Take 45 - Writer and Showrunner Sam Ernst, Haven, Carnival Row, Daredevil

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with projects that we're all gonna go for sure.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

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

SPEAKER_03 0:59

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Adventure podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. As ever, uh in my surround upon my wife's dresses in the only place in the house I can record a podcast in the evening. I am your non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rotstein, and in a room that looks like a writer's room but is just his study, we have no origin.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Hey, Dan, and I'd like to say that I know Dan well enough to say that those are not his wife's dresses, but in fact that his own closet full of very beautiful dresses behind him. I also want to say it's my honor and privilege to introduce TV writer, showrunner, and show creator Sam Ernst to the podcast today. Sam has worked on such shows as Daredevil, Carnival Row, Hand of God, The Dead Zone, and Haven, which he co-created with Jim Dunn. Sam also jumped on the podcast bandwagon years before almost anyone else, including us, with a terrific show called Sam and Jim Go to Hollywood. Welcome, Sam.

SPEAKER_03 1:55

Hello, good to be here. So you're not our first guest who had a career before entering the world of entertainment. So do you see yourself as a failed restaurant entrepreneur? Or do you see yourself as a successful writer, or are you a successful restaurant entrepreneur?

SPEAKER_04 2:21

You know, the restaurant thing is pretty much the photo negative of the writing career, which is to say we opened the restaurants, Jim Dunn and I, Jim's my writing partner, and we were freshman roommates at uh McAllister College, a small college in St. Paul, Minnesota. And I was the big city, New York City Jew, and he was the small town Catholic boy. And we completely sounds like the beginning of a romance, which you know, we've been married now for a long time, longer than our wives, certainly. Uh, but we uh we opened the restaurants right out of college, and we were we were a hit. Our first restaurant was a hit three weeks in, and we went from uh, you know, 10 people in the place to lines around the block, three hour waits. We eventually opened a second restaurant in Minneapolis called Table of Contents, and it had we had bars uh and we had catering, all of that. So it was just from zero to a hundred employees just in a few years, and and then it was uh and it was a huge success. Where and then finally one day I said to Jim, you know, we we started these restaurants primarily because we were so young and we wanted to write and we wanted to meet people and have characters to write about. And that was an insane idea that let's try this incredibly failure, uh high and high failure rate business of restaurants so that we could get into this higher rate of failure business of TV writing. And uh, but the first one worked right away. And I five years in, I we were sitting at the bar drinking Vov Clico on New Year's Eve. True story, and I said, tomorrow, 10 a.m., my house, um, let's start writing. And I lived in this beautiful place in the top of what was practically a castle in Minneapolis, and we met in the turret and we started writing a movie, and uh and that was the beginning. And fast forward a few years, we moved at the height of it um and moved to LA to become assistants, and then we did the opposite, which was it took years of making no money, the struggle that everybody had. September 11th happened in the middle of this and destroyed the restaurants, which was our income stream. They went out of business. I was holding my baby on my front lawn of my house when I was served with papers from the uh for a million-dollar lawsuit because of the leases for the restaurants, no job, no prospects, just the total shits. And and uh and then of course we came up from there eventually. Of course, when we got onto dead zone first and we sold some pilots and and eventually onto our first success, which was probably Haven. So they're kind of like there's a value between them, let's just put it that way.

SPEAKER_03 5:04

An amazing answer to the first question. You've sort of covered a lot of what we covered just in one. So actually, I think this is interesting because I know we've had other people who've walked away from things that were going well. So even though you set up the restaurants just uh interestingly, sort of create life experiences so you'll be better writers, presumably you knew enough about the way Hollywood works that you knew it would be tough. So given that you seem to have become the richest people in the Midwest quite young, was there a part of you that's like, yeah, so you know what? Let's just keep doing this because we're on to a good thing and we don't want to give up all of this for sort of starting at the bottom, albeit of a more interesting career.

SPEAKER_04 5:48

Well, I don't think we were that smart. I think, Dan, that you are implying some sort of intelligence and maturity. And I don't think you can have both of those things and become try to become Hollywood writers. Um, and we were in our 20s and we were in that immortal, invincible stage. And you know, we we didn't know anything about restaurants, and we jumped into that and it worked. So what the hell? We should be able to jump into this TV writer thing, and we'll make that work too. And we came out in I think 99, 2000, and uh, and then right about that time, it was all survivor, reality TV, cable dramas hadn't really started yet, and it was just uh, you know, people who had had jobs for years couldn't get jobs, and it was a really, really tough time. Um, so I I you know, whatever luck we had, and by luck I mean stupidity, bravery, um, insanity, we spent, we used it up on the restaurants, and and we weren't rich, we were just making a living, which you know, at 24 or 25 years old, I, you know, I was the boss, and all my friends were starting, you know, starting out in jobs and running around town for their bosses. And so it was this real disconnect. And I had 100 employees, and a lot of them, most of them were older than us, and uh, and it was crazy. And then we came down here and we were assistants, and I was literally on the phone with the restaurants back in in Minneapolis and St. Paul while I was scooping out my TV writer boss's kitty litter for her because she was out of town, and it was this weird disconnect in Miley in our lives. But you know, I had my, you know, Jim and I do not let the other one get proud, confident. You know, all the good things best friends do. We keep each other more than humble. At least we think so.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Your your story is crazy to me because before I moved to Hollywood, I don't even know if Dan knows all of these details. I talk about being a DJ, but my wife and I, and first myself, we had an event company, a production company, and we had 130 employees at our peak. And we ran, we did something like 400 shows a year. And we uh Hawaiian music, DJed music, entertainment, live music, and then we gave it all up to go to Hollywood, and I was an intern and I was getting paid nothing. Right. And I was buying Muralax and anti-dear diarrhea medicine from my bottle. I mean, literally, and you're like, but this is my question to you, because this is the question I'm I would sometimes ask myself, but the dream was so strong that, like, why didn't you go back? I didn't go back, but but like, what is it about staying here that was so appealing?

SPEAKER_04 8:25

Well, I think first of all, we would have to admit that we'd wasted years of writing for nothing. I think eventually you're just like, my investment is so deep. But also, we uh every you just have those small successes and they're just like small hits off the crack, the writing crack pipe. And you can just you can feel it. You know, we'd sell a script for a few thousand bucks, a feature script. And then, you know, we went our first script, I think we sold for 3,000 bucks. And the next one was maybe five or ten thousand, and you just just enough money and just enough people talking about it. We had a reading, I remember, of one script, and you got to hear that first time when everyone sang your lines out loud. And I just remember coming to that thing, I couldn't sleep. It was the most incredible thing ever, and it was such a better high, even than you know, being on the floor of the restaurants and it's a packed Saturday night and everything's working and and everything's beautiful. That was maybe an eight, but that that writing, I'm sorry, that reading of our script in some little house in Santa Monica that that first year or two that we landed was was just worth the price of admission right there. It was so beautiful. And and I just want to say part of that, and I knew this at the time, was the chefs in our restaurants, they were the creatives, and we were kind of the suits. And even though we work with them, design menus, all that stuff, we were the suits. And I didn't want to be the suit, I wanted to be the creative, and and I think that had a lot to do with it.

SPEAKER_03 9:56

Fascinating. I mean, obviously, nonlinear careers are definitely the uh way America tends to work, but this is a fantastic one that you've gone in all these different directions. So let's just go back to that moment. You're as you said, you're sitting outside your house, um, your restaurants are now disappearing, and you're getting yourself into some legal difficulty. Your writing career at that stage hasn't yet really taken off. So, what what does that look like? How are you feeling and how do you move forward from there?

SPEAKER_04 10:31

Well, what that feels like is uh three fingers of Bush Mills every time, uh right before dinner, and then during dinner another three fingers of Bush Mills Irish whiskey. And um, there's something about holding your baby when you know you can't feed the baby that is really powerful, you know. And uh and you know, I I it I I I can't describe it, except I I feel like a lot of people who probably listen to this podcast have had those moments. And uh we were barring against the house, you know, which you know was the peak of the house time, and I and I was doing my best, but you know, it was so bad. And yes, and at one point I was like, should I quit this career? I got a job for a little while, and uh I got a job with a friend of mine, and over pretty quickly I was the CFO of some small design firm that still exists. And and I when he started, he said, Would you come do this? And I said, I can't. I'm a writer, I don't want to do it. I've I've run businesses before. And then he offered me a real paycheck, and I told my wife, and she said, Well, I think you're gonna take that job. And I did. And meanwhile, I said to Jim, Jim, because he's my my you know, my oldest and best friend, and he says to me, you know, uh, you got to do it, man. You gotta feed the family. And uh, and so I did it. I did it part-time, and then we got offered a job, we got our first staff job on Dead Zone, and uh, and but it was a staff writer job, and we had to split a staff writer check, and we couldn't, I couldn't pay the rent on that. Um, and it I could, but I it was for 20 weeks. And how do you do that when I have so I give up my job? And so I kept, I we called the show and we said we can't take the job, even though I didn't tell anybody that I had this other side job uh part-time because I didn't want anybody to know that I was giving up in any way on the career. My agent didn't know, nobody knew. It was my secret thing, and I was paying the rent and it was beautiful. And and we turned down our first staff job, and then the showrunner luckily called us and said, All right, I'll tell you what, you don't both have to be in the room at the same time. And so I Jim went almost all the time and I came in and out, and nobody ever wondered where the hell I was those other days, and I just made it work, and then I was in this company that went from eight employees working out of a house to 40 in a nice space. It's now gone on in the years, in the decade or more in the more than that year's, it's gone on to much bigger. And I was in a meeting and I got a text from Jim that sci-fi wanted to buy Haven. And I had to walk into my boss's office and say, Hey, you know I'm a TV writer on the side. Well, I now have a career and I gotta go. And he was shocked because he was sure, and rightfully so, that the chances of me ever getting a career were were slim to know. And uh, and then everything changed.

SPEAKER_03 13:31

Of all the sort of secret pastimes somebody might have in Hollywood, being the CFO for a design firm doesn't feel sort of quite as sexy or as exciting as you know, know being a drug dealer or something on the side. But I guess you know, you've got to have a secret. That's your secret.

SPEAKER_04 13:51

Whatever pays the rent, man, then do what you gotta do.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

Now that everyone and now now that the secret's out. But I I I have a question that I've never asked anybody, but it it's again another parallel in my life where there was years where before most of us make it, right? We were here and we're struggling and we we sort of have limited successes, little sales, 2,000, 3,000. But I I had a real strong realization, and I have kids too, that I had to pay for and whatever, that uh I needed to get better. Like I just needed to be better. I wasn't good enough. I was good, but I wasn't where I needed to be, and I had to get there. And that that had to be a really painful examination of my own process. You have a partner in those years. Was there a moment where it's like we're here and we need to get there? How did you guys move yourself up that hill?

SPEAKER_04 14:40

Well, I I tell you, it was hard at the beginning because when we were in you know St. Paul, Minnesota, and you know, this was the late 90s, and we we didn't have, and we were writing in Jim's attic, my attic, and we didn't have Zoom. You know, you we had internet classes you could take and that kind of thing, but that the it just the knowledge base wasn't there. And and Dan, I know you're gonna ask me like what was the real low in your career at some point, and you're gonna hammer on it till I weep a little bit, but I'll I'll beat you to it because to answer Noah's question, which is we finally got when off of that meeting when I I got found out that Haven was picked up by sci-fi, and I quit my job and I started up and I came out to everybody that I'd had this gig and and then we jumped into it. I just said to Jim, what we which has only been our second. We'd written features that we'd sold, we'd written pilots that we'd sold to that point, but this is the only our second room. And I said, the thing that's driving me crazy and Jim too is we don't know what we don't know. And you know, we didn't, we we'd never been on set before. First time I was ever on set, it was my show. You know, we'd never been on uh we never I didn't know all the different pages, the colored pages, you know. That that you know, I didn't know if it was the blues, the pinks, the double, goldenrods. I mean, I didn't really know. And we we didn't have the craft, and we didn't know we we knew how to do it. I think we had the spark because we created characters that went and went uh you know six years, six seasons. And it was really, you know, it was a success in many ways. And I remember uh, but I remember driving with Jim to the writer's room one day, and I was like, how do we figure out who to trust? Not trust in terms of who's going to um screw us or not screw us, because we weren't dealing with duplicitous people. It was who's right, you know, who knows their shit. And because we don't know what we don't know. And now looking back on it, and you know, we've been on you know a lot of shows now, and um, of lots of different flavors and scope. Haven was, you know, a few million bucks. And then the last show we were just EPs on uh Carnival Row, and that's one of the biggest shows budget-wise on TV. It's the same issues, it doesn't make a difference. Hell, it's easier on it on a $15 million show. And I don't know exactly what the budget on Carnival Row is, but it's up there. It's easier because you can solve a problem with money. But when you were when you just have a few million bucks, you got to solve it with craft. And we did not have the language. We had like twins speak, our own little us in my garage speak, but how did we get that out? How do we translate that to other people so they could help us? And it it was maddening. I mean, it was very, very frustrating, um, and the hardest part.

SPEAKER_03 17:36

So I guess the obvious question is how did you solve that problem? And how did you work out who to trust?

SPEAKER_04 17:44

Well, you know, in in some ways we didn't work it out. Um we learned, we definitely learned on the fly. Um, but the thing is, so Jim and I do this this podcast now, and it's about craft, right? And that's all we talk about is craft. We we create this writer's room and we have people call in and we help break their stories. Because what I found out, and uh in between this, I you know, a few years ago, I started teaching occasional writing uh classes. And what I realized was I was telling people exactly what they need to know. They, you know, what does the character want? Let's try to get something exciting around here, let's do the things, all the stuff that I learned hard one. And we had taken classes at UCLA when we moved out here, and they were by two classes. One was a bitter retired writer who basically said to everyone, Why are you in this room? Go write, which is not what I needed to hear. And then another one who was introducing us to showrunners and they would come speak, but I wasn't learning the craft. And and I just I we couldn't figure get the right mix. So I thought, let's teach everybody the craft, let's do that, what we've learned. Everybody's got a different approach. And I realized is I can stare them in the face and tell them what they need to know. And the only way you can do it, and no, you know, this is you got to sit there and write shit for you know, like five years or whatever it is, and you just got to get incrementally better, and there's no shortcut. And ideally, you start out as a staff writer, and I remember being a staff writer on the dead zone and watching someone gave us great advice, which is don't say anything for the first couple of weeks. So we said almost nothing, and I just sat there and watched the senior writers and listened to them, and they were so fast, and they they saw round corners and they had this shortcuts, they talked to each other, and I just sat there and tried to absorb it and I was in awe of it. And I ended up working with those guys on other shows, but I was just so amazed at what they could do. And now I'm in a writer's room and I see the junior writers, they have a similar experience where they're they're listening to the senior writers who are just bouncing stuff really fast, and I know they're worried they're not keeping up or they're not contributing what they want, what they can, what maybe their talent is, but they don't have the language for it. And I always try to go out of my way to like pull them aside later and say, just so you know, there is if you were able to keep up with what we're doing, you would be a prodigy, right? Um, you and and because it's it just takes time. And that time where Jim and I could have sat in that office and written scripts for a hundred years, and we would never have gotten to where we needed to get to that we did sitting there with eight writers and listening and learning from them and bouncing it off. And ultimately that's what worked.

SPEAKER_03 20:34

Given that you, as you said, you didn't quite know what you were doing at the beginning, but you were entrusted with uh what seems like uh relatively large amounts of responsibility and budget. Is it a miracle that you didn't uh we tend not to swear here, but fuck it all up and sort of end your career the first time around? Do you look back and think, how did we manage not to sort of inadvertently end our careers because you didn't know enough to be where you were? Ah, well, here comes the pathos.

SPEAKER_04 21:08

So um the uh the the short answer is we kind of did fuck it up in that we weren't writing what we and by the way, we only had three writers on the first season of Haven. We had a couple freelance scripts, but Jim and I basically wrote 10 out of 13 uh that first year. So we went from you know where we were to writing 10, I think we're credited on seven or eight of the first season, and we wrote or completely rewrote 10 or 11 out of the first season. And um, and it was nuts. I mean, I was just writing as fast as I possibly could. And but uh and we got picked up for a second season off of that, and our ratings were good. But we were in a crazy situation, we sold it to Canadian television first, then foreign television came. On and then sci-fi came on last. And what we were told is basically that sci-fi didn't matter as much because they came on last. So it was really everybody had a voice, all those different networks. And because everybody had a voice, nobody had a voice. So it was pretty much just going to be our voice. This is not true, and I don't know that that ever happens because somebody forgot to tell sci-fi, who this is several regimes ago, that they were not the boss. So they started acting like the boss. And all those people that said, hey, don't worry, sci-fi is not the boss. They didn't call up sci-fi and say, hey, dude, you're not the boss. So every time we would sit down with scripts to rewrite a script, I would have a stack of notes from sci-fi stacked from the studio, stacked from Canadian television, stacked from foreign television, every other country represented by one group. So there'd be stacks of notes. And I'm trying to write all this stuff and keep a voice, satisfy everybody. And eventually I just learned that you just read them all, put them down, don't read them anymore, and just write it. And then hope that nobody notices that you know didn't remember this or didn't remember that. And at the same time as we were doing this, sci-fi was becoming less and less enamored with us. And because we were not satisfying them because we were trying to satisfy too many people, oh, and also our vision for what the show could be. And we it was it was just madness, and yet we got picked up, and we got picked up and we were doing well, and we end up going to comic. So on the one hand, we're going to Comic-Cons, and there's lines of people who want to, for some reason, talk to us as much as they want to talk to the stars. That's surreal. But sci-fi fans are very, you know, committed. And then they like the writers. And so we're talking to them. And then we go back to the job, and our stock is going down, down, down. Every to the point where we finally, in the third season, wrote one of our favorite episodes. And you know, our producers are like, This is finally, this is the best that this show has gotten. And the studio felt that way, and the other writers felt that way. And everybody's very happy. We sent it to sci-fi, and the script was great, except it had a problem. It said on the front, written by Sam Ernst and Jim Dunn. And that's when the call from the network came. Um, and it was to I was not the show, we were not the showrunners. It's only our third F season of television fourth. And the showrunners, you know, basically took a call and came to us and said, All right, we have to do some work here. They're not happy. And so we came, we listened to their notes, we did their notes, but they thought that he had done the notes. And so then they called us and they raved about the script because, oh my God, this guy, Matt, had completely saved the script. And of course, we had done the writing. And so our names were mud. And another showrunner who I don't want to name, he said that worked on a different sci-fi show, told me that he used to take the writers' names off the scripts when they went into the studio, the network, because he didn't want them to know because they would hold grudges, and you would get you would get credit or blame, and you might not deserve either. And we all know that a lot of scripts go in and they have one or two names on them, but they should have five. Um, and so we knew our names were were mud, and we were just we kind of got beat down. And so after season three, we stayed on as consultants. We actually wrote a bunch of episodes, but we moved on because we were getting tired of being beat up. And we went to another show called Crisis that uh uh Rand Ravage created and ran. And we were in the room, and it was our first room after having our own show, and we were so demoralized and so kind of unsteady about because we've been beat up so much for some stretch of time, and then by you know, only one person really, the network president, maybe his number two on sci-fi at the time, who just didn't think we were very good writers. And after we were on this show for a few weeks, Rand pulled us aside and he said, I don't know why you guys are partners, because you're both really good writers, you work independently, and uh and I and he said, and then he said he went on to say a very a stream of very nice things. And Rand Ravage, if you don't know, super smart guy, excellent writer, and no very low bullshit, and uh and definitely not a guy who's gonna pump you up if you if he doesn't think you deserve it. And I I I remember getting emotional about it on the way home, you know, like really kind of choking up a little bit because it was re it was the redemption. And I had to leave my own show and go work on somebody else's show to get that redemption, and it it was nuts. And I remember the song I was listening to, I know where I was. I was coming into downtown on my way up to uh Pasadena, and ice break, and it it changed everything for me. And from that point on, Jim and I, when we're on a show, we don't really write together. We write together when we're developing and we'll work whenever. But I we like being together, but we also like doing our own thing. And from that point on, we did that, and it's it changed everything for me. So it was weird. My biggest success was being a consulting producer on Rand's show, not being an executive producer on my own show. To me, that was the moment.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

That's a that's a hell of a story, and there's a lot of points in there that I was you know stopping to think about. And you know, I've worked for some really big showrunners, good people, not so good people, whatever. But the thing that they had in common was they had an internal due north. They knew what they wanted and they knew what they thought was good, and they were willing to fight for it. Now, they normally had the clout to fight for it in a way that most of us do not on our first show or for a mid-level person. But this is going back to your quest, your very first opening of all of this, which is like, who do you trust? You and Jim asking each other, who do we trust? Is the answer you trust yourself? Like what did you get out of that question? And and how did it become a sort of a transformative experience for you to because it sounds like what you learned not to trust was all of these different notes coming at you, and it was destabilizing you, right? You you you stopped trusting yourself, and that hurt your process.

SPEAKER_04 28:25

It it is, it's true. We did stop trusting ourselves. We started fighting in the middle of this a little bit. Jim and I are you know, we're two guys that met in a dorm room in Minnesota where it was 20 below, and it was me and Jim and a and a bong, and you know, watching Star Trek repeats on a nine-inch television that he brought from home. And so it was we we go way back, and we really never fought once when we had restaurants. And then when we get into writing, that's when we get grumpy with events. But during during Haven is when things started to fracture just a little bit. And we we had our big we we have as a partnership what we call these spit valve talks, where you know you clear out the trumpet of all the saliva that's been built up, and we we would have these spit valve talks, and we had a really good one. I think what happened was uh through all of this, uh, nobody works harder uh than a guy who owns a restaurant, a man or woman that owns a restaurant. Nobody, you know, and and nobody works harder than someone who owns their own business. So, yes, you know, television people work hard, showrunner people work really hard, everybody works hard. I mean, executives work hard. It's a it's a crazy business, a lot of work. But when we're sitting there in Carnival Road, just just this last season, when we're sitting there and we owe two scripts in three weeks, and we are working seven days, and you know, we're in the right, we started in the rosary room at nine or ten, and now it's nine or ten at night, and they're bringing in more food. Um, I am not plunging a toilet while I have a three-hour wait in the front. And the reason I'm plunging the toilet is because as the owner, I'm the most useless person there. I can't afford the dishwasher, one of the three dishwashers to come out and do it. So I'm like, nobody do it, everybody keep working, I'll do it. And we all have those moments from previous lives or when you're working on something. So when the shit really does fly in television, I'm just like, look, we're writing stories, man. It'll all work. We're just gonna work harder and we're gonna work longer. And I think that helps. It's sort of the sort of old world, we're just gonna do it, just keep doing. And in the restaurant business, I could never reveal to any of my staff that everything was going to shit because you couldn't, you wouldn't, you don't want to demoralize them. So if I hear a showrunner or someone complaining to their staff, I'm like, dude, this is management 101. You never show fear. You can't, you know, you can say, This sucks. Let's all acknowledge our feelings here, but now we got work to do. And um, and I think the best show owners do that, and the ones that I've worked for are overwhelmingly like that. Um, so I don't know. I I a lot of times I'll look at Jim. If I can make Jim laugh or make him go, oh shit, that's really my goal, you know, in that moment. And if he goes, Oh shit, really? I'm like, okay, all right, that idea may not work, but it doesn't suck, you know, and then I'm okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

Well, that leads me right into my next question, which I want to drill down on even more, because it has to be more than about making Jim laugh laugh. And my question is is I mean, you're sharing all these hard times as what the podcast is about, right? And obviously you've had some pies too, and that's the things that we don't go into on this podcast. But you had this little empire, restaurant empire. You you switched, you switched gears, you became a TV writer, you became a success, successful TV writer, but there's been challenges, hard challenges, gut, gut-wrenching challenges. Why do you do this? Why do we do this? Like what is it about this job that keeps you in it when you could cut bait, go back to Minnesota or New York and start a restaurant, do something else.

SPEAKER_04 32:01

You know, I think I think the thing that I'm attracted to, and I suspect this is true for a lot of writers, is there's a certain pride that I get with the skill that set that I have that some set of people, some number of thousands of people can do, or I don't know how many TV writers there are, but that I can sit there with a blank page and I can I can write a story that you're gonna want to listen to. And it's all me. Or it's all me and Jim. And I can never, he'll laugh, he'll he'd laugh if you heard he says, because I never remember who pitched something, almost never. Um and uh and so I value that more than anything else. And that's why we drive, that's why when the sh my chef, you know, any of the chefs in the restaurant, they are, you know, they were the ones taking the plates, the blank plates, and they were making something, and I was bringing it to the table. And other people were like, that's amazing. And I would be very proud of the chefs, and I'd be proud of the restaurant and all we did. And in truth, I probably undervalued what we were doing because we were Jim and I were making everything happen, but we weren't filling the blank plate, we weren't doing that, and that was unbelievably cool and very special to us now. So that the blank plate, the blank page to me, it's the same. It's the goal that we started out with. If I'd known the price was going to be as high, I maybe, maybe I would have taken a step back, but I don't think so because you know, when we were sitting in the restaurants and it was we reopened a restaurant on September 9th, 2001. And we poured a lot of money. We were living in California, but we came back, we reopened a restaurant, new name and everything. And uh and it was September 9th, and two days later, it was September 11th, and the hospitality business fell off 40%, and over the next year or more, the whole everything went out of business. And you know, that was really tough too. And it's just lots of shit's hard, you know what? It's not just our business, you know, but we feel it deeply because uh, you know, not only is everything writing about it, but we're being judged every minute, which is probably a little less true when you're you know working at some in some bank, you know. The other thing we can't do is we can't coast. That's what I miss about straight jobs is that you come in, you just do your job, and you go home. Oh, you know, we gotta bring it every day. That's true. That's some pressure. That's nuts. That's cool.

SPEAKER_03 34:31

You've talked about you know, when you're under pressure in the room, your experiences in your previous career, but also your experiences with what happened on Haven allow you to deal with that pressure in a sort of with perspective and good sense. Does that also apply to the rejections and the failures that happen in between shows? So when you when the show gets cancelled or when an I a pitch fails, do you still have that? Well, you know, I used to plunge toilets at restaurants, so it doesn't matter, or is that is that a different sort of feeling for you?

SPEAKER_04 35:14

I think I think the thing, the real answer is we I've just Jim and I have a pretty thick skin now, and I think every writer does to a point. And I was listening to one of your podcasts, and I can't remember who it was that said he crawled into bed for a few weeks after something got um something didn't work. Might have been Glenn Masera. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_03 35:33

It was Glenn, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:34

Yeah, but and I I I feel I feel that with him, but um, I don't know. We I I was just getting kind of we get kind of used to it after a while, you know. And I I don't know that I have, you know, Jim, Jim did something for a while. One of our spit valve talks was he would always say, It's fine. Whatever happened, he's like, it's gonna be fine. And finally I just popped. And I was like, motherfucker, you don't know that it's gonna be fine. And yes, nobody's gonna die, and tomorrow we're gonna wake up and the sun will be in the sky. But that was a really cool thing that just happened, or a really shitty thing that just happened, or a cool thing that died. And it doesn't, it's not fine for a minute. And I think for him, it was perspective, and he was having perspective in that moment. And for me, I was reacting to it of let us let us hurt for just a minute and and not have perspective and get it out. And I think that's the the New Yorker in me. I kind of want to yell about it and play some loud music and and and have it have a drink and just fucking rail at the moon. And Jim, that Midwestern, you know, Irish, Polish thing he's got going, is just like, you know what? Yeah, okay, they killed half of my family, but I'm gonna go farm that acre for another uh another year. And it's just sort of like we we both get we get to the same place, but we get there a little differently. Um, I think.

SPEAKER_03 37:06

It is your plan to bookend your career. So whenever you've finished achieving whatever you need to achieve in Hollywood, is your plan to open up another restaurant and be like like Rocky, you know, at the end of his career where you're sitting, you and Jim are sitting there telling your regular stories about yeah, the time you pitched this show and the time you had dinner with a movie star and all that sort of stuff. Do you want to so how do you want to end it all?

SPEAKER_04 37:34

Uh I think maybe if we hadn't started the career with a restaurant, that would be cool. But no, uh, it's way too much work. And Jim and I are aligned on this. If you want to go into a restaurant and be the owner and be treated like the owner, because definitely there were a lot of perks to being the owner. We go to other restaurants, and you know, they would be like, Oh, it's those guys from TapeCon. Come in, here's the table, let us cook for you. There were a lot, there were a lot of whistles, a lot of bells, and I I look back on them fondly. But if you want all of those experiences with none of the work, you just have to have enough money so you can walk into the same restaurant every Tuesday night and be a regular, and you will be treated like the owner or better than the owner. And all that requires is a bank account. And the television life, aside from the creativity and the joy and the and and the glory of it, yeah, it gives you a bank account eventually. And so now I can have that. And in none of those restaurants that I walk into where I am being treated well because I tip well, I have a nice dinner every Tuesday night. And by the way, this is eventually, I'm talking about when the kids are gone and I pay for college. But yeah, when that happens, not a single one of them are going to ask me to plunge that toilet. And I will be just fine with that.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

I have one comment, and then I have to lead us into our final question. But my comment is you were talking about your sort of come to Jesus moments with Jim and these moments where you were talking about projects that don't go forward. And I think something that we don't think about enough is that we also have to practice our craft, right? That these scripts that don't sell, it's our version of being first chair at Carnegie Hall. Those musicians aren't begrudging playing the clarinet for six hours every day before they do their performance. We write all day, we want to sell everything, and often we don't. But the only way that when we are playing first chair, when we are on a show or we're have our own show, is because we were at our desk. And I think sometimes we forget that we need to actually put that kind of work in on a daily basis. And it because we get so caught up in not selling something that it's made it a little bit easier for at least for me to think about my own work that way. It's like, okay, well, that's just practice. It's me, me at the keys, you know, getting my thing done. But this is leading, you know, obviously in into our final question, which we have to ask, which we ask every guest who comes on here. And that is, and I think you know what's coming, is if you have any advice for an aspiring screenwriter who wants to do this job today, uh, what would it be?

SPEAKER_04 40:01

Well, I think you really just answered it in large part, which is you you just have to do the work. You know, there's no magic, get the agent. You know, I see on screenwriter Twitter, people are always asking these questions of and I ask this these questions, Noah, I'm sure you did too at the time. What's what's the path? And we all know there's no path, and it's a terrible answer, and there's no real, uh, there's no real satisfaction. But I'll tell you my favorite moments in a writer's room are kind of in two or three categories, but they're all have the same thing, which is when that beautiful crystalline idea comes out and it just works, and it's it's glorious. And I've worked for showrunners. Um, uh, you know, Ben Watkins is particularly good at this, where he will just come out of left field with the craziest idea that never would have occurred to me in a million years, and I am blown away. Or when a junior writer, like the story editor or something, he or she is quiet for an hour, and then suddenly in this small voice says this thing, and you just want to protect it, and it comes out, and you're like, holy shit, that is beautiful. And sometimes they don't even know why it's so beautiful, right? Because they just it's their talent speaking, but they don't have the necessarily hours and hours to know to to recognize it. And and it's so beautiful, and they come out, and it's those moments are only a result of talent meaning craft. And that is that's what, and you know, I say to all the junior writers, you could be a lot more talented than me. You probably are, but I've done the time, and you know, that's that's what we have to do is the time, and it's the worst answer because nobody can, you know, is eager to get to their keyboard every day and sit there for six or eight hours. And that's why I have Jim, because he comes to my house or I go to his every single day, whether we have something to work on or not, and we sit there and we just pluck. And it's coming, it comes fast now, and we rewrite faster, and it's still a slog, but it's the work. And if it's all about the work, and if we can find the glory in the work, then it answers every other question we've had on this podcast to this time, anyway, because that's the only path forward, it's the only path to the beginning, it's the only path to the end. And Jesus, I sound like I'm preaching a religion now, but I'm kind of feeling it right now.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

Fantastic. So, Sam Ernst, the man who perfected craft services and then perfected the craft. Thank you very much for being part of our podcast. Pleasure to be here. It's nice to see you guys.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Thank you, Sam.

SPEAKER_03 42:54

Thank you for listening to another one of our fantastic episodes. Yet again, I think you'll find that I ask better questions than Noah. Noah, have you got anything to say?

SPEAKER_01 43:04

Um, as always, uh, since you've done most of the talking, I'm just gonna sit here quietly again.

SPEAKER_03 43:09

Surely there's some people to thank.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

Oh, right, right, right, right. Uh I would love to thank James for doing all of our outro music. Um, as always, I think we owe a big thank you to both of our wives who support us through this endeavor that started in our basement and seems to be ever growing. And if you want to reach out to either Dan or I, I am at at LN Epslin on Twitter. I'm not sure Dan has a Twitter account. Dan, do you have a Twitter account?

SPEAKER_03 43:36

Well, I I do, but no one cares. All I care about is being on Noah's podcast. So well done Noah for conceiving, producing, editing, writing, and asking the best questions of the two of us because you've done all this work and well done you.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

I do think it's worth pointing out after 33 or so episodes that I do both voices. There actually is no standard screen.