Take 2 - Screenwriter Zack Stentz, Thor, X-Men First Class and Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous

SPEAKER_02 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 sure, dozens of unproduced scripts litterating the floor.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

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

SPEAKER_03 0:20

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

SPEAKER_01 0:31

That's the normal thing we have to be able to persevere. Like everything in our business, your hands can count. It all bounces off you. That bounce does taste because that doesn't happen overnight.

SPEAKER_02 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_03 1:01

So welcome back to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity in the entertainment industry. As always, I am your non-entertainment but successful co-host, Dan Rutstein, joined by a failure and rejection in entertainment and elsewhere, Noah Evslin.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Hello, I'm king of failure myself. We have a great guest today. His name is Zach Stenz, and he's a prolific writer in both television and features. He started his career with such TV shows as Andromeda. He's worked on Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles, a TV show that I love, Fringe. He also has done such massive movies as Thor, X-Men First Class, The Rim of the World. Lately, you might have seen his animated show on Netflix, the new remake of Jurassic World for the teen tween group called Camp Cretaceous. Thank you, Zach. Welcome to the show. It's wonderful to be here. Talk about failure.

SPEAKER_03 2:03

So Noah's just read out only part of your IMDB profile. So for the for the regular listener, they'll be thinking, well, hold on a minute. How has this guy got anything bad to say? Because it seems to just be all success. So the first question has to be: why have you agreed to come on our podcast knowing what it's about?

SPEAKER_00 2:25

Well, if you if you look more closely at the IMDB, you will find both a large number of projects which did not end up getting produced, which are still vaporware, as they say in uh in software, software circles. And you also find rather large gaps in uh in uh my uh my resume of produced material. You can go from uh from X-Men First Class and Thor in the summer of 2011 all the way to I believe 2016 when uh when I did an episode of The Flash without without seeing anything actually produced by me. So that's that's five long years essentially.

SPEAKER_03 3:14

And that's a good place to start because particularly given all that's happened with those franchises, if somebody said there was a guy who wrote Thorne, there was a guy who wrote X-Men First Class, isn't that meant to be the rocket ship that propels you to multiple successes and signs you onto a whole load of new films immediately because they were such a success, or not?

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Yes, theoretically it is supposed to. And in the wake of uh in the wake of Thor and X-Men First Class, my uh my former writing partner and I got a lot of assignments and and took down a lot of uh of very plum, high-profile assignments, both in the world of uh both in the world of TV and in features. There was a there was a big deadline Hollywood article about all of the moves that we were making that I that I kind of broke down on Twitter um several months back and kind of went through all of those projects one by one, which were all very high profile, very promising. But as as some of you may know, um they went the way of most Hollywood projects, which is they they died in a ditch somewhere or uh or or mutated into another form and went on without us. That that included projects as diverse as Big Trouble in Little China, a remake of Starship Troopers, a remake, a feature remake of The Fall Guy, the uh the the old Lee Majors TV show, book series that we were supposed to turn into a TV series that you may have heard of called The Magicians. It ended up being made into a TV series, not with us though. So that those are those are a few examples of uh those are a few examples of the of the things that that we were involved in that for one reason or another just didn't just didn't go. And then in about halfway through 2015, my writing partnership, uh my 15-year-long writing partnership broke up. And uh, and that involved that involved me, you know, not exactly rebuilding from scratch, but having to build build myself up again as a uh as a solo writer. And that, you know, that involved everything from you know writing new projects by myself to uh to selling things by myself and and establishing that I could do it um on my own.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

I want to come back to sort of what happens in Hollywood when you break up with a writing partner and how you say you have to sort of rebrand yourself in some way, sort of restart your career. But you made a decision a couple of times to go very public with this idea that what your the success on paper might not be the success in reality, at least towards the writer. And you did it, there was a magazine article that came out, and you also did it on Twitter. Why did you feel the need to sort of publicly come out and say that the that the that the reality doesn't always match sort of what's out there?

SPEAKER_00 6:21

I feel like it's psychologically devastating for for writers, especially working writers, to have to keep up a constant facade of, oh, we're just going from wind to win and and momentum is behind me. And there's there's certainly the uh there's certainly pressure from agents and managers and other reps to uh to do that. Um but it it it both takes a toll because you always have to present a brave face to the world, and it's also just not honest to uh to other to other people and to people who are who are trying to get into the business about what the realities of of being a working writer are. I was gonna I was gonna jokingly say, unless you're Michael Green, but you know what, Michael Green has his share of heartbreak and and and projects that didn't go as well. So so you know, I I just I I guess if if I if I want to have a social media brand, it's kind of you know being positive but rat radical honesty in terms of what the challenges actually are.

SPEAKER_01 7:31

And I totally agree. And I think that's kind of maybe I've, you know, in some ways followed your lead, and in many ways, this podcast might have subconsciously come out of your openness there because I felt like you know, I was really inspired reading your post and being like, this is a guy I look up to in my career, and he's been on so many things and he's being so forthright, not only to me, I mean not it's not being directed at me, it's being directed at the world, but that it's really helpful to know that everybody is going, you know, through all of these different struggles.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Oh well, if if I played even a small role in helping other writers at varying stages of their careers um feel better about the fact that they don't win all the time, then uh then I I feel really good. Then I then I feel really good about about having made that choice to be honest. And certainly I got a lot of both publicly and privately um people reaching out to me and saying, you know, like like thank you for being so upfront about what the struggle actually is as a uh as a working writer.

SPEAKER_03 8:35

But accepting, well, being honest about it and sort of being public about it is obviously a big part of dealing with it. But how have you actually sort of, when you're not telling people about it, how do you actually deal with the frustrations of the rejections? You know, how do you personally handle it?

SPEAKER_00 8:58

You know, I I'd like to say I'm incredibly psychologically healthy and I I allow myself to process it and move on. That you know, that's that's the ideal. I I think if I've learned anything from, you know, I guess now 20 years as a uh as a professional screenwriter, it's that you need to give yourself time to mourn the the projects, especially the ones that are close to your heart that didn't go. And and you know, it that it that it's okay to wallow in it in a little bit. It's okay to feel bad that something didn't go your way. That there's there's a story that we all tell each other, um, especially once we get into the WGA and we're working writers, that we are because we know it's a tiny, tiny percentage of all of the people who want to be writing for a living who actually get to do it. And and so the story that you tell yourself is I'm so privileged to be doing this job and to be being paid to write that I I should just be grateful and happy all the time. And that's not a that's not a psychologically healthy, healthy state to be in all the time. It's okay to be pissed off and upset when things don't go your way, especially things that you that you poured hours and hours and sometimes months and years of uh of sweat equity of sweat equity into. So, so I you know, I I guess I want to I don't want to say I don't want to free writers to be bitter, but I want to free writers to to feel the emotions of when when things don't go your way. It's it's okay to feel something other than than gratitude than gratitude all all the time, even if you got paid for the thing that you know ultimately didn't go your way, because that's a reality too. There are there are writers who make very good livings while having very few things actually produced.

SPEAKER_03 11:00

So talking of things not going well, not going your way, not necessarily in relation to sort of actual writing projects, but just a question about how you deal. This is more maybe on the adversity side. So I remember I have a separate podcast, which is a whiskey podcast, and I had a I there was a writer on there who'd worked on one of the Star Trek TV shows, and we talked about the sort of toxic fandom part of being part of such a big franchise and how you dealt with that. Now you've obviously the great thing for you is that you've worked on you know the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but their fans, although maybe don't have the same reputation as Star Wars and Star Trek fans, they certainly have opinions. And so for you as a writer, obviously these are great movies, but I know that you've been, I think you called it thorsplained before by somebody. How do you how have you dealt with people, the negativity of the sort of rabid fans in that universe?

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Not just in that universe, but in other universes too. You know, it's tough for it's it's I'll be honest, it's difficult for me because I started in the 1990s as one of those fans complaining about things on the internet. I like the back and forth of arguing about our favorite things, arguing about which movies we liked, which movies we didn't. It's been an educational process in realizing that as a professional, I really need to step away from that a bit. I need to really step away from that a bit because when I engage in that, those are my peers that I'm talking about, those are my peers that I'm talking about. And I think, you know, like there are there are many writers who have reduced themselves in my estimation by the way that they conduct themselves on social media in a smaller number who have gone up in my estimation. So, so I I guess, you know, you just try to not take things personally and you try not to I more and more as I get older, my my philosophy is is whenever possible, just don't engage with negativity because nine times out of ten, they just want the attention. And what better attention than to have the original writer or the you know the person involved in the project coming in and saying, no, you're wrong about that character, no, you're wrong about that character. Like I at this point in my life, I'd rather starve them of the oxygen and just you know keep collecting those green envelopes and uh and and doing what I do.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

I I noticed this is some color commentary, but I noticed when you the announcement of the Island of Dr. Moreau remake came out that you're writing for television, that you were the first to post a negative deadline article about yourself on Twitter to say, like, yep, here they come. This is like, and deadline for you know, for our audience who you don't know, it's one of our trade magazines. But if you get an announcement and deadline for whatever reason, and this is often goes out to our peers, but it also goes out to the world, the comments can be just devastating, no matter who you are, when you get your first article or your 15th in deadline and deadline.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Yeah, you know, dead deadline is always the uh it's it's the great reality check and and reminder that there are, you know, if if you have any kind of success in the business at all, that that there are people who are very angry about it and think that they should have what you think that that they should have the career that you're having right now. Um and uh and the deadline comment section is the uh is the uh you know great place for them to express express their feelings about that.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

I I want to press down on something you talked about a few minutes ago, and that was your separation with your writing partner in connection with sort of dealing with your sort of uh emotions when you when you have like a big failure or a setback or even a success. Before you had a partner you worked with, and when something went bad, I wasn't in your relationship, but I can imagine you had a process where you guys did something or you was some ritual to get over it. There was two people that dealt with the call from the agents or whatever had just happened. And then, you know, as what happens in lots of writing partnerships, you guys went your separate ways, you had to rebrand, reset. And that, you know, can that's a whole different process. Can you sort of walk us through some of that, anyways?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Yeah, I mean, I mean, without going into detail or betraying any confidences, um, in the in the year or so leading up to the breakup of the partnership, it was it was clear that we were going in diverging uh in diverging directions. And there was a tremendous amount of pressure from the reps, from the agent and the managers who were very invested in this brand that they had built of us together in continuing that. And it, you know, the recognition that it would be a lot of work to uh to restart us both as uh as solo uh as solo artists. So there's the pushing against the there's the pushing against your own reps in some cases to do what you want to do, and then you're not what you want to do necessarily, but what needs to be done. And then the other thing is once you do break up, you recognize all of the places where you were letting the other person take the lead, and and all of the places where where um I was weak that I needed to become strong. I had let my partner do most of the talking and some of the pitches. So how do I become better at pitching now that it's just, you know, you know, if I lose my train of thought, I can't hand it off to someone, I can't hand it off to someone else. Um, how do I make sure that the drafts that I turn in don't aren't filled with typos and leftovers from previous drafts because I no longer have the person who looks at everything with a meticulous eye and the other set of eyes on it? Okay, I have to become that. Okay, okay, I don't have another person to bounce off of and and read my draft, you know, read what I just did and tell me if it's working or not. How do I grow, you know, because I think it's always good to have sounding boards. How do I get other people to become my sounding boards even if they're not writing it, even if they're not writing it with me? You know, it's it's all of all of those things had to be had to be done. And then it's and then it's it's you know, I've been in the business long enough so I have direct relationships with you know executives all all over the place. It's okay, how do I reintroduce myself to those people as okay, it's just me now? You know, there was a lot of work that uh that had to be that had to be done and and rebuilding. And you know, frankly, five five years into it, it's still ongoing, and it's still ongoing in some ways.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

When you were a partnership and you were rejected, did you in some ways sort of feel like you could only take half of the responsibility for the failure and therefore half the pain, but now you have to take all of it, or is it not that simple?

SPEAKER_00 18:22

It's more complicated than that. I mean, I mean, it's it's I I'm I'm someone who kind of takes takes uh takes everything per I'm really in the wrong line of work because I take everything personally and I automatically assume that everything is my fault. So I already felt the way that I did, even you know, at rejection, even when I was with a partner. So now at least, you know, now at least I I can own it and it's all on me, or I can just say, you know what, it was it was factors, it was factors out of my control. But then, you know, the nice thing about it is that you know, I I try to go into every pitch, every new situation with the attitude that I'm going to, to use a sports term, leave it all out on the field. I am going to do the absolute best job that I can on this. And it's either going to be me or it's not. And and if it's not, I I can hold my head up high because at least I know I I gave it my best shot, I gave it my best shot. And either I wasn't good enough or they were looking for something else.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Can you can what while we're kind of talking about that, is there any sort of specificity with maybe you can't name the exact project, but whether you were with your partner or alone, what was the sort of the hardest, the biggest setback for you, the hardest thing for you to sort of like that you didn't get or that it didn't go your way in regards to sort of a project in in your past?

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Like, like, oh God, in terms of biggest heartbreaks, honestly, I'll I it comes to me, we got very close to being the people who who wrote the the movie that ended up becoming Star Trek Beyond and my former partner and I. And um, we as they say missed it by that much. And whether you love how Star Trek Beyond turned out or didn't, Star Trek has been my primary love since I of in entertainment since I was five years old. So that was the the holy grail was to be able to say I wrote a star, I I worked on writing a Star Trek movie. So losing that was losing that was a uh was a a pretty pretty rough blow. Um and then as a solo person, I it's tough, it's tough to say, you know, um there are a couple things that I came close on that but didn't do, but I've you know, I I've been spending so much time trying to to rebrand myself as doing original work that I I haven't gone after a lot of the you know the the kind of big franchise the the big franchise assignments so it's been it's been different. I've been I've been pretty uh blessed so far as a uh as a as a solo uh artist.

SPEAKER_03 21:19

Given the success you had with Thor and X-Men, and then that fallow period where you were writing things that weren't getting produced, how has that colored your current feeling about success? So when you something really good happens and you get something, is it now always in your mind that this means nothing and I could go five years without again?

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yes, to some to some degree or another. They you know, like when having Thor and X Men First Class hit within 28 days of each other in the summer of 2011, and then having half a dozen projects lined up. Lined up beyond that, it was very easy to convince ourselves like we're gonna be walking this red carpet every few months in in perpetuity and then not having it happen again for years. Now I I think I'm a little I'm simultaneously more philosophical about you know like it could go this way or it could go that way. But in a weird way I feel more urgency too because because frankly I'm older and this is a this is an industry where people age out um and where there are you know hundreds of new right new younger, hungrier writers coming along every year to do the same thing that the same thing that I do. So you know it's it's it's in some ways um you know lit a fire under me to uh to to redouble my redouble my efforts to get things made because you know frankly that's that's the legacy that I I I'm I'm in this business not just to make a living but to but to get things made that I feel proud of and that that hopefully touch other people.

SPEAKER_03 23:11

So the aging out thing, obviously everyone knows about that on the actor side. Um and I think it's less of the case now, but certainly on the female actress side, there was a big issue around that for a while in Hollywood. And you know, it's a big thing in TV presenting and so on. But for writers, is that really a concern that somebody younger will come and take your eat your lunch?

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Oh, it's absolutely a concern for both writers and directors. I mean, look at the look at the incredibly talented directors um out there, many of them with great box office records, who if you went in um with with one of them attached to your movie, you would get back from a uh from an executive, and this is one of my one of my least favorite phrases, yeah, that person doesn't move the needle. You know, we want someone, they would rather have someone with a hot festival film or you know, uh a great PlayStation ad or what have you coming in than than than someone, you know, than someone like I I'll I'll just pull a name out of a hat, a Martin Campbell who's reinvented, you know, James Bond twice. Um that's that's just the reality. And that that same reality is at play with writers where where it's like, here's this exciting new voice come, here's this exciting new voice coming up, and and especially given how youth-oriented the business is and the in the and the films are. It's uh, you know, it's it's um like a middle-aged guy who's been writing teenager, you know, who's who writes teenagers uh uh a lot of the a lot of the time. And and and there's always the temptation, if you're an executive, to get someone, you know, to get someone younger, hotter, and not to put too fine a point on it, cheaper to uh to do the same thing. Even if, you know, the first two Spider-Man movies were written by Alvin Sargent, who is older than God and had done, you know, ordinary people before that.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

You have a very, you know, somewhat rare IMDB page where you bounce fairly equally between TV and movies. And and for those of you on the outside, often they don't realize that for a long time that was really bifurcated, right? There was the feature writers in our industry and there was the TV writers, and now that's changing somewhat. But for your almost your entire career, you went from TV to features, TV to features. And because this is a you know conversation about failure and heartbreak, and what what side of the business do you think gives, you know, is more heartbreaking, the feature side or the TV side?

SPEAKER_00 25:52

I think that I mean they're both heartbreaking, but I think the the features, the feature side just has so many more opportunities to uh to break it to break your heart. Even though, you know, I mean, I mean, if you talk to someone like Josh Friedman, who had, you know, who's had multiple TV shows taken away from him, you know, I'm sure he would tell, you know, and he's someone who's done both features and and TV shows, I'm sure he would tell you that that TV has uh has many opportunities to break your heart as as well. I have not been in the position in my career where, aside from Jurassic World, the uh Camp Cretaceous show, that's, you know, again, after 20 years in the business, that was my first show that I created slash developed that's uh that's gotten on the that's gotten on the air. But uh I I haven't yet been in the position of like, you know, guess what, the main actor wants you fi, you know, wants wants you fired and his best friend in a showrunner instead. Um you know, like but uh but I you know I still think it's I still think it's features also just because of the um you know TV is so much more thriving. It feels like there are a lot more ways. There are as many ways to fail in TV as there are in features, but there are also more ways to succeed in TV than there are in features.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

I only heard this secondhand, but I realized you were on the show, Josh Friedman, Sarah Connor's Chronicles, where he talked about learning he lost that show when some executive walked into his office and started measuring the furniture and the space for you know to move in himself.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Yeah. It's it's it's literally, yeah, it's it's it's literally that brutal. When we moved into our uh into this, you we we were working on the Warner Brothers lot when we moved in uh to our offices. They still had all the stuff from you know, our offices had been the Joey offices, and they had you know the Matt Le the Matt LeBlanc uh friend spin-off, and they still had the parking spaces painted that way, they still had the posters on the wall, it was still the message on the answering machine that I never figured out how to change. It was you know, like like uh Hollywood is this place where you come into a job and you can still see the chalk outlines on the rug of the uh of the dead bodies.

SPEAKER_03 28:20

We don't normally do this, but so I was in the diplomatic service with the British government before I left. And we had our version of that was when you get posted, you're you're given the house of your predecessor, so you turn up and you start going around the house saying new fridge, new cupboards, don't like those pictures while they're still in it. And it's a very strange feeling, and then they normally try and sell you their secondhand car before they get sent back to England. So it's a very odd feeling, but I'm glad it doesn't just happen in our world. So obviously, you've had lots of successes, you've had some frustrating moments. Were there any points where you thought I might I might give up, I might do something else?

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Yes, actually. If you if you go back, but it was towards the beginning of our career. I came to screenwriting from journalism, um uh, you know, in the right around the year 2000. And my former partner and I, we had three seasons on Andromeda. We worked on the UPN reboot of the Twilight Zone. And, you know, at one point within a month of each other, we had an Andromeda episode on the air, a Twilight Zone episode that we had written on the air, and Agent Cody Banks in the theaters being like the number one hit that, you know, so so it was it was our first taste of wow, we're doing pretty well. And then we didn't work for three years. Um, you know, that show went off the air. We were at a little agency that couldn't get us on another show. We were going out on low percentage shots and not connecting on any of them. And about three years into it, I was like, am I about to fall out of this industry? And I started, you know, calling my old editors um looking for work. And of course, this was the early 2000s when the internet was uh was cutting us with a scythe through journalism, and um, and you know, journalism was shedding thousands of jobs at that point. So it was literally, you know, I I was I was facing the prospect of falling out of my chosen profession, but my previous profession was in the process of dying. And the there was the genuine thought of like, what am I gonna, what am I gonna do for a living? And then, you know, right at the right time, we you know, we sold a feature that didn't end up getting made, but ended up paying the bills for a year. And then right as we're stalling out again, we got on Sarah Connor Chronicles, and that was the that was the kind of beginning of the rebuilding of the of the rebuilding process.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

Is there ever a time now in your career where it feels like the law? I mean, you you this year has probably been one of the hardest years for many writers and Hollywood because of the pandemic, but you seem to have, you know, landed a few things, but you had mentioned that in a tweet, I think, that that that's also a bit of a facade that you actually had your heart broken like this year, that a number of projects you've loved didn't didn't move forward. Is there is there any of those that you can talk about?

SPEAKER_00 31:23

Um I I don't want to get into too many specifics because a couple of them that seem to be dead might just be resting their eyes. Um, if you know what I mean, they might come back to life at some point. So I don't want to proclaim, I don't want to call time on uh on when the patient died in case they uh rise up off the slab. Um but um yeah, that you know, like there were there were a couple of feature projects that I got very close on and didn't get. There were ones that there were pitches that I went out on that I just poured hour after hour into. There there was uh, you know, there was a TV show that I that I was really excited by that didn't end up going. And and then there are there are also other things which look like they're going to go, but are happening at, you know, at that frustratingly slow Hollywood, Hollywood pace. So so it's it's been, you know, it's it's been a lot. The one nice thing, as you know, about being a writer is that when you do feel frustrated, that is that you never have an excuse to be bored and to be waiting for the phone to ring. If you're waiting for the phone to ring, you should be writing a freaking spec. You know, and and that has been the saving grace of pandemic, is that I ended up writing, you know, like I'm I will have written, you know, I've written like four specs this year, either written or co-written, feature specs, and I'm hoping to finish uh finish a fifth before we before we get out of this. So so it's it's the the the one great thing about failure as a screenwriter is you you always have the tools to write yourself write your way out of a career slump.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

I do want to just uh press down on that for one second, is you said you have four feature scripts that you wrote during the pandemic. And for people who are not writers and are coming in for from a different discipline, you know, people probably average if you're writing a lot, maybe a feature and a pilot a year on top of your assignments, maybe. So you're writing, you know, at any given time, how how many projects are you working on, both paid and unpaid, would you think?

SPEAKER_00 33:33

Um probably about half a dozen, paid and unpaid. I I always I feel very nervous if I don't have at least one paying gig with a deadline, you know, with a deadline to stare at. Um I've got two right, I've got currently I have two things that are that that are paying that require workout of me. And then and then, you know, Jurassic World, which at this point I'm cons you know, I'm giving notes on episodes and and things like that, but I'm in a more passive, passive position. And then another another animated show that appears to be in the process of selling, but it is very is very opaque. But you know, so there are those those two things, and then you know, the feature that we're in the process of setting up, and then uh a couple of other features behind that that we're trying to set up, and then you know, the the the eternal chase, you know, chasing down a gig.

SPEAKER_03 34:32

In terms of the pandemic, we we've tried not to these episodes are sort of timeless, we've tried not to talk about the pandemic too much, but given you seem to have written much more than usual. You know, we're in a funny time, obviously, there's now a lockdown again. If life went back to normal, would you and you can go to bars and restaurants and go to parties and see people and all the normal stuff. Presumably you're comfortable that you can return to whatever system you had before, or you're gonna end up being a hermit because you've got used to being prolific in this way.

SPEAKER_00 35:06

I I was writing from home before most of the time, um, although, you know, I was going out on meetings, and I will say in some ways I like the zoom meeting, you know, I like not spending half a day on a meeting because you have to, you know, drive down to Culver City and back to the valley. But um, you know, I hope to be even more productive once we're out of pandemic because I won't have three kids under the same roof as me all day long. Um the the navigating navigating uh writing in family in the middle of COVID is uh is a challenge because everyone is under the same roof. You know, if if the kids get hungry, they're not at the cafeteria at school, you know, they they need they need you. And uh and it's it's been an adjustment for every it's been an adjustment for everyone. But uh, but I'm very, you know, I don't care how experimental that vaccine is, I'm I'm taking it, I'm taking it, you know, the the day it becomes available to me.

SPEAKER_03 36:11

Yeah, you and me both. Well, I might not take it, but I'm gonna let my kids take it just to get them out of the house.

SPEAKER_00 36:17

There you go.

SPEAKER_03 36:18

Um, so look, our last question we ask every guest is if you could give one piece of advice to somebody wanting to break into this world, what would that piece of advice be?

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Uh one piece of advice in terms of someone wanting to break in terms of wanting to break in, I would say uh um get a small group of people whose taste and talent you trust to um to be sounding boards for your material, to to be someone who you can pitch ideas to, to be people who you can say, can can you read this draft, can you read this draft and tell me if I'm uh if I'm on the right track or anything? I I think it's very easy to get lost in your own head and convince yourself that something is either great or terrible. And I think it's really important to have uh I think it's really important to have what uh what Hemingway would call uh you know bullshit detectors uh vetting vetting your work for you until you, you know, before you take it out into the world.

SPEAKER_03 37:32

Very good. So look, Zach, who we think may well have been the original inspiration for this podcast, you've certainly not let us down. Um, you know, you're the poster child for talking about rejection and failure, even though you're actually a complete success. But thank you very much indeed for your time.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

Oh, thank you so much. This has been a this has been a really fun conversation, and I hope it it ends up being a little bit helpful and uh and uh illuminating for for people about about the reality behind the uh the uh the facade that it it ain't it ain't red carpet, it ain't red carpet premieres uh every uh every day. Thank you so much, Zach. This was great. Okay, take care, guys.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

All right, that's a wrap on this episode. If you want to leave us any feedback, go to hollywoodabyss.com.

SPEAKER_03 38:26

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 38:33

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_03 38:46

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

SPEAKER_01 38:58

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

SPEAKER_03 39:08

But you definitely can't podcast.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

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