah, but that wasn't a for a while. I was just uh Rob, we would just call me the the writer monkey because I was just always writing, you know, I'd be in the room or just you know, writing, polishing, doing comedy punch-ups, like what just always on script, always. And it's great. That's what you want to do, right? You don't want to be doing production meetings every five minutes. You know, it's all the stuff that I don't like is the stuff. That's when they like now what happens a lot is I get um um offers to um show run a show that a you know a baby writer um has you know written the pilot, but they don't know what's happening going forward, and they they want someone more experienced to come on and kind of guide them. And I think, well, that's just all the stuff I don't want to do. You know, like that's all the stuff I don't like as much. And um, I in order to do that, I would have to be so in love with the project and so in love with the other writer that I would be willing to do that. And it has happened that I almost did it once because I did love the project and did love the writer. But for the most part, it's not the funds you want to write. That's what we're writers, you know, that's what we want to do.

SPEAKER_02 39:44

I I do think there are some people out there who actually like the business side. That's a very uh unusual, atypical brain for what we do. Uh I I gotta say, Diane, I mean, I mean, this has been an amazing chat. I I got a perfect kind of guest who was willing to get into the weeds with some of this stuff and talk about, you know, from a raw, authentic place about how challenging some of this journey can be. But unfortunately, uh, as with all podcasts, we've we've hit our, you know, we we've come to our last question. We've run out of time. But this is a question that we ask everybody that comes on our show. And it's if you could give one piece of advice to an aspiring screenwriter or TV writer, what would it be?

SPEAKER_03 40:23

Um I should um be really prepared for that. Um I don't know. You know, I was thinking about this because we're thinking about the um the word failure because you guys talk about failure, right? And I just think it's so kind of destructive in and to have that in your head all the time that you're worried about failing and as artists, and we get into it and it's a business, and we think about the business aspect of it, but none of us we all started off just wanting to be creative, right? We didn't start off wanting the business end of it, we wanted the creative part of it. And I think like if we were if we were painters and we we painted a picture that we loved, it was beautiful, and someone else loved it and thought it was beautiful, or they commissioned it, they paid us to write it, and someone bought it, and they didn't hang it on their wall. Would we be a failure? Would we still be a painter? Do you know what I mean? We write these pilots and they don't get made and suddenly we're failures. I'm not a failure. I wrote a pilot and someone paid me a couple hundred thousand dollars to write it. Not a failure. Yes, I failed at the thing that I wanted, which was getting it on the air, but I'm not a failure. I I created something, didn't work for other people. It doesn't mean it's not good. And I think what my advice to other writers, you have such great advice that I've I've heard on this show that other people have said that is kind of strategizing and more geared towards having a professional career. I would say that my advice is don't forget that you're don't forget what brought you to this. Don't forget your creative soul, don't forget your voice and what you can do that no one else can do. And when the noise gets really loud, just get back to that, get back to you, get back to your thing, because that's the thing that no one can kind of take away. And I really believe that that's the thing that makes that propels people forward. You go off, you do your own thing, and that's the thing that reinvents you, that's the thing that empowers you, not I'm gonna write the next Ted Lasso. You're not. Write the next you and then and hopefully it can become the next Ted Lasso, but get back to you as an artist and not to sound precious about it, but it's the truth. You know, we are we're creative, we're artists, and I think getting back to that is important. So I'm sorry, I feel like I've exhausted you. You look completely exhausted from me when I'm looking at that.

SPEAKER_00 42:48

This is brilliant. Um when we set out doing this podcast, we we knew what we thought we wanted interviews to be like. And uh this is a compliment. Uh you have answered all of our questions uh spectacularly with honesty and candor, but also frankly, you've answered some questions we didn't actually ask as well, which is rather helpful for us. Um but again, in a in a good way. This has been a brief interview. In some ways, we could have we could maybe adapt this and just let you come on and we should give people time to talk about all the things that because you've you're giving us what we wanted, plus you know what other listeners will want to because that was uh I'm I've got it. I'm just sitting back and listening. No, I'll have to ask my question because you're just giving some incredible insights and answers and talking very personally about you know your journey and your successes. So this is um this will go down in history um as one of the most extraordinary episodes we've done. And thank you very much for being part of our show.

SPEAKER_03 43:51

I'm so happy to be here. I've been bugging Noah about coming on for a long time.

SPEAKER_02 43:56

So I I've been wanting her for a long time. I'm glad we finally made it out with us.

SPEAKER_03 44:02

Um, thanks so much, guys. I really appreciate it. And I love I love the show, and I'm happy for you guys.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

Thank you, well that's a wrap on this episode of Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss. As always, this episode was brought to you by Scriptation, screen writing, and annotation software that at the very least has made my life easier and will make your life easier as well. Uh, we'd like to thank our wives who put up with us recording these episodes in our offices and basements and closets and bathrooms and anywhere we get a little space to record an interview. And of course, we want to thank James Line who provided us with great intro and outro music.

SPEAKER_00 44:49

If you want to find us on social media, you can find our at NFL on Twitter, tweeting a variety of writer-based nonsense and uh some terrible puzzles and occasionally begging for sponsorship. Uh if you want a more refined tweet, mostly about football and whiskey, you can find me at Dan Rotstein. Or if you're interested in buying a copy of Scriptation, go to www.scriptator.com backslash stiff, S-I-T-H-A, you'll receive a special discount. Thank you very much for listening. As always, we appreciate you. Uh please give us any feedback, mostly positive stuff about me, and we will see you next week.

SPEAKER_02 45:35

And if you do say a negative thing about the handle, hit the channel by your screen copy.