Take 105 - Writer, actor, showrunner, director Deborah Pratt, Airwolf, Quantum Leap

SPEAKER_03 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 the floor.

SPEAKER_00 0:14

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

SPEAKER_01 0:26

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

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Like everything in our business here, we have to be out.

SPEAKER_03 0:43

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_01 1:03

Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss is brought to you by Scriptation, the Emmy Award-winning app that instantly transfers your notes into new drafts in seconds. Scriptation allows you to digitally mark up scripts, separate notes into layers, track changes across revisions, and so much more. Insert Noah saying something nice about scriptation.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Damn, I think this is where they actually want me to talk about how much I love it. And I do love it, it's great. Its collating function transformed me from the messiest writer in Hollywood to, well, ever so slightly less messy. My wife might have other things to say about that.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Sitha listeners can get a free month of scriptation by going to scriptation.com backslash Sitha.com backslash S I T H A. Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. I am, as ever, your non-entertainment co-host, Dan Rutstein.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

And I am your currently back at work industry co-host, Noah Epslin. On today's Screaming Without Into the Hollywood Abyss, I'm thrilled to introduce multi-hyphenet writer, producer, director, actor, singer, dancer, and novelist, Deborah Pratt. Because we have mostly writer listeners, I'm gonna stick with that side of the credits. But Deborah wrote on Airwolf, the original Magnum PI, the original Quantum Leap, which she also co-created and eventually ran, The Net, which she also created, as well as is currently the executive producer of the new Quantum Leap, uh, which she also showruns, amongst many, many other things. She's also a longtime actor and TV director, and so much more that I can't list here, or would be our entire podcast. Not gonna lie, I'm both impressed and more than a little jealous. Welcome, Deborah.

SPEAKER_02 3:00

Thank you very much. Uh it's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

I sometimes struggle a bit with people who are very successful and have a large number of credits on sort of how to get to the rejection and failure part. But as sometimes happens, when we were doing our warm-ups, you said you had plenty of rejections and failures. Can you tell us a bit? Given you had it feels like you can't have had much time to fail in between all of these successes. So tell us how you fitted in the failures between what seems like the most complete set of credits we've ever seen.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

Um, I think the most shocking failure to me was that I was homeless for three years.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Okay, right. We're now going to talk about that for at least the next five minutes. Um tell us about that.

SPEAKER_02 3:53

I had uh uh I guess it was 2010. Um I had uh written a series of books called The Vision Quest. And um I put all my money into those books. I believed in myself, and I didn't want to give up the rights because I had learned a harsh lesson with Quantum Leap. Once you give up the rights, you give up the rights. And um, so I was trying to uh fund it myself and learn how to run a business and learn how to do video games and publishing and um animation and everything else that I wanted to create from this world. I um just recently uh I have a new uh graphic novel, which is a story thread out of the book called Warrior One that'll come out in the beginning of next year. But what had happened was I bet on some wrong people who said they could do what um I couldn't, and that they could teach me, and they couldn't. And uh my son was just about to go to college, and I didn't want to put him in a situation to um go into student debt. His dad didn't want to pay for college, and it broke my heart, so I sold my house, and um, and then my mom got sick, and so I can't say I was homeless, homeless in the sense that I had many homes, and I went home to Chicago and I was with her, and it was the best thing I could have ever done, and took a bunch of money and paid for my son to go to college, and then I said, I gotta come back to Hollywood, I'm not done there yet. As much as I've done, I'm not finished, and so I slept on couches and once or twice in my car, and uh it was scary, and somehow or another, you know, ageism is a huge thing, race is a huge thing, being a woman is and I was like sporting all three. Um and a lot of people had um, based on being a little bit blacklisted, had uh gotten in my way so that I couldn't get to places that wanted to deal with me. And so I said, Oh, time to reinvent myself again. I was uh lucky enough to find my managers at zero gravity, and they, you know, got behind me. It was still really hard, but I realized, you know, after you spend 40 years in Hollywood, you kind of know people. And I said, that's it. I'm picking up the phone, I'm being fearless. And uh Debbie Allen, who I had uh hired, I had tried to direct on Quantum Leap, the first Quantum Leap. And it seemed like as head uh show as showrunner, one of the showrunners and uh head writer, every time there was a catastrophe, I had to jump in and either write a script in three days or um anyway. So I I uh called her and I had given her two shows. The only women that directed, because it was a fight with the studios and the networks back then to get a woman director. There were two women directors on the show, both my slots, both black women. Debbie Allen was one of them, and uh Anita Addison was the other. Rest her soul, she passed away. So I called Debbie, who was over on uh Gray's Anatomy, and I said, Um, help us out. And to her credit, she said, come on. And I walked on that amazing set, which was like iconic in itself and complicated. And I, you know, I had directed, I had a couple of films. I did a film for the BBC called Cora Unashamed. I did um a number of short films. Uh, but I had not gotten the break to do a television show. And I knew a lot of people, the men, this was really crappy. The men, men who I had given directing jobs to when I went to example, for example, to call, make the same call on the blacklist. Um, the executive producer who I gave given a break to said, Oh, there's too much testosterone on the set. I said, What does that mean? And uh he says, Oh, you know, women just don't do well here. And I said, Well, why would I be worried? I have you, you have my back. Crickets, never heard back. So it's it's a real thing, the the way that this town is set up. I've come very close to um, you know, big action movies that I've written, and it's really just getting someone to trust a woman to direct a 50, 60, 80, 100 million dollar film. And so that has been my journey. But what had happened was I had uh enough money. I found a place um in Koreatown that was pretty run down, that uh was a duplex. I bought it, I fixed it up as best I could. I had a renter that was at least paying most of the mortgage, and I started again. And um, you know, I'd been beating on Universal's door forever since Quantum went off the air, put the show back on. Quantum Leap, I pitched when I was at um Universal with the original show. I'd I commanded a meeting of every head of every division of that studio. And at first nobody came. And then the um, oh gosh, what was his name? Not Sid Scheinberg, Lou Wasserman said, Oh, this is a good idea. I'm coming. So once Lou said he was coming, everybody came. And they sat around this table. And I said, Here's the motion picture, here's the merchandising, here's the animated spin-off, here's the next television spin-off. Because if Star Trek can have nine series, three on the air currently, and nine motion pictures, why can't we? And I had an idea for a ride at Universal Studios tour. And um everybody started to move. We were developing all the things that I wanted. I thought, yes, this is happening, and then they canceled us.

unknown 10:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

I want to circle back. I mean, there's so much to impact there. The Debbie Allen I used to work for Grace Anatomy. We didn't cross, our areas didn't cross. But Debbie being a wonderful director, there's like so many eras of your career that I want to focus on. But to ground our audience a little bit, let's go back to the start because you talked about some of the difficulties, even in the current day, for you to launch some projects and obviously a successful showrunner, then being homeless. I mean, this is all fertile ground for Dan and I to dig into. But can we talk a little bit about, and and just because I love these shows as well, uh, the difficulties that it must have, you know, that you must have faced as a young woman writer uh on these action procedurals back then, the the um airwolves and the magnum PIs, the the barriers that you had to break through before you even created your first show and then into creating that first show.

SPEAKER_02 11:19

Uh it was a wake-up call for sure. Um I uh graduated college and auditioned, talked my parents into giving me a year before I had to go get my master's, because that's you know, we were black, upwardly mobile. Dad was a banker, mom was a psychologist, you know, one sister was off in medical school. It was that kind of thing. So when I said, Oh, I want to go into show business, they kind of went, Yes, but you need a real job. Um, anyway, I auditioned for the two of them and um got both. Uh Godspell and a show called Don't Bother Me, I Can't Cope, which I took. And the night my parents came to see my first performance on stage, my mom said, and dad said, Wow, you're really talented. We had no idea. I was singing and dancing. And the next morning there was an audition for uh a girls group that sang for years on the Dean Martin show. And so my mom called me and woke me up and said, they're having this open audition for girls uh for this called the Gold Diggers. And I went, oh, I don't like them. She said, Yeah, but you wanted to go to Hollywood. And I went, oh yeah, I did. So it was like it was like the voice, it was all no, it was really more like um what's the show where you go and like hundreds of people show up. Anyway, that's what it was. Hundreds of women showed up. And um eight hours later, it seemed like, yeah, it was five o'clock. Uh it was me and one other girl. And I'm standing there, and I see the choreographer and the musical director and the producers, and they're all heads together talking, and I realize I have to be back of the theater for curtain. And I've been singing and dancing all day, and I raised my hand and said, I this has really been lovely. Thank you uh very much. And they I have to go, I have to go to work. So um I'm gonna go. And the producer got up and looked at me and said, Do you not understand what we're offering you? And I said, Well, in truth, you haven't offered me anything, but if you do, you have all my information. Can I curse on this show?

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 13:47

So he comes over to me and he goes, Where did you get that fuck you attitude? And being a black girl from Chicago, I said, Who the fuck are you? And he said, Well, I'm Greg Garrison and I produced the Dean Martin show. And I went, again, you haven't offered me anything. But if you do, uh he said, I want to break that uh fuck you attitude. I said, Bring it on. But I'm going to work and I hope you uh respect my my um professionalism. Picked up my dance bag, walked out the door. Two weeks later, I thought, okay, well, that'll never happen. I get a ticket to Hollywood for the final auditions, and uh we make the final auditions, and I moved to Hollywood. I mean, it's it's a true great Hollywood story, but I was the first black girl in that group ever. Dean Martin was charming and wonderful. Every morning at eight o'clock in final rehearsal, he had a clear glass that looked like water, but he said, I said, What are you drinking it? And he said, Taste it. And it was like either gin or vodka. And I said, How do you survive? And he would always say, uh, he liked that I could riff. So he would always make me stand next to him. And then we played Vegas, and I got to meet Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack and and um sing and dance with you know old Hollywood. But as far as new Hollywood, I didn't fit in. The black exploitation move movement was just going, and they they would hire me, um, not as the league, because I wasn't white enough. Um, I was always the best friend to somebody, and I wasn't black enough to fit their definition of, oh, we got a black person in this show. So it was a real wake-up call to see what was happening. And then it translated when I start started, I left singing and dancing, I left the recording industry. I did a couple of albums with people and wrote music with war and Earth Wind and Fire, um, not Earth Wind and Fire, Chicago. Um, did some albums, um, toured with Debbie Reynolds. That's a whole story. Um, where Carrie Fisher and I met before she got Star Wars. We'll get into that another time. And um, and then I started writing. And when I did Airwolf, I said, I'm gonna write an episode and I'm gonna write for myself, and that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna change the paradigm and create the kind of films that I want to create for me, and so I wrote an episode of Airwolf, and in the original script, um, I saved the day. I flew Airwolf because I had to fly anyway, as Marella. And um, needless to say, by the time the studio and the network and Don Belisario got done with it, I was on the sidelines begging, you know, Jan Michael Vincent to come and save Archangel. But it was my first real um shot. Uh that's not true. The first thing I ever wrote, I didn't get credit for, was for a movie that I was in called Space Hunter, Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, if you've ever heard of it. It's a bit of a cult classic. And um the writer, whose name I don't remember, was an editor, and he was so terrified of the cast, he was afraid to talk to them. And then suddenly Columbia sends in these 3D giant cameras and says, We're making this in 3D. And I went, oh God. And we're out in the middle of Moab, Utah, in the desert, and they fire him. And suddenly we're out in the middle of the desert waiting for pages. Ivan Reitman comes out, he brings out a writing crew, he hires a new director, and we're waiting. And we go out to shoot the first scene. And in the original script, I was me, I was the leader of the Earth Girls, and and they kidnapped us on this horrible planet, and Peter Strauss and Molly Ringwall had to come and save us. So nothing, we had nothing to do. And I asked the director, What do you um see? How do you see the Earth Girls now that the script is changing? He says, Oh, they're like the golden fleece off in the distance, unattainable. And I went, so the next day I snuck into the writer's room and I wrote a seven-page scene because the earth girls were the reason that everything was happening. And I gave it to Ivan Reitman. And he said, Well, that's bold. And he said, I said, Yeah, but we're the whole reason this entire movie happens. So I think we should have something to say. So that's those seven pages. Of course, I overwrote just a little bit. Those seven pages became like the only things I said and any of the Earth Girls said in the the piece. And um, that's when I decided I'm gonna start writing for myself.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

That's an extraordinary, extraordinary story. Um, I I want to talk I want to talk about quantum leap or quantum leaps. Um, and helpfully you actually mentioned uh Star Trek because I was gonna draw this parallel in a slightly different way. So we've had people on this show before who've written on uh things like Star Trek and things like Star Wars, and we've talked about fans and how these shows are so cult and so iconic that there's a point where the fans feel like they know like more of the backstories and more of the details than even the people who you know write these things. And I think Quantum Leap falls into that category where obviously I watched it, uh, where people just love that show. There was something about it, it had a cult following. So when it comes back, how do you deal with the external noise? Because this isn't just you know, this is you're going back to something that people love, there's nostalgia to it. How do you, when you're in the room, how much do you have to think about how the original fans are gonna feel? And obviously, social media has now been invented, which it obviously wasn't the first time around. So they're gonna tell you.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

I have to correct you on that. Chat rooms just came into existence, and we found our fans in chat rooms in 1989. It was mind-blowing. One of the one of the assistants, Harriet, what was Harriet's last name? She was wonderful, and she said, You gotta come check this out. And so every night after the show, we go in the chat rooms. It was the water cooler conversation that uh eventually became um Twitter, basically. We were live tweeting with with people back in 1989.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

Funnily enough, uh I remember when I was asking someone about Star Trek, they actually corrected me as well. And they said the same thing because there were chat rooms. So you you are right, there was a narrower, less public version of it, but there were still, you know, you got to talk to the fans, but now obviously it's much more expanded. How do you deal with when you're going in to do Quantum Leap again? How do you think about those people and how they're going to react? And then obviously you're still trying to tell your story and it's got to be yours, not theirs. So how do you marry that balance?

SPEAKER_02 21:28

Well, their story is our story. That's what Quantum Leap is about, and that's why there's a visceral connection to it. I've had people, I've walked into meetings where like there's your executives of studios, and they'll go, It's such a pleasure to meet you. I have to geek out for just a second. I watched that show with my mom and my dad and you know, my grandparents. It was one of those shows, and we wrote it in this way. And I I I had this conversation very early on with the with the writers uh on this new um quantum. Leap and I said, you have to remember this show is about people, it's about what it feels like to step inside of another person that you would never understand what their life was about, and then get to experience it through the eyes of Sam Beckwit, through the eyes of you know Ben Song. I said, the four things you have to hit on this show, and if you do it in every episode, and there's a fifth secret one that is very difficult to do, we haven't done it on this show yet, which is the kiss with history, but you have to have history, you have to have humor, you have to have um oh what's I always think that forget the third one. The fourth one is hope. Every show has to have those the four H's, and it'll come back to me in a second. History, hope, humor. Those four things, if you have them in there, will make a great quantum leap. And if you ever watched the original show, it was like a roller coaster ride. You know, Sam finding out who he was, hit being hit by whatever uh dilemma he had to face and answers he had to find. Um and then the the everything falls apart in the third in the fourth, third act, and then it comes together in the the finale, and he makes a difference in someone's lives. I got letters from people who said, My parents were getting a divorce, and I would watch this show faithfully, wishing that Sam Beckett would leap into my my life, my family's life, and save my family. I got letters from a woman who watched the episode I wrote when the first time Sam leapt into a black man that I think put us on the map, which was um the studio didn't want me to do it, Don didn't want me to do it, the network was nervous about it, but Brandon Tardakoff, bless his heart, said she's right. Because they said, year three, we'll do this in year three. I said, No, we won't. The whole concept is about living the life that you would never live. And so that's what put put us on the map, that show. Anyway, she said she she did it on, she VHS'd it and she brought it to her eight-year-olds in the second grade and played the opening where he walks into the restaurant, to the diner, sits down to eat, and everybody like, you know, well, she says he walks into the restaurant, says he's hungry, sits down, and she pauses it and she asks these kids, what do you think happened? And the kids went, Well, he ordered lunch. He said he was hungry. And everybody kind of thought and said the same thing. And then she played the rest of it, where people turned around and they were shocked and they tried to throw him out. And Miss Melly walked in and took him away, and she stopped it again. And she said these kids were furious. Now, this is 1989. Civil rights had just happened, but they did not have any idea that it existed. So now you're sitting there as a viewer, and maybe you're eight, nine, ten years old, maybe you're 15, but it's not taught in our schools. But their grandparents are there, or their parents are there who knew enough about it and lived enough about it, so that there's a conversation. And the goal in writing this show well is not to tell somebody what to think, it's to lay out both sides of the story. And you be you are smart enough because this is a smart audience to make the decision of where you stand on it, but to listen to the conversation of the other people, something we need in this world right now. This show came back at, I think, the exact right time. We need hope. And that's what Quantum Leap is.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

I do, I think Quantum Leap might uh the Hollywood's a town filled with good ideas. Quantum Leap, both the original and the new incarnation, might be one of the best ideas that Hollywood's ever had. And so credit to you for this show that that has heart, humor, whatever you're heart.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

That was the missing one. Heart.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

There we go. Oh, it used to be a royality. I'm not available right now, Deborah, but in the future we can uh the um the no, I mean, just the longevity of the show, the what it does to people, that you have, you know, an engine that's obviously, and I'm not here to again, I would fanboy with you and all day, but that's not what it's about. Uh, this you've been in the career, you know, you've been in Hollywood for so long, you've seen so many things. Uh what was your absolute worst and or most ridiculous career moment?

SPEAKER_02 26:47

Most ridiculous career moment. Ridiculous, that's an interesting word to choose from.

SPEAKER_00 26:55

I mean, sometimes people have experiences that are so surreal that you're just you just don't even know what to do with them. So that's kind of why I put it in that bucket.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

Um as a woman in the 90s, I wrote an action adventure script with a young girl who whose mother has passed away. She's putting her, she got a scholarship to West Point, and she's tough and does great things, but she doesn't like guns. And she gets an email that says, um, her father has died. And she went, What father? What are you talking about? And it turns out he's the super rich um uh entrepreneur, techie, whatever, and he's left her this fortune. And she goes there, and it the adventure, because what she discovers is that he might not be dead. So she goes to find him. It gets falls into the veins of a female Indiana Jones kind of thing. And she wins the day and fights her way out. And uh, I remember pitching it, and the exec at the studio said, Wow, this is great, but wait, wait, wait. So when does the guy come to save her? And I went, Well, she saves him. And he went, Oh, no, no, no, that would never work. And I went, wow, okay. I guess I sit on that script, still sitting on it. And then I went into CBS and I pitched a show about this is again in the early 2000s, about a very wealthy Black family who had been in politics since the Civil War. And I don't know, most people don't know this, but there were more blacks in in Congress and the Senate after the Civil War than ever in the history of this country. And so I followed their family down, and this is a legacy. So it's like a Black Kennedy's. And she and the the matriarch of the family is going to um make sure that her golden son, who was in the military, who graduated Harvard, was going to be the first black president. And the man across the deck desk from me went, Well, that'll never happen. There, and and there are no wealthy black people. And I went, excuse me? Have you ever read Fortune 500 magazine? Do you know Libby? Do you know? And I started like naming the the blacks that are in that that rarefied air uh at the time for sure. And um, but I wanted to jump across the desk and just knock him out to go, how can you have this job and be so single-minded? And um, needless to say, they did not buy that idea. But somewhere, somewhere when Obama became president, I wanted to find his telephone number and call.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

I mean, those stories are obviously both sad and not that unexpected, given what we know about both the history of the Hollywood and arguably still bits of the present of Hollywood. Um, I want to ask it's sort of a linked question, going back to what you said about how you had to fight for the Quantum Leap episode where um he is his phrase it, but he he is a black man um, you know, in the character. With I'd like to know some ideas that didn't make it. Because obviously that one did, it had a bit of a fight. So either other ones you had to fight for, or were there any people he could have landed inside, as it were, who you just couldn't get that one past the execs?

SPEAKER_02 30:52

I was pretty tough. Um, well, let's let's give an example. I wrote an episode um called Black on White on Fire, and it took place in the Watts riots, and he leapt into a young black doctor, med student, and he had a white girlfriend. So I was balancing this interracial relationship in the middle of a riot, and I'm very proud of that episode. Uh five states in the south wouldn't air it. Now, this is a white man with a white woman, and the only time you see that he's a black man is when he looks in a reflective surface, still Alabama, North South Carolina, uh uh Georgia. I can't remember the other ones. I was like shocked, they pulled it from the air. To me, that's pretty ridiculous. Um I think I'm still a little bit angry about that one.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

So actually, so this this is a question. Obviously, a significant amount of time has passed. Uh you'll know the number, I'm not quite sure of it, but it's a significant amount of time between the end of uh the first quantum leap and it coming back. In terms of the storylines that you think will pass now and the resistance you get, has Hollywood moved on a lot in the sense of what you can now do with the show that you couldn't do before?

SPEAKER_02 32:28

It's moved a little bit backwards personally, because in that show we could say things and do things that were real history. We are so politically correct these days that you can't. And that's the challenge of of um making a show like Quantum Leap, because you can't tell the real history without offending the um the the buyers. You know, uh I was on set and we were doing an episode, uh box the boxer episode, and the police came in to um to arrest him, which was the history of what happened. And Ben Song, being not a black man, went to stand up to this white officer, and what the white officer said to back him down was not quite what would have happened in 1976, I think it was. He would have said some different things. And when I offered that suggestion, everybody went, oh, no, we can't say that word, no, we can't say that. And I went, but that happened. We're traveling in time. Tell that history so it doesn't happen again. But again, we live in a very delicate time right now where people's feelings are way too hurt when you confront them with the reality of what it is, but that's how we learn, that's why we don't repeat history because we learn from it, and that's a challenge in these days and times. And I I understand the studio, I understand the network for being uh tentative about it, but it it saddens me.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

This is a connected question. I didn't even mention this in your bio, but your WGA, SAG, DGA, your uh PGA, you're basically every guild and union we have in Hollywood, you are an active member of, and this is a fraught time for Hollywood unions right now with the different strikes and labor movements. You know, to what you're speaking to in that last answer and you know, just the current environment, is there anything you would say to Hollywood right now? Um, you know, your opinion just about some of these fraught things, whether it's political correctness or the way they're treating labor or the way they're or the way they're not treating labor. Or I'm just kind of curious on your some of your insight, uh, being that you are sort of the intersection of so many different areas of our industry.

SPEAKER_02 35:17

Great term. I feel like the intersection. Um, I I guess the wake-up call, you're probably gonna think I'm crazy, but it's what I want to do with the Vision Quest and Warrior One. Um, is this industry is changing. There are some elements of it that are gonna die and go away. Let's be real. Film has changed, it's gone into video more than actual film. We had a hundred years to make filmed movies, and it's very rare that we make them now. But I was looking at, you know, the whole AI, yeah, which I again I deal with in the Vision Quest books and um and and the Warrior One story. And when everything was happening, I was very concerned as an actor. You know, I do a voice of a character, and it can be taken. You look at what SAG is fighting for, they're fighting for their their faces, their bodies, their voices that have been sampled in music. The music industry changed because of all of this. That you can't just take somebody's song and put it in your song and not compensate them for it. So I think the rules are going to change. And between you and me, just for the hell of it, I um I asked uh Chat GBT, I think it was. I said, uh, if I had a uh script, an actor, you know, a writer, an actor, a director, and listed all the people that you it takes to make a TV show or a movie, could you build me a streaming system? ChatBT said, absolutely, and then laid out exactly what it would take to build a streaming system that would have equity for everybody involved. Um, but the point being is they are in much more danger if we become the collective that we need to be. We have the talent, we write the stories, we get in front of the camera, we get behind the camera. And the fact that you can program a camera to do, you know, two shot single over cameras could do it. And the the DGA has been asked to train them in that sense. And that you know, I tried to raise an objection to that. The biggest thing that we as a collective consciousness need to do is to remember that our money pays for their reality, and if we let them have complete control, the 1%, the 3%, the the top 10%, yeah, we're in big trouble. All of us. But if we can find a way to create a sense of equity where everybody participates and everybody benefits, we can evolve to the next level of entertainment, which is coming fast and hard. And I'm not gonna tell you what that is because I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

I love that. Um, so look, I have been accused by previous guests uh of saying this to everybody, but it's not true of saying this. Um, this has been absolutely fascinating. We're we're pretty much out of time apart from our final question, but I feel like we've barely scratched the surface given the uh breadth and depth of your career. So we will want to ask you to come back uh probably still this season, so we can get into the whole load of other questions we just didn't get to today. Uh so I want to, for those people thinking, can't this interview go for longer? We'll we'll we'll make it a two-part and we'll come back another time and and get you for more, because this has been utterly fascinating. And I've got follow-up questions a mile long that I haven't got to. But we do have to ask the final question for this version of this episode with you, which is if you could give a single piece of advice to somebody wanting to enter the entertainment industry, and you choose whether it's as a you know, writer, actor, dancer, producer, novelist, graphic novelist, because you've done all of those, but for somebody wanting to enter, probably more broadly the industry, what would that single piece of advice be?

SPEAKER_02 39:48

Besides watch Quantum Leap on Wednesday night at eight o'clock, or go to warrior1world.com. I would say be fearless, be fearless. The bigger the person is that you reach out to in whatever career you are, the more gracious they are. And as I told my kids growing up, take the chance, because the worst that could happen is that somebody says no. And then they're just the wrong person. And the reality is if you don't go after it, if you don't ask the question, you got no shot. You got a 50-50 shot if you ask it of getting a yes or a no, but you got nothing if you don't just ask it. And no is just incentive, it's not the end.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

Fantastic answer. Look, uh, after 105 episodes of this podcast, it would be fair to say this is the only one that has touched on homelessness, Frank Sinatra, Airwolf, uh, Star Trek, and Quantum Leap. Um, so uh Deborah Pratt, this has been an extraordinary adventure. Thank you for coming along for the ride. We really appreciate having you on the show.

SPEAKER_02 41:05

Thank you very, very much. It's a pleasure to meet you. I love scriptation, by the way. I use it all the time. So to do for them. And thank you. Again, please follow me and uh come see what's coming next. And watch quantum leap. I get to direct uh episode 211. So if you saw the first episode I did, it was very quantum leap, which was um family style. I'm very proud of it. I hit all the bells and whistles just to make sure people felt. And I did. Because it had heart, it had humor, it had hope, it had history.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode of Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss brought to you by Scriptation. Thank you as ever to James Launch for the music, and thank you to our loyal listeners. And if there's any showrunners out there who want to hear their fellow showrunners abused and ruffled around and put under the microscope so you can hear their stories of rejection failure in adversity, please send them our way. If you are interested in following us on social media, no I've lost track.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

I am at NEBslin on Twitter or X or whatever Elon Musk now calls it. And thanks to Elon Musk, I'm also at Noah Ebslin on Hive, Scoutable, Blue Sky, Threads, Mastodon, Myspace, Friendster, and I'm sure a thousand more.