Take 88 - Showrunner Jeffrey Lieber, Lost, Charmed

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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

SPEAKER_02 0:14

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

SPEAKER_01 0:21

There is sometimes even this is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

And I lost it. Well, that's it for me. I do my one big shot. What I've realized from that moment is it's never one bit shot. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss is brought to you by Scriptation, the Emmy Emmy Avdwitch.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Oh, it sounds awful when you say it. 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. Stither listeners can get a free month of Scriptation by going to Scriptation.com backslash Stitha. 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 your co-host, Dan Rutstein.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

And I am your industry co-host, Noah Ebslin. On today's Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, we're actually doing something for the very first time. Due to popular demand, we're bringing a guest back for a second round of rejection, failure, and adversity questions. In many ways, his episode, where he goes into detail about not yet writing his soul's work, set the standard for all future episodes. Anyways, long story short, I'd like to welcome screenwriter, TV writer, showrunner, and playwright Jeffrey Lieber back to the podcast. Jeff was one of the co-creators of Lost, as well as creating Miami Medical, Don't Look Deeper, and Impulsed. Most recently, he was also the showrunner of Don't Look Deeper and Charmed, as well as having a new play, Fever Dreams of Animals on the Verge of Extinction, which just had a table read at The Goodman. Welcome, Jeffrey.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

Hello. As I said to you guys beforehand, I'm both very honored to be here. And then I'm aware of the fact that coming back to for a second time to a podcast about failure means that either I have a larger bucket of failure that we have not, we could not get to the first time, or that I failed since I was here. And therefore, you know, and probably uh a little bit of both those things or something of that nature.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

So we had you on, I think it was episode 20. So we're now 60 something episodes further along, which is just over a year. So to I guess the for the second part of what you said as a reason, tell us about your if you've got anything to add to your rejection, adversity, and failure pile in the last 13 months or so.

SPEAKER_03 3:22

Um, I don't know, although I'm sure we'll find it in the conversation, but I I was listening to a podcast you guys did recently, and I and you one of you asked, and I'll say it's uh it's uh Dan because that's the way the shtick goes between the two of you. You asked a guest about a time you that the guest had actually failed. Not the time that something was a failure, but the guest had failed to look at something that was actually something they had done wrong. And I thought that was a really interesting question because a lot of what Hollywood is is failure, things that don't work out, things that don't happen. But then there are the times that we personally feel like we fail. We know we were the problem. And I think that's an interesting little nug to get at. And um I'll say that I was uh there was a show that I was on um that I was the that I that I went to help out with. Um and I was on the back end of of a bunch of things that hadn't worked out, and I and I wasn't the best staff member there. Not because I was uh, but I just was ill-suited for the role. I I had been running shows and I'd come in and I was there to just sort of help out, and I couldn't figure out my role at all. And you know, I felt as if that was a time at which I was just ill-suited for the place I had come to. And it was a it was a struggle for me to figure out what to do and how to handle it, and and um how to still be a good part of the team when I was ill-suited for the role I was in.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

So that was a yeah, well, it was me, because obviously all the better questions are, and it was but I think somebody was trying to explain how people shouldn't feel that everything's their fault, because the nature of the business means a lot of things happen that you can't control. So my question uh I think had been that's true, but what happens if it is your fault and how do you find out it really was you? Because otherwise you could blame everybody else. So it's interesting we get here. So I guess the question is obviously yeah, I guess it's partially your fault that you ended up in an ill-suited for a role. It's probably partly your manager, partly your agent, partly whoever hired you, but also I guess sometimes you don't realise until you're there. I guess once you were there, given that you are you're not, you know, some kid who's just starting, so it isn't your fault, you know, if if it's not fitting, it's not because you don't know how to do your job because you obviously do. It is a fit question. So what what does a Geoffrey Lieber do when they are in an ill-fitting role at your stage of your career? You know, do you put your hands up and say this isn't working, I'm gonna leave it, you know, it's not you, it's me. Or do you sort of how do you how did you navigate through that?

SPEAKER_03 6:01

Well, I did two things. One, I went into the showrunner who I was helping, and I said, I'm not doing great. I'm not, I'm I'm I I I realize that I'm not, I have not yet found my role. And thank you for being patient with me. And and please let me know how I better fit into your system. So I went straight to the person and said, I can see that I haven't found where I sit. The other was to at that point just kind of lean back a little bit and wait for the show to come to me, wait for my role to come into place. And ultimately, I, you know, having been used to being sort of the one with the hand on the wheel, um, where I realized I could help that show more was to be a go-between between the staff and and the showrunners in that case, where I where they were they were feeling certain kinds of frustrations, and I I could shuffle back and forth as somebody who knew both sides of the role. But it took me a moment, and I had to I mean, I think what there's a there's a defensiveness in this industry because there's a there's sort of the aura of brilliance, and that there are people who are brilliant, and they you know, when the truth is we all we all are fairly flawed individuals with with only the sets of talents we have, and um we get further when we stop down and say and admit our admit our humanity, right? And are willing to say, you know, what else can I do? How else can I help out? Um, I think as I said, maybe the first time we talked, you know, I don't need a when I hire a staff, I don't need a staff of 12 great writers, right? I need a few good writers, but then I need a bunch of other people to play roles for me. And so the trick is to figure out what role you're there for um and to help the organism because you could I I had a guy on a staff once who was not a great writer, in fact, what was the worst writer on the staff, right? But boy, oh boy, could he pitch ideas? And I was just happy. You know, I knew I had to get through his episode. I knew that when I handed him a draft, I was gonna have to do a lot of rewriting on that draft, right? But what I counted on was we'd get stuck and I'd hang my head and he'd go, what if there was an elephant? And I'd look at him and laugh, and then I'd go, okay, there's not an elephant, but you know, and we'd get going again. And that was his role, right? So he failed constantly in writing drafts. They were bad. But he succeeded in other ways that was just utterly helpful to me. And I and on this show that I was on, I realized that I had to figure out a way not to be the show runner of the show, but to be part of the staff.

SPEAKER_02 8:40

I that that brings up two comments and a question for me. So, comment one is I was just talking about this yesterday, and it's good to kind of elaborate for those listening who are trying to get into our business that our job is really as writers on a staff, TV writers, is broken up into three parts as far as I know. It's our job as a writer who'd writing drafts, our job in the room, and our job on set if you're privileged enough to go to set. So we have three distinct areas, and you probably have to be fairly good at two of them to keep your job. And if you're good at really good at one, then maybe you'll keep your job. If you're good at none of them, you're probably not coming back the next year. But I also wanted to talk about something that you referenced in this thing where you went back on a staff that we are in this really weird career where you are the CEO, the showrunner of many shows. And then sometimes, for whatever reason, sometimes you have an overall deal, sometimes someone asks you for a favor, sometimes you need to pay your mortgage or whatever. You come back as either consulting producer or sometimes co-executive producer after being the executive producer and showrunner, or the EP who's just the number two, and you're no longer the number one guy in the room. And that must be a really kind of weird. Obviously, I've never been in the position to do that, but a lot of some of my friends are like, I'm never more showrunner, I'm never gonna do that job. And then they do the job because they have to do the job, and no one's just handing out shower jobs over and over and over again, is just how it works. And by the way, it's a it's a great job.

SPEAKER_03 10:02

Like, I can't tell you the couple of times I've done it where I'm like, wait, I go home now? Like, I go home, there's a fire going on out there, and I don't have to pick up a bucket. You know, like like that job being just to the left or the right of the person they're taking aim at is sort of a wonderful job if you can accept that, right? If you can really accept and and the times I've had that job whereby I can come to the point of saying, I'm gonna give you my best shit, right? I'm gonna give it to you, and then I'm gonna trust you, right? Which is what you which is what I always ask of everybody else, is give me your best thing and then trust me. It's a great job, but you have to do it with people, you have to be willing to say, you know, whatever happens, happens. Right? Like whatever happens, happens. Um uh and I accept it. And and and ultimately we're in a position where you where somebody has to say, let's go west. And when they say you let's go west, you go west.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

Well, um, which does lead me to my uh my question, by the way, just on that too, is I always think the number three in a room is the best job in TV writing. Number two has a lot of pressure, number one has a ton of pressure. Number three, you're confident, you're good, but you're you're you're kind of skating beneath that. But my question to you is so when it when it began, when you recognize that it began to go sideways a little bit, that you weren't pretty you weren't contributing the way you wanted to, uh uh did A, did you did you start to doubt yourself? And B, were you ever able to write that ship? I know you talked to the showrunner, but but were you able to fix it, or would you, or would you just say maybe it's time for me to take on other projects?

SPEAKER_03 11:40

Um uh I would say both. I would say both I was able to fix it. And then um uh there came a point at which they they were looking to save some money and I had had a bunch of development and I we sort of parted company all friends in in that way. Ultimately, because part of part of the issue was when I was hired, there was a certain set of ideas as to what I was gonna be useful for, and then by the time I got there, it became apparent that some of those things had changed. And so my functionality had changed um along the way. Um but I think um what you don't want to do is keep doubling down on your on the concept of your being correct in some way, right? Like what have what would have been what would have been really destructive is if I had kept charging forward with this concept that, like, oh, I'm a showrunner and therefore I know X, Y, and Z, and we should keep going. I mean that's what takes staffs and sets them on fire when either people who do have the smarts or even people who don't have the smarts, you know, start to foment that kind of um uh crazy team energy whereby you leave the showrunner leaves the room and everybody starts to talk and so on and so forth, and and and the showrunner doesn't feel safe in their own room, and and the people in the room don't feel safe together because they know that some people are talking outside, and like that's the chaos, right? So, what I didn't, what I made sure not to do was to foment the idea that anybody was at fault for anything, because they really weren't, um, and be try to find a way that I could be useful, which was I think really to be a sort of a go-between between the staff and the and the showrunner.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

Uh that's great. Um, you know, normally the question I'm gonna ask now, normally we get to this at the end of an episode, but because we already had you on an episode, I kind of want to lead with this type of question to kind of push us a little bit deeper into you know rejection, failure, and adversity. But do you you've had a long career where you've had many successes? We talked at length last episode, and for those of you who haven't listened to it, you should go back and listen to that last episode because it's really good, uh, where you talked about lost and what happened with lost and all of that. Uh, but my question for you is really simple. Do you have, after 25 years, do you have any regrets uh about job specifically related to your career?

SPEAKER_03 14:07

Uh I don't well, I mean, I don't really. I the truth is that everything has led to something else. And while I could pick another path where at any point I could go left to right and maybe I'd have a different path, I don't know that that path would be any better. And where it's ultimately gotten me to is something we talked about last time, which is falling in love with the process over the product, right? That's where I've gotten to finally, which is which is okay, I have no control over the product. I have so much control over the process. And if I can fall in love with that and be excited by that every day, great. So that's what I do. I every day I double down on falling more and more in love with the process of the things that we do, which I have some control over. Um I mean, lots of things could have gone a different way. I mean, Lost is a real good the my ultimate success has been not folding, right? Like I've had stuff happen between between the thing that happened with Lost, where all of a sudden I was the the persona non grata on the biggest hit on television, right? And that could have been a folding point. Um, I had a moment where I was running a big franchise and and kind of got exhausted beyond belief, and and in the middle of the second season went home, and that was a point I could have folded. But each time, what I tried to do is just learn the lesson and move forward, right? So do I wish either of those experiences had gone slightly differently? Maybe, but I can't tell you that had I had I pulled it off somehow and we had done my version of Lost and it had been any bit of a success, that I was in any position to run that show. I'd never written a single episode of television at that point, right? Like, can you imagine the the kind of failure we'd be talking about if I was running that show? Like I didn't know what I was doing. I'd been I was a feature writer, I was a playwright who had managed to get myself into this position and had it gone forward with that kind of pressure, you know, who knows? That could have been the end for me.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

So we have referenced your episode on quite a lot of the episodes since you came on. Um I now want to reference a different episode we had recently with a question back to you. So I I think we had it's happened twice, where seasoned, I think is the right way of polite way of saying old, but you know, people nearer the end of the career than the beginning have said they worry they'll never run a show again, uh, and they'll worry they'll never work again. Um, and that is a preoccupation for them. Uh in fact, somebody quite young also said that. Um so I have to I can't not ask you that question, which is you know, when you pitch things and they don't work, is there a point where you think maybe I'll never run a show again, or maybe worse, I'll work in a room again? Every day, every single day.

SPEAKER_03 17:08

I mean, specifically the showrunning part, because it's such a hard place to get to, right? Like uh, you know, I sell development, I've got a bunch of development right now. You know, all of it could be uh chickens or it could be eggs that we make omelets with, right? Either way, one way or the other. But you know, when when I ran Charmed for three years, and I think I said this last time. If you told me I would have loved running Charmed, I would have told you you were crazy. But I loved running Charmed. It was a great job. It was incredibly fun. And when that ended, I took a deep breath and said, maybe this is it. Maybe this is the last time somebody hands me the keys and lets me run a TV show. And running, and I'm really good at it. And um it's really hard. And the things that come with running a TV show, like I listen a lot to young writers and they all say, I want to be a showrunner. And I want to say, it's management. Do you understand that it's management, right? And you do you really want to be management? Because maybe you do, maybe that's really fun for you. And being the kind of person I am, it is fun for me. But it's management, it's not art. There's some art there, but there's a lot of management, right? Um, I love that. I love making a schedule. I love, I love the the weird eccentricities of a board and putting it together and figuring out how you make 12-hour days work and like all this management stuff is really fun for me. And if I never got to run a TV show again, I'd be really sad. I mean, it'd be really sad. And there's very few of us in the business right now who have any guarantee. I mean, we're, you know, as I was thinking about coming on here, I realized that we're about to be in a moment of collective failure. This thing is now gonna contract for a while because the people who run the business have done a bad job of running the business for the last couple of years, and we are now gonna face the contraction that's coming. So we're gonna be in a moment of collective failure. And we're gonna have to figure out how, as a group, we all manage that together. Um, less jobs, less shows, less this. We're gonna have to deal with this for one season, maybe two. I don't know, maybe more, but I'm sure it's one season, two. And because of that, there'll be less jobs for people for people who want to run TV shows. So the answer to your question is yes, I worry about it every single day, which is why, again, I go back to a full love the process, not the product. And I think we now have to all look at each other together and say, how do we manage through this period to keep as much of us floating during this period of collective failure that we're about to go through?

SPEAKER_01 19:33

So not saying you necessarily did this for the for the last job where you came in as a consultant, but uh if if you get offered roles like that, where you're coming in as a number three or you know, just standing behind the number one, which of course you can only really be qualified for if you've previously been a number one, otherwise you don't have the skill set. But when you're looking at these, if somebody offers you one, you know, is there a part of you that just wants to be in a room and you'll take one even though you'd rather be the number one? Um so are you doing them as an excuse to get it back in the room, or are you are you comfortable enough that you're doing it, you know, specifically to achieve whatever needs achieving or doing the favor you're doing for somebody, knowing that you're you may well still get the number one elsewhere? Are you sort of cheating? It's just as a sort of like just in case I can't be number one, I'm gonna go back and be number two and a half.

SPEAKER_03 20:25

No, I um I am fortunate enough that I'm that I am not in a position to have to do it just to do it. Um, I do it because of the people. Uh, I do it because of sometimes of the product. Um, and I do it because um there's incredible fun in those other roles, as long as you have enough autonomy. I I normally say to people when they hire me for those roles, like, hey, I will come do whatever you want to do. Uh, would never need me to do, but also um, I need a certain amount of autonomy just because I'm you know old and cranky. I'm not cranky, but I'm old. I'm not old, but I'm kind of old. Um uh uh, you know, like like you get to a point where you can't like I can't do seven hour rooms in any sense. Like I can't do those shows anymore. And if somebody needs to do that, I'll say, hey, this is not, I can't, like that's not I can't do that because I don't think it's I don't think it's productive, I don't think it's good for the staff, I don't think it creates an interesting story. Um so there's certain things I I can't do anymore. Um but but I I love the camaraderie that comes from a bunch of people sitting around a room trying to say, okay, well, what happened then? So I I I I I find great joy in it.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

Speaking of great joy, I'm gonna ask a sort of a Dan adjacent question. Dan is the president of a soccer club, loves to talk about leadership and management. Management styles. And I, as the writer, normally like to talk about writing and we stick to we stick to our lanes mostly. You you talk about being a showrunner, loving being a showrunner, obviously falling down a couple of times. You talked about the openly of being a showrunner and then learning from that. You have very terrific, and I'm gonna plug it, uh, showrunner rules that you post periodically on different social media sites. Uh uh, I'm gonna ask you to please put them all into one list again so that Yes, I'm gonna they all exist now on Mastodon.

SPEAKER_03 22:28

Everyone get off Twitter and that asshole doesn't deserve it. Anybody's down um but but I but I'm gonna I I am committed in the next in the next 18 months to writing the book that goes with those lists.

SPEAKER_02 22:38

Right. And that and you should because it's fantastic and there's some really good kernels in there. But I'm not gonna ask obviously about what you the pithy comments that you make that are that are really interesting, obviously you do it well, but these are all came from hard learned experiences. Every one of those pieces of information is probably from something that went wrong and you realize, holy crap, I need to do it differently. What is the sort of does anything haunch, is there a mistake you made on a personnel level that you still think about or you learn from, or you were like, holy crap, there's I I find there's a very big difference when you go from number two to number one with your inner personal relations, even your friends on the step. Things are very different suddenly. And have you did you fall down? Did you pick yourself up? Did you realize along the way, holy crap, this is a whole different animal? Is there any stories that you can share?

SPEAKER_03 23:22

Yeah, I I I've had I I had uh uh a writer on a show um who wasn't cutting the mustard. Um, and I and it was somebody who I had a great uh uh affinity for as a human being. And at the end of the season, I went uh when the when the studio came to me and said, Who are you bringing back? I made a list and I said that I put this person on the list and I said, Look, this person's not getting there, but but um I I'll just keep teaching. And the studio said to me, you know what, maybe we'll just cut fake and go. And when I went to them, it was the the the writer, it was very upsetting to them because I had not I had not been fully honest with them along the way. I had not done the job of along the way um saying where the falling down is. You know, I kept I kept being the cheerleader when at some point I needed to be like, you know, and so so one of the things I learned, and one of the things is on my last show, we did we did intro interviews, we did mid-season interviews, and we did exit interviews on the show. We went and said, Oh my god, this is a business, this is management. This is not, you know, this is not uh all of our friends in a barn and I got costumes and everything else is a business. So we started every season with uh uh uh this was on on charmed, where at the beginning of the season we met with the writers, we said, here's where we're starting, here's what we think of you. What do you need? What have we done wrong? Then at Christmas we had that that same meeting again, and at the end of the season we had it again. And I realized that that we have to treat everybody like any other business. We can't be this sort of like, you know, so that was a that was one. Um another thing I did which which was a mistake was I um I had an interaction with an actor once on a show where I where I believed that I um I lost my temper. And I probably had a right to lose my temper. But I didn't read but I didn't think through that I was I could have been on a speaker phone, which I was on the other end, and and um I created a mess where there shouldn't have been a mess. And you know, I think one of those first early rules is when mad, don't pick up the phone, don't write an email, don't talk to anyone, sit down, shut up, and do nothing for a half an hour. And that was one of the things I I learned, which is that I I allowed myself to get triggered in the situation where I didn't know what all the elements were. And so there I was yelling on a cell phone, which was on speaker. Um, I didn't say anything, I didn't say anything hideous or mean or whatever, but I was yelling, and that was something I should have learned not to do.

SPEAKER_02 26:13

You just brought something I'm I'm out of curiosity, in fact, is the performance review part of our job feels like it's fairly new, like that it's it's happening across staffs where they're giving us performance reviews and whatever. And is the is is that a mandate that's sort of internally amongst show owners saying we need to do this, or is the studio saying, hey, we're in a new world, we got to cover our asses. You just can't fire someone for no for what they think is no reason anymore because they're gonna come back to HR and say they never they didn't warn us, or blah, blah. It just feels like the showrunners are really beginning to accept the fact that they're both manager, CEO, and writer and are are adjusting accordingly.

SPEAKER_03 26:50

I think it's coming from both directions because when we started doing it, nobody told us to do it. And then upon doing it, the studio came back and said to us, Hey, can you talk us through this process? And so they may be pushing it out there, but um, there definitely is the reality that given the world we live in, you can't just fire people. Um, and it's problematic because the what one of the hardest parts about what we do is it's super artsy, it's not picking up rocks and moving across the room. And there's a there's a je ne sais quoi, there's a that's the wrong word. There's a there's a there's an essence thing of it, right? And um so you don't want to start saying to writers, you're not cutting it because what they do is they close down. So you have to find a way to to to to do this magical thing where you say where you find a way to talk to them and and hold their spirit intact while getting the information across that it's not totally working. Because I, you know, I know you know I know that part of the reason part you know that right I was talking about before that I didn't that I just cheerleaded and then I had to fire. Part of the reason I didn't go to them before that was because I was afraid of crushing them. And so it was a it was a catch 22 where they couldn't get better because I couldn't tell them the truth. And I couldn't tell them the truth because I was afraid they'd get worse.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

And that and that's the instance in which you use, I don't know if it's a thing in your world, the shit sandwich. Do you have shit sandwiches in Rotary? Yeah. Um, but it's interesting what you're saying about I it's fascinating that your world where there's so much money at stake, um like the sort of basics of staff management are not adhered to, but it's remarkably present in lots of other businesses, which was a surprise to me. So I yeah, yeah. So my background is government, and we did yeah, everyone had objectives, they had performance reviews, we did anonymous 360-degree feedback on everyone every year, like it was very involved. Then I moved into the private sector, I ran a technology company, no one had any objectives, uh, no one had performance reviews, and then I joined the football team, no one had objectives, and no one had performance reviews. So I don't think the world of Hollywood is the only place where they don't do this, but it makes such a big difference. Now, some of it is the defensive part. If you want to fire somebody, you need to have a sort of audit trail and giving them a chance. But also it works on the positive side. So if you sit down with somebody and say, these are the five things I want you to achieve this year, and three months later you sit down and go, you know, your your scripts are excellent, your ideas are excellent, but when you're on set, you know, you offended everybody, um, and you're in charge of the graphics and you're not doing that very well, then you can have a conversation, you can lead people through. Um is laughing because he's, I think, in charge of graphics on his show, so I'm assuming they've had to tell him at some point he's not doing it very well. Um, so I think you know it it's it's fascinating. I've always found it fascinating when we talk on this show about showrunners as CEOs and the qualifications for being the CEO is are you very good at writing and coming up with ideas? Which doesn't feel like a proper qualification, and yet that's the whole business. Um sorry, that was me talking and asking questions. So here's I was gonna ask two questions, one of which is what is the worst single thing that has been said to you by a somebody more senior than you uh in your career? And I was gonna ask, what's the worst thing you've said to somebody uh as the boss? Although maybe this acting, this thing with the actor is it, but maybe maybe there's something else.

SPEAKER_03 30:35

Yeah, well, I I think what I said to the actor, what I didn't say a bad thing, I acted in a bad way. I I let my I let my temper go. I showed my temper, which was not productive, right? Um I don't I can't think of I mean I can't think of anybody who has said anything to me other than I once was in a relationship with somebody who insisted to me over and over again that they would have my back, and the moment I needed them to have my back, they did not. And so that was that that was um super disappointing and very painful and took a took a long time to get over because I want to trust, right? I I do I work best with people when I can feel like I can trust them, and by trust I mean we're in this together, right? Um if you're gonna title this episode, I I think I would say the title of this episode should be Is a sardine delicious? Which is to say, what is difficult about our business is it is utterly objective. So if I give you a sardine, and some to some people, sardines are wonderful, fantastic, and some people it's the most disgusting thing ever. So it's really hard to give feedback to the art part of our business because it's there's no there's no true north, right? There's nothing that we can definitively say is good or bad. I mean, I I suppose I suppose um expository writing is bad or writing that makes no sense is bad, right? But most of what we do is utterly uh subjective. And so when when uh uh uh Noah, when you said there are three parts, there's the there's the in the room part, there's the on the set part, and the there's a writing part, you gotta be good at two of them. Well, both except for the on the set part where where you can go around the set and say, is Noah liked? Does he do a good job? And and we'll get a reading and we'll be able to say yes or no. The other two parts, I don't know how it's so hard to know whether a sardine is delicious considering how you feel about sardines.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

Can you give I this is fascinating? Can you give an example on the sort of sardine analogy, I guess, of a time in your career where I guess this would be maybe around notes where you've written something and someone gives you a note which you disagree with. Or in a room you have an idea and someone completely disagrees with it, and they say something which you just don't think works, and then end up being actually a brilliant idea that worked incredibly well.

SPEAKER_03 33:19

Um when I was running uh the NCIS thing, um uh a good friend of mine uh who's on the staff at one point pitched that pride, um, the lead character got a bar. And I and I laughed him out of the room and I said to him, Come on, Jesus Christ, how cheap is this? He's gonna get a bar, we're gonna bring an act. And the next season, at the beginning of the season, we were running down a bunch of ideas, and I was like, What we need is a place where we can get away from this, and I pitched back the bar. And he just stared at me. And I had the and the room got to an end, and I had to stop and I said, Okay, I have done the ultimate shit sandwich thing, which is the thing that I mocked four months ago. I just pitched back and he was right and I was wrong. Um, but on the A side it felt cheap, and on the B side it felt necessary, and had I just opened my brain a little bit more on the A side. I mean, the other difficult thing is I think in the moment you get go in a direction and you close down, you know, and somebody smarter than me, I think it may have been Christiane Reed, who now runs Brockheimer's company, said it takes 24 hours to let an idea, a real radical idea, become possible. And I become a real proponent of that, which is to say when I get notes, even if they seem to me just corrosive, I try at least to give 24 hours before I react to anything because a lot of times it's that it is radical that is bothering me, not that it's rule. Right. And so that I just need myself to give time to be like, oh, that you know, uh the character that the show is named after. What if he was not the he or she was not the lead of the show? And you think to yourself, Jesus, fuck, and then you go spend 24 hours and you go, oh no, no, no, hang on. It's just a different show, and maybe that show is better.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

The um we would be remiss after last conversation to not touch upon writing your soul's work because that you you brought up that concept. We talked about that concept a little bit. You were you had said you had written things that were your soul's work, but you haven't produced them yet. And then in the time in between, the 67 episodes that we've done between you coming on, because that's how we judge time by episodes. Uh, you know, and you had written a play that I found delightful, uh, Fever Dreams of Animals on the Verge of Extinction, which you uh have table read in Chicago with a with a great director and a great cast, and it's seeming to move forward. But my question isn't about that, you know, the that project moving forward. It's a question about what happens emotionally when you write something amazing and it's not getting the response you want, or you can't get it in front of people. And how do we keep going when that happens? And and and has that happened to you and is that continuing to happen to you?

SPEAKER_03 36:09

Oh, yeah. I mean, I I've got some I've got this pilot with um an actress attached and a really good production company. I don't know. I mean, like, it's really good. It's really good, and the actress is amazing, and like it's all these things, and it may never see the light of day. Um, and so I you know, like my therapy, let me go back to that again, is about is about being able to be proud of myself that I wrote it. I wrote this really interesting TV show about the darkest genie show you've ever heard of, which is about redemption and about whether or not we're able to get redemption, or this play, right? Which is a which is about um in its in its most sort of primal form about how hard it is to live with the real truth. Like they're all the lies and justifications we tell ourselves and the people we love in order to get to the day to not really look at the way we have to live our lives, but can you ever really live in the full light? And um we I had this reading, it was great. Uh um I I got wonderful responses, and now I'm trying to basically get a real production that runs a couple weeks in a theater that I respect and so on and so forth. And maybe I'll succeed, but maybe I won't. Um and I keep trying to remind myself that I wrote the thing and that that's the only thing I have any control of, you know. Um but it's entirely possible like your father, your grandfather, right? It's entirely possible. I don't actually I take it back. I have I have figured out a way to get around your grandfather's curse, which is that your grandfather, as you said before, got to the end of his life and saw himself as a failure, and we all know he wasn't, right? So I've at least gotten myself to a point to know that having written these things, even if they never see mass, I wrote them. And that that is a feat. And that, you know, when they when they I guess they'll put me in the grave because they won't, they'll put me in a jar or something, or I'll end up in a in a you know, an ashtray somewhere. Um I'll ask them to slip these things right under it so that people come to see me, they will sit sit down and and and take a look at the things that I've done and they'll have their own reaction to them, but I'm really proud of them. Um that's the best I think I can do.

SPEAKER_02 38:35

So all of us can do. So is it's not the first time you brought up or we discussed the concept of of you of us as writers, we as writers, uh being one with our art. And you saying that you want your right, your words, these this these things you wrote to be there in your gravestone, on your cemetery with you, because that's that's that's what you identify is is so interesting, as maybe why this job is sort of inescapable for us. Uh now now this is a little tricky because normally we ask the same last question to everyone, a piece of advice for you know someone joining the business, but we've already asked you that question uh last time around. So we had to come up with a new question for you, which is a uh new final question that we do not ask every person that comes.

SPEAKER_03 39:16

This is this is good. This is this is a this is a chance at new failure. This could be the greatest thing ever or the worst question ever.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

Starting a new paradigm. But what's the biggest mistake you've seen uh up-and-coming screenwriters make? Either a single mistake or or people making this mistake over and over and over again, different people. And how would you recommend they don't do this?

SPEAKER_03 39:37

Um, the biggest mistake that writers make is they dig in. They dig in to think that there's an objective, an objective right or wrong to anything. As and so that so that I mean the the only times I've ever gotten conflict in a room is when people stick on something and say, you know, I'm gonna pitch you a platypus, and I say, I don't think it's gonna be a platypus, and they say, I'm gonna pitch you a platypus, and I say, I don't think it's a platypus, and they say, What if it was a platypus? And I say, please stop bringing up platypus, because they are convinced that there's a single right answer as opposed to um there is there is a question on the table, and we're gonna find an answer, right? And so it's it's really about about coming to understand that that that this thing that we do, which I think is more a sort of a craft than an art, right? It's a craft we do um is about this this wonderful flexibility where we all sit there and say, we know what we have to accomplish, and now how do we how do we take the pieces we have and put them in place in a way that is both interesting and makeable and on budget and will keep the four actors who we have happy and you know, it's all this massive set of things. And the answer is never, there's never any one right answer. There's only just you know, whatever the next step is. So I I would say the thing that that as writers, some of us have sort of a novelist um uh mentality about like do it alone, do it on my own way, do it, you know, vision, da-da-da. And this thing that we're in is is such a collective art that you have to be ultimately super flexible with it.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Very good. Well, great answer to a new question. So, Jeffrey Lieber, the first guest to appear twice on our podcast. Thank you to you, thank you to your therapist.

SPEAKER_03 41:33

Um, and my plan is my plan to keep failing so I can keep coming back. That is my goal. Is that the phone is here three times because something terrible has happened two weeks from now and you have to keep it?

SPEAKER_01 41:44

I sincerely hope, as somebody not in the industry, that over the next year you don't manage to make anything, but you nearly get things made in really funny and interesting ways that have never happened before, so that when you come on a third time, you've got plenty to talk about. But then you also have a success in there as well, just to keep because you probably deserve one.

SPEAKER_03 42:06

Well, what I want is what I want most is to get one of these soul projects made and then to fuck up on them so I can come back and tell you guys what it's like to have the thing you really, really, really, really want to do right and then still screw it up.

SPEAKER_02 42:19

And I will make the promise to our audience that if a huge failure happens to Jeffrey Lieber and he texts me saying this awful thing just happened, we will turn on the microphones and we'll record that episode and we were gonna push it out to you guys because you deserve to hear it. Uh but thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 42:34

And guys, I I've said this before to you personally, but I think this thing is a I hope people are listening to it because I do think um one of the things that's been difficult in our industry is that is that people have been seen as sort of auteurs and uh and geniuses and all these sorts of things. And the reality is it's a lot of people just like hunting through the dark and trying not to step on a rake and break their nose.

SPEAKER_01 42:57

Absolutely. And look, you know, underneath your jar of ashes, as well as your scripts that never went, I hope somebody puts a little link to the podcast as well.

SPEAKER_03 43:07

I will eventually do. I will add it to my will.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

Jeffrey Lima, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 43:13

Thank you guys for having me again. It was a real pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 43:20

Well, that's a wrap on this episode of Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss. As always, this episode was brought to you by Scriptation, the 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 for watching providing us with a great intro and outro.

SPEAKER_01 43:53

If you want to find us on social media, you can find Noah at NFLin on Twitter, tweeting a variety of writer-based nonsense and some terrible puns and occasionally begging for sponsorship. Uh, if you want more refined tweets, mostly about football and whiskey, you can find me at Dan Rutstein. If you're interested in buying a copy of Scriptation, if you go to www.scriptation.com backslash sither, S-I-T-H-A, you will 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 44:38

And if you do say a negative thing about Dan, there is a chance I might buy you a free copy of Scriptation.