Prologue

SPEAKER_00 0:01

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 the floor.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

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

SPEAKER_02 0:21

For every success, there is months, sometimes even years, of painful failure. This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

That's the normal thing you have to be able to perservate. Like everything in our business, here's hands get count.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

It all bounces off you. That bounce doesn't take care of that doesn't matter overnight. I was being told by my manager it's yours to lose. And I promptly lost it. And I remember thinking, like, well, that's it for me. I blew my one big shot. What I've realized from that moment is it's never one big shot. There will be other shots.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

Welcome to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. There's two hosts for this podcast. One of them is Noah Evslin, who, if you look up on IMDB, is a very successful writer and producer with credits on everything from private practice to scandal to Hawaii 5.0. But the real story behind it is actually Noah is rejected and has suffered failure more than probably anybody I or you have ever met in the entertainment industry and probably beyond.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Thank you, Dan. And I'd like to introduce my fellow co-host Dan Rutstein, who failed his way from London as a journalist to a diplomatic position in Los Angeles. Once that went sour on him, he failed his way to the becoming the president of a virtual reality company. And unfortunately, COVID took that from his him as well. So we are sitting here, two failures, wanting to talk to you about failure in the entertainment business.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

You know, they in in Hollywood they say write what you know, and in podcasting, they say talk about what you know. And we've both suffered plenty of rejection and failure with modicums of success somewhere in between. So that's what this podcast is going to be about. Now, the genesis for all of this isn't some brilliant planning session with a podcast network, it's a lazy tweet by Noah that ended up turning into something a bit more. Noah, tell us about your one of your many lazy tweets.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

One of my hobbies is writing uh terrible hot takes about this or that. And I had just faced one of many rejections in my writing career, and I posted sort of uh idly something like, I think I'm gonna start a podcast where after every rejection I just scream into a microphone. And that actually got a bit of traction on Twitter, as Twitter did as Twitter does, and people seem to like that.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

And as somebody who hosts one other podcast, the United States of Dramerica, the whiskey podcast that's not about whiskey, and have hosted other podcasts in the past. I saw this tweet from my friend, or more accurately, acquaintance, Noah, and thought maybe there's actually a podcast there. So I took his obviously joking, silly idea and used one of my many skills to pull it together. And we now actually have a real podcast called Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, where we are gonna talk about rejection and failure and adversity in the entertainment industry with a variety of guests. And I think there's gonna be a lot of material because Noah isn't the only person who fails.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

I think more, you know, more seriously, as Dan and I began to talk about this and others began to reach out to me through direct message over Twitter, this is something that people actually really want to talk about. When you come to Hollywood or you have ambitions to be in Hollywood, all you see are people's credits and many of their successes. And the IMDB profiles do not show the failures, they only show the things that went your way. And what many people do not understand is how often all of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day of our lives and careers.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

When I first met Noah, I think hearing about his career would be the equivalent of people asking me about my gambling successes when I go to Las Vegas. So I knew about Noah's successes, the show he was working on, how well he was doing, the meetings he was having. But obviously, he never told me about all the rejection in between, in the same way that, you know, I'll tell you when I've come back from Vegas with a few thousand dollars in my pocket after a big win, but I don't tell you about all the times in between when I lost a lot more than that. And I think that's where this all came from. And as we've got to know each other better, I started really understanding that people in this world of Hollywood entertainment, there is a lot of rejection. And for every success, there is months, sometimes even years, of really painful failure with all sorts of bits of hope offered in between that make the failures even worse. And that's his story, but it's also, as you'll find out over the coming weeks, the story of some people, again, who feel like they're very successful.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

And it often feels really lonely for people, especially those who are starting in the industry and those who actually have been in the industry for a while. When you begin to see your friends and people you started out with getting more success than you, you feel like you're the only one who's not succeeding. But the reality is, again, their successes don't always match some of the failures that are beneath it. So, again, people had begun to like, you know, out of the blue, I was just joking. I had really no intention of starting a real podcast. People say, I actually would really like to talk about that. And we're not gonna, you know, give out our guest list right now on this teaser episode, but we got some really great people who say, No, I there's some things that I I would love to talk about. Uh, we have writers and producers and directors and actors, and the goal of it is to really get people to have a better understanding of what we go through in Hollywood on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_02 6:12

You would have thought when you start listening to this podcast and see some of the names we've got, you would have thought, like, why would these people even agree to come on the show? But the fact that they were so keen to come on the show and people came forward and were so happy to embrace this shows that they want to share this part of the industry because it's such a big part. So you hopefully will be entertained by some actually quite amusing stories of how people got rejected. You will feel the pain as people talk through the crying and all the suffering they went through on their journeys. But hopefully, you'll also you'll also learn something about how the industry works, how people deal with this stuff, and maybe it will give people inspiration for their own careers, both in the Hollywood world, but even beyond that.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

And I I think and I've realized through some of these early discussions that we've had, and through my own career in Hollywood, that everybody in Hollywood faces adversity. And the only people that don't succeed are those who give in to that adversity. So, what's happening in some of these conversations is we're learning different skills and techniques and just what people went through on a day-to-day basis to basically get hit with a major rejection and then wake up the next morning and and say, no, I still want to do this. This is what the this is the career that I want to have. And how do you keep going? And how do you turn, you know, what feels like a failure in the present to successes in the future?

SPEAKER_02 7:36

We hope you listen to this podcast. We hope you enjoy this podcast. What I'd like you to do as listeners is give us feedback because we want to be told if we're failing and we need to hear some of these adverse, rude comments that we may well bet, because that is part of this journey. That's what Noah has to deal with every time he sends a script to me and I write back saying I don't like the ending. But we need you to tell us what you think of this and whether you think we should continue doing it or whether we should both give up and become Uber drivers.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

And if you think, you know, you know, partially along the way that Dan is failing and I'm succeeding, you can also point that out. We can talk about that, that maybe only one of the hosts is sort of cut out to be talking about these types of things. And the other ones might have a posh English accent and present himself well, but deep down you're starting to get the sense that maybe he's not pulling it together.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

That, of course, is one piece of feedback we're not expecting, but anything is possible, including somebody actually listening to this and thinking, well, maybe I should give Noah a job. So thank you for listening to this and thank you for listening to our podcast.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

And we'll talk to you guys and hear from you all soon. All right, that's a wrap on this episode. If you want to leave us any feedback, go to hollywoodabyss.com.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

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

SPEAKER_01 8:54

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

SPEAKER_02 9:07

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

SPEAKER_01 9:18

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

SPEAKER_02 9:29

But you definitely can't podcast.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

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